A Bed of Scorpions by Judith Flanders Page B

did with pages from books, or the covers. I know it’s a bit tragic, but I actually read the pages heincludes – you know, which Dostoyevsky novel is this taken from, and oh look, I have the same edition of
The Naked Lunch.’
    She didn’t quite back away from me, but I could tell she thought I was beyond weird. Oh well. I’d chopped enough vegetables to keep an entire commune fed for a season. I could move away without seeming rude. I wiped my hands on a tea towel and looked around for a bowl to put them in. I didn’t see a bowl, but I did see that Aidan had arrived, and he was standing in the doorway attempting to catch my eye. I summed up, as though we’d had a meaningful conversation: ‘That sounds like a great plan,’ leaving whatever ‘that’ might be carefully unspecified. ‘They’d be mad not to want you to go ahead.’ Then I mumbled the usual ‘see you later’ and set off towards Aidan. He had retreated to the sunroom at the back, which looked as if it was barely used. There was a desk and a chair, a bench loaded with old newspapers and magazines, and not much else. Aidan was sitting at the desk, flipping through two vast piles of mail. I pushed the newspapers on the floor and sat on the bench.
    ‘This is office post,’ he said, as though he needed to excuse himself to me.
    I nodded and waited. He finally looked up. ‘I wanted to ask you if your policeman had said anything.’
    I swallowed a smart-arse response – ‘my’ policeman? – and just shook my head. ‘He repeated pretty much what you told me at lunch: unexplained death, and they’re investigating.’
    Aidan pushed a second pile of papers off the bench and sat down beside me, reaching for my hand. He didn’t sayanything else, and I didn’t have anything to say, so we sat there quietly.
    I wasn’t thinking of anything much, when Lucy’s plans ran through my head. I didn’t think I’d jumped, but I must have.
    Aidan looked at me.
    I shook my head. ‘Nothing. A work thing I’d forgotten.’ Should I tell him? Jake? This was exactly what I’d foreseen at the start. Whose side was I on?
     
    I was home by ten, and I spent half an hour online reading back issues of the
New York Times
. Then I phoned Helena. If she’d rung me at that hour, I’d have been furious, and more than halfway to being asleep. With my mother, I’d be lucky to find her home. She was, though, which was a relief.
    ‘I was at Toby’s, and I was talking to his niece, the one who works in the gallery. She says they represent Edward Stevenson.’
    My mother was as infuriatingly calm as she always is. ‘Yes, I think I knew that. And?’
    ‘Didn’t you see the papers last month?’
    There was a silence. That was unusual. Then, even more unusual, she sounded like me. ‘Goodness.’
    I was too anxious even to think of mimicking her from earlier. ‘The question is, what do I do with this information?’
    Helena knows me well. ‘Let’s just revise first. I assume you’ve just checked the reports.’
    ‘I did. And they’re creepily familiar.’
    Helena didn’t have any truck with creepiness. Just the facts, m’lud.
    So I gathered myself. ‘The first newspaper report I could see was in May. A family in Vermont decided to convert their unfinished basement into a family room. When the builders took out an old boiler, they found a skeleton behind a partition wall. There was a shotgun and a suicide note beside it. Dental records identified the remains as those of Edward Stevenson, who had lived there until 1993. But that’s where the trouble seems to have begun.’
    ‘Go on.’
    I wouldn’t be able to swear it, but I was sure Helena was making notes. So I pulled up the articles I’d bookmarked. ‘Stevenson vanished in 1993. He wrote a letter to his wife saying he was leaving her and his family and going to join an ashram in India.’ I double-checked the date. ‘An ashram, in 1993? That’s what it says. Anyway, at the time everyone believed it. He’d