Picture This

‘No trouble. He family,’ she explained. Looking disbelieving, they nonetheless shrugged and walked on. Latisha turned back to Gabriel. ‘If you help me I will not go to the authorities.’

‘Go to the authorities with what? You have no proof.’

‘I have the paint.’

‘Which needs to be matched with the paint on the canvas. You think the authorities are going to listen to someone like you? Felix would have you discredited in minutes. You don’t know him.’

‘I know enough.’

‘Why do you even care?’

‘I told you before, he had a friend of mine killed and he’ll kill you too.’

‘That’s absurd. You’ve been watching too much B-grade TV—’ Gabriel turned to leave.

Latisha grabbed him. ‘You got the mark, like a darkness all down your face and body.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Death – he’s put his stamp on you, and he just waiting… You think you mean something to this man without morals? He a vampire. He have nothing in his veins except greed and ambition and maybe fear, which makes him so dangerous. He will use you up then spit you out.’

But the painter was already a few paces away. ‘Come after me, or break into my apartment again and I’ll have you arrested, you understand? Or worse!”

‘You threatening me, boy? Because I have no fear and nothing to lose. I will see justice!’

But Gabriel had disappeared around the corner.

*

Three glasses of water later Susie was still drunk, but the room had stopped spinning. She sat on the floor in the middle of Felix’s spacious bedroom cradling a cup of black coffee, wearing nothing but her make-up, the pale-blue thigh-high silk stockings and the eight-inch Union Jack platform shoes, the raven headdress still balancing atop her head.

‘I cannot tell you how sexy you look at this moment, like an Egon Schiele nude meets Britannia,’ Felix told her, sitting on the edge of his bed, still in his suit, tie loosened. He pulled his jacket off, then his shirt, then slipped down to the floor and began crawling toward her.

‘Come any closer and my bird will snap your cock off,’ she half-joked, yet she teased him a little by spreading her legs further apart.

‘Susie, bad news: your bird is dead and stuffed. Besides, it’s still got a cigarette butt pushed into its beak.’

‘Jesus! Is that fag still in there? Christ, I hope the photographers didn’t get a shot. I’ll have the anti-smoking lobby after me as well as the animal lobbyists. The designer’s gonna hate me!’

Felix reached her and began running his hands up her legs. She caught his wrists.

‘Truth or dare?’

‘What are we, ten years old?’

‘Truth or dare? C’mon, Felix, let’s live a little dangerously.’

He sat back, loosening his trousers over his erection. ‘Okay. Truth.’

She paused, revelling in the power she had over him in that moment. Then the niggling suspicion that had been blooming in the back of her mind since that woman had confronted her at the gala came to the forefront.

‘Maxine Doubleday – was she your lover?’ The second she’d finished asking the question she regretted it. It was apparent to her that she was now too involved to want him implicated in Maxine’s death in any way. She wanted to believe.

He looked away, calculating how to survive.

‘No,’ he lied, ‘absolutely not. She was just one of the artists I represented in the group show. We had a few meetings, a sweet girl – not untalented. But I did have a verbal contract to continue to represent her for five years after the group show whatever the critical reaction – I honoured that, Susie, I continue to honour it, as you know.’ God, I’m good. The very best! That voice, the inevitable thrill of deceit and getting away with it, filled him, as delicious as a clandestine orgasm.

Susie exhaled. Such was her relief that she thought the raven might come back to life and fly off her head.