Like the bulls he had admired so often in the ring, Goya sighted his target and moved towards it. The wall fell to the onslaught of darkness, figures emerging half-completed, half human, winding in a mad procession. Mouths gaped, eyes extended, insanity in the turn of bodies, a demented congregation smearing their ghoulish progress across the wall.

‘… I have painted these pictures to occupy my imagination, which is tormented by all the ills that afflict me …’

He had sent the confession to a friend, but knew he could not risk confiding the whole truth in words. Anything written could be retained and used as a weapon against him.

The written word had held danger before. Earlier in his lifehe had scrawled captions under his works, the most damning reserved for The Disasters of War, the eighty aquatints which he had never published. Under the drawings he had made comments like a war correspondent writing from the front:

One cannot look at this.

This is bad.

This is how it happened.

I saw it.

And this too.

Why?

He had charted the war atrocities and recorded them, but kept them secret. The reason was obvious. A famed liberal, Goya could not risk retaliation from the vicious Ferdinand VII. He was too old and too weak for political grandstanding. Too frightened to rebel publicly.

Staring at his work, Goya moved up to the belly of the wall, his breath warm against the paint and plaster underneath. He knew the pictures wouldn’t survive in the Spanish climate. Oils mixed with white preparation of calcium sulphate, together with the adhesion of glue, would fade quickly in the heat and the damp from the nearby river. But that wasn’t important. He wasn’t creating the paintings to be admired, but to leave behind a testimony of what was happening to him.

His mind slipped backwards, losing its hold on the ratchet of memory. He was back in the summer of 1796, in Andalusia, at the country estate of the widowed Duchess of Alba. They were lovers, of course, and Goya ran the gauntlet of the Inquisition in return for her soft mouth and violence of nature. Resting his faceagainst the wall, the old man felt the wetness of the paint and remembered leaning his head against his lover’s moist thigh. So extraordinary had she been, the Duchess’s image had repeated itself constantly in his work. Chief sorceress, witch of the heart.

Witches in the Spanish court, witchcraft in the Spanish court. Satanism a sop against the grinding control of Catholicism and the Inquisition. Where there was ignorance there was superstition, and he had painted it … Pushing back from the wall, Goya turned, facing another mural, startled by his own vision.

Slowly the day began to shift, dusk at the windows and the open door. Lighting the oil lamps, he turned back to his work. Blisters on his palms made his actions intermittently clumsy, the straining of weak eyes made his head throb, and the swelling of worn muscles ached in the heat.

But still he carried on.

37

London

The first soft rains of April had given way to a truculent temper of wind and early dark afternoons, spring taking her time. The previous night Ben had slept intermittently, troubled by noises and the image of his dead brother. When he woke he remembered that the skull had been stolen and sat on the side of the bed, his head in his hands. Who had broken into his house? And, more importantly, how had they known the skull was there?

The answer unnerved him.

They knew because they had been watching him.

They had followed the skull from Madrid to London. From Leon to Ben. From the hospital to the house. Someone out there wanted the skull badly – and they were determined to get it. Leon had not taken his own life. The skull was important enough for someone to kill for it. Leon hadn’t just been hearing noises and voices – he had been followed, robbed, hanged. And meanwhile, what had Gina been doing? Hadn’t she encouraged Leon to write about Goya? Brought Frederick Lincoln into his life? Confused Leon’s thoughts with mediums and the raising of the dead?

It would have been amusing to some, Ben thought. But not to Leon. Not to a man who had heard voices all his life. And then there were the Black Paintings. Pictures so disturbed they had confounded generations. Paintings which had spooked – and, some said, cursed – anyone who had tried to decipher them.

Getting to his feet, Ben moved into his study and reached behind the largest bookcase, his fingers scrabbling to catch hold of the edge of an over-stuffed envelope. Finally he pulled out Leon’s hidden testimony. To his relief all of his brother’s paperwork was intact, which meant that whoever wanted the skull either didn’t want the theory or didn’t know of its existence.

The phone rang suddenly, interrupting Ben’s thoughts. Roma Jaffe’s steady voice came down the line.

‘How are you? I was told you were back in London.’

How did she know that? Ben wondered.

‘I’m coping. How’s the Little Venice investigation going?’

‘Slowly.’

‘No leads?’

‘Nothing concrete,’ Roma replied. ‘We did a reconstruction, but no one recognised the victim.’

‘No one?’

‘No … Did you?’

Surprised, Ben took a moment to answer. ‘Why should I?’

‘He had your card in his pocket.’

‘That doesn’t mean I knew him. As I said before, there could have been a dozen reasons why he had my card.’

‘But why was there nothing on his body apart from your card?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘It’s a mystery,’ she said slowly. ‘You couldn’t identify the facial surgery either, could you?’

‘No. I just know I didn’t do it.’

There was a stilted pause before she spoke again.

‘I’m very sorry about your brother. It must have been a terrible shock. Duncan said that you didn’t think he’d killed himself, and that you wanted to prove it.’

Closing his eyes momentarily, Ben regretted his uncharacteristic outburst and tried to mend the damage.

‘I was very upset when I spoke to your colleague. I’d just found Leon’s body.’

There was another swinging pause.

‘What were the findings of your brother’s autopsy?’

‘They said it was suicide.’

‘But you don’t think so … So that means you must think that someone murdered him? Who?’

‘I don’t know.’

Even over the phone Roma could sense that he was holding back. ‘Do you know why your brother was killed?’

Detita was standing by the stove, stirring something in a pot. Behind her, at the kitchen table, sat the young Ben and Leon arguing good-naturedly over a book. Finally, Ben let go of the book and Leon leant back in his chair, holding the volume triumphantlyto his chest. In the distance came the angry sound of a dog barking, the wind clapping in the trees outside. The atmosphere changed in an instant, from homely to threatening.

‘You hear that noise?’ Detita asked, turning to the brothers. ‘That’s Goya. The old man’s come back. He’s looking for his head …’

Snorting, Ben laughed, but Leon glanced over to the window, unnerved.

‘Someone came to see the old painter at the Quinta del Sordo. Goya knew them, knew what they wanted to do …’ She paused, making sure the words were leaving an imprint on the cloying air as she pointed beyond the window, the outside lamp shuddering in a late summer wind, Leon transfixed. ‘He heard devils passing his house at night, on horseback—’

The firelight caught in her eyes for a heartbeat, yellow darts of flame in the blackness of her pupils. And behind that, somewhere Ben had never gone, was the place where she had taken Leon a long, long time before.

‘Mr Golding?’ Roma said, raising her voice slightly over the phone. ‘Do you know why your brother was killed?’