Els Bakker

Mid-February brought a cold snap hard enough to freeze the smaller canals, and Jo walked to the Jordaan rather than take the tram, glad of an excuse to think before she arrived somewhere she’d have to perform certainty she didn’t fully have. The reauthorisation file needed a restoration history for the loan paperwork regardless of anything else going on; that was the reason she could put in writing. The other reason travelled with her unwritten, the way most of her real reasons had for weeks now.

Els Bakker’s studio occupied the ground floor of a narrow house in the Jordaan, windows angled north the way every serious restorer’s windows were angled, and it smelled, the moment Jo stepped through the door, of turpentine, linseed and something mineral underneath both of them that took her a half-second longer than it should have to place.

Fresh oil paint. Not old, not curing, not the ghost of work finished weeks ago and aired since — fresh, the way the north room at the Grey Gallery had smelled fresh on two separate visits, in a room that hadn’t had a canvas moved through it in years.

She said nothing about it. She had learned, from the highlight on the girl’s knuckle onward, that a smell was not a fact, only the kind of thing that made you go looking for one.

“You’re the insurer.” Els said the word the way most of Amsterdam’s smaller trades said it, holding it at arm’s length, the way you’d handle something you weren’t sure was hostile. She was sixty-one and looked it in the good way, hands roughened by forty years of solvents, hair pinned back with the unstudied carelessness of someone who had stopped performing for a mirror decades ago. “Anselm said you’d want a word about the panel’s history.”

“Its cleaning and revarnishing record, mostly. For the loan file.” Jo set her bag down on the one chair in the studio not already covered in something. “You worked on it.”

“Twice. A light surface clean eleven years ago, and a varnish removal and replacement six years before that, when Anselm’s father was still nominally in charge and didn’t trust anyone else to touch it.” Els moved to the kettle without being asked, the reflex of a woman used to visitors who stayed longer than their business required. “I could find you the paperwork if the file doesn’t already have it. I keep records the way Annelies taught me to. Obsessively, and in triplicate.”

“Both jobs matched the file. Same dates, same materials, same before-and-after photographs I’ve already compared against the current condition report.” Jo said it to let her know, without saying so directly, that this visit had not been undertaken lightly, or without homework done in advance. “You do good, documented work. That’s not in question.”

“But something is.”

“Something usually is, in my line of work. It rarely turns out to be the person I’m sitting across from.” It wasn’t quite reassurance, and Els seemed to hear it for what it actually was — an honest hedge rather than a promise — because she didn’t relax so much as recalibrate, the stillness of someone deciding how much ground to give before being asked to give it.

Jo watched her work the kettle, unhurried, competent, a woman entirely at home in a room full of solvents that would have made most people’s eyes water within a minute. “What I actually wanted to ask about is the gap. The eighteen months, four years ago, when the panel doesn’t appear on any loan register, any exhibition record, anything at all.”

Something in Els’s hands slowed, very slightly, around the teapot. “Annelies was ill that year.”

“I know. I’ve seen the insurer’s note about her leave.” Jo kept her voice level, the register she used for a fact rather than an accusation, because the two sounded identical to most people until you’d trained yourself to hear the difference. “I’m not asking to cause anyone pain. I’m asking because a painting that stops existing on paper for a year and a half is the kind of thing my job requires me to account for, whoever it turns out to involve.”

“It doesn’t involve anyone. It was a bad year. Paperwork gets missed in a bad year.” Els poured water she hadn’t quite waited long enough to boil, a small imprecision Jo noted the way she noted everything, filed and unweighted. “You’d know that, if you’d ever nursed someone.”

“I haven’t. You’re right that I wouldn’t know it the way you would.” Jo let that stand rather than defending herself against it, because defending herself was not why she’d come. “You were close to her.”

“Closer than anyone left alive, now.” Els said it plainly, and for a moment something moved under the plainness that Jo recognised without yet knowing what to call it — not grief exactly, or not only grief. “Thirty years. We trained at the same institute, the same year, and she was better than me at everything except the one thing that actually pays a restorer’s rent, which is patience with paperwork. I used to do her filing for her, in the early years, before the gallery could afford proper help.”

“Did you do it during the illness too?”

The kettle rattled slightly against its base as Els set it down, more force in the gesture than the action required. “What are you actually asking me, Ms Achterberg?”

“I’m asking whether you ever handled her ledgers, her cataloguing records, anything with her handwriting in it, during the period the panel’s paperwork went quiet.” Jo said it exactly, without softening it, because she had decided in the tram on the way over that softening it would only make the moment when Els noticed the softening worse for both of them. “It’s a factual question. It doesn’t have a version that implicates you simply by being asked.”

“Doesn’t it.” Els’s hands had gone still on the counter, and her voice, when it came again, had lost the easy warmth of thirty seconds before. “I helped her with correspondence sometimes, when she was too tired to sit up at the desk. Everyone who loved her did small things for her that year. It doesn’t mean any of us kept a record of doing it, because none of us imagined, at the time, that anyone would ever need one.”

“I’m not suggesting you kept a record. I’m asking if you remember.”

“I remember she was dying, and that most days the only thing worth remembering was whether she’d managed to eat something.” The sharpness surprised them both, Jo thought, watching Els’s face do something complicated in the second after she’d said it — not quite regret, not quite defiance, something caught between the two and unable to settle on either. “I’m sorry. That wasn’t — I don’t get asked about that year very often. Most people have the decency to let it stay closed.”

“I’m not trying to open something for the sake of it.”

“No. I don’t imagine you do anything for the sake of it. You strike me as a woman who’s earned the right to be exact.” Els turned back to the counter, hands finding the cups again, a gesture Jo had already clocked as armour rather than hospitality. “Annelies used to say something like that about you people, actually. Insurers. She said you were the only profession left that still believed a fact could exist independently of who benefited from it.”

“Did she mean it as a compliment?”

“With Annelies it was always hard to tell where the compliment ended and the diagnosis began.” For a moment something almost fond crossed Els’s face, the first unguarded thing Jo had seen there. “She’d have liked you, I think. God help you both.”

“I’m not most people, in this job. I’m sorry it costs you something to have me ask.”

Els busied herself with cups she didn’t need, giving her hands the work Jo recognised from a dozen interviews now, the tell of someone who needed a task to survive a question rather than answer it. “How is he? Anselm. Really, not the version he gives everyone at the gallery.”

“You’d know better than me. You’ve known him thirty years.”

“He doesn’t tell me the truth any more. He tells me the version he thinks I can carry, which is his way of loving people, and I used to think it was sweet before I understood it was also a wall.” Els set two cups down, hands not quite steady, and looked at Jo with an attention that had shifted, in the space of a sentence, from wary to searching. “Is he sleeping? Is he eating properly, or is he doing the thing he does where he forgets meals exist because a client’s called with a problem? Is he — “ She stopped herself, visibly, the question arriving somewhere she hadn’t meant to let it go.

“Is he what?”

“Nothing. It doesn’t matter.” Els picked up her own cup and didn’t drink from it. “I worry about him. That’s not a crime, is it, worrying about an old friend.”

“No,” Jo said. “It’s not.”

But she filed it anyway, the way she filed everything — not the worry itself, which was ordinary enough between two people who’d shared thirty years and a grief, but the size of it. It was the overreach of a woman asking after a man’s sleep and his appetite and some unspoken third thing with the intensity of someone checking on a wound she’d caused, rather than one she’d merely witnessed.

“I should let you get on,” Jo said, standing, because she had what she’d come for and staying longer would only give Els time to notice how much of herself she’d already shown. “Thank you for the tea.”

“You didn’t drink it.”

“No,” Jo said, and didn’t apologise for that either, because it hadn’t been the reason she’d come.

At the door, Els caught her sleeve, briefly, the same two-second contact Marijke had used weeks before after a meeting that had gone well, except that nothing about this visit had gone well for either of them. “You’ll be gentle with him. Whatever this turns out to be.” It wasn’t quite a question. “He’s had enough taken from him already, without a stranger deciding what the rest of it’s worth.”

“I don’t decide what things are worth. I find out what’s true, and then other people decide what it’s worth.” Jo said it the way she’d said it to a dozen clients before Els, and heard, for the first time, how thin the distinction sounded when the person asking clearly didn’t believe it either.

· · ·Scene break

She stood on the narrow street outside a moment longer than she needed to, coat pulled tight against a wind coming straight off the Prinsengracht two streets over, and let herself think the thing properly rather than filing it half-formed the way she’d filed everything inside.

The smell in that studio had been the same smell as the north room. Not similar — the same mineral note of oil paint mixed and applied within days rather than years, in two rooms that had no business smelling of anything but varnish and dust three years after the woman who’d worked in one of them had died.

It proved nothing. Restorers used oil paint; that was the entire substance of their profession, and a working studio smelling of fresh paint was about as remarkable as a bakery smelling of bread. She told herself that twice, walking to the tram, in the flat administrative language she used to talk herself down from a feeling before it became something she’d have to defend under questioning.

It didn’t work, this time, the way it usually worked. She had catalogued forty years of Els Bakker’s honest hands against thirty seconds of a woman who couldn’t finish a sentence about what she’d almost asked, and the second fact sat heavier in her than the first, however much the first one deserved to win.

She had nothing she could write down. No document, no discrepancy, no measurable thing a court would let her call evidence — only a smell in two rooms that shouldn’t share it, and a woman who worried about a man’s sleep with the weight of someone keeping a debt rather than a friendship.

She got on the tram without deciding what to do with any of it, which was, she thought, its own kind of answer — the first time in this whole case that she had let a suspicion sit in her without immediately reaching for the next test that would prove or kill it.