My husband said the storage unit was empty — he had been paying for it every month for fourteen years.
He has gone to that spot on the Wexham road every year on the anniversary for fourteen years, and I have never once known he was out of the house.
He goes early. Before seven. He is back before I am up.
And the paintings.
He started in 2013. One or two a year. Always from that one photograph, because it is the only one he has ever had, because he never met her.
That is the thing I cannot put down.
He has painted a stranger’s face thirty-one times and he has never seen it in life. He has only seen a newspaper page and — I found this out later — about four seconds on a road.
And then the gate went.
I was still on that floor. I had my phone in my hand and I had got as far as his name on the screen.
And behind me, at the top of the row, the barrier came up and there was an engine.
And I want to say honestly that in that half second, everything I had just worked out went out of my head and I was certain — completely certain — that it was him, back early, and that I was about to have the worst conversation of my life on a concrete floor.
It was the man from the desk. In one of those little site buggies.
He had seen on the camera that 214 was open and that a woman he did not know was inside it, and he had come down.
He got out and he did not come near the door. He stopped about four metres away, which I have thought about since, because it was deliberate.
And he looked past me at the paintings — at eleven of them turned round, propped against the rack — and he did not react at all.
And I said something like: do you know what this is.
