Page 56 of All I Want for Christmas

Darcy straightened. ‘Really? Where is he?’

Viggo shrugged. ‘His PA didn’t say.’

‘Well, when will he be back?’

He shrugged again. ‘Apparently he is away for a few days this week. That’s all I know.’

Darcy considered it. It was one thing not wanting to have to work in his presence, but if he really wasn’t there...If it was guaranteed that he was gone for a bit, it would be an own goal – face-spiting – to miss the opportunity to put in a few more hours.

She watched as Viggo pottered over to the next display. They were in the Madsen Heritage room, a small parlour at the back of the gallery giving a potted history of the philanthropic family which had done so much for Danish art. A timeline had been painted on the walls, sepia and black-and-white tinted images showing old family photographs. From a distance, they looked like every other rich Danish dynasty of their time – the men neatly bearded and in three-piece suits, the older women still wearing their hair in the old Gibson Girl pompadour style...

She walked slowly behind Viggo, looking at the photographs with vague curiosity. She hadn’t looked around upstairs at all since coming to work here – either because the tourists were always jostling about or she was in too much of a hurry to hit the stacks. But it felt soothing to wander up here in the calm quiet before the doors opened and any of the other gallery staff arrived.

Viggo attached the plaques to the small brass posts already positioned in the wall; everything had been measured up weeks ago, the copy checked and double checked before it had been sent off to print.

She stopped in front of the giant black-and-white photograph that dominated the room and stared at it in silence,wishing the people she saw there could talk. Did they have the answer she was looking for?

The photograph showed the family arranged as a group in an orangery. Vines trailed the walls behind them, the women sitting on fashionable Lloyd Loom chairs, the men behind them looking straight to camera. In the very centre of the photograph sat an older man in a rocking chair. He had white hair and a monocle, a gnarled hand gripping the hand-rest and a small leather book on his lap. Darcy checked the information plaque to the side, her hunch confirmed: Bertram Madsen, 1918. The two young men either side of him were his sons, Frederik and Casper.

According to what Viggo had told her over one of their coffees, Madsen Senior had been a brilliant chemist, once nominated for the Nobel Prize for Chemistry; he had made the family’s fortune. But it was his eldest son, Frederik, who had turned the family into a social tour de force, not least by setting up the Foundation. Frederik wasn’t a handsome man, with his slightly goggly eyes and lantern jaw, but he had a stern, proud look which Darcy suspected had made him impossible to ignore. His brother, Casper, was slighter in build and darker-haired with watchful eyes. The reserved, recalcitrant younger brother? Spare to the heir?

Seated on a sofa beside Bertram, in front of the brothers, sat the mother and daughter – Gerde and Lotte Madsen, their hands demurely clasped in their laps. The girl looked to be in her mid-teens, doll-like and so pale she could have been fashioned from porcelain. Like her mother, she had fair hair and light eyes and looked so mild-mannered in demeanour that Darcy suspected neither one of them had ever encountered anything more violent in their lives than a runny egg or dropped hem.

She wandered to the next picture. Again it showed the mother and daughter, in a garden, but Lotte looked slightly younger here: June 1915, said the plaque. There was a young girl in the image with them, too, and Darcy could see a gardener working in the background, a pair of shears in his outstretched hand as he tended a flower bed. Gerde was sitting in a canopied deck-chair, the girls on a picnic blanket at her feet with books around them. The photograph had a reportage feel to it as the girls were slightly blurry, as if they had glanced up at the call of their names. They were barefoot, wearing cotton summer dresses and making flower crowns. Was midsummer approaching? Darcy knew from her mother’s stories of her own childhood that Sankt Hans Aften – Midsummer’s Eve – was a big deal here: bonfires were lit on the beach, an ancient Viking tradition...

The photograph showed an idyllic scene, with no hint whatsoever that at the same moment, Europe was at war and men were dying in the trenches. Darcy’s own great-great-grandfather had been killed at Ypres; he’d been one of five brothers in a family of nine, cut down in his prime. And meanwhile, these rich little girls had made flower crowns in the garden.

Darcy turned away, feeling agitated by the unfairness of it all even now: why some should suffer so horribly, and others prosper. Others play.

But life wasn’t fair and it never had been. Some people simply had all the luck.

The day passed with its usual gentle rhythm – the constant shuffle of papers, Viggo’s low voice on the phone, soft-soled footsteps, the background hum of the visitors upstairs. Darcy had worked straight through lunch, on a roll with Trier’sdiaries now that she had established that none of the women in his official catalogue of work bore a resemblance to the woman in the hidden portrait. It had been a huge relief to realize she hadn’t wasted the past week after all.

‘Time’s up,’ Viggo said, coming to stand by the table at the end of the stack where she was working. He had put on his long overcoat and was setting his trilby on his head.

‘Really? Already?’ she asked, surprised. Another time slip. It had felt more like five o’clock to her, but it was so difficult to tell without daylight.

‘Jens is here I’m afraid.’ Jens was the chief security officer and oversaw a team of three others, plus two dogs.

‘He’s always so punctual,’ she complained, tapping her papers back into a neat pile and replacing them in the archive box file.

‘How did you get on today?’ he asked. ‘I didn’t hear any eurekas.’

‘No, sadly none of those. Ididfind a very rude pencil sketch that’s made me look at Mr Trier in a new light.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. Homoerotic, you might say.’ She glanced at Viggo. ‘Was he gay?’

‘If he was, he wasn’t publicly. Same-sex relationships weren’t legal here till ’33.’

‘Mm. It might just have been a doodle, of course. If he did like men, it certainly didn’t stop him consorting with women too. I think he paid more for prostitutes than he did for food.’ She replaced the box in its position in the stack. She was one column away from the end of the first stack now. Progress, if not achievement.

She grabbed her coat, scarf and bag and they walked up the stairs together. The gallery had closed at six and the shopand reception staff never stayed longer than half past. All the lights had been switched off so that the only light coming through was the early evening twilight through the glass-domed roof.

It always felt special to Darcy, walking through a gallery after hours; maybe even sacred. The space had a pristine quality to it – no litter or mess, of course; nothing so fallible and human as that. But in the silence and darkness, the space breathed, somehow, as if the souls of past lives were caught behind the paint in the canvases. Eyes followed her footsteps. Smiles hovered on lips. Washing on lines billowed mid-blow of the breeze. The gallery was not dead space, but merely sleeping. It had its own slow pulse. Immortality could be captured within these walls, for the long departed were not truly gone for as long as they were looked upon.

‘Got any plans this evening?’ she asked him as they walked through the hallowed rooms.

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