Playing Dirty(140)

“Keira would never do such a thing,” I said.

“She had the knife in her hand! How many times do I have to—”

Our mother raised a hand, which drew instantaneous silence. “The painting was badly slashed?”

“Irreparable,” Michael said.

She shook her head. “I struggle to imagine Keira doing something like that. However much she may have fallen in with bad company,” she said, shooting a glare at me, “she is an art lover.”

“But she’s just a maid,” said Michael, who firmly believed that the lower classes could enjoy art no more sophisticated than soap operas and amusingly shaped vegetables.

“Shut up, Michael,” she replied, waving a hand at him. “You sound like an ass when you talk like that. Keira could very easily take you to school on the subject of old masters. In fact she could probably take me to school.”

“The painting she slashed was hardly an old master.”

“An art lover would never destroy art,” she replied firmly. “Even art they dislike. Much as I find Jake Keillor’s ‘Street’ series to be a descent into vulgarity and laziness, much as I find calling it ‘art’ to be an affront to the word itself, much as I would shed no tears were someone to set fire to the beastly thing—I would never start the fire myself. Art represents someone’s work and thought.” She shook her head. “The more I think about it, the more I think that Andrew is right: Keira wouldn’t have done this. I don’t say she is one-hundred percent innocent either, but clearly there is more to this incident than meets the eye.” She sighed. “If only there were some way of knowing exactly what happened in that room.”

We stood pondering the problem a while before I finally spoke. “Wait…don’t we have security cameras?”

My mother looked sheepishly at me and my brother.

“Let us agree,” she said at last, “to never tell anyone how long we spent talking about this before thinking of the obvious solution.”

We agreed.

An hour later, I sat in front of a computer monitor, watching footage from the gallery. Keira and Alexandra had been brought in to watch the footage with us, and I had a comforting hand resting on Keira’s shoulder, just so she’d know I was one-hundred percent on her side in this mess. She’d looked a little confused and uncertain when she’d initially been brought in, and my heart went out to her. She must have had a miserable night—pregnant and accused of a crime she hadn’t committed—and I cursed myself inwardly for having got her into this.

When Alexandra entered, she’d been incensed to find Keira there, and I wondered if, in the confines of her own mind, Alexandra had managed to convince herself that Keira was actually guilty, or if she was just a very talented and devious actress. The affront that she showed certainly seemed real, and she showed no sign of backing down, even when told that we were going to watch the security tapes. Keira’s face, meanwhile, lit up at the mention of the tapes.

The footage played out on the little screen.

“No sound, I’m afraid,” said the Captain of the guard, who had located the relevant footage.

“You’d think we could afford the sound version,” my mother muttered.

On screen, Keira looked at the pictures in the gallery, and then Alexandra entered.

“This is different to the version of events you gave earlier,” my mother said to Alexandra.

“I was panicked,” Alexandra replied. “You can hardly expect me to recall what happened exactly.”

The ensuing argument between the two women yielded little information—without sound it was just two people talking, and although Alexandra did seem to be the aggressor, it could no doubt be argued either way. But then…

“There!” Keira nearly sprang out of her chair in excitement. “She had the knife! Not me!”

The footage showed the moment clearly: Alexandra reached behind her back and drew forth a knife that she must’ve grabbed from the dinner table. The Captain of the guard played it back again in slow motion just to be sure, and there could be absolutely no arguing with the footage. Or so I would’ve assumed.

“That’s not what happened!” Alexandra insisted.

“Alexandra,” my mother said in a tone of gentle remonstration that she might have used on Alexandra when she was a child and had been caught stealing the jam, “it’s there on screen. We all saw it.”

“It may be on the screen,” said Alexandra, with a defiance that suggested she had more legs to stand on than she did, “but it didn’t happen.”