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Chapter 24: More pictures

Spike was the one trembling now. “During the fight... I lost control. Didn’t know what I was doing. All I knew was that I had to protect you.” Buffy stepped away from his embrace and put some distance between them. She refused to turn around. She didn’t want to look at him. She could barely hear Spike’s whisper, “I…I’m not sure, luv. How could I be sure? But I’m afraid that…that I killed them. There wasn’t time. We needed to leave…had to get you safe, luv. God, Buffy, I’d die if I let anything happen to you.”

“That’s why you didn’t want to call the police! Spike, you should have said something. We should have done something…”

Her outburst came to an abrupt end as her eyes lighted on something else that she desperately needed to see for herself. Moving swiftly, she swung open one of the hanging rods before he could stop her. The picture facing her was a very high quality copy of a Monet. Even the brush strokes looked perfect. But now that she knew what to look for, it was obvious. Underneath the water lilies, among the flowers, just barely visible, floated the bloated corpse of a young girl. Wildly she pulled out the next hanger, then the next, scanning each picture for what she was afraid that she would find.

“Spike? You’re scaring me. Who are these people?” She could barely get the words past her lips. “Are they…are they all dead?”

She flinched when he went to touch her. “I’m not really sure. Some I recognize, like the thugs from New York, but the rest… I don’t know who they are. Whether they’re real people, or just my imagination run wild, I’m not sure. Like I told you, sometimes when I paint…things just come out. I don’t mean to paint them, but they’re there just the same.”

Buffy moved away from him, backing towards the windows. She considered signaling for help, but instead of being threatening, Spike sank to the floor, head bowed. When he raised his head to look at her his eyes were pleading.

“Please, luv. Give me a chance to explain. After my mother died, they all turned out like this, or worse. I didn’t paint for years and years. Then Tara talked me into it. She said she thought it would help me to come to terms with myself. That my paintings were a form of self-expression, or something.” He looked up at Buffy with tear-streaked eyes. “She told me to paint something beautiful. That’s when I started copying old masters. I thought I was getting better. I could control it more, just paint what I saw in front of me.” He looked so devastated sitting there. “I’m sorry, Buffy. I really am. I should never have brought you in here.”

She had to think this through rationally. Spike was the same man he had been five minutes ago. The same man she would have sworn did not have an evil bone in his body. The man she had been contemplating letting herself fall in love with, before all this talk of murders and fingerprints. Before she had discovered the tortured images that he concealed in his workshop.

He hadn’t changed in the last few minutes; only her perception of him had. And she was still an agent on an assignment. It was her job to get to the bottom of this mystery. As much as the girl in her was horrified, the Agent looked at this storeroom of horrors and saw evidence.

It shouldn’t have been difficult to focus her mind on her mission, but it was. What particulars could she look for? What bound these images so strongly to his mind that they would creep out when he wasn’t expecting them to? Were there images of the murdered girls among these pictures? She had no pictures to go with the names. All she knew was that one of girls had been Chinese, another had been black, and the third simply foreign. All three had been young.

She took a step closer to him, still prostrate on the floor. Perhaps Spike himself could help her out. She bent down next to him, as if offering comfort. “The images that you do recognize? Tell me about them. Who they are, why do they haunt you?”

“That’s the word for it, luv. They haunt me, even during my waking hours, because they are dead ….and I’m not.” He gestured vaguely at the pictures hanging on the racks on the wall. “At least half these paintings contain images of my Mum. I told you that I never quite did get over losing her. I tell myself that it wasn’t my fault. But I guess I don’t really believe it.”

Buffy was glad that she had spoken to Tara about Spike. Despite everything he was accused of, she knew that she would have a doubly hard time if she thought that he had had anything to do with his mother’s death. Here was her chance to get Spike’s version of what had happened. And perhaps if he opened up to her about something so painful, he would be open to telling her more. She sat beside him on the floor. “Tell me more about your Mom. How she died.”

He was almost pathetically eager to talk. “She was sickly, my Mum. Had a rare cancer; completely inoperable. She went to all the specialists. In Britain, Europe, and in the States. They all told her the same thing. She wouldn’t accept it though. We thought…we thought maybe if Western medicine couldn’t do anything for her, maybe Eastern mysticism could cure her. Looking back on it, I know it was stupid – and probably mostly for my benefit. I couldn’t bear to see her give up and just wait to die. So we got our things together, and went on a trip visiting every Eastern mystic we could think of. It was all for nothing in the end. She died while we were in China. And I couldn’t help but think that if I hadn’t encouraged her to take that blasted trip, if we’d left for home sooner, that maybe, somehow, she might have pulled through.”

“I’m so sorry, Spike.” The words came out of her lips, and she was sorry for what a younger Spike had suffered. Inwardly she rejoiced that at least his words confirmed what Tara had told her. She could rest her mind that he was innocent of that particularly horrendous charge. “But there was nothing anyone could have done,” she continued. “It was her time. Just like my Mom. Sometimes you have to let go.”

“I know. I know.” There were real tears on his face. It was hard to be suspicious of a man who cried over the death of his mother. “It’s just hard. And things went from bad to worse. The things that happened while we were in China…It was just awful Buffy. I don’t know why we ever went there…”

Without prompting, Spike pulled another canvass rack out from the wall.

It was a more traditional looking portrait. The face staring out of the picture belonged to a young Asian girl, but wearing what looked like traditional warrior garb of some kind. Buffy gasped. Was this the first victim? Was Spike was going to tell her what happened in China?

“I never did learn who she was. It was right after my Mum died. We were still in Hong Kong. This girl, she just came out of nowhere. She had a sword, like in the picture, but she wasn’t dressed like that. Anyway, she, she said something in Chinese, but I don’t know what it was. Then she started swinging at me. I dodged and tried to run, but she followed. In the end, she gave me this scar above my eye, but she…she was dead, Buffy. I swear it was self-defense, but she was dead, and I …I wasn’t. I can’t tell you how many times I wished I’d died there instead. Angelus wouldn’t let me go to the local authorities about it, and then we packed up and left to return to England. I was in such a daze over what had happened, and my Mum being gone, that I don’t really remember much about anything until I got home to England. Of course it wasn’t really home anymore, without my Mum. Not long after, Dru and I came to the States, and I tried to forget. But I guess I haven’t done a very good job of it.”

“Oh, Spike! Why would she do something like that? Attack you? It doesn’t make any sense!”

“I know. Looking back on it, knowing what I do now, I can’t help but think that Angelus had something to do with it. It was obvious we were all traveling together. He must have done something to set her off, and when she couldn’t find him, she settled on me instead.”

She wondered if this explanation of why his fingerprints were found on a sword used to kill a young Chinese girl in Hong Kong in the early 1980’s would hold up under scrutiny. It certainly was easier to believe that Angelus O’Connor had been instrumental in the girl’s death than the man in tears on the floor. Silently she wondered what Giles would think of Spike’s story, and whether he would have just as convincing explanations about the young Romanian girl and Nikki Woods.

Looking around her as a stranger would, and seeing his life’s work as merely a multitude of evidence on display, Buffy knew that this looked so much worse than anything she had imagined finding. Based on what she had seen, she was certain that it was possible that Spike had painted the forged Renoir himself. The almost forgotten forged painting that had started off this whole investigation. If he had somehow managed to keep his personal gallery of horrors out of his work, he certainly had the talent to pull it off. But even worse, his other paintings implied that he was guilty of the murders Giles had accused him of. But would it be enough to convict him?

She was never going to get a better opportunity. The more the girl in her was confused and traumatized, the more Agent Buffy Summers took control. Depending on what she found, she probably never wanted to come back to this house, or see Spike, ever again.

His defeated demeanor and the fact that backup was so close by made her bold. “I’ll stay the night if you like.”

“What?” He wiped his face and rose unsteadily to his feet.

“In my own room,” she amended. “You probably shouldn’t be alone right now. This has been a very difficult evening.”

Once he was asleep she would try to get back into the workroom and take pictures of everything she could. Giles would probably be able to run the images through some kind of computer program, and they might be able to come up with names for some of the faces. Faced with enough facts, they might be able to piece together what was going on here. Or maybe Spike would confess to her. “If you feel up to it we can talk about it more in the morning. Does that sound okay to you?”

“Thank you. I should have painted you with wings, you’re like an angel to me.” He reached out to touch her face and tried not to notice that she refused to allow it. He could understand that she’d be feeling very ambivalent about him right now. He wasn’t too happy with himself. But then he never was.





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