A Supernatural Mystery 

book 1

To the Artist, a wedding. To the eye, testimony.

Catrin Morrow restores paintings for a living, working alone from a deconsecrated Victorian wedding chapel in Portsmouth. Her method is the same for every object on her easel: record first, explain second.

The commission seems ordinary. A family wedding group, a century old, surface grime, yellowed varnish — and a client who wants the strange red bird painted above the chapel roof removed.

But the painting refuses to be photographed. The bride's face is wrong in a way Catrin can measure but not explain. And the more carefully she documents what is in front of her, the clearer it becomes that the picture is not a record of a marriage. It is a record of what was done to prevent one.

A woman who refused to sign. A grave carrying the wrong name. A sealed room beneath the vestry floor that everyone agreed to forget. Catrin's rules exist to keep her work honest — and every one of them is about to be tested by an object that has waited a hundred years for someone to look at it properly.

The first novel in The Chapel of Wet Paint series — quiet, exact British supernatural mystery for readers of Susan Hill, Andrew Michael Hurley and Laura Purcell. Each book stands alone; the chapel remembers everything.

Read the first chapter

Chapter 1 — The Chapel Studio

By half past eight, the old wedding chapel had taken the morning into itself and made it colder.

Catrin Morrow stood beneath the west window with a mug of tea cooling in one hand and the day’s first painting propped on the conservation easel in front of her. Outside, the lane was bright in the ordinary way of late spring: pale sky, traffic noise softened by distance, gulls worrying at the roofs beyond the churchyard wall. Inside, the light arrived cautiously. It fell through the chapel’s stained glass in diluted strips, blue and amber and a bruised rose colour, and settled across the stone floor as if reluctant to touch it.

The chapel had not been consecrated for weddings in nearly twenty years, but it still kept the shape of ceremony. The aisle remained, although Catrin had covered most of it with washable runners. The pews had been removed before she bought the place, leaving faint scars in the flagstones where the fixings had been. A shallow step led up to what had once been the altar and was now her main work area: easels, lamps, drying racks, cotton gloves, glass jars of brushes, trays of swabs, solvents, scalpels, conservation sponges, blotting paper, varnish samples, rolls of acid-free tissue.

The old vestry had become a store. The little robing room had become an office. The bell rope had been cut short and tied above head height, though it still hung in the corner beside the inner door, a thick, dust-darkened braid ending in nothing.

Catrin had kept the register table.

She told people it was because the height was useful, which was true. She used it for paperwork, photographing condition reports, unpacking frames. But she had kept it mostly because its surface had been polished by decades of nervous hands. Brides, grooms, witnesses, mothers with hats pinned too tightly to their heads. People had signed their names there before leaving as something altered.

It seemed suitable for restoration.

She set her tea on the table, beside a padded envelope from the courier and the printed intake notes clipped to a board.

Client: Mrs. A. Bellweather.

Object: Framed oil painting. Approx. 1900–1920.

Subject: Wedding group outside chapel.

Condition: Surface grime, yellowed varnish, minor craquelure, losses to lower right corner.

Request: Clean, stabilise, advise on frame.

Notes from client: Family piece. No urgent deadline.

No urgent deadline was always a kindness. Catrin had built her life around work that did not like haste. Paintings punished impatience. So did old buildings, old grief, and most people.

It was also, this year, a necessary kindness. The practice review was due in September — five-yearly, routine, a matter of submitting completed casework and being visited by two assessors who would look at her records, her premises, and her judgement, and decide whether her name stayed on the referral list that most of her institutional work came through.

She had passed it twice before without thinking about it. She thought about it now, occasionally, in the way one thinks about a filling that has begun to feel slightly wrong.

She took up the nitrile gloves from the tray and put them on carefully. Her fingers were narrow and practical, with a small crescent scar across the first knuckle of her left hand where a framing pin had caught her years ago. She flexed them once, then switched on the angled lamp over the easel.

The painting brightened under the controlled light.

It was not large. Twenty inches by sixteen, oil on canvas, set in a dark wooden frame with a narrow gilt slip. A chapel stood in the background, recognisable enough that Catrin had noticed it the moment Dan unpacked it two days ago.

Her chapel.

Not exactly, perhaps. The painting showed the front elevation from across the lane, before the low wall had been rebuilt, before the yew at the left of the porch had been cut back, before the drainage pipe had been replaced with ugly black plastic. But there was no mistaking the pointed arch above the door, the pair of lancet windows, the worn threshold stone that dipped slightly in the centre.

A wedding party had been arranged outside. Bride and groom at the middle, formal and unsmiling. Two women in pale dresses. Three men with stiff collars. A girl at the edge of the group, perhaps twelve, looking not at the painter but at the chapel door. There were flowers painted as blunt white marks in the bride’s hands. The sky was a flat, varnish-yellowed grey.

And above the chapel roof, perched on the ridge where no bird would comfortably sit, was a red eagle.

It was the wrong part of the picture.

Catrin had seen symbolic birds in folk portraits before. Doves for fidelity. Robins for death or visitation. Swans, peacocks, blackbirds, owls. But this bird was none of those. The eagle was too large, too deliberate, painted in a red that had not dulled with the varnish. Even through the brown film of age, it held its colour. Not bright exactly. Not decorative. Deep red, the colour of arterial blood darkened by air.

Its head was turned sideways.

It watched the wedding party.

Catrin leaned closer, her breath shallow enough not to disturb the surface. The varnish had cracked in a fine network across the sky, but around the eagle the craquelure changed. Smaller. Tighter. As though that area of paint had dried under different conditions, or been altered later.

She noted it on the report.

“Possible later addition: red eagle on roof ridge. Pigment/varnish relationship to be assessed.”

Her own voice sounded too loud when she dictated the note into her recorder. The chapel returned it faintly from the high ceiling.

Assessed.

She disliked words that pretended to be neutral. They were useful, necessary, professionally safe. Still, every so often a painting made her feel the stupidity of them. You could write “surface irregularity” when what you meant was someone had touched a face out of a family portrait. You could write “overpaint” when what you meant was a dead child had been made to look alive. You could write “possible later addition” when what you meant was why would anyone paint that there?

Catrin took a first set of photographs. Full front. Full reverse. Frame details. Corner losses. Raking light.

The camera screen showed the painting more harshly than her eyes did. It flattened the chapel, sharpened the faces, turned the varnish yellow into sickness.

She took another shot.

The screen flickered.

Catrin lowered the camera, waited, then looked again. Battery still good. Memory card fine. She pressed playback.

The photograph appeared.

For a moment she thought the eagle was not there.

Then the screen refreshed, and it was.

She frowned.

The camera was four years old and disliked cold weather. The chapel’s stone floor held winter long after winter had gone, and the west end in particular could make electronics sulk. She had learned that in her first month, when a humidity monitor refused to connect unless she warmed it in both hands like an egg.

She deleted the blurred shot and took another.

This time the eagle appeared clearly.

“Right,” she said.

No one answered, because no one ever answered in the chapel unless she had the radio on.

She had not put the radio on yet.

That was unusual. Catrin disliked beginning the day in silence. She preferred Radio 4 murmuring under the work: news she half-heard, voices discussing things far beyond the chapel, small evidence that the world continued in lanes and offices and kitchens while she coaxed dirt from dead varnish. But the radio sat untouched on the side shelf, its black cord trailing down behind the ultrasonic cleaner.

She looked at it, then at the painting.

The wedding party remained rigid in their century-old arrangement.

The bride’s face was the least distinct of them all. Not because of damage, exactly. The faces of the others had been painted with plain competence: brows, noses, mouths, shadow below chins. The bride’s features were soft, almost smudged beneath the veil. The white of the veil had yellowed badly. It dulled her into the background.

Catrin moved the lamp a fraction to the left.

The bride’s right hand emerged from the bouquet. Bare fingers. No glove.

No ring.

Catrin checked the groom’s hand. There was a ring there, a thin gold line on his left hand, positioned with the small vanity painters often gave such details when families had paid for them.

Odd.

She leaned in further, then stopped herself. First look was not for solving. First look was for recording. She had learned that early, when she was still young enough to want every painting to confess immediately. It was better to let the surface speak in order.

She picked up the condition report and began her standard assessment.

Canvas: slightly slack, no visible tears.

Stretcher: original, softwood, one replaced key missing.

Frame: minor losses, old woodworm holes, inactive.

Surface: general grime, discoloured natural resin varnish, localised bloom in lower sky.

Paint layer: stable overall, scattered abrasion, possible overpaint.

Possible overpaint.

The phrase sat heavily in her head.

Catrin put down the pencil and crossed to the narrow kitchen alcove by the vestry. The kettle stood beside a sink with a separate filtered tap and a line of mugs on hooks. The mugs were all hers, though several had belonged to other people first. Charity shop ceramics, one with a fox on it, one with a chipped blue rim, one printed with the name of a museum conservation department that had never employed her but had provided excellent biscuits during a training course.

She picked up the fox mug, changed her mind, and returned to the tea already cooling on the register table.

Halfway across the chapel, she stopped.

The smell was wrong.

Not strong. Not dramatic. Just a small thread of scent laid across the colder air.

Orange blossom.

Catrin stood very still.

The chapel usually smelled of stone dust, paper, weak tea, timber, and the precise clean odours of her work: ethanol, deionised water, wax, cotton, aged varnish disturbed under the scalpel. Sometimes damp came up after rain. Sometimes the old drains contributed their opinion if the weather turned.

But this was floral. Sweet, with a waxy edge.

Orange blossom.

She turned her head towards the painting.

The bride’s bouquet was painted too roughly to identify the flowers. White marks. A little green. A suggestion only.

Catrin exhaled through her mouth and looked at the sink.

Cleaning products. That would be it. She had changed washing-up liquid last week after the usual one was out of stock. Citrus. Something citrus. The mind, encouraged by a wedding picture, had supplied blossom.

She crossed to the alcove and picked up the bottle.

Lemon.

She held it under her nose.

Sharp. Synthetic. Nothing like what she had smelled in the aisle.

“Fine,” she said, and put it down.

The word returned softly from the ceiling.

Fine.

The chapel was not silent after that. It clicked and settled around her in its normal ways. Pipes in the wall. A faint shift in the roof timbers as the sun reached the slates. A car passing too quickly outside. The building had its own vocabulary, and Catrin knew most of it.

This was part of why she had bought it. Not because she liked chapels in the romantic sense. She did not consider herself romantic. She liked the height, the north light, the way the thick walls held the temperature steady, the fact that nobody above or below could complain about solvents or odd working hours. She liked that the place had once been used for promises and now housed repair. She liked that it was not a home, though she had made a narrow bed in the office for late nights and occasionally used it despite promising herself she would not.

She had told her sister, Beth, that the chapel suited her because it was “structurally honest.”

Beth had said, “That means lonely, doesn’t it?”

Catrin had refused to answer on principle.

She returned to the easel and began the first surface tests.

A tiny cotton swab, barely dampened. Rolled, not rubbed. One discreet area at the lower edge where grime had collected along the frame lip. The swab lifted grey. Good. Surface dirt first. No pigment movement. She made the note. Repeated with a different solution. Another note.

Work steadied things. Work was sequence. The discipline of attention. The world reduced to what could be tested, observed, recorded. Catrin trusted a good procedure more than she trusted most explanations. Procedures did not flatter, panic, or invent motive. They either revealed something or they did not.

By ten, the first cleaning window had opened a patch of sky above the chapel roof. Under the yellow varnish and dirt, the original grey was cooler, almost pearly.

The eagle did not change.

Its red remained dense and unwet-looking, untouched by the bloom that clouded the paint around it. Catrin tested near it, not on it. The varnish dissolved at the sky. The red refused to dull or soften.

She made another note.

At quarter past ten, Beth phoned.

Catrin saw her sister’s name light up on the mobile and considered ignoring it. She was in gloves. She was working. She had solvent open. These were all good reasons.

She answered with her elbow and put the phone on speaker.

“You’re alive,” Beth said.

“I am at work.”

“So alive and pretending that counts as a personality.”

“I have several personalities. They’re all busy.”

“You forgot dinner.”

Catrin looked at the calendar pinned beside the store-room door. Tuesday. Beth’s house. Seven o’clock. The square was written in Beth’s rounded hand because Beth had learned not to trust Catrin’s calendar unless she physically wrote on it herself.

“I didn’t forget. I deprioritised.”

“You forgot.”

“I may have failed to bring it to the front of my mind at the correct time.”

“That’s longer than forgot.”

Catrin glanced at the painting. The bride stood in her yellowing veil. The girl at the edge of the group continued not to look at the painter.

“I’m sorry,” Catrin said.

There was a little pause. Beth knew when an apology had come too easily and was therefore attached to something else.

“You all right?”

“Mm.”

“Work horrible?”

“Interesting.”

“Your interesting usually means mould, death, or somebody’s terrible great-uncle painted over somebody else’s terrible great-aunt.”

“It’s a wedding group.”

“See? Death.”

Catrin smiled despite herself. “Outside this chapel, actually. Early twentieth century, I think.”

“That’s nice.”

“I’m not sure nice is the word.”

“Of course not. You’d have to invoice extra for nice.”

Catrin reached for a clean swab, then paused. “There’s a bird on it.”

“On the wedding group?”

“On the roof. A red eagle.”

“A red eagle?”

“On the roof ridge. Wings folded.”

“Is that a thing?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Maybe they were dramatic.”

“People usually are.”

Beth made the small noise she made when she wanted to ask something and had decided not to. Their mother used to do the same thing, though Beth would have denied the inheritance.

“Come tonight,” Beth said. “Seven. I’m making stew. The boys want to show you something involving cardboard and betrayal.”

“That sounds promising.”

“Seven, Catrin.”

“Yes.”

“I mean it.”

“I heard the number.”

The call ended.

Catrin removed one glove to lock the phone and saw, when the screen went black, the chapel behind her reflected in it.

The aisle. The coloured light on stone. The easel. The painting.

For one second, the reflection showed a white mark at the chapel door.

Not the painted chapel door.

The real one.

Catrin turned.

The actual front door stood closed at the west end, bolted at top and bottom as she had left it that morning after the courier. Black iron latch. Key in the mortice lock. No white mark. No movement.

She looked back at the dead phone screen.

It reflected only her own hand, the dark rectangle of glass, part of her face cut at the mouth.

She put the phone face down on the register table.

“No,” she said.

It was not a frightened word. More irritated. A correction offered to the air.

The chapel clicked once above her.

By midday, the first cleaning area had widened enough to show that the painting was better than she had initially thought. Not valuable in the way auction houses used the word, perhaps, but competent, careful, observant. The painter had recorded the chapel’s stonework accurately. There was a crack running from the left lancet window towards the porch that Catrin knew intimately because she had paid to have its modern descendant repaired after buying the building. In the painting, it existed already, a thin grey line in the stone.

The bride’s veil, too, was more carefully handled once the dirt lifted from the lower edge. Fine strokes. Transparent whites. A suggestion of embroidery.

Catrin cleaned a narrow strip beside the bouquet.

Then she stopped.

There was something behind the bride.

Not a figure. Not yet. A dark vertical disturbance in the chapel doorway, partly obscured by the veil, concealed under varnish and grime. It might be shadow. It might be a person standing just inside. It might be damage.

She angled the light. The dark shape remained.

The bride had been painted not merely outside the chapel but in front of its open door.

Catrin checked the full photograph taken at the start of the morning. Under yellow varnish, the doorway had looked closed or simply dark. But now, in the cleaned strip, there was depth.

Someone had stood inside the chapel, watching the wedding party from the threshold.

Or something in the paint gave that impression.

Catrin took another photograph. The camera focused, clicked, and displayed the image: the doorway dark, no shape in it. She looked from screen to painting. On the painting, beneath the lamp, the vertical darkness remained.

She took another shot, this time closer.

On the screen, only the bride’s veil, the groom’s shoulder, the chapel stonework, the dark rectangle of the door.

No watcher.

Catrin’s mouth had gone dry.

She set the camera down very carefully, as if it were the object at fault and sudden movement might encourage it. Then she stepped back from the easel and looked at the chapel around her.

The studio was exactly itself. Jars. Tools. Notes. Lamp. Stone. Window. Register table. Tea. The fox mug in the kitchen alcove. Her coat on the hook. The cut bell rope in the corner.

Nothing moved.

No orange blossom now. Only solvent and cooling tea and the faint mineral chill of old stone.

Catrin looked again at the painting.

The dark shape in the painted doorway had acquired an edge.

Or perhaps she had simply adjusted to seeing it.

She took the oldest tool from the easel tray: a magnifying glass with a brass rim, inherited from the first conservator who had trained her and shouted at her for breathing too near flaking paint. She held it above the cleaned strip.

Under magnification, the doorway resolved into layers.

Black. Brown. Grey. A thin greenish glaze from old varnish caught in the cracks.

And, very faintly, a pale vertical mark at the centre.

Not a face. Too narrow.

A veil.

Catrin lowered the glass.

The bride was in the wedding party.

And also in the chapel door.

No.

That was not a conclusion. That was a shape interpreted under pressure. It was overpaint, reflection, bloom, loss, previous restoration. It was anything before it was that.

She turned to the client notes.

Mrs. A. Bellweather. No address on the printed sheet except the billing form in the office. The painting had come through a local intermediary, a house clearance man who sometimes brought Catrin damaged frames and oil portraits that smelled of attics. Family piece, he had said. Bride side, he thought. The client wanted it cleaned before deciding where to hang it.

Catrin had not asked which family.

She should have.

She walked to the office, still in one glove, and opened the intake folder on the desk. The office had once been where clergy signed things and stored spare candles. It had one small arched window, a radiator that clanked before heating, and shelves arranged with the sort of order people mistook for calm. Catrin found the billing sheet.

A. Bellweather

Address: 17 Mariners Row, Southsea

Phone: handwritten, landline

Email: none

There was a note beneath, added by Dan from the clearance business.

“Elderly lady. Doesn’t do email. Said chapel picture from great-grandmother’s side. Asked whether ‘the red bird’ would clean off. Told her no promises.”

Catrin read the line again.

Asked whether the red bird would clean off.

So the client knew the eagle was unusual. Knew it enough to name it separately from the painting.

Catrin copied the phone number into her notebook. She did not call. Not yet. You did not ring an elderly client at lunchtime to say the wedding painting appeared to contain the bride twice and one version would not be photographed.

She returned to the nave.

The chapel felt colder.

Not dramatically. No theatrical plunge. Just enough that the skin at her wrists noticed where the gloves ended. She checked the digital thermometer on the shelf. Eighteen point four degrees. Perfectly within range. Humidity fifty-two. No concern.

Her body disagreed.

She looked towards the front door again.

Still closed.

The old brass plaque beside it caught a strip of coloured light from the west window. It had been left by the previous owners and listed, in neat engraved letters, the chapel’s former uses and refurbishment dates. She had meant to remove it and never had.

St. Idris Wedding Chapel

Chapel on this site since 1724

Restored 1862, 1931, 1976, 2004

Below that, smaller:

All ceremonies by appointment

Catrin had always found that funny in a faintly bleak way.

The painting waited under the lamp.

She considered covering it, locking the studio, going out for lunch, and returning with a better frame of mind. Instead she washed her hands, put on fresh gloves, and prepared a new swab.

Avoidance was not evidence.

At one o’clock, the radio turned on.

Not loudly. Not even fully. A sudden burst of voices from the side shelf, cut by static, then a woman speaking mid-sentence.

“—not able to confirm the witness account—”

Catrin froze with the swab lifted.

The radio had no digital presets. It was an old black Roberts with a loose tuning dial. The switch was physical. Up for on, down for off.

The switch was up.

She looked at it for several seconds before crossing the chapel. The voice dissolved into static, then into a thread of music, then back to speech too broken to understand.

Catrin pressed the switch down.

Silence returned.

She remembered, very clearly, not turning it on that morning. She remembered noticing she had not turned it on.

The chapel made a small settling sound overhead.

The painting stood at her back.

Catrin turned slowly.

Nothing had changed.

That was worse, somehow. Not much worse. Only enough to make her aware of the spaces in the building she could not see from where she stood: the office, the kitchen alcove, the vestry, the little cupboard under the stair to the loft hatch, the shadowed corner where the bell rope hung. She had worked here alone for nearly three years. She had stayed past midnight more times than she admitted. She knew the noises of the place and the habits of her own nerves.

She did not know who had turned on the radio.

She picked up her phone and photographed the radio, because that was what she did when something did not make sense. Record first. Explain second.

On the phone screen, the photograph was blurred.

She took another.

Blurred again.

Her hand was steady. The light was adequate. The radio was six feet away, an easy subject.

She checked the lens for dust.

When she looked back, the radio switch was up again.

This time the radio remained silent.

Catrin did not move.

The chapel held its breath.

Not a metaphor. The air changed pressure. The high room seemed to draw in around her eardrums, the way the world changed before a train entered a tunnel. She swallowed, and the movement was too loud inside her own head.

From the painting came a small sound.

Not from behind it. Not from the wall. From the painting.

A dry, light tick.

Like a fingernail touching glass.

The painting had no glass.

Catrin stood between the radio and the easel and understood, without yet believing anything, that her day had divided. There was the morning before the sound, with its tests and notes and rational irritations, and there was everything after it.

Tick.

She forced herself to walk back to the easel.

The sound had come from the lower right corner, where the paint loss exposed a small crescent of ground layer. She crouched, keeping her face level with the painting but not too close. No insect. No flaking movement. No fresh crack.

Then she saw the red.

A single speck of it on the stone floor below the painting.

Catrin stared.

It lay on the grey flagstone like a fallen seed. Red pigment, perhaps. A dry fragment no larger than a pinhead.

She looked at the eagle.

It was intact.

She picked up tweezers from the tray and lifted the speck carefully onto white paper. Under the lamp it was not a paint flake. It had no thickness, no brittle edge, no underside. It was soft.

A thread.

A fibre.

Dark red.

She placed it in a sample envelope and labelled it with the date, time, location, and object number. Her handwriting remained legible, which comforted her more than it should have.

Then she covered the painting with unbleached cotton.

The cloth settled over the frame.

For a moment the shape beneath it was simply a rectangle.

Then, at the top edge where the eagle sat beneath the fabric, the cotton lifted.

Only slightly.

As though something under it had raised its head.

Catrin stepped back so quickly her heel struck the runner and nearly slipped. She caught the register table with one hand. Her cold tea tipped, slopped over the rim, and spread across the old polished wood.

The cotton fell flat again.

Nothing moved.

The radio remained switched on and silent.

Catrin stood in the nave of the chapel she owned, surrounded by her tools, her notes, her clean white gloves, and the day outside going calmly on beyond the stone walls.

She did not uncover the painting.

She did not call Beth.

She did not leave.

Instead, because fear had not yet found a better shape in her than discipline, she crossed to the register table, rescued the intake sheet from the spilled tea, and wrote beneath her morning notes:

Unexplained environmental irregularities observed during initial assessment. Do not proceed with cleaning until documented.

The sentence was absurd.

It was also the only one she could write.

Above her, from the cut bell rope in the corner, came one soft pull of weight.

The bell itself had been removed years ago.

Still, the rope twitched once.

Then it was still.