The Silent Patient Free PDF, Epub, Mobi By Alex Michaelides Book

CHAPTER ONE

ALICIA BERENSON WAS THIRTY-THREE YEARS OLD when she killed her husband.

They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia

was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer. He had

a distinctive style, shooting semi-starved, semi-naked women in strange,

unflattering angles. Since his death, the price of his photographs has

increased astronomically. I find his stuff rather slick and shallow, to be

honest. It has none of the visceral quality of Alicia’s best work. I don’t

know enough about art to say whether Alicia Berenson will stand the test of

time as a painter. Her talent will always be overshadowed by her notoriety,

so it’s hard to be objective. And you might well accuse me of being biased.

All I can offer is my opinion, for what it’s worth. And to me, Alicia was a

kind of genius. Apart from her technical skill, her paintings have an

uncanny ability to grab your attention—by the throat, almost—and hold it

in a viselike grip.

Gabriel Berenson was murdered six years ago. He was forty-four years

old. He was killed on the twenty-fifth of August—it was an unusually hot

summer, you may remember, with some of the highest temperatures ever

recorded. The day he died was the hottest of the year.

On the last day of his life, Gabriel rose early. A car collected him at 5:15

a.m. from the house he shared with Alicia in northwest London, on the edge

of Hampstead Heath, and he was driven to a shoot in Shoreditch. He spent

the day photographing models on a rooftop for Vogue.

Not much is known about Alicia’s movements. She had an upcoming

exhibition and was behind with her work. It’s likely she spent the day

painting in the summerhouse at the end of the garden, which she had

recently converted into a studio. In the end, Gabriel’s shoot ran late, and he

wasn’t driven home until eleven p.m.

Half an hour later, their neighbor, Barbie Hellmann, heard several

gunshots. Barbie phoned the police, and a car was dispatched from the

station on Haverstock Hill at 11:35 p.m. It arrived at the Berensons’ house

in just under three minutes.

The front door was open. The house was in pitch-black darkness; none

of the light switches worked. The officers made their way along the hallway

and into the living room. They shone torches around the room, illuminating

it in intermittent beams of light. Alicia was discovered standing by the

fireplace. Her white dress glowed ghostlike in the torchlight. Alicia seemed

oblivious to the presence of the police. She was immobilized, frozen—a

statue carved from ice—with a strange, frightened look on her face, as if

confronting some unseen terror.

A gun was on the floor. Next to it, in the shadows, Gabriel was seated,

motionless, bound to a chair with wire wrapped around his ankles and

wrists. At first the officers thought he was alive. His head lolled slightly to

one side, as if he were unconscious. Then a beam of light revealed Gabriel

had been shot several times in the face. His handsome features were gone

forever, leaving a charred, blackened, bloody mess. The wall behind him

was sprayed with fragments of skull, brains, hair—and blood.