Find the clues in the story to enter our Damien Hirst competition
The note must have been pushed through my door in the very early morning. Since the start of spring, I'd been waking up early, 5am or 5.30am, to work on my paintings in the dawn light. It's quiet then, and the colours look more themselves than at any other time of day. I get to hear London waking up, too. Every morning the same slow unfurling of the day, as comforting as the tide because it, too, will be here long after we are gone.
But two mornings ago, when I walked downstairs to open the front door, look out at the quiet early morning road, there was a note on the mat. A folded sheet of A4 paper torn from a notebook, my name scrawled on the outside. I knew who'd written it before I even opened it.
"Dear Daniel," she said, "dear Art Gallery Man. I think I finally understand. The world is too hard for some people, I think. And we try to escape. There are lots of different ways. Drink and drugs or sex and shopping or any of those things people use to make themselves feel better.
"Fame was like that for me. I thought I could become someone different, some big person with my picture everywhere and all the things that made me feel small would go away. But nothing makes them go away.
"So. It has to be over. This world is too hard for me. I can't bear it any more.
I love you, you know. Maybe not in the way you want, but I do.
Xxx
Vic."
That was two mornings ago. I tried to call her mobile first of all, but it was switched off. I called the clinic, they said she'd gone sometime in the night. I called her manager, her mother, her publicist, her stylist, her hairdresser, even her various rejected lovers. No one, nothing.
But the police called me this morning. Just to let me know, they said, before it hit the papers. They'd found her car abandoned by a bridge. Door open, clothes and various objects strewn about. Not her. Just her car, left by a bridge.