In the Frame (12 page)

‘No,’ I said. ‘I was just there, that was all. Same as I’m here. Just looking at pictures. Nothing wrong in that, is there? I go to lots of galleries, all the time.’

Mr Greene got his voice back. ‘I saw him in England,’ he said to the office man. His eyes returned to the Munnings, then he put his hand on the office man’s arm and pulled him up the corridor out of my sight.

‘Open the door,’ I said to the boy, who still gazed in.

‘I don’t know how,’ he said. ‘And I don’t reckon I’d be popular, somehow.’

The two other men returned. All three gazed in. I began to feel sympathy for creatures in cages.

‘Who
are
you?’ said the office man.

‘Nobody. I mean, I’m just here for the racing, of course, and the cricket.’

‘Name?’

‘Charles Neil.’ Charles Neil Todd.

‘What were you doing in England?’

‘I live there!’ I said. ‘Look,’ I went on, as if trying to be reasonable under great provocation. ‘I saw this man here,’ I nodded to Greene, ‘at the home of a woman I know slightly in Sussex. She was giving me a lift home from the races, see, as I’d missed my train to Worthing and was thumbing along the road from the Members’ car park. Well, she stopped and picked me up, and then said she wanted to make a detour to see her house which had lately been burnt, and when we got there, this man was there. He said his name was Greene and that he was from an insurance company, and that’s all I know about him. So what’s going on?’

‘It is a coincidence that you should meet here again, so soon.’

‘It certainly is,’ I agreed fervently. ‘But that’s no bloody reason to lock me up.’

I read indecision on all their faces. I hoped the sweat wasn’t running visibly down my own.

I shrugged exasperatedly. ‘Fetch the police or something, then,’ I said. ‘If you think I’ve done anything wrong.’

The man from the office put his hand to the switch on the outside wall and carefully fiddled with it, and the steel gate slid up out of sight, a good deal more slowly than it had come down.

‘Sorry,’ he said perfunctorily. ‘But we have to be careful, with so many valuable paintings on the premises.’

‘Well, I see that,’ I said, stepping forward and resisting a strong impulse to make a dash for it. ‘But all the same…’ I managed an aggrieved tone. ‘Still, no harm done, I suppose.’ Magnanimous, as well.

They all walked behind me along the corridor and up the stairs and through the upper gallery, doing my nerves no slightest good. All the other visitors seemed to have left. The receptionist was locking the front door.

My throat was dry beyond swallowing.

‘I thought everyone had gone,’ she said in surprise.

‘Slight delay,’ I said, with a feeble laugh.

She gave me the professional smile and reversed the locks. Opened the door. Held it, waiting for me.

Six steps.

Out in the fresh air.

God almighty, it smelled good. I half turned. All four stood in the gallery watching me go. I shrugged and nodded and trudged away into the drizzle, feeling as weak as a fieldmouse dropped by a hawk.

I caught a passing tram and travelled a good way into unknown regions of the huge city, conscious only of an urgent desire to put a lot of distance between myself and that basement prison.

They would have second thoughts. They were bound to. They would wish they had found out more about me before letting me go. They couldn’t be certain it wasn’t a coincidence that I’d turned up at their gallery, because far more amazing coincidences did exist, like Lincoln at the time of his assassination having a secretary called Kennedy and Kennedy having a secretary called Lincoln; but the more they thought about it the less they would believe it.

If they wanted to find me, where would they look?
Not at the Hilton, I thought in amusement. At the races: I had told them I would be there. On the whole I wished I hadn’t.

At the end of the tramline I got off and found myself opposite a small interesting-looking restaurant with B.Y.O. in large letters on the door. Hunger as usual rearing its healthy head, I went in and ordered a steak, and asked for a look at the wine list.

The waitress looked surprised. ‘It’s B.Y.O.,’ she said.

‘What’s B.Y.O.?’

Her eyebrows went still higher. ‘You a stranger? Bring Your Own. We don’t sell drinks here, only food.’

‘Oh.’

‘If you want something to drink, there’s a drive-in bottle shop a hundred yards down the road that’ll still be open. I could hold the steak until you get back.’

I shook my head and settled for a teetotal dinner, grinning all through coffee at a notice on the wall saying ‘We have an arrangement with our bank. They don’t fry steaks and we don’t cash cheques.’

When I set off back to the city centre on the tram, I passed the bottle shop, which at first sight looked so like a garage that if I hadn’t known I would have thought the line of cars was queuing for petrol. I could see why Jik liked the Australian imagination: both sense and fun.

The rain had stopped. I left the tram and walked the last couple of miles through the bright streets and dark parks, asking the way. Thinking of Donald and Maisie and Greene with an ‘e’, and of paintings and burglaries and violent minds.

The overall plan had all along seemed fairly simple: to sell pictures in Australia and steal them back in England, together with everything else lying handy. As I had come across two instances within three weeks, I had been sure there had to be more, because it was surely impossible
that I could have stumbled on the
only
two, even given the double link of racing and painting. Since I’d met the Petrovitches and the Minchlesses, it seemed I’d been wrong to think of all the robberies taking place in England. Why not in America? Why not anywhere that was worth the risk?

Why not a mobile force of thieves shuttling container-fuls of antiques from continent to continent, selling briskly to a ravenous market. As Inspector Frost had said, few antiques were ever recovered. The demand was insatiable and the supply, by definition, limited.

Suppose I were a villain, I thought, and I didn’t want to waste weeks in foreign countries finding out exactly which houses were worth robbing. I could just stay quietly at home in Melbourne selling paintings to rich visitors who could afford an impulse-buy of ten thousand pounds or so. I could chat away with them about their picture collections back home, and I could shift the conversation easily to their silver and china and objets d’art.

I wouldn’t want the sort of customers who had Rembrandts or Fabergés or anything well-known and unsaleable like that. Just the middling wealthy with Georgian silver and lesser Gauguins and Chippendale chairs.

When they bought my paintings, they would give me their addresses. Nice and easy. Just like that.

I would be a supermarket type of villain, with a large turnover of small goods. I would reckon that if I kept the victims reasonably well scattered, the fact that they had been to Australia within the past year or so would mean nothing to each regional police force. I would reckon that among the thousands of burglary claims they had to settle, Australia visits would bear no significance to insurance companies.

I would not, though, reckon on a crossed wire like Charles Neil Todd.

If I were a villain, I thought, with a well-established business and a good reputation, I wouldn’t put myself at risk by selling fakes. Forged oil paintings were almost always detectable under a microscope, even if one discounted that the majority of experienced dealers could tell them at a glance. A painter left his signature all over a painting, not just in the corner, because the way he held his brush was as individual as handwriting. Brush strokes could be matched as conclusively as grooves on bullets.

If I were a villain I’d wait in my spider’s web with a real Munnings, or maybe a real Picasso drawing, or a genuine work by a recently dead good artist whose output had been voluminous, and along would come the rich little flies, carefully steered my way by talkative accomplices who stood around in the States’ Capitals’ art galleries for the purpose. Both Donald and Maisie had been hooked that way.

Supposing when I’d sold a picture to a man from England and robbed him, and got my picture back again, I then sold it to someone from America. And then robbed him, and got it back, and so on round and round.

Suppose I sold a picture to Maisie in Sydney, and got it back, and started to sell it again in Melbourne… My supposing stopped right there, because it didn’t fit.

If Maisie had left her picture in full view it would have been stolen like her other things. Maybe it even had been, and was right now glowing in the Yarra River Fine Arts, but if so, why had the house been burnt, and why had Mr Greene turned up to search the ruins?

It only made sense if Maisie’s picture had been a copy, and if the thieves hadn’t been able to find it. Rather than leave it around, they’d burned the house. But I’d just
decided that I wouldn’t risk fakes. Except that… would Maisie know an expert copy if she saw one? No, she wouldn’t.

I sighed. To fool even Maisie you’d have to find an accomplished artist willing to copy instead of pressing on with his own work, and they weren’t that thick on the ground. All the same, she’d bought her picture in the short-lived Sydney gallery, not in Melbourne, so maybe in other places besides Melbourne they would take a risk with fakes.

The huge bulk of the hotel rose ahead of me across the last stretch of park. The night air blew cool on my head. I had a vivid feeling of being disconnected, a stranger in a vast continent, a speck under the stars. The noise and warmth of the Hilton brought the expanding universe down to imaginable size.

Upstairs, I telephoned to Hudson Taylor at the number his secretary had given me. Nine o’clock on the dot. He sounded mellow and full of good dinner, his voice strong, courteous and vibrantly Australian.

‘Donald Stuart’s cousin? Is it true about little Regina being killed?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘It’s a real tragedy. A real nice lass, that Regina.’

‘Yes.’

‘Lookee here, then, what can I do for you? Is it tickets for the races?’

‘Er, no,’ I said. It was just that since the receipt and provenance letter of the Munnings had been stolen along with the picture, Donald would like to get in touch with the people who had sold it to him, for insurance purposes, but he had forgotten their name. And as I was coming to Melbourne for the Cup…

‘That’s easy enough,’ Hudson Taylor said pleasantly. ‘I remember the place well. I went with Donald to see the
picture there, and the guy in charge brought it along to the Hilton afterwards, when we arranged the finance. Now let’s see…’ There was a pause for thought. ‘I can’t remember the name of the place just now. Or the manager. It was some months ago, do you see? But I’ve got him on record here in the Melbourne office, and I’m calling in there anyway in the morning, so I’ll look them up. You’ll be at the races tomorrow?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘How about meeting for a drink, then? You can tell me about poor Donald and Regina, and I’ll have the information he wants.’

I said that would be fine, and he gave me detailed instructions as to where I would find him, and when. ‘There will be a huge crowd,’ he said, ‘But if you stand on that exact spot I shouldn’t miss you.’

The spot he had described sounded public and exposed. I hoped that it would only be he who found me on it.

I’ll be there,’ I said.

Jik called through on the telephone at eight next morning.

‘Come down to the coffee shop and have breakfast.’

‘O.K.’

I went down in the lift and along the foyer to the hotel’s informal restaurant. He was sitting at a table alone, wearing dark glasses and making inroads into a mountain of scrambled egg.

‘They bring you coffee,’ he said, ‘But you have to fetch everything else from that buffet.’ He nodded towards a large well-laden table in the centre of the breezy blue and sharp green decor. ‘How’s things?’

‘Not what they used to be.’

He made a face. ‘Bastard.’

‘How are the eyes?’

He whipped off the glasses with a theatrical flourish and leaned forward to give me a good look. Pink, they were, and still inflamed, but on the definite mend.

‘Has Sarah relented?’ I asked.

‘She’s feeling sick.’

‘Oh?’

‘God knows,’ he said. ‘I hope not. I don’t want a kid yet. She isn’t overdue or anything.’

‘She’s a nice girl,’ I said.

He slid me a glance. ‘She says she’s got nothing against you personally.’

‘But,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘The mother hen syndrome.’

‘Wouldn’t have cast you as a chick.’

He put down his knife and fork. ‘Nor would I, by God. I told her to cheer up and get this little enterprise over as soon as possible and face the fact she hadn’t married a marshmallow.’

‘And she said?’

He gave a twisted grin. ‘From my performance in bed last night, that she had.’

I wondered idly about the success or otherwise of their sex life. From the testimony of one or two past girls who had let their hair down to me while waiting hours in the flat for Jik’s unpredictable return, he was a moody lover, quick to arousal and easily put off. ‘It only takes a dog barking, and he’s gone.’ Not much, I dared say, had changed.

‘Anyway,’ he said. ‘There’s this car we’ve got. Damned silly if you didn’t come with us to the races.’

‘Would Sarah…’ I asked carefully, ‘… scowl?’

‘She says not.’

I accepted this offer and inwardly sighed. It looked as if he wouldn’t take the smallest step henceforth without the nod from Sarah. When the wildest ones got married, was it always like that? Wedded bliss putting nets over the eagles.

‘Where did you get to, last night?’ he said.

‘Aladdin’s cave,’ I said. ‘Treasures galore and damned lucky to escape the boiling oil.’

I told him about the gallery, the Munnings, and my brief moment of captivity. I told him what I thought of the burglaries. It pleased him. His eyes gleamed with humour and the familiar excitement rose.

‘How are we going to prove it?’ he said.