The Haunted Lady (17 page)

Eve apologised on my behalf. ‘Adam doesn’t like to surrender a pet theory, even if he’s totally wrong,’ she explained. ‘What exactly do you think we missed? Short of lifting all those pallets the artefacts in the basement were placed on and looking beneath them, we’ve searched every square inch of the place.’

To the astonishment of everyone, including Eve, I picked her up, whirled her round and kissed her, before setting her gently back on her feet. ‘Thank you, my darling Eve, now we know where the diptych has been hidden.’

Eve straightened her hair, then her jumper, before addressing the others. ‘Sorry about that; Adam often behaves strangely. Please don’t worry, though, he’s relatively harmless. You simply have to be patient and await the explanation. Quite often that will be in English, and sometimes it will even be understandable.’

‘Pallets!’ I exclaimed.

‘What?’

‘I said “pallets”.’

‘Oh, for a moment I thought you were swearing.’

I could tell by their expressions that the others had been under the same misapprehension. ‘What about them?’ Eve asked.

‘It was your mention of pallets that triggered a memory of something I’d seen in the basement. At the back wall – all those shelving units stood on pallets, didn’t they?’

‘Yes, but what of it?’

‘No, that’s what we assumed, but we were wrong.’

‘Wrong, how were we wrong?’

‘They weren’t
all
on pallets. One shelf unit was standing on what resembled a pallet unless you looked at it closely. It had a sealed end and sides, like a small crate. If we go back downstairs I’ll show you what I mean.’

When we stood in front of the shelf unit, the difference between its support and that of the others was obvious. ‘All we have to do is lift the artefacts off, remove the unit and we can get at the container,’ I told them.

That might sound like a simple, task, but even with six of us working it took a long while to remove everything that had been stacked on the quasi-pallet.

The container was nothing like the pallets in appearance. It was a large, shallow rectangular box, measuring approximately four feet long by three feet wide and with a depth of roughly eight inches. Even the wood used in its construction was different.

As with everywhere else in the storeroom there was an accumulation of dust on the top surface. There were also two extremely large spiders that scuttled for cover once their hiding place had been revealed. As the shrieks of the female members of our party died away, Evans, who was nominally in charge of proceedings, highlighted our next problem. ‘I’ve got a crowbar for opening crated exhibits, but I’d be loath to try it on that. So how do we open it?’

We began by dragging the container clear of the surrounding shelves so we were able to scrutinise it with the advantage of slightly better light. Even then, there seemed to be no way of opening the container, short of prising the surfaces apart with the crowbar, or a hammer and chisel. When I mentioned this, Michael objected. ‘That can’t be right. For one thing, you could easily damage the painting, if it
is
inside. Also, we ought to be able to figure out how the container was sealed in the first place.’

‘That’s all very well, Michael, but there are no screws or nails showing,’ Marjorie pointed out.

‘We could do with a torch,’ Evans suggested.

‘How about my lighter?’

Michael’s suggestion brought him under fire from his mother.

‘You haven’t started smoking, I hope?’

‘No, mother, I use it to light candles in the church and the gas fires in the vicarage.’

‘Oh, that’s all right then. But wouldn’t this be better?’ With that, she dug into the large handbag she always toted and with a flourish worthy of a magician, produced a small pocket torch.

With the additional light provided, Eve said, ‘Look down the edges. There appears to be a row of tiny circles along each side.’

‘I reckon the screws have been hidden by these wooden caps.’ I pointed to a couple of them. ‘The work is extremely good. If you look closely, you can see that even the grain has been matched to the surrounding surface.’

‘That sounds like an awful lot of trouble for something that’s no more than a box,’ Marjorie said. ‘I could understand it if this was a valuable piece of furniture but it’s only a container.’

‘I agree, but it seems to be the only possible way to open it,’ Michael insisted.

‘I don’t understand why it was done, though.’

‘The only reason I can think of,’ Eve told her, ‘is that the person who constructed it didn’t want anyone to know what was inside, or that it was anything other than a pallet. It’s only thanks to Adam’s eagle eye that we didn’t dismiss it altogether.’

I blinked, surprised by what sounded like a genuine compliment. I waited for the backhander but, for once, nothing came.

‘There
is
a way we could find out, as long as we take care not to damage anything,’ Evans said. He produced a penknife and opened one of the blades, a sharp, narrow piece of steel with a fine tip. ‘I propose to run this very carefully around the circumference of one of these circles. If we’re right, these dowels will have been glued in. By now the glue will have dried and hardened, so with luck I should be able to break the seal without harming the surrounding wood, or what is beneath.’

He knelt on the floor and we watched with bated breath as he worked slowly, with infinite patience, until eventually a long cylindrical piece of wood popped out and landed on the surface of the container. Using the torch, we examined the hole that had been created and sure enough deep inside we could see the head of a screw. ‘Bingo,’ I breathed. ‘Now all we have to do is take out them out then unscrew the top.’

‘That might not be as easy as it sounds,’ Evans replied. ‘If the container has been down here for a long number of years, the screws might have rusted and weakened. Unless we’re careful they could break off when we try to remove them. I think it would be a good idea to get our caretaker on the job. He’s more at home with this sort of thing – and he’s got the tools.’

It was ten minutes before Evans returned accompanied by a middle-aged man dressed in a brown warehouse coat; almost regulation issue for a caretaker. He spent a couple of minutes looking at the container, before glancing at his surroundings. I think he would have scratched his head, if he hadn’t been wearing a flat cap. ‘I don’t reckon anybody’s been down here for donkey’s years’ He gestured to the contents of the shelves. ‘That lot’s been here since before I started working in the museum, and I started in sixty-six. I can even remember the date because it was a week before we beat Germany in the World Cup Final.’

He rummaged in his tool kit until he found a box cutter. With the aid of this, he set to work carefully removing the remaining dowels. At one point Evans mentioned the possibility of the screws rusting. The caretaker stared up at him and shook his head. ‘They’re brass. Brass doesn’t rust. It’ll corrode, but enclosed like this, these screws will be as good as the day they were fitted.’

He began to remove the first of them. ‘Have you another screwdriver?’ I asked. ‘It’ll be much faster with two of us working.’

He reached in his tool box and passed me the requisite tool. One thing that struck me as strange was the quality of the wooden panels. Unlike the pallets I was kneeling close to, the timber of the container had been planed, which I thought highly unusual, not the sort of thing you would expect from something used only for storage. I could find no logical explanation for this, unless Casper Harfleur or Bennett had used whatever was close to hand when he’d packed the paintings. Within half an hour all the screws had been removed. As the caretaker had intimated, the brass looked as bright as when they were new. ‘Now, if two of you grab the other end, we’ll take this one and we should be able to lift the top clear.’ As he spoke, the caretaker gestured to me to take the opposite corner. Between us we lifted the top, taking extreme care to avoid the slightest chance of damaging the contents. We set it against the wall and Marjory shone her torch on the container as we pulled away the reams of paper.

Inside, revealed for the first time in many years, was a painting. The image was that of a woman, clearly one of beauty, her features marred by fear, distress and sadness.

‘That’s it,’ Michael explained in little more than a whisper. ‘That’s a depiction of Mary Magdalene following the Crucifixion.’

‘It’s beautiful,’ Marjorie gasped.

Together, he and I lifted the diptych and stood it vertically, leaning it against one of the shelves so that we could see the reverse. It was heavy and I cast my mind back to our first visit to St Mary’s Church, before telling Michael, ‘I’m not certain, but from memory, thinking about the hinges on the old support in the Lady chapel, they might not be sturdy enough to bear the weight of these frames. I think Harfleur must have deemed the originals as either damaged in some way or inappropriate when he was charged with the restoration. Whatever the reason, they’re certainly very heavy.’

‘How would the original frames get damaged?’

‘It could be something as straightforward as woodworm, or damage incurred when they were being moved, who knows?’

We stood back and looked at the reverse painting. Like the previous portrayal, the work was encased by a plain border surrounding the image. The second figure revealed was barely recognisable as the same woman, so different was her expression and body language. This time, she was not hastening in terror and grief from the scene of a brutal slaughter. Instead she looked content, her serenity that of someone who had just received joyous news.

‘Oh, Michael, they’re wonderful. I didn’t expect them to be like this,’ Chloe said.

‘I agree. That,’ Michael told us, ‘represents Mary Magdalene after the Resurrection.’

Although the figure in the foreground commanded the viewer’s instant attention, after a few seconds, my eyes were drawn to the scenery behind her. A large boulder had been rolled to one side, revealing the mouth of a cave. Michael gestured to this part of the painting and added, ‘She was reputedly the first person to whom Christ appeared, soon after she discovered that the tomb was empty.’

I didn’t pay particular attention to the passage of time because we were too intent on trying to discover why the paintings had been so carefully concealed and secreted in this obscure corner. If further proof that there was some strong reason for them to be hidden away in this manner was needed, the fact that the container had been so cunningly disguised provided it. Although we pored over every inch of the canvases, their frames and the container itself, we found nothing out of the normal save for a tiny slip of paper Chloe picked up from the container base. Although the writing had faded badly, the message was clearly discernible. It read, ‘Property of St Mary’s Church, Dinsdale’ followed by three sets of initials, those of Andrew Kershaw, Casper Harfleur and Mark Bennett.

‘I assume you have no objection to the diptych being returned to its rightful place?’ Michael asked the curator.

‘Certainly not, even though I think these paintings are of far better quality than you suggested. They should grace the setting for which they were intended, rather than continuing to gather dust in the obscurity of this basement. It’s a bit late to be thinking of moving them tonight though.’

The last remark prompted me to glance at my watch. I was surprised to see how late it was. Obviously Michael was of the same opinion. ‘Actually, I think it would be wiser to wait until I’ve organised someone capable of replacing it in the Lady chapel. That could take me a day or two. Do you mind holding on to the diptych for a few more days? I’ll be as quick as I can.’

‘That’s not a problem. As Bob, the caretaker, said; it’s very rare that anybody comes down here, so a few days more or less will be neither here nor there. Just to be on the safe side though, I suggest we replace the paintings in the container and fasten it down. I doubt whether anything will happen, but you can never be too sure.’ Evans paused and looked at the vicar, before adding, ‘If I may make a suggestion, I think you would be well advised to get an expert valuation of those paintings. I can’t be sure, but if they’re as good as I believe, you might need to reassess your insurance.’

‘You think they’re valuable? I was always led to believe they were nothing special.’

‘That style of art isn’t really my speciality but, unless they’re forgeries, you could be talking thousands of pounds. Quite a few thousand, I’d say.’

His last comment reduced any euphoria the discovery might have caused. Knowing that the paintings had been handled by someone with a reputation for forgery meant that both Eve and I discounted the possibility that the church might be holding an undiscovered masterpiece. It seemed that Michael, his mother, and Chloe were of a similar opinion.

––––––––

E
ven though the search for the missing diptych had reached a satisfactory conclusion, Eve and I felt a sense of anti-climax. The examination of the paintings and their container had provided no clue as to why Kershaw had employed Harfleur to secrete the artwork in the first place. ‘Why did they go to all that trouble?’ Eve asked, ‘I think we’re missing something. Possibly something that is staring us in the face, and before you ask, Adam, I’ve absolutely no idea what that might be.’

‘That means you’re as ignorant as I am, Eve, because I haven’t a clue either. We’re a clueless pair.’

My thoughts returned to Andrew Kershaw’s career. Why had the authorities been so desperate to avoid any publicity regarding a possible spy whose activities had ended well over twenty years ago, and who had been dead for a couple of decades? Although Cooper had been extremely reticent, his request to be kept informed of any developments was significant, but in precisely what way, I wasn’t sure.

There had been no suggestion, either from Cooper or anyone else that Kershaw’s activities had been in any way damaging to his country; unless he’d been a double agent. Or could it be that in the course of his work he’d uncovered some activities that
were
suspicious? Perhaps Cooper’s desire to keep the matter under wraps signified his involvement?