In the Frame

7

Jik had gone from the gents, gone from the whole Arts Centre. I found him back with Sarah in their hotel room, being attended by the Hilton’s attractive resident nurse. The door to the corridor stood open, ready for her to leave.

‘Try not to rub them, Mr Cassavetes,’ she was saying. ‘If you have any trouble, call the reception desk, and I’ll come back.’

She gave me a professional half-smile in the open doorway and walked briskly away, leaving me to go in.

‘How are the eyes?’ I said, advancing tentatively.

‘Ruddy awful.’ They were bright pink, but dry. Getting better.

Sarah said with tight lips, ‘This has all gone far enough. I know that this time Jik will be all right again in a day or two, but we are not taking any more risks.’

Jik said nothing and didn’t look at me.

It wasn’t exactly unexpected. I said, ‘O.K.... Well, have a nice week-end, and thanks anyway.’

‘Todd...’ Jik said.

Sarah leapt in fast. ‘No, Jik. It’s not our responsibility. Todd can think what he likes, but his cousin’s troubles are nothing to do with us. We are not getting involved any further. I’ve been against all this silly poking around all along, and this is where it stops.’

‘Todd will go on with it,’ Jik said.

‘Then he’s a fool.’ She was angry, scornful, biting.

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Anyone who tries to right a wrong these days is a fool. Much better not to meddle, not to get involved, not to think it’s your responsibility. I really ought to be painting away safely in my attic at Heathrow, minding my own business and letting Donald rot. Much more sensible, I agree. The trouble is that I simply can’t do it. I see the hell he’s in. How can I just turn my back? Not when there’s a chance of getting him out. True enough, I may not manage it, but what I can’t face is not having tried.’

I came to a halt.

A blank pause.

‘Well,’ I said, raising a smile. ‘Here endeth the lesson according to the world’s foremost nit. Have fun at the races. I might go too, you never know.’

I sketched a farewell and eased myself out. Neither of them said a word. I shut the door quietly and took the lift up to my own room.

A pity about Sarah, I thought. She would have Jik in cottonwool and slippers if he didn’t look out; and he’d never paint those magnificent brooding pictures any more, because they sprang from a torment he would no longer be allowed. Security, to him, would be a sort of abdication; a sort of death.

I looked at my watch and decided the Yarra River Fine Arts set-up might still have its doors open. Worth trying.

I wondered, as I walked along Wellington Parade and up Swanston Street, whether the young turps-flinger would be there, and if he was, whether he would know me. I’d seen only glimpses of his face, as I’d mostly been standing behind him. All one could swear to was light-brown hair, acne on the chin, a round jaw-line and a full-lipped mouth. Under twenty. Perhaps not more than seventeen. Dressed in blue jeans, white tee-shirt, and tennis shoes. About five-foot-eight, a hundred and thirty pounds. Quick on his feet, and liable to panic. And no artist.

The gallery was open, brightly lit, with a horse painting on a gilt display easel in the centre of the window. Not a Munnings. A portrait picture of an Australian horse and jockey, every detail sharp-edged, emphatic, and, to my taste, overpainted. Beside it a notice, gold embossed on black, announced a special display of distinguished equine art; and beside that, less well-produced but with larger letters, stood a display card saying ‘Welcome to the Melbourne Cup’.

The gallery looked typical of hundreds of others round the world; narrow frontage, with premises stretching back a good way from the street. Two or three people were wandering about inside, looking at the merchandise on the well-lit neutral grey walls.

I had gone there intending to go in. To go in was still what I intended, but I hesitated outside in the street feeling as if I were at the top of a ski jump. Stupid, I thought. Nothing venture, nothing gain, and all that. If you don’t look, you won’t see.

I took a ruefully deep breath and stepped over the welcoming threshold.

Greeny-grey carpet within, and an antique desk strategically placed near the door, with a youngish woman handing out small catalogues and large smiles.

‘Feel free to look around,’ she said. ‘More pictures downstairs.’

She handed me a catalogue, a folded glazed white card with several typed sheets clipped into it. I flipped them over. One hundred and sixty-three items, numbered consecutively, with titles, artists’ names, and asking price. A painting already sold, it said, would have a red spot on the frame.

I thanked her. ‘Just passing by,’ I said.

She nodded and smiled professionally, eyes sliding in a rapid summing up over my denim clothes and general air of not belonging to the jet set. She herself wore the latest trendy fashion with careless ease and radiated tycoon-catching sincerity. Australian, assured, too big a personality to be simply a receptionist.

‘You’re welcome anyway,’ she said.

I walked slowly down the long room, checking the pictures against their notes. Most were by Australian artists, and I could see what Jik had meant about the hot competition. The field was just as crowded as at home, if not more so, and the standard in some respects better. As usual when faced with other people’s flourishing talents I began to have doubts of my own.

At the far end of the ground-floor display there was a staircase leading downwards, adorned with a large arrow and a notice repeating ‘More Pictures Downstairs’.

I went down. Same carpet, same lighting, but no scatter of customers looking from pictures to catalogues and back again.

Below stairs, the gallery was not one straight room but a series of small rooms off a long corridor, apparently the result of not being able to knock down all the dividing and load-bearing walls. A room to the rear of the stairs was an office, furnished with another distinguished desk, two or three comfortable chairs for prospective clients, and a civilised row of teak-faced filing cabinets. Heavily framed pictures adorned the walls, and an equally substantial man was writing in a ledger at the desk.

He raised his head, conscious of my presence outside his door.

‘Can I help you?’ he said.

‘Just looking.’

He gave me an uninterested nod and went back to his work. He, like the whole place, had an air of permanence and respectability quite unlike the fly-by-night suburban affair in Sydney. This reputable business, I thought, could not be what I was looking for. I had got the whole thing wrong. I would have to wait until I could get Hudson Taylor to look up Donald’s cheque and point me in a new direction.

Sighing, I continued down the line of rooms, thinking I might as well finish taking stock of the opposition. A few of the frames were adorned with red spots, but the prices on everything good were a mile from a bargain and a deterrent to all but the rich.

In the end room, which was larger than the others, I came across the Munnings. Three of them. All with horses; one racing scene, one hunting, one of gypsies.

They were not in the catalogue.

They hung without ballyhoo in a row of similar subjects, and to my eyes stuck out like thoroughbreds among hacks.

Prickles began up my spine. It wasn’t just the workmanship, but one of the pictures itself. Horses going down to the start. A long line of jockeys, bright against a dark sky. The silks of the nearest rider, purple with a green cap.

Maisie’s chatty voice reverberated in my inner ear, describing what I saw. ‘... I expect you’ll think I was silly but that was one of the reasons I bought it... because Archie and I decided we’d like purple with a green cap for our colours, if no one already had that...’

Munnings had always used a good deal of purple and green in shadows and distances. All the same... This picture, size, subject, and colouring, was exactly like Maisie’s, which had been hidden behind a radiator, and, presumably, burned.

The picture in front of me looked authentic. The right sort of patina for the time since Munnings’ death, the right excellence of draughtsmanship, the right indefinable something which separated the great from the good. I put out a gentle finger to feel the surface of canvas and paint. Nothing there that shouldn’t be.

An English voice from behind me said, ‘Can I help you?’

‘Isn’t that a Munnings?’ I said casually, turning round.

He was standing in the doorway, looking in, his expression full of the guarded helpfulness of one whose best piece of stock is being appraised by someone apparently too poor to buy it.

I knew him instantly. Brown receding hair combed back, grey eyes, down-drooping moustache, suntanned skin: all last on view thirteen days ago beside the sea in Sussex, England, prodding around in a smoky ruin.

Mr Greene. With an ‘e’.

It took him only a fraction longer. Puzzlement as he glanced from me to the picture and back, then the shocking realisation of where he’d seen me. He took a sharp step backwards and raised his hand to the wall outside.

I was on my way to the door, but I wasn’t quick enough. A steel mesh gate slid down very fast in the doorway and clicked into some sort of bolt in the floor. Mr Greene stood on the outside, disbelief still stamped on every feature and his mouth hanging open. I revised all my easy theories about danger being good for the soul and felt as frightened as I’d ever been in my life.

‘What’s the matter?’ called a deeper voice from up the corridor.

Mr Greene’s tongue was stuck. The man from the office appeared at his shoulder and looked at me through the imprisoning steel.

‘A thief?’ he asked with irritation.

Mr Greene shook his head. A third person arrived outside, his young face bright with curiosity, and his acne showing like measles.

‘Hey,’ he said in loud Australian surprise. ‘He was the one at the Art Centre. The one who chased me. I swear he didn’t follow me. I swear it.’

‘Shut up,’ said the man from the office briefly. He stared at me steadily. I stared back.

I was standing in the centre of a brightly lit room of about fifteen feet square. No windows. No way out except through the guarded door. Nowhere to hide, no weapons to hand. A long way down the ski jump and no promise of a soft landing.

‘I say,’ I said plaintively. ‘Just what is all this about?’ I walked up to the steel gate and tapped on it. ‘Open this up, I want to get out.’

‘What are you doing here?’ the office man said. He was bigger than Greene and obviously more senior in the gallery. Heavy dark spectacle frames over unfriendly eyes, and a blue bow tie with polka dots under a double chin. Small mouth with a full lower lip. Thinning hair.

‘Looking,’ I said, trying to sound bewildered. ‘Just looking at pictures.’ An innocent at large, I thought, and a bit dim.

‘He chased me in the Art Centre,’ the boy repeated.

‘You threw some stuff in that man’s eyes,’ I said indignantly. ‘You might have blinded him.’

‘Friend of yours, was he?’ the office man said.

‘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 containerfuls 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.