Name To a Face

FOUR

Harding had explored the historic heart of Penzance and was walking aimlessly along the promenade late the following morning, heading towards the fishing harbour of Newlyn, when the call came he had been expecting since breakfast.

“Hi, Tim. How’s it going?”

“Fine, thanks, Barney. How was Abu Dhabi?”

“Dry What’s it like in the old home town?”

“Overcast. If you really want to know.”

“What I really want to know is how you got on with Humph.”

“As well as could be expected. I wouldn’t say there was an outburst of gratitude, but he seems… happy enough.”

“Good.”

“He’s going to Heartsease this morning. I plan to take a look this afternoon at the ring and the famous starburst box.”

“Carol said you’d spotted the connection.” Harding had agreed with Carol that she would mention his call-one of his calls, at any rate. “Dad was always going on about it when we were kids. The name just stuck in my memory, I suppose.”

“The ring’s three hundred years old, Barney. Has it been in your family all that time?”

“Doubt it, old son. Dad never actually said which ancestor first laid hands on it. Probably didn’t know. And it certainly doesn’t matter. Just keep an eye on Humph till the auction and wait to see if he cracks a smile for the first time in decades when you plonk the bloody thing in his paw straight afterwards.”

“OK, Barney. Leave it to me.”

Heartsease was in a tree-shaded road lined with large family homes that looked to date from the inter-war years. It was a big, inelegant pile of a house, with timbered gables, squat chimneys, irregular dormers and uneven bays, dankly flanked by limp palms, overgrown evergreens and a spectacularly feral camellia.

The neighbourhood was probably quiet as a rule, but Isbister’s advertisement had brought double-parked cars and a steady stream of bargain-hunters to Polwithen Road. Harding trailed behind several of them up the drive to the side-door, taking the route prescribed by a sign out on the pavement. He reflected that Humphrey had been wise to come early. A chance to inspect the belongings of Gabriel Tozer (deceased) and to prowl round his house was evidently the high spot of quite a few people’s Saturday.

The auctioneer had put the conservatory adjoining the entrance into service as a cloakroom, where coats and bags had to be left. Catalogues were on sale at a fiver a throw, but Harding kept his money in his pocket. His interest, after all, was confined to one lot and one lot only.

As he was waiting for the ticket for his coat, he was suddenly jostled to one side by a burly, scruffily dressed figure, demanding the return of a bag he had deposited. The man was middle-aged, with grey-shot black hair cut in a rudimentary short-back-and-sides. His jowly face was flushed and pockmarked and sheened with sweat. And there was a smell of whisky on his breath.

“Leaving so soon, Mr. Trathen?” the cloakroom attendant enquired as he passed Harding his ticket and the other man a bulging Co-op carrier-bag.

“I’ve seen enough,” Trathen replied, jostling Harding still further as he took his leave.

“Doesn’t take long to see enough when you’re seeing double,” the attendant murmured. “Sorry about that,” he said, smiling at Harding. “Probably shouldn’t have let him in. I don’t think he was here as a serious buyer. As any kind of buyer, come to that.”

“No?”

“Bit of a sad case, Ray Trathen. But you don’t want to know about him, believe you me.”

Harding moved on into the house, having established that Lot 641 was to be found in bedroom 2. He paused in the large, square hallway at the foot of the stairs, up and down which his fellow punters were coming and going. Doors stood open to the drawing room, dining room and kitchen. Only one door, beneath the stairs, was marked PRIVATE. Everywhere else they were free to roam.

The interior of Heartsease was a stolid, spacious family abode, with a lot of handsomely burnished wood, well-proportioned rooms and stained-glass flourishes in several of the windows. Solitary occupant as he was, Gabriel Tozer had done a good job of filling it with possessions rather than people. Cabinets, bookcases, bureaux and tables groaned under the weight of his meticulously catalogued belongings, every chair, every lamp, every doorstop, every jug, every spoon, every neatly stacked run of Country Life and the Illustrated London News, every rug across which the punters moved, every humdrum object they picked up and put down again, bearing its telltale numbered tag.

It was the same upstairs as down. If anything, the concentration of material was even greater, with toys, models, train sets, coins, banknotes, stamps, postcards, cigarette cards, wrist-watches, pocket watches, musical boxes, snuffboxes, cameos, figurines, compasses, candlesticks and yet more accumulated back copies of magazines-Reader’s Digest, The Countryman, Punch and journals too obscure to be remembered-filling glass-fronted cabinets in all four bedrooms or standing in dusty stacks on the broad landing.

But only one cabinet, in only one bedroom, interested Harding. It contained tie-pins, cufflinks, signet rings, a couple of silver cigarette cases, a baffling number of hourglasses and… a small box decorated with radiating panels of black and white, the lid standing open to reveal its contents, nestling on a bed of satin: a gold ring with an emerald set within a circle of diamonds.

“Nice, isn’t it?”

Harding looked round to find, standing close beside him, a representative of the auctioneers, identified by a badge pinned prominently to his lapel. He was a big, bluff, tweed-suited fellow with thinning fair hair, beetling eyebrows and a broad, yellow-toothed grin. And according to the badge he was none other than Clive Isbister, auctioneer-in-chief.

“I can open the cabinet if you want to take a closer look.” “That’s all right. Don’t bother. I, er… see you’re Clive Isbister.”

“For my sins, yes.”

“I’m a friend of Barney Tozer. I gather-”

“You wouldn’t be Mr. Harding, would you?”

“Yes. Tim Harding.” They shook hands. “How did you-”

“I spoke to Barney on Wednesday when he set up an account for the auction. He mentioned a Tim Harding would be attending on his behalf. Then there was his brother Humphrey paying that particular ring a lot of attention earlier today. And now you, sporting a tan that clearly isn’t the product of a Cornish winter. Elementary, my dear Watson.”

Harding laughed. “Going well, is it-the viewing?”

“Bit of a nightmare in some ways, to be honest, but it’s much the best way to stimulate interest.”

“I think I might know what you mean about nightmares. I met a bloke called Trathen on my way in.”

“Ray Trathen?” Isbister winced. “Bad luck. I’m sorry for Ray of course. He and I were at school together. But he’s his own worst enemy.”

“You were at school with Barney as well, weren’t you?”

“Yes. That’s right. I expect that’s why Barney gave Ray a job a few years back. For old times’ sake. It didn’t work out, I’m afraid. Most things don’t in Ray’s life. Excuse me, will you? One of my colleagues is waving rather frantically at me. Probably another breakage. Just as well there’s so much here, hey? I don’t think you’ll have any serious trouble getting the ring, by the way. It’s a lovely piece, but sadly not fashionable. And fashion is all in this business, as in most others. See you on Tuesday, no doubt.”

Harding had been tempted to ask Isbister how much he knew about Gabriel Tozer’s alleged theft of the ring. Yet perhaps, he reasoned, it was best he had not had the chance to do so. It did not really matter, after all, given the apparent confidence of all concerned that it would not be leaving the Tozer family.

Looking at the ring, its emerald and surrounding diamonds glittering in the light of the overhead lamp, switched on so that the contents of the cabinet might be seen to their best advantage, Harding could not help but feel it was too small and trifling an object to justify a feud of several decades’ standing, however valuable it might be. But a ring could have a symbolic as well as a monetary value. So could a starburst box, come to that. There was something about this ring in this box that mattered to Humphrey Tozer and had mattered to his Uncle Gabriel. As for Barney, Harding was unsure. The indifference could have been sham, the willingness to delegate responsibility a ploy of some kind.

Not that it really mattered. Harding had agreed to do Barney this favour and it would not take much to see it through. He had promised to keep an eye on Humphrey but proposed to do the bare minimum in that direction. He would bid as high as he needed to to secure Lot 641 at the auction, however. And then, he told himself, he would fly home and forget all about it.

After a mooch round the other bedrooms, Harding felt he had seen enough. Spectating at the avaricious mass scrutiny of a dead man’s belongings rapidly palled. He sensed that Gabriel Tozer had been an obsessively private man. It was strange, then, and faintly obscene, that his goods and chattels should be priced and tagged and fingered by dozens upon dozens of strangers. Harding headed downstairs.

He was most of the way down when he noticed a young woman crossing the hallway from the direction of the conservatory. She was conspicuous because she was wearing a short, belted mac, had a small rucksack slung over one shoulder and was also carrying a well-filled canvas bag. She was petite, almost elfin, with boyishly cropped dark hair, and still darker eyes set saucer-like in a delicate, heart-shaped face.

Harding stopped dead at the sight of her and she glanced up at him as he did so, then slipped a key out of the pocket of her mac, unlocked the door marked private and stepped through out of sight, closing it behind her.

Harding leant back against the newel post behind him as other people moved past. There had been no recognition in the young woman’s glance; not so much as a flicker. But he recognized her. There was no doubt of that in his mind. He recognized her, even though, for the moment, he could not place her, could not fix her in his memory, could not put a name to a face he felt disablingly certain he knew very well.