The Moon Tunnel

11

The sun was low in the late-afternoon sky and the mist beyond the city banished, leaving the light to shine across their path as they turned south on the zigzag route to Osmington Hall, the wartime scene of the burglary and murder Roger Stutton had recalled. The light made the freshly harvested peat-fields glimmer a marmalade orange; across them stretched the impossibly long shadows of the roadside poplars. The overarching sky relegated the landscape to a footnote. The sense of space was intoxicating and Dryden felt his mood lift. Humph hummed in tune with his socks as he watched seagulls in his rear-view mirror, trailing the cab like a trawler leaving port. Dryden thought of Dr Mann and the oppressive museum and kicked out his feet, annoyed by the lack of leg room in the rust-jammed passenger seat. He thought of the dead PoW, struggling forward in the nightmare of his escape, encased in clay. He looked up at the sky and drank in the space like an antidote.

Humph pushed his full weight on the accelerator as they passed the last outlying cottages of the town and sped into the wider fen, exploding into the sunshine like a bullet fired from inside the wall of mist they left behind. Dryden checked the map: ‘Head for Southery, then take the back road past the sugar beet factory, then turn back south towards the Lark.’

The PoW had been found with what looked like part of a burglars’ haul. Could he have been part of the gang that raided the house in 1944? But by that time the Italians were billeted out on the farms – so what was he doing in an escape tunnel under the old camp? If he could find any solid link between the body in the tunnel and the burglary it would give him a decent story for the Express. Friday afternoons were otherwise an ocean of lost time he needed to fill: The Crow published, the next paper days away, and a weekend beckoning unpunctuated by work, measured only by the listless ticking of clocks.

It was only 4.00pm when Humph swung the cab into the gravelled car park of the hall but the damp was already rising from the moat which surrounded the fortified Tudor house. Beyond the National Trust café and the herb garden – both deserted – a bridge spanned the water and entered the house under a portcullis reminiscent of a Cambridge college. A peacock strutted in the parterre, its screech echoing back from the surrounding woods. The inner courtyard was empty save for a few wooden benches, some potted trees and a sports car in lipstick red.

A National Trust volunteer appeared from a cubby hole in the gatehouse brandishing a clipboard.

‘The entrance is straight ahead,’ she said in an accent dipped in something posh. She had perfect white hair carved into a filigree helmet and appeared expertly dressed as Celia Johnson’s double from Brief Encounter. A blue enamel badge proclaimed her to be an ‘authorized guide’. Dryden cocked a thumb at the parked-up sports car, which radiated wealth like a diamond.

‘Family still live here?’

‘No, no. I’m afraid the family is gone. The late forties. Death duties, you understand.’

Dryden nodded as though this was a common problem in his own family.

‘The Trust bought it from the administrators of the estate; the family no longer has any formal connections with Osmington.’

‘Anyone left of the family – locally, I mean?’

‘Miss Hilgay.’

‘Miss Hilgay?’ Dryden wondered if he would have to repeat everything the woman said.

‘Yes. She’s the last of the family. She must be seventy by now – Ely, I think. A home, perhaps. She was the only child.’

‘The car?’ asked Dryden.

‘The car?’ she said, clearly vexed that she might have to repeat everything the young man said.

‘The sports car.’

‘Ah. Mr Tobias – from the National Gallery. Visits quarterly to check the collection. When the estate collapsed the pictures were sold but the Trust is allowed to show some of them here, with appropriate security of course.’

It took Dryden half an hour to find Mr Tobias. He trailed through rooms where the smell of beeswax polish was almost hallucinatory in its power, and past four-poster beds which reeked of mothballs. At the top of the house, in the roof space above the Great Hall and just below the exit to the battlements was the Long Gallery, with polished oak floorboards a foot wide and whitewashed walls displaying about twenty paintings in heavy gilt frames. Mr Tobias, Dryden presumed, was the man on a footladder working with a scalpel at the edge of a large, crowded canvas.

Mr Tobias wore an expensive suit, Dryden noted, which on a brief inspection was probably worth more than the pictures.

Dryden paced the gallery, laying his heel down first with a sharp click like a military boot. One wall appeared to be full of the paintings of one artist, scenes of Europe’s antiquities – from the Parthenon to Pisa, the Colosseum to the ruins of Pompeii, all depicted by moonlight. The opposite wall held a variety of work, but all, again, showed the moon, or were scenes by moonlight. Most exhibited a sickly Victorian sentimentality which brought on in Dryden an almost overwhelming desire to blow raspberries. He diverted this urge by squirrelling into his pockets and extracting a Cornish pasty, which he begun to nibble by the crust.

Mr Tobias worked on, oblivious to Dryden’s manic presence. The canvas receiving treatment was one of the moonlit antiquity series, this one a rather wobbly rendition of the Oracle at Delphi.

‘Moonlight,’ said Dryden.

Tobias turned, the spell of concentration broken.

‘Who was the collector?’ asked Dryden, his mouth full of potato and gristle.

Tobias jumped down, landing with surprising agility on the wooden floor, and began to wipe the scalpel clean of oil paint.

‘The Hilgay family – mainly Sir Robyn – collected between about 1880 and 1949. The war stopped the spending, I guess, and he died sometime soon after – but there were no further acquisitions.’

‘Philip Dryden,’ said Dryden, offering his hand.

‘John Tobias – National Gallery.’ The accent was neutral, without a trace of the art world twang Dryden had expected.

‘The gallery owns the pictures, I understand,’ said Dryden. ‘How much are they worth?’

Tobias began to pack the scalpel away in an expensive black leather bag, and took his time annotating a moleskin notebook. ‘Today? Difficult to say. The collection was bought by an anonymous benefactor and presented to the gallery. The price was something in the region of £30,000 at that time – 1950.’

‘That doesn’t seem very much.’

‘The Pethers aren’t very sought after, I’m afraid.’

‘These?’ said Dryden, pointing to the moonlit European tourist spots.

‘Yes. I think they’re what started Sir Robyn off on the theme. The Moonlight Pethers. A whole family of artists – they knew they were on to a good thing and kept painting. There’s hundreds around – a good one by Samuel is worth £10,000 today – perhaps. They’re local – to Norfolk, anyway.’

‘There was a burglary during the war. Was it these paintings they took?’ asked Dryden.

‘Er, yes. Yes, I believe it was. You can see the damage here.’ Tobias slipped out a metal pointer from the black leather bag and tapped it on some blemishes on two of the Pethers. ‘Water damage. They stuffed them in a potato store, would you believe? They were recovered very quickly, within weeks, I think. They were kept above water level but you can see what the damp has done even in that short time.’

‘But no real harm done?’

‘Not to these. But one of the paintings was never returned. It’s still missing.’

Tobias stopped, reluctant to go on. Dryden nodded and took a closer look at one of the Pethers. ‘And what do we know about the missing painting?’ he said finally.

‘Richard Dadd. A Moonlight Vision. There’s a sketch for the work in the Ashmolean at Oxford.’

‘And that would have been worth…?’

Tobias shrugged: ‘The sketch is worth £600,000 today. We could be talking twice that – perhaps a lot more. The work was unsigned – but then so was the sketch, and most of Dadd’s output in his later life. There would be no doubt about the authenticity. His style and technique are unique – in the true sense of the word.’

‘Insurance?’

‘I don’t think so. Many private collectors took the view that their pictures were irreplaceable and to the confident Victorians insurance was often seen as expensive. I suspect it was a decision they regretted. Anyway, when Sir Robyn picked up the Dadd it was practically worthless – Dadd was in many ways a futuristic painter. Closer to our tastes today, in my view.’

‘Did the burglars get away with anything else?’

Tobias shrugged: ‘Frankly, I’m not an expert. You could try one of the guides.’

‘And the Dadd was part of the collection because of the moonlight subject?’

‘Yes, perhaps. There’s another theory – my theory, actually – that Sir Robyn’s purchase was double-edged. The Victorians loved moonlight for the romantic effect, of course, but also there was its association with madness, another obsession of the time. Richard Dadd died in Broadmoor Hospital in 1886. He’d spent most of his life in asylums. He killed his father with a kitchen knife. He was a lunatic.’

Dryden glanced out of one of the tall, elegant Long Gallery windows and saw the moon rising over the box hedge. He wandered aimlessly through the rest of the house. Celia Johnson was by the exit, a bouncer in tweed.

‘I do hope you enjoyed your visit,’ she said.

‘The wartime burglary here – does anyone remember the details? What else was taken besides the pictures – that kind of thing?’

She clutched at the silk scarf at her throat: ‘No. No, not at all. I think everyone has gone – Miss Hilgay, perhaps?’

Outside the sun had set, but the waxing moon had risen now, and floated in the moat like a drowned face.