A Sprig of Sea Lavender Page 11

  ‘No, they weren’t at the mill tonight. They don’t come all that often. Their cruiser is a modern boat, beautifully fitted out, with a bottled-gas stove in the galley, all that sort of thing. They’re friendly enough, but they seem to like being on their own. We’ll see them tomorrow, I expect.’

  ‘Are they married? What is their other name?’

  Sally laughed. ‘Are we married? People accept couples, but they don’t go around asking to inspect marriage lines. Trish and Malcolm seem to have a more or less permanent relationship, but whether they’re married or not, goodness knows. As for their name, well, you’ve seen how difficult it is tonight. I think it’s something like Malcolm Winterer, but I’m only going by something Roger once asked me. I’d come back from Lavenham, and he said, “Did you meet Malcolm Winterer at Lavenham today?” I didn’t, and I said no.’

  ‘Do you think Roger was ever in love with Sandra? He told me this evening that they nearly got married once – that was how he put it. He went on to say that it wouldn’t have worked out because Sandra was moody, and she didn’t like going to sea because she was always seasick. It seemed a funny thing to say to a chance acquaintance.’

  ‘That’s because you’re not used to this world, Piet. People are always pouring out their souls to chance acquaintances. It doesn’t surprise me a bit – he may have felt that he had to say something to explain why he seems to have teamed up with Trudi. Yes, I daresay he was a little in love with Sandra once. She was very attractive. But he couldn’t have been much in love. If you’re really in love it seems a rotten reason for not marrying someone, just because they get seasick.’

  ‘Was Sandra moody?’

  ‘She could be. Who isn’t sometimes? She may have seemed moody to him because she was upset over Trudi, but you can scarcely blame her for that. Whether Roger ever thought seriously about marrying Sandra, I don’t know. Sandra probably thought about marriage, but I doubt if he did.’

  They turned back, and Piet said, ‘You know, Sally, I don’t think you really belong in this set-up either.’

  ‘I do wish Sandra had never asked me to come here. It seemed a good idea at the time, but oh, Piet, it’s turned out to be just horrible.’

  They walked back to the Fen, and crossed the footbridge over the sluice. Even in thin moonlight, Piet’s sharp visual memory told him that something in the scene had changed. The motor-cruiser belonging to Malcolm and Trish was not there.

  VII

  Sally at Lavenham

  SALLY DIDN’T HAVE to be at Moat Cottage until her first class at eleven thirty but since Piet had to be in London by noon they got up early and were away soon after seven o’clock. Roger and Trudi had not stirred. It was too early for breakfast at the mill, but there was an oil stove in the botter’s galley, and Sally made a pot of tea. It wouldn’t matter, she said, if she got to Lavenham early – she had an unfinished flower picture there and could get on with that. And she had her own detective work to do in finding out who had been away from the studio recently.

  They were careful not to discuss anything but tea on board the botter, but when they were safely in the car Piet asked if the Trish and Malcolm cruiser often left her mooring on the Fen. ‘I don’t know what you mean by “often”,’ Sally said. ‘And I can’t say that I’ve ever recorded her movements – I’ve not been that much interested. In the two months or so that I’ve been here she may have been away a couple of times – at least, I know she’s been away twice, because Trudi went with her to get impressions for seascapes. She may have been out more, of course. I haven’t been here all the time.’

  ‘How long does she go away for?’

  ‘Oh Piet, it’s awfully difficult! She was away for two nights on one of Trudi’s trips – I know that because Sandra was so happy to have Trudi out of the way. The other trip that Trudi went on was simply a day outing. All I can say is that Trish and Malcolm have generally been around.’

  ‘You don’t know where they go when they leave the Fen?’

  ‘No.’

  *

  Not wanting to be seen again at Moat Cottage for the moment, Piet dropped Sally at the bus-stop in Lavenham, promising to get back as soon as he could for their rendezvous at the pub. ‘It’s going to be a very lonely day without you,’ Sally said.

  ‘I’m going to miss you, too, Sally, and much more than I can say. When this wretched business is over I want to talk to you about all sorts of things.’

  ‘What sort of things?’

  ‘You’re not much of a detective!’ He kissed her hand lightly, and drove off.

  *

  He had to call on all his powers of self-discipline to stop thinking about Sally and concentrate on the case. As a matter of fact, he couldn’t stop thinking of Sally, who stayed as a warm glow in his mind. But he could make other parts of his mind go over the various problems that had emerged at Poplar’s Fen. Why did Sandra apparently have two sugar tins? And why was Roger using one of them? The tin in his pocket had been right at the back of the shelf, and the shelf was in a dark corner of the mill. Could she have lost one tin and got another? And if someone wanted to remove Sandra’s sugar tin, could he have found and taken one tin, not realising there were two?

  What a curious dichotomy there was in the Poplar’s Fen colony! There seemed two sharply distinct groups of people – the boat-owners and the mill crowd. He hadn’t met the owners of the cruiser, but from what Sally said of them they seemed to relate more to Roger than to the slightly hippy element in the mill. The man Roger seemed much more like a prosperous businessman keen on yachting than a happy-go-lucky artist. The botter was in good condition, and her maintenance would not be cheap. True, she might save the cost of a home on land, particularly if she could find free mooring, but she would still need money spent on her. Roger gave the impression of being well-to-do – what on earth could he find to attract him in the rather childish group of people in the mill? Did he own the mill? There was a faintly proprietorial air about him, although he seemed to accept Clare’s leadership of the mill group docilely enough. The mill colony could simply be squatters, but there wasn’t the feel of an illegal squat about the place. Someone had installed the kitchen range and equipped the mill with furniture of a sort. If Roger owned the mill – whoever owned it, for that matter – occupation by a colony of young artists could scarcely be regarded as a reasonable investment.

  He was no nearer answering any of his own questions when he got to London, but concentrated thought made for a quick journey and he was at Scotland Yard by eleven. The first thing he did was to send the sugar tin to the laboratory with a request for immediate analysis of its contents. He had a word with the chief chemist on the phone, explained the urgency of the matter and was promised a preliminary report early in the afternoon. Then he reported to his Superintendent and got ready to receive Mr Wilbur Constantine.

  *

  The art dealer was a very worried man. ‘I’m thankful to see you, Chief Inspector,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t have believed it possible that I could be in doubt about a Constable, but I am. This is the picture that was brought to me yesterday.’ He opened the portfolio he was carrying and carefully laid a painting on Piet’s desk. It was slightly smaller than the painting recovered from the train at Liverpool Street, but in a similar style. It was another landscape, the foreground showing a rutted road with a man leading two horses, great patient Suffolk punches, clearly tired after a day’s work. Just as the other picture had suggested a ford without actually showing it, so this suggested the approach to a farm, man and horses nearly home, thankful for the rest ahead of them.

  Piet looked at it for a long time. Then he said, ‘I see what you mean. I have the same feeling about the other picture. It is Constable, and yet there’s something . . . not lacking, almost something added.’

  The art dealer nodded. ‘It would seem to belong to the same period as the other, a late period near the end of his life. He died in 1837 at sixty-one. If he painted this it would have been, I think,
when he was approaching sixty, absolute master of technique and materials, his vision still unclouded, but his mood saddened by the death of his wife and by his frequent bouts of illness. You can see fatigue in those plodding figures; they’re heavy with weariness, but it’s weariness bravely borne. They know they’ve got to go on.

  ‘I agree with you, Chief Inspector, though perhaps for somewhat different reasons. You are judging instinctively, and you feel that there’s something you have never met before in Constable’s work, not exactly non-Constable, but an unknown Constable. I am judging technically. I know – at least, until last week I should have thought I knew – every nuance in John Constable’s oeuvre, but there’s something here that defeats me. If this picture, and the one you showed me the other day, are genuine, then we’ve got to revise a whole chapter of art history. I’m not saying that revision isn’t called for. I am doubtful of the facts.’

  ‘You have not yet submitted the painting to any tests?’

  ‘It is not my property. I took it home last night and I have been living with it ever since. I am not prepared to say that it is by Constable, but I am not prepared to say that it isn’t.’

  ‘Tell me how it came to you.’

  ‘It is an extraordinary story. Yesterday morning a woman came to our galleries and asked to see me, asked for me by name. That is not uncommon – most people concerned with English painting have read my books. My secretary went down to see what she wanted and came back with her card. I have it here – Mrs Shirley Vincent, Moat Cottage Studio, Lavenham. Antiques and Fine Art. She told my secretary that she had a picture which she wished my firm to auction for her, and that she was sure I would be interested in it. I agreed to see her and she brought in this painting. Naturally, I was intensely interested. She said that she believed the picture to be by Constable. I was noncommittal and asked how it had come to be in her possession.

  ‘She was prepared for this. She told me that she runs an art centre and antique business at Lavenham in premises that were once part of the Moat Grange estate. The house, supposedly an Elizabethan building, had long been in ruins, and she bought the ruins with the cottage and about five acres of land some three years ago. She wanted to build on to the cottage. Getting the necessary planning consents, and then getting the building work done, took about two years, and she opened her place for business in the spring of this year. Now comes the almost unbelievable part. In building on to her cottage she used some old stone from the ruins of the Grange. There was nothing habitable above ground, but in demolishing a wall for stones they came across the entrance to a cellar. It was quite dry and contained a mass of old junk, including some big wooden boxes. The builders made a bonfire of most of the stuff, but she had the boxes taken into her cottage. She says that she was too busy to look at them and forgot about them until a few weeks back. Then she opened them and found a number of pictures, of which this is one. She wants my opinion on it and to know if we will handle it for sale.’

  ‘Even if the story is true, her title to the pictures would seem highly dubious,’ Piet said.

  ‘Yes, but she says she has gone into that. The Moat Grange estate was broken up before the First World War – the house has not been inhabited during this century. The family which then owned it appears to have died out. The land was sold off to various local farmers. The ruins hung on the market and were finally sold just before the Second World War to a building company. Nothing could be done during the war, and after the war, when they wanted to build houses there, they ran into planning difficulties. The original building company sold the place to another property company, which had an idea of building a country club. Again there were planning difficulties, the company ran short of money and finally went into liquidation. She bought the place from the receiver. She had a canny lawyer who drew up a very wide conveyance setting out that the sale included the ruins and any articles found on the land above or below ground. She says that this was because the site was archaeologically interesting, and she might want to excavate it one day. It seems a remarkably wise provision, as things have turned out.’

  ‘It seems too clever by half. And if anyone else could produce a serious claim to the pictures his lawyer would argue that the receiver had no title to the pictures when he sold the property. However, that is purely speculative. No doubt the lawyers could argue about it for years. If no other claimant turns up her title might stand, I suppose. What have you done to check her story so far?’

  ‘She is coming back tomorrow with the conveyance. She has given me the name of her builder and says that he will confirm the finding of the wooden boxes in the cellar. There has been no time to go into this yet.’

  ‘He can’t confirm what was in the boxes, because they weren’t opened in his presence. As far as the provenance of the pictures is concerned, his evidence is worthless.’

  ‘You think the whole story is a fake?’

  ‘Don’t you?’

  The art dealer paused before replying. ‘In the records of my firm there are a number of extraordinary stories, at least some of which are true,’ he said. ‘I agree that her story is improbable, but the improbable is not necessarily untrue. At present I have no evidence on which to believe or disbelieve what she told me.’

  ‘What do you know of Mrs Vincent?’

  ‘Nothing, apart from her trade card and what she said of herself. She is not a member of our association, but that in itself means little – many reputable small dealers are not in the association. We have, as you know, a trade protection branch, and I have inquired about her there. They have nothing against her. She has bought and sold goods from time to time – always antiques, I think, not pictures – with member firms, and the transactions have been perfectly satisfactory. But she has not dealt much – on her own story, she has not been in business long.’

  ‘What is your next step?’

  ‘I shall see her tomorrow afternoon at five o’clock – I made the appointment as late as I could because I wanted to see you first and I was not sure then when I should be able to. She will presumably bring the conveyance she talked about, and that will confirm her title to the Moat Grange ruins. It will not go far towards establishing a history for the picture. Genealogy is often important to us, and we are in touch with a number of genealogists. I have asked a man who is considered the leading expert on the families of East Anglia to find out what he can about the former owners of Moat Grange. It was occupied for some two centuries by a family called Carless, and he believes that that particular Carless family is, indeed, extinct. He is conducting some research into the matter, but it will take a little time. We shall try to discover whether any member of the family was known to collect pictures, or had any known association with John Constable. If it is impossible to authenticate the picture, and it seems unlikely to have been painted by Constable, we shall, of course, decline to put it in a sale with any attribution suggesting that it may be by Constable. But I have sufficient doubt not to want to let it go too easily. If by any chance it can reasonably be attributed to Constable it is a most important find, and we would naturally want to handle it. I shall explain to Mrs Vincent that much research is needed, and hope that she will leave the picture with me.’

  ‘I think you will find that there is a Carless-Constable connection, of a sort that can be neither proved nor disproved easily. I can almost tell you what it will be. John Constable was at school in Lavenham and some Carless then living at Moat Grange is believed to have befriended him – it will be something like that. And I shall not be surprised if the Moat Grange hoard does not soon produce a Gainsborough. His home was not far away, at Sudbury, and doubtless the Carlesses invited him to dinner. Later there may be a Turner connection, though it is geographically less clear.’

  Mr Constantine was both pained and excited. ‘You talk, Chief Inspector, as if you have unearthed a conspiracy.’

  ‘I am not sure. I have reason to be deeply suspicious of the pictures you saw the other day, and of the new Constable that h
as been brought to you. It is conceivable that the Constables at least are genuine, though I have a theory that may account for the puzzling features about them. It would be improper for me to say more at present – I have said too much already, but we are allies in the same cause and I know I can trust your discretion. I would advise you to be very much on your guard in any dealings you may have with Mrs Vincent. And I have a request to make: would it be possible for me to be present at your interview tomorrow, in such a way that I can see and hear without being seen?’

  The art dealer considered this. ‘It would be possible, I think,’ he said. ‘My secretary’s room opens from mine, and you could be in there with the door slightly ajar. Mrs Vincent is due at five – could you be at my office at four thirty? We may need to make one or two small adjustments to the furniture.’

  Piet undertook to be there.

  *

  He had lunch with his Superintendent and got back to his own office to find the telephone ringing. The call was from the chemist at the forensic lab. His tin contained sugar, probably beet sugar, but it would require further analysis to determine its precise origin. With the sugar was an admixture of arsenic trioxide, which certainly could not occur naturally in sugar, either beet or cane.

  ‘Don’t worry about the sugar,’ Piet said. ‘Tell me about the arsenic. What sort of quantity is there? Would it be a lethal dose?’

  ‘Well, we haven’t had time to do a full quantitative analysis, but as far as I can estimate the total it would undoubtedly be lethal. Arsenic trioxide is highly toxic.’

  ‘What would happen if it wasn’t taken all at one time – say a spoonful or two of the arsenic-sugar mixture once or twice a day?’

  ‘The mixture is fairly well dispersed – there wouldn’t be a great deal of arsenic in one spoonful, and if taken in tea or with a breakfast cereal probably not enough to taste. But it would remain toxic, of course, and over a period of some days the cumulative effect would be lethal.’