A Sprig of Sea Lavender Read online

  That led to Piet’s transfer to a branch of the CID specialising in the investigation of art robberies. Now he was in charge of his own section of what was known loosely as the Fine Art Squad at New Scotland Yard, with a steadily widening range of more general responsibilities.

  *

  In the endeavours by the City Police to establish the identity of the young woman found dead in the train at Liverpool Street it was natural that her portfolio of pictures should come to Piet. It was brought by Detective-Sergeant Williams, who was a little nervous about going to Scotland Yard because he felt that he ought somehow to have made more progress with the identification. Chief Inspector Deventer was a younger man than the sergeant had expected, and this made him more nervous still, for young officers are not always tolerant of the shortcomings of others.

  Piet, however, was concerned to make him feel at ease, and before opening the portfolio the sergeant found himself talking about his family and the general run of work in his Division of the City.

  ‘Having a big main line station like Liverpool Street must make for a lot of extra work,’ Piet said.

  ‘Well, it does and it doesn’t, sir,’ Sergeant Williams replied. ‘There’s the railway police to look after all the railway side of things, but there’s always things happening at the station which are liable to bring us in – like this case, you see. The girl – young woman, I suppose I should say – happened to be found dead in a train at Liverpool Street, but apart from being a passenger in a train there was nothing in particular to connect her with the railways. So naturally we had to take it on – and I’m afraid we’ve got nowhere with it, sir.’

  ‘Your people sent me the papers – I don’t see what more you could have done in the time you’ve had. It seems a very strange case, and odd that the Suffolk police haven’t had any reports of a young woman’s being missing. You’d have thought that she must have family or friends somewhere, and the fact that she doesn’t seem to have had any luggage rather suggests that her home was in Suffolk and that she was coming to London just for the day.’

  ‘She only bought a single ticket to London, sir.’

  ‘Yes, but from what I can make out from the papers she didn’t buy it – somebody else on the train bought a ticket for her.’

  ‘You’re quite right, sir. That was the solicitor, a Mr Tomlinson, who carried her big portfolio because he thought she looked ill, and bought the ticket for her at Mark’s Tey. But you’d have thought he’d ask if she wanted a single or return.’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s a point that could be put to him if necessary. As things are I doubt if it means much. He thought she looked ill, there may have been several people waiting at the booking office window, and he may have just asked for a single without thinking. I take it you haven’t gone into the question of the ticket?’

  ‘No, sir, I’m afraid not. But I didn’t interview Mr Tomlinson myself – I was given his statement by the railway police. He was called to give evidence at the inquest, but he just said he bought the woman’s ticket for her, and the Coroner didn’t pursue the matter.’

  ‘Well, it’s another possible line of approach. Wasn’t the inquest held rather quickly?’

  ‘I don’t think so. The Coroner gave us a reasonable chance to try and identify her. We might have had longer, but it’s a busy district, and the authorities naturally wanted a burial certificate. And all the inquest could do was to return an open verdict, which means that inquiries have got to go on, anyway.’

  ‘You did a lot of work on the clothes.’

  ‘I did what I could, but it didn’t come to anything. She was wearing a coat and skirt with a chain-store label, but the store has branches all over the country and it couldn’t tell us which particular branch the clothes had come from. Same with her jumper and underclothes – all clean and in good condition, but they could have been bought almost anywhere. No laundry marks. She must have done her own washing, but then most people do nowadays.’

  ‘And the only other thing was the portfolio of pictures?’

  ‘Yes. We took it to various shops selling artists’ and architects’ materials, but they all said there was nothing special about it and it could have been bought, or made up, anywhere, not necessarily even in England. The torn label suggests that it had been to or come from some address in Suffolk, which rather bears out the theory that she lived in Suffolk. But all inquiries by the Suffolk police have drawn blank.’

  ‘Did you take round the pictures with the portfolio?’

  ‘No, sir. And you’ll have seen that there was no reference to the pictures at the inquest. That was the higher-ups’ decision. They reckoned that if the pictures were of any value they’d be reported missing, and since we’d no means of knowing how they’d come into the woman’s possession they didn’t want to put ideas into people’s heads.’

  ‘Hm. It’s a point of view. I’m inclined to think that they should have gone for expert examination right away, but that’s just my own feeling. I’m not blaming you, sergeant, or anybody else. Let’s have a look at them now.’

  Sergeant Williams untied the portfolio and Piet Deventer got one of the severest shocks of his life. He was looking at a Constable masterpiece. Of course it couldn’t be. All Constable’s pictures were recorded. John Constable was his particular love, the painter above all others with whom he felt a kind of special kinship, who spoke to him as it were in a personal, private language. He knew, or thought he knew, every picture Constable had painted. He’d made pilgrimages to most of the originals, and knew the rest from reproductions. Could there be an unknown Constable? It was possible, though highly unlikely. But this was Constable – no other artist could have felt and revealed, understood the very treeishness of a tree, such as that on the canvas before him. Yet it couldn’t be.

  He said nothing for several minutes, lifted the big picture carefully and studied each of the other three in turn. Then he went back to the big picture he thought of as the Constable.

  ‘Are they likely to be worth anything, sir?’ Sergeant Williams asked.

  ‘I don’t know. They may be worth a great deal, the big picture in particular. The others may be valuable, too. They’ll have to be examined by specialists, and it will take a bit of time. Meanwhile it’s absolutely vital that we should try to find out where they come from.’

  ‘We went through all the lists of stolen pictures, and they don’t seem to match anything in the police records.’

  ‘That’s not quite the point – at least, it’s not the whole point. If I’m right about one of these pictures, perhaps two, they may be extraordinarily important. I don’t know that I am right, of course. But if I am, they may be unknown works by very great artists. We must know where they’ve come from. They may have been stolen from someone who doesn’t yet know about the theft. Or they may have been brought to London for sale, and that must be gone into because we’d like to know who was handling them. Important works of art can’t be sold abroad without a licence. And other matters come into it – possible fraud on the Revenue, for instance. I’m very glad you’ve brought them to me.’

  ‘You think we ought to have brought them to you before?’

  ‘Well, I’d like to have seen them, but I can promise you that I’m not going to make a fuss about it. Your Division acted quite reasonably. You’re not specialists in pictures, and from your point of view the portfolio and its contents were just effects belonging to – or rather, in the possession of – the dead woman. You did your best to identify her, and in the ordinary way her belongings would have been handed over to her executors. I think there may be something very much out of the ordinary about these pictures, but it’s my job now to deal with that. I hope you can feel that I’m on your side. You’ve done everything you could, and I think it’s just as well your people decided to say nothing about the pictures at the inquest. That was good police instinct. I’ll be in touch with your Division, of course and I’ll make a point of saying how impressed I am by the work you put i
n trying to identify her.

  ‘And now, sergeant, we’ve done a lot of talking, and you’ll be having a late lunch if you wait to get back to the City. What about sharing a sandwich and a beer? There’s a nice little pub in a turning off Victoria Street, where the bread is fresh and the sandwiches pretty good. I’d be delighted if you’d join me.’

  ‘That’s very kind of you, sir.’

  ‘Not a bit. We’ve both got to eat, and it will be pleasanter if we eat together. Meanwhile, I’d be grateful if you’d say nothing whatever about the possible value of the pictures. Keep your eyes open, and if you come across anything –anything – that you think may have any bearing on the case, give me a ring at once. I’ll just get my secretary to type out a receipt for the pictures and then we’ll adjourn to the pub.’

  *

  When Piet got back to his office he telephoned Wilbur Constantine, a partner in Gavell and Gainsworth, the big firm of Fine Art dealers and auctioneers. There had not been a Gainsworth in the firm since the end of the eighteenth century, and Mr Constantine was a grandson of the last of the Gavells. He was not, however, a mere beneficiary of maternity, for he was an efficient director of the firm’s picture sales and a considerable expert, particularly on English painters of the period 1750–1850, about whom he had written catalogues raisonnées which were accepted as authoritative. Piet knew, liked and respected him, and he asked if he could drop whatever he was doing and come over to Scotland Yard. ‘It’s not that I regard my time as more important than yours,’ he added. ‘I’d call on you as I’ve often done before, only I’ve got some pictures here that I want to show you and it will be easier if you can manage to come over.’ Constantine promised to extract himself in about half an hour.

  *

  The art dealer was as astonished by the big picture as Piet had been. ‘It’s not a copy because there’s no known work by Constable of this particular scene,’ he said. ‘If it’s genuine – lord, we’ll need to make some revision of art history. Can you place the landscape?’

  ‘No,’ Piet said. ‘I’ve explored the Constable countryside pretty thoroughly, but I can’t say this rings any particular bell. I’d put it somewhere in the Colne Valley – between Fordstreet and Wakes Colne, perhaps, but it could be almost anywhere on the Essex-Suffolk border. Maybe it can be placed, maybe it can’t – it doesn’t much matter. John Constable wasn’t a photographer – he was quite capable of moving a tree if he wanted it somewhere else. All one can say is that this seems to me a perfect composition – the cottage in relation to the tree in the foreground, the rough track leading to a ford. You can’t see the ford, or the river, but you just know it’s there. At least I do. Sorry.’

  ‘There’s no need to be sorry. You have a remarkable sensitivity to Constable, or perhaps to his influence on the way we look at landscape, and that’s something to be cherished. I know just what you mean,’ Constantine said. ‘Whether this really is by Constable is another matter. Whoever painted it, it’s a lovely piece of work.’ He took from his pocket a magnifying glass, a beautiful little thing that folded into a tortoiseshell case, and studied the detail in the foreground of the picture. ‘As far as I can see the brushwork is quite typical – there’s a distinct touch of the same work in the well-known Valley Farm. The mood also seems to be fairly typical, though of the later work, after his wife’s death. There’s a hint, not of depression, exactly, but of a kind of brave melancholy – brave, because Constable was forcing himself to paint when he was depressed. He was often depressed and ill in his last years. The sheer courage of the man comes out in his work.’

  ‘You’re talking as if you accepted the picture as genuine.’

  ‘Forgive me. I’m as shaken as you obviously are. We can’t trust to instinct, we need hard, scientific work. First, what is its provenance?’

  ‘It has no provenance so far. It came into the possession of the police because it was in a portolio carried by a young woman who was found dead in a train at Liverpool Street a short time ago.’

  ‘And no one has reported the loss?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Who was the young woman?’

  ‘We don’t know. We have not yet been able to identify her. But there’s more to it. I want to show you these.’

  Piet took from the portfolio the painting of boats drawn up on a beach.

  ‘My God! Turner!’

  ‘And these two?’

  ‘The portrait has a look of a Gainsborough, about the right period, and it’s certainly a Gainsboroughlike composition. But offhand I can’t possibly say. The second landscape doesn’t strike me as having the quality of the others. It suggests a Constable influence, but it’s certainly not by Constable himself. Conceivably it’s an experiment by Delacroix, which would make it interesting, but if Delacroix had anything to do with it, it’s not a good example of his work. Again, I can’t say offhand.’

  ‘What do you make of the collection as a whole? An unknown Constable, an unknown Turner, an unknown Gainsborough and possibly an unknown Delacroix?’

  ‘My dear Chief Inspector, I can make nothing of it! You call me up out of the blue and show me a collection of pictures which, if genuine, are worth many hundreds of thousands of pounds, and one of which, whether by Constable or not, is undoubtedly a masterpiece. And you tell me they were found at Liverpool Street station, just like that. What do you expect me to make of it?’

  ‘I’m hoping that you will be able to help me – you have as direct an interest as I have in protecting the art world from forgery and fraud. There seem to me three main possibilities. First, that all these works are forgeries. Secondly, that they have been stolen from some uncatalogued collection. Thirdly, that they have not been stolen, but that the owner of them is trying to dispose of them without raising questions of estate duty, or the need to obtain export licences for sale abroad. There are other possibilities, of course, but those seem to me the main ones. Do you think they are forgeries?’

  ‘I can’t possibly say. If the potential Constable is a forgery, it’s an extraordinarily good one, and if there is anyone around capable of such a forgery he is clearly a most dangerous man. Much the same applies to the Turner and the Gainsborough – I leave out the word “possible” just to save my breath. There are some exceptionally good forgeries of works by famous artists – he would be a bold man, or a fool, who swore that all the works in great collections attributed to particular artists are in fact by them. And “forgery” is not always the right word. Many great painters had pupils, and the work of the pupil may naturally be in the style of the master, and in the course of time the works of pupil and master may come to be confused. Then there are artists who, without the least fraudulent intention, deliberately set out to follow the style of someone they admire, and such works may come to be attributed wrongly, but in good faith. As you know, the attribution of paintings by men long dead is a matter of lifetime study, and what we call “provenance”, the history of how a particular painting came to be where it is, and through whose hands it passed to get there, is of the highest importance.

  ‘If these works are forgeries, they are dangerously good ones, and it is of the most urgent importance, Chief Inspector, that you should find the forger.

  ‘Your other possibility – uncatalogued collections – is slightly remote, but it is certainly possible. Artists of the fame of those we are discussing have been studied for so long, and their works are so valuable, that with every year that passes it becomes less likely that completely unknown paintings by them remain to be found. But it is not impossible. Turner’s output, for instance, was enormous, and no one can say that unknown Turners may not still turn up in attics or on the walls of houses whose occupiers have no idea of the value of some picture they have inherited. Constable, too –his paintings were much admired in his lifetime by fellow artists, but the picture-buying public did not take to them with alacrity, and many of his landscapes were unsold. He had private means and was comfortably off, so sales did not matter to him g
reatly. He has become so famous since his death that we may think all his works must have come to light, but we can never be sure of such things. I take it you have not yet sent any of these pictures for laboratory examination?’

  ‘No. They came into my hands only today and I wanted your impressions – I may say that I value your impressions, certainly where Constable is concerned, at least as much as a laboratory report.’ The art dealer gave a little bow. ‘Laboratory examination is the next step, but you know the difficulties here. The pictures are not ours, presumably they have some lawful owner, and in submitting pigment or canvas to the kind of tests that are likely to be conclusive it is all too easy to damage a work of art.’

  ‘Yes, but modern techniques can accomplish a great deal. It is possible to determine the age of canvas within quite narrow limits, and to discover the main constituents of pigment – which may or may not have been in use in the period when a picture is supposed to have been painted.’

  ‘Of course. And, as I said, laboratory examination is the next step. The trouble is that while it can disprove, it can’t prove. It can show that a painting cannot date from the lifetime of a particular painter – it cannot prove that any painting must have come from a particular hand. That remains a matter for experts like yourself.’

  ‘Well, we shall have to see. If laboratory tests show that canvas or pigment is modern, then your theory of forgery becomes probable. Let us carry on from there when you have a few more facts. I hope most of all that you will soon discover the identity of the dead woman and obtain a provenance for the pictures. I am grateful to you for letting me share your problem – it’s as important to me as it is to you.’

  ‘I’m equally grateful to you for coming as you did – and I shall certainly need your help again. Meanwhile, may I ask you to keep the existence of these pictures strictly under your hat? Please don’t mention them even to your own colleagues.’

  The art dealer smiled. ‘My firm has been in business for over two centuries,’ he said. ‘During that time we’ve enjoyed – and kept – the confidence of most of the great families of Europe. We wouldn’t have stayed in business if we hadn’t. I shan’t be less scrupulous where you are concerned, Chief Inspector.’