The Decayed Gentlewoman

by E. X. Ferrars

  Mr. Sibbald, on the other hand, was a man of dim tones and very restrained manners. At a first glance his plump, spectacled face gave an impression of placid good nature, but there was a petulance about his full lips and uneasy arrogance in his eyes. When his wife brought Colin and Ginny into the sitting-room, he was standing in front of the fire, holding on to a copy of the Sunday Times as if he were prepared to raise it as a screen between him and his visitors if he did not like the look of them.

  Offering each of them a cold hand to shake round the edge of the newspaper, he hurriedly sat down in the most comfortable chair in the room and keeping the paper on his knees, fixed his gaze on his wife, showing that this odd business of letting strangers in on a Sunday afternoon was entirely her affair.

  She showed herself brightly ready to answer any questions that Colin and Ginny wanted to ask her.

  “Not that there’s much Mr. Sibbald or I can tell you about his poor old auntie, or the things she had in that awful house,” she said. “Mr. Sibbald’s a very busy man. He works for the Universal Insurance Company, and that’s always meant so much travelling he couldn’t manage to get down to Oldersfield as much as he’d have liked. And too, he has a lot of commitments locally. He’s treasurer for our branch of the Conservative Party and he does a lot of work for our church and he helps with the finances of our Operatic Society —and that, let me tell you, is a life work by itself.” She laughed gaily. “And then there’s the garden. There’s always something wants doing in a garden, isn’t there? So with one thing and another, sometimes it was a year or more between visits to Oldersfield. Of course, Mrs. Sibbald wasn’t really a relation. I mean, not a blood relation, just one by marriage. Her husband was brother to my father-in-law. Not that that ever made any difference to Mr. Sibbald’s feeling for her.”

  A remark, Colin thought, that could be taken two ways. “What I wanted to ask you about,” he said, “was the picture that was found in her attic and that fetched a hundred and ten pounds at the sale in Lake’s Saleroom. I wondered if you knew anything of its history.”

  “A hundred and ten pounds!” The mention of that sum of money brought Mr. Sibbald bouncing up out of his chair. “Are you telling me that a picture in that sale went for a hundred and ten pounds?”

  “Oh, weren’t you there?” Colin asked innocently.

  Sitting down again, Mr. Sibbald rolled his newspaper up tightly and held on to it with clenched hands. He did not answer, but there was something feverish in his gaze as he fastened it again on his wife.

  She gave an uneasy laugh. “There now, I always said we ought to have gone through the house properly before agreeing to the offer Mr. Lake made us. I said, ‘We can’t tell what’s hidden away in drawers and cupboards and all.’ Didn’t I, dear? But to tell you the truth, Mr. Lockie, the very smell of the place put me off. Poor old woman, she’d let the whole place go to wrack and ruin. She ought to have moved out years ago and gone to a nice Home, where she’d have been properly looked after. It wasn’t as if she couldn’t afford it. She’d quite a nice little income. It was all in an annuity, though, so Mr. Sibbald and I haven’t benefited, to speak of. What was this picture you mentioned?”

  “It was a picture of a woman in a plumed hat, with her hands folded in front of her and a very noticeable ring on one finger,” Colin said. “It was in a rather battered gold frame.”

  “How big?” she asked.

  “About two feet by three, I think.”

  She looked at her husband with a frown. “D’you remember anything like that, dear?”

  “I didn’t go up into the attic,” he said. “I didn’t like the look of the stairs. Rotten. The whole house was stinking with dry rot. A crime. It was a good property once.”

  “Yes, well, I admit it was a bit of a disappointment to us, the state it was in,” his wife said. “We knew it was coming to us and we did think it’d be worth four or five thousand anyway, with values what they are today. But it’s no good crying over spilt milk. Just why are you so interested in the picture, Mr. Lockie?”

  “Well, it’s—an interesting picture,” he said. “It fetched far more at the sale than anyone expected. So I’d hoped you might be able to tell me where and when Mrs. Sibbald came by it.”

  “Can’t tell you a thing!” Mr. Sibbald’s voice was full of angry bitterness. He brought his rolled-up newspaper down with a crack on the palm of one hand. “Except that Lake put one over us. He knew what he was doing all right when he offered me a round sum for the contents. Don’t tell me he didn’t expect that picture to fetch what it did.”

  “Was it the only thing that got a good price?” Mrs. Sibbald asked curiously. “Were there other things that went well? I’m just wondering how badly we got stung.”

  Ginny answered, “I think it was the only thing that fetched much more than ten pounds.”

  “That’s a comfort, anyway.”

  “I imagine the old lady didn’t even know she had it,” Mr. Sibbald said. “She was bent double with arthritis and if I didn’t like the look of the stairs, you can bet she hadn’t been up them for years. For all I know, the picture may have been up there when she and my uncle moved into the place. That’s more than fifty years ago. I can’t see them buying a thing like that themselves. I mean, they didn’t go in for art, and if they’d done it as an investment, because they’d heard it was valuable, they wouldn’t have left it rotting in a damp attic. Stands to reason. A hundred and ten pounds!” The newspaper struck again. “My guess is, it was stuck up there by whoever owned the house before them.”

  “And I’m afraid we can’t tell you about them,” Mrs. Sibbald said with a titter, “because neither Mr. Sibbald nor I was even born then!”

  Colin was not interested in who had lived in Mrs. Sibbald’s house before her. If the portrait of the lady in the plumed hat had been in the house for more than two and a half years, it was no concern of his.

  As he and Ginny walked back to the Underground station from which they had come, she exclaimed, “They were just like Joe told us, weren’t they? Respectable, cold-hearted, and resentful. Did you notice Mrs. Sibbald said there was sometimes more than a year between her husband’s visits to the old lady and then said how disappointed they were at the state of the house? But a house doesn’t get into that sort of state in a year or two. If they’d visited her within the last five years, they’d have known what was in store for them.”

  Colin nodded. “Yes, I should think we can say the Sibbalds are just what they seem to be and that probably means that what we’ve heard about the old lady is true too. But you see what that means, Ginny. It means they didn’t put the picture up in the attic, so somebody else did—unless it was never there at all.”

  The line of her mouth grew hard. “Yes, Colin. At least I see what that means to you. You think Joe put it there, or anyway into the sale. But you’re wrong. I keep telling you, he’s a completely honest person.”

  “Let’s think about another possibility, then,” Colin said. “Somebody else, not Joe, put the picture in the attic. Why?”

  “To keep it hidden, perhaps. It would have been quite a safe hiding-place. And probably quite easy to get in and out of, if Mrs. Sibbald was half-paralyzed and deaf and lived all the time on the ground floor.”

  “But that would mean that the men who held me up came all the way down to Oldersfield just to hide the picture in that attic and then—then for some reason they forgot all about it. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Of course, it was the picture they were after, not the car,” Ginny said. “They can’t have been the two men who escaped from prison.”

  “Which raises the question of how they knew about it, whoever they were. I think I must go to Ardachoil in the near future and see if the aunts can tell me anything. Why did they suddenly want the picture cleaned? But going back to Mrs. Sibbald and her attic, why was it left there when she died? Why did someone go to all the trouble of stealing it, and forget about it?”

  “Perhaps they die
d too,” Ginny suggested.

  “Or went away, thinking there was no risk of things being disturbed yet. In that case, they might decide the only thing to do was to buy it back openly at the sale.”

  They had just reached the Underground station. Colin went ahead to buy their tickets and because he did this, he did not notice that Ginny had not answered him. But when he turned back to her, her face was so drained of colour, so pinched about the nostrils, that it gave him a shock. But her eyes were bright with enthusiasm, or what for a moment he mistook for enthusiasm.

  “Then it’s been Greer from the start!” she cried. “That’s wonderful—I’m so glad it’s Greer! The instant I saw him at the sale, flipping his programme up and down at Joe and giving me dirty looks every time I went higher, I felt absolutely certain he was something pale and crawling that had come wriggling up out of the slime. And I don’t often feel like that about people. I usually see all sorts of good points about them, even when other people warn me off.”

  Her eagerness was a little too shrill. Her chatter, as she and Colin walked on to the train, turned into something that sounded uncannily like the flow from Harriet to which they had both had to listen the evening before.

  All the way to Charing Cross, Ginny went on elaborating her loathing of Greer. When Colin tried to talk about anything else, she came back to it. It was as if it were the only thing in life of which she felt quite sure.

  Colin wanted to tell her to stop it, to warn her that she was only driving him to think about the very thing that she was hoping she could keep out of his mind, if, with luck, it had not occurred to him yet. Because, however you looked at it, either Ginny herself or Harriet had to be the connection between Oldersfield and Ardachoil. And Harriet had gone away to Spain a fortnight before the sale…

  He said nothing for so long that at last Ginny asked him what was the matter. He said nothing was the matter, but that he was thinking about the visit to Vickerman and Ogg. He did not say that, in the circumstances, he was not much inclined to rely on Harriet’s solicitors. He only said that he had a feeling that they wouldn’t get much out of them.

  “If we don’t, we’ll try somewhere else,” Ginny said. “Greer needn’t think we’re going to let him get away with any legal hocus-pocus.”

  “Yes,” Colin said, “that’s just what I was thinking myself.”

  At Charing Cross he saw Ginny on to the Oldersfield train. Her mother had managed to make her promise to return for the evening and had wanted Colin to come too, but Ginny had said that she knew he wanted to stay in London. He had thought that she did not want him to see any more than could be helped of her mother. When her train had gone, he went to a telephone. He rang up a friend of his Imperial College days, whom he still saw quite often when he came south, and asked if he knew anything about solicitors in London.

  “Well, well,” came the answer, “what’s the trouble, Colin? Murder, divorce, or drunk-in-charge?”

  “It’s—fraud of a sort,” Colin answered hesitantly, not wanting to say any more than he must.

  “Then I can take it you’re the victim. Well, I’ve a brother-in-law who’s a solicitor, if he’s any use to you.”

  Colin got out his diary and a pencil. “What’s his name?”

  “Paul Dickman, of Copsey, Costelloe and Dickman. They’re in Gray’s Inn. I forget the number, but you’ll find them in the phone book. Mind you, I don’t know much about Paul’s abilities. He’s the sort of man who’d hate you to be able to guess at sight that he’s a solicitor, but he seemed quite adroit about buying our house for us, which is the only professional contact I’ve ever had with him. Which reminds me, where are you staying tonight? The spare bedroom’s free and Anne’s just muttering in my ear that there’s plenty of food in the house.”

  So Colin took a train to Golder’s Green and spent the night with Denis and Anne Goode, passing most of the evening in an argument with Denis about the influence of the nucleus in morphogenesis. For a little while the problem of the Decayed Gentlewoman seemed to become strangely unreal and far away.

  But in the morning Anne rang up her brother and made an appointment for Colin to see him at three o’clock. With a satisfied feeling that he had taken at least one step in the affair of the stolen picture that had not been somehow imposed on him by Ginny, he went to meet her.

  Their appointment with Mr. Ogg was at twelve o’clock.

  “You’d better do the talking,” Ginny said as they went in at the street door of the firm’s Holborn offices. “I’m just going to be watchful and discreet.”

  Following an arrow, she started up the stairs. Colin found himself more impressed by the atmosphere than he had expected. The staircase was a very fine specimen of Victorian public-lavatory architecture. The walls were covered with dingy-coloured tiles in a pattern of little paddle steamers plying across what was no doubt the Atlantic. The stone steps were worn at the edges and there was a smell of smoky staleness. The general effect was one of great respectability, for only a firm with the self-confidence of perfect probity could have afforded such an unattractive entrance.

  At the top of the stairs they were met by a clerk of great age, wearing a wing collar and stiff cuffs, who conducted them along a short passage into a minute and windowless waiting-room. It smelt of musty leather and was lit by a single weak bulb, dangling from the centre of a remote and dusty ceiling. There they waited until twenty-five minutes past twelve, when at last Mr. Ogg was ready to see them.

  He came to fetch them himself, suddenly throwing open the door and coming in with large hand outstretched and giving each of them a painfully muscular handshake. He was a big bear of a man, not more than fifty, which was younger than seemed appropriate in that place. He had a square, strong-featured face and charcoal-grey hair with a white pinstripe in it, which happened just to match the suit that he was wearing. For a moment he seemed to fill the dead air of the little waiting-room with a warm, benevolent presence, with friendliness and vitality.

  But the moment was soon over and the effort of having produced this impression of himself, just in case the two strangers in the waiting-room might have been worth impressing, seemed to leave Mr. Ogg slightly worn. Once he was seated behind the big desk in his roomy, book-lined office, he became merely an impatient man with an eye on the clock and his thoughts on something else, most probably lunch at his club. His geniality had disappeared like a light switched off.

  When Colin began to describe the nature of the problem that had brought him and Ginny there, there was nothing responsive in Mr. Ogg’s manner. He made a note or two on a sheet of paper, then, as Colin could see from where he sat, doodled pictures of fish all round them.

  “Hmmmm,” he said at last, neatly drawing scales in all over something that might have been a salmon. “I see. Difficult business, market overt. Yes. I doubt very much if there are any decided cases on just the point you raise. I’d have to look it up.” The thought seemed to fill him with depression. He gave a pointed glance at the clock. “You say you can prove the original ownership of the picture?”

  “I’m not sure that I can,” Colin said. “But that isn’t the point I’m raising at the moment. What I want to know is, if the picture bought by Mr. Greer is the one that was stolen from me, does the fact that he bought it in what he calls the open market really transfer legal ownership to him? And exactly what constitutes an open market?”

  “Exactly, ah!” The salmon was acquiring fins that made it look like a flying fish. “Very difficult to tell you exactly. Roughly—you won’t want technicalities—roughly speaking, it’s, ah, well, a market—”

  The telephone on Mr. Ogg’s desk rang.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, picked the telephone up and spoke into it for the next ten minutes to a woman who appeared to be in trouble with a neighbour about the noise made by her very large number of dogs. The sum of his advice to her seemed to be that it was all a bad business, however you looked at it. Naturally he was very sorry for her, but what could he d
o?

  At last he put the telephone down. “You were saying… ?”

  “We were talking about market overt,” Colin said.

  “Hmmmm, yes. Was it by any chance in the City of London that the sale took place?”

  “I think I said it was in Oldersfield in Kent.”

  “Yes, so you did. It’s all rather different in the City, I believe.”

  “It isn’t in the City.”

  “No.” The salmon-cum-flying-fish was blowing bubbles all the way up one side of the paper. “Well, it sounds to me as if this man Greer you mentioned may quite possibly have a case. As I understand it, he purchased the picture in a regular market. In any case, you’d find it very difficult to bring the matter home to him. Difficult and expensive. The cost of an action would almost certainly exceed the value of the picture. Oh yes, certainly.”

  “But if we went to the police, wouldn’t they take the action?”

  “No, no.” Mr. Ogg looked up at the clock with an air of hungry concentration. “You’d have to start the proceedings yourselves. There’s a section in the Larceny Act of 1916 which states that if anyone guilty of knowingly receiving stolen property is prosecuted to conviction by or on behalf of the owner, the property shall be returned to the owner. By or on behalf of the owner—that’s the point. I’m sorry for you, very sorry indeed. But since you aren’t even sure you can prove the picture is really the one that was stolen from you—”

  The telephone rang again.

  “I’m sorry,” Mr. Ogg said, reaching for it again.

  He was in the middle of another conversation with the same woman who was ringing up about the same dogs, and which this time threatened to go on forever, when Colin and Ginny stole quietly out.