“I’ll find them somewhere,” I promised. “Maybe I’ll turn the whole back garden into a bloody animal sanctuary.”
“You should and all,” she said. “Always badgers lurking around out here.”
“I haven’t seen a badger in years,” I admitted, scratching the back of my neck.
“Well, they’re hardly going to come slinking into the city for old chips and rancid bits of scran, are they?”
I chuckled, dipping my head. “When it’s all done,” I told her, “I’ll have you over for some dinner.”
Her eyes widened, and she looked around the room again, staring up at the ceiling. “I might be dead by the time that comes around, lad.”
“I should be out here more often, then,” I answered. She reached over and slapped me on the back of the head,
“Don’t you play with me, Max Thatcher. I saw you into this world, and I’ll see you out of it if I have to.”
“Consider me warned,” I said, rubbing my head.
“It’s getting on out there,” she said after a pause, her face directed towards the window where the sky was streaking with orange and pink. “You best be home. Get a good night’s kip for this new case of yours.”
“How do you know about my new case?”
“Heard that Sharp make a statement about it. Her best people, she says, working the case. Knew it would be you.” She hopped down from the stool and looked at me proudly. “It is you, isn’t it? I’m not going to have to go and have words with her, am I?”
“No,” though the thought of such an interaction was a marvellous image, “she was referring to me.”
“You’ll see it sorted.” She rubbed my shoulder and stuck her hands in the pockets of her coat. “Take care of yourself, Max.”
“You too, Elsie.” She waved my words off, shuffling from the coaching house, muttering under her breath about dust and beetles. That was a thought. I’d hadn’t considered beetles and woodworms. Another job on the list, I thought tiredly, jumping down from the stool.
I went to put the boards back up, safety mostly, until I got the windows all fixed and secure, and my phone rang again. My heart sunk a little as I fished out and saw Mills’s name there inside of Jeannie’s. It was late for him to be calling, he never phoned after six unless he had something good to share, or to see if I fancied a pint.
“Mills,” I answered.
“Sir,” his quiet voice greeted me, “I’ve found the artist. Brynmor Ragsdale.”
“Brynmor Ragsdale?” I repeated. It was a day for ridiculous names, apparently.
“Yes, sir,” he confirmed.
“Who names their child that?”
“Someone who wants a painter for a son?” he suggested.
I chuckled quietly at that. “Local chap?” I asked.
“Yes. Born in the Hocking Estate village, early twentieth century. Died during the first World War.”
“Born on the Estate?” I muttered, more to myself.
“Well, the village sir, sir.”
“Interesting. Go on.”
“The piece that Lord Hocking has was given to him a gift from Ragsdale’s younger sister after he expressed interest in it.”
“A gift?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Alright,” I pushed him on.
“One of Ragsdale’s pieces sold five years ago at an auction, made just under one and a half thousand pounds.”
I stopped where I was standing, frowning into the empty room. “That’s all?”
“That’s all.”
“Thought it’d be worth more than that,” I muttered, dragging my hand through my hair. “Definitely a sentimental piece then.”
“Definitely,” he agreed, “both as a gift, and since it was of the estate itself, I can’t imagine anyone else paying much for it. Smaller than the one from the auction, too, if my measurements are right.”
I didn’t doubt that they were. “Alright. Good work, Mills,” I said honestly, glancing at the darkening sky. “Get some rest now, you’ve done enough for today.” I paused, all this art driving me a bit mad.
“Jeannie called,” I told him, knowing he’d be smug faced at that.
“She did?” came a causal response.
“Knows an art dealer who handles private sellings that we can meet.”
“That’s good news.”
“If our thief is going to sell,” I reminded him, “but if that’s the profit that we’d be looking at, I don’t want to pin all our hopes and dreams on it.”
“What’s the next move then, sir?”
“Richard Sandow. If you wanted to piss off your brother, what would you steal from him?” I never had one myself, but I always knew exactly how to piss off Sally.
“The one thing I know he’d probably break my nose for taking.”
I laughed at that. Sally had once lobbed a bucket at my head for taking her favourite pinecone. “We’ll cross the art dealer of the list,” I decided, “more for Sharp’s sake than anything else, but we focus on the brother and the butler. That’s where my suspicion lies right now.”
“See you tomorrow then, sir.”
“Tomorrow, Mills,” I bid farewell and hung up, placing the last board back up, taking Elsie’s advice, and heading home.
Ten
Thatcher
We were in the station early the next morning to update Sharp on our plans. As we waited for her, I pulled up Jeannie’s email, making a note of the art dealers’ information. She’d set up the meeting herself, and we were due to meet him this morning in a few hours, at a café in the city. Mills did some digging into this Laurin Harrer as we twiddled our thumbs. His name was tied to a few galleries in the city, to a few private collections in houses not unlike the Hocking Estate. Specialising in private auctions, he was our best bet at finding the painting if it was due to be sold. Neither Mills nor I expected it to be, but we had to cross off every lead. My biggest lead would come to fruition this afternoon, now that I had found Richard Sandow. Learning about what exactly had come between the two brothers, what had happened amongst the whole family and I would wager, in that very house itself, felt to me like the appropriate thread to follow.
Now, I just had to make sure that Sharp agreed.
She was uncharacteristically late, blustering into the station in a whirl of coat and coffee cups, her hair windswept all around her face. Appearing in the hall across from our open door, she waved us over and into her office, where she pulled off her coat and sorted her hair in a very flustered manner. Mills helped her out of her coat when her arm got caught, hanging it on the rack for her as she, at last, collapsed in her chair. Sharp rubbed at her temples, looking rather exhausted, and took a long sip of her coffee. I looked her over, her skin, the shadows underneath her eyes, her slightly hunched posture, looking for signs of illness.
“My son threw up,” she told us as Mills sat down beside me, “in the car on the way to school.”
I winced. “Is he alright?”
She waved a hand. “He’ll be fine. That’s what grandparents are for. Now,” she folded her hands together under her chin and sat up straight, “the painting. Tell me what you boys are up to.”
“We have a meeting in about an hour with an art dealer, Laurin Harrer,” I told her. “He works private auctions, selling directly from the artists to the buyer. Our theory is that if the thief is going to sell and they’re avoiding the market, he’d be the sort of man to know about such a trade.”
“Unless they sell it outside the city,” she suggested.
“One bridge at a time, ma’am,” I replied.
She nodded slowly. “What else?”
“I’ve found the information on Richard Sandow, Lord Hocking’s estranged brother. My plan is that this afternoon, I’ll go and meet him. See what he can tell me about the family, why they fell out.”
“And he might shed some more light on the painting,” Mills added.
“Sandow?” Sharp repeated, tapping her computer into life.
<
br /> “Yes, ma’am.”
“Name’s familiar,” she told me, frowning at her screen. “Something to do with the hospital, or welfare or something.”
“He worked on the board of directors for a hospital,” I told her. But she shook her head and looked away from the screen,
“No, it was something else. It’ll come to me. Lord Hocking made no mention of his brother?”
“He did not. Only the sister,” I said.
“Well, you would think that given the circumstances, he would have told you about him. This brother of his might have all the right motive necessary to steal the painting.”
“And knowledge of the house,” Mills added. “He’d know about the annual party, about where the painting was kept, the layout of the house. All of it.”
“And the staff,” I agreed quietly. “None of them mentioned seeing him.”
Sharp frowned at the tone of my voice. “Unless…?”
“Unless they were working with him.”
“The butler, again?” she asked.
“If he knows that family as well as he’s supposed to, and the house, and the guests, you’d think he would have noticed something out of the ordinary. Would have stayed somewhere he could monitor all that. But instead, he was rooting around the back corridors, where he couldn’t see who came in or out.”
“Butlers have jobs, Thatcher,” Sharp reminded me.
“He would have known Richard Sandow,” I pressed. “All I think is that it’s a bit odd, is all. I’m asking you to bear it in mind,” I added, only slightly jokingly.
“He had worked there a while,” Mills put in, “and his father before him. Maybe he always preferred Richard or took his side in whatever fall out they had.”
Sharp’s eyes narrowed, reading both of our faces. They flicked to her computer screen again, and she sat back in her seat, crossing her arms. Whatever half-remembered fact she knew about Sandow was clearly still nagging at her. After staring at us for a long minute, she gave a short nod.
“Get this business with the art dealer over and done with,” she instructed us. “At least once it’s done, you can follow more genuine leads. But the family is prolific, and the press are already interested in this case, the public too. We need to be showing that we’re following the rules correctly. By the book, Thatcher, got it?”
“Ticking all the boxes, ma’am,” I assured her.
“Good.” She stood up, leaning on her desk, and Mills and I followed suit. “Report back after your meeting with the dealer,” she ordered, “and once you’ve seen Sandow I want you back here, alright?”
“Alright, ma’am.”
“Are you both going?” she asked, looking from me to Mills.
“That was the idea, yes,” I said.
She turned to Mills. “Once you’re done with the art dealer, come back here. Thatcher can handle the brother alone, and I want you working with Smith. The sooner we get all the alibis confirmed and ironed out, the better.”
Mills nodded, but I noticed the light dimming in his eyes. He was more like me than I had first realised. Liked to be out there, talking, looking, though he was certainly a dab hand at the paperwork side of things too.
“Off you go then,” Sharp said, sitting back down and dismissing us with a wave.
We trudged out, fetched our things from our office, and headed down to the street, opting to walk to the café, amidst the growing numbers of tourists. They flocked outside the tall buildings, taking pictures of the walls, the narrow streets and snickelways.
Mills and I strode along, dodging the wandering visitors.
“Alibis,” he muttered as we walked, “I hate checking alibis.”
“We all do,” I reminded him. “Smith especially, actually. With you there, the whole thing will be over before you know it.”
He didn’t notice the compliment. It slid over his head as he sidestepped a cyclist. “I wanted to meet Richard Sandow myself,” he was saying as he caught back up to me. “Two heads are better than one, right?”
“I was wondering what you’d make of him,” I told him, “and I’ll be without your note-taking, which is a shame.”
“You don’t need it, sir. You’ve been Sharp’s best man long before I showed up.”
“A year ago,” I commented.
“What was that, sir?”
“You joined us a year ago. I’ve never kept a sergeant for a full year,” I told him.
He smiled, amused. “Feel as if I deserve some sort of certificate. Or one of those patches you get when you learn how to swim.”
“The sort that gets sewn onto your towel?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll find you one. Bound to be a place here that sells all that nonsense.”
Mills bent his head and laughed, the wind blowing the strands of his black hair all around his face.
“Where is this café?” I asked after we rounded yet another corner.
“Should be just over there.” Mills pointed across the street. “On the map, it wasn’t far from the Minster. There’s a gallery not far from it.”
“You a gallery man, Mills?” I asked as we stood at the traffic lights.
“Not so much. My mum is…” he told me, “she studied art history. More of a museum family, us. What about you?” He added the question after a pause of hesitation, his voice quieting. Still uncharted territory for him, asking about my family. And unchartered territory for me, talking about them.
“My grandmother took me to a lot of garden centres,” I recalled. She’d had to bribe me with toffees, but the memories were fond all the same. “My mother liked castles. She would drive all round the country to look at them.”
And then some. We’d spent one of my school holidays up in Scotland, driving from castle to castle.
“The nice ones with all the interesting furniture? Or the ruined kind that have half-collapsed stairs and roofs that drip on you?”
“Both. But if they had ramparts, they were her favourite.”
We crossed the street, heading towards the towering shadow of the Minster, the number of tourists growing the closer we got. Mills spotted the café, down a little alley, tucked into a small courtyard filled with early blooming flowers.
Inside, a number of people sat around, talking and laughing, but it wasn’t hard to spot our man.
He sat towards the back of the room, dressed in an impeccably clean-cut suit the likes of which I’d only ever seen in London, down Bond Street. His tie, silk no doubt, was an elegant floral pattern, his shoes shining even from across the room. A ring sat on his pinkie finger, hands folded together on the table as he waited, posture perfect. His silver hair was swept back from his face, a pencil moustache perfectly trimmed above his lip like Clark Gables.
“Think that’s him?” Mills asked. I chuckled, pushing my way through the table to where the man sat.
“Mr Harrer?” I asked.
He looked up. “Detective Inspector Thatcher?”
“The very one,” I smiled, “and sergeant Mills. May we sit?”
“By all means.” He unfolded his hands, and we sat. “Jeannie told me you were handsome,” he said with a grin.
“How kind of her,” I replied.
“And that you have questions for me about this missing painting?”
“We do,” I confirmed.
“Please proceed, Inspector.”
I nodded to Mills, who pulled out his notes on the piece and the artist.
“It’s a painting of the Hocking Estate,” he told Mr Harrer, “done by Brynmor Ragsdale in the early twentieth century.”
“Are you familiar with Mr Ragsdale’s work?” I asked him.
He nodded enthusiastically. “He’s a fine local chap, though not many know about him, sadly. A bit of undiscovered talent, there. A great shame. To those of us in the know,” he winked, “a rare artist to have in your collection. His sketches from the trenches in France are hauntingly beautiful.”
“For someone in the know then,” I
began, “one of his pieces might go for a fair amount of money?”
He hesitated. “That entirely depends, Inspector. On the buyer, and the piece. His sketches go fairly cheaply, and from what I understand, his descendants have little interest in selling them. His larger canvases, oil mostly,” he informed us, “can fetch a good price when sold correctly.”
“Correctly?”
“At an auction,” he told us. “They might not be very aware as to what exactly they are selling. Ragsdale's name is not as well known, so the price would be less.”
“But if someone like you sold them,” I asked, “they could fetch a higher price?”
“Certainly. I know my buyers, and I know my art. And my history,” he added cheerily, “for that matter. If someone was determined to sell this piece, selling privately would be in their best interest. Commission rates included Inspector.”
“If we are right about the thief's knowledge of the piece, it’s likely they would. If they were going to sell,” I said. “Have you any knowledge of a Ragsdale piece coming into sale at all?”
“No. And I can assure you, Inspector, that I would be all over it like a rash if it were. Those are the sorts of rare opportunities I have constantly have little eyes and ears looking out for.”
“Are there any other private sellers who might have already caught wind of it?”
“There are only a handful of us in the city, Inspector. And they all know that Ragsdale pieces come to me first. Nobody else can sell them as well. We have a fragile… sort of understanding. Our business is art,” he said proudly, “and the art must always come first. Over any professional pride, most certainly.”
“And if you are aware,” I asked in a darkening voice, “that the painting was a stolen piece?”
He sat up, affronted. “I would inform the authorities. I am not a criminal, Inspector. I sell art, I do not steal it. Jeannie would have told you that.”
“I don’t always trust Jeannie on everything she tells me,” I said.
His wounded expression faded, and he laughed lightly. “No, Inspector, nor I. Good instincts there.”
“We believe you, Mr Harrer, that you are a good man. And good at your work,” I added with a smile, pulling my card from my pocket. “If you hear anything, from any of your little eyes and ears, please call me directly.”
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