The Woman in the Blue Cloak

by Deon Meyer

  ‘But, Junior . . .’

  Benny and Vaughn heard, but couldn’t stop staring at the painting.

  ‘We think she is Hendrickje Stoffels,’ said Minnie.

  ‘Okay,’ said Cupido, the enchantment of the woman and the painting still holding him in its grip.

  ‘What?’ asked Griessel.

  ‘Rembrandt’s mistress,’ said Minnie. ‘Rembrandt often painted her, that’s how we know what she looked like. But this is the only painting showing her pregnant. That was in 1654, shortly before Fabritius died. There was a bit of a scandal about her . . .’

  ‘Now I’m confused,’ said Cupido.

  ‘Me too,’ said Griessel.

  ‘She and Fabritius have that effect on people,’ said Minnie. ‘Look here, see this burn mark?’

  They looked. On the left edge of the painting a small section was missing, and the edges were burned black.

  They nodded.

  ‘Come on, let’s have a cup of coffee, and I’ll tell you everything.’

  She told the tale with dignity, the farmer’s wife with the dimples in her cheeks. With the help of her husband. She said this was the version she believed, though there was little concrete proof of the story.

  She said that Carel Fabritius’s real name was Carel Pieters. But that was not important. Fabritius was a pupil of the famous Rembrandt van Rijn. Fifteen years after he had studied under him, in the summer of 1654, Fabritius visited his old teacher in Amsterdam, and saw that Rembrandt’s mistress and former housekeeper was pregnant with their first child. Back in Delft, Fabritius completed the painting of Hendrickje, probably as a gift for Rembrandt. He must have finished it before October 1654.

  At half past ten on the morning of 12 October 1654 the manager of the Kruithuis, the powder magazine where they stored the town’s gunpowder, entered the building with a lantern. Nobody will ever know precisely what happened, but the explosion, known as the Delft Donderslag, the Delft Thunderclap, flattened more than a quarter of the city. It was heard a hundred and fifty kilometres away.

  Carel Fabritius, the genial painter with a big career ahead of him, was at home when the Kruithuis exploded. He died instantly, and almost all the paintings that he had been working on at the time were destroyed.

  ‘I think that little burned spot on the edge of the painting happened at the Delft Donderslag,’ said Minnie Vermeulen. ‘And I think someone picked it up there and I think that man was a Van Schoorl. But let me jump ahead three hundred and fifty years or so, so you can understand why I think that.’

  The painting, she said, which was done on wood, incidentally, had been in her husband’s family for many generations. When she married Junior, she saw it hanging in the master bedroom in the farmhouse, when the farm still belonged to her father-in-law, Willem Vermeulen Senior.

  It enchanted everyone who saw it, but few were given the privilege. Senior was a staunch churchman, and the near-nakedness of the woman was not something he liked to flaunt.

  When Junior took over the farming, she asked if the painting could stay in the bedroom. ‘Very well,’ her father-in-law said. ‘But you’re not to show it off. Promise me.’

  She promised.

  Minnie Vermeulen explained that she was a reader. From a young age. She read anything, but she was always behind with her reading, because there are so many good books, and so little time. It was only last year in April that she got round to reading Donna Tartt’s book, The Goldfinch.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ said Cupido.

  ‘That’s what the prof talked about,’ said Griessel.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Cupido. ‘What’s with the Tartt woman?’

  The farmer’s wife said Donna Tartt was an American author who wrote a very popular novel called The Goldfinch, about a painting of a goldfinch by the same Fabritius. The real goldfinch painting is on display in the Mauritshuis in The Hague in the Netherlands. But all that was not important. What was important, was that the Tartt book made Minnie Vermeulen get up from her reading chair out on the back veranda, and go to the painting in the bedroom.

  She knew she had seen the name Fabritius before, and she was sure it was on the bottom of the picture that hung in front of their bed.

  And she saw that it was – in the same Roman letters and handwriting, and the same year as The Goldfinch painting.

  ‘I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t want to believe it. I rubbed my fingertips over the oil paint to make sure it was genuine. I went to find Junior and asked him how old the painting was. I talked to my father-in-law, read everything about Fabritius that I could find, and then I started scratching around in the history in the Archives to try and find out if it was genuine. I knew, if it was really a Fabritius, it would be worth a lot of money.

  ‘I didn’t have proof for everything, but I believe a man by the name of Van Schoorl picked up the painting near Fabritius’s house the day the Kruithuis exploded in Delft. And I think he boarded a ship by the name of Arnhem two weeks later and sailed to the Cape to work for the Dutch East India Company. And I think his son sold the painting twenty years later to one of Junior’s forefathers, a Van Reenen.’

  She said there was really only one way to be completely sure that it was genuine, and that was to share the painting with experts. But they weren’t ready for that, because her father-in-law lived close by in town, and she had promised not to show the painting to anyone.

  So she searched on the internet, and came across the website of a company called Restore, and their expert on the Dutch painters of that time, Alicia Lewis.

  ‘So I took a photo of the painting and sent it to Alicia Lewis—’

  ‘Without saying a word to me,’ Junior interrupted.

  ‘That’s true, I can’t deny it. I just wanted to hear first if there was anything in it, you understand? Anyway, I sent the photo to the woman and asked her if she thought it might be a genuine Fabritius. Within the day I had an email reply, and she said it might be, and could she phone me, please. And I thought, oh, no, goodness, what if she starts telling the world there’s a Fabritius here. Pa Senior will murder me, and I said, no, I don’t have a phone, she can just email me. Then, a few days later, she sent me a bunch of photos of Rembrandt’s paintings of Hendrickje Stoffels, and she said, I must take a good look, is that not the same woman? I compared them, and I could see the likeness, the chances were good it was the same woman. So I wrote back to her, yes, I do think it is the same woman, and her next email was this awfully long one saying she was sending me a contract, she would like to represent me, and I owe it to the world to reveal and display the painting, and do I realise, if it is genuine, it was worth over a billion rand. That gave me an enormous fright. Enormous.’

  That was when she took the whole story to her husband. Junior asked her what the Lewis woman knew about them. She said nothing, except her email address – minnie43@mweb.co.za

  ‘Just leave it then, vrou,’ said Junior. ‘Pa will disown us, and we don’t need the money, and we don’t need the fuss. And it will cause a major drama, this thing . . .’

  The farmer leaned forward now, and said, ‘Ja, that didn’t help, because last November, that detective arrived here at the farm with a little picture on his phone, and I said no, Pa lives in town, and he asked, do you know this painting?’

  ‘It’s the same photo that I sent to Alicia Lewis,’ said Minnie. ‘But his was just cut much smaller, so you could only see Hendrickje’s face and a piece of the cloak.’

  ‘Martin Fillis?’ asked Cupido. ‘Was that the detective’s name?’

  ‘No, it wasn’t . . .’

  ‘Billy de Palma.’

  ‘That’s it. De Palma. And idiot that I am,’ said Junior, ‘I’m such a bad liar that I long ago stopped trying. I told him, yes, I’ve seen the painting. And he asked, where? And I started to understand and I said, why do you want to know? And he hummed and hah-ed, but he didn’t want to say, and I said, then we have nothing to talk about. And he left again.’

  ‘
Junior came to tell me and I said, Junior, let’s put it in the safe, in case someone tries to steal our Fabritius. So we did. And I took my photo, and had it enlarged and framed it, and we put that there in front of the bed, so that I can still see Hendrickje, because by now we are best friends . . .

  ‘We’d barely hung it up, one Sunday, when we came out of church after the nagmaal service in town, and when I switched my phone back on, the security people had left a message to say the house alarm had gone off and we must come. The only thing that was stolen out of that whole house was the photo of the Fabritius on our bedroom wall, my pearls that were in the little box on my dressing table, under the picture, and two bottles of preserved peaches from the kitchen.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘I installed a bigger, thicker door on the strongroom.’

  19

  ‘I thought you said you’d found the stolen goods,’ said Willem Vermeulen Junior. ‘That’s why I asked you if you had any news, about the painting, earlier. When we reported the theft to the local police, we said it was a picture of a woman in a blue cloak. In any case, we thought, that would be the last we would hear about it. Until Monday.’

  ‘There was a knock on the door, around half past eleven. Junior was in the vineyards, I was in the kitchen baking Hertzog cookies, and I went to see. There was a woman there, smartly dressed, and she said, “Good morning, I’m looking for Willem Vermeulen,” and I said, I’m Minnie Vermeulen, pleased to meet you, and she gave me a look, and said, “Minnie. Of course. Minnie. We’ve spoken before. Via email. My name is Alicia Lewis.” ’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘I invited her in, and sent someone to fetch Willem from the vineyards, because I was scared now, I had brought all this on myself, I was the one who sent the photo and the email and now here she was. She asked straight away to see the Fabritius, and I said, “No, there’s bad news, just wait for my husband to come,” and when he came in, I told him in Afrikaans that he must play along with my lie. We told her the painting was stolen, and she could check with the police, we had reported the theft.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘She wouldn’t believe us. I showed her the place where it used to hang in the bedroom. She cried then, right there in our room. I had to comfort her, and I felt so awfully bad, she was crying because I lied to her, but we persisted with it. She had lunch with us, and she asked how big and how beautiful the painting was, and then she left.’

  ‘At what time?’

  ‘Probably . . . It was late, she stayed a long time, like she didn’t want to leave. Must have been about half past three?’

  Junior agreed.

  ‘When did she die?’ Minnie Vermeulen asked.

  ‘Shortly after,’ said Griessel.

  ‘Ay, Heretjie,’ said Minnie, and she began to sob again.

  The sun was setting when they drove back to Bellville. Griessel had the wheel; he phoned Mooiwillem Liebenberg to hear how he was getting on with Martin Fillis.

  ‘He’s still sitting here. Looks like his alibi for Monday is watertight. Uncle Frankie is still verifying some details, but Fillis was at his office. A check on his cellphone confirms that’s true, there’s a camera at his building’s reception that shows him entering, and at least one of his clients says they had a meeting with him around three o’clock.’

  ‘Damn . . . What about a contract killing, Willem?’

  ‘His phone records for the last month show nothing suspicious, Vaughn. Only if you go further back . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Philip and his team found one flag on the system: there was a flurry of calls between Fillis and a man by the name of Rudewaan Ismail. More than thirty-four calls, back and forth, over a few weeks. Now, Ismail has an impressive record. He’s been to jail seven times for housebreaking, he’s a pro—’

  ‘When, Willem? When did Fillis have contact with Ismail?’

  ‘Let me see . . .’

  ‘November? December?’

  ‘That’s right, early December. They talked a few times a day, up till the fourteenth.’

  ‘Is there a last known address for Ismail?’ Cupido asked.

  ‘Yes, Mitchell’s Plain . . .’

  ‘Ask them to bring him in, Willem. For the theft of a painting on a farm outside Villiersdorp . . .’

  Griessel and Cupido went to join Uncle Frank Fillander and Mooiwillem Liebenberg who were still interrogating Fillis. Fillis wasn’t sitting down any more, he was pacing up and down the room and cursing them, saying he was going to sue the Hawks and the entire SAPS. The floor was littered with cigarette butts and the place reeked of old smoke.

  ‘Go ahead,’ said Cupido. ‘But let me tell you something, Billy Boy. We’re going to nail you. Your pal Rudewaan Ismail is on his way to pay us a visit. And he’s going to make a deal with us, I can guarantee it.’

  ‘Fuck you, Vaughn.’ But now he looked anxious. ‘I want food and water and cigarettes, I’m not talking to you any more.’

  They walked out. Fillis swore after them.

  They went to Cupido’s office to call the Villiersdorp police station. They needed the dossiers of the breakins.

  Rudewaan Ismail was forty-one years old, slim as a reed, with a pencil moustache and a very humble and submissive manner. They sat with him in Cupido’s office. ‘No, sieurs,’ he said, using the old-fashioned deferential address, ‘the criminal record, the guilty verdicts, it was all a misunderstanding, the stuff was planted on me, I’m not the kind that steals.’

  ‘All seven times, brother?’ Cupido asked.

  ‘Hard to believe, I know, but it’s true, sieurs.’

  ‘Sieurs. That’s old school, my bru’.’

  ‘That’s the way I am.’

  ‘Rudewaan, you know Martin Fillis . . .’

  ‘I couldn’t really say, sieur . . .’

  ‘No, we know that you know him. We have records of your many phone calls in December and we have Fillis himself over there in the interrogation room, and he’s singing like a canary. He says it’s you who did the burglaries, not him. He just whispered in your ear . . .’

  ‘No, sieur, that doesn’t ring a bell.’ But his eyes had suddenly become restless.

  ‘The thing is, Rudewaan, he wants to nail you for the crime. He wants to walk out of here free as a bird, and you’re going back to the tjoekie. That’s not right.’

  ‘But it’s just his word against mine, sieur . . .’

  ‘No, it’s not,’ Griessel lied. ‘We know you were wearing gloves during the burglaries, Rudewaan. But our forensic guys found some of your hair at the scene. Hair always falls out, and now we’re going to test that hair for DNA, and then we can place you at the scene. You will go back to jail.’

  ‘Ay, sieur . . .’

  ‘Here’s the deal, Rudewaan,’ said Cupido. ‘We’re not after you; we want that snake, Fillis. I swear to you, tonight you’ll walk away a free man if you tell the truth. I’m your get-out-of-jail-free card . . .’

  ‘Ay, sieur . . .’

  ‘Last chance, Rudewaan . . .’

  ‘The judge is going to put you away for a looong time,’ said Griessel.

  ‘Will you put the deal in writing for me, sieur?’

  ‘You’re old school, but you’re not stupid, hey, bru’.’

  A tiny, nervous smile behind the pencil moustache. ‘No, sieur, I’m not stupid.’

  Rudewaan Ismail told them that Martin Fillis had caught him for housebreaking eight years ago, when Fillis was still a detective at Caledon Square. ‘But he didn’t arrest me; he said from then on he wanted five hundred rand a month protection money.’ Ismail paid it, until one night in Durbanville he was caught red-handed and sent to jail.

  ‘And then, end of last year, Fillis turned up, first time in I don’t know how many years that I saw him, and he said he would give me ten thousand to steal a painting from a farm for him. There by Villiersdorp.’

  ‘What painting?’

  ‘Die vrou met die blou.’

 
; ‘What?’

  ‘Vrou met die blou. The lady in blue. That’s what Fillis called it. He showed me a little photo, and said, bring me die vrou met die blou.’

  The detectives exchanged a significant look.

  ‘Okay, carry on.’

  ‘So I went to chat to the people who work on the farm, and I saw that, no, Sunday during church was the best time. That’s when I broke in, and there in the bedroom I saw the lady in blue, the same one as on the photo, and I stole her. I took it to Fillis, but he said, no, you imbecile, this isn’t a painting, any idiot can see it’s a photograph. So I said, but it’s the only woman in blue in the whole house, and I wanted my money. He said, then the painting must be in the old man’s house, and I asked what old man, and he said, never mind, here’s the address. So I went and stole all the paintings at that house. But there wasn’t a woman in blue among them. So he hasn’t paid me a cent. That’s why I don’t really mind ratting on the bastard.’

  They arrested Martin Fillis of Billy de Palma Private Investigations on charges of accessory to burglary, conspiracy and dealing in stolen goods. They sat down with Mooiwillem Liebenberg and Frankie Fillander, and questioned Fillis relentlessly, till well after midnight, about his activities on Monday. They studied his phone records and questioned his alibis, but they got nothing but curses and his insistence on calling his lawyer.

  They locked Fillis in the cells at Bellville police station for the night, and drove home after one in the morning.

  Vaughn Cupido was still certain that Fillis had something to do with the death of Alicia Lewis. He just didn’t know where they would find any evidence.

  Benny Griessel didn’t share his colleague’s suspicions. His heart was in his boots. He knew they didn’t have a single true suspect.

  20

  Griessel was up again by seven, and he and Alexa sat at their big kitchen table drinking their morning coffee. He was totally preoccupied with the painting and the investigation, telling her about the strange spellbinding attraction of the Fabritius portrait and its incredible journey, from an explosion in a town in the Netherlands three hundred and sixty years ago, to the walk-in strongroom of a farmhouse in Villiersdorp on the southern tip of Africa. A painting that might be worth a billion rand, but to the owners the dignity and sense of propriety of an aged, retired farmer were more important than the money and probable fame.