The Art of Intrigue

by P A Latter

  She didn’t voice a further thought: And when I am really in control, that damned Assassin goes straight back into storage.

  ~

  The following morning she filled Penny in on the offer the trustees had made. She was surprised when Penny echoed Hugh’s words.

  ‘It’s setting you up to fail. I know how much time John spent on researching funding opportunities and drafting proposals. Getting cash for the arts - especially art history - is a complete lottery now.’

  ‘What about the National Lottery?’

  ‘Matched funding only and that just for a few fashionable projects, as far as I can tell.’

  ‘Then I’ll be needing all your experience to guide me, but I mean to give it a try.’

  ‘You will have all the help I can give, but I hope this doesn’t make you miserable.’

  ‘I’m willing to risk a little misery - I’ve lived through a bit before. And you helped me through it last time.’

  ‘That was rather different and there isn’t a man alive that’s worth getting miserable about.’

  Julia appreciated her friend’s protective instincts. She knew Penny would like to see her in a settled relationship, even though Penny’s own marriage seemed to have its ups and downs. ‘It’s a dead one that keeps haunting me. I know it’s stupid, but I feel like that damned Assassin is watching every move I make.’

  ‘That’s the stress rubbing against an already raw spot. Are you really sure you want to take on the curatorship?’

  ‘More than anything. It’s a chance I never thought I’d get.’

  They were interrupted by one of the volunteers tapping on the office door.

  ‘Julia? Inspector Barrett is asking for you.’

  ‘What can he want, now?’ Julia said as much to herself as the others, as she went to meet him.

  ‘Ms Bailey, could we talk in your office, please?’

  ‘Yes, of course, Inspector.’ She showed him in and closed the door. ‘How can I help you?’

  ‘We have evidence that suggests Dr John Carmichael may have been poisoned.’

  Chapter 8

  ‘John was poisoned? That was what killed him? It must have been some accidental exposure, surely?’

  ‘The police have to keep their minds open to all possibilities. Although the simplest explanations generally turn out to be the right ones, we don’t like coincidences and we really don’t like multiple unexplained deaths.’

  ‘There can’t possibly be any connection between this and Aaron Rowe?’ Julia wanted it to be a statement, but couldn’t help the rising inflection that turned it into a question - a plea for reassurance.

  ‘The only connection I know of is this museum.’

  ‘But Aaron had a heart attack. It was sudden. It can’t have been the same cause. He wouldn’t have eaten or drunk anything here anyway.’ Julia cast around for anything that might account for a poisoning. ‘There are some solvents in the conservation workshop, that you certainly shouldn’t drink, but I cannot imagine either John or Aaron …’

  Barrett interrupted her. ‘Ms Bailey, can you think of anyone who stood to gain from Dr Carmichael’s death?’

  ‘Inspector, John’s death is a terrible loss to all of us at Fathon House.’

  ‘But isn’t it true that his death is likely to confirm your position as Director and Curator?’

  Julia almost laughed out loud. It was too grotesquely fantastical to imagine. ‘That is far from certain. Even if it were, it’s not something I would commit murder for. And what possible reason could I have to want Aaron dead? Do you suppose I was responsible for Mrs Rowe’s murder, too?’

  The inspector was wearing his exasperatingly bland smile. ‘I admit, you are an unlikely candidate for a murderer, but I did want to test your reaction. I need to go back to my first question: Did anyone stand to gain from his death? Or did anyone have another reason to want him dead?’

  ‘I’m afraid your shock tactics are not helpful. I can’t make sense of any of this.’ Julia’s hands scrubbed at her temples. ‘I can’t think of anything. I don’t think he was especially rich. I don’t think he was the type to make enemies.’

  ‘No-one he’d upset, who might have a grudge?’

  ‘He was utterly focused on the art collection. That made him occasionally annoying to work with, but nobody murders their boss for something like that. He must have been an unintentional victim, or it was some ghastly accident.’

  ‘We have ordered further tests, following the initial post mortem. Regrettably, this means a delay in releasing the body to his family for a funeral, but hopefully it will give us more information on the nature of the toxic agent - if there was one.’

  ‘So it is still uncertain if it was poison, at all? And do you really think there is a link to Aaron Rowe’s death? That was a heart attack, yes?’

  ‘As I said, Ms Bailey. We have to keep open minds. Now, if I may be a little cheeky, I would like to borrow your office to talk to the rest of the staff. I’ll try not to scare them, but please don’t discuss our conversation before I speak to them.’

  Julia rose wordlessly and opened the door. She gestured to Penny to take her place in the curator’s office and wandered down towards the kitchen. She was in need of strong coffee, at the very least, to try to recover her equanimity.

  Her first thought was to phone Hugh and she pulled her phone out of her jacket pocket. She reconsidered - what was she going to say? I’m a murder suspect? The nasty policeman was bullying me. Grow up, Julia. The phone returned to her pocket. She should let Hugh know that the police believed poison was responsible for John’s death - if they hadn’t already spoken to him. An email would be sufficient. She didn’t need to bleat for his reassurance.

  Two of the volunteers were taking a break and Julia wasn’t ready to participate in a normal, casual conversation so, while the kettle was boiling, she walked back along the corridor and went into the Specials gallery. She was alone in the room and the ever-present menace of the Assassin caused a shiver.

  She scanned the picture as objectively as she could for some clue to its power, but the Assassin’s expression that day was as bland and inscrutable as the police inspector’s smile. She noticed a tiny spider’s web at the corner of the picture. Instinctively she raised her hand to brush it away.

  A moment before she touched the frame, she hesitated - drilled into donning gloves. And then she saw it was painted - a trompe l'oeil effect, to look as if it hung from the frame, with a spider disappearing beneath the edge - and she had never spotted it before.

  Two visitors walked into the gallery - a retired couple by their appearance.

  ‘Oh, look at him!’ One said to the other, not bothering with the hushed library-tones usually used by visitors in historic houses. ‘“One may smile and smile and be a villain” He certainly fits the bill.’

  ‘Is he a Shakespeare character, do you think? Oh, it just says “Portrait of a Venetian Nobleman.’

  ‘Is that all, nobody famous? I bet he was infamous in his day.’

  Julia saw the outstretched hand in time to break the spell. ‘Please don’t touch any of the exhibits, sir.’

  The visitor fell back as once and Julia saw his brow furrow. It was evident the man’s movement toward the picture had been wholly unconscious.

  His partner covered the minor embarrassment hastily. ‘Perhaps you could tell us more about this work?’ She caught sight of Julia’s badge. ‘You’re the one who chooses the exhibits in here?’

  Julia explained that her position - like the display - was temporary. She described the rotation of pictures from storage, to encourage repeat visits to see more of the extensive collection. She told them that the Venetian portrait was assumed to be a souvenir from a Grand Tour visit by a Seckfield family scion and spoke at greater length about the artist whose “school” the portrait was attributed to.

  ‘It’s a pity no-one knows who this character was. Blood-thirsty rascal by the looks of him. Thanks for the information, thou
gh.’

  The visitors moved on to view the other works, taking a little more time than some of the paintings perhaps deserved, anxious to demonstrate they weren’t philistine tourists.

  Julia returned to the kitchen to make her coffee. The necessity of speaking to the visitors, of performing a routine activity, had calmed her. The two earlier volunteers had finished their tea break and returned to their posts upstairs and in the main gallery.

  They were replaced by Imogen - that day taking a turn to man the upstairs rooms - and Sam. Since their conversation about the Assassin, Sam was more relaxed, but still skittish about being in the Specials room on her own.

  Sam was speaking as Julia walked in. ‘... So I’m thinking, it’s like, he possesses people to try them out. He draws them in, warps their nature and when he’s finished with them, he returns to the painting and they die. That’s why he made Aaron come back to the gallery after he stabbed his wife.’

  Julia was reluctantly drawn in herself, to challenge their speculation. ‘But that makes no logical sense. Even if there was such a thing as demonic or ghostly possession. John didn’t commit murder. Or die here.’

  ‘Dr Carmichael didn’t have the balls to hurt anyone. I reckon when the Assassin realised that, he discarded him and then he just took a long time to die.’

  ‘Sam, this isn’t a gothic fantasy, it’s real life.’ Julia’s mind shied away from thinking about the Friday night, before John fell ill, when they hung the temporary exhibition. ‘This is ridiculous.’

  ‘Julia, you know there’s something uncanny about that fucking - sorry - painting. It pulls people towards it. He’s luring them in. We’ve all seen it. All the volunteers keep saying they’re fed up with repeating “please don’t touch the exhibit”.’

  ‘I think that’s just something about the frame. The carvings are very tactile.’

  The frame was cruder than the elegant painting and depicted sharp-clawed bears with an economy of confident cuts in fine-grained and richly-coloured wood.

  Julia continued. ‘I have an idea that should deal with that problem, at least.’

  ‘Don’t ask me to re-frame it. I don’t want that thing in my workshop.’

  ‘No. I think the frame is the original - at least, there’s no record on the case of the Seckfield’s reframing it. I don’t think we should change that. I have something else in mind.’

  ‘If you can fix it so that no-one else touches it, that should queer his deal’.

  Julia presumed that was Sam’s equivalent of “spiking his guns” - disarming him. Appropriate metaphors for an assassin, but Julia was still worried about Sam. Was it better that she had gone from being scared of the painting to fighting back - if she was still imbuing the artwork with a will - an evil will - of its own?

  ‘I don’t want to hear any more talk of possession.’ Julia sounded impossibly schoolmarm-ish. ‘Mrs Rowe’s murder had nothing to do with Fathon House. It is just a tragic but meaningless coincidence that Aaron had a heart attack while he was at the gallery. And Dr Carmichael’s illness was obviously unrelated.’

  She told herself that had to be true, but Aaron’s return to the Specials gallery was weird. There was no doubt that the painting could be disconcerting. Her skin crawled at the feeling of its eyes on her. For someone in a state of extreme stress, the fascination of the picture might have been sufficient to make them return to it, for some unaccountable personal reason.

  There was no need to invoke supernatural powers. Even if John’s death was due to poison, it had to be inadvertent exposure. No-one could have wanted to murder him. It all just went around and around in her head without resolution.

  ~

  At least there was something she could do that should stop people trying to touch the picture. She wished she could also think of a way to stop the daftness about the “Curse”. That evening Julia stayed after they closed to visitors and the others left.

  It seemed a logical solution with the limited resources available: She disabled the alarm in the office, connected to their solitary motion-sensor camera, which protected their most valuable painting.

  There were few artefacts in the collection with substantial value individually, excepting an early but fine oils-on-canvas by society portraitist George Romney, which had been deemed worth the investment in personal protection. It pictured Emma Seckfield as Artemis, virgin goddess of childbirth, commissioned by George Seckfield around 1760 as a wedding present for his bride - clearly signalling his expectations.

  When Penny first saw the collection, she had said “I bet she’d have preferred jewellery”, but Emma should have been pleased with the picture: either Romey had flattered or had captured her beauty exquisitely. The picture had a prominent place in the main gallery.

  Julia had always felt that the individual alarm on the painting was more to draw attention to its value, than realistic theft protection and she didn’t have the budget to purchase another motion-sensor system anyway. So relocating this one was just a pragmatic way to deal with an annoying problem.

  It was true that the volunteers were utterly fed up with stopping visitors who tried to touch it. Standing guard over the Assassin limited their ability to range around the room and the main gallery, to interact with visitors in a more varied and positive fashion.

  Julia donned her conservator’s gloves and detached the system to carry through to the Specials room. She carefully re-assembled it, so that the sensor was obvious. Anyone stepping within a two metre perimeter of the Assassin would trip the alarm.

  She turned her back on the picture to check the sensor was correctly positioned and the frame knocked her shoulder. For a second, it seemed as if the painting would drop, as its weight fell forward. Julia turned and caught the frame in gloved hands, but she felt the stubbly texture of the oil paint against her cheek as she re-settled the picture on the wall brackets that supported its hanging chain.

  She stepped back and returned to the office to re-arm the alarm. After testing that it was functioning correctly, Julia stood back and surveyed the picture, satisfied.

  Deal queered, she thought. Guns spiked. Dagger sheathed, perhaps. But the Assassin’s eyes only met hers with a completely blank expression.

  Chapter 9

  The following morning Julia slept through her alarm and woke up feeling odd. She decided it really didn’t matter if she wasn’t at the museum before everyone else - Penny had a set of keys. She snoozed for a half hour and then got up for a leisurely breakfast.

  She didn’t feel ill, although she had a headache and the sight of the empty wine bottle by the kitchen bin confirmed that she had drunk rather more than her customary single glass, the previous evening. Despite the hangover, she still felt alert, energised.

  Eventually she set off from the house. Julia normally appreciated being able to walk to her office, but that morning she wished it was practical to take the car. She wanted to feel speed and power under her control.

  En route she stopped at a coffee shop to buy a double espresso - a minor extravagance she generally avoided. Convincing herself that breakfast had been insufficient, she added a chocolate brownie and paid with a £10 note. The barista gave her change from £20 and she pocketed it without a word.

  As soon as she reached her desk she bit into the dense cake, savouring the mouth feel of the chocolate chunks melting against her tongue, with an intense sensual pleasure.

  Her mobile rang, startling her.

  ‘Julia? It’s Ken James. I know you’re officially on leave, but could you spare a moment?’

  Julia had negotiated extended unpaid leave to enable her to continue as acting curator. She knew that, after a couple of disasters, the third temp at MJL was doing well. Calls for help were now infrequent.

  ‘Yes, that’s fine. What’s up?’

  ‘It’s a huge favour. I really should have given you some notice, but I didn’t know he was going to come in today.’

  ‘Who’s coming in and what’s the favour?’

>   ‘It’s a new client. Potentially a whale. He’s an art dealer and I happened to mention that you worked at Fathon House - so he’d think we knew all about the art world. You know the sort of spiel.’

  ‘Yes, but what do you want me to do?’

  ‘Could you give him a personal guided tour? This morning? It needn’t take too long.’

  ‘Ken, you don’t have to beg. You’ve been very generous to let me have time off. A return favour is the least I can do. An art dealer? He sounds interesting.’

  ‘You’re a gem. You will come back to us soon, won’t you?’

  ‘I thought the latest temp was managing.’

  ‘She’s good enough, but a bit scatty. We could trust you for everything. Anyway, I’ll send the chap - his name’s Barrington Ferrers - up to you later this morning.’

  Ken James rang off and Julia remembered that she hadn’t yet told the partners she would be quitting to try for the permanent post as curator. She supposed she ought to feel guilty for letting them down, but why should she? She had to think of herself.

  Ken had spoken of their trust in her and she recollected that she still held a full set of keys for the MJL office. How easy it would be to walk in one night and open the safe. Not for the petty cash that was kept there, but for the key and combination that would give access to their safety deposit box. An assortment of valuables belonging to various clients was held in the bank vault.

  She was interrupted by Penny, reminding her that they had intended to take time that morning to reschedule all the meetings and events they had postponed during John Carmichael’s illness. Julia apologised that their session would be delayed by the visit from the MJL client, justifying the change of plans by saying she was schmoozing a potential future donor.

  ~

  Just before Ferrers was due, Julia refreshed her make-up and applied scent. When he arrived, he looked more like a street trader than an up-market art dealer, despite an expensive suit and what Julia suspected was a public school tie.

  ‘Mr Ferrers.’