Sea Lord

by Bernard Cornwell

  “There’s no doubt about that!” Lady Buzzacott said dismissively, then, after a few seconds of reflection, she looked rather more sceptical. “Well, of course, there’s always doubt about things once the lawyers get involved, but Leon has taken counsel’s opinion, and it seems that the picture has to belong to your family’s Trust, and that means you. Your mother’s will shouldn’t be able to change that.”

  I remembered how Sir Oliver had skated swiftly away from the subject of my mother’s will. “I haven’t seen the will,” I said, hoping for enlightenment.

  I wasn’t disappointed. “There’s nothing in it for you,” Lady Buzzacott said, “apart from some bad-tempered advice which I’m sure you’d do best to ignore. Instead your mother left all her property to your sister Elizabeth, and specifically included the Van Gogh in that bequest, but it’s very doubtful whether she had the power to leave the painting to anyone. She’d already given it to the family Trust, you see, in an effort to avoid tax. Doubtless, when she made her will, she was hoping that the lawyers could somehow disentangle the mess. I don’t know why people believe that of lawyers. In my experience they almost always make things a great deal more complicated.”

  “But Elizabeth probably believes the will has greater power than the original deed of gift to the Trust,” I said.

  “I’m sure she does!” Lady Buzzacott said firmly; then, with a small prevaricating shrug, “or perhaps not. She and your mother did try to have the trust wound up two years ago.”

  “They did?” That was news to me.

  “But, of course, everyone needed your signature, and you were swanning off being unpleasant to Scandinavians, so the Trust still inconveniently exists. Though, of course, if you died without having any children, then Elizabeth becomes the Trust’s main beneficiary.”

  “It’s very strange,” I said, “how this family knows so much more about my affairs than I do.”

  “That’s because you don’t care. You have to be very dull to wade through all those tedious documents. Ah, and speaking of dullness, here’s Hans.” A young, tall and sleekly handsome man had come on to the terrace. He was one of those foreigners who dress in the English manner, which meant he was wearing the most expensive brogues and a tweed suit, but all the money had only succeeded in making him look like a tailor’s dummy. Hans had yet to learn that the shoes and suit should be worn by his gardener for a full year’s hard labour before they would look properly English. He seemed somewhat taken aback by my wardrobe, but looked reassured when I was introduced as an earl. Perhaps he thought I was one of the eccentric English aristocrats he had heard so much about. I asked him how the cheese was going.

  “Cheese?” He sounded worried.

  “Helen told me you were in cheese?”

  “Ah! The processed cheese!” He brightened up. “Indeed. But it is only a very small part of our overall business, my lord. We would like to expand it, especially in the American market, but the American taste for cheese is not like our own. We have to develop brands with a flavour that can endure extreme refrigeration…”

  “Oh, look at the time!” Lady Buzzacott smiled graciously at her prospective son-in-law. “Would you very much mind telephoning Jenny and telling her that if she’s lunching with us she should come soon?”

  Hans, clearly confused by his reception, dutifully obeyed. Lady Buzzacott caught my eye, and I saw from her gaze that she was an altogether more formidable lady than I had at first supposed. “If you think I’m being especially nice to you, John, you are entirely right. I am trying to suborn you. I want Leon to have his Sunflowers, and I want you to have a good price for them.”

  “I do hate the way this family patronises me,” I said, though without rancour.

  She laughed delightedly, then glanced through the window. “Ah, I see that Jenny is already on her way from the gallery. We shall go through to luncheon and you can hear more about cheese. Then we shall have our council of war. But without Hans, because he isn’t family. Yet.” And, I suspected from her tone, she was not at all sure that she ever wanted Hans as family. I decided I liked this lady very much indeed, so I offered her my arm and took her through for luncheon.

  Sir Leon and Lady Buzzacott, the Contessa Pallavicini, Inspector Harry Abbott and myself formed the council of war.

  Harry did most of the talking and was actually rather impressive. Lady Buzzacott said very little, but listened acutely. Sir Leon spoke when necessary, and took notes. Jennifer Pallavicini was disdainfully cold. She had been cold throughout luncheon, almost ignoring me. I had noticed that, unlike our previous meetings, she was wearing an engagement ring; a great chunk of diamond which must have cost a lot of processed cheese.

  Harry began by describing the world of stolen art. The lecture was clearly for my benefit, though it did not stop Sir Leon from making notes in a small leather-bound book. The stealing of art works, Harry said, was a most specialised occupation. Only a very few professional criminals were involved. Their qualifications were not the obvious ones of breaking and entering premises, even though those premises were usually superbly guarded with high technology alarms. The essential qualification was the knowledge of who would be willing to pay for the stolen picture. “The breaking and entering,” Harry said, “can be sub-contracted to run-of-the-mill villains. Naturally those villains seek an inside accomplice, which is why, when the Stowey Sunflowers was nicked, we thought Johnny here was their inside man.”

  Lady Buzzacott offered me a dazzling smile, Sir Leon made a note in his tiny handwriting, while Jennifer stared at the ceiling. I stared at her. She really was very beautiful, and somehow the existence of Hans had made her even more desirable.

  “Once the painting is successfully stolen,” Harry went on, “the contract labour is paid off. It’s a straight fee; no percentage and no contingencies…”

  “His lordship may not know what contingencies you speak of, Inspector?” Sir Leon pointed out in his low voice.

  “Like, if the painting isn’t sold, no cash. The contract labour gets its money as agreed whatever happens. Got that, my lord?” Harry hated calling me ‘my lord’, but clearly felt it was incumbent in these palatial surroundings.

  “I understand you, Inspector. Please go on.”

  He gave me a filthy look as a reward for my own punctiliousness, then heaped sugar into his coffee. “Once the painting’s nicked,” he went on, “it’s taken straight to whoever has agreed to buy it. And that’s the key, you see, because the buyer is usually lined up before the job’s ever done. I mean, no one wants ten million quid’s worth of Rembrandt hanging about their house while they try to find a bloke with a bit of unused space on his living-room wall.”

  “Quite,” Sir Leon said in a disapproving tone.

  “So the painting goes to the buyer, the final cash changes hands, and that’s the end of the matter. The new owner takes care to keep the picture hidden, and it may never be found until long after he’s dead.”

  “And the buyers?” Sir Leon asked. “Who are they?”

  “Increasingly, these days, sir, the Nips.”

  “But why don’t they just buy at auction?” I asked.

  “Because the particular painting they want may not be up for sale,” Harry said, “and because, if the deal’s successful, it’s a lot cheaper than buying at auction. You can probably get a top-flight Rembrandt for a straight million on the black market.”

  I still didn’t understand why a man able to pay a million pounds could not satisfy himself at auctions. I said as much, prompting Sir Leon to lay down his gold pen and look at me. “You have to understand, my lord, the nature of a collector’s mind. It is, and I speak with some knowledge, a single-minded passion which is entirely consuming. It might apply to postage stamps, model railways, vintage cars, porcelain, cigarette cards, or” – he paused, and I thought he was going to say ‘women’ – “works of art. Whatever is the object of that passion becomes nothing short of obsession, even, if I might use the words, a form of unreasonable and u
ncontrollable lust. A man desires, say, a particular canvas by Picasso, and he will not be happy, he will not know any satisfaction, until that painting is in his possession. This form of lust is a disease, my lord, that distorts a man’s perception of reality until he believes that his happiness will be incomplete until he satisfies the desire. In all other respects he may seem a most normal man, but in that one area, so secret and deep, he is unreasonable. You will have noted, my lord, that I have constantly referred to the male gender. It seems that women are not subject to this particular affliction. Have I answered your question?”

  He had, and I realised he had also been describing himself. He wanted the Van Gogh, and he would devote his life to finding it. Sir Leon was a collector, a very rich one, and though he might never stoop to criminality, he clearly understood the minds of those who did and was very sympathetic to them.

  But he had no sympathy at all for men who would hold a painting to ransom by mutilating it. “And it now seems certain,” Sir Leon said, “that the fragment of canvas was cut from the Stowey Van Gogh.”

  “How can you be sure?” I asked.

  Jennifer answered, describing how she had carried the cut corner to New York where the Metropolitan Museum had subjected it to tests. “The pigment and canvas are identical to other compositions he painted in the late 1880s.” Her voice sounded rather despairing, and I realised how much she must have been hoping that the mutilated corner was not genuine. It was not that the painting had been irrevocably ruined by the small excision, but she was anguished by the implicit threat that yet more of the canvas could be cut. She spilt the scrap of canvas out of its envelope on to the table. I picked it up. The paint was rough and striated, like the texture of a sea blowing up in a brisk wind.

  “We don’t even know,” Jennifer said, “whether this was the only corner they sent to a collector. Perhaps they’re trying to ransom the painting to a dozen rich men?”

  “Maybe.” Harry sounded unconcerned. “But I’ll bet my next month’s wages that they only sent the one fragment. They know how badly Sir Leon wants the painting, which means they’re confident he’ll pay their ransom. Their biggest worry is exactly how to engineer that payment, because they’re frightened of getting caught red-handed. That’s why they’ve given us so much time. They know Sir Leon doesn’t need till the end of August to raise the money, but they need that time to work out a foolproof handover.” He plucked the scrap of precious canvas from my fingers and waved it like a small trophy. “In short,” he said happily, “we’re dealing with amateurs.”

  “Amateurs?” I asked.

  “We’re not dealing with professional art thieves, that’s for sure, or else the painting would have disappeared long ago. And no professional would ransom a painting, it’s too risky!”

  “Do you mean,” I asked slowly, “that these people have kept the painting hidden all this time? Why would they do that? Why wouldn’t they have ransomed it four years ago?”

  Harry was enjoying himself. He had his audience, and was relishing his careful reconstruction of an old crime. “Let’s go back four years, to when the painting was first stolen.” He thrust an accusing cigarette towards me. “I reckoned that you nicked the damn thing to stop your mother selling it.”

  “Why on earth would I do that?”

  “Because your mother would have spent the money on preserving Stowey, which you clearly didn’t want. So if you stole the painting, then hid it till she died, you could have kept all the proceeds for yourself. In other words, my lord, I believed you were defending the value of your inheritance by a nasty bit of theft. But I was wrong.”

  Jennifer glanced at me, and I wondered if I saw the faintest blush of shame on her face. Probably not.

  “So what makes you think I didn’t nick it?” I asked Harry.

  “It’s obvious, isn’t it? The painting belongs to you now, so why should you continue to hide it? If you had it, you could pretend that it had merely been mislaid all these years, discover it, sell it to Sir Leon, then go out and buy yourself a proper suit.”

  Lady Buzzacott smiled. Jennifer, perhaps reluctant to discard her belief in my guilt, frowned. Sir Leon glanced from me to Harry, then asked the obvious question. “So who did steal it?”

  “Johnny knows.” Harry, in his happiness, easily dropped my honorific. “Don’t you, Johnny?”

  I think I did, but I wasn’t entirely ready to believe my suspicions, so I said nothing.

  “Same motive, different villain.” Harry lit the cigarette he’d been holding for the last few minutes. He had clearly been nervous of offending Lady Buzzacott, but his craving for a smoke overcame his diffidence. He sucked gratefully at the smoke, then looked at me. “Who becomes the beneficiary of the family Trust if you die?”

  “So long as I don’t have children,” I said softly, “Elizabeth.”

  “The Lady Elizabeth Tredgarth,” Harry confirmed, “who is a bitter and disappointed lady. And a very ambitious one. And in her view you are a very unsuitable heir. You don’t care about the title, you never cared about Stowey, and you don’t seem to mind if the Rossendale family slides into poverty, yet those are things which your twin sister takes very seriously. It would suit her very well to inherit a Van Gogh which she could turn into ready cash. And who stood between Elizabeth and that tasty little fortune?”

  “My mother and I,” I answered dutifully.

  “Exactly. And now there’s just you. And if you died now, Johnny, your sister will simply claim to have found the painting in your baggage. That’s why she’s so busy telling everyone that she’s met your accomplice! She has to prove your guilt to establish her innocence.”

  He was making Elizabeth into a very cold-blooded murderer, a West Country Lady Macbeth, and the portrait did not fit. Elizabeth was bitter, and she was proud, and she could be heartlessly ruthless, as the two caravans in a nettle patch proved, yet I could not see her as a murderess. “She’s no killer,” I protested to Harry.

  “Women may not be collectors,” Lady Buzzacott observed mildly, “but they are not innocent of greed, and many have conceived of murder.”

  “She’s an opportunist.” Harry took up the condemnation of my twin sister. “I don’t think she’s had this planned for ever. It was your mother’s death that sparked her. That and your return to England.” He paused to tap ash into his saucer. “And remember she has a partner, and he is a killer.”

  “Garrard,” I said more to myself than to anyone else. I could understand Garrard being a killer, but that did not explain why he had beaten Jennifer Pallavicini on board Sunflower.

  “That was fear!” Harry explained when I raised the objection. “I’ve no doubt Garrard went to Salcombe to kill you, but he discovered the Contessa instead. What was he to think?”

  “That I was making a deal with her?” I ventured.

  “Which implied,” Harry went on, “that your sister had made a deal with you. Garrard was scared that he was being double-crossed by a brother–sister agreement! He was frightened that Elizabeth would give you the painting to sell on condition that you shared the price with her. It wasn’t true, but I’ll bet my last brass farthing that’s what Garrard believed when he found the Contessa on your boat. Sometime in the next few days your sister must have reassured him, so he went to George’s yard to finish the job properly. Would your sister have guessed you might be at Cullen’s place?”

  I nodded. Elizabeth would indeed have remembered my old association with Cullen’s yard. The pieces were falling into place, but I did not like the picture they made. It’s hard to see one’s twin as a killer.

  “And when your friend Charlie Barratt stopped that second murder attempt,” Harry went on, “what happened?”

  “I sailed away.”

  “Which meant she and Garrard had failed,” Harry was pleased with his exposition. “You were still alive, you’d disappeared, so now Elizabeth has a problem. The painting is still not legally hers, but she’s desperate for the money. So she has to run th
e risk of a ransom. But she was a little too greedy. She tried to put the screws on to your little sister’s money as well, and that brought you home. Maybe she even wanted you to come home, because my belief is that she’d still rather have you dead.” He looked at Sir Leon. “The painting must be worth a great deal more than the amount demanded in the ransom note?”

  Sir Leon hesitated, then nodded. “The value is around twenty million.”

  “So there you are,” Harry looked back at me. “Your death is worth sixteen million quid to your sister. Not a bad profit.”

  I stood and walked to the window. “But if she’s already got the painting” – I was seeking a loophole in Harry’s thesis – “why doesn’t she just fight me in the courts for possession? She’s got my mother’s will as ammunition?”

  “Because she’ll lose,” Sir Leon said harshly.

  “But she wasn’t even at Stowey when the painting was stolen.” I raised another objection.

  “Garrard nicked it,” Harry said easily. “She must have given him keys and told him how to work the alarm system.”

  “But Elizabeth wouldn’t know where to find men like Garrard and Peel,” I protested.

  Harry dismissed that objection. “Horses. Garrard used to be a good amateur steeplechaser before he turned bad. And the racecourses are full of villains.” He looked happily at the Buzzacott family. “If you ever need a crook, that’s where to go: the racecourse.”

  Lady Buzzacott smiled her thanks for the advice, while Sir Leon looked pained and Jennifer just frowned.

  It all worked. I could see that. Harry had presented a wonderful concoction of greed, violence and inheritance, a very upper-class concoction indeed, but I still did not want to believe that my twin sister was a killer. That was not because I loved her, but rather because, just as Elizabeth feared the genetic taint of Georgina’s madness, so I feared the taint of Elizabeth’s murderous nature. I shook my head. “I don’t know, Harry, I just don’t know.”

  “So let’s find out!” Harry said cheerfully. “You’re back now, so let’s see if she tries to knock you off again. After all, she’d much rather sell the painting legally than go through the risks of collecting a ransom. And if she and Garrard do try murder again, we’ll catch them red-handed.”