Paint a Murder

by Lily Ashton

  And that was going to be weird.

  The last time Alice saw Nathan Salisbury, apart from the day after the break-in, he was sitting in his mother’s living room on the puce floral sofa Alice hated. And she was explaining how their long-distance relationship could never work. His new job with the Manchester force demanded long hours and a wheelbarrow-full of emotional tribulation, while she still had another year of college left. They hardly saw each other as it was and when they did, they were both exhausted.

  It was a hard decision, and for some time afterwards Alice agonised over whether she had done the right thing. After the split, she often wondered how Nathan was getting on. Once, she even called him, leaving a drunken message on his voicemail and regretting it the following morning as she nursed her hangover. It was not until she met Joe that Nathan’s memory faded away. Until now.

  “You wanted to see me?” Nathan said, a double row of dark eyelashes sweeping radiant grey eyes. “Come on through to the interview room.”

  As she followed him along the corridor, she took in the broad shoulders, the swagger – confident without being showy – and the polite “Sir” uttered by everyone he passed. He entered a small room and invited Alice to take a seat. It was quieter than the waiting room, but no less stuffy. The only concession to visitors was a jug of tepid water and a stack of plastic cups. Alice helped herself.

  Nathan Salisbury lowered his athletic body into the chair opposite, his navy jacket sleeve riding up enough to reveal gold cufflinks on his blue shirt.

  “It’s good to see you, Alice. I hope you don’t mind me calling you Alice, this is an official meeting after all?” She shook her head. “Good. So, how can I help you?”

  She looked at his lean, tanned face.

  She wanted to say, “When did you get so hot? And you’ve been working out, too.” She glanced at his left hand. “And you’re available.” But when she sat up straight and cleared her throat, what came out was: “As you know, I’m curating the centenary exhibition at Gregory’s House.” Assured, not boastful … “So, you can imagine that I’m very upset about the theft of my paintings, especially the Augustus John drawing.” A little pompous, maybe? “And I wanted to see how your investigation was going. And to see if I could help.”

  Nathan’s passive expression remained intact. He put down his pen, lining it up alongside a notebook.

  “I appreciate your offer.” His sonorous voice was calm and even. “And you can help, by giving us the fullest and most truthful account of your day the drawing went missing. Tell us every little detail, even if you don’t think it’s important. Would you do that for me, Alice?”

  It dawned on Alice that he must have asked the two plods what she’d said. And that he didn’t believe her.

  Alice looked out the window behind him, following a squirrel as it bounded along a muscular branch.

  “I was thinking more about art expertise. We have lots of contacts in the art world. People who buy and sell paintings, dealers, people like that. I thought we could give you some advice. You know, likely suspects, that sort of thing.”

  “You’re right that we need some art expertise.” Nathan smiled. “So, I’m bringing a specialist into the investigation. She’s recovered valuable artworks before, so she knows her way around the art world.”

  So he already had it covered.

  “As it happens, I know the best man. In fact, he specialises in Augustus John and his era, so he’d be perfect. I know he’d make himself available if I asked him.”

  “If we find ourselves in need of any extra expertise, we’ll know where to go.” He scanned her face, eyes narrowing as if he was searching for something. “I need to ask, Alice: Where were you that evening?”

  Thunder clapped in her head and her throat clammed. She gripped both sides of the chair, willed herself to stay calm.

  “I spent the evening with friends. Dinner at Marjorie Cavendish’s house.”

  Nathan just stared.

  “And your specialist, Nathan, er, DI Nath— DI Salisbury? Does she have any likely suspects? Or do you?”

  Nathan placed his palms on the table and moved them together until his fingertips touched. A beam of light from the window picked out just a trace of moisture across his temples. Nathan frowned and Alice averted her eyes, looking back at the squirrel outside.

  That, she thought, is one serious police face.

  “We’re just gathering information, which is why we need a full account from you. After that, I’m confident we’ll have a credible lead. We’ll be ably assisted by our art specialist and if we require any further assistance, we will seek appropriate advice.” His face softened. “I realise this must be difficult for you Alice, but I hope that helps relieve your anxieties.”

  “Absolutely. But you will let us know when you have a suspect? Just so we’re prepared at the gallery.”

  “Duncan Jones will be briefed as and when appropriate. Do you have any other questions?”

  “Yes, I do. The dead man in the river. Jason Marley? What can you tell me about him?”

  Nathan clenched his jaw and glanced over Alice’s head. He tipped his head to one side and was just about to speak when the door opened and a voice said, “Phone call, boss.”

  “Thanks Riley, just coming.” Nathan jumped up and walked around the table, resting a hand on the back of Alice’s chair so she had to look up at him. “It would be good to catch up, and I’d like to hear about your exhibition. How about a drink next week?” He patted the chair and smiled. And a chorus of doves fluttered around her head.

  A few minutes later, Alice was floating along Sam’s Lane. Nathan had done really well for himself. He deserved it. And it would be lovely to see him again.

  She was looking forward to that drink.

  She ran across Daisy’s gangway and jumped onto the deck.

  It was a pity Nathan wasn’t more helpful on the suspects. Still, as a detective inspector he could hardly blurt out confidential information. And there was nothing stopping her conducting her own enquiries.

  Alice could use the centenary exhibition as cover and question the lenders, local art collectors and dealers she knew. She had her own incident room set up, with her own list of suspects. Now all she needed to do was to find some evidence.

  Chapter 28

  In Daisy’s cabin, Alice fired up her laptop and settled down on the bean bag to investigate her three prime suspects for the Augustus John theft.

  First, Edward Hacker. His blog on the Hacker, Stanley & Dole website was filled with his fundraising activities. Last month he had run a mini marathon, and had posted a picture of himself handing the money raised to the rep of a local charity. Absent from his blog, though, was any reference to the council or its art collection.

  Alice went back to the council’s list of borrowers. HSD had borrowed an artwork every June for the past eleven years and others at random times, a total of sixteen in all.

  If Edward Hacker had chosen the paintings himself, it displayed an eclectic taste in art. She wondered why he had chosen those particular works.

  Perhaps there was a clue in the paintings themselves … Vivien Taylor had said she could see the council’s collection, so she would do just that.

  She couldn’t afford to wait for Monica Streatham to get back from holiday. A call to the town hall resulted in another conversation with Helen Yardley, who invited Alice to view the collection any time before five.

  She bit the head off a green jelly baby. Julian de Havilland was next. Like Edward Hacker, he did not show an interest in art, but neither had he spent his spare time running marathons. However, he had a lot to say about the proposed shopping centre and even more about the opposition to it, much of it involving Jason Marley.

  Though she learnt more about her suspects, none of the material took Alice any closer to the Augustus John drawing.

 
She ate the jelly baby’s body and turned her attention reluctantly to Stefan Erickson, the last name on her shortlist of potential suspects. His name went into the search box. As the list of results came up, a piece from a Stockholm newspaper turned her mouth dry.

  Stefan had been investigated for stealing a painting from a wealthy art collector in the city. He was arrested, and questioned for two days, but released when police were unable to find enough evidence to charge him. The article was dated 1997, so she calculated that Stefan would have been about eighteen years old. Perhaps it had been a teenage prank, from which he must have learnt a hard lesson, as she had never heard a hint of impropriety against him. However, a large glug of water did little to alleviate her parched mouth.

  Not having the heart to research her friend further, she went up on deck where she found Roddy and Joe standing over bits of plastic and metal which lay strewn over Daisy’s deck.

  “What’s this?”

  “Joe is fixing my dinghy’s outboard.” Roddy was sitting on the lounger while Joe wiped a piece of metal with an oily rag. “So I can whizz up to town on the river instead of walking.”

  “Gosh, Joe, that’s brilliant.”

  Joe said, “How did you get on with the police?”

  “Really well. It was all good.” She hoped that sounded convincing. “Roddy, would you mind speaking to Lady Graydon today? I want to see if we can borrow her Picasso for the exhibition, instead of the family portrait she originally promised. I thought she might be more receptive to you asking her than me.”

  “You don’t have my charm, it’s true. I will extract the Picasso for you.”

  “Thank you. I’m off to a meeting now, so I’ll see you both later.”

  As the town hall came into view, Alice’s stomach somersaulted. She dreaded seeing Vivien Taylor.

  The entrance lobby was packed with wedding guests waiting to file into the Grand Library. Alice mingled until Helen Yardley spirited her away and into the basement.

  “It’s all very straightforward,” said Helen. “The collection starts over there and runs down these aisles. Here, I’ve brought you a list of the paintings, they’re ordered numerically. If you see anything you like, let me know. I’ll have to leave you to it, I’m really busy.” And with that she left.

  Alice relaxed. She welcomed the opportunity to nose away without anyone peering over her shoulder.

  She unfolded her list of lenders, where she had marked the paintings that Edward Hacker and HSD had borrowed. She would start with those.

  The collection was neatly ordered in racks and clearly numbered. Alice tracked along a line of units until she reached number twenty-two. A watercolour by a local artist, it had been borrowed by HSD for five weeks in 2014.

  Alice held the frame and eased the painting out of its slot. An agreeable enough landscape, portraying a section of the river by Narebridge, painted by a noted nineteenth-century artist. A respectable choice for a firm of solicitors.

  Number twenty-nine was an oil landscape, trees and fields, which could have been anywhere in the country. So far, so ordinary. As were the next fourteen artworks that HSD had accessed from the collection over the previous eight years.

  Alice swished the list back and forth, sighing. This group of unremarkable artworks told her nothing about Edward Hacker or why he might have stolen the Augustus John drawing.

  In hindsight, the visit was probably a long shot. He could have picked the works for any number of reasons that had nothing to do with personal taste.

  Still, she wanted to see the Gwen John, so it would not be a wasted journey. She was keen to display the two John siblings’ works alongside each other in a future exhibition. Now that, she told herself, would be quite a draw.

  The Gwen John was listed as number fifty-seven. At the allocated space, Alice pulled down the painting: a portrait of a seventeenth-century family by an unfamiliar artist. She put the family back and lifted down the pieces from either side, but the Gwen John was not there either.

  Alice skipped back to the beginning and checked the first compartment for another piece on her list. Yes, it held the correct painting. As did the next few that she tried.

  Number nine was an oil painting of a wary-looking stag. It had been correctly listed, so Alice slid it back into its compartment. However, the painting stalled before it was the whole way in, leaving one edge protruding. She pushed it harder but it would not go any further.

  Reaching into the unit, she felt a large hard-backed envelope and lifted it out. As she did so, a piece of paper fluttered out and down to the floor. She bent to pick it up. It was a receipt from a company called Art in Your Home.

  “Alice.” Helen Yardley was calling from the door. Alice shoved the receipt into her pocket and slid the painting back in its space. “We’re closing now, you’ll have to leave so I can lock up. How did you get on?”

  “I didn’t get all the way round, but thanks anyway.”

  “Perhaps you can come again when Monica’s back from holiday.”

  As she entered the entrance lobby, Vivien Taylor was heading towards her across an emptying floor. Alice stopped and went to offer a greeting, but the councillor was talking on her mobile and thundered straight past without acknowledgement. Her heels clicked along the corridor until they faded away.

  In the market square, she sat by the fountain and pulled out the Art in Your Home receipt. It was for a ‘reproduction’ of one oil painting – The Stag, by Charles Popper.

  Number nine on the council’s art collection list was The Stag. Meaning, Alice assumed, that the piece in the town hall was the reproduction.

  Somebody had taken the painting, had it copied and put the copy in the town hall, keeping the original for themselves.

  Alice took out her list of borrowers. Number nine, Charles Popper’s The Stag, was last borrowed in April 2015. By Julian de Havilland.

  Chapter 29

  Alice paced around her incident room, throwing virtual darts at de Havilland’s picture on the board. How many other paintings had he taken? And where were they now?

  Alice wrote the questions on a blank card, added it to the incident board and fell back on the bean bag.

  She had already elevated Julian de Havilland in her own mind to prime suspect.

  How had he managed to get away with such a racket without anyone noticing? Surely Monica Streatham, as the keeper of the collection, must have known … How had she not suspected anything untoward? After all a copy, even a good one, was still a copy. Perhaps Monica was in on it too?

  Julian de Havilland had to have found a home for the original paintings somewhere. Locally? Surely not, but she could ask the various lenders about any new paintings they had acquired when she visited them. If she could ferret out information about unusual dealings, it could lead to the recovery of the Augustus John.

  And then there was Jason Marley. He had to be the link between Beach and the shopping centre. But how?

  Her phone beeped and she got up to answer it.

  “Hey, how are you?” It was Claudia. “Just wanted to check that you survived your demo ordeal. I hear you got duffed up.”

  “I’m fine now, thanks. It’s not something I’m planning on doing again any time soon, though.”

  “You’ve probably seen that we’re running the demo as our main story and that we’ve already mentioned you were treated at the scene. I wanted to run your side of the story as a follow-up piece. Why you were there, your impressions of the event and in particular, your treatment by the police.”

  “Why? Was that an issue? I thought they were really helpful.”

  “There are different views on that. Some people think the police were a bit heavy-handed. There were lots of arrests and there’s a feeling that’s because the protest was right outside the town hall.”

  Alice had no intention of talking about her experien
ce to anyone, least of all a journalist. Her picture on the front page of the Courier, she was fairly sure, would send Duncan into counselling for the rest of his life. Still, she was keen to keep Claudia on side. If she did agree, perhaps she could get something out of it.

  She knelt on the sofa and picked at a piece of loose thread from a cushion.

  “Tell you what, Claudia, I’ll do you a swapsie. I’ll talk to you about the protest, if you tell me about Jason Marley’s judicial review of the Dunn Road shopping centre development. How does that sound?”

  “Good. We should meet for a proper chat. Are you free now?”

  “… and the next thing I knew, I was in an ambulance.”

  Claudia sipped her water and put the glass down on Daisy’s deck. “Thanks, Alice, I appreciate you telling me your story. I know it’s not easy to relive traumatic events.”

  Alice gave a wry smile. “Well, now that’s over, come down to the saloon and I’ll show you my Mary Potter painting.”

  Before Claudia arrived, Alice had closed the door to the cabin, not wanting to give the journalist a glimpse of her incident board, and a free story.

  “I love the shape of that jug,” said Claudia. “I’ve only seen Potter’s landscapes before, but I much prefer this.”

  “Me too, and I only found it by chance, at a furniture auction in Norfolk. Joe was looking for a dining table and I saw this poking out from behind a dresser. It wasn’t even one of the lots. So, I made them an offer and they took it. I don’t think they realised what they had.”

  “Well, let’s hope you got a genuine Potter. I got fobbed off with a forgery recently and that was from a respectable London gallery.”

  “The art world is riddled with stories like that. One time, I was researching a Jean-Baptiste-Camille Carot work I had in an exhibition and discovered that of the 2,500 paintings he produced, 7,800 of them were in America! He’s got to be the most forged painter in the world. Tell me this. You must have lots of good stories about forgeries and other shenanigans in the art world. Have you published any of them?”