by Jan Jones
‘In what way?’ asked Leo, signalling to Penny to join them.
‘Well, just look at it!’ said Mr Steggs. ‘Choosing that colour mount with that colour sky! Dad was always very particular about that sort of thing. He’d normally use a much creamier one to complement all the grey.’
‘Perhaps he’d run out,’ suggested Leo. ‘There must have been shortages during the war.’
Mr Steggs looked affronted. ‘Steggs never runs out. We pride ourselves on our stock and our service. I was just an apprentice in those days, so some of the gentlemen thought if I framed their work I’d be cheaper, but Dad put them straight. Steggs is Steggs, he’d say. Doesn’t matter who does the work.’
‘Did you mount all the artists’ paintings?’ asked Leo.
‘Only the ones who didn’t have the knack of doing it themselves. Mr Greville would always do his own, and when he married Elizabeth Barnes he had that big house to build himself a proper studio in.’ He nodded to Alice as she paused to talk to a waiter. ‘Tidy lass, that. Does a proper job, not like some people. Argued for us in council that they should keep our rents low or they’d drive all the independent retailers out of business and we’d end up with unemployed locals and a town full of chain stores. That would be bad for tourism, see. Came to look around the workshop and showed she knew a thing or two about the business. Well, she would, wouldn’t she, being brought up with her grandpa’s studio in the same house.’ He looked again at the seascape on the wall and sighed. ‘Good thing Dad’s not alive to see this. Mortified, he’d be.’
‘Maybe it isn’t the original mount,’ said Penny.
‘It’s got Dad’s mark – tiny dot in the corner, see? Be all right if the sky had a touch more yellow in it. The colour would really bring it out then.’
Penny and Leo moved away. ‘That’s two,’ said Leo. ‘Two paintings that seem wrong.’
‘Three,’ said Penny, and told him about Minnie Pilgrim’s shawl.
A small, fanatical light gleamed in Leo’s eye. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is a story.’
Sunday. Rest and relaxation. And thank goodness for it, thought Penny, wincing as she got out of bed and her leg muscles twinged in protest. She’d barely sat down yesterday. She was looking forward to a day of idleness.
The phone rang as she put the kettle on.
‘Morning, Penny,’ said Leo’s enthusiastic voice. ‘I’ve been on the internet all night. Got some fascinating snippets to tell you about, but I’ve left some of my notes up at the gallery. Do you want to pick me up and collect them, then talk the story through?’
Penny saw her lazy day disappear. ‘There are times,’ she said bitterly, ‘when I understand why your ex-wife called you a workaholic.’
‘But it’s interesting! I’ll buy you Sunday lunch in the pub,’ he added in a wheedling tone.
Penny thought of the beef still in the freezer. ‘Arm-twister. Give me an hour to make myself human.’
In fact it was a nice morning to be out. Leo’s neat, blue-hulled cruiser looked spruce in the sparkling sunshine. Leo himself, however …
‘I can understand you not going to bed because you were tracking down a story,’ said Penny. ‘But did you also not pass a mirror at any point?’
Leo had a quick squint at himself. ‘Tousled hair and designer stubble is very sexy in London.’
‘In Salthaven it could be mistaken for unkempt and unshaven.’
‘You’re going to keep looking at me like that until I tidy myself up, aren’t you?’ He made a face at her. ‘Sit there for five minutes.’
Leo shaved quickly, wanting to get on before he lost the tenuous threads that were beginning to mean something in his head. ‘Some interesting things,’ he said as he hurried Penny out to her car. ‘Alice’s grandpa’s paintings make up the bulk of the exhibition –’
‘Of course they do,’ she said. ‘The real purpose of this exercise is to establish George Greville as a serious artist for Alice’s CV.’
Leo loved Penny’s sense of humour. He waited for her to drive off, then continued. ‘The other artists’ canvases had to be recovered from all sorts of places. Private houses, obscure collections – even attics and outhouses. In some cases the owners didn’t even know they were there.’
‘You found that on the internet? I’m impressed.’
He grinned at her. ‘It’s what I do. Stories in online papers. Paragraphs in local and regional press about the discoveries. All adds to the thrill of the chase.’
‘Each to his own. Go on, then.’
‘A lot of places had no idea which painting was from the 1940 exhibition until Alice went down with Greville’s notebook and identified it.’
Penny swung the car round the corner and up the steep hill. ‘She’s thorough, I’ll give her that. Rosamund says she wasn’t taking any chances with the couriers losing what she’d painstakingly tracked down, which is why she collected most of the canvases herself.’
Leo got that tingle again. His journalistic hunch. Something that sounded right, but wasn’t. ‘Does being obsessive square with what you know of her?’
‘Oh yes. Alice believes if you want something done properly, do it yourself. Nothing left to chance. This country will have to pull its socks up if she ever gets to be Prime Minister.’
‘Today, County Hall. Tomorrow, world domination, is that it? Sorry, am I distracting you?’ Leo was glad he wasn’t driving up this incline.
‘Dear me, no. When you’ve driven a carful of fighting teenagers for years you can cope with anything. Did you find more about the Ted Edwards painting?’
‘Nothing about the painting, but Edwards and Greville had regular fallings-out. Edwards is the next best known artist in this collection and left a nice bonanza of diaries and interview transcripts. Sometimes he praises Greville, sometimes he rages about him. He came back from the war quite damaged. Changed style completely from the naïf harbour scenes.’
‘Poor chap.’
Leo got out quickly as Penny parked in front of the gallery. Her car was a little cramped for his leg. He kept talking so she wouldn’t notice. ‘There’s an entry where he says he now found them unbearably trivial and added that many artists experimented with styles before settling on the technique that felt right for them. He instanced Greville, who once had a bet on that he could paint in anyone else’s manner so well nobody could tell the difference.’
‘Oh, I remember that story,’ said Rosamund, joining in as she opened the door to them. ‘Greville was supposed to have put a lot of copies on show to prove it. However, every time he was asked the outcome he turned shifty and changed the subject.’
‘Why does that not surprise me?’ said Penny with a laugh.
Leo hurried upstairs to fetch his notes, mentally slapping himself for missing an avenue that could be explored. He’d forgotten both women had known Greville, particularly Rosamund, who had grown up with him hanging around Salthaven Heights. He’d have to get her to talk more about the man. He found his notes and started back down. Penny and Rosamund were still chatting in the easy way that old friends had. Leo stopped for a moment, appreciating the airy, Art Deco rooms. Was there any other style that so instantly conjured up an age? He crossed the hall and walked the artists’ wing again, seeing in his mind’s eye the community rubbing along in a volatile sort of way, mostly understanding and respecting each other but with massive clashes of ego every now and again.
‘Are you all right?’ said Penny as they left.
‘Fine.’ He didn’t want to admit to the sudden feeling of not-belonging, of being a transient in their lives. His mobile rang, saving him from more questions.
‘Hello, Daddy,’ said a thin treble voice.
Leo’s world suddenly contracted to the sound of his son’s voice. ‘Hello, Daniel, how are you?’
‘I’m all right, but I want to see your boat.’
His heart twisted. ‘That would be lovely. It’s a long way from your house, though. I don’t think Mummy would like it if I brough
t you this far. I’m coming down next weekend and we’ll have an adventure all of our own and go by bus to see Granny and Grandad.’
A sigh. ‘OK. Can I help Granny make a cake?’
‘I expect so. And you can see my boat one day, I promise, but not just yet. What have you been doing today?’
He listened to Daniel chattering on, aware that Penny had got into the car and was reading through the notes. Giving him privacy. Thank you, he said silently.
After Daniel had gone, called away by Kayleigh who kept a jealous eye on the clock, rationing his minutes, he stood for a moment, looking at the view.
‘Are you all right?’ asked Penny as he climbed in beside her.
He met her eyes. ‘Not really. Why aren’t I a different person?’
‘You might just as well ask why you didn’t marry a different sort of woman. None of us are perfect, Leo. We adapt and move on.’
‘Have you adapted? Don’t you miss that feeling of it not being just you against the world?’
‘I’m not sure I ever had it,’ she said. ‘It was always Julian against the world. I wasn’t considered to have a path of my own. It’s odd, watching him with Alice. I realised last night that he respects her as a person far more than he ever did me. I think I like him for it.’ She shook her head. ‘Back to the plot. Why would anyone bother to fake obscure paintings? I suppose the Ted Edwards might be valuable as it’s the last one in his old style, but there seems no reason for the others.’
‘True. Greville is quite collectable, but some of the others you can pick up for sixpence. Interesting that he’s the only one from those days to have stayed in the area. Is that Salthaven’s artistic inspiration?’
Penny grinned. ‘Hardly. The ‘local girl’ he married was the daughter of a leading businessman. Big house. Nice cushion of profits to nestle against if times got hard. Greville wasn’t exactly slumming it.’
Leo chuckled. His phone rang again. But it wasn’t Daniel this time, it was Kayleigh.
‘Are you mad, Leo? You promised Daniel he could come and stay on your boat? After what happened when you took him out before?’
Leo tensed. ‘I didn’t say he could stay. I said maybe, one day, he could come and see it.’
Beside him, Penny made to get out of the car. He reached across and stopped her, gripping her arm for support as he took a deep breath and said into the phone, ‘What do you mean after what happened before?’
Some two hundred miles away, Kayleigh exploded. ‘Handing your own son over to a complete stranger because you were too busy being Mr Big Time Reporter to see to him yourself! And don’t tell me she was a professor’s secretary and perfectly respectable. I told you then and I’m telling you again now, your access rights are in serious jeopardy. He’s only six years old, Leo! Anything could have happened!’ The phone went dead.
‘Well, that was helpful,’ said Leo, trying to appear normal as Penny let out the clutch and started off down the hill. ‘I wonder what I did?’ He was glad he wasn’t driving. He felt shaky from Kayleigh’s biting words. Why couldn’t he remember? Why did he still have this gap around the time of his accident? They reached the bottom of the road, Penny started to make the turn and the sun glanced off the wing mirror straight into Leo’s eyes.
Already off-balance by the phone call, a kaleidoscope of images rushed at him. A bend. A quiet suburb. The road slick with rain and the sun dazzling off it. And then the steering wheel jumping under his palms. The scream of tyres …
‘Stop!’ he yelled, covering his face with his hands. ‘Stop!’
The car braked to a halt. ‘What?’ said Penny urgently. ‘Leo, what is it?’
The world had stopped moving. Leo opened his eyes. A child skipped down the pavement chattering to her mother. Seagulls screeched overhead. ‘I’ve remembered,’ he said.
Penny drove Leo back to the boat. She thought he probably needed to be in familiar surroundings. On the way, he told her what he remembered.
The interview with Professor McGregor had been rescheduled at short notice, which was why Leo had had to take Daniel with him. No sooner were they in the office than his son had a call of nature so the prof’s secretary showed him where the toilet was and brought him back.
Kayleigh had got every detail of the day out of Daniel and then spent the evening screaming down the phone at Leo about irresponsibility. What sort of blinkered, self-serving moron was he? Didn’t he know the outside world was stuffed with perverts? On and on, bringing up everything he’d ever done wrong, proving he wasn’t a fit husband, father, or member of the human race.
‘Oh dear,’ said Penny awkwardly. She parked near Leo’s boat and glanced worriedly at him.
He gave a lopsided grin. ‘If you prescribe hot sweet tea, I won’t buy you lunch after all.’
That was better. He must be all right if he was making jokes.
He continued. ‘The next day I was stupidly brooding on what she’d said. I drove round a bend, the sun was low, it dazzled off the wet surface and I went off the road into a tree. Not mechanical failure, not brain failure, just a simple – potentially deadly, really dumb – lack of concentration.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ said Penny. ‘You look shattered. I’ll go home.’
‘No, don’t. Please. I need to keep busy. I want to solve the exhibition mystery. It’s a pain that the authentication was done after the break-ins.’
‘It makes no sense anyway.’ Penny followed him on board, balancing herself as the boat rocked. ‘Suppose I’m a forger. For reasons best known to myself I make these copies. Am I really going to hang around Salthaven Heights with three dodgy canvases? The entire area has eyes and ears and a hotline to Neighbourhood Watch! And that’s assuming those paintings are even there to be swapped. If it hadn’t been for Greville’s notebook showing the paintings and all the last known addresses, they wouldn’t have been found at all.’
‘Fortunate for the gallery that he was so meticulous,’ said Leo.
‘But he wasn’t!’ said Penny. ‘I remember him well. Alice may be putting a gloss on him now, but he was a real character around here. Talked your ear off about the old days, but he was lazy and rode on his talent. That list must be the only efficient thing George Greville ever did in his life.’
Leo looked up, arrested. ‘Wait a sec! Why did he make it?’
‘He saw himself as the father of the Salthaven School. Always on the lookout for new talent to revere him. All through the sixties I’d come up to the gallery with Rosamund and he’d be holding forth to the few hippy artists still gathered here.’
‘New talent, Penny. Not old, has-been talent.’ The air was suddenly electric as Leo gestured. ‘Listen – put yourself in his place – the coast is being bombed, his patron has run for America, everyone has scattered. Why would he make a careful list of the paintings in the last exhibition and match them up with the artists’ names and addresses? Unless he had a vested interest.’
A vested interest … Penny was jolted by a sudden flash of inspiration. ‘That story about him copying paintings and showing them to the public for a bet!’
‘Edwards didn’t give a date.’ Leo flicked rapidly through his notes. ‘Suppose it was the 1940 exhibition. No wonder Minnie reported Greville as being furious when he couldn’t get into the strongroom. All the fakes were in there!’
‘He must have stored the original paintings at his own house while the exhibition was on,’ said Penny, working it out aloud. ‘Then returned home after being demobbed to find his copies returned to the artists by mistake.’
‘He’s not the sort to chase trouble, so he sits tight and waits for people to notice. And if they don’t, the real paintings stay in his loft gathering dust. A charming time bomb for his descendants.’
Penny stared at Leo, light dawning at last. ‘That’s it,’ she said softly. ‘Alice has been putting the paintings back.’
They sat in the cabin with a pot of tea and thrashed it out. Once you accepted that the paintings now in the galle
ry were the originals, everything fitted. Alice’s paranoia about collecting the canvases herself. Nothing showing up on the CCTV on the nights of the break-ins – because, of course, she knew where the cameras were.
‘Her bonfires!’ cried Penny. ‘It wasn’t a sudden interest in gardening at all! The weeds were camouflage for the destruction of the copies. Thank goodness for that. I was really struggling with her being a garden goddess as well as every other sort.’
‘Why go to all that bother?’
‘Oh come on, Leo, you’re the journalist! In case the fakes were ever proved, of course. You heard her polishing up Greville’s memory last night. Now, no one can smear her about him. Alice is going to be the most squeakily-clean politician in history.’
Penny sat back in her chair with a lovely sense of satisfaction at having solved the puzzle. Greville had made each copy with a deliberate error, so Alice had simply been tidying up. Doing what should have been done sixty years before. She looked across at Leo, expecting him to share the triumph.
Instead he was frowning. ‘Salthaven must be getting to me,’ he said ruefully. ‘I can’t write this story.’
Penny’s heart missed a beat. Of course! She’d forgotten. Leo hadn’t just been solving a puzzle like her. He was looking for copy. ‘We don’t have any actual evidence,’ she began hastily.
‘It’s not that. I could find that.’ Leo made a frustrated gesture. ‘It’s Alice herself. This is an annoyingly efficient woman who gets real results for her local community. All she’s been doing is putting things right without telling anyone. How can I expose that?’
Penny let out her breath in a whoosh. ‘If you mean it, then I’m glad. Because I honestly do want Alice to be selected for this seat. I want her to win the election and go to Westminster and take Julian with her, even if it’s only temporarily.’ As she said it, she experienced a surprising revelation of her own. ‘I need to move on.’
Leo sat up. ‘Move on? Now? But I’ve only just got here.’
Penny felt a tiny frisson. ‘You mean you’re staying?’
‘Salthaven is as fine a place as any for a fresh start.’