by Susan Moody
‘But she gifted the house and contents to you,’ I said. ‘She must have known about them when she did that.’
‘Tell the truth, at the moment I’m living in fear of finding something else equally valuable she hid somewhere in the house.’
‘Well, they haven’t been completely authenticated yet, have they?’ I soothed. ‘Maybe someone sold them to her as the real thing, which is why she hid them behind her friend’s painting, but they’re not actually genuine. Where are they, by the way?’
‘Up in London still, thank the Lord. I hardly dared to light a match while I still had custody, in case the house went up in flames and they were destroyed.’
‘Major, you’ve been lighting matches for years without any ill-effects. Why would you suddenly start setting fire to things?’
‘Silly, I know. Anyway, I’m delighted that they’re not currently in my possession.’
‘I’ll come down to see you as soon as I can,’ I promised.
A couple of days later, when the afternoon had begun to cool off, I went out. I walked along the seafront, up towards the university perched on the hill above the town, then striking right out into the countryside. It took me just under an hour to reach the top of Honeypot Lane. I walked down and into the Major’s garden.
I could hear him crooning something. Difficult to say what, exactly. Sounded like his singing voice was on a par with his topiary skills. Poor to hopeless, in other words. But he sounded really happy. As I reached the open kitchen door, I heard another voice joining in. Female, this time.
‘Tea for two,’ rumbled the Major.
‘And two for tea,’ sang a higher, clearer voice.
Goodness me. What was this all about?
‘… how happy we should beee …!’
‘Tea for two,’ started the Major again.
At which point I rapped on the door and said, ‘Make that three, if you don’t mind.’
Both of the people in the kitchen turned towards me. The Major looked beatific. The other one, a woman, looked startled. She must have been at least in her early sixties, with a huge mop of curly, grey-brown hair gushing from her head and big brown eyes. Her clothes were what you might expect from someone who’d had all of theirs stolen and been forced to resort to a rag-bag of old curtains, torn skirts, discarded blouses. She reminded me vividly of my murdered friend and business partner, Helena Drummond.
‘Alex! How lovely to see you, m’dear,’ said the Major.
‘And you too, Major. Gosh, for a minute there I thought I’d blundered into a private concert.’
He drew the woman forward. ‘Do you know Ms Forbes?’ he asked.
‘No, I don’t think so.’ I stuck out my hand. ‘How do you do? I’m Alexandra Quick.’
She smiled, shook my hand and stepped back. ‘I have actually heard of you,’ she said. ‘Norman never stops talking about you.’
‘Nonsense, m’dear.’
Forbes. I realized that actually I did know the name. Philippa Forbes had been the art mistress at the girls’ high school. Maybe still was. The one who’d painted the farmhouse behind which the Major had discovered the two Tiepolo sketches. ‘Aha,’ I said. ‘Are you still teaching art?’
‘Just about.’ She grinned at me, displaying a set of flawless plastic teeth. ‘But very much looking forward to retirement.’
The Major was nodding and winking behind her. ‘I’ve made some peanut butter cookies which are to die for,’ he said. Unusual phraseology for the Major, I must say.
‘And I brought a chocolate cream sponge with me,’ said Ms Forbes. ‘Homemade, of course.’
‘Three for tea, and tea for ten,’ I said. ‘And what a tea it sounds!’
Later, having consumed two largish slices of cake and three cookies, I said, ‘I take it you two have things to … er … discuss.’ Was I supposed to know about the Italian drawings or not? I gave the Major a thumbs up.
‘Yes,’ he said. He cleared his throat. ‘The Tiepolos.’
‘Yes, indeed,’ agreed Ms Forbes.
‘Thing is, m’dear, Flo here dropped by a couple of days ago to find out if I knew about them. We’ve been discussing our best course of action more or less ever since.’ He looked at Ms Forbes. ‘Tell her, Flo.’
Flo? I had thought the art teacher’s name was Philippa. Or Fiona. The Major’s memory was clearly not in peak condition. I said nothing.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Well. Nell and I went on holiday together back in the spring. To Venice. Before she got sick, this is.’ She ran her hands through the curls on top of her head. ‘It was a great trip. We were in this little hotel, in a back street somewhere, with carved angels above the front door, and a rather grand salon on the first floor. Piano nobile, they call it. It must have been an impressive place once. Very simple, lovely.’ Her expression was wistful.
‘Anyway …’ I said.
‘Yes. Sorry. Anyway, we were rootling round the antique stalls in one of the squares, looking at prints and so on, and those two small sketches rather leaped out at me.’
‘But …’ Hadn’t they been found in a bookshop?
‘You see, in my younger days at art college, I did a dissertation on Tiepolo for my degree, so I recognized them at once. The style, at least. The execution. I said to Nell that I had to buy them, just as a nostalgic souvenir of Venice and my long-lost youth. Naturally it didn’t occur to me that they might be the real thing.’
‘Which square was this?’
She looked up at the ceiling. ‘Um … Piazza di Sant something.’
‘Not hugely helpful.’
‘Sorry. I’m pretty sure there was a P in there somewhere. Pietro? Paulo? Can’t remember exactly. Anyway, I bought the drawings and the man put them between pieces of cardboard, and they fitted very comfortably into my shoulder bag.’ She looked at me. ‘You’ve seen them … they’re quite small.’
I nodded.
‘Anyway, we found a nice restaurant for lunch, on a little canal. Sat outside. I had pasta with octopus … delicious! People were passing back and forth, smiling and so on. I noticed this one man, because I’d seen him back in the square where we bought the sketches. He was wearing—’
I interrupted. ‘You bought these drawings from a stall, or from a shop?’
She seemed irritated. ‘I just said … from a stall in the piazza di something. This man was wearing one of those flat white caps made of cotton or linen that men on the Continent like to wear. And then he passed our table, which was fine, why shouldn’t he? But then he came back again, past us. And then went past again and came back. I’d got my shoulder bag very securely over my ankle, foot in the strap sort of thing, in case he was a pickpocket trying to snatch it.’
‘You thought he was a would-be thief?’
‘I was quite convinced of it.’
‘What did he look like?’
‘Well, funnily enough, apart from the cap thing on his head, he looked quite respectable. Suit and tie, polished shoes and so on. Anyway, after lunch, Nell and I walked back towards our hotel, thought we’d have a little nap, since we’re both getting on a bit, and again I noticed him behind us. So I said to Nell that we’d walk round the corner and then dodge in at the back gate of the hotel, so he wouldn’t know where we’d gone.’
‘Though he’d probably have guessed,’ the Major said. ‘Where else could you have gone?’
‘As it happened, there were a couple of other hotels right there. And a patisserie. Even a small grocers-cum-supermarket. Coop, it was called. The Italian version of the Co-op, I imagine.’
‘So what did you do then?’ I asked.
‘It was difficult to know what was best, really. Did he take us for rich tourists with bulging wallets? Was he planning to grab our jewellery? We were far too old …’
‘Nonsense, m’dear,’ came from the Major.
‘… to be abducted by a white slave trafficker unless it was for a kinky sheikh or something, into old women.’ She threw back her head and laughed, display
ing a lot of gold fillings at the back of her mouth.
‘So then what?’
‘It didn’t really occur to me that he could be after my souvenir Tiepolos until later, even though we first saw him near that stall. We took as many precautions as we could, and he seemed to move off.’ She moved her mouth around, making it clear that her dentures needed adjusting.
‘Other fish to fry, I expect,’ said the Major.
‘Except …’ She stared at us with eyes opened dramatically wide.
‘Except?’
‘Except that two days later, when we arrived at the airport to catch the plane back to London, there he was again!’
‘Goodness me,’ I said, since she obviously expected something in the way of a reaction. ‘What did you do?’
‘What could the poor girl do?’ said the Major, sounding all protective and, not to put too fine a point on it, soppy. How did this happen? It was only a few days since I last saw him, and there wasn’t any Flo Forbes in the offing then.
‘What I did when we got back home was give the sketches to Nell, hidden behind a small painting of mine. If the man had been watching as closely as that, he would have known that I was the one who’d bought them, not her. So it probably wouldn’t have occurred to him that they might be in her possession. By then, I’d had a really good look at them, and was pretty sure they were originals.’ She gave the Major a white-dentured smile and he looked back, I’m sorry to say, like a lovesick adolescent.
‘So you see, they aren’t mine at all,’ he said to me.
‘I would have come round sooner, but I didn’t want to march in claiming ownership of objects in the house before poor Nell was cold in her grave,’ Ms Forbes continued. Her teeth clacked a bit. ‘And since she died, I’ve been away on a number of trips and courses, plus visiting friends and relations all over the place. So it’s only now I’ve been able to come round to see dear Norman.’ She put her hand on his knee. I thought he was going to have an orgasm right there on the spot.
How very convenient, I thought. Just after dear Norman had had the Tiepolos evaluated by experts in London and pronounced as worth quite a large sum. Maybe I simply have a suspicious nature, but we had absolutely no way of telling whether her story was true. And given the Major’s faulty memory, it was possible he’d remembered all wrong what Nell had told him. But it could just as easily have been Nell who bought them, as she’d told the Major, Nell who was the target of the stalking man in the white cap, Nell who had then hidden the sketches behind the painting her friend had given her. In which case, the Major was in danger of being cheated out of a substantial sum of money. I don’t know whether it was the hair or the dentures, but frankly, I didn’t believe a word the woman said. Especially after the Major had earlier reported Nell’s own words regarding the discovery of the drawings in the Venetian bookshop the size of a coffin. Had he forgotten?
Maybe while I was in Venice, I could try to track down the bookshop and the guy who’d sold them.
When I got home, I rang the girls’ high school. The woman who answered seemed very efficient. ‘I’m trying to find my mother’s friend, Ms Forbes,’ I said. ‘Florence Forbes.’
‘That would be Philippa Forbes,’ said my informant.
So where did she get off insisting that her name was Flo? ‘The one I’m after was Florence,’ I said positively. ‘Or was it Fiona? She taught, or teaches, art. She was a good friend of Nell Roscoe. Headmistress.’
‘I know who you mean. And now, alas, like Mrs Roscoe, poor Pippa is no longer with us.’
Aha! And aha! again. ‘My mother will be so sad to hear that. She told me her friend had a big mop of curly hair.’
‘The only person I can think of with hair like that is Angela Morton, our old Head of Maths.’
‘I see,’ I said, although I didn’t. ‘Perhaps my mother got it wrong. These days she does tend to get confused.’
‘Tell me about it! My husband’s mother has just come to live with us and …’ She rambled on for several minutes about her mother-in-law, not in very flattering terms, before I could escape.
If the experts did indeed confirm their authentications, it sounded to me like the Major was about to be fitted up good and proper by the so-called Flo Forbes. I’d have to warn him. And shatter his new-found happiness, you bitch, said a nasty little voice inside me.
EIGHT
I went out to do some last-minute shopping before I flew to Venice. I got back to find there were several messages waiting. All of them were from Maddalena Grainger. All said more or less the same thing: ‘I need to talk to you urgently. Call me soonest.’
What could have happened? And why did she want to talk to me? She was more my parents’ generation than mine. I rang her back but the line was busy. I called her again. Still engaged. I went over to my desk and rootled through it. Somewhere I had a note of her cell phone number, but goodness only knew where. Eventually, after some fruitless searching it occurred to me that in a burst of efficiency, I just might have copied it into my address book – if I could only locate that. Which I eventually did, lost in a pile of old newspapers. I called the landline again, which was still engaged. Then dialled her number on the cell phone, to which there was no reply. I left a message, telling her to get back to me.
Hours later, the phone woke me from sleep. Sleepily checking my clock as I reached for it, I saw that it was one-forty in the morning. Late, by anybody’s reckoning.
‘What?’ I said.
‘Alexandra! It’s Maddalena Grainger. Thank God I got you at last!’ She sounded close to hysterical.
‘You’d have got me much sooner if you hadn’t constantly been on the phone.’
‘That’s just it! I haven’t been. Oh Dio, Dio! Wouldn’t you know the thing would choose today of all days to go out of order?’
‘What’s so special about today? And why’re you ringing me at this hour of the night, anyway?’ I recollected that she had said that whatever it was that was bugging her was urgent.
There was a gulping silence.
‘Mrs Grainger …?’ I said.
‘It’s … it’s Sandro.’
‘What about him?’
‘That’s just it … I don’t really know. He flew to Italy two days ago, with my brother, to spend a week in Venice. He met a friend for dinner the day before yesterday, and never returned. None of us has heard anything from him since. It’s so unlike him that I’m really beginning to worry.’
‘And Cesare doesn’t know where he is either?’
‘No. None of us have the slightest idea where he is or what he could be doing.’
‘Haven’t you?’ I could. Sandro had been a babe magnet since birth. ‘How about he met a girl and they’ve been shacked up together ever since?’ I suggested.
‘A girl?’ Maddalena hesitated, as if for a moment she wasn’t quite sure what a girl was. ‘I know I’m only his mamma but he’s always been so reliable. All his life. He wouldn’t have gone for as long as this without talking to Dominic and me unless something bad had happened to him.’
‘It’s only been, what, two and a half days? Forgive me for pointing it out, but aren’t you overreacting?’
‘No, no. He has always kept in touch.’
‘Have you contacted the police over there?’
‘Of course. But they refused to take me seriously. They assumed the same as you did, that he must be with some girl. That it’s not a very long time since we last spoke to him … Perhaps their sons are more careless than mine. Look, Alexandra … I know you’re terribly busy and so on, but if there was any chance that you could go out there for a couple of days, look around for me …’ As always when she was agitated, Maddalena’s accent was growing more pronounced. ‘Dominic and I would pay all your expenses, of course. You can stay at Cesare’s place.’
‘Well …’ I began.
There was some more gulping. A sob. ‘Oh, God, what on earth is he doing, why hasn’t he been in touch with us? I just know there’s something
terribly wrong.’
‘He’s twenty-five, so he’s fully independent.’ I couldn’t share my friend’s anxiety. ‘Able to make his own decisions without reference to Momma and Poppa.’ I clamped my teeth around the yawn which erupted from my inner depths, nearly fracturing my jaw as I did so. The first yawn was swiftly followed by a second one. One-forty a.m. … Give me a break. ‘I’ll be happy to poke around a bit while I’m there. But I absolutely can’t promise anything. For all you know, he might not even be in Venice any more. Or he’ll turn up in the morning, apologizing for not getting in touch.’
‘That’s just what my brother said. It’s so unfortunate that he and his wife had to travel to meetings in Rome the day after Sandro got there so they didn’t realize he was no longer around until they got back this evening, when the servants told them.’ There was the sound of another muffled sob, then she added, ‘How soon can you go?’
‘I’m hoping to fly out there tomorrow. Should be there by the evening.’
‘I’m so grateful, Alex.’
I didn’t point out that I was going anyway. ‘Bear in mind that he might not still be in Venice,’ I cautioned.
‘Oddio! Suppose he … suppose he has been taken to the ospedale civile without identification and nobody knows who he is. Or he has drunk too much and fallen into the lagoon and drowned!’
‘The hospital is the first place I’ll check. As for accommodation, since you’ve offered and if you’re sure Cesare won’t mind, I think it would be better to stay with him than in a hotel. He’ll know more about the local scene and the best people for me to contact.’
‘I will call him immediately. Give me your flight details as soon as you have them and he’ll send someone to Marco Polo to meet you. Oh, Alexandra, I’m so grateful to you,’ she repeated.