by Peter Corris
‘He didn't tell me’, he said again.
After that we had the cops and an ambulance, and a doctor who looked at me and put some stitches in my head. I made a statement and Silverman made a statement, and Patrick phoned his lawyer. Eventually they all went away, and I drank a lot of Scotch and went to sleep.
They knocked down the houses anyway and built the home units which look like an interlinked series of funeral parlours. I hear the residents have trouble getting their cars in and out. Clive Patrick went to gaol for a long time, and I got paid, but nobody has ever found any trace of Kenneth Silverman.
Stockyards at Jerilderie
She was leaning against the peeling plaster wall outside my office and looking only fifty per cent likely to knock on the door. I hurried down the passage towards her, glad that I'd had a shave and that my clothes were more or less clean—business in the private enquiries game was slow; I understand it's the same in imported limousines and oil shares.
‘Did you want to see me? I'm Cliff Hardy.’ I put a hand out which she shook as she told me her name and then I used it to open the door. Like me, the office was neater than usual; I'd used some of the idle hours I'd had lately to clean things up a bit and I'd even put a bunch of flowers in a vase on top of the filing cabinet. They were starting to droop a bit but still had a few days left in them. She sat in the chair in front of the desk and crossed her legs; they were long, thin legs and the knees jutted up high. She was a long, thin woman in fact, around thirty-five with nice, brown eyes. She wore a plain linen dress and a light beige jacket; like her they were nice, not flashy, maybe even a bit severe.
She shook her head at the cigarettes I offered and came to the point. ‘How honest are you, Mr Hardy?’
‘Moderately’, I said. ‘I believe in moderation in all things.’
She thought that over for a minute and looked at me like a horse buyer inspecting yearlings. As I say, I was clean and a bit tanned from being under-employed; I was also a bit under-weight but that was a plus, surely ‘What do you charge for being moderately honest?’
It was my turn to inspect the goods. Her clothes and leather shoulder bag weren't cheap, her short brown hair had been well cut and her teeth were good. ‘A hundred and twenty dollars a day and expenses’, I said. ‘I need a retainer, but that's negotiable.’
She smiled, her lips were thin, but not too thin. ‘If Lang Hancock walked in you'd charge five hundred a day.’
‘If he walked in I'd walk out. I can't stand hornrimmed glasses.’
She laughed and I saw a few more good teeth. ‘I hope we can do business. I want to recover something that belongs to me.’
‘What is it?’
‘A painting.’
‘Aha, go on, Miss Woods.’
‘I don't think you're taking me seriously.’
‘Maybe I don't take painting seriously. Please go on.’
She drew in an exasperated breath. ‘All right. I recently split up with a man I'd been living with for a few years. We divided possessions, you know how it is?’
I did; I'd divided everything with Cyn my ex-wife, then she'd divided my share again seventy-five twenty-five. ‘Yeah’, I said.
‘It wasn't a very friendly parting. Leo took this painting and refuses to give it up. It has a sentimental value for me, and I've heard he's planning to sell it.’
‘Why don't you buy it, then?’
‘It's a matter of principle; it's mine.’ I suppose it was then that I decided that I didn't like her. There was something frozen and emotionless in her face and maybe the lips were too thin. But life is a struggle, and sometimes you have to prise the jaws apart and say the words that will make people put your name on cheques.
‘I see. What action do you have in mind?’
She mistook my attitude for complicity and leaned forward a bit over the desk. ‘I want you to break into his house and take the painting.’
‘No’, I said.
‘It means nothing to Leo. He probably wouldn't even know it had gone.’
‘No.’
She looked at me for a minute and then she shrugged and got up. Suddenly the flowers seemed to be drooping a bit more, and the dust motes in the air swarmed thick in the beams of light that came through the clouded windows. She adjusted the strap of her bag and walked out leaving the door open. I got up, closed the door, and tried to sit the flowers a little more proudly in the vase.
Three days later, as I read in The News, she was dead. She'd been found in her house in Paddington with her head caved in. She was thirty-four and described as an ‘art dealer’. I read the report, and felt vaguely sorry for her, the way you do, and vaguely pleased that I hadn't taken her on as a client and then I forgot about it. The next day I got a phone call from Detective-Inspector Grant Evans, who manages to be both an old cop and old friend. He told me that my card had been found in Susannah Woods’ bag and asked if I knew anything about her.
‘Yeah’, I said. ‘She came to my office and asked me to look for a painting she'd lost.’
‘What d'you know about painting?’
‘A bit, Cyn was keen on it.’
He grunted. ‘You take the job?’
‘No, out of my depth. Any ideas on who killed her?’
‘Not really, she had this boyfriend, ah … Leo Porter, but he's in the clear time-wise.’ He read out Porter's address and number, and I wrote them down. There was a pause in the conversation.
‘Why are you telling me this, Grant?’
I could imagine him sucking in his belly against his belt and poking the flab; Grant tried to balance his moral rectitude against his physical decay and the effort left him unhappy. ‘Well, I haven't got the time or the manpower for this one, Cliff. She hung around with artists and queers; no one cares. The Commissioner hates artists and queers. I thought I might just throw this to you—apparently this Woods woman had a valuable painting, insured for God knows how much. It's not over the fireplace just now and the company would like it back. I gather they're willing to spend a little money. Interested?’
I said I was, and he gave me the name of the man at Hawker Insurance Company—Quentin James.
‘Quentin?’ I said. ‘I bet the Commissioner just loves names like Quentin.’ Grant hung up on me, and since I had the phone in my hand I used it to make an appointment that afternoon to see Mr James.
The insurance company was housed in one of those buildings which make you wonder where the world is going: the floors were made of some substance which was hard, cold and foreign, and it was too dark in the lobby to read the signboards. I got in a lift and found that Hawkers was on the third floor, but by then the lift had shot up to the tenth and I had to ride up to the sixteenth before it came down again. Inside a smoked glass door a woman was sitting perfectly still at a desk. I walked up, and she kept her hands in her lap and only moved the minimum number of muscles for speech. It was a short speech.
‘Yes?’
‘Hardy, to see Mr James.’
She kept her left hand where it was and lifted her right to flick a switch. She repeated what I'd said, adding another Mr. Then she put her hands together again.
‘Down the corridor to your right, Mr Hardy.’ Her head inclined an inch to the right.
I wandered down the passage between the pot plants and the paintings to where a door with a laminate aping cedar bore the words ‘Q de V C James — Claims Investigation’. I knocked and went in. A secretary had her back to me as she delved into a filing cabinet. She waved a hand at a door off to one side, and I gathered that Mr Q de V C James was available. The door came open as I moved towards it and a tall, elegant character stepped out. He had a swathe of papers in his hand which he tossed on to the desk.
‘Tania’, he said breezily. ‘Here's the report, do your best. Hello, who're you?’
‘Hardy.’
‘Oh, yes.’ He did something that used to be called beaming, I don't know what they call it now, you don't see it often. ‘Hardy!’ he bellowed. ‘Priv
ate eye. Come in! Come in!’
The hearty manner and the pin-stripe, three-piece suit gave an impression of aimiable idiocy, but he soon dispelled that.
‘Sit down, Mr Hardy.’ He waved me into a comfortable chair in his comfortable office. ‘Inspector Evans speaks well of you. Good man, Evans; honest cop, rare breed.’
‘That's right’, I said.
‘This is a strange case, bad smell to it. Miss Susannah Woods; shady lady I'm afraid.’ He picked up a folder on the desk, opened it and read: ‘Susannah Catherine Woods, divorced, thirty-six years, childless, journalist, art critic, artists’ agent, art dealer.’ He gave the last word an emphasis, looked up at me and said: ‘And crook.’
I clicked my tongue. ‘Maybe she's doing her time in a room full of Botticellis. What was her crime here on earth?’
‘You don't like Botticelli?’
‘Hypocrite’, I said, ‘Loved little bums and tits and put in haloes to say he was sorry.’
‘Hmm. Well, Miss Woods insured paintings and lost them, sometimes.’
‘And other times?’
‘She sold them; sometimes she sold the ones she lost if you follow me.’
‘Yeah’, I said. ‘Why'd you take her on if you knew all this?’
‘We didn't know, Mr Hardy. This’, he tapped the folder, ‘is the result of forty-eight hours of phoning around. She spread her business and hurt a few people.’
‘What's your problem?’
He looked through the folder. ‘Some idiot wrote a policy on a Castleton …’ He looked up at me.
I shrugged.
He let out the bellow again, and it came to me that all this heartiness was defence and—in a word, shrewdness. ‘Charles Castleton’, he said. ‘Painter, mid-nineteenth century, Australia. He's Said to have perfected the colonial fence.’ I snorted and he laughed more normally. ‘It's all such incredible nonsense. Castleton was a drunk who daubed this and that. His oeuvre is uncertain; experts disagree. As I say, he painted fences in a particular way and this is almost his trademark. Now, Miss Woods had an authenticated Castleton; there are a few fakes about, and she insured it with us for $30,000.’
I whistled. ‘It'd fetch that much?’
‘Hard to say. Art insurance is a specialised field and the man who wrote this policy was good on motor vehicles. Anyway, her executors can claim the thirty thousand from us, although the whole thing is very fishy.’
‘In what way?’
He looked at the papers. ‘There's a very curious point here. Normally we insist on security arrangements in such cases; hers were acceptable, but she also informed us that she had a copy of the painting on display in her house ordinarily. She only brought out the original for knowledgeable guests and suchlike.’
‘Bloody confusing’, I said. ‘Where's the copy now?’
‘Still in her house, but there's no sign of the original.’
‘Are you sure she ever had it?’ I was thinking of my conversation with her on the third last day of her life but I didn't tell him anything about that.
‘Oh yes, the authentication was done by a reputable man—Dr Bruno Ernst, an expert in the field.’
I asked for and got Dr Ernst's address and a retainer from the company. The deal was that I'd be entitled to five per cent of the claim if I recovered the painting—$1500 was three to four weeks work in my league, a nice round sum that brought out my enthusiasm and optimism.
I used the cheque I'd got from Quentin to buy myself a phone call at the desk of the frozen lady. She was still there, like a fragile, prehistoric bird trapped in the ice. I dialled Leo Porter's number and a rich, masculine voice came on the line.
‘Mr Porter? My name's Hardy, I'm working for the Hawker Insurance Company on a matter connected with the estate of Miss Susannah Woods.’
‘Yes.’ Guarded was the word for it, Horatius at the gate would have seemed relaxed by comparison.
‘A small matter, Mr Porter, I understand you have a painting which had been in the joint possession of yourself and Miss Woods.’
‘Yes.’ Loquaciousness was not his middle name.
‘I'm told you've offered this painting for sale, Mr Porter; is that right?’
He gave a short laugh. ‘Wrong, it's worthless, it's a copy, very crude. I found it amusing.’
‘Could I see it?’
‘Anytime Mr … Hardy except now. I'm busy. Call me later. Goodbye.’
He sounded assured and hostile, and now I had more to think about. That made three Castletons, two fakes and a dinkum. It was all a bit much and I decided to bank the Hawker cheque, draw out lunch and travelling money, and do a bit of research. I had the lunch in Glebe at Lionel's crepes—one savoury and one sweet—and I put down a good bottle of hock with them. Two short black coffees fought the good fight with the wine as I walked up to the university to tap the resources of the Fisher Library.
There were three books on Castleton, all of which seemed to be based on the same slim supply of facts. He was a remittance man of sorts, good family, good with horses, and with a weakness for booze and opium which got him in the end. Falling off horses helped. Two of the books had colour reproductions of some of his paintings which looked undistinguished to me—all hazy blues and greens with an occasional streak of brown. I could see what they meant about the fences though; they wavered up hills and petered out among trees under harsh suns. Good fences. This all took a few hours; I took notes on the titles of his authenticated pictures and I browsed through a couple of books which mentioned Castleton in unimportant ways. It was mid-winter and the shadows were long on the lawns when I got out of the library. A student pushed a pamphlet into my hand. It read: LOOK AROUND YOU. THREE OUT OF FIVE OF US WILL BE UNEMPLOYED IN FIVE YEARS! VOTE RADICAL SOCIALIST FOR A FUTURE!
I walked back down Glebe Point Road to my car and sat in it wishing I'd talked to Miss Woods just a little more when I had the chance. If her racket was losing paintings and selling them, she'd have to have mates—dealers, proxies, go-betweens. I needed names, and since Grant hadn't given me any, I concluded that the cops hadn't found anything interesting in her house. But then, as Grant had said, cops had better things to do. I drove home and had a drink and a sandwich before putting on the dark clothes and the rubber-soled shoes, and taking out the wallet which contains a few useful housebreaking tools.
I like Paddington; I've been to a few good parties there and spent a couple of those nights of sexual excess that everyone should have before they die. Miss Woods’ place was a tiny cottage in a row of four in a narrow street. All four houses would have gone for a song in the 1950's and were worth more than a hundred thousand each now. There was a lane wide enough for a skinny cat behind them, and I slipped down there and over the back fence. AC-DC were playing a number on the stereo in the house next door so I didn't have to worry too much about the clink of milk bottles or the rasp of metal on metal. Her security was lousy. I was inside the place in two minutes and could have taken every Van Gogh in sight with no one the wiser. I used a narrow-beam torch to snoop around the place but the results were disappointing. Her bureau contained only a few papers, all innocuous, and if there were any hidden safes in the house they were well hidden. The imputed Castleton was on a wall in the tiny bedroom which was occupied by a big, well-used bed. I was looking at the painting when I heard the noise outside. The music next door had stopped, and I heard the glass tinkle into the sink. Then everything went very quiet before there was a scraping and rasping and the back door opened. I went down the stairs quietly, but he must have heard me. It was moonless dark and I had trouble adjusting after the torch light upstairs. I had my foot on the bottom step when he turned on the lights. I got a glimpse of him, pale and dark-haired, and then he hit me. It wasn't much, a clumsy poke in the stomach, but I was off balance, I lurched forward, grabbed him but missed, and in that cramped little house a big, hard piece of furniture leaped up and crashed into the side of my head. I went down, hard, and the lights went out.
I heard myse
lf swearing, using some exceedingly nasty language, and then it hurt to swear or to do anything except lie very still. After a bit of that I got up slowly and took hold of the stair rail; everything seemed to work reasonably well and I dragged myself upstairs. The painting was gone. I stared at the empty space for a while and when I reached up to touch my head I found I had a piece of cloth in my hand; it was cotton, looked like part of a shirt, and it was smeared and crusty with dried paint.
I put the cloth in my pocket and sat on the bed to do some thinking but my head hurt too much. Downstairs Miss Woods kept a nice supply of liquor with the fixings. I made a strong Scotch and oiled my brain with it. The treatment worked to the extent of making clear to me that we now had two missing Castletons and one still at large. I used Miss Woods’ phone to call Leo Porter's number but there was no reply. Why should there be? It was Tuesday night, just right for a quiet dinner somewhere, a drink or two afterwards and all that that might lead to. It was what any sensible, unattached, professional man would be doing with his time, but then I was only a semi-professional myself.
I went out through the front door and slammed it closed—King Kong could have been sitting on the balcony and no one in the street would have known. Leo Porter lived a half mile away in one of the curvy, leafy iron-lace-filled streets Paddington is famous for. His front gate was open and his front door was open; I walked into the house and closed the door behind me. Leo lived in style — everything was of the best, carpets, furniture, TV, the lot. There were no paintings on the walls and that was a lot of walls, upstairs and down, six big rooms in all. My head was still hurting, so I put together some of Leo's Scotch and ice and even lit myself one of his thin panatellas. It tasted like sea-grass matting and I stubbed it out; the Scotch was good, though. After the drink I snooped through the house again but didn't find anything interesting; there was nowhere for the painting to have hung but it could have stood on the ledge above the living-room fireplace. Bad spot for a painting, though.