By Death Possessed

by Roger Ormerod

  ‘Mr Hine?’

  I shook my head, clearing my eyes. ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘You can see the point, I’m sure. The possibility is that you went there, the second time, and she woke, and told you what she intended to do. Which was to cancel her gift. But you wanted those paintings. How did you put it? You would give wall space to them. You wanted them. So you would not want her to retract her gift in writing.’ He cocked his head, and waited. It was quite clear what he meant.

  ‘Are you making a charge?’ I managed to say.

  It was then that the basic unreality of the scene swept over me. I was standing aside, mouthing words that had been scripted for me, and I could discover no emotional background to lend them force. For the past forty-eight hours I had been moving in an insecure world, prompted by impulses and reactions rather than reason. I’d been carried along by it, finally retreating into my darkroom to be embraced by my firm and structured life. But I’d opened the door on to the world again. My routine life should have been there, too, to be lived or confronted or opposed. But real. Now there was no home and no family, only a fantasy involving paintings and a throw-back to my ancestry. And I was now being virtually accused of murder. Did I laugh in this man’s face, did I demolish his reasoning with well-structured but dignified rhetoric? No. I merely said in an empty voice: ‘Are you making a charge?’

  The way he shook his head was not denial, it was disbelief. He’d seen everything, but I was a new discovery.

  ‘You’ll naturally be shocked, Mr Hine. You’ll need time to think. All I’m asking is that you keep yourself in touch. I may need to find you again.’

  At last I laughed, but it was the natural humour of a man who can find amusement in his own dilemma. I was amused. ‘I’ve only got one place where I can lay my head, and I can’t give you the address. I’ve been driven there, and I’ve walked away from it. I can find it again. It’s near Kidderminster, I know that much. And there’s here. Follow me home ...’ I stopped, and gestured helplessly. ‘Follow me to Dr Dennis’s place and that’ll be it. For now.’

  ‘This Dr Dennis?’ he asked. ‘This is the witness you spoke about, at your grandmother’s?’

  I nodded. We were now talking naturally, me trying to be helpful, as would a normal law-abiding citizen, he probing gently without pushing it.

  ‘It’s Dr Margaret Dennis. She’s an art expert.’

  ‘Well-known?’

  ‘Internationally,’ I said, with reflected pride.

  ‘Then we’ll be able to trace her. And trace you. This association with her—can I ask?—is recent?’

  ‘Very. Her interest is professional.’

  ‘Your private life—’

  ‘Is none of your business. I merely mentioned it in case my wife—’

  ‘She told me there was a woman.’

  ‘The same.’

  We stared at each other. I could read his thoughts. I smiled, allowing them to mature. He pushed his hat on more firmly.

  ‘If you get any more news,’ I said. ‘You know—the post-mortem, I’d like to know.’

  ‘I’ll see you’re kept fully informed, Mr Hine. Closely.’ He nodded, opened the outer door, and left.

  I returned to my darkroom, where I had a high stool in front of my bench. My legs felt weak. I wanted a smoke, and filled my pipe. It’s rarely that I smoke in there, because of the poor ventilation. This time I did, unable to get back to my work, and attempting to clear the situation in my head. I was trying not to think about Grannie Angelina’s death.

  I had declared that I was not really concerned about the provenance of the eighty-one canvases. In either event, they had been painted by one of my grandparents. But this didn’t mean that I wasn’t concerned about owning them. In fact, there was a deep and hard core of possessiveness growing inside me. They were mine. Gran had wanted me to have them. Yet now there was a hint of dispute over their ownership. Grace could well put up a legal battle about them, monetary value or not. They’d been the last straw of a series of gifts extorted from Gran, trading on her generosity. There was going to be trouble from Grace, and hell, I’d got all the distracting trouble I could handle.

  Determined to be professional, and refusing to brood uselessly, I forced myself to return to the prints, and, as always, became completely absorbed within a couple of minutes.

  *

  The cottage—I had to continue to think of it as that—was dark when I arrived there, but Margaret came at a touch of the bell-push in the porch. I heard her rapid footsteps up the staircase. She opened the door, snapping on the light at the same time.

  ‘Where have you been? For God’s sake ... Tony, I needed you.’

  She might well have been my wife. I smiled, smoothing the mood. ‘It’s a big job. Ten hours solid. I’m whacked.’

  She was jumpy, her eyes jerking around, her hands moving in small gestures. Her make-up was minimal, her hair mussed, her clothes stained. One hand held a cigarette between two fingers. Her lips plunged for it, and she drew smoke in greedily. She turned away. It was almost a command to follow. We nearly trotted through the kitchen, and I had only a moment to notice the scattering of quick snacks and empty cups, and the saucers lined with cigarette stubs.

  Inside her workroom there was a flat glare of white, pitiless light. She closed the door, the gesture being allied with the closing of my darkroom door. Inside here was her life, but whereas, for me, there had been another life, for her this had long been the nucleus of her basic existence.

  She had completed the cleaning, the whole eighty-one, and had them ranked all round the walls, perched on her benches. They glowed, they danced. Sunlight shone from them, mocking her artificial tubes. Here was Paris in the spring and summer, and on into six or seven autumns, but it was a Paris where the sun always shone. Frederick Ashe—or Angelina Foote—had loved sunlight, had tried to recreate it, and had succeeded. I stood, caught in awe.

  ‘You’ve had a busy day,’ I said at last.

  ‘I have.’ Her voice was harsh. ‘I’ve had five under the spectroscope, I’ve analysed the pigments ...’

  ‘But we know they shared the same palette.’

  She moved a hand in quick rejection. ‘There was a chance, damn it.’

  ‘But ... nothing?’

  ‘Not one clue. Hers or his! I’ve agonized over brush strokes and techniques, the force of the impasto, the ... the vision. They could be his. His, Tony!’ Her voice was unsteady. She had worked too hard and too long. ‘But look round them. Go on. Take your time. Tell me what you see.’

  I glanced at her. There was a bitter harshness to her voice that I didn’t like. Then I walked round slowly. These were mine. All this beauty really belonged to me. Did I say they mirrored Paris? Well yes, but there were a few that held a tang of England. There was one that held more than a tang. I turned with it in my hand.

  ‘You put my original one amongst them,’ I accused her.

  She flicked me an empty smile, bent, and picked up a canvas from behind a chair. ‘No. This is your original one.’

  One in each hand, I turned them over. She was correct. The one she’d just handed me was mine. I knew that because there was a small scorch mark on one of the wooden stretchers, which I’d never been able to understand, but now did.

  ‘Look at them,’ she said fiercely. ‘Go on. Tell me if you can see a difference between the two.’

  Of course there were differences. No two brush strokes can be identical, no loading of the brush, even from the same palette, equally full. Nevertheless, they could well have been painted by the same person. Yet there was one difference, one that was immediately apparent to a photographer. Perspective.

  ‘They were painted from slightly different viewpoints,’ I said, not because that proved anything, just as something to reassure her. Certainly, from the wildness in her eyes, she needed reassurance.

  ‘I saw that. D’you think I’m a complete fool!’ Her voice was too loud. She modified it. ‘There’s more of the
side of the cottage in the one than the other. One tree is farther over to the left than in the other. It fits, Tony, for heaven’s sake. They sat side by side—say three feet apart—so of course they would see the view from slightly different angles.’

  She had reasoned this out. At the end, she was managing to speak reasonably. Then she spoilt it by waving wildly round the room and crying out: ‘But I ought to know which is which! It’s driving me mad. I’m an expert. People pay me to fly round the world. I say yes, this is genuine, that is a fake, and they take my word. I ought to know, blast it, and I don’t.’ Then I saw that it was fear in her eyes. ‘I ought to know, Tony,’ she said with a catch in her voice. ‘I have to know.’

  ‘Perhaps one of them was left-handed,’ I suggested, introducing a light touch. ‘What?’

  ‘Sitting side by side, using the same palette, one of them would have to lean over awkwardly to reach it. But if one was left-handed, it’d solve it for them. Perhaps that was why they always shared a palette, placed between them.’

  ‘Don’t be a fool, Tony. Please.’

  ‘Just an idea.’

  ‘You don’t realize what we’ve got here, do you! It’s a great art find, the find of the century. We can’t keep it a secret and hide them all away. Some time I’ve got to produce them and say: yes, that’s Frederick Ashe, and that one’s Angelina Foote. Me. The expert. And I’ll need to point out why I say that, and be confident. Confident! And I’m lost. I can’t get hold of anything positive I can latch on to. Don’t you see, Tony? I don’t know which of those two in your hand is Ashe’s. And I should be able to!’ she wailed, whipping her hands up and sending her hair flying.

  ‘If one of them was left-handed ...’

  ‘Oh for God’s sake.’

  ‘... and we know which ...’

  ‘Will you please—’

  ‘... we’d at least know—or be fairly certain—which of these two was done by who.’

  She paced a while. My suggestion seemed to have sailed right past her. She stopped, pointing a finger at me. Maybe it was the light that made her seem so pale, but after all she was conceding a defeat.

  ‘There’s only one thing for it. We’ll have to go back to your grandmother and ask her—show her both—and ask her which is which.’

  She was asking me to do this, and her reluctance was in no way linked with her belief that I might be hesitant to comply. She was hating herself for admitting the necessity.

  ‘I’m afraid we can’t do that,’ I said gently. ‘She died last night.’

  She sucked in her breath so sharply that it fluttered her lower lip. ‘Then she was ... dying, when we saw her?’

  I wasn’t going to go into the ramifications. ‘I don’t think we could have helped her.’

  ‘Oh hell! The poor old thing. I upset her. You don’t think that could ... oh no. No! I don’t know ... I can’t see ... there’s nothing I can think of. Oh ... Tony!’

  She stood before me, arms now limp at her sides. Her eyes were brimming with tears, though whether at my grandmother’s death or at her feeling of helpless defeat I couldn’t tell.

  ‘You’ll think of something.’

  ‘I’ve thought and thought.’ Her hands came up in small fists in front of her. ‘I’ve racked my brains, nearly driven myself mad ...’ Then she moved to stand facing me, raised her fists, and thumped my chest. I allowed the two canvases to slip from my fingers, slide down my legs, and flop gently to the floor. I took her elbows, then slid my hands up to her shoulders.

  ‘It’s going to be all right, Margaret.’

  She searched my face for confidence she could cling to. ‘But it’s not! she moaned. ‘Everything’s ...’ Her voice sank to a whisper. ‘Everything’s going to nothing.’

  Tears welled on to her cheeks. This was the young Margaret, home from art school as a failure. I was her father. She needed comfort and understanding. And who better than me to understand, who’d made my photography a retreat from unpromising reality? But her case was worse than mine. Hers was not simply her obsession, it was her life and her only reality. She had worked for it, fought for it, hacked herself a notch in the hierarchy of art knowledge, and always she had to be aware that the higher she climbed, the farther her fall if she made one incorrect identification. She was exposed and vulnerable, and however successfully she had trained herself into a practicality and severity fitting her status, beneath it there was a woman refusing to admit her basic frustration.

  So I kissed her on the forehead as a comforting father, kissed her on the eyelids with gentle understanding, and on her lips as no father would kiss her. There were aeons of desperate longing in her lips, and her hands tightened around my neck in a frantic desire for security and self-confidence.

  I lifted my face from hers. Her eyes were huge.

  ‘In the morning,’ I pronounced, as one who knows, ‘it will seem different. You’ll see.’ My voice betrayed none of my own lack of self-confidence.

  She didn’t answer. She clung to me again, and the morning was a long way away.

  CHAPTER SIX

  We stared at each other across the breakfast table. She was relaxed, her face naked of make-up, her hair in a tangle that I found delightful.

  ‘You said it would look different,’ she said. ‘And it doesn’t.’ But it was delivered with a smile.

  Whatever I’d said to her in the night, I had not mentioned the possibility that Gran’s death might not have been natural.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about it.’

  ‘Oh? When?’

  I grinned at her. ‘Between times.’

  ‘I’m not sure that’s a compliment.’

  ‘But I was thinking for you.’

  ‘Hmm!’ She nodded, sipped coffee. ‘Such as?’

  ‘Two things. This left-handed business ... no, don’t laugh. It’s valid. Listen. If both were right-handed—or both left-handed, of course—they could well have switched positions from time to time, to share the strain of reaching over. If so, we’re in trouble. But if one of them was left-handed, and the other not, the odds are that they always painted together in the same positional relationship. You’re with me?’

  ‘Oh certainly. With you, but not convinced.’

  ‘Then consider this. We don’t know whether my original one is Ashe’s or Grannie’s. But if we did, you’d have a clue. Am I right there?’

  ‘If we knew that, you idiot, we’d have the truth here and now.’

  ‘But there are six others around. Presumably those have all been assessed by other experts, your peers, whose judgement you’d respect. Yes?’

  A spark of interest had entered her eyes. It died when she realized it would mean deferring to other opinions. ‘I see what you mean. But how does it help?’

  I had to work it out as I spoke, clarifying the situation in my own mind.

  ‘Let’s look at what we’ve got. Things we know. We know two sets were painted, and from what you say they’re almost indistinguishable from each other.’

  She nodded glumly. ‘You’re right there.’

  ‘We also know that my original canvas is not from the same set as the eighty-one. We know this, because it’s matched with one from the loft set, apart from the fact that it was painted from a slightly different viewpoint.’

  ‘I can’t argue with that.’

  ‘But what we don’t know is whether the other, already-known, Ashes are part of the loft set, which would make the original complete set eighty-seven—’

  ‘Angelina said more than eighty.’ She nodded her permission for me to continue.

  ‘Or from the other set, the same set as mine, and not destroyed because they were sold in Paris, long before the bonfire.’

  ‘If we knew, what would it prove?’

  ‘Accepting ... accept it for the moment ... that the other six can be attributed to Frederick Ashe, then we’d know whether to attribute the whole loft set to him, or only my original one.’

  ‘How would we know?’

 
‘By whether the six match with six in the loft set, and by the question of the viewpoint of the painter.’

  To my surprise and disappointment she looked down miserably at her cup, and moved it around with one finger at the handle. She looked up.

  ‘I’m afraid I’ve already thought of that. Something like it, though not the left-handed business. I was frantic for ideas. Do you know what it’s like ... no, of course not. I thought I was going insane. So I phoned all four of the art galleries. And there’s a snag.’

  ‘You’d have to go there?’

  Not that. They haven’t got the paintings now.’

  ‘Sold? They’ll know who—’

  Not sold. Stolen. In the past two years. All four. Clever, slick and efficient robberies, aiming for those specific canvases. The Frederick Ashes.’

  I thought about that. It took only a second. ‘A collector. Somebody interested in Frederick Ashe.’

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘But there’s still the other two. In a private collection, you said.’

  She made a dismissive sound, pursing her lips. ‘There’s a man. He’s known in the trade. He sends a representative to bid for him when there’s something he wants, with simple instructions—no limit. He can afford to. His wealth is legendary, but where he got it from is doubtful. There’ve been rumours, ranging from drug-smuggling to stock exchange irregularities. Rumours only. But he has a house, almost a fortress, and rumour, again, has it that he owns a huge collection of paintings. The snag is, nobody’s ever been allowed to see them. But of course, whatever his wealth, he can buy only what’s offered for sale. It’s he who owns the two other Frederick Ashes, and legitimately. The odds are that he’s got the whole six, now. So what can we do there? I ask you.’

  I looked at her across the table. Elbows on the surface, her hands cradling a coffee mug, she was staring wide-eyed at me, and making a tiny moue of embarrassed surrender. And that was exactly what she was doing; she was asking me. Some time in the night she had come to terms with herself. She could not wholly admit that she was beaten, not to the extent of calling in fellow experts. They might shame her by displaying greater knowledge and a more firmly established scholarship. But she could dare to display her weaknesses to a friend—an intimate friend—who wouldn’t be ashamed to use unartistic methods of proof. So she was asking me, but meekly, in a way suggesting surrender to a stronger character than herself—a man. It was this part of it that was false, but I didn’t let her see I realized it. In practice, I was becoming personally involved with the puzzle, and didn’t mind playing the game, if that was what she wanted.