The Chalon Heads

by Barry Maitland

  He was wearing a white shirt, and for a moment she thought of a surgeon, or a dentist, intent on some delicate surgical procedure. But she knew that the focus of his attention was a postage stamp, one of a number on the white page in front of him. There was a multitude of colours, she saw, dull, faded colours, oranges, greens, sepias and blues, but all of the same unvarying design.

  He looked up at her.

  ‘Chalon Heads,’ she said, then noticed with a shock that he was crying, tears glistening on his cheeks.

  He stared at her, his round face absurdly expressionless, given the tears.

  ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to disturb you. I saw the light . . .’

  She turned to go but he called after her, ‘No . . . It’s all right. Come back, if you want.’

  His voice was hoarse and also rather plaintive, as if he had a need to say something.

  ‘You think this is mad,’ he said, and she wasn’t sure at first what he was referring to.

  ‘This,’ he said, pointing to the sheets of stamps.

  ‘Oh. Actually I’m trying to get the hang of it. Mr Melville lent me some books. I’m still on primitives— postmaster provisionals, Sydney views, cottonreels and woodblocks. There’s a lot more to it than I realised.’

  He dipped his head in a little bow. ‘Very conscientious of you, Sergeant, trying to understand the mind of the deranged philatelist.’

  ‘Are you deranged?’

  ‘Just at the moment it feels very much like that.’

  ‘He said that you’d written a book on the Chalon Heads.’

  Starling nodded.

  ‘I’d like to read it, if I may.’

  ‘There’s a copy in the bookcase in the living room. Help yourself.’

  ‘Thank you. He said it was very well regarded.’

  ‘Mr Melville is a kind man. He arranged for this.’ He indicated the sheets of paper in front of him, and Kathy saw for the first time that they were coloured photocopies. ‘My collection belongs to Cabot’s now. But James had these copies made for me. He realised that these are my favourites.’ He turned his head sadly to the pages. Kathy stepped closer to the table and stood at his shoulder looking down at them.

  ‘This one, for instance . . .’ Starling lifted a page with a single block of twenty identical brown Chalon Heads, four rows each of five stamps. ‘Nova Scotia, 1853, one penny brown, block of twenty, mint. Beautiful, beautiful . . .’ he whispered, lost in admiration. ‘It was a present—from Eva.’

  ‘From Eva? So she knew about stamps too? She knew what to buy for you?’

  ‘No, no . . .’ Starling sighed. ‘It was chance, and yet, like the innocent she was, she hit the jackpot first time. She found me these for my birthday, a couple of years ago, from some little hole of a stamp shop. I was knocked out.’

  Kathy looked at the block of pristine stamps, Eva’s present, twenty tiny self-portraits. She wondered if Eva was aware of the striking resemblance. But how could she not be?

  Starling turned the page, sighing at the treasures that were no longer his.

  ‘I’ll go and find your book,’ Kathy said softly.

  He didn’t respond and she turned to leave. Then he said, ‘They’re not going to call, you know,’ and he gave a little sob.

  ‘Of course they will,’ she said.

  ‘No, no. You were right, you see.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘The stamps on the ransom notes. You asked if they could be my own.’ He turned and looked directly up at Kathy, tears brimming from his eyes. ‘You suspected that she was behind it, didn’t you? Well, you were right, they were mine.’

  ‘What?’ Kathy was stunned. ‘But you said . . .’

  ‘You asked me if I’d checked to see if mine were missing, and I said I had, because I thought if I didn’t then you would insist that we look. But I hadn’t checked, because it would have been like doubting her, and also . . . because I was afraid to find out the answer.’

  ‘And now you have checked?’

  ‘No. I have . . . I had many thousands of stamps, not all properly mounted and catalogued. It was always possible that I might overlook some. But Cabot’s have been very thorough.’ He lifted a document from the table and handed it to Kathy.

  ‘Over the past couple of days they have listed and valued all of my stamps. The Chalons are listed separately, Van Diemen’s Land stamps under Tasmania.’

  Kathy turned to the Tasmania pages and found about fifty entries, each identified by a number code.

  ‘That’s the number given in the Stanley Gibbons catalogue, which is the standard reference. You see that the numbers begin at SG 19, of 1856.’

  ‘Yes, I see.’

  ‘The stamps on the notes were from the year before, SG 14, 15 and 17, which I also used to own. But they are not on Cabot’s list.’

  ‘Are you quite sure you had them? There are so many, and they all look the same.’

  ‘I’m sure. You see, 14, 15 and 17 are the first Van Diemen’s Land stamps to use the Chalon design, and I made a great point about getting the first ones from each of the countries which issued it.’

  He slumped in his seat, shoulders sagging. ‘You were right, Sergeant Kolla. She took them.’

  ‘Someone took them.’

  He shook his head hopelessly. ‘Who else?’

  ‘How long have you realised this?’

  ‘Just now. I was going through the list. She’s not alone, of course. The voice that told me to go to the airport, it was a man’s voice . . .’

  Kathy felt a great flood of relief. She had been right, Eva was safe. The whole thing had been nothing but a bizarre domestic dispute, carried to absurd, hysterical lengths. Brock could sleep easy again, and they could all get on with more pressing, more mundane, more real crimes. But for Sammy Starling, moving on would be much more difficult. She looked at him in his devastation, and said gently, ‘I’ll have to tell Brock about this, Sammy. Will you speak to him?’

  He groaned. ‘Please,’ he whispered, ‘I . . . I won’t talk to him right now. Tell him I’m sorry.’

  There was a single french window from the study on to the end of the stone terrace, and Kathy stepped outside to make her call to Brock. From there she could watch Starling through the window, head in hands, motionless.

  ‘He what?’ Kathy heard the same progression in Brock’s voice that she had gone through, from consternation to annoyance to relief. ‘Well, so you were right, Kathy! Thank God for that.’

  ‘It was very cruel, wasn’t it? Putting him through all that. She must really hate him.’

  ‘Putting us all through all that! Presumably the pair of them took off from Heathrow some time this afternoon while we were all running around in circles. Bloody nerve!’

  ‘Yes. I’m kind of worried about Sammy. He’s shattered.’

  ‘No doubt he’s reflecting on the fact that if he’d paid more attention to you he could have saved himself well over a million quid. You want to stay there tonight?’

  ‘I think I should.’

  ‘OK. Does he have any malt?’

  ‘Could be.’

  ‘Pour yourself a big one. I can’t pretend I’m not relieved. Forensic were coming up with the damnedest things . . . Night.’

  He rang off before she could ask him what they had come up with. She shrugged and returned to the study. Starling looked up. ‘Was he angry?’ he asked.

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Will you be leaving now?’

  ‘I thought I might stay. After all, we can’t be sure . . .’

  He smiled sadly at her and said, ‘I’ll see how Marianna’s getting on with dinner.’

  In the lounge Kathy turned on a couple of table lamps, then went over to the drinks cabinet and poured herself a small Scotch. There was a shelf of books above the cabinet, the only books in the room, and all slim volumes. There was a guide to contract bridge, a compendium of games of patience, an English–Portuguese phrase book, and a copy of The Chalon Heads: A Chronology
, by Samuel Starling. Kathy picked it out and went back to the armchair. Touchingly, she thought, the book was dedicated to Eva’s father, Dom Arnaldo de Vasconcellos. The introduction was titled, ‘A Female Head of the Greatest Beauty’.

  When a thing has never existed before in the world, what should it look like? The first aeroplanes were designed to look like birds, the first motor cars like horseless carriages, and the first postage stamp like a coin or medallion. When Rowland Hill invented the adhesive postage stamp, he took the advice of Benjamin Cheverton that its design should incorporate ‘a female head of the greatest beauty, to be executed by Mr Wyon’, and based on William Wyon’s commemorative medal of 1837, showing the head of the newly crowned Queen Victoria in profile.

  This established a model for almost all future British stamps, and seems an inevitable and natural reference to the practice, dating back to ancient Roman times, of showing the sovereign’s head, in profile, on the currency of the realm. It gave a classical legitimacy to the new device, and a respectability which a piece of gummed paper otherwise sorely lacked.

  Kathy shook her head, thinking that this could never have come from Sammy Starling.

  But was it so inevitable? It is interesting to reflect that, as other countries clamoured to take up the British invention, few followed the British design. The Tsar of Russia’s head does not appear on the nineteenth-century stamps of that country, which instead bear the Romanov coat of arms. Neither do we find the German Kaiser’s head, nor that of the King of Greece.

  Yet we do find the head of Queen Isabella of Spain on her country’s stamps, as well as a variety of mythical female figures—Ceres, Germania and Britannia, for example— on those of other countries. What is the reason for this preference for female heads? Whence comes this reluctance . . .

  Whence, Sammy? she thought, raising her eyebrows. Whence?

  Whence comes this reluctance (except in the stamps of the United States, where the Presidents’ heads parade blithely through the nineteenth century like a succession of Roman Emperors) to portray male rulers? And why did Cheverton ask, not for, say, ‘a fine head of the sovereign’, which would have been a natural way of putting it, but instead for, ‘a female head of the greatest beauty’?

  Perhaps the French Revolution had made the European monarchs somewhat nervous of portraying themselves as detached heads: it might give the people ideas. Yet this does not account for the gender-specific nature of this reticence. Perhaps, rather, there was something offensive, to both male rulers and their subjects, in the association of their image and a paper token which was both disposable and worthless after a single use, and which entailed a kiss, an oral assault to the reverse of the image, in order to use it?

  Kathy’s eyes widened and she took another sip of her drink. No wonder Mr Melville had had kittens. As for Sammy, she doubted he had ever read his book, let alone written it.

  Clearly this unease did not apply to the female image —on the contrary, there was something compelling about performing these actions with ‘a female head of the greatest beauty’. And in 1851 the most ravishing, the most erotic of these female images appeared: the Chalon Head.

  The original portrait of Queen Victoria by Alfred Edward Chalon shows a rather bemused young woman of eighteen years of age, who has just acceded to the throne. Her full-length figure is overwhelmed by the surrounding architecture and by the heavy drapery and clothes with which it is encumbered. The overall effect is ponderous, formal, and intended to give authority and respect to someone who must have seemed an exceedingly fragile holder of great office.

  But when the first Chalon Head postage stamp appeared fourteen years later, this image had been subverted in numerous ways. Unlike the Wyon profile portrait, remote and conventional, we now see her fully rounded, in three dimensions, staring wistfully out at us. Only the head and naked shoulders of the woman in the Chalon painting are now shown and, with the heavy robes of state edited away, we have no reason to believe that she may not be posing for us entirely naked, apart from the crown and jewellery she wears.

  And in more subtle ways, too, the original portrait was changed, to greater or lesser degrees, in the various versions of the Chalon stamp. Where the painting had her mouth tightly, primly closed, many of the stamps now show her lips parted invitingly; her eyes are enlarged, her rather plain features prettified, and the teenage puppy fat of the original takes on a more voluptuous womanly form. In every respect, the sexual potency of the image has been enhanced and made more graphic.

  The Chalon image was never used on British stamps; perhaps it was too explicit too close to home. But in the Empire it was a smash success. It ran and ran, and as late as the 1880s, when the real Queen Victoria was in her sixties, the citizens of the Australian and West Indian colonies were still licking the image of the eighteen-year-old virgin girl every time they put a stamp on a letter.

  There was a small noise at Kathy’s back. Startled, she turned and saw Marianna standing behind her.

  ‘Dinner,’ she growled disapprovingly.

  ‘Thank you.’ Kathy got to her feet and followed the little woman to the door. In the hall she was pointed to another open doorway, through which Kathy found a dining-room with a long mahogany table and a dozen chairs, and two places set at the most distant opposite ends.

  It was an uncomfortable meal. Marianna’s spicy cataplana stew was excellent, but the silence of both Starling and the housekeeper was oppressive. Kathy attempted to break it at first, but met with so little success that she soon gave up.

  Starling waited until she had finished, hardly touching his own plate, then rose to his feet and said, ‘I really feel quite done in. I think I’ll go to bed now, if you don’t mind. It’s been such a very long week.’

  When Starling had gone, Kathy took the plates through to the kitchen and tried without success to talk to Marianna, who snatched the dishes from her, clucking with annoyance, and ignored Kathy’s attempts to make conversation.

  Kathy went back up to her room and locked the door. She had brought nothing with her, but she needed nothing that wasn’t available in the little en suite bathroom. She showered, washed her underwear in the basin, and sat naked for a while, watching a huge golden moon rise over the dark forest. She had never been involved in a kidnapping before, and had had no idea how it would develop. She pictured Eva at Heathrow, with dark glasses, headscarf and boyfriend, plucking Sammy’s million-pound stamp from the messages board and disappearing into the blue, and felt sad that it could end like that.

  Some slight movement caught her eye, beyond the far edge of the lawn, where the woodland curled around the rose garden. She stared hard and saw first one, and then another cautious figure emerge from the twilight gloom of the woods. Deer. They moved delicately forward to the edge of the ornamental pool, and lowered their heads to drink.

  Later, in bed, drifting off to sleep, Kathy became aware of the murmur of distant voices. It was a warm night, her windows open, and it was hard to judge how far away they might be. She got out of bed and leaned out of the window, hearing them more distinctly, from the east side of the house, the kitchen end, where she could just make out the glow of a light reflected on the shrubbery. A man and a woman, she thought, arguing, or at least disagreeing. She tried to match them in her mind with the sounds of Starling and Marianna’s voices, but couldn’t be certain. After a few minutes they stopped abruptly, and she heard nothing more.

  7

  A Female Head of the Greatest Beauty

  The next morning, Marianna presented them with a huge breakfast of bacon and sausages, tomatoes and eggs, all served on an enormous platter in the centre of the dining table. Starling eyed this banquet—enough for a dozen people—balefully.

  ‘I had to tell her, last night,’ he said to Kathy. ‘She thought you . . .’ He scowled at the heaped food. ‘She thought I’d brought you here while Eva was away.’

  ‘She thought I was your bit on the side?’ Kathy tried helpfully.

  ‘Yes
. So I told her about Eva having disappeared. I had to. And I told her you’re with the police.’

  ‘And this is her reaction?’

  ‘It’s her way of coping. She’s baking loaves of bread now. It’s crazy.’

  ‘Well, it seems a shame to waste this. Do you mind if I eat? I’m hungry.’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘How about you?’

  He shook his head and turned away to the french windows. He pushed them open, but didn’t go outside. Instead he pulled a packet of cigarettes from his pocket and lit up, his actions awkward, a tremble in his hand.

  ‘I didn’t know you smoked,’ Kathy said, pouring a cup of coffee from a huge jug.

  ‘Gave up, eleven years ago.’

  Did you buy those on the way back from the airport?’

  Starling didn’t answer, blowing a stream of pale smoke out towards the cloudless morning sky. He didn’t explain, and Kathy let it go. From the kitchen came a sound of banging, as if Marianna were attacking a side of beef with a cleaver.

  At ten fifteen, when Kathy was on the point of leaving, there was the sound of a motorbike in the gravel forecourt of the house. The front doorbell rang, and Starling went to answer it, Kathy close behind. A messenger in black leathers and a bright-yellow helmet was pulling an envelope from the pouch on his chest. He presented it and a clipboard to Starling, who signed. The messenger made to restart his bike, but Kathy stopped him.

  ‘Hang on,’ she said. ‘Who’s the sender?’

  ‘It’s all right.’ Starling’s voice came dully from the hall behind her. ‘It’s from Cabot’s. This is their address label. Must be more papers to sign.’

  ‘Got the dogs tied up somewhere, have you?’ the messenger said, looking around cautiously.

  ‘Dogs? We don’t have any.’

  ‘Really? Looks like a pack of wolves has gone for that parcel at the gate.’

  Kathy looked beyond him and saw the trail of torn paper leading from the gates away down the lane. ‘That’s odd,’ she said.

  Behind her, Sammy said, ‘Jesus Christ . . . What’s this?’