There was silence. So this was why they had wanted my return: to be a target? None of them looked at me, perhaps embarrassed by what they expected of me.
Sir Leon cleared his throat. “I fail to see why collecting a ransom should be riskier than committing murder?”
“Murder comes out of the dark, when you least expect it,” Harry said, “but if you want a ransom you have to specify a time and a place, which gives your enemies a chance to ambush you.”
Sir Leon shook his head impatiently. “For my part I find it hard to believe that the recovery of the painting is intrinsically bound up in an attempt at murder.” He shrugged, as though suggesting that his qualifications for making that judgment were not as good as Harry’s. “I do believe, however, in their willingness to exchange the painting for a ransom.” He turned his myopic gaze to me. “They have requested that we insert a coded message in the personal column of The Times, which message would indicate our willingness to pay the ransom of four million pounds. On receipt of that message, they will instruct us in the method to be used for making that payment.” I sensed that I was hearing the echoes of an old disagreement. Sir Leon was quite ready to pay any price for the painting, while Harry was more intent on trapping Elizabeth and Garrard. Sir Leon still looked at me. “I see no need for you to be a murder target, my lord. If you’re content, then I suggest you allow me to ransom the painting, then to negotiate a fair price with you.”
“No!” Harry, with a surprising asperity, slapped the suggestion down. “Once you’ve agreed to pay the ransom, you’ve no assurance they’ll give up the painting. They’ll just soak you for another four million.” He looked back to me. “I’d rather trick the bastards into showing themselves. If you’ll help.”
“Oh, I’ll help you,” I said easily, “but there is a condition for my help.”
“I do assure you” – Sir Leon, perhaps piqued by Harry’s strong opposition, spoke very irritably – “that I will pay you the highest imaginable price for the painting. Indeed, I’m quite certain your eventual price will be far too high. I have, after all, conducted negotiations with your family before.”
Those final words whipped at my pride like the recoiling slash of a broken wire-rope. Sir Leon’s voice had been smug and scornful, implying that my family, though broken and poor, had shown nothing but greed. The words told me that Sir Leon despised me, and he was showing that derision by letting me know that my greed could never match his fortune. He had the power of new money over old families, but I would be damned before I would let him patronise me. “Bugger your price,” I said. That shook all of them. “I don’t give a toss about your price. And don’t equate me with the rest of the family. If you negotiate with me, then you satisfy my terms, and those terms are very simple, Sir Leon. You take care of Georgina’s future, all of it.”
Sir Leon blinked at me. He had clearly been astonished by my vehemence, but not so astonished as to forget that he was at a negotiating table. “Your price, as I understand it, is your younger sister’s security?”
“And happiness.”
He gazed at me. He had very pale eyes, and I suddenly saw that he was not a timid little man at all, but a very hard one. “And your monetary price besides?” he asked in his most mocking voice.
He must have known he would get under my skin. “You can have the bloody painting!” I matched his scorn with my own. “Why the hell do you think I’m here? Because I care about being rich? For God’s sake, I inherited Stowey and the painting four years ago, and I didn’t want them then and I don’t want them now. I came here, Sir Leon, not to save a painting, but to save my sister from a squalid caravan in a dripping wood.”
Jennifer was staring at me. I knew I’d overreacted to her stepfather’s patronising tone. I’d lost my temper, said far more than I had wanted to say, and now found myself on the brink of giving up a fortune just to prove to this small bastard that not everyone would lick his arse to become rich. But at least I had succeeded in astonishing Jennifer, who was now staring at me as though she had never quite seen me before.
Sir Leon smiled. “I accept your terms, my lord. One painting in return for your sister’s lifelong security.” He held out his hand.
“Think carefully, John,” Lady Buzzacott warned me in a soft voice.
Jennifer shook her head slightly, as though disbelieving that I would take the offered hand. Sir Leon smiled at my hesitation. “So you’re not as pure as you’d have us believe, my lord? You wish to amend the terms of the agreement?”
“Bugger your amendments.” I shook his hand.
Which meant that to surprise a multimillionaire, and to impress his stepdaughter, who was engaged to a squillionaire and despised me anyway, I’d just given away a Van Gogh. And I knew just how my ancestor, the seventeenth Earl, must have felt when he lost all the family’s Irish estates and all our rich sugar plantations in the Caribbean on the single turn of the ace of diamonds; I felt like a proper fool.
Harry was almost doubled over with laughter. We had left the family and gone into the garden where we were hidden from the house by a big yew hedge. “What a berk you are! Sweet Jesus! What a bloody berk!”
“Shut up.” I was far more angry with myself than I was with Harry.
“Sweet suffering Christ!” He laughed again. “You gave it away! And you only did it to impress that bird! How much is it worth? Twenty million?” He shook his head in wonderment. “You gave away a Van Gogh worth twenty millions!”
“I don’t care about the bloody money,” I said bitterly.
“Of course you care, Johnny, you just don’t want to admit it.” Harry gave a final hoot of delighted laughter.
“I don’t care about the money,” I insisted, “I never have. I wouldn’t be a blue-water sailor if I cared about money.”
“A blue-water sailor,” he mocked me with cruel mimicry. “But you care about the Contessa, don’t you? And it’ll take more than a shabby boat to get into her knickers. She’s the kind that needs a diamond necklace before every tumble, and I reckon you’ve just blown away your chances, Johnny.”
“You’re a crude swine, Harry.”
“But let’s hope I’m a clever one, my son.” He lit a cigarette and stared at a statue of a half-naked nymph which graced an alcove in the hedge. “Clever enough to stop Sir Leon paying the ransom. That’s all he wants to do, pay up, because he thinks that’s the surest way to get his picture. He can’t wait. He’s like a kid locked out of the toyshop, but I don’t believe it’s as easy as he thinks. If they can winkle four million out of him now, what’s to stop them going back to the well with a bigger bucket? They can’t be fools, they must know it’s worth more than four million.”
I didn’t answer. I was still trying to accustom myself to a belief in Elizabeth’s guilt. I didn’t like her, I’d really never liked her, but it was hard to think of her as wanting my death. Yet Harry’s arguments had been persuasive. “Why don’t you just search Elizabeth’s house?” I asked him. “If you find the picture, then it will all be over.”
“Funnily enough my grandmother taught me to suck eggs before you were born, Johnny. Don’t be a cretin. She won’t have a bloody Van Gogh tucked away in the attic. It’s been hidden away for four years, and we’re going to have to be clever if we’re to get it back.”
“Then find Garrard,” I suggested.
“I’m looking for Mr Garrard,” Abbott said grimly, “but he’s done a bunk. So we have to persuade Mr Garrard to find us.” He still squinted up at the nymph’s mossy breasts. “A nasty piece of work, Mr Garrard.”
“You know him?”
“Of course I know him.” Harry abandoned the nymph to walk slowly up the newly cut grass to where a fountain sparkled prettily in the afternoon sunshine. He sat on the wall that circled the fountain’s pool and looked at me quizzically. “He got slung out of the Paras for nicking the mess funds, then, because the Fraud squad found him monkeying about with some dodgy bonds, he did a bunk and joined one of those mercena
ry groups in Southern Africa. About five years ago he came home on leave, and he never went back. He’s been small-time ever since, bookies and winkling, which is very puzzling.” Harry tapped cigarette ash into the fountain’s pool. “Why does a top-drawer bastard with a good brain scratch around with lowlife villains? He was making good money in Africa.”
“He must be making more here.”
“Not now, he isn’t.” Harry frowned. “But I reckon Garrard’s bought a share of that picture. He’s not hired labour, Johnny, but a full partner with your sister. And he’ll be coming after you with a knife because he smells several million quid at the end of the road. How do you feel about that?”
“I’m not ecstatic at the prospect.”
“But at least you’d die in the knowledge that you’d helped me solve an old crime.”
“Up yours, too.”
“Because if I’m right,” Harry went on, “they’d still rather have you out of the way. With you dead Elizabeth can sell the painting on the open market and she won’t have to answer any awkward questions about where her fortune came from; she’ll be free, rich, and laughing.”
“And I’ll be dead.”
“Not with your Uncle Harry looking after you” – he gave me an evil grin with his tombstone teeth – “and if I’m clever,” he went on, “I’ll have your sister and Garrard behind bars, Jenny-baby will be married to that Swiss cheese, Sir Leon will have his painting, and you’ll be as poor as a church mouse because you gave your family fortune away. So shall we start letting the evil ones know that you can’t wait to be knifed?”
I went to a gap in the hedge to see if Jennifer had followed us out to the gardens, but the empty lawns just shimmered in the day’s heat. Which meant I was alone, and poor, and about to be a target.
Five days later, on a summer’s day as beautiful as any that could be wished, I sailed Sunflower into Dartmouth. The sun shone benevolently and the wind was a well-behaved force three, just enough to shift Sunflower along nicely, yet not strong enough to jar the launches which carried the television news crews.
This was Harry’s malicious way of baiting his hook: publicity.
Sir Leon’s publicity department had made the arrangements. John, Earl of Stowey, once suspected of stealing his family’s Van Gogh, was returning to England to help the authorities find it. The press release carefully ignored the fact that I had twice visited England earlier in the year; instead it was implied that like a prodigal I had just sailed back from unknown waters. As I neared the river mouth more launches joined the procession till I began to feel like one of those record-breaking circumnavigators coming home. Questions were shouted across to my cockpit, but I waved them away. I wanted to berth safely first.
A berth had been reserved for me on the inner side of the town pontoon. I sailed Sunflower into the narrow space which was just, but only just, wide enough for me to turn her. I was showing off. Most people would have used the motor for the final approach and the turn into the tide, but I hoped Jennifer Pallavicini was waiting for me on the quay, so I sailed Sunflower into the confined water between pontoon and quay, swung her bows hard over, knew I’d misjudged the flooding tide, began to panic, and prayed desperately that Sunflower would keep way on her as we came up to wind and tide. She didn’t, but hung up, and I realised that in twenty seconds the wind and tide would drive my new mast against the bridge which led from the town quay to the pontoon. I didn’t have time to start the engine, so swore instead, but then Sunflower was saved by a quick-witted yachtsman who told me to heave him a line. I did, and was ignominiously hauled into the vacant berth where one of the waiting reporters sincerely congratulated me on a fine piece of seamanship.
The questions were unavoidable now. Had I heard about the damage done to the painting? Yes. What had made me change my mind and come home to help? That damage. Where had I been? Everywhere. Would I sell the painting if it was recovered? All the time I was trying to secure Sunflower properly, tensioning her warps and springs and sometimes cursing at a reporter who got in my way. Two of Sir Leon’s publicity men were trying to impose order on the chaos and only managed to make things worse. One photographer went down into Sunflower’s cabin and started taking flash photographs so I hauled him out and threw him on to the pontoon. Photographs were taken of that. Another photographer cheered me up by falling overboard.
I finally succeeded in locking the boat. The publicity men shepherded me towards a nearby hotel where a room had been reserved for a formal press conference. Jennifer Pallavicini was already there. I said good morning. She said good morning. The two of us then sat behind a table while the rabble arranged their lights and microphones. A full size reproduction of the Stowey Sunflowers was framed on the wall behind us. I noticed that Jennifer was not wearing her engagement ring, and decided that she must keep it for private occasions only. Or perhaps Harry Abbott was right, and most of the time it was kept in a bank vault.
Was it true, a woman reporter opened the proceedings, that the painting was being held to ransom?
“Yes,” I said.
Could I afford the price?
“You must be joking,” I said. “I’m skint.”
“So how will you save the painting?”
“By co-operating with Sir Leon Buzzacott.” Which was a cue for the questions to be directed to Jennifer who was present on behalf of the Buzzacott Museum Gallery. She coolly confirmed that her stepfather was taking full financial responsibility for the painting’s recovery.
“But if he pays the ransom,” the first woman asked, “will he then have to pay a purchase price to the Earl of Stowey?”
“That purchase price has already been agreed,” Jennifer said.
“How much?” That was about fifty voices.
I waited for quiet. “I’ve decided to donate the painting to Sir Leon’s gallery.”
That reply caused pandemonium. I patiently confirmed that they had not misheard me and that I had indeed given the painting to Sir Leon, and wanted nothing for myself.
“Why?” a dozen voices wanted to know.
“Because I want the painting to stay in Britain, and because Sir Leon’s gallery will provide the perfect home.”
But why had I given it away? Weren’t there galleries that would have paid me millions for the picture?
“I’m a philanthropist,” I said. “Ask the Contessa here. She can vouch for the benevolent side of my character.”
Jennifer’s lips tightened slightly. Not that any of the reporters noticed. How did I feel now, they asked instead, about my arrest four years before?
“I was never charged,” I said, “so I feel it was all a mistake.”
But I had been the chief suspect. How did I feel about that?
“Flattered.”
“Did you steal it?” one idiot asked.
“Of course I didn’t bloody steal it. Don’t be so bloody stupid.” Sir Leon’s publicity men had impressed on me that I must not be nasty to the press, but I didn’t really see why. They were nasty to me.
How had I heard about the damage done to the painting?
“The Contessa flew out to the Azores and told me.”
How did I think my presence in England would assist the police in finding the picture?
“I don’t know,” I said, “ask them.”
Had the police given me any indication of who they thought might have stolen the picture?
“Yes.”
That simple affirmative, as it was meant to, caused a flurry of further, eager questions and, just as Harry had instructed me, I qualified the answer. I hadn’t been given any names, I lied, but I had received the strong impression that the police weren’t entirely clueless. The reporters tried to suck more meat off that bone, but both Jennifer and I refused to elaborate.
Jennifer then confirmed that her stepfather was employing specialists in ransom psychology to back up the police effort. That was news to me, but I imagined it was all a part of panicking Elizabeth into rashness. Jennifer gave t
he impression that a vast organisation was about to descend on the thieves. She was very impressive.
After the press conference I went back to Sunflower and did four interviews for television reporters. They all asked the same questions and all got the same answers. I obliged the radio reporters afterwards, then posed like an idiot for some press photographers. By midday the fuss had died down, all but for one man who waited till the other reporters had gone, then told me his paper would pay me a six-figure sum if I’d dictate a candid account of how I’d nicked the painting from my mother. I told him to get lost.
“Think about it, my lord.”
“I told you to get lost.”
“Come up to London and chat to the editor. Why not? We’re not talking peanuts here.”
“Fuck you,” I said, and thumped him in the belly. His photographer took a picture of that, so I thumped the photographer as well. I didn’t hurt either man, which was a pity.
But at least my actions saw them off. Jennifer Pallavicini had watched the proceedings from the pontoon, and now she stepped down on to Sunflower’s foredeck. “You’re really trying to be popular, aren’t you?”
“I thought the object of the exercise was to announce my intention of retrieving the painting, not to win a beauty competition?”
She shrugged that answer off. “Do you always hit people who annoy you?” she asked.
“Only men.”
“Are you ever hit back?”
“Frequently. I once had the shit knocked out of me in Australia.”
She frowned. I thought she’d taken offence at my language, but it seemed there was something else on her mind. “What do you care about, Mr Rossendale?”
“Georgina.” Whom I had carefully not mentioned to any of the press.
“Why?” Jennifer asked.
I paused, wondering whether to answer. “Because,” I finally said, “she’s too loopy to worry about herself.”