Why not a mobile force of thieves shuttling container-fuls of antiques from continent to continent, selling briskly to a ravenous market. As Inspector Frost had said, few antiques were ever recovered. The demand was insatiable and the supply, by definition, limited.
Suppose I were a villain, I thought, and I didn’t want to waste weeks in foreign countries finding out exactly which houses were worth robbing. I could just stay quietly at home in Melbourne selling paintings to rich visitors who could afford an impulse-buy of ten thousand pounds or so. I could chat away with them about their picture collections back home, and I could shift the conversation easily to their silver and china and objets d’art.
I wouldn’t want the sort of customers who had Rembrandts or Fabergés or anything well-known and unsaleable like that. Just the middling wealthy with Georgian silver and lesser Gauguins and Chippendale chairs.
When they bought my paintings, they would give me their addresses. Nice and easy. Just like that.
I would be a supermarket type of villain, with a large turnover of small goods. I would reckon that if I kept the victims reasonably well scattered, the fact that they had been to Australia within the past year or so would mean nothing to each regional police force. I would reckon that among the thousands of burglary claims they had to settle, Australia visits would bear no significance to insurance companies.
I would not, though, reckon on a crossed wire like Charles Neil Todd.
If I were a villain, I thought, with a well-established business and a good reputation, I wouldn’t put myself at risk by selling fakes. Forged oil paintings were almost always detectable under a microscope, even if one discounted that the majority of experienced dealers could tell them at a glance. A painter left his signature all over a painting, not just in the corner, because the way he held his brush was as individual as handwriting. Brush strokes could be matched as conclusively as grooves on bullets.
If I were a villain I’d wait in my spider’s web with a real Munnings, or maybe a real Picasso drawing, or a genuine work by a recently dead good artist whose output had been voluminous, and along would come the rich little flies, carefully steered my way by talkative accomplices who stood around in the States’ Capitals’ art galleries for the purpose. Both Donald and Maisie had been hooked that way.
Supposing when I’d sold a picture to a man from England and robbed him, and got my picture back again, I then sold it to someone from America. And then robbed him, and got it back, and so on round and round.
Suppose I sold a picture to Maisie in Sydney, and got it back, and started to sell it again in Melbourne… My supposing stopped right there, because it didn’t fit.
If Maisie had left her picture in full view it would have been stolen like her other things. Maybe it even had been, and was right now glowing in the Yarra River Fine Arts, but if so, why had the house been burnt, and why had Mr Greene turned up to search the ruins?
It only made sense if Maisie’s picture had been a copy, and if the thieves hadn’t been able to find it. Rather than leave it around, they’d burned the house. But I’d just decided that I wouldn’t risk fakes. Except that… would Maisie know an expert copy if she saw one? No, she wouldn’t.
I sighed. To fool even Maisie you’d have to find an accomplished artist willing to copy instead of pressing on with his own work, and they weren’t that thick on the ground. All the same, she’d bought her picture in the short-lived Sydney gallery, not in Melbourne, so maybe in other places besides Melbourne they would take a risk with fakes.
The huge bulk of the hotel rose ahead of me across the last stretch of park. The night air blew cool on my head. I had a vivid feeling of being disconnected, a stranger in a vast continent, a speck under the stars. The noise and warmth of the Hilton brought the expanding universe down to imaginable size.
Upstairs, I telephoned to Hudson Taylor at the number his secretary had given me. Nine o’clock on the dot. He sounded mellow and full of good dinner, his voice strong, courteous and vibrantly Australian.
‘Donald Stuart’s cousin? Is it true about little Regina being killed?’
‘I’m afraid so.’
‘It’s a real tragedy. A real nice lass, that Regina.’
‘Yes.’
‘Lookee here, then, what can I do for you? Is it tickets for the races?’
‘Er, no,’ I said. It was just that since the receipt and provenance letter of the Munnings had been stolen along with the picture, Donald would like to get in touch with the people who had sold it to him, for insurance purposes, but he had forgotten their name. And as I was coming to Melbourne for the Cup…
‘That’s easy enough,’ Hudson Taylor said pleasantly. ‘I remember the place well. I went with Donald to see the picture there, and the guy in charge brought it along to the Hilton afterwards, when we arranged the finance. Now let’s see…’ There was a pause for thought. ‘I can’t remember the name of the place just now. Or the manager. It was some months ago, do you see? But I’ve got him on record here in the Melbourne office, and I’m calling in there anyway in the morning, so I’ll look them up. You’ll be at the races tomorrow?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘How about meeting for a drink, then? You can tell me about poor Donald and Regina, and I’ll have the information he wants.’
I said that would be fine, and he gave me detailed instructions as to where I would find him, and when. ‘There will be a huge crowd,’ he said, ‘But if you stand on that exact spot I shouldn’t miss you.’
The spot he had described sounded public and exposed. I hoped that it would only be he who found me on it.
I’ll be there,’ I said.
8
Jik called through on the telephone at eight next morning.
‘Come down to the coffee shop and have breakfast.’
‘O.K.’
I went down in the lift and along the foyer to the hotel’s informal restaurant. He was sitting at a table alone, wearing dark glasses and making inroads into a mountain of scrambled egg.
‘They bring you coffee,’ he said, ‘But you have to fetch everything else from that buffet.’ He nodded towards a large well-laden table in the centre of the breezy blue and sharp green decor. ‘How’s things?’
‘Not what they used to be.’
He made a face. ‘Bastard.’
‘How are the eyes?’
He whipped off the glasses with a theatrical flourish and leaned forward to give me a good look. Pink, they were, and still inflamed, but on the definite mend.
‘Has Sarah relented?’ I asked.
‘She’s feeling sick.’
‘Oh?’
‘God knows,’ he said. ‘I hope not. I don’t want a kid yet. She isn’t overdue or anything.’
‘She’s a nice girl,’ I said.
He slid me a glance. ‘She says she’s got nothing against you personally.’
‘But,’ I said.
He nodded. ‘The mother hen syndrome.’
‘Wouldn’t have cast you as a chick.’
He put down his knife and fork. ‘Nor would I, by God. I told her to cheer up and get this little enterprise over as soon as possible and face the fact she hadn’t married a marshmallow.’
‘And she said?’
He gave a twisted grin. ‘From my performance in bed last night, that she had.’
I wondered idly about the success or otherwise of their sex life. From the testimony of one or two past girls who had let their hair down to me while waiting hours in the flat for Jik’s unpredictable return, he was a moody lover, quick to arousal and easily put off. ‘It only takes a dog barking, and he’s gone.’ Not much, I dared say, had changed.
‘Anyway,’ he said. ‘There’s this car we’ve got. Damned silly if you didn’t come with us to the races.’
‘Would Sarah…’ I asked carefully, ‘… scowl?’
‘She says not.’
I accepted this offer and inwardly sighed. It looked as if he wouldn’t take the smalles
t step henceforth without the nod from Sarah. When the wildest ones got married, was it always like that? Wedded bliss putting nets over the eagles.
‘Where did you get to, last night?’ he said.
‘Aladdin’s cave,’ I said. ‘Treasures galore and damned lucky to escape the boiling oil.’
I told him about the gallery, the Munnings, and my brief moment of captivity. I told him what I thought of the burglaries. It pleased him. His eyes gleamed with humour and the familiar excitement rose.
‘How are we going to prove it?’ he said.
He heard the ‘we’ as soon as he said it. He laughed ruefully, the fizz dying away. ‘Well, how?’
‘Don’t know yet.’
‘I’d like to help,’ he said apologetically.
I thought of a dozen sarcastic replies and stifled the lot. It was I who was the one out of step, not them. The voice of the past had no right to break up the future.
‘You’ll do what pleases Sarah,’ I said with finality, and as an order, not a prodding satire.
‘Don’t sound so bloody bossy.’
We finished breakfast amicably trying to build a suitable new relationship on the ruins of the old, and both knowing well what we were about.
When I met them later in the hall at setting-off time it was clear that Sarah too had made a reassessment and put her mind to work on her emotions. She greeted me with an attempted smile and an outstretched hand. I shook the hand lightly and also gave her a token kiss on the cheek. She took it as it was meant.
Truce made, terms agreed, pact signed. Jik the mediator stood around looking smug.
‘Take a look at him,’ he said, flapping a hand in my direction. ‘The complete stockbroker. Suit, tie, leather shoes. If he isn’t careful they’ll have him in the Royal Academy.’
Sarah looked bewildered. ‘I thought that was an honour.’
‘It depends,’ said Jik, sneering happily. ‘Passable artists with polished social graces get elected in their thirties. Masters with average social graces, in their forties; masters with no social graces, in their fifties. Geniuses who don’t give a damn about being elected are ignored as long as possible.’
‘Putting Todd in the first category and yourself in the last?’ Sarah said.
‘Of course.’
‘Stands to reason,’ I said. ‘You never hear about Young Masters. Masters are always Old.’
‘For God’s sake,’ Sarah said. ‘Let’s go to the races.’
We went slowly, on account of a continuous stream of traffic going the same way. The car park at Flemington racecourse, when we arrived, looked like a giant picnic ground, with hundreds of full-scale lunch parties going on between the cars. Tables, chairs, cloths, china, silver, glass. Sun umbrellas optimistically raised in defiance of the rain-clouds threatening above. A lot of gaiety and booze and a giant overall statement that ‘This Was The Life’.
To my mild astonishment Jik and Sarah had come prepared. They whipped out table, chairs, drinks and food from the rented car’s boot and said it was easy when you knew how, you just ordered the whole works.
‘I have an uncle,’ Sarah said, ‘who holds the title of Fastest Bar in the West. It takes him roughly ten seconds from putting the brakes on to pouring the first drink.’
She was really trying, I thought. Not just putting up with an arrangement for Jik’s sake, but actually trying to make it work. If it was an effort, it didn’t show. She was wearing an interesting olive green linen coat, with a broad brimmed hat of the same colour, which she held on from time to time against little gusts of wind. Overall, a new Sarah, prettier, more relaxed, less afraid.
‘Champagne?’ Jik offered, popping the cork. ‘Steak and oyster pie?’
‘How will I go back to cocoa and chips?’
‘Fatter.’
We demolished the goodies, repacked the boot, and with a sense of taking part in some vast semi-religious ritual, squeezed along with the crowd through the gate to the Holy of Holies.
‘It’ll be much worse than this on Tuesday,’ observed Sarah, who had been to these junkets several times in the past. ‘Melbourne Cup day is a public holiday. The city has three million inhabitants and half of them will try to get here.’ She was shouting above the crowd noises and holding grimly on to her hat against the careless buffeting all around.
‘If they’ve got any sense they’ll stay at home and watch it on the box,’ I said breathlessly, receiving a hefty kidney punch from the elbow of a man fighting his way into a can of beer.
‘It won’t be on the television in Melbourne, only on the radio.’
‘Good grief. Why ever not?’
‘Because they want everyone to come. It’s televised all over the rest of Australia, but not on its own doorstep.’
‘Same with the golf and the cricket,’ Jik said with a touch of gloom. ‘And you can’t even have a decent bet on those.’
We went through the bottleneck and, by virtue of the inherited badges, through a second gate and round into the calmer waters of the green oblong of Members’ lawn. Much like on many a Derby Day at home, I thought. Same triumph of will over weather. Bright faces under grey skies. Warm coats over the pretty silks, umbrellas at the ready for the occasional top hat. When I painted pictures of racegoers in the rain, which I sometimes did, most people laughed. I never minded. I reckoned it meant they understood that the inner warmth of a pleasure couldn’t be externally damped: that they too might play a trumpet in a thunderstorm.
Come to think of it, I thought, why didn’t I paint a racegoer playing a trumpet in a thunderstorm? It might be symbolic enough even for Jik.
My friends were deep in a cross-talking assessment of the form of the first race. Sarah, it appeared, had a betting pedigree as long as her husband’s, and didn’t agree with him.
‘I know it was soft going at Randwick last week. But it’s pretty soft here too after all this rain, and he likes it on top.’
‘He was only beaten by Boyblue at Randwick, and Boyblue was out of sight in the Caulfield Cup.’
‘Please your silly self,’ Sarah said loftily. ‘But it’s still too soft for Grapevine.’
‘Want to bet?’ Jik asked me.
‘Don’t know the horses.’
‘As if that mattered.’
‘Right.’ I consulted the racecard. ‘Two dollars on Generator.’
They both looked him up, and they both said ‘Why?’
‘If in doubt, back number eleven. I once went nearly through the card on number eleven.’
They made clucking and pooh-poohing noises and told me I could make a gift of my two dollars to the bookies or the T.A.B.
‘The what?’
‘Totalisator Agency Board.’
The bookmakers, it seemed, were strictly on-course only, with no big firms as in England. All off-course betting shops were run by the T.A.B., which returned a good share of the lolly to racing. Racing was rich, rock-solid, and flourishing. Bully for Australia, Jik said.
We took our choice and paid our money, and Generator won at twenty-fives.
‘Beginners’ luck,’ Sarah said.
Jik laughed. ‘He’s no beginner. He got kicked out of playschool for running a book.’
They tore up their tickets, set their minds to race two, and made expeditions to place their bets. I settled for four dollars on number one.
‘Why?’
‘Double my stake on half of eleven.’
‘Oh God,’ said Sarah. ‘You’re something else.’
One of the more aggressive clouds started scattering rain, and the less hardy began to make for shelter.
‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Let’s go and sit up there in the dry.’
‘You two go,’ Sarah said. ‘I can’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because those seats are only for men.’
I laughed. I thought she was joking, but it appeared it was no joke. Very unfunny, in fact. About two thirds of the best seats in the Members’ stands were reserved for males
.
‘What about their wives and girl friends?’ I said incredulously.
‘They can go up on the roof.’
Sarah, being Australian, saw nothing very odd in it. To me, and surely to Jik, it was ludicrous.
He said with a carefully straight face, ‘On a lot of the bigger courses the men who run Australian racing give themselves leather armchairs behind glass to watch from, and thick-carpeted restaurants and bars to eat and drink like kings in, and let their women eat in the cafeterias and sit on hard plastic chairs on the open stands among the rest of the crowd. They consider this behaviour quite normal. All anthropological groups consider their most bizarre tribal customs quite normal.’
‘I thought you were in love with all things Australian.’
Jik sighed heavily. ‘Nowhere’s perfect.’
‘I’m getting wet,’ Sarah said.
We escalated to the roof which had a proportion of two women to one man and was windy and damp, with bench seating.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ Sarah said, amused at my aghastness on behalf of womenkind. ‘I’m used to it.’
‘I thought this country made a big thing about equality for all.’
‘For all except half the population,’ Jik said.
We could see the whole race superbly from our eyrie. Sarah and Jik screamed encouragement to their fancies but Number One finished in front by two lengths, at eight to one.
‘It’s disgusting,’ Sarah said, tearing up more tickets. ‘What number do you fancy for the third?’
‘I won’t be with you for the third. I’ve got an appointment to have a drink with someone who knows Donald.’
She took it in, and the lightness went out of her manner. ‘More… investigating?’
‘I have to.’
‘Yes.’ She swallowed and made a visible effort. ‘Well… Good luck.’
‘You’re a great girl.’
She looked surprised that I should think so and suspicious that I was intending sarcasm, and also partly pleased. I returned earthwards with her multiple expressions amusing my mind.