Landscape of Lies Read online

  Landscape of Lies

  An Art-World Mystery

  Peter Watson

  MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

  For Katie

  Prologue

  The moment Isobel awoke she knew there was someone else in the house. She didn’t know why she was so certain of it—only that she instinctively held her breath. She couldn’t see her watch but from the way the May moon sliced its shadows across the bedroom carpet she guessed it must be after three. As she started to get out of bed she heard the study door, downstairs, click in its lock. Isobel had been brought up in this house, lived in it for most of her twenty-nine years, and that noise told her how the intruder had got in: a window was open in the dining-room. The study door always rattled when the dining-room windows were opened. She had known, ever since she began to live alone in the big house, that the low bay windows of the dining-room were a security risk, but she had never really believed a burglar would take advantage of them. Now it was too late.

  She slipped out of bed and silently put on her dressing-gown. At first she had no fear—rather, she was intrigued to know what the burglar had come for. There was nothing of any real value in the house, not even a decent set of silver. Since her father had died and left the farm to Isobel, she had been fighting a losing battle. Gradually she had sold off the Chinese porcelain, the Japanese lacquer, the jade carvings that her father, a diplomat in the Far East before he retired, had collected. There was nothing left to steal.

  It was only then that Isobel began to be afraid. Perhaps the intruder had come not to steal but to assault her? There were so many stories these days about rape. Maybe she would know him. Maybe he would kill her afterwards. Afterwards … she shivered.

  She shivered but didn’t hesitate. She knew the house and its character inside out. As a very young girl, before her father was sent abroad, she had often crept on to the landing in the evenings to watch when he was entertaining downstairs and no one had ever guessed she was there. So she knew that if she pushed the bedroom door before she turned the handle it would open without complaint. In the corridor she knew just where not to tread to avoid making any sound.

  As she moved down the corridor no one came towards her and she breathed more easily. It was a burglar she had to deal with, it seemed, not a rapist.

  She turned a corner and stopped. Here the corridor became a gallery overlooking the hall. There was an oak balustrade. She inched towards it and peered down. There he was. A tall, shadowy figure stood in front of a painting in the hall. He was reaching up to lift it off the hook.

  Isobel was suddenly filled with an immense anger. It was as if the fear she had felt a moment ago had redirected itself to another part of her: she was awash in fury. It was widely known in the area that she lived alone. Now it seemed she was fair game, that anyone could come into this great house and help himself to whatever he wanted.

  Immediately she had a plan. She wanted to stop the theft, but she also wanted the man to know that she wasn’t afraid—that although she lived alone she wasn’t helpless.

  She half turned to where she knew there was a large pewter vase on a table. It had been in the family for ever, so she had been told, and had an ivory collar, a carving of some sort, around its base. Once it might have been valuable but the pewter was knocked about a lot and the ivory was chipped: it was ideal for what she had in mind. Noiselessly she lifted it off the table: it was cumbersome but not too heavy.

  Raising it with her right hand, she reached across with her left and held the light switch. She paused, telling herself that she would have the advantage of surprise but that, for a moment after the light went on, both she and the intruder would be blinded. She tried to memorise where he was standing.

  She took a breath—and threw the switch.

  As the hall was flooded with light, the figure grunted, a sound of muffled surprise. The man—he was much too tall to be a woman—was wearing a motor-cycle helmet. It turned her way. Behind the darkened glass of the visor she thought she could see two startled eyes. The helmet with its shiny, anonymous skin was menacing; it unbalanced the proportions of the figure and transformed it into a kind of distended growth, bulbous and threatening. Isobel didn’t wait any longer.

  She pitched the vase as hard as she could into the hall. She didn’t aim at the man’s head. That struck her as too dangerous even in the circumstances and she knew that the law had some weird ideas about the rights of criminals. In any case he was wearing the helmet. She aimed at his feet.

  The vase was top-heavy and slid out of her hand with less control than she would have wished. Still, she had the advantage of height, and the helmeted figure was not far away. Before he could move, the vase had skidded on to the stone slabs of the hall floor about a foot in front of his feet. Dropping the picture, he instinctively jerked to one side—but that was his undoing. As the vase hit the floor, the ivory collar snapped off and shattered into several pieces. The vase itself, however, being metal, bounced up again and struck the intruder below the knee on his left leg.

  Isobel winced as she heard the crack of bone, and the man’s scream drowned the rattle of the vase as it clattered back on to the stone slabs. Despite the pain he must have been in, however, the figure immediately stooped again to pick up the painting. Seeing this, Isobel nearly exploded in fury and turned to look for other weapons that were within reach. All she could see was a dish of alabaster eggs in the middle of the table near where the vase had stood. Her fingers closed over one of the eggs—but then she checked herself. This little nest would do far more damage as a job lot. A ladylike form of shrapnel, she thought grimly.

  She gripped the dish with both hands and carried it to the balustrade. The figure downstairs was now clutching the painting and straightening up. One leg was curled under him in a way that showed he was still in great pain, but even so he wasn’t giving up.

  Neither was Isobel. Without faltering she leaned over the balcony and tipped the eggs on to the intruder. There must have been fifteen of them in the dish and three scored direct hits. One cannoned on to the man’s shoulder. Another—surely the most painful—caught him on an elbow. The voice within the helmet screamed again and he dropped the picture a second time. The third egg cracked against the helmet. The figure would have felt little pain from this but the helmet visor was fractured and a splinter fell to the floor. Now Isobel stood a chance of seeing who the burglar was.

  She quickly ran round the gallery to where there was another of the mementoes her father had picked up in the Far East, a Japanese scimitar. Still swamped in anger, she grabbed the blade, tearing it from its mount on the wall, and launched herself down the stairs.

  But now the figure in the helmet had turned away and, half running, half hopping, was making for the dining-room and the open window by which he had entered.

  Reaching the cold stone slabs of the hall floor, Isobel turned to give chase, but her bare right foot stepped on to one of the ivory fragments that had broken off the vase. This cut painfully into the ball of her foot but, worse, caused her to skid on the stones. As she put out her hand to break her fall she fell against the edge of the scimitar. Luckily the blade missed her eye but it bit deep into her cheek and immediately drew blood. The force of her fall caused the scimitar to slip from her fingers and when she got to her feet and ran to the dining-room the figure had gone. The net curtain hung limp in the open window. In the silver moonlight outside the house there were no moving shadows. Isobel waited a moment, listening, then closed the window. In her bare feet she could not give chase.

  She returned to the hall, warm blood still oozing from her cheek. When she inspected the painting the helmeted figure had tried to steal, Isobel saw that the frame had broken at the corner and a small area of paint was
scratched. As she examined the scratch mark, one hand still dabbing her sticky cheek, she heard in the distance the sound of a motor bike retreating into the night.

  1

  ‘You may be richer than you think, Michael. Come over here and I’ll show you why.’

  Julius Samuels smiled and lifted a glass to his lips. The liver spots danced on his old throat as he swallowed his whisky. It was not quite 10 am. He was seated in a worn mahogany swivel chair and wearing a white coat smudged with paint. His left hand held a large oval-shaped palette with squibs of pigment laid out in a curved spectrum near the edge. A cigar thicker than a thumb burned in a tray on a shelf near his right shoulder.

  Michael Whiting picked his way past stacks of gilded frames, tins of oil, bottles of varnish brown as beer, rows of canvases, their faces turned confidentially to the wall. He edged around a large easel, careful not to snag his corduroy suit on the wood, and stood next to the massive bulk of London’s most venerable picture restorer. Behind and below them the traffic in Dover Street rumbled forward in the sunshine.

  In front of the two men, on the easel, stood a painting. It showed a woman: her skin was pale but she had the faint blossom of pink in her cheeks. She was wearing a blue hood—except that half the hood was missing. It had been removed by the restorer. Under it was revealed a thick mane of chestnut hair.

  Samuels reached for his cigar and drew on it. The end glowed like the curly filament in a small lamp. ‘I took off the varnish, then applied some diluted acetone and white spirit.’ He cleared his throat. ‘The blue came off straight away, as easy as wiping your nose. I found all this lovely hair underneath. Then I found the earring … that’s when I called you.’ He wedged the cigar back into his mouth.

  Michael was examining the chestnut hair. It was beautifully painted; he could almost count the strands. ‘Perbloodyfection. But why would anyone cover up such lovely hair with that hideous hood?’

  ‘Rum bunch, those Victorians. But I’ve come across this before. People were more religious then than they are now. Italian religious art was fashionable in those days—and that made it expensive. But it wasn’t hard to “doctor” one of the family portraits, which were much more common and therefore cheaper. Get a nice-looking woman, safely dead so she couldn’t complain. Cover up the jewels, the cleavage, the fashionable hairdo. In no time you have a saint or the Blessed Virgin.’ He chuckled, though it sounded as if he was gargling. ‘They were rogues in those days.’

  Michael smiled, carefully keeping his eyes on the picture. ‘You should know.’

  Samuels replied without removing the cigar from his mouth. ‘Have a whisky, Michael. You’re not thinking straight this morning. I sometimes “improve” paintings, I know. All restorers do. That’s what customers want—old masters that look as though they were painted at the weekend. But I never invent.’ He reached across for the Bell’s and a glass.

  He continued as Michael helped himself. ‘The reason I phoned you was this: if you give me the go-ahead and I clean all this Victorian mush away, you might be able to identify the lady from her jewels. There might even be a coat of arms in the background. If you can identify her you know better than I do how much that will improve the value of the picture. That’s why you may be richer than you think.’

  Michael’s eyes were watering slightly from the strength of the whisky so early in the day but he tried not to let it show. He felt a quickening of the pulse that wasn’t due to the alcohol and stared again at the canvas. This was one of the main reasons he had become an art dealer: for the thrill of discovery. True, he loved just looking at paintings. English ones especially. Michael thought English painting was very underrated across the world. The Americans appreciated it, but the Italians, the French and the Germans had never regarded English art as equal to their own. The few occasions when Michael had sold paintings to foreign museums had been the proudest moments of his career. But the discoveries he had made—those were the most exciting times.

  He leaned forward to inspect the picture again. The hair and the jewel were certainly a cut above the blue hood. As old Jules said, underneath this dreary Victorian saint, which he had acquired at a house sale along with something else he valued more highly, there might just lurk a much better painting.

  Julius had taken down from a shelf a large book. Like all good restorers he kept a meticulous record of what he did to paintings. He made notes and little drawings, partly to cover himself should there ever be any dispute about the authenticity of something he had restored, partly as an aide-mémoire in case, as regularly happened, a work came back to him on a later occasion. He opened the book and showed Michael a tiny drawing on one of the pages. ‘This is how much I’ve taken off so far. The rest shouldn’t take me too long. What do you think?’

  In reply, Michael placed his hand on the old man’s shoulder. ‘If this woman turns out to be Lady Luck, Jules, it’s not going to do your liver much good.’ They had a deal that Michael always paid in whisky, to avoid the tax man.

  Samuels gave a throaty chuckle. ‘Michael, by my age your liver becomes your favourite and most useful organ.’ Samuels chuckled again and the liver spots did another jig on his throat. He pointed at Michael’s glass. ‘Knock that back and let me get on. You must have a shop to go to.’

  This time Michael laughed and finished his drink. Samuels delighted in calling dealers’ galleries their ‘shops’: he knew how it hurt their sensibilities.

  Out in the sunshine, Michael turned south, towards Piccadilly. He had broken his cardinal rule of never drinking anything other than single malt whisky—as he always did when he visited Julius. But he was smiling; an encounter with the old man always put him in a good mood.

  He dodged the traffic in Piccadilly and walked down St James’s Street. He passed White’s, turned into Jermyn Street, then right opposite Fortnum and Mason into Duke Street. His own gallery was in Mason’s Yard, halfway down the street on the left, through an archway. It wasn’t Duke Street itself, of course, or Old Bond Street, come to that, but it wasn’t bad. He and his partner could afford more space there, and anyone who knew anything about British painting knew where to find them.

  He passed a couple of other galleries. In the window of one was a portrait and he stopped to admire it. It was a small Degas pastel, smudges of powdery pink, pale blue and apricot splashing out from the dark charcoal lines. It showed a middle-aged man, bearded and balding, but elegant in a close-fitting jacket and a high collar, with a flowered handkerchief cascading from his breast pocket. A comfortably off figure from the comfortable world of the nineteenth century, the world of servants, bicycles, picnics. A world that lots of people wanted to return to, in art if they couldn’t do it in real life.

  Michael looked past the portrait to his own reflection in the window. Corduroy suits, he had been told a thousand times, were a thing of the past. They reeked of jazz and coffee bars, the archaeology of the twentieth century, in the words of his ungovernable younger sister, Robyn. But, at thirty-three, he couldn’t quite bring himself to abandon what he had got used to. Nor was the art dealer’s uniform—dark, double-breasted suit, sea island cotton shirt, black shoes, shiny as olives—all that enticing either. The brown velvet of the corduroy suited Michael’s colouring too. He’d been even blonder as a baby but he was still very fair. Robyn was jealous of his hair and its waviness, even though he couldn’t seem to keep it in place. His gaze shifted to the cigar in his hand. The tobacco was a weakness, of course. Cigars were expensive, made him look older than he was, and lots of people, women especially, hated the smoke. But Michael was hooked. He loved the smell, the crackle of the leaves, the colour of the leaves. He relished the deliberate ritual of cutting and lighting a cigar, of rolling it in the flame of the match. He rolled the cigar between his fingers now, then jabbed it into his mouth and straightened his tie, using the reflection in the window.

  Michael sighed. He always seemed to have an unravelled look, no matter how hard he tried. He took another glance at the
apricot splashes in the Degas and moved on through the archway which led into Mason’s Yard. His gallery was at the far end where its sign could be seen by passers-by in Duke Street. The green and gold lettering read: ‘Whiting & Wood Fine Art’. Michael had a partner, Gregory Wood, an accountant who had many contacts in the City. All galleries had to borrow from the banks so that they could maintain sufficient stock to give customers a decent choice. If Greg could borrow money at a better rate than other galleries were getting they were ahead of the game.

  Michael and Greg got on well—they had to, given the fact that they were a small firm and in each other’s pockets for most of the time. While Greg raised loans and chased customers who hadn’t paid it was Michael’s job to find the paintings and the customers. The only slight shadow on their relationship was coming towards Michael now as he opened the door to the gallery and stepped inside. The pleasure Michael took in their current ‘star’—a small Gainsborough oil sketch, a landscape with a low, pepper-coloured horizon and a firebrick sky—was soon wiped out as Patrick Wood greeted him.

  Had Patrick not been Greg’s son Michael would never have allowed the boy—for he was barely twenty—anywhere near the gallery. Snobbish, pompous, someone who imagined that dealing in paintings made him better than other people, he was a not unfamiliar type in the art world. Worse, a thin gold chain dangled from the buttonhole in his left lapel and he affected brightly speckled bow ties. Today’s was pink with dark red spots.

  ‘Good morning, Paddy.’ Michael knew how Patrick hated being addressed as if he were an Irish bricklayer. ‘What were you doing in the inner sanctum?’

  The ‘inner sanctum’ was the viewing room at the back of the gallery, where favoured customers were shown paintings they might like to buy. It had easy chairs, a hidden bar and two velvet-covered easels. Access to the sanctum was supposed to convey a sense of privilege, or achievement, denied to ordinary mortals. Patrick had just stepped out of it, leaving the door half open.