Sea Lord

by Bernard Cornwell

  I smiled. “You’ve got a happy marriage, Charlie?”

  “You know how it is, Johnny.” He lit a cigarette. “They’re never happy, are they? You can give them the world and they’ll still find something to bitch about. But Yvonne’s all right.” He made the concession grudgingly. “She’s a good mother, anyway. Not that I’m home much. Business.”

  “What were you doing in Hertfordshire?”

  He touched a sly finger to the side of his nose. “Wasn’t actually in Hertfordshire, Johnny. More like Bedfordshire.” He laughed, then changed the subject. “I had a chat with George Cullen this morning.”

  “I hope you thumped the bastard rotten.”

  “He says he never told a soul where you were. I think he meant it too. He was upset about it.”

  I wasn’t convinced. “Of course he told them! He knew who those men were, he even told me as much!”

  “I know. He told me the same.” Charlie thickly smeared a bread roll with butter. “But I don’t think George did tell them. I think they just found you. After all, it isn’t difficult to find a boat on the Devon coast. How long can it take to search Plymouth, the Yealm, Salcombe, Dartmouth, Torquay and the Exe? Not long, mate, not long at all. I think you were just unlucky.”

  “I want to make them unlucky,” I said with impotent bitterness. “And I want to know what bastard sent them to kill me, and why.”

  He leaned back and frowned at me. “Do you really?” It was an odd question, asked in a strangely quizzical tone.

  “They tried to kill me,” I said in outraged explanation, “and I want to know who sent them.” Till the day before I hadn’t cared about the painting, or its fate, or about the people who pursued the canvas, but my humiliation in the night had set up an atavistic desire for revenge.

  We fell silent as the steak and kidney pie arrived. Charlie fetched two more pints, then ladled pie, potatoes, peas and gravy on to my plate. “What I mean,” he said, “is do you want anything more to do with that bloody painting?”

  “Not with the painting, no.”

  “Then bugger off. Sail away.” He pointed his knife at me. “Because so long as you’re here, they’ll chase you.”

  I was staring through the window. “Elizabeth,” I said softly.

  “What about her?”

  “If I’m dead,” I said, “then there’ll be no legal complications about the painting’s ownership. And Garrard told me my sin was inheriting the painting. That’s it, Charlie! Don’t you see?” Then my voice tailed away. I was suggesting that Elizabeth wanted me dead so she could inherit the painting, but even as the explanation had convinced me, so I found it impossible to believe that my twin sister would do such a thing.

  “For Christ’s sake!” Charlie protested in disgust. “The painting’s long gone, Johnny. It’s in some Texas vault or Swiss strongroom!”

  “Is it?” I wondered aloud, then answered my own question. “I suppose it is, yes.”

  “Of course it is!” Charlie said with sturdy good sense, “so sail away and forget the bloody thing. But eat your pie first.”

  I leaned back. “I’ve just discovered something about myself.”

  “You don’t like steak and kidney pie?”

  “I get pissed off when people try to kill me.”

  He laid down his knife and fork. “Listen, Johnny. If it’s any help, I’ll put the word out on Garrard. I’ll find him for you, and I’ll skin him alive. But don’t you hang about waiting for the chop. Go back to sea!”

  It was good advice, but I was still suffering from the shameful memory of the previous night. “Garrard said he was making sure I never got possession of the painting. That suggests the thing is still around somewhere, Charlie…”

  “Of course it isn’t around. Use your loaf, Johnny. It must have been flogged off four years ago. Garrard’s probably got his knickers in a twist, nothing else. But I promise you I’ll find him and I’ll discover who wound him up. You bugger off back to sea.”

  “I’ll help you find him.”

  “No.” He spoke very firmly. “You don’t need the trouble, Johnny. Leave it to experts.”

  I smiled. “You’re an expert?”

  “Enough of one.” He said it grimly. “You don’t need the aggravation, Johnny. All you need is to go back to sea.”

  “I also need some transport.”

  “Transport?” He sounded suspicious.

  “Some wheels, Charlie. For a girl.”

  He understood that reason well enough. He laughed. “Who is she?”

  “Just a girl.” I was thinking of a competent girl with dark hair and a quick temper. A girl with an Italian name. “The trouble is,” I said, “that she’s a good distance away.”

  “And you’ve got the itch. No problem.” Charlie spread his hands in a gesture suggesting that all my difficulties could be solved by his munificence. “Take the jeep. Go and chase her!”

  “You don’t mind?”

  “You’re my friend. What’s mine is yours, and what’s yours I wouldn’t touch with a bloody bargepole. Now eat your pie.”

  I ate the pie.

  Comerton Castle, Sir Leon Buzzacott’s country house, was neither a castle nor a house. It was a late-eighteenth-century monstrosity; a mansion built to display wealth rather than to be a home. Pillared, porticoed, winged, domed, spired, lavish and vast, Comerton had once belonged to a ducal family, but, just as they had to my own family, the taxmen had flensed away until the house had to be sold. Buzzacott had purchased it ten years before. I wondered what he did with all the rooms, reputedly a room for every day of the year. Not that I would find out, for my business did not lie in the main house, but in the great Orangery that was built beside the garden terraces beneath the south front.

  The Orangery alone was the size of Stowey. It was a long single-storeyed building, stuccoed white, that had once been a glasshouse, summer house and Arcadian retreat for the Duke and his guests. Now, at astronomical expense, Sir Leon had transformed it into an art gallery. Many people had criticised the gallery, claiming it was too far from any large city, and that it was an elitist exercise aimed solely at gaining Sir Leon the coveted peerage he desired, and maybe they were right, at least in the first criticism, for there was only a handful of cars in the huge car park.

  I paid my pound at the door. A moving ramp led to the gallery floor which had been excavated twenty feet below the original ground level. The job had been done without disturbing any of the Orangery’s masonry. The air below the ground was conditioned to a consistent coolness and humidity. Automatic louvres controlled the sunlight entering the glass domes and tall casements which, now that the floor had been lowered, served as clerestory windows.

  I hadn’t asked for Jennifer Pallavicini at the entrance desk. I first wanted to see this rich man’s fantasy for myself. Sir Leon’s critics snidely called him Britain’s second-rate John Paul Getty. It would have been better, they said, if he had donated his collection to one of the big London galleries. They said his museum was a white elephant, a monstrous underground irrelevance; yet, in truth, it was magnificent. I’d seen photographs of the galleries and I had read the newspaper accounts of their extraordinary construction, but I had never visited, so I had never experienced the uncanny sense of peace in the subterranean halls. That quietness had earned accusations that Sir Leon was making a shrine to art when, according to modern London thinking, art should be an integral part of everyday life. Meaning, I suppose, that if someone wanted to slash a Rubens to shreds, then the act should be seen as necessarily therapeutic as well as a valid criticism. For my money these paintings were well away from London.

  The collection was not big. Sir Leon had bought selectively, but what he had bought was of the very finest. The scarcity of paintings made it possible to hang each to its best advantage. Instead of crowding jumbled swathes of pictures along a wall, each canvas was positioned within its own private area. Sometimes, when juxtaposition would help explain a painting’s provenance, it would
be displayed with others, but most of the paintings hung in solitary splendour. They hung on the outer walls of the gallery, protected by a dry moat. Visitors walked to a small balcony which faced each painting. There were no attendants visible in the gallery, which added to the quality of privacy and peace. The corridors leading to each balcony contained displays which explained the context and importance of the painting beyond the deep moat. The corridors led from the gallery’s central spine down which an endless walkway silently moved. Everything had been done to the highest quality and with exquisite taste. It would, I thought, be a fitting home for Stowey’s Van Gogh.

  There was already one Van Gogh in the collection. It was a drawing done with black chalk and showed a woman digging in a bleak field. The notes in the corridor frankly said it was not the finest of Van Gogh’s drawings, but that it was included in the exhibition because, for the moment, Sir Leon owned no other works by the artist.

  “It’s an early work.” Jennifer Pallavicini’s sudden voice startled me. “He did it in 1883. It’s rather clumsy.”

  “Is it?” I turned to face her. She herself looked anything but clumsy, instead she was chillingly pretty. She was wearing a simple cream skirt and a striped silk blouse. She looked crisp, cool, competent, and distinctly unfriendly.

  “It’s self-conscious.” She was looking at the drawing rather than at me. “When we get a suitable painting by Van Gogh we’ll hang this in Sir Leon’s private quarters. What are you doing here?”

  “I came to see you.”

  The brown eyes’ gaze flicked towards me. “We feared you’d come to steal another Van Gogh, Mr Rossendale.”

  I ignored the jibe. “How did you know I was here?”

  She gestured upwards and I saw how television cameras were monitoring every balcony. “So far,” she said, “we haven’t had any fools trying to throw paint or worse at a canvas, but you can never tell. We keep a constant watch. Why did you want to see me?”

  “Those two men,” I said, then faltered, for her gaze was so disapproving and so off-putting that I felt gauche.

  “I do remember them,” she said icily.

  “They tried to murder me two days ago.”

  “And evidently failed.” She leaned on the balcony, her back to the drawing. “Did you come here for sympathy?”

  “Do we have to talk here?” I asked. I had suddenly found the quietness oppressive. The barely audible hiss of the hidden air-conditioners seemed somehow threatening.

  She shrugged; then, without saying anything, walked back through the corridor. I followed her. We crossed the slow-moving walkway to a door which she opened with a key. She led me up a white-painted stair, through another door, and so into a small formal garden. I walked silently beside her down the gravel path, round an ornately sculpted fountain, to a stone balustrade that looked out on the Wiltshire countryside. A tractor was harrowing a far field, but otherwise nothing moved. “Well?” she asked.

  “I don’t like people trying to murder me,” I said, and immediately thought how lame it sounded.

  “I imagine that’s understandable. I didn’t much like it when that man molested me.” It was the most sympathetic thing she’d said to me so far, and it gave me encouragement.

  “They attacked you,” I said, “and now they’ve attacked me. I just thought that together we might find some reason for what they’re doing.”

  “Isn’t that a job for the police?” she challenged me.

  I half smiled. “You went to the police?”

  She hesitated, then shook her head. “What happened in Salcombe was trivial. It certainly wasn’t attempted murder. I have to be flattered that you think I might be able to help, but I suggest you should approach the real experts: the police.”

  I leaned on the mossy stone balustrade. “If I went to the police, I’d have to tell them what happened in Salcombe. They’ll want to talk to you.”

  “I have nothing to hide, Mr Rossendale.”

  “Nor do I.” I spoke with sudden vehemence. “You don’t seem to understand, no one does. I did not steal that painting, I had nothing to do with its theft, yet everyone, you included, seems convinced I did steal it. Why on earth would I want to steal it?”

  “The usual theory, Mr Rossendale, is that you did it to spite your mother. You hated her, did you not?”

  I hesitated. “I didn’t hate her. I just disliked her.”

  “So the theory is partially correct. To that we add all the other evidence, and you must agree that you remain the likeliest suspect.”

  “For God’s sake! That evidence was all circumstantial!”

  She let that protest die away on the summer’s air, then began a remorseless cataloguing of the evidence. “A week before the painting was to be transported, you removed it from your mother’s room.”

  “She asked me to. She didn’t want to be constantly reminded that it was leaving Stowey.”

  “You claim to have stored it in the gun room, to which only you had a key.”

  “Rubbish. There were a dozen keys. My sister had a key, half the servants had keys.”

  “Not according to the police. The painting was in your charge, Mr Rossendale, your fingerprints were the only ones found on the door’s lockplate, and you told your mother that you had hidden the painting away and told no one its exact whereabouts.” Her voice was biting with disbelief and scorn. “Yet on the morning of the removal, it wasn’t there! It’s a perfect mystery, isn’t it? A locked room, undisturbed alarms, and a missing painting. I suppose you’ll tell me that dozens of people knew how to disable the alarm system?”

  “One or two knew,” I said feebly.

  “And where were you the next day? When everyone else was desperately trying to help the police? You were sailing across the Channel! No doubt carrying the painting with you, but of course no one suspected you that day, why should they? You were the Earl of Stowey, the apparent victim of the crime, but since then, my lord, your protestations of innocence have worn a little thin. Isn’t it a fact that every guilty man protests his innocence, and does so as vehemently as you are now?”

  “But why on earth would I steal from myself?” I challenged her with the obvious defence.

  “Clearly from your dislike of your mother. So long as she was alive she shared control of the Stowey Trust with you, and doubtless she would have spent the proceeds of the painting in ways you did not like.”

  She was so damnably cool. Most of the evidence she had adduced was true, but it was still circumstantial or coincidental. I hadn’t stolen the Sunflowers. I closed my eyes, wondering how I could convince her. “Please listen,” I said. I opened my eyes to see her level, judgmental gaze on me. “Those two men came to kill me. I’m trying to find out why they did it because, truly, I don’t understand. They said they wanted to prevent me from getting hold of the painting, but I can’t do that because I don’t know where it is.”

  She laughed scornfully at my protestation of ignorance. “I can quite imagine why they should want you dead.”

  “For God’s sake, why?”

  She hesitated, then evidently decided to speak her brutal version of the truth. “It’s obvious, isn’t it? It’s four years since the painting was stolen, and in those four years we’ve heard nothing. There hasn’t been a whisper. We’ve been listening, Mr Rossendale, because there are art dealers who know about stolen paintings and we’ve been paying them to pass on any rumour they might hear, but in four years? Nothing. Now, suddenly, there’s a flurry of activity. A man questions me brutally, the same man allegedly tries to kill you. And what has changed? Two things, Mr Rossendale. First your mother has died, and secondly you have come home. Doesn’t that suggest something?”

  “Not to me.”

  “Oh, come!” she protested at what she perceived as my intransigence. “If the painting had been recovered while your mother was alive, she would have shared in the proceeds of its legitimate sale. Now, under the terms of the Stowey Trust, you are the sole beneficial owner. Clearly
it is now in your strong interest to retrieve the painting and place it on the open market.”

  “Jesus wept,” I said in frustrated anger at her glib assumption of my guilt.

  “It isn’t my place to speculate,” Jennifer said, but proceeded to do so anyway, “but I would imagine that the two men are working for whoever you sold the painting to. That person clearly does not want you to betray his possession of stolen goods, so is taking care to silence you. Doubtless you sold it four years ago for a derisory sum, or else you would not need to reclaim it now. It’s a classic case of thieves falling out, and it’s all rather sordid, and I find it more than a little insulting that you should see fit to involve me in your attempts to avoid trouble.”

  “I’m not a thief,” I said in hopeless protest.

  “So you say. But you should know that Sir Leon considers your guilt or innocence entirely irrelevant. If you can give us any information that will lead to the Van Gogh’s recovery, then you’ll be well rewarded as well as handsomely paid for the painting itself.”

  “I don’t give a monkey’s toss about Sir Leon’s reward,” I said brutally, “but I do give a damn about people who try to have me killed.”

  “That’s just masculine pride,” she said scornfully. “No one ever accused you of humility.”

  “You know nothing about me,” I said angrily.

  She smiled. “I know a great deal about you, my lord.” She made the honorific sound like an insult. “We’ve spent four years searching for that painting, and our starting point, and our ending point, is always you. So, my lord, I am somewhat of an expert on your grubby life. You were expelled from three public schools, you’ve been arrested four times…”

  “Just drunk and disorderlies,” I protested, “nothing else. Anyone can get pissed.”

  “One charge of grievous bodily harm,” she insisted icily. “You served two months in a Tasmanian jail for that.”

  She had done her homework. No one had ever known that it had been the twenty-eighth Earl of Stowey in that jail, but she had somehow discovered it. Mind you, the bastard I had knifed had been pleading for trouble, but I didn’t think Jennifer Pallavicini would be amenable to that excuse. “It was all a long time ago,” I said feebly.