by Peter Watson
‘You have a visitor. I was hoping to keep her all to myself—though it seems she’s here to see you.’
‘A woman?’
‘Not just any woman, Michael. This is Rita Hayworth, Princess Diana and Zelda Fitzgerald all rolled into one. As the Michelin Guide might say: “Well worth a detour”.’
Michael grinned at Patrick. The boy was improving, almost human. ‘Keep that up and we’ll have you writing catalogue entries soon. Think you can make some coffee without spraying speckles on that lovely bow tie?’
Patrick nodded. These sparring matches were normal and they both knew Greg approved. He said he wanted the spots knocked off his son.
Michael cast a brief glance over the walls of the gallery. It was late May and the art world was preparing for its big season, June through to mid-July. Soon Michael and Greg would be putting their best wares on the walls in readiness for the foreign collectors who would descend on London for the big auctions and the fancy antique fairs. For now, however, the gallery was showing some of its less intimidating pictures: a small Hoppner portrait, a Cozens landscape and a wonderful, almost abstract, cloud study by John Thistle in peach, cream and crimson. Michael adjusted the picture, which was not quite straight on the wall, and went through to the inner sanctum.
The room stuck out at the back of the gallery with nothing built above it, and Greg and he had been able to equip it with a glass roof or skylight so that pictures could be viewed for much of the time in natural light. The sun streamed in through the glass panels and on to the woman who was waiting. Patrick had not been entirely wrong. She wasn’t young enough to be Princess Diana but she had the Hayworth hair, long and sweeping down the side of her face so that it almost covered one cheek. Deep eyes, dark as damsons. A warm, wheat-coloured skin. But the face was dominated by the sharp arch of her eyebrows, which were somehow curved and angled at the same time. It gave this woman’s face an amused, quizzical, sardonic cast. Michael noticed that she had a thin plaster across one cheek. She hadn’t taken off her raincoat, hadn’t even unbelted it; that, he supposed, was what gave her a Fitzgerald air. It was as if she had an open car waiting for her nearby.
‘Hello,’ he said, holding out his hand. ‘You’re here to see me? You’re not the taxman, I hope?’
She stood up, smiled, and shook hands. In high heels she was an inch or so shorter than he was—taller even than Princess Diana. Her hands were surprisingly rough. ‘Isobel Sadler.’
‘Please sit down,’ he said. ‘I’ve just been to see a man who insisted on offering me a large Scotch—at this hour!—so I for one need some coffee. Would you like to take off your coat?’
The coat masked the woman’s figure so he was disappointed when she refused. Instead, she unbelted it and let it hang loose. Underneath she was wearing a white cotton shirt and a kilt. She sat back in her chair and crossed her legs.
Before she could speak the phone rang. Michael picked up the receiver and took a fresh cigar from his top pocket. As he listened he lovingly rolled the thick tube between his fingers. ‘I don’t believe it,’ he said into the receiver. ‘Again? Imbloodypressive. How many divorces is that—four? Five! Yes, I’m in, of course. Good idea. Three weeks, I’d say. If Miss Masson is divorcing, it can only mean she’s ready to get married again. Okay? ’Bye, Nick.’ He replaced the receiver, licked the end of the cigar and began to fiddle with his matches. ‘Sorry about that. Where were we?’
Isobel Sadler said, ‘It’s good of you to see me. I gather it’s normal to have an appointment. As if you were a doctor.’ An eyebrow lifted a fraction. A mocking movement?
Michael shrugged and breathed blue smoke into the room. ‘You’re lucky I’m here,’ he said. ‘I travel a lot. You might have wasted your time.’
‘I hope I’m not wasting yours. Edward Ryan suggested I come to you.’
‘Oh yes? I wonder why.’ Ryan was a dealer in oriental things. Michael tapped the first of the cigar ash into a lacquered tray.
Isobel Sadler smiled. ‘He said you weren’t too old or too young, that you weren’t too rich or too hungry, that you weren’t too straight or too bent, and that you liked a gamble.’
‘Hmm. Who are Ryan’s solicitors? I’ll sue.’
‘Save your money. He also said you thought like a detective—that’s why you’ve made so many discoveries. Well, I have a mystery for you.’
As she said this, Isobel Sadler reached down to a packet at the side of her chair. From the shape it looked like a painting. She unwrapped the paper. Michael admired her movements but noticed once more the rough skin on her hands. In profile, her nose was too long to be perfect, and in an ideal world her lower lip would not have been so fleshy. But those eyebrows, which seemed to move independently of the rest of her face, gave her expression a jolt of electricity, radiation as much as warmth. It was one of those faces where none of the individual parts was in itself remarkable but where the whole added up to considerably more than the sum. Michael liked it.
She got up and placed the picture on one of the velvet easels, then sat down again in her chair.
Michael looked at the painting. He could usually tell straight away how good or bad something was but it was hard on people to respond too quickly. They were more flattered, and more convinced, if he took his time over it, and less devastated if the verdict was unfavourable.
He noticed immediately that the frame of the picture was broken at one corner and that some paint had chipped off nearby.
The picture showed a landscape of sorts. There was a valley in the background, and some buildings behind a copse of trees. In the foreground was a ring of figures—he counted nine—and, it appeared, all were male. Each figure was dressed differently: one was in a tunic, another in what looked like a monk’s habit, and yet another appeared to be a skeleton wearing a mitre. One of the figures lay in front of a ruined window that made a kind of arch, through which the countryside could be seen. The ruin contained a number of columns, one with a carved capital, and to one side there was what looked like a small chapel area screened by a red cloth.
Conscious of Isobel Sadler’s eyes on him, Michael stared at the landscape for a while, pulling on his cigar. So Edward Ryan thought he liked a gamble, did he? Gambling was just one of Michael’s sins. Most of the other things he enjoyed—whisky, cigars, red meat—were rapidly becoming crimes these days. He let the smoke fill his mouth, then breathed out slowly, feeling his chest and shoulders relax: the taboo comfort of tobacco. He got up and examined the picture more closely. It was not in good condition. The panel was cracked in at least three places, and one of the cracks looked quite new. Besides the paint loss he had already noticed, there were patches of dirt and discoloured varnish. He turned the panel over. Sometimes the back of a picture told you more than the front: who had owned it, when it had been sold and where, whether its supports had been changed. Not this time: apart from the fact that two of the cracks went all the way through to the reverse side of the panel and there were several worm holes visible, the back of the painting told him nothing new. He replaced it on the easel, sat down again and tapped more ash into the lacquered tray.
‘No problems here for the taxman. Your picture has decorative value only, I’m afraid.’ He wondered if Miss—Mrs?—Sadler knew that this was the time-honoured way of saying something was virtually worthless. ‘It is probably English, northern European certainly, but not by anyone I recognise … Not that I am the best judge,’ he added quickly. ‘Although it says “English paintings” on our window outside and on our business cards, our speciality is really the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Your picture, I would say, is much earlier—sixteenth century by the looks of it, and to judge from the panel … However, apart from the poor condition it’s in’—Michael pointed with his cigar to the cracks and the abrasions—‘it is a very odd composition. To put it bluntly, it’s not at all well painted.’ He tapped one of the faces, on the right of the picture. ‘This head, curiously, is well done, but the rest’—he
waved his hand over the other figures—‘are very weak, clumsy even. The proportions are wrong; the heads are awkward on the bodies and the features on some of the faces are coarse.’ He said all this as gently as he could, not wanting to crush his visitor’s hopes too harshly but at the same time not wanting to mislead her. ‘I must say I have never seen such a composition before.’ He pointed to the figure in the tunic, which had curly designs on it. ‘This man, who appears to be holding a clock, looks like some sort of mythological figure.’ He pointed to another man. ‘There’s a skeleton holding a crosier.’ Then to a third. ‘This one seems to have some sort of plant growing out of his middle—I haven’t a clue what that is. Very odd.’
He stared at the picture for a while without speaking, then turned to look at Isobel Sadler. Her hair had fallen forward over one eye. It made her seem as though she was hiding from the bad news he was bringing.
He spoke softly. ‘In short, it’s an old picture but not a very good one. I can’t put an exact figure on it but it’s worth hundreds at the most, not thousands. Sorry.’
He placed his cigar back in his mouth. People, he had found, responded to the bad news in one of three ways. There were those who let their disappointment show. There were those who laughed it off—nervously; they were disappointed too. And there were those who had never really believed in the first place that they could be lucky enough to have stumbled across something truly valuable. They sometimes let their resentment turn into anger and would storm out of the gallery.
Isobel Sadler did none of these things. One eyebrow rose a fraction. She tapped her teeth with a fingernail, pushed her hair back from her eye and said, ‘Yes, you’ve confirmed what I thought.’
Though Michael was genuinely passionate about cigars, and smoked them in the bath or when he was fishing, there were occasions in the art business when they were useful to hide behind, to buy time. He could puff regularly, without speaking. It was almost as if cigar smoke contained some sort of soporific. People accepted delay more willingly. He played for time.
Isobel Sadler was an odd lady, he reflected. As odd as her picture. Before he could say anything, however, Patrick appeared with the coffee. The young man set the tray on a side-table and handed the cups across. Michael waited for him to leave before saying, ‘If you knew the picture was nothing special, why bother to come? It was a waste of time after all—’
‘I didn’t say that!’ Isobel Sadler didn’t exactly shout but there was something—an edge—in her tone and Michael was brought up short. His coffee-cup rattled in its saucer.
She went on, the edge still there in her voice. ‘I agree that on the face of it this picture has little or no value, Mr Whiting. I have a soft spot for it—mainly because it’s been in my family for ever. But that doesn’t blind me to the fact that it is not—well, a fine work. I come from an old West Country family and there is a tradition that Holbein was a friend of our ancestors. But I never really believed this was by him. As you say, a lot of it is clumsy and the composition is—well, you called it odd and I wouldn’t disagree. If I didn’t have a soft spot for it I would probably think it horrible.’ She looked at Michael fiercely, as if to say that he didn’t need to be gentle in his professional opinions with her. ‘But—and this is the odd thing—I do think it may be special. Now I can get to the mystery. It’s not how valuable this picture is, or who painted it, but why, two nights ago, someone tried to steal it.’
Michael set down his coffee-cup. The sharp way in which Isobel Sadler had addressed him had caused him to flush slightly. He did not reply for a moment but sat, coaxing the smoke out of his cigar. His sister had a sharp tongue: Robyn would like the woman opposite. Then he said, ‘That proves nothing. Thieves don’t always know about art. They could have tried to take it by mistake or, because it was “art”, imagined that it must be valuable.’
‘No,’ she said quickly. ‘The thief made straight for the painting. I know because he woke me up breaking in and I disturbed him. I don’t have any Ming in the house, or silver. But there’s the usual hi-fi equipment. Thieves always go for electronic stuff first, or so I’ve been told. What’s more, after I interrupted him—I managed to hit him in the shin with a vase that I threw at him—he escaped on a motor cycle. He could never have carried bulky hi-fi equipment on that. No, he definitely came for the painting.’
Michael pretended to examine the leaves of his cigar. The idea of this woman lobbing a vase at a burglar fascinated him. She was clearly a brave lady—but then the tone in her voice had told him she was red-blooded. Another thought struck him. If she was tackling burglars single-handed, did that mean she lived alone? He could feel her gaze fixed on him, the calculating eyebrows. ‘You may be right, you may be wrong,’ he said. ‘I don’t know. What I do know is that no amount of interest in this picture by thieves can make it valuable. It’s not.’
Isobel Sadler’s hair had fallen over her eye again and she brushed it away impatiently. ‘I’m telling you my story backwards, Mr Whiting, and that is probably confusing. I apologize. I haven’t told you about the coincidence yet. I wanted to be sure that it meant something. The fact that you confirm the picture is worthless only makes the coincidence more marked.’
Michael said nothing. A layer of lazy smoke drifted between them. As it approached Isobel Sadler she pointedly waved it away.
‘I said I had a mystery for you, but the picture is only part of it. I suppose I should tell you something about myself—it will help. My family, the Sadlers, can trace our ancestors back to Tudor times. We are no longer rich’—she held up her hands—‘I have had to work my parents’ farm since they are both dead, but yes, we go back many generations.’ Her eyes probed his. ‘We have one famous ancestor—or perhaps “notorious” is a better word. Sir William Sadler: 1480 to 1537.’ She smiled. ‘I can never forget his dates. Anyway, he had a rather controversial role in the dissolution of the monasteries—he was called a “Visitor” and his job was to help Henry VIII dispose of all their assets, so it didn’t exactly make him popular. The point is that because of Sir William—“Bad Bill” we called him in the family—I’ve always been interested in history, especially local history, anything to do with the family or the area we come from, near Painswick in Gloucestershire. For instance, I get all the catalogues of the manuscript sales at the auction houses and a few weeks ago I noticed that some papers relating to Bad Bill were due to come up for auction at Sotheby’s.’ She rubbed an eyebrow with her knuckle. ‘For most people I would imagine they are thoroughly boring. They consisted of inventories mainly, relating to monasteries which Sir William had had a hand in dissolving, and there were a few letters he’d written, including one to another member of the family. That’s what I was mainly interested in. They weren’t expensive—a hundred and fifty to three hundred and fifty pounds for the lot. I thought I would have no bother getting them.’ She smiled.
‘But you did?’ Michael had no idea why he was listening to this story, which had nothing to do with art.
Isobel Sadler nodded. ‘I started bidding at the low end of the estimate: one hundred and fifty pounds. But there was someone else just as interested as me. I got carried away and so did this other person. The price went over five hundred pounds. Then to six hundred. I was astonished. At seven hundred pounds I had to drop out—the farm is a real drain just now.’
For a moment it was as if Isobel Sadler had left the room, so preoccupied was her expression, and Michael suspected that the farm was rather more than a drain. He glanced again at her rough hands. This woman was obviously having to work as a farm labourer herself.
But then, just as suddenly as she had left, she returned. ‘I sat for a few moments after the lot had been knocked down. I was sort of stunned, I suppose. I didn’t know who had beaten me but it didn’t matter. I know that sometimes, at big sales, the underbidder will offer the winner a quick profit after the auction proper has ended, but I was so far over my limit anyway that, in my case, it was out of the question. There was no
possibility I could offer any more. I started to leave—and that’s when a man came up to me.’
Michael leaned forward. ‘Your rival?’
Again she nodded. ‘I learned later that his name was Molyneux. As I got up and struggled to the end of the row he helped me out. I thanked him and he said he’d seen me bidding and asked if I was a dealer. I said no. Then I explained my interest in the documents, just as I’ve explained to you. He apologised, saying he’d bought them on commission for someone else, an American. He walked out with me, making small talk, asking me where I lived, what else I collected and so on. He was very tall and towered over me. He towered over everyone. There were creases in his cheeks, I remember that. Outside on the pavement, he said he or his partner might be down in Gloucestershire in a few days and could he call? That’s when he gave me his name. He also promised to ask the man on whose behalf he’d bought the documents whether he could send me some photocopies. It would be better than nothing, he said, and he might be able to drop them off if he stopped by.
‘Then I forgot all about it. I never imagined he would call—it was just small talk. But he did. He didn’t phone in advance, just turned up late one morning. He said he’d been visiting a house sale near Cirencester and had taken time off to visit me. I was half impressed and half puzzled. He had no news on the documents; he said his client was abroad and he had to wait for him to return before he could do anything. But he was hopeful, he said. I gave him some coffee, we chatted and he asked if he could look round the house. I gave him a very quick tour since I had to get back to the farm.’
‘You showed him the picture?’
She nodded. ‘He actually laughed when he first saw it, pointing out how odd it was, just as you did a few minutes ago. He asked how long I’d had it. I told him it had been in the family for ever—I inherited it from my father, he from his father and so on. Anyway, after Molyneux had examined the painting we went on round the rest of the house and he began to talk about the curiosities he himself collected. He said he was reviving the old tradition of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when people like the Hapsburgs had curio chambers with things like stuffed dodos, pictures of bearded ladies or notorious murderers, perpetual-motion machines or gems that were supposed to have magical properties. He said he would love to have the picture for his collection and offered me a thousand pounds for it. He suggested I might use the money to make an offer to the man who had bought the “Bad Bill” documents. In effect I would be swapping the picture for the papers.’ She brushed her hair away from her eye again. ‘I nearly said yes. But then I thought: if the man didn’t agree to sell the documents to me I would have lost both them and the painting. So in the end I said no. Molyneux was charming. He said he quite understood, and left soon after. Then came the coincidence. Three days after his visit someone tried to steal the same picture.’
