by John Burke
‘Ah, dear lady. Everything going smoothly, I trust? Being well looked after?’ His condescendingly comradely smile at Beth hid a threat of less comradely repercussions if their visitor made even the slightest complaint.
‘Things are going just fine. Now, where’s this man I just have to see, this … what did you say his name was, Beth?’
‘Luke Drummond.’
‘But of course,’ said Ogilvie. ‘Luke. Made great progress since he became one of our team. But first, I’m sure you need a cup of coffee while we discuss the timetable I’ve worked out for you. Naturally Luke’s a part of it. Just one part.’
For a moment Beth thought the woman was going to override him; but there was a brief, sardonic twist to her pencil-thin lips, and she gave a nod which permitted him to lead her fussily away towards his office.
Beth made her own way to the library.
Luke was seated on the far side of his vast table behind his usual array of books and documents. He looked her up and down as she came in, and she knew from his appreciative grin that he was mentally undressing her. Not speculatively, as lots of men did, but reminiscently. The grin was just suggestive enough to be flattering, showing that he remembered what lay beneath the trimmings. Not so long ago he would have followed it up physically, later that same day or when current business had been wrapped up. That was all over now, but they still felt at ease in each other’s company, enjoying the same commitment to whatever project was currently being worked on, and preserving their own standards against the niggling of Simon Ogilvie.
‘All tarted up,’ he said. ‘And very nice too. Well, how did it go? What d’you make of her?’
‘Pretty powerful stuff. But keeping it all under tight control for the moment. You know the sort of thing — very formal but friendly, but with a lot kept in reserve. No telling how intense things may get.’
‘Intense?’
‘There’s a lot bottled up there. But right now I’d say she’s committed to this venture one hundred per cent, and she’s not going to be distracted. Maybe, having lost her husband, she’s got to have something to take her mind off things. Though somehow she … that is …’
‘Don’t waffle, Beth. Not like you.’
‘Well, she doesn’t seem like a grieving widow. Though it’s six months or more, isn’t it? And maybe they weren’t all that close. Or … oh, whatever.’
Luke drew a sheet of paper from a small stack close to his left hand. He had always been proud of his ability to pluck a relevant document out of a pile or off a shelf. As archivist he was no dull pedant, but always quietly precise, loving to track things down and tidy up loose ends.
As a lover, he had been the same. He had once studied academically the positions in the Kama Sutra and then tried them out on Beth, starting dispassionately, like trying the temperature of the water with his toe, then opening up to the warm gentle affection intertwining with the text and climaxing with no further need of instruction.
Now he impassively read out the facts.
*
Morwenna Ross, née Chisholm, had been born in Toronto. Her father was a merchant banker involved in a number of business ventures with Ross Enterprises. At twenty-one she met and married Calum Ross, older son of James Fergus Ross (known, though never to his face, as Old Jamie). Obviously a dynastic marriage. Old man Ross was a shipping and transcontinental transport millionaire who had built up a web of interwoven production and distribution companies, based on the family’s original logging and timber sales business in Nova Scotia. Like Carnegie, in later life he had begun to plough large proportions of his profits into charitable works and the endowment of museums via the Ross Foundation — especially, like Carnegie, with sentimental preferences towards his forebears’ homeland although, unlike Carnegie, he himself had not been born in Scotland.
‘I get the impression from our copies of internal memos,’ said Luke, ‘that when the historical documents started piling up in the Ross Library in Winnipeg, old Jamie found himself snowed under. Like so many tycoons, no matter what enlightened opinions he had from time to time, he probably couldn’t give his undivided attention to anything other than the basic moneymaking. So he would have been pleased to find that his daughter-in-law could talk the language he wanted to hear, at the same time taking the more routine administration off his hands.’
‘And her husband?’
Calum Ross, as they had cause to know as far away as the London and Edinburgh offices, had taken after his father in business ruthlessness. Single-mindedly devoted to their commercial operations, he regarded the ageing Jamie’s belated charitable commitments as due to senile sentimentality. A few donations to good causes for tax and prestige reasons, sorted out by their accountant, all right; but not too lavish.
Jamie’s younger son had been very much at odds with his brother. Born in Nova Scotia, David had studied in the US at MIT. His father meant this to fit him to contribute in some high profile way to the family’s business development. Early on he showed what his brother Calum sneered at as ‘arty-crafty bunk’. There were suggestions of a final falling-out when, soon after their mother’s death, their father remarried. His new wife, Nadine, came from a background of old family money and status. Luke’s collection of gossip column stories and fashion magazine features showed her as an expensively dressed yet flashy blonde with a fixed, petulant smile. Calum might have disapproved of a woman so obviously capable of making further inroads into the Ross family finances, but he wasn’t going to risk any open breach with the old man, who still had his hands on the controls.
David Ross had different ideas. Even before his father’s gaudily publicized wedding he threw up his planned career and was written out of Ross history. There were rumours of him ending up in some hippy crowd in Los Angeles. ‘Probably going in for psychedelic painting after a few drug sessions, that kind of thing,’ said Luke.
‘Nobody ever bothered to follow up in detail?’ asked Beth.
‘We were given no instructions to maintain a file on him. Mr Ross isn’t the sort to follow up on people he thinks have let him down.’ Luke turned over three sheets of paper. ‘And then old Jamie’s second woman gets involved with another man and there’s an acrimonious divorce.’
‘But this David doesn’t come back.’ It wasn’t a question. Beth knew that the name of David Ross had not featured in any of the Ross Foundation internal memoirs, annual reports, or news stories.
‘Never heard of again. Or mentioned. Seems to have been written off by the rest of the family. And then Calum gets written off too. Leaving the old man without an heir to take over.’
Luke unfolded a photocopy of the front-page story of a Newfoundland newspaper. One of Calum’s few indulgences had been his boat, kept moored in a creek in Cape Breton. He and his wife Morwenna had gone for a weekend’s sailing and, reported the paper, had been caught in one of the fogs characteristic of those coastal waters. The whole community regarded it as a tragedy that such an accomplished yachtsman as young Mr Ross should somehow lose control and get thrown overboard. Morwenna managed to get the boat back to port but then collapsed, too hysterical to recall exactly what happened. It took a search party two hours to find Calum’s corpse. There were theories about his having been hit by the boom and knocked over the side, but there was no mark of any severe bruise on him, and the shuddering Morwenna simply could not confirm or deny the idea.
Since the collapse of his second marriage, old Jamie Ross had come to rely on her more and more as a confidante, possibly to her husband’s irritation.
‘And,’ concluded Luke, ‘I think we can reasonably assume that for once Slimy Simon is right. It’s to take her mind off the tragedy at Cape Breton that he’s now sending her over here to hustle us along on his pet project.’
‘And she is the potential inheritor of the whole works?’
‘Could be. Interesting to know what’s in her mind, deep down.’
The door opened. Ogilvie made a dramatic entrance, swerving round to hol
d the door open for Morwenna Ross.
‘Thank you for the coffee.’ She swept past him and held out a hand. ‘You must be Luke. So now we can really get down to work.’
Ogilvie edged towards a chair at the end of the table, but she turned a dazzling yet fierce smile on him. ‘I really mustn’t take up any more of your time, Simon. I know you have a lot of commitments. We all keep up with your regular bulletins to head office back home.’
He backed awkwardly away, not happy but not willing to risk disobeying.
‘Now,’ said Mrs Ross. ‘I won’t bore you with details which you probably know better than I do. What I would like are details you know about and I don’t. Where and how we collect the artefacts to authenticate the setting. Our manager back in Cape Breton has dug out a few souvenirs — a spinning wheel that one family managed to take with them, a loom, and a couple of peat irons. We’ve put out an appeal for souvenirs all over Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. And a few settlements in the United States, plus Australia and New Zealand. But we need a lot more. Above all’ — her voice became surprisingly hushed and almost reverent — ‘we do have to find the Ross Tapestry.’
There was a long silence. Morwenna looked from one to the other, waiting for some kind of response. Beth felt sorry for Luke. It was rare to see him fazed, but she sensed that he was struggling between a polite reply and blunt scepticism.
At last it came out. ‘If it exists. If it ever existed.’
‘Oh. It exists.’ She was no longer quietly companionable. ‘Every which way we look, there’s mention of it. It’s an essential part of the fabric of our plans. What we don’t know is where it is. All the indications are that it was left behind, here in the Old Country.’
‘Oh, but —’
‘Before we go any further,’ said Beth hurriedly, to stop Luke blundering into a confrontation so soon, ‘I can confirm that we have you booked, Mrs Ross, for the local arts programme immediately after the television news tomorrow evening.’
‘Yes, Mr Ogilvie did tell me he’d had that set up.’
Beth caught Luke’s eye. Slimy Simon had set it up? They were both aware of a twitch of shrewd amusement from the woman sitting opposite.
‘They’d like you in the studio tomorrow morning for a couple of hours,’ Beth went on, ‘to time the inserts of scenes from those location suggestions your office sent over. They’ve rustled up quite a few from an earlier documentary.’
‘Didn’t know you could get those folk organized so fast.’ Luke’s narrow, rather austere face offered Beth one of those comradely grins that were more flattering than any of the sweet-talk she often got from her pushier PR contacts.
She went on: ‘It might be a good place, Mrs Ross, to appeal for contributions from the public. Some souvenirs must have been handed down through families who did contrive to stay on in the Old Country.’
Luke prodded forward a small cluster of booklets rather as if he were betting a pile of coins at a roulette table. ‘There are some museum catalogues here, Mrs Ross, and —’
‘If we’re going to work together, I must insist that you both call me Morwenna. And if that’s not correct form in the Old Country, too bad. Just for once let’s enjoy a few anachronisms.’
‘Morwenna.’ Luke smiled his sunniest, most relaxed smile. Beth laughed inwardly at the suavity with which the name slid off his tongue. ‘Catalogues,’ he repeated, ‘from a couple of public collections, and one from a tourist exhibition three years ago. I think we might get some items on extended loan. But when it comes to purchasing things, there might be difficulties.’
‘There are no financial problems.’
‘All the same, there’d be some longwinded negotiations, and I understand we don’t have that much time.’
‘Too right we don’t. Mr Ross’ — the way she intoned the name reverberated solemnly in Beth’s head, just the way it did when Simon Ogilvie uttered it — ‘wants to see the croft and contents restored before he … before he’s too old to appreciate it.’
Was the woman hoping, as they had half suspected, to inherit the whole business, and pandering to the old man’s every whim so that she could stay in his good books right to the end?
Beth said: ‘I think your appearance on telly tomorrow might bring in some valuable responses.’
‘I guess so. But there’s one hell of a risk there as well. We give an address where we can be contacted, and —’
‘And,’ Luke finished, ‘every greedy chancer in Scotland turns out the attic and lumbers us with … well, lumber.’
‘We’re going to need someone to sift through whatever comes in. And someone with specialized knowledge to go hunting on our behalf.’
Beth was aware of Luke trying not to bristle. ‘With all the resources I have … we have on the premises —’
‘I always believe in getting the best specialist in whatever field we’re working in. Save us a whole lot of time. And a lot of errors.’
To Beth, Luke’s expression was so familiar, as if he were mentally standing in front of those rows of bookshelves and filing boxes or checking on his computer screen, identifying the most important reference and reaching out to pluck it from its place.
The shift hadn’t escaped Morwenna. ‘You know somebody?’
‘Well …’
‘Come on, out with it. Something suspicious about the guy?’
‘It’s a woman,’ said Luke.
‘And nothing suspicious,’ said Beth. She was still closely enough in touch with Luke to know who he had in mind. ‘Just the opposite. But I’ve heard she’s very busy at the moment, working on a book. Probably not in the market for outside work right now.’
‘We make it worth her while, she can leave her book over till later. Who is this woman?’
‘Lady Torrance of Black Knowe, in the Borders.’
Quick to pick up Beth’s cue, Luke played his keyboard and summoned up a colour photograph of a tall, dark stone tower rising from a hill with a cluster of more modern houses in the vale below.
‘Some kind of aristocrat with a hobby?’ said Morwenna dubiously.
‘Before she married Sir Nicholas’ — Luke was happily summoning up every detail from triggered memory — ‘she was a police detective. Specializing in art thefts and forgeries. She was the one who unearthed the truth behind those Sargent and Ramsay fakes in the Brigid Weir scam a few years back. I believe she still acts as part-time regional consultant to Scotland Yard’s Arts and Antiques squad.’
‘Get her.’
‘We can’t be sure she’d be interested,’ ventured Beth.
‘Make her interested. And make it clear that money’s no object. We want the best, we pay for the best.’ Morwenna’s gaze was like the sudden glare of a torch stabbing at each of them in turn. ‘When Mr Ross is well enough to fly in, everything has to be ready.’
3
The mail rarely reached Black Knowe before the middle of the morning, delivered by a postman who also brought the morning papers. Today there was a heavier package than usual. Mrs Robson stumped upstairs with it under her arm, dropping two letters on the landing and having to stoop and retrieve them.
‘Sir Nicholas.’ She panted with some exaggeration as she put the package and envelopes heavily on the coffee table. ‘Your Ladyship.’ Then, to show that she was really fond of them and didn’t mind the effort, ‘It’s a fine morning, so it is.’
Nick pushed his coffee cup to one side and reached for the paper, nodding at the package. ‘That one’s for you, my love. Some blistering comments from your chums, I’d guess. And I’d also guess it’ll be an excuse for you to shut yourself away for the rest of the day.’
Lesley had been eagerly awaiting the arrival of these proofs. Work on her book on art forgeries had taken the larger part of a year — not counting those past years of experience in the CID Special Operations Unit which had led up to the publisher’s commission — and now there was just this last stage to get through. Nick was right. She intended to shut herself away and
go through eagerly, if a bit apprehensively, the comments and criticisms she had asked for from old contacts in the Art and Antiques squad. It was good of them to spare their time, considering that they were being cut down in size in the latest of a misguided series of supposed economies. She was glad to be out of that rat race; but glad to know she still had friends there.
The screen at the side of her desk showed she had an email waiting. It could wait. With a lovely feeling of self-indulgence she opened the bulky package and stacked the proof sheets up in front of her.
Then the phone rang. She sat very still, silently pleading with Nick to stop reading the paper and pick up the extension beside his armchair. After a few rings he must have done just that.
Then the buzzer near her knee sounded.
‘A Beth Crichton of the Ross Foundation ringing about an urgent email you haven’t answered,’ said Nick apologetically. ‘Just can’t bear to wait, can they? I’ve tried to tell her you’re very busy, but she insists she’s got a very important matter to discuss. She’s sure you’ll be interested. Shall I still tell her to push off?’
Lesley looked longingly at the top sheet on her desk, with a scribbled comment in familiar handwriting. It was bound to be more interesting than some stranger’s impatient concerns. Yet she was unwilling to let Nick shoulder the task of finding a polite — or maybe not so polite — way of sending the caller on her way.
‘I suppose I’d better take it. But darling, listen in, will you? Just in case I’m in danger of letting myself be dragged into making some silly mistake.’
‘So I’ll be the one to carry the can? Oh, very cunning.’
