A Study in Gold

by Annie Dalton

  Anna picked up an album, flipped to the front page and saw herself on her seventh birthday, wearing an unflattering party dress. She decided to concentrate on pictures which hadn’t made the final cut. There was the possibility they’d hold more surprises.

  She could hear the faint, familiar chords of Van Morrison’s ‘Moondance’, coming from the top floor flat; her lodger Dana’s break-up music. Tomorrow, Dana would emerge deathly pale in sunglasses and drop a couple of empty bottles in the recycling, before driving off to the Sir John Radcliffe where she worked in orthopaedics.

  ‘It was room service,’ Jake said, back from answering his door. ‘Do you mind if I eat and talk? I am starving.’

  ‘So long as you don’t mind if I sort photographs and talk.’

  Anna picked up a fading, colour photo of a long-ago family picnic. She suppressed a little huff of laughter. Her mother (she knew it was her mother, her father never took the photos), had been trying to get all her children suitably posed on the same picnic blanket. Anna, the bossy big sister, held a bewildered, three-year old Dan in such a vice-like grip that it looked as if she was marching him off to jail. Will was just a blur of chubby baby legs and feet, as he crawled rapidly out of shot. Her little sister Lottie hadn’t yet been born. Anna put the photo to one side and began leafing through the others, as she filled Jake in on her visit to Dog-eared Adventures.

  ‘Fischer came right out and accused your father of being party to some kind of shady cover-up? That can’t have been fun.’

  ‘Not really.’ She’d found a photo of Dan on his first day at the Dragon School, grinning with mixed pride and trepidation. ‘The more I think about it,’ she said, bringing her mind back to David Fischer, ‘the more I can’t really blame him. Getting back his grandfather’s Vermeer has become like his sacred task.’

  ‘And you know what that’s like?’

  ‘Exactly. And he does have persuasive evidence.’ She explained about the photographs and the porter, Lionel Rosser’s sighting of the Hans Thoma painting, which had hung in the Fischer family’s apartment in Vienna.

  ‘I took Bonnie out for a long walk over the University Parks this afternoon,’ Anna said, ‘to try to clear my head and I was thinking, even if Michael Kirchmann did make a profit from these artworks, that doesn’t mean he set out to cheat those poor people. Maybe he couldn’t see any other way to protect his own loved ones?’ Anna knew that if, by some divine miracle, she could have her family back alive and well, she’d do anything at all to keep them that way.

  ‘How do we know what we’d do, you know, if we were faced the same circumstances?’

  ‘We don’t,’ Jake said with feeling. He’d served in Iraq and Afghanistan, seen human beings behave in ways she didn’t want to imagine. ‘Are you applying the same thinking to your dad?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m trying,’ she said. ‘Though it’s hard to reconcile the Julian I knew with the person David Fischer described. I think I shouldn’t leap to judge him without knowing what really happened.’

  ‘If my schedule wasn’t so tight, I’d love to help you out, dig around on your behalf.’ Jake rarely complained about his life, which was currently a relentless round of hotel rooms, meetings and conferences. He focused on the upside, for instance that his current lifestyle allowed him and Anna to spend precious time together.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘But the truth is, I could do some digging around for myself, only I’m scared of ending up like the female version of that mad Spanish knight, charging at windmills and then I’ll never get to the bottom of what happened to my family.’ Hearing herself say these words out loud, Anna was startled. She hadn’t known she felt this way.

  ‘OK,’ Jake said. ‘Let’s think this through a minute. First, I believe we already agreed there are no coincidences?’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘Second,’ he said firmly, ‘I refer you to the principle, informally known as the Cosmic Ripple Effect.’

  She laughed. ‘You’ve been spending too much time with Tansy.’

  ‘To give you just one example, darlin’,’ Jake’s intonation was noticeably more southern, a sign he was utterly serious. ‘The day I found Bonnie guarding that little boy’s body, I could not have imagined the ripples that would spread out from the simple act of rescuing her. I was just someone who’d seen too much killing, evening up the score by saving one small, flea-bitten life. But, honey, it’s turned out to be so much bigger than that.’

  Anna had picked up a photo but could not have told you of what or of whom, because of the sudden blur of tears.

  ‘Third,’ Jake went on, sounding slightly husky with emotion himself, ‘I once saw this card on the wall of a Buddhist café, I forget where, it said “The obstacle is the path”. What if this is your path, Anna? Not a side-trip or an obstacle you need to dig up or fight or swerve around. What if it’s leading you right where you need to be, the way saving Bonnie led me to you?’

  Anna had to stop to blow her nose. ‘Thank you,’ she said, unsteadily.

  ‘Having made you cry, I am now callously starting to eat my main course,’ Jake said.

  ‘Yeah, you brute,’ she said, managing a laugh. ‘You enjoy every selfish mouthful.’

  She blinked away the last of her tears and the photograph in her hand wobbled back into focus. Another birthday party, Will’s second. It had a double, no, a triple exposure, so that he seemed to be three ecstatic, little boys holding three brightly-coloured, Fisher Price trains. She leafed through photos: one of herself in the egg and spoon race at Sports Day, Dan in his first cricket whites, Anna and Tim at the Freemantle family’s Halloween party, bobbing for apples.

  Upstairs Dana had got tired of ‘Moondance’ and was playing ‘All Things Must Pass’, by George Harrison.

  From the corner of her eye, Anna noticed Bonnie joyously toss a bone-shaped treat into the air. She’d sneaked it upstairs when Anna wasn’t looking, then got carried away by the excitement of ownership and started tossing it and catching it again with an audible snap, sometimes giving it an occasional, possessive lick. Anna described this for Jake’s entertainment, then took the next photo from the pile. Instead of another school sports day or Nativity play, she found herself looking at a picture of her parents, Julia and Julian, both wearing enormous 1980s sunglasses, against a backdrop of snowy mountains; the only photograph she’d found of the two of them so far, something that seemed, if not sinister, at least slightly concerning. She flipped it over and saw that her mother had written on the reverse; Innsbruck 1988.

  I believe we both agree that there are no coincidences.

  1988. The year that her grandfather, Charles Hopkins, had finally been forced, through ill-health, to take a back seat in the family auction house and her father, at the age of thirty-five, had assumed the responsibility for running Hempels. And at some point, for reasons unknown, he had taken her mother to Innsbruck …

  ‘Jake, I’ve got to go,’ Anna said urgently. ‘I just need to quickly ask my grandfather something.’

  She grabbed her car keys, called Bonnie and hurried out with her into the balmy May evening.

  When she walked in, she found her grandfather peacefully listening to a concert on Radio Three. As usual, he was delighted to see her and Bonnie. Anna’s White Shepherd immediately sat at his feet, eyes bright, hoping for further treats. Anna sat down, then almost immediately stood up, too jittery to obey the normal niceties.

  ‘I’ve been going through old photos,’ she said abruptly, ‘and I needed to check with you about something.’ She handed him the photo. George Ottaway put on his glasses and studied the picture in silence.

  ‘Do you remember Mum and Dad going to Innsbruck?’ she asked. ‘I’d have been about five years old, so it would have been before Dan was born.’

  Her grandfather was still looking at the photo.

  ‘I remember they went abroad, yes,’ he said. ‘It was their sixth wedding anniversary. They’d missed out on their honeymoon because of problem
s with the auction house. You came to stay with us for two weeks and they had a belated honeymoon travelling around Europe. I think Innsbruck was one of the places they stayed.’

  ‘My parents went off and left a five-year-old child for two weeks?’ Anna was incredulous.

  ‘Darling, you didn’t miss them at all!’ he said with a chuckle. ‘The only time you cried was when they turned up to take you home and then you had the most spectacular tantrum. Julian was most put out!’

  He’s ninety years old, she reminded herself. He grew up in a different time. It would not occur to George Ottaway that a five-year old’s ‘spectacular tantrum’ could have anything to do with her distress at being abandoned by her parents.

  He handed back the photo.

  ‘This has upset you, hasn’t it?’ He sounded baffled.

  Anna hadn’t known she was going to ask him, until she heard herself say, ‘Grandpa, have you ever heard anyone mention a Vermeer painting called A Study in Gold?’

  She saw a flicker of reaction, so quickly veiled that she immediately doubted she’d seen it at all.

  ‘No, never.’

  Her grandfather sounded uncharacteristically gruff. He quickly reached down to stroke Bonnie, with a suddenly tremulous hand.

  It was the first time she’d suspected her grandfather of lying to her. There had been so many lies already and now her grandfather, her faithful guiding star, was adding to these sticky layers of untruth. Her sense of betrayal was so acute that she very nearly walked out.

  The moment passed. She made them both a pot of tea, and they talked, too politely, about other things for half an hour or so.

  Driving back, catching the alert gleam of Bonnie’s dark eyes in her mirror, Anna kept remembering how her grandfather’s hand shook, as he gruffly dismissed her question and that look in his eyes; an old man’s plea not to question his version of reality, which had made it impossible to challenge him. The memory was like an ache in her chest.

  She had to go back to Hempels. She had to persuade Thomas Kirchmann or Alexei to talk to her. David Fischer had enough evidence to warrant further investigation into his claims. So why was everyone hell-bent on denying it?

  Next morning, Anna was sitting at a pavement table outside a café in South Kensington, until it was time for the auction house to open. She sipped her mediocre coffee, ate an almond croissant and, in between, she exchanged texts with Tansy, who was already at work in her gallery but not noticeably rushed off her feet. Isadora had already filled Tansy in on the events of the previous day, so Anna told her about the photo she’d found of her parents coincidentally holidaying in Innsbruck.

  Is that in Switzerland?

  Tansy’s geography was famously vague, Anna typed her reply.

  Austria.

  Where they have cakes like in Pfeffers?

  And schnitzel with noodles and whiskers on kittens.

  Ha-ha, how very Julie Andrews.

  Seconds later Anna received a texted emoji of hands folded in prayer.

  Can we go on a road trip? Just you and me? I’m so overdue for an adventure.

  How would Liam feel about that?

  Don’t care! Tansy flashed back. Liam’s doing my nut! A lurid scream emoji followed.

  Anna couldn’t help smiling, it was so Tansy, but she was also concerned for her friend. What had gone wrong between her and Liam? She dabbed up the last crumbs of her croissant and stood up.

  I can do this. I can.

  This time, when she arrived at Hempels, Anna found Ms Carmody, the receptionist, at her desk in the foyer.

  ‘Mr Kirchmann is out of his office,’ she said. ‘And Mr Lenkov said he’ll be late in today. But Ms Jinks is available if you’d like to talk to her?’

  Anna’s heart sank. Why hadn’t she phoned ahead? Leaving aside the PA’s off-putting super efficiency, Alice had to be seven or eight years younger than Anna at least, so it was unlikely she could shed any light on her father’s connection with David Fischer. But Anna could hardly back out now and agreed to talk to Ms Jinks.

  Alice soon appeared, wearing another of her expensive little shifts. This one was the colour of ripe damsons, a kind of twilight purple. Her long hair was done up in a silky French plait to show off her swingy gold earrings.

  ‘How funny, I was just thinking about you and here you are!’ she said, smiling. ‘Let’s go up to my office and have a proper natter.’

  When she stepped out of the lift on to the second floor, Anna experienced the same disorientation she’d felt on her earlier visit. Everything seemed so light, spacious and ordered. In her father’s time, the second floor had been divided between an open-plan jumble, where Hempels’ consultants competed for desks and telephones and a scruffy little accounts office.

  ‘Heavens.’ A tiny furrow appeared in Alice’s forehead, as Anna described the original set-up. ‘That does sound chaotic!’

  ‘It was totally chaotic,’ Anna agreed. And gloomy and grubby, she thought. But as a small child, she’d found it exciting too, a place where she might stumble on long-forgotten treasures.

  Alice’s office was a bright, white-painted cubicle, with a view over an adjacent hotel.

  ‘Coffee?’ she said. ‘It’s quite good coffee, though Herr Kirchmann pretends to disagree.’ She laughed. She was noticeably more human today and much less like the perfect android PA. Perhaps with her boss away, she felt entitled to an hour off from her tireless smoothing, managing and filtering of Herr Kirchmann’s world.

  Anna took a seat and waited while Alice fetched their coffee. It came in proper china mugs, not plastic cups and was as good as she’d promised. Alice perched on the edge of her desk, one foot swinging slightly in its suede ballet slipper, which was the exact golden-brown colour of demerara sugar. She looked barely old enough to leave school, let alone hold down such a high-powered job.

  ‘I was genuinely thinking about you, you know,’ Alice said earnestly. ‘That wasn’t just some PA ploy to win your confidence!’

  Anna laughed. ‘Ok, I believe you.’ She felt herself relax a little. ‘What were you thinking though?’

  ‘Oh, just how alike we are in some ways,’ Alice said. ‘I mean, your family’s connection with Hempels goes back generations and so does mine.’ She saw Anna’s surprise. ‘It’s true! We’re Hempels twins!’

  ‘Oh, wow, I didn’t know,’ Anna said. ‘Did you used to come here as a child?’ She had a charming image of herself and Alice, two solitary little girls occupying different time-lines, separately exploring Hempels’ ramshackle palace of treasures and gazing up wide-eyed at the same stuffed giraffe.

  ‘No,’ Alice said, dispelling this fantasy. ‘I never saw inside. My granddad was old school. Work was work and women and children just got in the way.’ She sketched an impatient little wave. ‘But my grandad and his dad – and I’m almost sure his dad before that – absolutely lived and breathed Hempels and so I feel like this auction house is kind of in my blood. My grandfather worked closely with your father and your grandfather. You see? Official confirmation that we’re twins!’ She sipped from her cup, looking at Anna over the rim. ‘Isn’t that a funny little coincidence?’

  ‘It is strange,’ Anna agreed. ‘Did you always want to work here, even as a child?’

  ‘God no! I was going to be an actress or – I don’t know – a rock star. I was headed for big fame! I couldn’t see how messing about with a lot of fusty old antiques would get me anywhere I wanted to be. I was an extremely shallow little girl, I’m afraid,’ she added with disarming frankness.

  ‘Weren’t we all?’ Anna said.

  ‘However, life has a way of changing us,’ Alice said. ‘And, as you see, here I am! I like to think that Lionel would be proud of me if he could see me now!’

  Anna set her mug down very carefully on the corner of Alice’s desk.

  ‘Lionel was your grandfather? Lionel Rosser who worked here as a porter?’

  She felt a distinct chill enter the little office.

  �
�He might have started off as a porter,’ Alice almost snapped, ‘but he was an art expert in his own right by the time your father took over. He wasn’t just lugging heavy furniture about.’

  ‘I honestly didn’t mean to imply that,’ Anna said quickly. ‘I know that porters in auction houses often become incredibly knowledgeable. It’s more that I recently heard your grandfather’s name mentioned in connection with something that’s been giving me some sleepless nights. That’s really why I’m here.’

  ‘I see.’ Alice’s voice still had an edge. ‘I’m sorry you’ve been having sleepless nights, but I can’t see where my grandfather comes in.’

  ‘I heard a rumour that, at one time, Lionel was concerned Hempels might be dealing in stolen art.’ Anna tried to make her voice sound neutral. ‘Had you ever heard anything like that?’

  ‘Of course, I knew about that!’ Alice flashed back. ‘The world of London auction houses is so incestuous; it was inevitable that it would filter back. But it isn’t something I exactly enjoy talking about.’ She shifted her gaze slightly so that she could look out of the window, though there was nothing to see but row upon row of more windows, all with their blinds firmly pulled down. Anna heard Alice take a breath.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It upsets me to think about it even now.’

  ‘No, I’m sorry,’ Anna said. ‘I’m sorry I upset you.’

  Alice gave her a wan smile.

  ‘Everyone understands about dementia now, don’t they? My mother still blames herself for not realising. Denial, I suppose? It’s a frightening thing to see someone you loved and looked up to gradually losing their mind.’

  Anna had that sickening sensation of almost missing a step. ‘You mean he—’

  ‘He started making wild accusations against everybody,’ Alice said. ‘Not just against your poor grandfather, but my parents, his oldest and dearest friends. It was mortifying. He started forgetting to shave and change his clothes. He’d bring back some rusty junk he’d found in someone’s garage and insist it was going to make all our fortunes. Just awful.’ Alice passed her hand across her face. ‘And so I wouldn’t give too much credence to that sad little story if I were you,’ she added crisply, sounding more like her PA self. ‘Herr Kirchmann and his partners were brilliant though once we’d got a diagnosis. They were so generous to Lionel in his final years.’