A Study in Gold

by Annie Dalton

  Initially, her conversation with Dominic had left Anna feeling that she’d been scattered into a million tiny drifting pieces, her very last certainty stripped away. But today she felt, she felt … on the cusp of something new, a new way of being in the world. It’s time, she thought. I can do it. I think I can really do it now. She hurried out into the garden to find Bonnie.

  ‘I need company,’ she told her.

  Still holding her mug of tea, Anna ran upstairs to her study, her bare feet leaving damp prints on the polished wood. Bonnie bounded after her, catching her excitement.

  She opened the door and hesitated. For a moment, the room was haunted by the memory of Alice Jinks: ‘I was trying to be your friend. To look out for you, because of us both being Hempels girls.’ Anna set down her cup, took the key from the desk drawer, unlocked the double doors of her armoire and recoiled as if she’d come up against an electric fence.

  Chaos. Madness. Not her own private, far superior version of a police investigation room. Just a cupboard crammed with agony that had nowhere else to go. She forced herself to walk into that appalling force-field, until she was close enough to see every photograph, every word on every news clipping, police report or witness statement, all held together with a cat’s cradle of criss-crossed tapes. Thick black scribbles added whenever traumatic memories overwhelmed her:

  Where ARE You? Will Somebody PLEASE just BELIEVE me? I KNOW you’re out there!!!

  The words scrawled across fuzzy photos of Dominic and her subsequent boyfriend, Max Strauli.

  Anna’s eyes stung with pity for her broken younger self. How ill she’d been. How lost. Not any more, she thought.

  She grabbed her waste paper bin, desperate to be rid of this evidence of the futile years of pain. She reached up to rip out the floor-plan of the room, where her little sister, Lottie, had been butchered in her bed.

  But as she went to touch the brittle and yellowed paper, her hand jerked back, it seemed, of its own volition. It would be like a betrayal, like giving up ever knowing what had happened to her family that night.

  Her heart still thumping with unused adrenalin, Anna closed the cupboard doors, relocked them and left the room followed by a puzzled Bonnie.

  ‘I’m not ready,’ Anna said aloud at the top of the stairs, and had to fight back tears. ‘I don’t know if I’ll ever be ready.’

  That afternoon, Anna went to meet Isadora and Tansy at the Randolph, where Isadora had booked them a table for high tea.

  ‘It’ll be an opportunity to catch up on everything that’s been happening,’ she’d added, when she’d phoned Anna to remind her.

  Anna arrived to find her friends already seated in front of a glorious teatime spread in the hotel’s opulent drawing-room. Taking in the crystal chandeliers and gilt-framed paintings, Anna said, ‘I can see luxury is getting to be a habit for the dog-walking detectives!’

  Tansy patted one of the squashy, russet-upholstered chairs so Anna could sit down.

  ‘I was just telling Isadora that I’m suffering from serious dog envy,’ she said earnestly. ‘I’m not a real dog-walking detective now am I? Though Buster was only borrowed and, to be honest,’ she added, ‘I wouldn’t actually choose him for my doggie soulmate.’

  ‘What kind of dog would you choose?’ Isadora asked.

  ‘A rascally mutt,’ Tansy said at once. ‘With a slipping down sock and an eye patch.’

  ‘Sounds like a cross between Just William and Captain Hook,’ Isadora commented.

  ‘You could go to a rescue shelter,’ Anna suggested. ‘You never know. You might find rascally, little William waiting for you?’

  Tansy shook her head. ‘Maybe one day, when things feel more settled.’ She quickly changed the subject. ‘Isadora says you talked to Dominic.’

  ‘We talked for hours,’ Anna said.

  ‘So, we can conclude she didn’t hate him,’ Isadora said drily. She helped herself to a miniature smoked salmon sandwich.

  ‘This is lovely of you,’ Anna gestured at the tea table with its array of sandwiches, scones, tiny cakes and tartlets.

  ‘Well, when I initially booked this, it was to compensate me and Tansy for missing out on coffee and cake at Pfeffers,’ Isadora explained.

  ‘Oh, no, now I feel terrible,’ Tansy said. ‘Because I don’t think we can ever compensate you for missing out on the Orient Express!’

  ‘You can’t!’ Isadora said crisply, but her eyes held a teasing glint. ‘Here’s the thing – I’m about to do something that I almost never do.’ She flashed them another of her playful smiles. ‘I was wrong. Not for playing devil’s advocate but for not trusting your instincts. And now we’ve all forgiven each other,’ she added swiftly, ‘let’s get down to business! Thomas Kirchmann has convinced Anna – and me – that he was in no way involved with the stolen Vermeer. So where does that leave us? Assuming Lili and David were both murdered because of their connection with this painting, who could have done it? Who had a motive?’

  Tansy was spreading clotted cream on her scone. ‘My money is on the bad Russian,’ she said cheerfully.

  ‘Bad Russian?’ Anna said.

  ‘Alexei, isn’t that his name? The man who always remembers to buy strudel for his wife.’

  Isadora laughed. ‘Not the “bad Russian” trope, darling, that’s been done to death!’

  Tansy bit into her scone and closed her eyes with pleasure.

  ‘I’d love to know what happened to the Vermeer after Kirchmann saw it in the Scott-Neville’s library,’ Isadora mused.

  ‘Yes, well,’ Anna said, thinking about her own life and her own mysteries. ‘It’s possible we’ll never know. Not for sure.’

  Isadora shot her a searching look, seeming to understand that Anna wasn’t just talking about the Vermeer. ‘And could you live with that, darling?’

  ‘You don’t always get a choice,’ Anna said quietly. She’d become aware of her mobile vibrating inside her bag. She took it out and said, surprised, ‘It’s Dominic. If you don’t mind, I’m going to take this.’ She took her phone into the hotel lobby with its view over the Ashmolean. ‘Dominic?’

  ‘Sorry, Anna, this is going to be a big information dump.’ Today Dominic sounded like a clipped, public schoolboy to the point of self-parody. It’s his default setting, she remembered, when he was under stress.

  ‘What’s happened?’ she asked.

  ‘Kirchmann told me you’d asked him about a Vermeer?’

  ‘That’s right, but—’

  ‘Sorry to interrupt,’ he said, ‘but the police are on their way to take me in for questioning about Lili’s murder. My solicitor is here. In fact, he’s standing right beside me hissing at me to hurry up. Don’t worry,’ he said, before Anna could react. ‘I didn’t kill her. I even have an alibi. It’s something to do with emails I supposedly sent to her. It’s all rather confused. But there’s some stuff I need to tell you as a matter of urgency.’ He took a breath. ‘I – knew about A Study in Gold, Ok? In fact, as part of my belated attempt to atone for centuries of the Scott-Nevilles’ wrongs, I tried to reunite David Fischer with his Vermeer.’

  Anna was clutching her phone so tightly against her ear by this time that her fingers had gone slightly numb.

  ‘I should have told you last night, but I thought … to be honest I didn’t know how you’d react. I know you had your – not entirely unfounded – concerns about me and my family, but it was the first time we’d talked in over a decade and I didn’t want that to muddy the waters, if that makes sense?’

  Anna knew exactly why he’d think that and it made her feel completely torn. She could feel all her old Pavlovian suspicions kicking in. He knew about the painting. What else did he know? She was like an amputee, she thought, plagued by unreal sensations in a phantom limb.

  She forced herself to focus on Dominic’s voice explaining how he and Lili had come to meet at a fund-raiser at the National Gallery. In passing, she’d mentioned that she was working on art restitution. He’d liked
and trusted Lili, and suddenly felt guided.

  ‘I realize that makes me sound like a religious nut, Anna, but that’s what happened,’ he confided.

  ‘You knew where it was?’

  ‘I knew exactly where it was. After Kirchmann spotted the Vermeer in our library, my father hid it behind an amateur, not to say terrible, watercolour painting of our folly painted by my mother.’

  Anna vaguely remembered the Scott-Nevilles’ folly, a Victorian take on a timeless romantic ruin.

  ‘My old man was a perverse bastard, as you know, and the idea of this lost masterpiece hanging on his wall, for all intense and purposes in plain sight, really got his juices going. But then, when he knew he was dying, he wrote to me revealing the truth, like he’d perpetrated some wonderful practical joke. He signed off with his usual wit and charm, saying he was having it auctioned off and that as his touchy-feely Christian son, I wouldn’t see a penny from it.

  ‘Sure enough, when I came back with Ghislaine to take over the estate, something even my father couldn’t prevent, my mother’s watercolour was no longer on the wall. I told Lili all this. The last time I heard from her she was lit up with excitement. She said she’d been called in by Hempels to advise on a completely unrelated painting and, as she was passing someone’s office, the door opened and she saw what she believed might be my mother’s watercolour hanging on the wall. I don’t know what happened after that, but my gut-feeling is that Lili was so angry about how David Fischer had been treated that she went back later and attempted to retrieve it.’

  ‘Dominic, you absolutely have to tell this to the police!’ Anna said.

  He gave a short laugh. ‘I did! It turns out that babbling about stolen Vermeers and Nazi gold is a sure-fire way of getting yourself evicted from a police station.’ Anna heard agitated voices in the background. ‘I’ve got to go, but as soon as I’m done, I’ll call you, Ok?’

  ‘Yes, please. And Dominic, good luck. I’m so sorry you’ve got to go through this.’

  She went back to the tea-room, where Isadora and Tansy were chatting quietly as they started in on the cakes.

  ‘You could go back to college, darling,’ Isadora was saying. ‘You are so smart and you’re still so young. You could do anything you like, even in these strangely blighting times.’

  Anna resumed her seat and quickly drained her tea cup.

  ‘Are you Ok?’ Isadora asked her. ‘You’ve gone awfully pale.’

  ‘I’m a bit shocked,’ Anna said. ‘The police want to question Dominic about Lili’s murder. There are some incriminating emails, or something. He wasn’t very clear.’

  ‘Has he got an alibi?’ Tansy said.

  Anna gave a tight nod. ‘But even so.’

  ‘How worrying,’ Isadora said, ‘but I am going to pour us all some more tea and I hope you will help us dispose of some of these divine little cakes?’

  ‘I’m sure I can manage that!’ Anna said, trying to smile.

  She drove home, but instead of getting out of her car, Anna sat staring at her phone. She’d braved Herr Kirchmann and survived a life-changing conversation with her nemesis Dominic Scott-Neville, so why was she still avoiding talking to her grandfather? She hadn’t been to visit him since her trip to Innsbruck. They’d spoken on the phone, stilted exchanges that left her feeling wrong-footed and oddly guilty.

  Call him again, before you lose your nerve, she thought. Ask him what’s wrong.

  He answered on the third ring.

  ‘Hello Grandpa. How are you?’ she said.

  ‘I’m fine, darling, how are you?’ Her grandfather sounded tired and, to her dismay, slightly wary.

  She’d done this to him, Anna thought with a pang. It was up to her to put it right. She drew a breath. ‘Things haven’t been right between us, not since I asked if my dad had ever talked to you about a Vermeer. It’s my fault, for not saying something earlier but I can’t bear to go on pretending nothing’s changed, when it has.’

  He didn’t immediately respond; she could just hear him breathing on the end of the phone.

  ‘I hate us not being friends,’ she went on, ‘and I know really that you’d never lie to me, but I have this feeling that I’m not getting the whole story from you.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, I just couldn’t!’ he burst out. She heard his voice break. ‘I was so ashamed. If I’d listened to your father, if I’d taken him seriously when he came to ask my advice about that painting then … I know it’s stupid, but all these years I couldn’t help thinking, he might still—’ he let out a wrenching sob. ‘Your father might still be alive. They might all be alive.’

  ‘Oh, Grandpa, don’t. Please don’t be upset.’ Anna felt her eyes filling in sympathy.

  ‘Rationally, I know that might not be why he died. But we’d only talked such a short while before it happened. Julian needed someone to turn to and I let him down. I was no better than that loathsome snob Charles. You must know I’d never deliberately hurt you, Anna. I love you far too much for that.’

  ‘I love you too,’ she told him tearfully.

  Her grandfather hadn’t lied. He was not hiding a dark secret. He’d been evasive because he’d felt desperately guilty; something she might have recognised sooner, Anna thought, ashamed, if she hadn’t been caught up in her own dramas. They talked until they were both feeling calmer, then she said, ‘I’ll come over at the weekend. We’ll go out to lunch somewhere nice and we can have a proper talk.’

  Back in her kitchen with no one to distract her from her thoughts, Anna was flooded with fresh anxiety for Dominic. She knew how it felt to come under suspicion. After her family’s murders the police had subjected Anna to lengthy questioning about her and Max’s dodgier associates. They hadn’t suspected her of direct involvement with her family’s deaths, but for a time they’d seemed to believe she could lead them to the killers. The bad daughter, Anna thought. The mad, bad daughter.

  Inevitably, her thoughts circled back to her own toxic legacy. Forget family baggage, Anna had an entire armoire. She imagined herself dragging it with her into the future. Setting off with Jake to make a fresh start; Oh, I’ll be bringing my murder cupboard with me, if that’s Ok?

  She remembered her evening with Tim. The sweet childhood memories they’d shared. Those were the images she wanted to hold on to, not the bloody horror she’d stumbled over that terrifying, summer’s night.

  ‘That’s it!’ she told Bonnie. ‘I’m getting rid of it right now! You can be my witness.’

  Anna ran upstairs, Bonnie following eagerly at her heels. She threw open the door and plugged in her shredder, weirdly elated. She was finally going to be free. She unlocked the armoire, flung back the double doors and made a wild grab for the nearest piece of paper.

  And found herself physically unable to let it go.

  Anna let out a scream of frustration and rage. She kicked her waste bin, sending it hurtling across the study, crashing into her running machine with a metallic bong.

  Bonnie stared at her in alarm. She sidled up to Anna, tail drooping, doing her anxious grin. Anna dropped to her haunches, instantly contrite.

  ‘I’m not mad with you, you lovely dog. I’m mad with me. What is wrong with me!’ Bonnie regarded her owner for a moment as if she was wondering how best to handle this new crisis, then she very firmly and deliberately pressed her forehead against Anna’s, remaining in that mutually uncomfortable position without moving a muscle, until Anna reluctantly let out a rueful giggle.

  ‘Ok, Wonder Dog! I’m cured. You can stop my therapy now!’

  Anna and her dog went back down to the kitchen. She found Bonnie one of her favourite crunchy treats and made herself a pot of Doctor Chillout’s tea, with lavender and camomile. She had bought it for just such a mental health emergency, but it turned out to be so foul that she made herself a cup of strong coffee instead. She needed to eat, she thought, but she couldn’t face cooking, plus her fridge was almost empty. Maybe she’d order a takeout?

  Her phone lit
up. Jake had sent her a text.

  I thought we could take George out to lunch this weekend?

  Anna shook her head amazed. She texted back.

  Ever thought of setting up as a mind-reader?

  She heard a ping from her laptop. Anjali had sent her links to the photos taken by High Table’s photographer at the VE Night ball. To Anna’s dismay there were over 200. She decided the photos could wait until she’d ordered and eaten her takeout.

  By the time she’d eaten and stashed her plate in the dishwasher, she could hear a steady rain falling outside. She opened her laptop and began working her way through the photos. She had no serious hopes she’d find anything since the police had already been through them. As she clicked on photo after photo, Anna found herself feeling almost nostalgic for their murder mystery weekend. Looking at these slickly professional photos she could see why they’d all, herself included, gradually fallen under Anjali’s 1940s spell. The clothes, the hairstyles, the hectic VE Night atmosphere came across as utterly authentic. Anna recognised the man in the kilt, importuning some unknown female. A beautiful shot of Isadora, waltzing with her air-force pilot could have been a still from a 1940s movie. There was a breath-taking photo of several, wildly jitterbugging couples, who must have come with one of the re-enactment groups. As she continued to trawl through group photos, Anna was surprised to spot herself with Tansy and Isadora, looking unexpectedly glamorous in her evening dress and almost relaxed! She scribbled down the serial number thinking she might get copies for herself and her friends.

  Then some nagging awareness that Anna couldn’t quite explain, made her go back to the photo of the jitterbugging dancers. This time she took special note of the gilt-framed mirror just off to the side, where the photographer had captured a passing reflection.

  Anna zoomed in closer and her mouth was suddenly as dry as cotton wool. Even magnified, the reflected figure, a shadowy profile, was indistinct. But Anna knew who it was: I came to warn you. Don’t trust anybody.

  ‘Alice Jinks,’ she whispered and felt her heart jump, warning her of a danger she couldn’t yet define.