A Place of Hiding (Inspector Lynley, #12)(187)

“At the end of the war, Guy was twelve, I was nine. It was years before he could go to France and find out what had happened to our family. We knew from the last letter we had that they’d left everything behind but the clothing they could fit into one suitcase each. So the pretty lady with the book and the quill remained, along with the rest of their belongings, in the safekeeping of a neighbour, Didier Bombard. He told Guy that the Nazis came for it all, as property of Jews. But of course he might have been lying. We knew that.”

“How on earth would your brother have found it, then?” Deborah asked. “After all these years?”

“He was a very determined man, my brother. He would have hired as many people as he needed: first to search for it and then to acquire it.”

“International Access,” St. James noted.

Ruth said, “What’s that?”

“It’s where his money went, the money he had transferred out of his account here on Guernsey. It’s a company in England.”

“Ah. So that’s it.” She reached for a small lamp that lit the top of her brother’s desk, and she moved it over, the better to shine more brightly upon the painting. “I expect that’s who found it. It makes sense, doesn’t it, when you think about the enormous collections of art that are bought and sold every day in England. When you talk to them, I imagine they’ll tell you how they tracked this down and who was involved in getting it back for us. Private investigators, most likely. Perhaps a gallery as well. He would have had to buy it back, of course. They wouldn’t have just handed it over to him.”

“But if it’s yours...” Deborah said.

“How could we prove it? We had only that one family photo as proof, and who would look at a photo of a family dinner and decide the picture hanging on the wall in the background is the same as this one?” She gestured to the painting before them on the desk. “We had no other documents. There were no other documents. This had always been in the family—the pretty lady with the book and the quill—and other than this one photo, there was no way to prove it.”

“Testimony of people who’d seen it in your grandfather’s house?”

“They’re all dead now, I presume,” Ruth said. “And besides Monsieur Bombard, I wouldn’t have known who they were anyway. So Guy had no other way to retrieve this but to buy it from whoever had it, and that’s what he did, depend upon it. I expect it was his birthday gift to me: to bring back to the family the only thing left of the family. Before I died.”

In silence, they looked down upon the canvas stretched across the desk. That the painting was old there could be no doubt. It looked Dutch or Flemish to St. James, and it was a mesmerising work, a thing of timeless beauty that had no doubt at one time been an allegory both for the artist and for the artist’s patron.

“I wonder who she is,” Deborah said. “A gentlewoman of some sort, because look at her robes. They’re very fine, aren’t they? And the book. It’s so large. To have had a book like that...even to have been able to read at that time...She must have been quite rich. Perhaps she’s a queen.”

“She’s just the lady with the book and the quill,” Ruth said. “That’s enough for me.”

St. James stirred himself from his contemplation of the picture, saying to Ruth Brouard, “How did you happen upon this this morning? Was it here in the house? Among your brother’s things?”

“Paul Fielder had it.”

“The boy your brother mentored?”

“He gave it to me. Margaret thought he’d stolen something from the house because he wouldn’t let anyone near his rucksack. But this is what he had in it, and he handed it over to me straightaway.”

“When was this?”

“This morning. The police brought him over from the Bouet.”

“Is he still here?”

“I expect he’s on the grounds somewhere. Why?” Ruth’s face grew grave. “You’re not thinking he stole this, are you? Because really, he wouldn’t have. It’s not in his nature.”

“May I take this with me, Miss Brouard?” St. James touched the edge of the painting. “For a while. I’ll keep it quite safe.”

“Why?”

He said only, “If you wouldn’t mind,” by way of answer. “You needn’t worry. I’ll get it back to you quickly.”

She looked at the painting as if loath to part with it, as she no doubt was. After a moment, though, she nodded and then removed the books from either end of the canvas. She said, “It needs to go into a frame. It needs to be properly hung.”

She handed the canvas over to St. James. He took it from her and said,

“I expect you knew your brother was involved with Cynthia Moullin, didn’t you, Miss Brouard?”

Ruth switched off the light that was on the desk and moved it back to its original position. For a moment, he thought she might not answer, but she finally said, “I discovered them together. He said he would have told me eventually. He said he meant to marry her.”

“You didn’t believe him?”

“Too many times, Mr. St. James, my brother claimed he’d finally found her. ‘She’s the one,’ he would say. ‘This woman, Ruth, is definitely the one.’ He always believed it at the moment...because he always mistook that frisson of sexual attraction for love, the way many people do. Guy’s trouble was that he couldn’t seem ever to rise above that. And when the feeling faded—as these things do—he always assumed it was the death of love and not merely a chance to begin to love.”