A Place of Hiding (Inspector Lynley, #12)(228)

“I would have trusted it all to Kevin Duffy,” Ruth Brouard said. “But Adrian said no. He said, ‘He’s not family. We don’t know what’s going on and until we do, we’re handling everything that needs to be handled ourselves.’ So that’s what we did.”

“Why did she kill my father?” Adrian Brouard asked St. James. That brought them to the painting, for as far as St. James had been able to ascertain, the painting was China River’s objective. But there by the stables was not the place to discuss a stolen seventeenth-century canvas, so he asked if they might return to the house and have their conversation in the vicinity of the pretty lady with the book and the quill. There were things to be decided about that painting.

The picture was up in the gallery, a room that extended most of the length of the east side of the house. It was paneled in walnut and hung with Guy Brouard’s collection of modern oils. The pretty lady seemed out of place among them, lying frameless on a table that held a display case of miniatures.

“What’s this?” Adrian said, crossing to the table. He switched on a lamp and its glow struck the veil of hair that fell copiously round St. Barbara’s shoulders. “Not exactly a piece that Dad would collect.”

“It’s the lady we ate our meals with,” Ruth replied. “She always hung in the dining room in Paris when we were children.”

Adrian looked at her. “Paris?” His voice was sombre. “But after Pari s...Where has it come from, then?”

“Your father found it. I think he wanted to surprise me with it.”

“Found it where? How?”

“I don’t expect I’ll ever know. Mr. St. James and I...We’ve thought he must have hired someone. It went missing after the war, but he never forgot about it. Or about any of them: the family. We just had that one picture of them—the Seder picture? the one in your father’s study?—and this painting was in that picture as well. So he couldn’t forget it, I suppose. And if he couldn’t bring them back to us, which of course he couldn’t, at least he could find our picture. So that’s what he did. Paul Fielder had it. He gave it to me. I think Guy must have told him to do that if...Well, if anything happened to him before it happened to me.”

Adrian Brouard wasn’t obtuse. He looked at St. James. “Does this have to do with why he died?”

Ruth said, “I don’t see how, my dear.” She came to stand at her nephew’s side and considered the painting. “Paul had it, so I don’t see how China River could have known about it. Even if she did—if your father had told her for some reason—well, it’s a sentimental thing, really, the last vestige of our family. It would have represented a promise he’d made to me in childhood, when we left France. A way of recapturing what we both knew we couldn’t ever really replace. Beyond that, it’s a nice enough picture, isn’t it, but that’s all it is at the end of the day. Just an old painting. What could it mean to anyone else?”

Of course, St. James thought, she would learn the answer to her question soon enough and if for no other reason than Kevin Duffy would tell her. If not today, then someday, he’d walk into the house and there it would be in the great stone hall or the morning room, in this gallery or in Guy Brouard’s study. He’d see it and he’d have to speak...unless he learned from Ruth that this fragile canvas was just a memento of a time and a people that a war had destroyed.

St. James realised that the painting would be safe with her, as safe as it had been for generations when all it was was merely the pretty lady with the book and the quill, handed down from father to son and then stolen by an occupying army. It was Ruth’s now. Coming to her as it had done in the aftermath of her brother’s murder, it wasn’t governed by the terms of his will or by any agreement between the two of them that had preceded his death. Thus, she could do with it what she liked, when she liked. Just so long as St. James held his tongue.

Le Gallez knew about the painting, but what did he know? Merely that China River had wanted to steal a work of art from Brouard’s collection. Nothing more. What the painting was, who the artist was, where the canvas had come from, how the robbery had been carried out...St. James himself was the only person who knew it all. The power was his to do with as he liked.

Ruth said, “In the family, a father always handed it down to his oldest son. It was probably the way a boy metamorphosed from scion to patriarch. Would you like it, my dear?”

Adrian shook his head. “Eventually, perhaps,” he told her. “But for now, no. Dad would’ve wanted you to have it.”

Ruth touched the canvas lovingly, at the foreground where St. Barbara’s robe flowed like a waterfall forever suspended. Behind her the stonemasons hewed and placed their great slabs of granite into eternity. Ruth smiled at the placid face of the saint and she murmured, “Merci, monfrère. Merci. Tu as tenu cent fois la promesse que tu avais faite à Maman.” Then she stirred herself and gave her attention to St. James. “You wanted to see her one more time. Why?”

The answer, after all, was simplicity itself. “Because she’s beautiful,” he told her, “and I wanted to say goodbye.”

He took his leave of them then. They walked with him as far as the stairs. He said they had no need to accompany him farther, as he knew the way out. They came down one flight with him nonetheless, but there they stopped. Ruth wanted to rest in her room, she said. She was feeling less and less spry each day.