Still Waters (Charlie Resnick #9)(6)
Miriam Johnson smiled. “It’s a study for Departing Day, you know. His most famous painting, in so far as poor Herbert was famous at all. He made the mistake of being British, you see. Had he had the foresight to have been born French …” She tilted her head into an oddly girlish laugh. “French and Impressionist, it’s almost as if they were brought together from birth, don’t you think? Whereas if you were to stop some person in the street and ask them what they knew of our British Impressionists all you’d get would be so many blank looks.
“Even among the knowledgeable few,” she continued, “it is Sargent who is remembered, Whistler of course; but not Herbert Dalzeil.” She pronounced it De-el.
“Excuse me if this is a daft question,” Vincent said, “but if he’s not famous, why would anyone go out of their way to steal his work? Especially if it’s not like, you know, the one that’s reckoned his best?”
Miriam Johnson smiled; such a nice boy, that soft dark skin, not black at all, but polished, almost metallic brown. And he wasn’t brash, like some young men. Polite. “He painted so little, you see. Especially toward the end of his life. He would have been, oh, sixty I suppose when he did his best work, but then he lived on another thirty years.” She laid a finger on Vincent’s sleeve. “It’s extraordinary, isn’t it? He was born right in the middle of the last century and yet he lived to see the first years of the Second World War.” Again she laughed, girlishly. “He was even older than I am now. But he lost his health, you see. His eyesight, too. Can you imagine, for a painter, what a loss that must be?”
She smiled a little sadly and Vincent smiled back.
“It’s their rarity, then, that would make these worth stealing?” Resnick asked.
“And not their beauty?” Miriam Johnson countered.
“I don’t know. To a collector, I dare say both. Though I doubt anyone would try to sell them on the open market; any reputable dealer would know they were stolen.”
“Japan,” Vincent said, “isn’t that where most of them go? There or Texas.”
“I should have given them to a museum,” Miriam Johnson said, “I realize that. That’s what was intended to happen to them, of course, when I died. It was all arranged in my will. The Castle would gladly have added them to their collection, they don’t have a single Dalzeil. I know it was wrong to cling onto them, especially once I couldn’t afford the insurance premiums. But I was so used to having them, you see. And I would look at them every day, not simply pass them by but really sit with them and look. Of course, I had the time. And each year I thought it can wait, it can wait, there can’t be long to go, just let me keep them for now.” Her eyes as she looked up at Resnick were bright and clear. “I was a foolish old woman, that’s what you’re thinking.”
“Not at all.”
“Well, Inspector, you should be.”
Like many in the Park, the house had been built in the latter half of the last century, testimony to the wealth which coal and lace had brought to the city. Not converted into apartments like so many of the others, it lingered on in drab high-ceilinged splendor, slowly declining into terminal disrepair. The burglar—and they were assuming it was one person acting alone—had risked the rusting fire escape and forced entry into an unoccupied second-floor bedroom. The window frame had been so rotten the catch had been easy to prize away whole. In the drawing room, pale rectangular patches on the heavy wallpaper showed clearly where the paintings had hung, one above the other. Nothing had disturbed the owner, asleep at the rear of the ground floor.
“Careful,” Vincent remarked. “Professional.”
“Yes.”
“Professional enough for your friend Grabianski?”
Resnick remembered the smile that had settled on Jerzy Grabianski’s face, the hint of smugness in his voice. “Half an hour with one of the unsung masters, worth any amount of risk. Besides, you’ll not bother charging me, not worth the paperwork. Nothing taken. Not as much as a speck of dust disturbed.”
All right, Resnick thought: that was then and this was now. “Maybe, Carl, maybe. But there are ways of finding out.”
Four
The Sisters of Our Lady of Perpetual Help lived in an undistinguished three-story house midway between the car park for the Asda supermarket and the road alongside the Forest recreation ground, where the local prostitutes regularly plied their trade.
There but for the grace of God, as Sister Bonaventura used to remark, bustling past. Whether she was referring to whoring or working at the checkout, Sister Teresa and Sister Marguerite were never sure.
All three of them were attached to the order’s outreach program, living in one of the poorer areas of the city and administering as best they could to the unfortunate and the needy, daily going about the Lord’s business without the off-putting and inconvenient trappings of liturgical habits but wearing instead civilian clothes donated by members of the local parish. Plain fare for the most part, but ameliorated by small personal indulgences.
Sister Marguerite, who came out in a painful rash if she wore anything other than silk closest to her skin, purchased her underwear by mail order from a catalog. Sister Bonaventura stuck pretty much to black, which she relieved with scarlet AIDS ribbons and a neat metallic badge denoting Labour Party membership. “Who do you think He would vote for, if He came back down to reclaim His Kingdom on earth?” she would ask when challenged about this. “The Conservatives?”