The Art of the Matter

AUGUST

The month of August swept over the West End of London like a pint of chloroform. The tourists took over and those who lived and worked in the city tried to get away. For the upper crust of the House of Darcy that meant a variety of choice destinations: villas in Tuscany, manors in the Dordogne, chalets in Switzerland, yachts in the Caribbean.

Mr Alan Leigh-Travers was a passionate amateur yachtsman and kept his own ketch in the British Virgin Islands where it was boarded during the non-use periods at a boatyard behind Trellis Island. He intended to spend his three weeks away cruising as far south as the Grenadines.

Peregrine Slade might have thought he had made the Darcy computer as safe as Fort Knox but he was wrong. The IT expert he had called in used one of the systems invented and developed by Suzie’s boss. She had helped perfect some of the system’s fin

er points. One who has developed a system can circumvent it. She did. Benny needed all the holiday rosters for August along with destinations and emergency contact addresses. These she had downloaded.

Benny knew that Leigh-Travers would be cruising the Caribbean, and that he had left two contact numbers: his worldwide mobile phone number and the listening frequency to which he would tune his yacht’s radio. Suzie altered both numbers by one digit. Though unaware of it, Mr Leigh-Travers was going to have a really tranquil vacation, with no disturbances at all.

On 6 August the ginger Scotsman swept into the London office and demanded his oil painting back. There was no objection. He was helpful enough to identify it by storage number, and in ten minutes a porter had retrieved it from downstairs and handed it over.

By nightfall Suzie noted that the computer records had logged the painting as having been brought in to the Bury St Edmunds office for valuation on 31 July, but withdrawn by owner on 6 August.

She altered the last part. The new records showed it had been collected by arrangement by a van from the Colbert Institute. On the 10th Mr Leigh-Travers, who had never heard of The Game Bag, let alone seen it, left for Heathrow and Miami, there to take a connector flight to St Thomas and Beef Island where his ketch was waiting for him.

The Hon. Peregrine Slade was one of those who preferred not to travel in August. The roads, airports and resorts were a congested nightmare in his view. Not that he stayed in London; he retired to his country seat in Hampshire. Lady Eleanor would depart for her friends’ villa at Porto Ercole and he could be alone with his heated pool, broad acres and small but adequate staff. His contact numbers were also on the holiday rosters log, so Benny knew where he would be.

Slade left for Hampshire on the 8th. On the 11th he received a letter, handwritten and posted at Heathrow. He recognized the writing and signature immediately: it was from Alan Leigh-Travers.

‘My dear Perry, in haste from the departure lounge. In all the bother of trying to get away and leave the department shipshape for the September sale there was a matter I forgot to mention to you.

‘Ten days ago some unknown brought a picture into the Bury office for valuation. When it reached London I had a glance at it. Frankly, a quite ghastly late-Victorian oil showing a couple of dead partridge and a gun. Utterly talentless and normally it would have gone straight back. But something about it seemed odd. It intrigued me.

‘You will know the late Victorians painted both on panel and on canvas. This was on a panel that seemed extremely old, several centuries before the Victorian period.

‘I have seen such panels before, usually in Seb’s department. But not oak, that was what intrigued me. It looked a bit like poplar. So it occurred to me that some Victorian vandal might have painted over a much earlier work.

‘I know it will cost a few quid and if it is all a waste of time, a big “sorry”. But I have sent it to the Colbert to ask Steve Carpenter if he will have a look and give it an X-ray. Because I shall be away and Steve told me he is trying to get off as well, I asked him to send you his report direct to Hampshire.

‘See you at the end of the month, Alan.’

Peregrine Slade lay on a lounger by the pool and read the letter twice while sipping his first pink gin of the day. He too was intrigued. Centuries-old poplar wood was never used by the British, even when they painted on panel. Northern Europe used oak. The Italians used poplar, and broadly speaking the thicker the panel the greater its age because the sawing techniques of centuries ago made thin panels almost impossible to cut.

Using someone else’s old painting and painting over it was not uncommon, and it was quite well known in the history of art for some talentless idiot to overpaint an earlier work of genuine merit.

Thankfully modern technology had made it possible to age and date tiny fragments of wood, canvas and paint, to identify not only the country of source but sometimes even the school from which they came, and to X-ray an overpainting to see what lay underneath.

Leigh-Travers was right to do what he did, just in case. Slade intended to go up to London the next day for an exquisitely painful visit to Marina; he thought he would also pop into the office to check the records.

The records confirmed everything the letter from Heathrow had said. A certain Hamish McFee had blown into the Bury office and left behind a Victorian still life entitled The Game Bag. It had been accorded a storage number of F 608.

The storage records showed that the oil had arrived in London on 1 August and been collected by the Colbert on the 6th. Slade closed down the system, reflecting that he would await with interest the report from the legendary Stephen Carpenter, whom he did not personally know.

Glancing at his watch he saw it was six p.m. in London or one p.m. in the Caribbean. He spent an hour trying to raise Leigh-Travers on his mobile or his marine radio, but kept finding himself speaking to someone else. Finally, he gave up and went off to his rendezvous with Marina.

On the 18th a shortish porter in the dust coat of the Colbert Institute walked through the front door of the House of Darcy and presented himself at the front desk. He bore a small oil painting in protective bubble wrap.

‘Morning, luv. Delivery from the Colbert as arranged.’

The young woman behind the desk looked blank. The delivery man fished out a docket from his pocket and read from it.

‘Darcy storage number F 608,’ he read. Her face cleared. She had a number for the computer on the table behind her.

‘One moment,’ she said, turned and consulted the fount of all wisdom. The oracle explained matters to her. She saw that this item had left the store for examination at the Colbert on the authority of the absent director of British Modern and Victorian art. And now it was being returned. She rang for a porter of her own.

Within minutes she had signed the Colbert man’s receipt form and the wrapped painting had been taken back to store.