If it were bigger, then . . . eighty?”
“Exactly,” said Pat.
Ian Rankin looked at Matthew. “Would you agree with that?”
“I would,” said Matthew, adding glumly, “Not that I know much about it.”
“But you’re the dealer?”
“Yes,” said Matthew. “But there are dealers and dealers. I’m one of the latter.”
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“I’m just going to have to think about this for a moment,”
said Ian Rankin. “Give me a moment.”
And with that he took a deep breath and disappeared under the surface of the water. There were bubbles all about his head and the water seemed to take on a new turbulence.
Pat looked at Matthew. “I had to tell him,” she said. “I couldn’t lie. I just couldn’t.”
“I know,” said Matthew. “I wouldn’t have wanted you to lie.”
He wanted to say something else, but did not. He wanted to tell her that this was exactly what he liked about her, even admired
– her self-evident honesty. And he wanted to add that he felt strongly for her, that he had come to appreciate her company, her presence, but he could not, because she was in love with somebody else – just as he had feared – and he did not expect, anyway, that she would want to hear this from him.
Ian Rankin seemed to be under the water for some time, but at last his head emerged, dark hair plastered over his forehead, the keen, intelligent eyes seeming brighter than before.
“It’s in the kitchen,” he said. “But of course you can have it back. Go inside and I’ll join you in a moment. I’ll get it for you.”
Matthew began to thank him, but he brushed the thanks aside, as if embarrassed, and they made their way into the house.
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“I didn’t think he’d do that,” Matthew whispered. “Not after you said what it could be worth.”
“He’s a good man,” said Pat. “You can tell.”
Matthew knew that she was right. But it interested him nonetheless that a good man could write about the sort of things that he wrote about – murders, distress, human suffering: all the dark pathology of the human mind. What lay behind that? And if one thought of his readers – who were they? The previous year, on a trip to Rome, he had been waiting for a plane back to Edinburgh and had been queuing behind a group of young men.
He had observed their clothing, their hair cuts, their demeanour, and had concluded – quite rightly as their conversation later revealed – that they were priests in training. They had about them that air that priests have – the otherworldliness, the fastidiousness of the celibate. Matthew judged from their accents that they were English, the vowels of somewhere north – Manchester perhaps.
“Will you go straight home?” asked one.
“Yes,” his friend replied. “Straight home. Back to ordinary parish liturgy.”
The other looked at the book he was holding. “Is that any good?”
“Ian Rankin. Very. I read everything he writes. I like a murder.”
And then they had passed on to something else – a snippet of gossip about the English College and a monsignor. And Matthew had thought: Why would a priest like to read about murder?
Because good is dull, and evil more exciting? But was it? Perhaps the reason the good like to contemplate the deeds of the bad is that the good realise how easy it is to behave as the bad behave; so easy, so much a matter of chance, of fate, of what the philosophers call moral luck. But of course.
Immensely relieved at the recovery of the Peploe?, Matthew and Pat returned to the gallery in a taxi, the painting safely tucked
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away in a large plastic bag provided by Ian Rankin. Matthew’s earlier mood of self-pity had lifted: there were no further references to failure and Pat noticed that there was a jauntiness in the way he went up the gallery steps to unlock the door.
Perhaps the recovery of a possible forty thousand pounds meant more to Matthew than he was prepared to admit, even if the identity of the painting was still far from being established. In fact all they knew – as Pat reminded herself – was that she thought that it might be a Peploe, and who was she to express a view on such a matter? Her pass in Higher Art – admittedly with an A – hardly qualified her to make such pronouncements, and she was concerned at having raised everybody’s hopes prematurely.
“It’s probably worthless,” she had said to Matthew in the taxi.
“I don’t think Ian Rankin really believed that it was worth anything. That’s probably why he let us have it back.”
Matthew was not convinced. “He gave it back because he thought it was the right thing to do. I could tell that he thought it was a Peploe too. I’m pretty sure you’re right.”
