smaller, but even at this reduced scale, there was no mistaking the study for the painting that she had been shown by Guy Peploe. This was Jura, through the eyes of Andrew McInnes.
DOWNSTAIRS, the party had made its way back into the kitchen.
When Isabel came in, Rob looked up from the chart that he was showing Jamie, a naval chart, it appeared, with depths, reefs, rocks. They were looking at the Gulf of Corryvreckan.
“I don’t like to pry,” said Isabel, not looking at Jamie as she said this, “but that picture up there in the corridor, the little oil painting in the grey frame: Do you know who it’s by?” She answered her own question. “Andrew McInnes, who often painted on Jura. It’s a McInnes oil.”
At first Rob looked puzzled, as if trying to work out which painting it was that Isabel was talking about. Then he shook his head. “No,” he said. “I don’t think so. That’s by a man who stayed here. We let this place out, you see. People come up for a week or two. That man was a painter, I think, and when he went he left a rubbish bag full of sketches and stuff that he didn’t want. I found that little painting tucked away in it.”
Jamie looked at Isabel. “Here,” he said, handing Charlie over to Lizzie. Then he turned to Isabel in astonishment.
“Isabel?”
She returned his gaze. “You see,” she muttered. “A fake.”
Rob was puzzled. “That painting?”
Isabel lowered herself onto one of the kitchen chairs. She was thinking. It all made sense now: the forger, whoever he was, had come up to Jura to do some McInnes paintings. He had found the most remote spot available, a place where he would T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S
1 7 9
never be disturbed, and he had produced the new, posthumous McInnes paintings. Her intuitions had been right.
“Who was this man?” asked Isabel.
“I didn’t meet him,” said Rob. He turned to Lizzie. “Did you, Lizzie? Were you around when he was here?”
“When was it?” she asked. “I don’t remember a painter anyway.”
Rob crossed the room to fetch a small brown file. He flicked through some papers and eventually found one which he took out. It was the list of lettings.
“Last September,” he said. “Quite a late let. A Mr. Anderson. Frank Anderson.”
“Where was he from?” asked Isabel.
Rob looked through the papers again. “No idea,” he said.
“We would have known at the time, but we weed out the old letters. We don’t keep them.”
“A pity,” muttered Isabel. She thought of her conversation with Christopher Dove: it was exactly what she had done with the old correspondence of the
“Oh well,” said Jamie.
“Why are you interested?” asked Rob.
“Because I think that this Frank Anderson, whoever he is, has been responsible for some, well, what shall we call them, some fine
Rob looked interested. “Done here? Well . . .”
“Did you meet McInnes?” asked Isabel.
“No,” said Rob. “I didn’t. But I do know who he is. And I do know that he’s considered a great painter.”
“That often happens after somebody’s dead and buried,”
said Isabel.
1 8 0
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h
“He shouldn’t have gone out,” said Lizzie suddenly. “People who don’t know these waters should be more careful.”
Isabel thought: What whirlpools take—they don’t give back.
Where had she heard that? That was the trouble; there was so much in her mind: philosophy, poetry, odd facts; and they kept surfacing, these odd remembered lines, like corks unexpectedly popping up out of the water.
How would it be to be lost at sea, to sink down into those green depths and deeper, into the dark? Was there a moment of calm when the lungs had filled with water and there was just a heaviness, a moment of clarity, or remembrance, as people said there was, or even that progress towards a light, a gentleness, that was sworn to by those who had near-death experiences?
If they were to be believed—those people who had clinically died and then been brought back—the experience was one of great calm, of resolution. And many of them spoke of some form of reunion, a feeling of being in the presence of those they had known, and of being forgiven and made to understand, but gently; not scolded. Nobody was scolded.
T H E Y D I D N OT D I S CU S S the matter as they travelled back with Lizzie in the Land Rover, but once they had set off from Ardlussa in the green Swedish car, they talked about little else.
“I hope that you’re going to have the good grace to admit that I was right,” Isabel said to Jamie as they drove over the Ardlussa bridge and set off on the narrow public road that would take them back to Craighouse.
