The Careful Use of Compliments

“Of course. Of course I will.” He paused. “But I don’t know what we can do next—if anything.”

“What do you mean, if anything?” asked Isabel. “We can 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

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hardly keep this to ourselves. And why should this man, this Frank Anderson, get away with it?”

Jamie sighed. Isabel was incorrigible; she could not resist setting things right, solving things. It was almost as if she felt that life was a chess game in which the end game had to be played out. “We’re not the police,” he said simply. “We’re private citizens. We can report it, of course, to those concerned. So you can tell Guy Peploe that you think that that painting may not be all it looks to be; that’s fine. And you do have some evidence, after all. You can tell him about the painting you saw today.”

“But what will Guy be able to do?” objected Isabel. “He’ll be able to raise it with the person whose painting it is. He’ll hand it back, I suppose. And he’ll probably ask questions, but he won’t be able to do much more than that.”

“So you’re going to try to find this man?”

For a few moments she was silent. She had been wondering how she would proceed, and had not had any ideas. And yet she knew that she had to do something; her inaction in the face of wrongdoing was hardly an option, provided, of course, that wrongdoing had entered the circle of one’s moral recognition, and this, she thought, had done just that.

“Frank Anderson must be a talented painter,” she said at last. “You can’t do fakes unless you really know what you’re doing. Look at that Dutchman, the one who did the Vermeers, what was he called—van Meegeren. He was a real expert. He knew everything there was to know about painting techniques.

The pigments, the canvas, the way old paint cracks. Everything.

You can’t get the exact effect unless you’re really good.”

“So he knows what he’s doing. Where does that get us?”

Isabel was thinking aloud. “Well,” she said, “imagine if you had been in the Netherlands at the time and you had wanted to 1 8 2

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h find an artist called van Meegeren. Would it have been all that difficult? Even if he wasn’t very well known? You would have asked around and people would have known. Somebody would remember him from art college.”

Jamie saw where Isabel’s comments were going. “So this man, Frank Anderson, is likely to have been trained?”

“Highly likely. Which means that somebody will remember him from their four years at art college. Somebody will know him—as long as he’s in Scotland. If he’s in England, then we’re on more difficult ground.”

Jamie agreed that it might be possible to find Frank Anderson, but he was more worried about what would happen after that. Finding somebody was one thing; unmasking him as a forger was an altogether different matter.

“All right,” he said. “Find him. But don’t do anything stupid.

Frank Anderson will be facing criminal charges if he’s found.

He’s not exactly going to cooperate with you.”

Isabel guided her car into a passing place, one of the small bulges in the road that allowed vehicles to pass one another on the narrow strip of tar. A postal van was approaching from the south, and when it passed her, the driver waved in thanks and smiled. That was how it is here, she thought, where there are no strangers.

C H A P T E R F I F T E E N

E

IT SEEMED TO ISABEL that they had been away for weeks.

The world of Jura, that self-contained island world, seemed so far from Edinburgh, and yet it was only a drive of half a day or so, and it was the same country. As she stood in her garden on the day after their return, she closed her eyes for a moment and saw the hills, and the burns tumbling down, and the veils of fine rain. And she thought, One can love a country until it hurts.

But one could not stand in one’s garden thinking about Scotland. The whole point about being in Scotland was that one was in Scotland, and being in Scotland, for Isabel, meant that she had to get on with those things that required attention, and these were many. Charlie, who might normally have headed the list of those in need of attention, did not do so that morning; Grace had taken him for a walk to Blackford Pond, a pond on the south side of the town popular with dogs, ducks, and children. The resident ducks were overfed by everybody and sailed low in the water as a result, or so Isabel thought. “It’s dangerous to feed birds overenthusiastically, ” she had once said to Jamie, when they had taken Charlie on one of his first visits to the pond. “And it’s also dangerous to overinvest birds with symbolism. These national eagles that people make such a fuss about 1 8 4

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h must find it difficult to take off under the weight of all that symbolism.”

Jamie had looked at her and said, “That’s a very strange remark, Isabel. You talk complete nonsense sometimes. Flights of fancy.”

She had not minded. “I like to think about things,” she said airily. “I like to let my mind wander. Our minds can come up with the most entertaining possibilities, if we let them. But most of the time, we keep them under far too close a check.”

Jamie thought about this for a moment. He was trying to recall something rather funny that Isabel had started to say a few days earlier but had been cut off midstream by some protest from Charlie.

“What were you saying about cars the other day? Something about older drivers? Then Charlie started creating a fuss.”