It was my turn to inspect the goods. Her clothes and leather shoulder bag weren’t cheap, her short brown hair had been well cut and her teeth were good. ‘A hundred and twenty dollars a day and expenses’, I said. ‘I need a retainer, but that’s negotiable.’
She smiled, her lips were thin, but not too thin. ‘If Lang Hancock walked in you’d charge five hundred a day.’
‘If he walked in I’d walk out. I can’t stand hornrimmed glasses.’
She laughed and I saw a few more good teeth. ‘I hope we can do business. I want to recover something that belongs to me.’
‘What is it?’
‘A painting.’
‘Aha, go on, Miss Woods.’
‘I don’t think you’re taking me seriously.’
‘Maybe I don’t take painting seriously. Please go on.’
She drew in an exasperated breath. ‘All right. I recently split up with a man I’d been living with for a few years. We divided possessions, you know how it is?’
I did; I’d divided everything with Cyn my ex-wife, then she’d divided my share again seventy-five twenty-five. ‘Yeah’, I said.
‘It wasn’t a very friendly parting. Leo took this painting and refuses to give it up. It has a sentimental value for me, and I’ve heard he’s planning to sell it.’
‘Why don’t you buy it, then?’
‘It’s a matter of principle; it’s mine.’ I suppose it was then that I decided that I didn’t like her. There was something frozen and emotionless in her face and maybe the lips were too thin. But life is a struggle, and sometimes you have to prise the jaws apart and say the words that will make people put your name on cheques.
‘I see. What action do you have in mind?’
She mistook my attitude for complicity and leaned forward a bit over the desk. ‘I want you to break into his house and take the painting.’
‘No,’ I said.
‘It means nothing to Leo. He probably wouldn’t even know it had gone.’
‘No.’
She looked at me for a minute and then she shrugged and got up. Suddenly the flowers seemed to be drooping a bit more, and the dust motes in the air swarmed thick in the beams of light that came through the clouded windows. She adjusted the strap of her bag and walked out leaving the door open. I got up, closed the door, and tried to sit the flowers a little more proudly in the vase.
Three days later, as I read in The News, she was dead. She’d been found in her house in Paddington with her head caved in. She was thirty-four and described as an ‘art dealer’. I read the report, and felt vaguely sorry for her, the way you do, and vaguely pleased that I hadn’t taken her on as a client and then I forgot about it. The next day I got a phone call from Detective-Inspector Grant Evans, who manages to be both an old cop and old friend. He told me that my card had been found in Susannah Woods’ bag and asked if I knew anything about her.
‘Yeah’, I said. ‘She came to my office and asked me to look for a painting she’d lost.’
‘What d’you know about painting?’
‘A bit, Cyn was keen on it.’
He grunted. ‘You take the job?’
‘No, out of my depth. Any ideas on who killed her?’
‘Not really, she had this boyfriend, ah… Leo Porter, but he’s in the clear time-wise.’ He read out Porter’s address and number, and I wrote them down. There was a pause in the conversation.
‘Why are you telling me this, Grant?’
I could imagine him sucking in his belly against his belt and poking the flab; Grant tried to balance his moral rectitude against his physical decay and the effort left him unhappy. ‘Well, I haven’t got the time or the manpower for this one, Cliff. She hung around with artists and queers; no one cares. The Commissioner hates artists and queers. I thought I might just throw this to you-apparently this Woods woman had a valuable painting, insured for God knows how much. It’s not over the fireplace just now and the company would like it back. I gather they’re willing to spend a little money. Interested?’
I said I was, and he gave me the name of the man at Hawker Insurance Company-Quentin James.
‘Quentin?’ I said. ‘I bet the Commissioner just loves names like Quentin.’ Grant hung up on me, and since I had the phone in my hand I used it to make an appointment that afternoon to see Mr James.
The insurance company was housed in one of those buildings which make you wonder where the world is going: the floors were made of some substance which was hard, cold and foreign, and it was too dark in the lobby to read the signboards. I got in a lift and found that Hawkers was on the third floor, but by then the lift had shot up to the tenth and I had to ride up to the sixteenth before it came down again. Inside a smoked glass door a woman was sitting perfectly still at a desk. I walked up, and she kept her hands in her lap and only moved the minimum number of muscles for speech. It was a short speech.
‘Yes?’
‘Hardy, to see Mr James.’
She kept her left hand where it was and lifted her right to flick a switch. She repeated what I’d said, adding another Mr. Then she put her hands together again.
‘Down the corridor to your right, Mr Hardy.’ Her head inclined an inch to the right.
I wandered down the passage between the pot plants and the paintings to where a door with a laminate aping cedar bore the words ‘Q de V C James-Claims Investigation’. I knocked and went in. A secretary had her back to me as she delved into a filing cabinet. She waved a hand at a door off to one side, and I gathered that Mr Q de V C James was available. The door came open as I moved towards it and a tall, elegant character stepped out. He had a swathe of papers in his hand which he tossed on to the desk.
‘Tania’, he said breezily. ‘Here’s the report, do your best. Hello, who’re you?’
‘Hardy.’
‘Oh, yes.’ He did something that used to be called beaming, I don’t know what they call it now, you don’t see it often. ‘Hardy!’ he bellowed. ‘Private eye. Come in! Come in!’
The hearty manner and the pin-stripe, three-piece suit gave an impression of amiable idiocy, but he soon dispelled that.
‘Sit down, Mr Hardy.’ He waved me into a comfortable chair in his comfortable office. ‘Inspector Evans speaks well of you. Good man, Evans; honest cop, rare breed.’
‘That’s right’, I said.
‘This is a strange case, bad smell to it. Miss Susannah Woods; shady lady I’m afraid.’ He picked up a folder on the desk, opened it and read: ‘Susannah Catherine Woods, divorced, thirty-six years, childless, journalist, art critic, artists’ agent, art dealer.’ He gave the last word an emphasis, looked up at me and said: ‘And crook.’
I clicked my tongue. ‘Maybe she’s doing her time in a room full of Botticellis. What was her crime here on earth?’
‘You don’t like Botticelli?’
Hypocrite, I said, ‘Loved little bums and tits and put in haloes to say he was sorry.’
‘Hmm. Well, Miss Woods insured paintings and lost them, sometimes.’
‘And other times?’
‘She sold them; sometimes she sold the ones she lost if you follow me.’
‘Yeah’, I said. ‘Why’d you take her on if you knew all this?’
‘We didn’t know, Mr Hardy. This’, he tapped the folder, ‘is the result of forty-eight hours of phoning around. She spread her business and hurt a few people.’
‘What’s your problem?’
He looked through the folder. ‘Some idiot wrote a policy on a Castleton…’ He looked up at me.
