I walked over to the house; the front door was a ruin with some of the panels replaced by cardboard. I pushed one in and put a hand through to undo the catch. In the passage way the floorboards were rotten and the walls smelled of damp. There was a chink of light under the second door along and I pushed it open with the gun held high. There were mattresses around the walls, some clothes scattered about and a candle burning crookedly in the middle of the floor. Two men were lying together on one of the mattresses. One of them turned his head to look at me, the other’s eyes were closed.
‘Trouble?’ The accent was southern US, with a lot of illness and heroin in it.
‘No trouble. Paul Steele here?’
‘Upstairs. I’m glad there’s no trouble.’
I closed the door and felt my way up the stairs. The front room was showing a faint light and I could hear soft, slow voices. I crept up close and listened. There was only one voice, a woman’s, and it was saying, ‘Pauli, c’mon Pauli, Pauli?’ over and over again.
I pushed the door open and the woman gave a scream and jumped off the floor and straight at me. She was big and fat, and she swung a fist into my face and followed that up with a fingernail attack. Both did some damage, and it was hard to counter while holding the gun. I gasped ‘Easy’, and tried to duck the next swing and get at her feet, but she was quick, despite her weight. Her hand hit me again and I forgot my manners; I clipped her smartly under the chin, her knees sagged and I rushed her back against the wall which pushed all the breath out of her. I held her there while she struggled for breath.
‘I’m not going to hurt you’, I rasped. ‘Now behave, or I’ll shove something in your mouth to shut you up. Understand?’
She nodded and I let her go keeping a cautious eye on her hands and feet. But all the fight had gone out of her and she slipped down to the floor beside the mattress on which Paul Steele lay. He’d been watching us but there was no interest in his eyes.
I bent down. ‘Remember me, Paul?’
There was no reaction and I reached into my pocket for the piece of cloth. He was wearing the same shirt and I dropped the torn piece onto his narrow, heaving chest.
‘He’s OD’d’, the woman said. ‘What is this?’
‘It’s a murder investigation’, I said. ‘A woman named Susannah Woods got killed. What’s your name?’
‘Morgan Lindsay’, she said. ‘Have you got a cigarette?’
‘No. Where are the paintings?’
‘Over there.’ She pointed to the far corner of the dark room. I picked up a box of matches from the floor and went across to the corner. The three canvases were stacked carelessly against the damp wall. I struck a couple of matches and peered at them but under those conditions it was impossible to tell which version of ’Stockyards at Jerilderie’ was which. The woman was sitting listlessly by the ragged mattress listening to Steele’s breathing which was harsh but even.
‘Where’d he get the money for the heroin?’ I said.
‘Pinched something from that bitch’s house and flogged it. It must be bad stuff though, never seen him like this before. God, I wish I had a smoke.’
I looked at Steele and thought that his colour was bad, he had a sort of nineteenth century opium-den pallor and then one of the things that had been jangling around loose in my mind clicked into place. I had a short talk to Morgan Lindsay and then Steele’s breathing broke up into erratic gusts and we went out to look for a phone.
I talked to her some more in the street while the ambulance was coming. But when we got back to the room, Steele and his torn shirt and the ragged mattress were covered with blood and vomit, and he was dead.
I handed the three paintings over and Quentin de V C James pushed the buttons to get a cheque made out for me-promptly. He took the canvas with Dr Ernst’s mark on it over to the window and let the expensive light flood over it. He put it down and shook his head.
‘Not my idea of $30,000 worth’, he said.
I grinned. ‘Nobody’s idea, it’s a fake.’
‘Then they’re all fakes.’
‘That’s right, Steele did them all; the first one was a dry run which he wasn’t happy with. Woods left it lying around and Leo Porter got hold of it. Then there was the deliberate fake to help authenticate the first-class fake. Steele killed her when she said she was going to burn that one and collect the insurance.’
‘But why? He’d have got his cut surely?’
I shook my head. ‘He was past that. Have a look at these.’ I took out Primo’s picture and laid it on the desk, then I opened up one of the books on Castleton. It had as a frontispiece a photograph of Castleton taken at a time when he was ill. The hair, the face, the lines of suffering were almost identical.
‘Remarkable’, James said.
‘Yeah, the woman filled most of it in for me. Steele was pretty nutty to begin with and the dope didn’t help. He did a deep study of Castleton when he took on this commission for Woods. In the end he came to believe that he was Castleton or was his son or grandson-the Lindsay woman said he shifted around a bit on that point.’
‘And he cracked when she said she was going to burn the painting?’
‘That’s right. By then he believed it was real and that he’d painted it as a real artist.’
‘Is that why he went after the other pictures?’
‘Probably, but I think the girl might have helped a bit there. The rough jobs probably looked more like Steele’s own work, if they turned up and someone saw Steele’s style in them that would lead directly to him. The Woods woman wanted to get the rough copy back so as not to confuse the issue when she made her claim. That’s why she came to me.’
James was nodding sagaciously when a secretary came in and handed him an envelope. He passed it over to me and did some more beaming.
‘A brilliant piece of work, Mr Hardy, my congratulations.’
‘Thanks.’
‘One would have expected you to look a little more pleased.’
I said: ‘Would one?’, and got up and left. I was thinking of the pictures of Charles Castleton with his life sucked away by the booze and opium and Paul Steele, eaten down to the bone by smack.
‹‹
Blood is thicker
He had a long, horsey face that needed a pipe stuck in it to bring it to perfection. His eyes were a washed- out blue, and his sandy hair was cut in a severe short-back-and-sides. He looked like the archetypal Aussie; a six footer, a survivor of Lone Pine and the Somme. He was from Taranaki, New Zealand. The black Oxfords were polished, the grey flannels were pressed and his tweed jacket had been expensive and fashionable twenty years ago. The woman with him was fashionable now and anytime; she was a tall, Viking blonde, in a green silk dress with modish accessories. He was Hiram Dempsey, farmer, and she was his daughter Susan, secretary.
We were sitting in my dusty office with the linoleum decor and the streaky windows. Hiram made the introductions, mentioned the New Zealand policeman who’d referred him to me, and then let Susan take over. I could see the pride in his face when she spoke.
‘We want you to look for my brother, Mr Hardy. We understand you’re very good at finding people.’
I tried to look modest. ‘It depends how badly they want to stay lost; some dig in deep, some just stay on the surface. When did you last see this brother?’
She looked at her father. ‘Fifteen years?’
He nodded. ‘Fifteen, near enough.’ He had that slight Scots burr many older New Zealanders have, slurring
