making of it, paint her up, and we’ll rig a new mast in a couple of weeks. Your sails are already drying in my paint shop.”
“I can’t afford a new mast,” I said bitterly.
“You probably can’t afford to buy my dinner either, but we won’t go hungry. Come on, you bastard, cheer up!”
“Charlie, I’m serious. I can’t afford it.”
He paused at the head of the ladder. “What’s friendship for if it can’t help out a mate, eh? Don’t be daft, Johnny. You won’t have to pay. I’ve already ordered your bloody mast. Now come on, I’m hungry as hell.”
We drove to a pub where the barmaids greeted Charlie with a kiss. He knew everyone, and had a word for all of them. He glad-handed the bar like a politician on the make, but then took me to a secluded corner where we could talk in peace. “I told them to make us a proper steak and kidney pie,” he said as he sat down. “You could do with some decent food.”
“Sounds good.”
“And no salad.” He drank half his pint. “Yvonne eats nothing but bloody salad. She read this article about diet in one of her women’s magazines. Jesus wept, I’m married to a rabbit. She told me I should give up the beer and the beef. Like hell, I said. I told her I expected a proper meal on my table, and by God she’d better provide it.”
I smiled. “You’ve got a happy marriage, Charlie?”
“You know how it is, Johnny.” He lit a cigarette. “They’re never happy, are they? You can give them the world and they’ll still find something to bitch about. But Yvonne’s all right.” He made the concession grudgingly. “She’s a good mother, anyway. Not that I’m home much. Business.”
“What were you doing in Hertfordshire?”
He touched a sly finger to the side of his nose. “Wasn’t actually in Hertfordshire, Johnny. More like Bedfordshire.” He laughed, then changed the subject. “I had a chat with George Cullen this morning.”
“I hope you thumped the bastard rotten.”
“He says he never told a soul where you were. I think he meant it too. He was upset about it.”
I wasn’t convinced. “Of course he told them! He knew who those men were, he even told me as much!”
“I know. He told me the same.” Charlie thickly smeared a bread roll with butter. “But I don’t think George did tell them. I think they just found you. After all, it isn’t difficult to find a boat on the Devon coast. How long can it take to search Plymouth, the Yealm, Salcombe, Dartmouth, Torquay and the Exe? Not long, mate, not long at all. I think you were just unlucky.”
“I want to make them unlucky,” I said with impotent bitterness. “And I want to know what bastard sent them to kill me, and why.”
He leaned back and frowned at me. “Do you really?” It was an odd question, asked in a strangely quizzical tone.
“They tried to kill me,” I said in outraged explanation, “and I want to know who sent them.” Till the day before I hadn’t cared about the painting, or its fate, or about the people who pursued the canvas, but my humiliation in the night had set up an atavistic desire for revenge.
We fell silent as the steak and kidney pie arrived. Charlie fetched two more pints, then ladled pie, potatoes, peas and gravy on to my plate. “What I mean,” he said, “is do you want anything more to do with that bloody painting?”
“Not with the painting, no.”
“Then bugger off. Sail away.” He pointed his knife at me. “Because so long as you’re here, they’ll chase you.”
I was staring through the window. “Elizabeth,” I said softly.
“What about her?”
“If I’m dead,” I said, “then there’ll be no legal complications about the painting’s ownership. And Garrard told me my sin was inheriting the painting. That’s it, Charlie! Don’t you see?” Then my voice tailed away. I was suggesting that Elizabeth wanted me dead so she could inherit the painting, but even as the explanation had convinced me, so I found it impossible to believe that my twin sister would do such a thing.
“For Christ’s sake!” Charlie protested in disgust. “The painting’s long gone, Johnny. It’s in some Texas vault or Swiss strongroom!”
“Is it?” I wondered aloud, then answered my own question. “I suppose it is, yes.”
“Of course it is!” Charlie said with sturdy good sense, “so sail away and forget the bloody thing. But eat your pie first.”
I leaned back. “I’ve just discovered something about myself.”
“You don’t like steak and kidney pie?”
“I get pissed off when people try to kill me.”
He laid down his knife and fork. “Listen, Johnny. If it’s any help, I’ll put the word out on Garrard. I’ll find him for you, and I’ll skin him alive. But don’t you hang about waiting for the chop. Go back to sea!”
It was good advice, but I was still suffering from the shameful memory of the previous night. “Garrard said he was making sure I never got possession of the painting. That suggests the thing is still around somewhere, Charlie…”
“Of course it isn’t around. Use your loaf, Johnny. It must have been flogged off four years ago. Garrard’s probably got his knickers in a twist, nothing else. But I promise you I’ll find him and I’ll discover who wound him up. You bugger off back to sea.”
“I’ll help you find him.”
“No.” He spoke very firmly. “You don’t need the trouble, Johnny. Leave it to experts.”
I smiled. “You’re an expert?”
“Enough of one.” He said it grimly. “You don’t need the aggravation, Johnny. All you need is to go back to sea.”
“I also need some transport.”
“Transport?” He sounded suspicious.
“Some wheels, Charlie. For a girl.”
He understood that reason well enough. He laughed. “Who is she?”
“Just a girl.” I was thinking of a competent girl with dark hair and a quick temper. A girl with an Italian name. “The trouble is,” I said, “that she’s a good distance away.”
“And you’ve got the itch. No problem.” Charlie spread his hands in a gesture suggesting that all my difficulties could be solved by his munificence. “Take the jeep. Go and chase her!”
“You don’t mind?”
“You’re my friend. What’s mine is yours, and what’s yours I wouldn’t touch with a bloody bargepole. Now eat your pie.”
I ate the pie.
Comerton Castle, Sir Leon Buzzacott’s country house, was neither a castle nor a house. It was a late- eighteenth-century monstrosity; a mansion built to display wealth rather than to be a home. Pillared, porticoed, winged, domed, spired, lavish and vast, Comerton had once belonged to a ducal family, but, just as they had to my own family, the taxmen had flensed away until the house had to be sold. Buzzacott had purchased it ten years before. I wondered what he did with all the rooms, reputedly a room for every day of the year. Not that I would find out, for my business did not lie in the main house, but in the great Orangery that was built beside the garden terraces beneath the south front.
The Orangery alone was the size of Stowey. It was a long single-storeyed building, stuccoed white, that had once been a glasshouse, summer house and Arcadian retreat for the Duke and his guests. Now, at astronomical expense, Sir Leon had transformed it into an art gallery. Many people had criticised the gallery, claiming it was too far from any large city, and that it was an elitist exercise aimed solely at gaining Sir Leon the coveted peerage he desired, and maybe they were right, at least in the first criticism, for there was only a handful of cars in the huge car park.
I paid my pound at the door. A moving ramp led to the gallery floor which had been excavated twenty feet below the original ground level. The job had been done without disturbing any of the Orangery’s masonry. The air below the ground was conditioned to a consistent coolness and humidity. Automatic louvres controlled the sunlight
