Zach checked the information in the front of the Christie’s brochure. The sale was in eight days’ time; viewing had been two days ago. He knew a member of the fine art team at the auction house-Paul Gibbons, who’d been at Goldsmiths with him. Another artist who had sidestepped from trying to make a living selling his own art to making a living selling other people’s. Zach had already tried to discover the identity of the vendor of the recent Aubrey pictures from Paul and been told in no uncertain terms that strict anonymity was a condition of sale. Now he wrote Paul a quick e-mail to ask if there was some way he could get in touch with any of the people who’d bought one of the portraits of Dennis. It was a long shot, he knew, but there was a chance that seeing the work in the flesh might provide some extra insight.
“Who’s that?” said Hannah, looking at the catalog as she sat back down and passed Zach another pint, even though he’d refused her offer. “Drink up,” she said.
“Therein lies the mystery,” Zach said, and took several gulps from his glass. Suddenly, getting drunk at lunchtime with this hard, vibrant woman, who smelled of sheep but swam in a red bikini, seemed like as good a plan as any. “Dennis. No other name, no reference to him in any of Aubrey’s letters or in any of the books about him.”
“Is that a big deal?”
“Most definitely. Aubrey was faddy, obsessive; he fell in love with something-a place or a person, or an idea-and he painted and drew that thing or person exhaustively, until he’d got everything from it he could, creatively. Then he…”
“Dumped them?”
“Moved on. Artistically speaking. And during that time of immersion he wrote about them in letters, and sometimes in his workbook. Letters to friends, or other artists, or his agent. Listen to this one he wrote about Dimity-I must show her this, actually. I think she’d be pleased. Listen.” He scrabbled around in his notes for a moment, until he found the page he was looking for, marked with a pink paper tag. “This is a letter to one of his patrons, Sir Henry Ides. ‘I have met the most wonderful child here in Dorset. She seems to have been raised half wild, and has never left this village in all her young life. Her whole sphere of reference is the village and the coast within a five-mile radius of the cottage where she grew up. She is untouched, in every sense, and this innocence radiates from her like light. A rare bird indeed, and quite the loveliest thing I have ever seen. She draws the eye the way a splendid view will, or a lance of sunshine breaking through clouds. I enclose a sketch. I plan a large canvas with this girl to embody the essence of nature, or English folk at their very core.’ ” Zach looked up, and Hannah raised an eyebrow.
“I don’t think you should show that to Dimity.”
“Why not?”
“It’ll upset her. She has her own memories and… ideas about what passed between her and Charles. I don’t think it would sit well to hear herself described so objectively.”
“But… he says she’s the loveliest thing he’s ever seen.”
“That’s not the same as being in love with her, though, is it?”
“You don’t think he was?”
“I don’t know. How should I know? Maybe he was. I’m just saying that that’s not what he’s saying in this letter, is it? I wouldn’t show it to her, but it’s up to you,” she said.
“I think it shows love. But perhaps not that kind of love… She ignited his… his creative zeal. She was his muse, for a while. A long while. But this Dennis… he never mentions him. And when I showed Dimity one of these pictures of him, she said she’d never seen him before, and didn’t know who he was. It just strikes me as… very odd.”
“Aubrey was only here two or three months of the year, you know. This young man could be someone he met during any one of the remaining ten months, somewhere other than here…” She trailed off as Zach shook his head.
“Look at the dates. July 1937; then February and August 1939. We know Aubrey was here in July 1937, in London in February 1939, and here and in Morocco in August 1939. So, did this Dennis travel with him? From Blacknowle, or from London? Surely if Aubrey knew him well enough to take him on holiday, there’d be mention of him somewhere? But that’s not the only weird thing. These three pictures all came from an anonymous collection in Dorset. All from the same seller. But I don’t think… I don’t think they’re by Charles Aubrey. There’s something just not quite right about them.” He slid them towards Hannah, but she barely glanced at them. A tiny frown had appeared between her brows. She pushed the catalogs away from her.
“Does it really matter?” she said.
“Does it matter?” Zach echoed, louder than he’d intended. He realized he was definitely quite drunk. “Of course it does,” he said, more quietly. “Wouldn’t Dimity know? Shouldn’t she know who this Dennis is, if these drawings were done by Aubrey here in Blacknowle? She says she spent as much time as she could with him and his family…”
“But that doesn’t mean she was there all the time, or that she knew everything he was doing. She was just a kid, remember?”
“Yes, but…”
“And if you don’t think Charles Aubrey drew these, who do you think did? You think they’re forgeries?” she asked lightly.
“They could be. And yet… and yet, the shading, the draftsmanship…” He trailed off, bewildered. Hannah seemed to think hard, and tapped her fingernails on the page of one of the catalogs for a moment; a rapid little staccato that, just for a second, betrayed some kind of agitation. Then she stopped, and curled the hand into a loose fist when Zach spoke again. “I think,” he said, still lost in thought, “I think these pictures were here, in Blacknowle, before they were sold. And I think there could be more of them.”
“That’s a big theory. You mean Dimity, I take it? You think Mitzy Hatcher is a skilled enough artist to forge Aubrey works so that they could pass as genuine?”
“Well, maybe not. Aubrey must have given her the pictures, then… or perhaps she took them for herself. That would explain why she’s so cagey about certain things…”
“Come on, Zach. Mitzy? Little old Mitzy with the dowager’s hump? Does she really live like someone with a hidden stash of priceless artworks?”
“Well, no, not at all. But if she really needed the money, she might have started to sell a few of them… she’d be reluctant to, of course. She would want to keep anything with connections to him.”
“And she just nips out and takes them up to London from time to time, and makes thousands?”
“Well…” Zach struggled. “When you put it like that, it doesn’t sound too probable. But she could phone the auction house and get them to send a courier for them, or something.”
“It doesn’t sound probable because it’s wholly improbable. She doesn’t even have a phone, Zach. And there are loads of big houses tucked away around here-any one of them would be far more likely to have an art collection like that. What makes you even think they’re in Blacknowle?”
“It was… kind of just a hunch.”
“Or wishful thinking, perhaps?”
“Maybe,” said Zach, deflated.
“You know what I think?” she said.
“What?”
“I think you should stop chewing it over for now and drink more of the Spout Lantern’s finest.” She raised her glass to salute him before downing the last of her own. Zach smiled woozily at her.