Whatever I’d been expecting, it wasn’t this. Lord Bal-lantrae was wearing faded jeans and a Scottish rugby shirt that matched sparkling navy blue eyes. His wavy hair fell over his collar at the back, its coal black a startling contrast to his milky skin. There was an air of suppressed energy about him. He looked more like a computer-game writer than a major landowner. He sat down, stretching long legs in front of him, and lit a cigarette. “So, Henry Naismith tells me you’re looking for his Monet,” he said.
I tried to hide my surprise. “You know Henry?” I asked. Let’s face it, they both spoke the same language. Their voices were virtually indistinguishable. How in God’s name do Sloanes know who’s calling when they pick up the phone?
He grinned. “We met once on a friend’s boat. When my wife told me about your call yesterday, I put two and two together. I’d already spoken to a reporter on the Manchester evening paper about these art robberies and when she mentioned a Monet going missing in Cheshire, I could only think of the Naismith collection. So I gave Henry a ring.”
“The reporter you spoke to is a friend of mine,” I said. “She passed your number on to me.”
“Old girls network. I like it,” he exclaimed with delight. “She did the right thing. God, listen to me. My wife tells me that arrogance runs in the family. All I mean is that I’m probably the only person who has an overview of the situation. The downside of having locally accountable police forces is that crime gets compartmentalized. Sussex don’t talk to Strathclyde, Derbyshire don’t talk to Devon. It was us who brought to the police’s attention the fact that there had been something of a spate of these robberies, all with the same pattern of forced entry, complete disregard of the alarm system and single targets.“
“How did you find out about the connections?” I asked.
“A group of us who open our places to the public get together informally…” I heard the door open behind me and turned to see a thirty-something redhead with matching freckles stick her head through the gap.
“Coffee all round?” she said.
“My wife, Ellen,” Ballantrae said. “Ellen, this is Kate Brannigan, the private eye from Manchester.”
The redhead grinned. “Pleased to meet you. Be right back,” she said, disappearing from sight, leaving the door ajar.
“Where was I? Oh yes, we get together a couple of times a year for a few sherbets, swap ideas and tips, that sort of thing. Last time we met was a couple of weeks after I’d had a Rae-burn portrait lifted, so of course it was uppermost in my mind. Three others immediately chipped in with identical tales-a Gainsborough, a Canaletto and a Ruisdael. In every case, it was one of the two or three best pieces they had,” he added ruefully.
“And that’s when you realized there was something organized going on?” I asked.
“Correct.”
“I’m amazed you managed to keep these thefts out of the papers,” I said.
“It’s not the sort of thing you boast about,” he said dryly. “We’ve all become dependent on the income that comes through the doors from the heritage junkies. The police were happy to go along with that, since they never like high-profile cases where they don’t catch anyone.”
“What did you do then?”
“Well, I offered to act as coordinator, and I spoke to all the police forces concerned. I also wrote to as many other stately-home owners as I could track down and asked if they’d had similar experiences.”
“How many?” I asked.
“Including Henry Naismith’s Monet, thirteen in the last nine months.”
I took a deep breath. At this rate, the stately homes of Britain would soon have nothing left but the seven hundred and thirty-six beds Good Queen Bess slept in. “That’s a lot of art,” I said. “Has anything been recovered?”
“Coffee,” Ellen Ballantrae announced, walking in a with a tray. She was wearing baggy khaki cords and a shapeless bottle green chenille sweater. When she moved, it was obvious she was hiding a slim figure underneath, but on first sight I’d have taken her for the cleaner.
I fell on the mug like a deprived waif. “You’ve probably saved my life,” I told her. “My system’s still recovering from what they call coffee in Hawick.”
Both Ballantraes grinned. “Don’t tell me,” Ellen said. “Warm milk, globules floating on top and all the flavor of rainwater.”
“It wasn’t that good,” I said with feeling.
“Don’t let me interrupt you,” she said, giving her husband’s hair an affectionate tousle as she perched on the table. “He was about to tell you about the Canaletto they got back.”
Ballantrae reached out absently and laid his hand on her thigh. “Absolutely right. Nothing to do with the diligence of the police, however. There was a multiple pileup on a German autobahn about a fortnight after Gerald Brockleston-Camber lost his Canaletto. One of the dead was an antique dealer from Leyden in Holland, Kees van der Rohe. His car was shunted at both ends; the boot flew open, throwing a suitcase clear of the wreckage. The case burst open, revealing the Canaletto behind a false lid. Luckily the painting was undamaged.”
“Not so lucky for Mr. van der Rohe,” I remarked. “What leads did they come up with?”
“Not a one,” Ballantrae said. “They couldn’t find anything about the Canaletto in his records. He conducted his business from home, and the neighbors said there were sometimes cars there with foreign plates, but no one had bothered to take a note of registrations.” He shrugged. “Why should they? There was no indication as to his destination, apart from the fact that he had a couple of hundred pounds’ worth of lire in the front pocket of the suitcase. Unfortunately, van der Rohe’s body was badly burned, along with his diary and his wallet. Frustrating, but at least Gerald got his painting back.”
Frustrating was right. This was turning into one of those cases where I was sucking up information like a demented Hoover, but none of it was taking me anywhere. The only thing I could think of doing now was getting in touch with a Dutch private eye and asking him or her to check out Kees van der Rohe, to see if we could come up with something the police had missed. “Any indication of a foreign connection in the other cases?” I asked.
“Not really,” Ballantrae said. “We suspect that individual pieces are being stolen to order. If anything, I’d hazard a guess that if they’re for a private collector, we’re looking at someone English. A lot of the items that have been stolen have quite a narrow appeal-the Hilliard miniatures, for example. And my Raeburn too, I suppose. They wouldn’t exactly set the international art world ablaze.”
“Maybe that’s part of the plan,” I mused.
“How do you mean?” Ellen Ballantrae leaned forward, frowning.
“If they went for really big stuff like the thieves who stole the Munch painting in Norway, there would be a huge hue and cry, Interpol alerted, round up the usual suspects, that sort of thing. But by going for less valuable pieces, maybe they’re relying on there being less of a fuss, especially if they’re moving their loot across international borders,” I explained.
Ballantrae nodded appreciatively. “Good thinking, that woman. You could have something there. The only thefts that fall outside that are the Bernini bust and Henry’s Monet, but even those two aren’t the absolutely prime examples of their creators’ works.”