Miss Hewson said: “Gee, Earl, if I hadn’t clean forgotten! Gee, how crazy can you get? Look, Mr Alleyn: look, Superintendent, I got to ‘fess up’ right now, about that problem-picture. There’s been a kind of misunderstanding between Brother and me. He calculated I’d sent it off and I calculated he had.”
“Just the darnedest thing,” Mr Hewson put in with a savage glance at his sister.
“Certainly is,” she agreed. “And so what do you know? There it is just exactly where it’s been all this time. In the bottom of a grip in my stateroom.”
“Fancy,” said Alleyn. “I shall enjoy taking a second look. Last time I saw it, it was in an otherwise empty case in the deceased’s cabin, which, by the way, I locked.”
A fairly long silence was decorated with a stifled giggle from Caley Bard.
Miss Hewson said breathlessly: “Well, pardon me, again. I guess I’m kind of nervously exhausted. I meant to say the spare cabin.”
Mr Hewson said angrily, “O.K. O.K. So it wasn’t posted. So we acted like it was. Why? I’ll tell you precisely why, Superintendent. This picture’s a work of art. Ask your lady-wife. And this work of art maybe was executed by this guy Constable which would make it a very, very interesting proposition commercially. And we paid out real money, real British money, if that’s not a contradiction in terms, for this work of art and we don’t appreciate the idea of having it removed from our possession by anybody. Repeat: anybody. Period. Cops or whoever. Period. So whadda-we-do?” Mr Hewson asked at large and answered himself with perhaps a slight loss of countenance. “We anticipate,” he said, “the event. We make like this picture’s already on its way.”
“And so I’m sure it would be,” Alleyn said cheerfully, “if it wasn’t for a large and conspicuous constable on duty outside the Ramsdyke Lock post-office.”
Mr Hewson’s face became slightly pink but his gaze which was directed at Alleyn did not shift. His sister coughed with refinement, said: “Pardon me,” and looked terrified.
“You can’t win,” Mr Pollock observed to nobody in particular and added after a moment’s reflection: “It’s disgusting.”
“If we’re not going to keep you up till all hours,” Alleyn said, “we’d better begin. Anybody really want to see the search-warrant, by the way?”
“I certainly do,” Mr Hewson announced. “It may be a very crude notion but I certainly do want that thing.”
“But not at all,” Alleyn rejoined. “Very sensible of you. Here it is.”
Fox displayed the warrant and the Hewsons and Mr Pollock looked upon it with distaste. Mr Lazenby said generally that it was a fair go and he had no complaints. Caley Bard tipped Alleyn one of his cock-eyed winks but offered no comment and Dr Natouche interrupted his work on the map to produce the key of his cabin and lay it on the table. This action seemed to rattle everybody but Caley Bard who merely remarked that his own cabin was unlocked.
“Thank you so much,” Alleyn said. “We do carry one or two of those open-sesame jobs but this will be quicker.” He picked up the key. “Any more?” he asked.
“You know something?” Mr Hewson said. “If you hadn’t gotten those other honest-to-God cops around I’d say you were some kind of phoney laugh with the pay-off line left out.”
“You would?” Alleyn said absently. “Sorry. There’s no joke anywhere that I can see, I promise you that.”
It turned out that the only other locked cabin apart from Natouche’s and the Hewsons’ was Mr Pollock’s. He handed over his key with as bad a grace as he could muster, turned his back on the company and sucked his teeth.
Before he left, Alleyn walked over to the corner table where Dr Natouche still concerned himself with his map of the water-ways. He drew back, rested his dark hands and looked placidly at what he had done. “I am an amateur of maps,” he said, perhaps by way of excuse.
If this was a true example of his work he was right. The chart with its little tentative insets and its meticulous lettering was indeed the work of a devoted amateur. It was so fine and so detailed that it almost needed a lens to examine it. Alleyn followed the line of The River to Longminster. There he saw, predictably, the Minster itself but there, too, was an inn-sign and beside it a thin, gallant and carefully drawn female figure with a dark cropped head.
He looked down at Dr Natouche’s head with its own short-cropped fuzz and at the darkish scalp beneath. The two men did not speak to each other.
Alleyn and Fox embarked on their search.
They found the “Constable” still in place, took possession of it, moved into Miss Hewson’s cabin and methodically emptied the drawers and luggage.
“Funny,” Mr Fox remarked, laying out a rather dreary night-gown with infinite care upon Miss Hewson’s bed. “I always expect American ladies’ lingerie to be more troublante than this type of stuff.”
Alleyn stared at him. “I am speechless,” he said.
“Why do you make out they were so anxious we wouldn’t get a look at that picture?”
“You tell me.”
“Well,” Fox said. “I’ve been trying to set up a working theory. Suppose it was all on the level. Suppose this picture was in the cupboard when this Jo Bagg bought the sideboard.”
“Which it wasn’t, if his story’s right.”
“Quite so. Suppose, then, it’d been on the premises and somebody shoved it in the cupboard and the Baggs hadn’t taken any notice of it and suppose the Hewsons just happened to pick it up like they said and pay for it all fair and above board. In that case what’s wrong with letting us have a look at it? They showed it off willingly enough last night, by all accounts. He kind of hinted they were afraid we might confiscate. They may have been looking at British telly exports in the States, of course, and taken some fanciful notion of how we go to work but personally I didn’t think their yarn stood up.”
“I agree. Playing it by ear, they were, I don’t mind betting.”
“All right, then. Why? People only go on in that style because they’ve got something to hide. What would they have to hide about this picture? I can only think of one answer. What about you, Mr Alleyn?”
“That it’s a racket and they’re in on it.”
“Just so. The thing’s a forgery and they know it. From that it’s a short step to supposing Jo Bagg never had it. The Hewsons brought it with them and planted it in the cupboard when the Baggs weren’t looking.”
“I don’t think so, Br’er Fox. Not from the account Bagg gave of the sale.”
“No? I wasn’t there, of course, when he gave it,” Fox admitted.
“How do you like the possibility of the motor-cyclists planting it? They were hanging about Bagg’s yard on Tuesday and the screech of the cupboard door seems to have drawn old Mrs B.’s baleful attention to them.”
“Could be. Could well be. Come to that, they might be salting the district with carefully planted forgeries.”
“They might, at that. Look at these, Fox.”
Alleyn had drawn out of a pocket in Miss Hewson’s dressing-case, a folder of colour photographs and film. He laid the prints out on the lid of the suitcase. Three of them were of Ramsdyke Lock. He put the painting on the deck beside them.
“Same thing,” Fox said.
“Yes. Taken from precisely the same spot and by the look of the trees, in spring. Presumably on the previous visit that old Mrs Bagg went on about. But look. There’s that difference we noticed.”
“The trees. Yes. Yes. In the painting they’re smaller and—well—different.”
“Very thorough. Wouldn’t do, you see, to have them is they are now. They had to go back to the Constable era. I wouldn’t mind betting,” Alleyn said. “That those trees have been copied from an actual Constable or a reproduction of one.”