Dominic was standing in the doorway of the room with his school-bag under his arm. He had been there for some time, waiting to be noticed, and unwilling to break into his father’s concentration until he could catch his eye. The morning was bright, and the normality of everything wonderfully reassuring, and they had said not a word that could tend to cast a shadow on Kitty. Not that other people were expendable, of course, but he couldn’t help being glad when Kitty slipped clean out of the discussion.
“Have I to bike to-day, Dad, or are you going in this morning?” he asked, seizing his opportunity.
“Yes, I’m going, I’ll take you. Give me five minutes and I’m ready.”
Dominic had hoped that he would be communicative on the ride, but he wasn’t, he remained preoccupied, and nothing was said between them until they parted at the corner by the police station. It was still an effort not to ask questions, but since the inquiries seemed to be veering well away from Kitty it did not hurt him quite so much to contain his curiosity.
“Can I ride back with you this afternoon? I shall be a bit late myself, because it’s rugger practice. Say quarter to five?”
“I hope to be free by then,” agreed George. “You can call in and see, anyhow. I shall be here.”
He watched his son shoulder his bag and stride away along the street. He was running to length these days, not so far off a man’s height now, but still very slender. He was getting control of his inches, too, and learning to manage his hands and feet and all the other uncoordinated parts of him. Give him a year, and he’d be downright elegant in movement. Odd how they do their growing-up by sudden leaps, so that however constantly and affectionately you watch them they still manage to transmute themselves while your back’s turned, and confront you every third month or so with another daunting stranger. Freckled and chestnut-haired and no beauty, apart, perhaps, from those eyes of his; but like his mother, whom he so engagingly resembled, he didn’t need beauty. George found them both formidable enough as they were.
He went in to his conference with Superintendent Duckett assembling in his mind the details of his evening interview with Jean and Leslie Armiger. Duckett found them no less interesting than George had done, and endorsed his proposition to follow up the curious affair of the inn sign. The dreary, dogged search for bloodstained clothing, the exhaustive interrogation of anyone and everyone who had been present at the opening night of The Jolly Barmaid, would go on all day and probably for a good many more days into the bargain; but if a promising side-track could shorten the journey, so much the better for them all.
George telephoned County Buildings before he set out, to check with Wilson.
“That’s right,” said Wilson amiably, “I offered to pick up the thing for Leslie and take it over to Cranmer’s for him. Oh, yes, I think the chap’s all right, knows his stuff, and all that. He’s had one or two good things in since I’ve known the place. I don’t know a thing about this panel of Leslie’s, no. I’ve seen it, of course, but there’s nothing exceptional about it on sight, except, perhaps, the quality and solidity of the panel it’s painted on. I’d like to see the worm who could get his teeth in that. No, I can’t say I know Cramner, except just from looking round his place occasionally, and buying one or two small things. He’s been there a few years now. Usual sort of antiquary, old and desiccated and hard as nails.”
The description fitted Mr. Cranmer very fairly, George thought, when he entered the small gallery in Abbey Place, and took stock of the person who hovered delicately in the background, refraining from intercepting him until he showed whether he wanted to gaze or do business. The neighbourhood was a part of the old town, mainly early Tudor, and the low black-beamed frontage of the shop was beautiful. English black-and-white, in contrast to some of its European kin, is so wonderfully disciplined, makes such a patterned harmony of a whole street, instead of a Gothic cadenza. The interior was also plain white beneath the enormous beams of the ceiling, and not cluttered. The man himself was of medium height, slightly stooped, grey of hair and complexion and clothing, and lean with an astringent leanness like that of roots and sinews and all that is most durable in nature. He wore thick-lensed glasses that made his eyes look enormous and incredibly blue. To approach him from the inoffensive side-view and be suddenly transfixed by that vast blue glare was electrifying.
The voice that went with the grey shape was old, prosaic and discreet; so discreet that until George identified himself as a police officer it produced no information whatever, and without even appearing to be wilfully stalling; as without any apparent volte-face it then became loquacious. Yes, he had the painting in question in his workshop, he understood that it had been the sign of an inn called The Joyful Woman. Yes, it might possibly turn out to be of some value, though questionably of very much.
“Several times clumsily overpainted, you know, and exposed to a great deal of weathering when in use as a sign, and therefore frequently touched up and varnished over, like most of its kind. But I have an idea, mind you, it is just an idea, that it may be based on an eighteenth-century portrait by a local artist named Cotsworth. You won’t have heard of him, I dare say. Not important, but interesting, if it turns out to be his. Worth a few hundreds, perhaps, to a local collector.” He trotted away into his back room to bring forth a foot-square framed canvas, the head of some long-dead worthy. “This is a Cotsworth,” he said triumphantly. It seemed to George depressingly smug, clumsy and ugly, but he forebore from saying so.
“You’ve had the painting for about a fortnight, I understand. Are you making tests on it? Did young Mr. Armiger empower you to do that, or was he merely asking for an opinion first?”
“He asked for an opinion, but I should like, if he agrees, to try to uncover at least a corner of the older paint, and see if it confirms my guess. If it does, Mr. Felse, I may be prepared to offer Mr. Armiger as much as two hundred and fifty pounds for it myself.”
“Very handsome, Mr. Cranmer. Did you inform Mr. Armiger senior, or anyone in his employ, that you had the painting here, and that it might conceivably be valuable?”
The two hundred and fifty pounds had struck the first really phoney note; if he was ready to mention such a sum he was thinking in terms of a thousand and upwards. And once that false quantity had jarred on George’s senses this whole room began to seem as much a faŕšade as the magnified blueness of the eyes.
“Certainly not,” said the old man stiffly. “It came to me as the property of Mr. Armiger junior, through Mr. Wilson, and I wouldn’t dream of communicating with anyone else about it. Except, of course, the police when they require me to co-operate.” He made it a plaintive and dignified reproof, and George let him have it that way; but the fact remained that he had not been required to co-operate to the extent of naming a price, and there had been no need whatever for him to do so. Unless, of course, he wanted his offer to come back to the owner in this superlatively respectable fashion, relayed by the innocent police. It might not come off, but there was nothing lost in trying.
All very correct, thought George, halting for a moment outside to weigh up the three mediocre moderns in the low Henry VII windows; but then, he would be correct, and cautious too, now that Armiger’s dead. The last thing he’d want would be to be involved. All the same, George suspected that Mr. Cranmer had indeed flashed the urgent warning to Armiger: look out, you’re giving away something valuable. He probably didn’t know that Armiger had gone as high as five hundred pounds in his attempt to recover it, or he wouldn’t have stuck at two hundred and fifty himself, the discrepancy was too glaring to pass without comment. He hadn’t, of course, actually made an offer, only hinted that he might be prepared to do so, but the implications were there. He would have collected a plump commission, no question of it, if he’d helped Armiger to get the better of Leslie, and acquired the great man’s formidable patronage into the bargain. Now that that was knocked on the head, quite literally, he was going into the deal for himself. All that, thought George, strolling without haste back to his car, depends rather on whether Mr. Cramner was acquainted with the painting’s provenance; but since the thing came from young Armiger, and he evidently knows it to be the sign of The Joyful Woman, we may safely assume that he could guess Armiger had thrown it out as valueless, even if Wilson didn’t tell him. And he probably did, he’s a talkative soul, he confides easily.