‘Yeah’, I said. ‘She came to my office and asked me to look for a painting she’d lost.’
‘What d’you know about painting?’
‘A bit, Cyn was keen on it.’
He grunted. ‘You take the job?’
‘No, out of my depth. Any ideas on who killed her?’
‘Not really, she had this boyfriend, ah… Leo Porter, but he’s in the clear time-wise.’ He read out Porter’s address and number, and I wrote them down. There was a pause in the conversation.
‘Why are you telling me this, Grant?’
I could imagine him sucking in his belly against his belt and poking the flab; Grant tried to balance his moral rectitude against his physical decay and the effort left him unhappy. ‘Well, I haven’t got the time or the manpower for this one, Cliff. She hung around with artists and queers; no one cares. The Commissioner hates artists and queers. I thought I might just throw this to you-apparently this Woods woman had a valuable painting, insured for God knows how much. It’s not over the fireplace just now and the company would like it back. I gather they’re willing to spend a little money. Interested?’
I said I was, and he gave me the name of the man at Hawker Insurance Company-Quentin James.
‘Quentin?’ I said. ‘I bet the Commissioner just loves names like Quentin.’ Grant hung up on me, and since I had the phone in my hand I used it to make an appointment that afternoon to see Mr James.
The insurance company was housed in one of those buildings which make you wonder where the world is going: the floors were made of some substance which was hard, cold and foreign, and it was too dark in the lobby to read the signboards. I got in a lift and found that Hawkers was on the third floor, but by then the lift had shot up to the tenth and I had to ride up to the sixteenth before it came down again. Inside a smoked glass door a woman was sitting perfectly still at a desk. I walked up, and she kept her hands in her lap and only moved the minimum number of muscles for speech. It was a short speech.
‘Yes?’
‘Hardy, to see Mr James.’
She kept her left hand where it was and lifted her right to flick a switch. She repeated what I’d said, adding another Mr. Then she put her hands together again.
‘Down the corridor to your right, Mr Hardy.’ Her head inclined an inch to the right.
I wandered down the passage between the pot plants and the paintings to where a door with a laminate aping cedar bore the words ‘Q de V C James-Claims Investigation’. I knocked and went in. A secretary had her back to me as she delved into a filing cabinet. She waved a hand at a door off to one side, and I gathered that Mr Q de V C James was available. The door came open as I moved towards it and a tall, elegant character stepped out. He had a swathe of papers in his hand which he tossed on to the desk.
‘Tania’, he said breezily. ‘Here’s the report, do your best. Hello, who’re you?’
‘Hardy.’
‘Oh, yes.’ He did something that used to be called beaming, I don’t know what they call it now, you don’t see it often. ‘Hardy!’ he bellowed. ‘Private eye. Come in! Come in!’
The hearty manner and the pin-stripe, three-piece suit gave an impression of amiable idiocy, but he soon dispelled that.
‘Sit down, Mr Hardy.’ He waved me into a comfortable chair in his comfortable office. ‘Inspector Evans speaks well of you. Good man, Evans; honest cop, rare breed.’
‘That’s right’, I said.
‘This is a strange case, bad smell to it. Miss Susannah Woods; shady lady I’m afraid.’ He picked up a folder on the desk, opened it and read: ‘Susannah Catherine Woods, divorced, thirty-six years, childless, journalist, art critic, artists’ agent, art dealer.’ He gave the last word an emphasis, looked up at me and said: ‘And crook.’
I clicked my tongue. ‘Maybe she’s doing her time in a room full of Botticellis. What was her crime here on earth?’
‘You don’t like Botticelli?’
Hypocrite, I said, ‘Loved little bums and tits and put in haloes to say he was sorry.’
‘Hmm. Well, Miss Woods insured paintings and lost them, sometimes.’
‘And other times?’
‘She sold them; sometimes she sold the ones she lost if you follow me.’
‘Yeah’, I said. ‘Why’d you take her on if you knew all this?’
‘We didn’t know, Mr Hardy. This’, he tapped the folder, ‘is the result of forty-eight hours of phoning around. She spread her business and hurt a few people.’
‘What’s your problem?’
He looked through the folder. ‘Some idiot wrote a policy on a Castleton…’ He looked up at me.
I shrugged.
He let out the bellow again, and it came to me that all this heartiness was defence and-in a word, shrewdness. ‘Charles Castleton’, he said. ‘Painter, mid-nineteenth century, Australia. He’s said to have perfected the colonial fence.’ I snorted and he laughed more normally. ‘It’s all such incredible nonsense. Castleton was a drunk who daubed this and that. His oeuvre is uncertain; experts disagree. As I say, he painted fences in a particular way and this is almost his trademark. Now, Miss Woods had an authenticated Castleton; there are a few fakes about, and she insured it with us for $30,000.’
I whistled. ‘It’d fetch that much?’
‘Hard to say. Art insurance is a specialised field and the man who wrote this policy was good on motor vehicles. Anyway, her executors can claim the thirty thousand from us, although the whole thing is very fishy.’
‘In what way?’
He looked at the papers. ‘There’s a very curious point here. Normally we insist on security arrangements in such cases; hers were acceptable, but she also informed us that she had a copy of the painting on display in her house ordinarily. She only brought out the original for knowledgeable guests and suchlike.’
‘Bloody confusing’, I said. ‘Where’s the copy now?’
‘Still in her house, but there’s no sign of the original.’
‘Are you sure she ever had it?’ I was thinking of my conversation with her on the third last day of her life but I didn’t tell him anything about that.
‘Oh yes, the authentication was done by a reputable man-Dr Bruno Ernst, an expert in the field.’
I asked for and got Dr Ernst’s address and a retainer from the company. The deal was that I’d be entitled to five per cent of the claim if I recovered the painting-$1500 was three to four weeks work in my league, a nice round sum that brought out my enthusiasm and optimism.
I used the cheque I’d got from Quentin to buy myself a phone call at the desk of the frozen lady. She was still there, like a fragile, prehistoric bird trapped in the ice. I dialled Leo Porter’s number and a rich, masculine voice came on the line.
‘Mr Porter? My name’s Hardy, I’m working for the Hawker Insurance Company on a matter connected with the estate of Miss Susannah Woods.’
‘Yes.’ Guarded was the word for it, Horatius at the gate would have seemed relaxed by comparison.
‘A small matter, Mr Porter, I understand you have a painting which had been in the joint possession of yourself and Miss Woods.’
‘Yes.’ Loquaciousness was not his middle name.
‘I’m told you’ve offered this painting for sale, Mr Porter; is that right?’
He gave a short laugh. ‘Wrong, it’s worthless, it’s a copy, very crude. I found it amusing.’
‘Could I see it?’
‘Anytime Mr… Hardy except now. I’m busy. Call me later. Goodbye.’
He sounded assured and hostile, and now I had more to think about. That made three Castletons, two fakes and a dinkum. It was all a bit much and I decided to bank the Hawker cheque, draw out lunch and travelling money, and do a bit of research. I had the lunch in Glebe at Lionel’s crepes-one savoury and one sweet-and I put down a good bottle of hock with them. Two short black coffees fought the good fight with the wine as I walked up to the university to tap the resources of the Fisher Library.