‘Where’d he get the money for the heroin?’ I said.
‘Pinched something from that bitch’s house and flogged it. It must be bad stuff though, never seen him like this before. God, I wish I had a smoke.’
I looked at Steele and thought that his colour was bad, he had a sort of nineteenth century opium-den pallor and then one of the things that had been jangling around loose in my mind clicked into place. I had a short talk to Morgan Lindsay and then Steele’s breathing broke up into erratic gusts and we went out to look for a phone.
I talked to her some more in the street while the ambulance was coming. But when we got back to the room, Steele and his torn shirt and the ragged mattress were covered with blood and vomit, and he was dead.
I handed the three paintings over and Quentin de V C James pushed the buttons to get a cheque made out for me-promptly. He took the canvas with Dr Ernst’s mark on it over to the window and let the expensive light flood over it. He put it down and shook his head.
‘Not my idea of $30,000 worth’, he said.
I grinned. ‘Nobody’s idea, it’s a fake.’
‘Then they’re all fakes.’
‘That’s right, Steele did them all; the first one was a dry run which he wasn’t happy with. Woods left it lying around and Leo Porter got hold of it. Then there was the deliberate fake to help authenticate the first-class fake. Steele killed her when she said she was going to burn that one and collect the insurance.’
‘But why? He’d have got his cut surely?’
I shook my head. ‘He was past that. Have a look at these.’ I took out Primo’s picture and laid it on the desk, then I opened up one of the books on Castleton. It had as a frontispiece a photograph of Castleton taken at a time when he was ill. The hair, the face, the lines of suffering were almost identical.
‘Remarkable’, James said.
‘Yeah, the woman filled most of it in for me. Steele was pretty nutty to begin with and the dope didn’t help. He did a deep study of Castleton when he took on this commission for Woods. In the end he came to believe that he was Castleton or was his son or grandson-the Lindsay woman said he shifted around a bit on that point.’
‘And he cracked when she said she was going to burn the painting?’
‘That’s right. By then he believed it was real and that he’d painted it as a real artist.’
‘Is that why he went after the other pictures?’
‘Probably, but I think the girl might have helped a bit there. The rough jobs probably looked more like Steele’s own work, if they turned up and someone saw Steele’s style in them that would lead directly to him. The Woods woman wanted to get the rough copy back so as not to confuse the issue when she made her claim. That’s why she came to me.’
James was nodding sagaciously when a secretary came in and handed him an envelope. He passed it over to me and did some more beaming.
‘A brilliant piece of work, Mr Hardy, my congratulations.’
‘Thanks.’
‘One would have expected you to look a little more pleased.’
I said: ‘Would one?’, and got up and left. I was thinking of the pictures of Charles Castleton with his life sucked away by the booze and opium and Paul Steele, eaten down to the bone by smack.
‹‹
Blood is thicker
He had a long, horsey face that needed a pipe stuck in it to bring it to perfection. His eyes were a washed-out blue, and his sandy hair was cut in a severe short-back-and-sides. He looked like the archetypal Aussie; a six footer, a survivor of Lone Pine and the Somme. He was from Taranaki, New Zealand. The black Oxfords were polished, the grey flannels were pressed and his tweed jacket had been expensive and fashionable twenty years ago. The woman with him was fashionable now and anytime; she was a tall, Viking blonde, in a green silk dress with modish accessories. He was Hiram Dempsey, farmer, and she was his daughter Susan, secretary.
We were sitting in my dusty office with the linoleum decor and the streaky windows. Hiram made the introductions, mentioned the New Zealand policeman who’d referred him to me, and then let Susan take over. I could see the pride in his face when she spoke.
‘We want you to look for my brother, Mr Hardy. We understand you’re very good at finding people.’
I tried to look modest. ‘It depends how badly they want to stay lost; some dig in deep, some just stay on the surface. When did you last see this brother?’
She looked at her father. ‘Fifteen years?’
He nodded. ‘Fifteen, near enough.’ He had that slight Scots burr many older New Zealanders have, slurring the hard Y sound.
‘I scarcely remember him’, she went on, ‘I was only seven or so when he left.’
‘Why did he leave and where did he go?’
Hiram looked over my head out at the fierce summer sky. ‘Robert and I didn’t get along. I’m a farmer, he wasn’t. I’m a Christian, he was a sinner.’
‘What sort of sins?’
‘Theft, drunkenness, loose living.’
I thought I had the picture. ‘When you say theft, do you mean robberies or…’
‘Cars.’
‘Right.’ It sounded familiar, a country boy out of his mind with boredom pinching cars, getting pissed and screwing girls. It happens; some of them become public servants.
‘Robert came to Australia, Mr Hardy, to Sydney. My mother, she died three years ago, said that he always talked about the big city and he meant Sydney.’
‘He might have moved on; New York’s bigger, so’s London.’
‘No.’ Hiram said the word harshly. ‘Robert sent his mother a postcard every few years. After she died I found them; they were posted in Sydney.’
‘Do you have them?’
He reached into his jacket pocket and took out a slim stack of postcards held by a rubber band. He passed them across. The cards were mundane-the Bridge, the Opera House, the Zoo. The messages were minimal and written in a firm, round hand: ‘Dear Mum, Hope you are well. All’s fine with me, loving it in Sydney and doing very well. Hope to get over to see you before too long’-that sort of thing. They were dated at two and three year intervals, with a gap of four years in the middle of the sequence of seven. The last card was dated one month ago. Dempsey watched me examining it.
‘He didn’t know his mother had died’, he said.
I looked at him, there was something unyielding about him and I decided that I’d been wrong about the pipe, the prop he needed was a Bible. ‘Can you tell me why you want to locate your son now, Mr Dempsey? I gather you haven’t forgiven him his trespasses.’
‘Don’t blaspheme’, he snapped. ‘I have less than a year to live Mr Hardy. I’ll be joining my wife before long. I have a growth. I’m hoping that my eldest son will farm my land; it’s been Dempsey land for five generations.’ He let out a sound that in a weaker man would be called a sigh. Some of the lines around his eyes which I’d taken to be marks of country hardiness now looked like tiredness, and there was a fragility beneath his resilience. ‘It’s unlikely I know’, he went on, ‘Robert was a wastrel but he might be redeemable.’
‘Sure. Well, we need a starting point. I gather you have another son; would he have had any contact with his brother?’
‘No. William is thirty and settled. He lives in Wollongong, he’s an academic’ He spoke the words without much enthusiasm; Old Dempsey must have been a hard man to please, any son who didn’t have cowshit on his boots wasn’t a son at all.
‘He’d remember him, though. Could I have his address?’ Susan gave it to me as the old man seemed to withdraw into himself. Maybe he was hoping that his Creator was a farmer. I asked for a photograph of the prodigal and she produced an old snapshot and a newspaper cutting. The photograph, which was yellowed and creased, showed a youth in his late teens standing beside a motor cycle. He was smiling broadly and he had a mop of dark curling hair; he was a good-looking lad.