Mr Greene got his voice back. ‘I saw him in England,’ he said to the office man. His eyes returned to the Munnings, then he put his hand on the office man’s arm and pulled him up the corridor out of my sight.
‘Open the door,’ I said to the boy, who still gazed in.
‘I don’t know how,’ he said. ‘And I don’t reckon I’d be popular, somehow.’
The two other men returned. All three gazed in. I began to feel sympathy for creatures in cages.
‘Who are you?’ said the office man.
‘Nobody. I mean, I’m just here for the racing, of course, and the cricket.’
‘Name?’
‘Charles Neil.’ Charles Neil Todd.
‘What were you doing in England?’
‘I live there!’ I said. ‘Look,’ I went on, as if trying to be reasonable under great provocation. ‘I saw this man here,’ I nodded to Greene, ‘at the home of a woman I know slightly in Sussex. She was giving me a lift home from the races, see, as I’d missed my train to Worthing and was thumbing along the road from the Members’ car park. Well, she stopped and picked me up, and then said she wanted to make a detour to see her house which had lately been burnt, and when we got there, this man was there. He said his name was Greene and that he was from an insurance company, and that’s all I know about him. So what’s going on?’
‘It is a coincidence that you should meet here again, so soon.’
‘It certainly is,’ I agreed fervently. ‘But that’s no bloody reason to lock me up.’
I read indecision on all their faces. I hoped the sweat wasn’t running visibly down my own.
I shrugged exasperatedly. ‘Fetch the police or something, then,’ I said. ‘If you think I’ve done anything wrong.’
The man from the office put his hand to the switch on the outside wall and carefully fiddled with it, and the steel gate slid up out of sight, a good deal more slowly than it had come down.
‘Sorry,’ he said perfunctorily. ‘But we have to be careful, with so many valuable paintings on the premises.’
‘Well, I see that,’ I said, stepping forward and resisting a strong impulse to make a dash for it. ‘But all the same...’ I managed an aggrieved tone. ‘Still, no harm done, I suppose.’ Magnanimous, as well.
They all walked behind me along the corridor and up the stairs and through the upper gallery, doing my nerves no slightest good. All the other visitors seemed to have left. The receptionist was locking the front door.
My throat was dry beyond swallowing.
‘I thought everyone had gone,’ she said in surprise.
‘Slight delay,’ I said, with a feeble laugh.
She gave me the professional smile and reversed the locks. Opened the door. Held it, waiting for me.
Six steps.
Out in the fresh air.
God almighty, it smelled good. I half turned. All four stood in the gallery watching me go. I shrugged and nodded and trudged away into the drizzle, feeling as weak as a fieldmouse dropped by a hawk.
I caught a passing tram and travelled a good way into unknown regions of the huge city, conscious only of an urgent desire to put a lot of distance between myself and that basement prison.
They would have second thoughts. They were bound to. They would wish they had found out more about me before letting me go. They couldn’t be certain it wasn’t a coincidence that I’d turned up at their gallery, because far more amazing coincidences did exist, like Lincoln at the time of his assassination having a secretary called Kennedy and Kennedy having a secretary called Lincoln; but the more they thought about it the less they would believe it.
If they wanted to find me, where would they look? Not at the Hilton, I thought in amusement. At the races: I had told them I would be there. On the whole I wished I hadn’t.
At the end of the tramline I got off and found myself opposite a small interesting-looking restaurant with B.Y.O. in large letters on the door. Hunger as usual rearing its healthy head, I went in and ordered a steak, and asked for a look at the wine list.
The waitress looked surprised. ‘It’s B.Y.O.,’ she said.
‘What’s B.Y.O.?’
Her eyebrows went still higher. ‘You a stranger? Bring Your Own. We don’t sell drinks here, only food.’
‘Oh.’
‘If you want something to drink, there’s a drive-in bottle shop a hundred yards down the road that’ll still be open. I could hold the steak until you get back.’
I shook my head and settled for a teetotal dinner, grinning all through coffee at a notice on the wall saying ‘We have an arrangement with our bank. They don’t fry steaks and we don’t cash cheques.’
When I set off back to the city centre on the tram, I passed the bottle shop, which at first sight looked so like a garage that if I hadn’t known I would have thought the line of cars was queuing for petrol. I could see why Jik liked the Australian imagination: both sense and fun.
The rain had stopped. I left the tram and walked the last couple of miles through the bright streets and dark parks, asking the way. Thinking of Donald and Maisie and Greene with an ‘e’, and of paintings and burglaries and violent minds.
The overall plan had all along seemed fairly simple: to sell pictures in Australia and steal them back in England, together with everything else lying handy. As I had come across two instances within three weeks, I had been sure there had to be more, because it was surely impossible that I could have stumbled on the only two, even given the double link of racing and painting. Since I’d met the Petrovitches and the Minchlesses, it seemed I’d been wrong to think of all the robberies taking place in England. Why not in America? Why not anywhere that was worth the risk?
Why not a mobile force of thieves shuttling containerfuls of antiques from continent to continent, selling briskly to a ravenous market. As Inspector Frost had said, few antiques were ever recovered. The demand was insatiable and the supply, by definition, limited.
Suppose I were a villain, I thought, and I didn’t want to waste weeks in foreign countries finding out exactly which houses were worth robbing. I could just stay quietly at home in Melbourne selling paintings to rich visitors who could afford an impulse-buy of ten thousand pounds or so. I could chat away with them about their picture collections back home, and I could shift the conversation easily to their silver and china and objets d’art.
I wouldn’t want the sort of customers who had Rembrandts or Fabergés or anything well-known and unsaleable like that. Just the middling wealthy with Georgian silver and lesser Gauguins and Chippendale chairs.
When they bought my paintings, they would give me their addresses. Nice and easy. Just like that.
I would be a supermarket type of villain, with a large turnover of small goods. I would reckon that if I kept the victims reasonably well scattered, the fact that they had been to Australia within the past year or so would mean nothing to each regional police force. I would reckon that among the thousands of burglary claims they had to settle, Australia visits would bear no significance to insurance companies.
I would not, though, reckon on a crossed wire like Charles Neil Todd.
If I were a villain, I thought, with a well-established business and a good reputation, I wouldn’t put myself at risk by selling fakes. Forged oil paintings were almost always detectable under a microscope, even if one discounted that the majority of experienced dealers could tell them at a glance. A painter left his signature all over a painting, not just in the corner, because the way he held his brush was as individual as handwriting. Brush strokes could be matched as conclusively as grooves on bullets.
If I were a villain I’d wait in my spider’s web with a real Munnings, or maybe a real Picasso drawing, or a genuine work by a recently dead good artist whose output had been voluminous, and along would come the rich little flies, carefully steered my way by talkative accomplices who stood around in the States’ Capitals’ art galleries for the purpose. Both Donald and Maisie had been hooked that way.