‘The date on your note to me was some weeks ago. How long had you had the painting then?’
‘Oh — oh, let me see — I got to London in August. The twelfth.’ He gave a sudden, unexplained laugh. ‘The Glorious Twelfth. Do you shoot? I used to. Now I can’t-The noise upsets me.’
It came to Denton slowly: the twelfth of August was the opening of grouse season, a very big event in the lives of sporting people. He waited for the young man to go on; when he didn’t, he murmured, ‘So you got to London on August twelfth.’
‘Yes.’
‘And bought the painting? I mean, how long after did you buy the painting?’
‘Oh-The date would be on the receipt. If I still have it. They could tell you at the shop. In the arcade. It was — oh, a while ago.’
‘It’s now the twenty-sixth of September. You sent me your note and the envelope on August twenty-ninth.’
‘Oh.’
‘So, it must have been pretty soon after you bought it.’
‘Yes, it was while I was hanging it. My man was hanging it, I mean. He, mmm, brought it to my attention. I put it in an envelope and wrote that silly note the same day. “Little Wesselons”!’ He laughed a bit hysterically. ‘Ass.’
Denton waited several seconds for him to get calm. ‘The letter inside the envelope was dated more than two months ago.’
‘What did it say?’
‘It must have sat sat in the back of the painting — or somewhere — for several weeks before you found it.’
‘I was in the war.’
That meant South Africa — fighting the Boers, a war that had gone on far too long and had reached a vicious stage where the British army was building concentration camps. It probably explained Aubrey Heseltine. Denton had seen young men like this after the Civil War, young men who were never the same, young men whose lives had been taken over by war. ‘Are you on leave?’ he said.
‘No, I’ve been-I’m invalided home. You reach a point-Then it’s no good going on. You’re no good. They don’t trust you any more.’
‘I was in the American Civil War.’
‘Then you understand.’
‘A little, maybe.’
‘You’ve seen it, then. You’ve seen them.’ His face twitched. ‘Boys. Men with families. My sergeant said we’d get them out. He told them that. Then he was dead.’ The right side of his mouth pulled down in a tic. ‘They shelled us. Our own guns. The line was cut. I sent a runner back-A boy, one of mine, he was eighteen, then he was just a tunic, you know, and one leg. A nice boy. Lancashire. I pulled them back. Against orders. I admitted it at the investigation. Why should they die like that from their own guns? That isn’t right, is it, Mr — Denton? Is it?’
Denton shook his head.
‘I’m on medical leave.’ The side of Heseltine’s face pulled down again. ‘But they’re going to court-martial me. For pulling back.’
The soldier in Denton wanted to judge him harshly; on the other hand, his older self said, nothing was proven yet. ‘Is it bad?’
Heseltine gave him the half-smile again. ‘They’ll cashier me.’ ‘You have dreams about the war?’
‘Yes.’
‘You remember all their names.’
‘Yes, yes-’
‘You don’t want to go out.’
‘No.’ He hardly voiced the syllable.
‘I shouldn’t have bothered you.’
‘I’m glad you came.’ Heseltine put his face in his hands, then sat up very straight. ‘I’m afraid you must think me weak.’
Denton stood. ‘Thank you for your help.’
‘I thought there might be — something-’
Something what, Denton wondered. Something more? Something for me? Something to be done? He said, ‘The envelope had a note asking for my help.’
‘I’m so glad I sent it on, then.’
‘Was there a woman at the shop where you bought the painting? ’
‘Only the man in the front, but I think in the back — where they framed and so on — I think there was someone else. But I — didn’t-’
‘I wanted to see if the sender of the note was all right.’
‘Yes, oh, you must! Yes, it’s so important to help people when they ask you for — protection — help-’ The side of his face pulled down. ‘Will you keep me informed?’
‘It’s been so long, I’m not sure it’s worth pursuing.’
‘But you must! Yes — please. I’d like to feel I had a part.’
So Denton took the name of the shop in Burlington Arcade where he’d bought the painting and promised that he’d report back, and each of them said again how important it was to follow things through and to help when help was asked for. As Denton was leaving, he said, ‘Why did you buy that particular painting?’
‘The Wesselons? Because — it was a bargain, he said; somebody else had put down money on it and then not taken it — and-It was the idea of the menagerie, the animal so far away from his own kind-’ He was looking at a bookcase, not at Denton, frowning in concentration. ‘He must have been a wretchedly unhappy animal, but he looks so stalwart! As if he’d come through. Do you know what I mean?’
Outside, the day was close. A dull sky suggested rain. The air smelled of horse dung and urine. The city’s clatter and hum filled Albany Court.
The old man let Denton out to Piccadilly. He made his way to Burlington Arcade and strolled through, looking at the shops and seeing nothing, wondering how many horrors and sufferings there were just then in London, and how an attempt to resolve one simply led to another.
He hadn’t intended to push things any farther that day. Or any day — he had enough without a possibly missing woman. He felt sluggish since he had seen Heseltine, drained of the hangover-derived energy that had driven him when walking. But, because it was raining and he was standing outside a shop that said in dull gold letters on black, ‘D. J. Geddys Objects of Virtue’, he went in.
The public part of the shop seemed small, over-filled with things that even Denton sensed were good — Oriental vases, Wedgwood, Georgian silver, several shawls, many enamelled and decorated surfaces, antique lace, mahogany end tables and tapestry fire screens; on the walls, oil paintings large and small, either safely pre-Victorian or intensely Royal Academy. Denton’s experience of art had been only with big Scottish paintings of sheep and hairy cattle — he had bought by the yard, not the artistry — and had left him indifferent to all of them.
‘May I help you, sir?’
The man had materialized from a dark corner. He was small, so hunched that he was barely five feet, his neck dropped forward and down so that his face had to be turned to the side and up to speak. He had very thick glasses, a beard cut short, the upper lip shaved. He might have been sixty, suggested some near-human, faintly sinister creature, gnome or troll, with a nasty sense of humour kept bottled in, perhaps to come out as practical jokes. His voice was hoarse and very deep, coming out of his pigeon chest in a bass rumble.
Denton debated pretending to be a customer. What might he have been looking for? He knew nothing about ‘objects of virtue’. Not a field in which he could pretend.
‘Mr Geddys?’
‘The same.’
‘I’m trying to locate a woman named Mary Thomason.’
The name had a strange effect on Geddys, as if he’d been bumped. He rolled his head as if to get a better look at Denton, but the movement might have been a cover for something else. There was something wrong with his neck, Denton thought, almost as if he had been hanged. Unlikely, however. There was also something wrong with his expression — a false disinterest, perhaps. Geddys said, ‘Yes?’
‘I believe that perhaps she worked here.’
Geddys looked away from him. ‘I can hardly be expected to talk to a stranger about employees.’ He glanced over his shoulder at Denton. ‘If she worked here.’