‘I’ve been wondering about that, child, but I cannot believe that he was merely a genuine busybody who believed he was doing a good turn. If he was, the police will trace him and get him to tell his story. I did have one other thought about him. How did he speak? What kind of voice had he?’
‘He hadn’t an American accent,’ replied the intelligent O’Hara. ‘I suppose their market for those pictures was on the other side of the pond?’
‘I should think so. I have a friend at the National Gallery and he is going to make some enquiries, privately, of the experts in Boston, New York and Philadelphia, to find out whether they have any suspicions that faked or stolen pictures have been making their way over there.’
‘I should say that’s a pretty long shot, you know. They probably won’t have any information,’ said Gascoigne, who was present with his cousin. ‘Some of the private collectors are such brutes that they’d buy what they thought was good stuff and not let the reputable people—the expert dealers and the museum staffs—have a sniff at anything that happened to come their way, especially if they had reason to believe it might have been stolen.’
‘Yes, if they know the source is tainted they’d be hardly likely to broadcast the news,’ agreed Laura. ‘But Mike’s certainly right in thinking that this crew made a record blunder when they used him to help them carry a corpse. Why, but for that, we’d never have known anything at all about the business from first to last. Dashed odd, when you come to think of it. What do you say, Mrs. Croc? That’s always been the queerest thing in the case, I think.’
‘I agree,’ said Mrs. Bradley. ‘Still, murder will out, you know.’
‘I wish this one would,’ said Laura. ‘I want to go to the ballet at Covent Garden, and I can’t do that, stuck here, with murderers and picture-fakers all round me.’
‘But go, child, go! Take a fortnight’s holiday and enjoy yourself! Why not?’
‘Because I couldn’t bear to miss the finish of this. Having had all the fun so far, I’d be a mutt to fade out of the rest of it. It was just a passing whiff of the vapours, that’s all.’
‘ “Uncertain, coy and hard to please!” ’ said Gascoigne, accusingly. ‘Go on, Mike. Further errors?’
‘Well, the woman—Mrs. Battle?—at Newcombe Soulbury seems to have acted like a pretty far-gone lunatic. Fancy her giving you a letter to post which was addressed to Cassius.’
‘Ah, but she had no idea that we should go to Slepe Rock and contact this Cassius,’ said Laura.
‘She may have been justified in the supposition,’ Mrs. Bradley observed. ‘Either she had forgotten, or else she was not aware of the fact that a man had disappeared from Slepe Rock, just as a man had disappeared from Newcombe Soulbury.’
‘Besides, she didn’t know we were investigating disappearances, did she?’ Laura demanded.
‘That may be true,’ said O’Hara. ‘Well, another mistake I think they made was to allow this Mrs. Battle to move about. She was at the farm, where I first saw her; she was at the cottage at Newcombe Soulbury when Mrs. Bradley met her; then she was at the house with the four dead trees—Cottam’s you know—when Laura, Gerry and I went along there— ’
‘I’m sorry the four dead trees didn’t work out right,’ said Laura. ‘They ought to have been significant, but they aren’t.’
‘We don’t know that they aren’t,’ said Gascoigne. ‘I’ve been thinking things over, and it seems to me that they do represent four dead people.’
‘I think so, too,’ said O’Hara.
‘You can’t count the man that the stone fell on,’ Laura pointed out. ‘That was sheer accident. Ah, and by the way, that reminds me! Why couldn’t they risk having that man identified? What was there about him that would have incriminated them?’
‘That is a most fascinating question, and it will not be answered until the police track down the head and hands, child.’
‘But will they ever do that?’
‘If they do not, we must. I say that in no civic spirit. I want to know the answer to your question. Why should that man’s dead body have been so dangerous? I think I know the answer, but Michael is the only person who can prove it.’
‘But how do you mean that the four dead trees do represent four dead people?’ demanded Laura of O’Hara, ignoring Mrs. Bradley’s interesting statements.
‘Well,’ said O’Hara, hesitating a little and glancing at Mrs. Bradley, ‘it struck me—I expect I’m wrong, mind you, and it may not be what Gerry means—but it did strike me that the deaths that really ought to be investigated are those of the drowned couple in the yacht. I mean that we’ve allowed for the disappearance of the fellow who owned the cottage—now the garage at the pull-in—but nothing has been said about the young couple who got drowned in their yacht; and yet it was just as important for these picture merchants that those two should “disappear” as that the previous bloke should have been got out of the cottage so that they could have it. If that couple inherited or bought it, the smugglers were no better off.’
‘Oh, dash!’ said Laura, annoyed. ‘If you’re right, that destroys the nine-year cycle.’
‘The four dead trees spoil the number nine, anyway,’ said Gascoigne. ‘And now we see whom they represent, if they represent people at all.’
‘I’d like to know who’s at the bottom of all that symbolism said O’Hara.
‘Young David Battle,’ said Mrs. Bradley positively. Her audience looked at her with enquiry and interest in their eyes.
‘How come?’ asked O’Hara gently.
‘It is a theory at present,’ Mrs. Bradley replied, ‘but I have little doubt of its truth. David has a warped and terrified mind, and I daresay it was some sort of comfort to him to write his father’s guilt in some such way, even though no one, except our intelligent Laura, whose mind is powerful and not warped, might ever read what was written.’
‘But Mike read it, too, when he saw the four dead trees, and so the four dead trees,’ said Laura, looking happy again, ‘do represent dead people. They represent the poet who disappeared from Slepe Rock, the yachting couple, and, now, Toro. Tell me,’ she continued, looking at her employer, ‘how the business of my two portraits fits in, and how you tumbled to the picture-smuggling racket.’
‘The second question first: my attention was attracted to a remarkable imitation of an Old Crome— ’
‘Do you mean a copy of an Old Crome?’ asked O’Hara.
‘No, child. That is the point. The subject of this particular picture is not one which Old Crome could have painted. I happened to recognize the subject, which chances to be a bit of the Isle of Wight, and Old Crome, so far as we know, never stayed there, but spent the greater part of his life in his native Norwich. I imagine that the picture was not painted by Battle with any intent to deceive, as, although it portrays a pastoral landscape with no view of the sea, Battle would have been the first to realize that the master would not have visited the island and therefore could not have chosen the subject. I am no expert, of course, but I have a fair knowledge of English painting of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and to me the imitation of style was unmistakeable. But, as I say, I think it was painted as a tour de force, and not with any intention of trying to deceive buyers into believing that it was a genuine Old Crome. I say this because it is evident that the artist has forgotten the picture. If it had been painted to defraud, he would have got it back from the dealer long before this, I fancy.’