Dick Francis - In the Frame

I went down. Same carpet, same lighting, but no scatter of customers looking from pictures to catalogues and back again.

Below stairs, the gallery was not one straight room but a series of small rooms off a long corridor, apparently the result of not being able to knock down all the dividing and load-bearing walls. A room to the rear of the stairs was an office, furnished with another distinguished desk, two or three comfortable chairs for prospective clients, and a civilised row of teak-faced filing cabinets. Heavily framed pictures adorned the walls, and an equally substantial man was writing in a ledger at the desk.

He raised his head, conscious of my presence outside his door.

‘Can I help you?’ he said.

‘Just looking.’

He gave me an uninterested nod and went back to his work. He, like the whole place, had an air of permanence and respectability quite unlike the fly-by-night suburban affair in Sydney. This reputable business, I thought, could not be what I was looking for. I had got the whole thing wrong. I would have to wait until I could get Hudson Taylor to look up Donald’s cheque and point me in a new direction.

Sighing, I continued down the line of rooms, thinking I might as well finish taking stock of the opposition. A few of the frames were adorned with red spots, but the prices on everything good were a mile from a bargain and a deterrent to all but the rich.

In the end room, which was larger than the others, I came across the Munnings. Three of them. All with horses; one racing scene, one hunting, one of gypsies.

They were not in the catalogue.

They hung without ballyhoo in a row of similar subjects, and to my eyes stuck out like thoroughbreds among hacks.

Prickles began up my spine. It wasn’t just the workmanship, but one of the pictures itself. Horses going down to the start. A long line of jockeys, bright against a dark sky. The silks of the nearest rider, purple with a green cap.

Maisie’s chatty voice reverberated in my inner ear, describing what I saw. ‘... I expect you’ll think I was silly but that was one of the reasons I bought it... because Archie and I decided we’d like purple with a green cap for our colours, if no one already had that...’

Munnings had always used a good deal of purple and green in shadows and distances. All the same... This picture, size, subject, and colouring, was exactly like Maisie’s, which had been hidden behind a radiator, and, presumably, burned.

The picture in front of me looked authentic. The right sort of patina for the time since Munnings’ death, the right excellence of draughtsmanship, the right indefinable something which separated the great from the good. I put out a gentle finger to feel the surface of canvas and paint. Nothing there that shouldn’t be.

An English voice from behind me said, ‘Can I help you?’

‘Isn’t that a Munnings?’ I said casually, turning round.

He was standing in the doorway, looking in, his expression full of the guarded helpfulness of one whose best piece of stock is being appraised by someone apparently too poor to buy it.

I knew him instantly. Brown receding hair combed back, grey eyes, down-drooping moustache, suntanned skin: all last on view thirteen days ago beside the sea in Sussex, England, prodding around in a smoky ruin.

Mr Greene. With an ‘e’.

It took him only a fraction longer. Puzzlement as he glanced from me to the picture and back, then the shocking realisation of where he’d seen me. He took a sharp step backwards and raised his hand to the wall outside.

I was on my way to the door, but I wasn’t quick enough. A steel mesh gate slid down very fast in the doorway and clicked into some sort of bolt in the floor. Mr Greene stood on the outside, disbelief still stamped on every feature and his mouth hanging open. I revised all my easy theories about danger being good for the soul and felt as frightened as I’d ever been in my life.

‘What’s the matter?’ called a deeper voice from up the corridor.

Mr Greene’s tongue was stuck. The man from the office appeared at his shoulder and looked at me through the imprisoning steel.

‘A thief?’ he asked with irritation.

Mr Greene shook his head. A third person arrived outside, his young face bright with curiosity, and his acne showing like measles.

‘Hey,’ he said in loud Australian surprise. ‘He was the one at the Art Centre. The one who chased me. I swear he didn’t follow me. I swear it.’

‘Shut up,’ said the man from the office briefly. He stared at me steadily. I stared back.

I was standing in the centre of a brightly lit room of about fifteen feet square. No windows. No way out except through the guarded door. Nowhere to hide, no weapons to hand. A long way down the ski jump and no promise of a soft landing.

‘I say,’ I said plaintively. ‘Just what is all this about?’ I walked up to the steel gate and tapped on it. ‘Open this up, I want to get out.’

‘What are you doing here?’ the office man said. He was bigger than Greene and obviously more senior in the gallery. Heavy dark spectacle frames over unfriendly eyes, and a blue bow tie with polka dots under a double chin. Small mouth with a full lower lip. Thinning hair.

‘Looking,’ I said, trying to sound bewildered. ‘Just looking at pictures.’ An innocent at large, I thought, and a bit dim.

‘He chased me in the Art Centre,’ the boy repeated.

‘You threw some stuff in that man’s eyes,’ I said indignantly. ‘You might have blinded him.’

‘Friend of yours, was he?’ the office man said.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I was just there, that was all. Same as I’m here. Just looking at pictures. Nothing wrong in that, is there? I go to lots of galleries, all the time.’

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.’