Peter Corris - Heroin Annie

I clicked my tongue. ‘Maybe she’s doing her time in a room full of Botticellis. What was her crime here on earth?’

‘You don’t like Botticelli?’

Hypocrite, I said, ‘Loved little bums and tits and put in haloes to say he was sorry.’

‘Hmm. Well, Miss Woods insured paintings and lost them, sometimes.’

‘And other times?’

‘She sold them; sometimes she sold the ones she lost if you follow me.’

‘Yeah’, I said. ‘Why’d you take her on if you knew all this?’

‘We didn’t know, Mr Hardy. This’, he tapped the folder, ‘is the result of forty-eight hours of phoning around. She spread her business and hurt a few people.’

‘What’s your problem?’

He looked through the folder. ‘Some idiot wrote a policy on a Castleton…’ He looked up at me.

I shrugged.

He let out the bellow again, and it came to me that all this heartiness was defence and-in a word, shrewdness. ‘Charles Castleton’, he said. ‘Painter, mid-nineteenth century, Australia. He’s said to have perfected the colonial fence.’ I snorted and he laughed more normally. ‘It’s all such incredible nonsense. Castleton was a drunk who daubed this and that. His oeuvre is uncertain; experts disagree. As I say, he painted fences in a particular way and this is almost his trademark. Now, Miss Woods had an authenticated Castleton; there are a few fakes about, and she insured it with us for $30,000.’

I whistled. ‘It’d fetch that much?’

‘Hard to say. Art insurance is a specialised field and the man who wrote this policy was good on motor vehicles. Anyway, her executors can claim the thirty thousand from us, although the whole thing is very fishy.’

‘In what way?’

He looked at the papers. ‘There’s a very curious point here. Normally we insist on security arrangements in such cases; hers were acceptable, but she also informed us that she had a copy of the painting on display in her house ordinarily. She only brought out the original for knowledgeable guests and suchlike.’

‘Bloody confusing’, I said. ‘Where’s the copy now?’

‘Still in her house, but there’s no sign of the original.’

‘Are you sure she ever had it?’ I was thinking of my conversation with her on the third last day of her life but I didn’t tell him anything about that.

‘Oh yes, the authentication was done by a reputable man-Dr Bruno Ernst, an expert in the field.’

I asked for and got Dr Ernst’s address and a retainer from the company. The deal was that I’d be entitled to five per cent of the claim if I recovered the painting-$1500 was three to four weeks work in my league, a nice round sum that brought out my enthusiasm and optimism.

I used the cheque I’d got from Quentin to buy myself a phone call at the desk of the frozen lady. She was still there, like a fragile, prehistoric bird trapped in the ice. I dialled Leo Porter’s number and a rich, masculine voice came on the line.

‘Mr Porter? My name’s Hardy, I’m working for the Hawker Insurance Company on a matter connected with the estate of Miss Susannah Woods.’

‘Yes.’ Guarded was the word for it, Horatius at the gate would have seemed relaxed by comparison.

‘A small matter, Mr Porter, I understand you have a painting which had been in the joint possession of yourself and Miss Woods.’

‘Yes.’ Loquaciousness was not his middle name.

‘I’m told you’ve offered this painting for sale, Mr Porter; is that right?’

He gave a short laugh. ‘Wrong, it’s worthless, it’s a copy, very crude. I found it amusing.’

‘Could I see it?’

‘Anytime Mr… Hardy except now. I’m busy. Call me later. Goodbye.’

He sounded assured and hostile, and now I had more to think about. That made three Castletons, two fakes and a dinkum. It was all a bit much and I decided to bank the Hawker cheque, draw out lunch and travelling money, and do a bit of research. I had the lunch in Glebe at Lionel’s crepes-one savoury and one sweet-and I put down a good bottle of hock with them. Two short black coffees fought the good fight with the wine as I walked up to the university to tap the resources of the Fisher Library.

There were three books on Castleton, all of which seemed to be based on the same slim supply of facts. He was a remittance man of sorts, good family, good with horses, and with a weakness for booze and opium which got him in the end. Falling off horses helped. Two of the books had colour reproductions of some of his paintings which looked undistinguished to me — all hazy blues and greens with an occasional streak of brown. I could see what they meant about the fences though; they wavered up hills and petered out among trees under harsh suns. Good fences. This all took a few hours; I took notes on the titles of his authenticated pictures and I browsed through a couple of books which mentioned Castleton in unimportant ways. It was mid-winter and the shadows were long on the lawns when I got

out of the library. A student pushed a pamphlet into my hand. It read: LOOK AROUND YOU. THREE OUT OF FIVE OF US WILL BE UNEMPLOYED IN FIVE YEARS! VOTE RADICAL SOCIALIST FOR A FUTURE!

I walked back down Glebe Point Road to my car and sat in it wishing I’d talked to Miss Woods just a little more when I had the chance. If her racket was losing paintings and selling them, she’d have to have mates-dealers, proxies, go-betweens. I needed names, and since Grant hadn’t given me any, I concluded that the cops hadn’t found anything interesting in her house. But then, as Grant had said, cops had better things to do. I drove home and had a drink and a sandwich before putting on the dark clothes and the rubber-soled shoes, and taking out the wallet which contains a few useful housebreaking tools.

I like Paddington; I’ve been to a few good parties there and spent a couple of those nights of sexual excess that everyone should have before they die. Miss Woods’ place was a tiny cottage in a row of four in a narrow street. All four houses would have gone for a song in the 1950’s and were worth more than a hundred thousand each now. There was a lane wide enough for a skinny cat behind them, and I slipped down there and over the back fence. AC-DC were playing a number on the stereo in the house next door so I didn’t have to worry too much about the clink of milk bottles or the rasp of metal on metal. Her security was lousy. I was inside the place in two minutes and could have taken every Van Gogh in sight with no one the wiser. I used a narrow-beam torch to snoop around the place but the results were disappointing. Her bureau contained only a few papers, all innocuous, and if there were any hidden safes in the house they were well hidden. The imputed Castleton was on a wall in the tiny bedroom which was occupied by a big, well-used bed. I was looking at the painting when I heard the noise outside. The music next door had stopped, and I heard the glass tinkle into the sink. Then everything went very quiet before there was a scraping and rasping and the back door opened. I went down the stairs quietly, but he must have heard me. It was moonless dark and I had trouble adjusting after the torch light upstairs. I had my foot on the bottom step when he turned on the lights. I got a glimpse of him, pale and dark-haired, and then he hit me. It wasn’t much, a clumsy poke in the stomach, but I was off balance, I lurched forward, grabbed him but missed, and in that cramped little house a big, hard piece of furniture leaped up and crashed into the side of my head. I went down, hard, and the lights went out.

I heard myself swearing, using some exceedingly nasty language, and then it hurt to swear or to do anything except lie very still. After a bit of that I got up slowly and took hold of the stair rail; everything seemed to work reasonably well and I dragged myself upstairs. The painting was gone. I stared at the empty space for a while and when I reached up to touch my head I found I had a piece of cloth in my hand; it was cotton, looked like part of a shirt, and it was smeared and crusty with dried paint.