Peter Corris - Heroin Annie

I put the cloth in my pocket and sat on the bed to do some thinking but my head hurt too much. Downstairs Miss Woods kept a nice supply of liquor with the fixings. I made a strong Scotch and oiled my brain with it. The treatment worked to the extent of making clear to me that we now had two missing Castletons and one still at large. I used Miss Woods’ phone to call Leo Porter’s number but there was no reply. Why should there be? It was Tuesday night, just right for a quiet dinner somewhere, a drink or two afterwards and all that might lead to. It was what any sensible, unattached, professional man would be doing with his time, but then I was only a semi-professional myself.

I went out through the front door and slammed it closed-King Kong could have been sitting on the balcony and no one in the street would have known. Leo Porter lived a half mile away in one of the curvy, leafy iron-lace-filled streets Paddington is famous for. His front gate was open and his front door was open; I walked into the house and closed the door behind me. Leo lived in style-everything was of the best, carpets, furniture, TV, the lot. There were no paintings on the walls and that was a lot of walls, upstairs and down, six big rooms in all. My head was still hurting, so I put together some of Leo’s Scotch and ice and even lit myself one of his thin panatellas. It tasted like sea-grass matting and I stubbed it out; the Scotch was good, though. After the drink I snooped through the house again but didn’t find anything interesting; there was nowhere for the painting to have hung but it could have stood on the ledge above the living-room fireplace. Bad spot for a painting, though.

Leo got home about an hour later and he was very displeased to see me on his sofa with another drink in my hand. His companion was a dark, slim elegant woman who fitted cigarettes into a long holder and smoked while we talked. Leo didn’t introduce us. I told him how I’d got into the house and he poked around out the back and found what I’d found-this guy’s trademark, the broken glass in the kitchen.

‘I could have got in another way, gone out the back and done that just for show’, I said.

He grunted.

‘I’m surprised you’re not dashing about checking on your valuables.’

‘My dear fellow’, he said as he made himself and the woman a drink, ‘I don’t have any valuables. I’m one of those lease it people, rent’em and wreck’em, you know?’

‘Yeah. What business are you in?’

‘Tax consulting. I’m the expert, I pay no tax myself.’

‘Lucky you. Did Susannah Woods pay much?’

He smiled. ‘Only what she had to; shrewd woman, Susannah.’

The clothes horse in the armchair raised an eyebrow at that but decided to sip her drink rather than speak.

Porter looked at his slim, digital watch. ‘Just why are you here, Mr Hardy?’

One good question deserves another. ‘Is anything missing, Mr Porter?’

‘I told you, I simply don’t care, nothing here is mine.’

‘What about the painting?’

He spun around, nearly spilling his drink and looked through the arch into the living room. ‘Christ’, he said. ‘It’s gone.’

‘Tell me about it’, I said.

‘It was worthless. Who’d want to steal that?’ He walked through the arch and looked at the blank space. ‘I used to spend some time at Susannah’s place and she was often here. A civilized arrangement, you understand?’

‘Yeah’, I said.

‘Well, we each left things in one place or another, moved things back and forth. I took a liking to this painting; don’t know why, it was hardly finished really.’

‘Where did it come from?’

‘I don’t know, it just turned up in the house. She was always hanging around artists, I assumed it was just something one of them knocked up. I don’t know anything about art, but this had something I liked… call it spontaneity.’

‘Was it signed?’

‘Oh yes, something illegible, Castlemaine, something like that. Now what’s all this about? I suppose it connects with Susannah’s death?’

‘Yeah, what do you know about that?’

‘Nothing, except what I read and was told. I was upset of course, a horrible thing to happen. But I hadn’t seen her for over a month, we were finished.’

‘What finished you?’

He shrugged. His dark clothes were well cut and expensive; so were the shoes with lifts in them that brought him up to about five foot eight. The woman in the chair was taller, tall enough to see the bald spot near the crown of his head. He looked at his watch again, he seemed anxious to get into a position where bald spots wouldn’t show and didn’t matter. ‘Susannah wanted me to help finance an art gallery, a crazy idea.’ He opened his hands and spread them shoulder-high. ‘Besides, I don’t have any money.’

I nodded and got up. ‘Forgive the intrusion. You were lucky, the guy who busted in here took a swing at me earlier in the night.’ I touched my head.

‘Good God! Do you think he’ll be back here?’

‘Thanks for the sympathy. No, I think he’s got what he wants.’ I finished the drink and said goodnight to Porter whose colour wasn’t so good. He looked a bit unsure of himself for the first time. The tall woman in the chair held out her glass for a refill and I gave her one of my wicked smiles and left.

I cleaned up the head wound, took some aspirin and went to bed. In the morning the head was still tender, but I’d had worse, and was anxious to try to bring about a meeting with the guy who’d given it to me. I used the telephone, and at ten o’clock I was inside Dr Bruno Ernst’s study. He lived in a little sandstone cottage in Balmain down near the wharf. The house looked small because it was full of books and paintings, without them there would have been enough room in it for people, but apart from Ernst himself the only other thing that appeared to live there was a cat. There would probably have been some silverfish. Ernst was a short, squat guy with a fringe of white hair around a bald head, and a spade-shaped white beard. He pushed a typewriter aside on his desk and started to pack a curved pipe with tobacco. Outside a cold wind was rippling the water and flapping the ropes on boats tied up at the wharf. I sat and waited until he’d puffed enough smoke into the air.

‘I understand you’re an expert on Charles Castleton, Dr Ernst.’

‘Bruno’, he said. ‘Not strictly true, no-one is an expert on him, in a way there is nothing to be expert on. I have some knowledge and an interest, yes.’

‘You authenticated a Castleton belonging to a Miss Woods a few weeks back.’

‘That’s right.’ He puffed smoke and looked a little uncomfortable. ‘I was never happy about it.’

‘Why not?’

‘It was unusual. There are lost Castletons, of course. He led an erratic life, gave pictures away, paid debts and liquor bills with them. In 1884 Castleton held an exhibition in Sydney, a little tin-pot affair, but it was reported in the papers of the time and some of the paintings were described. Do you know about this?’

‘Not in detail.’

‘The newspaper report only came to light fairly recently, and it is now taken as the best guide to Castleton’s later period. Most of the paintings mentioned can be accounted for, two cannot.’

‘And Miss Woods had one of them?’

‘Hmm, she had the painting which is called “Stockyards at Jerilderie”.’

‘Fences’, I said.

‘Indeed, a great many fences. This confers value on the work, a puzzling notion.’

‘You’re sure it was genuine?’

He shrugged. ‘I gave my opinion that it was, no-one could be sure. But the woman had another painting of the same subject which was obviously a fraud. The materials were modern, and the technique was crude. She said she had come upon the painting by accident and averted an attempt to produce a fake version. I found this commendable, you see?’