John Harvey: Still Waters

“And he got off? Nothing?”

“A few months. By the time it came to trial …” Resnick shrugged. “Get yourself out to the house first call. If nothing else has been disturbed, clean entry, place looking more like it’s had a visit from an overnight cleaner than a burglar, Grabianski might be in the frame.”

“Right, boss.”

From the shrill version of “This is My Song” that came whistling up the stairs, Resnick knew DS Graham Millington was about to make an appearance.

Hannah had said little more about Alex and Jane Peterson. She and Resnick had soon fallen asleep-the consequence of good food and good wine-and their morning had been too rushed and sleepy for much in the way of conversation.

Sitting in his office now, shuffling papers, Resnick thought back to the previous night’s dinner, trying to recall any signs that would support Hannah’s accusation. Alex had been the more dominant, it was true; domineering even. He clearly felt his opinions counted for a great deal and was not used to having them contradicted: a consequence perhaps, Resnick thought, of talking to people whose mouths were usually stretched wide and crammed with metal implements.

But while Jane had been quiet, she had scarcely seemed cowed. And when she had stood up to him about the Broadway event she was organizing, he seemed to take it well enough. Hadn’t he kissed her as if to say he didn’t mind, well done? While Resnick was aware that Hannah would probably regard that as patronizing, he wasn’t sure he altogether agreed.

How long, Resnick wondered, had they been married, Alex and Jane? And whatever patterns their relationship had formed or fallen into, who was to say they were necessarily wrong? What best suited some, Resnick thought, sent others scurrying for solace elsewhere-his own ex-wife, Elaine, for one.

He was mulling over this and wondering if it wasn’t time to wander across to the deli for a little something to see him through till lunchtime, when Millington knocked on his door.

“Our Carl, called in from that place in the Park you were talking about earlier. Wondered if you might spare the time to go down there. Reckons how it’d be worth your while.”

The photographs showed the paintings clearly. One was a perfectly ordinary landscape, nothing especially interesting about it that Resnick could see: sheep, fields, trees, a boy of fourteen or fifteen, a shepherd with white shirt and tousled hair. The other was different. Was it the photograph or the painting that had slipped out of focus? As Resnick continued to look, he realized it was the latter. A large yellow sun hung low over a plowed field patched with stubble; undefined, purplish shadows bunched on the horizon. And everything within the painting blurred with the tremor of evening light.

“What do you think of them, Inspector?” Miriam Johnson asked. “Are they worth stealing, do you think?”

Resnick looked down at her, a small keen-faced woman with almost white hair and an arthritic stoop, voice and mind still sharp and clear in her eighty-first year.

“It seems somebody thought so.”

“You don’t like them, then? Not to your taste?”

When it came to art, Resnick wasn’t sure what his taste was. Which probably meant he didn’t have any at all. Though there were reproductions here and there in Hannah’s house that he liked: a large postcard showing a scene in a busy restaurant, a man talking earnestly to a woman at a center table and leaning slightly toward her, hand raised to make a point, the woman in a fur-trimmed collar and reddish flowerpot hat; and another, smaller, which was tucked into the frame of the bathroom mirror, a woman painted again from behind, seated, but looking out across reddish-brown rooftops from one side of a large bay window-Resnick remembered the white vase at the center holding flowers, a sharp yellow rectangle of light.

“I think I like this one,” Resnick said, pointing at the second photograph. “It’s more interesting. Unusual.”

Miriam Johnson smiled. “It’s a study for Departing Day , you know. His most famous painting, in so far as poor Herbert was famous at all. He made the mistake of being British, you see. Had he had the foresight to have been born French …” She tilted her head into an oddly girlish laugh. “French and Impressionist, it’s almost as if they were brought together from birth, don’t you think? Whereas if you were to stop some person in the street and ask them what they knew of our British Impressionists all you’d get would be so many blank looks.

“Even among the knowledgeable few,” she continued, “it is Sargent who is remembered, Whistler of course; but not Herbert Dalzeil.” She pronounced it De-el.

“Excuse me if this is a daft question,” Vincent said, “but if he’s not famous, why would anyone go out of their way to steal his work? Especially if it’s not like, you know, the one that’s reckoned his best?”

Miriam Johnson smiled; such a nice boy, that soft dark skin, not black at all, but polished, almost metallic brown. And he wasn’t brash, like some young men. Polite. “He painted so little, you see. Especially toward the end of his life. He would have been, oh, sixty I suppose when he did his best work, but then he lived on another thirty years.” She laid a finger on Vincent’s sleeve. “It’s extraordinary, isn’t it? He was born right in the middle of the last century and yet he lived to see the first years of the Second World War.” Again she laughed, girlishly. “He was even older than I am now. But he lost his health, you see. His eyesight, too. Can you imagine, for a painter, what a loss that must be?”

She smiled a little sadly and Vincent smiled back.

“It’s their rarity, then, that would make these worth stealing?” Resnick asked.

“And not their beauty?” Miriam Johnson countered.

“I don’t know. To a collector, I dare say both. Though I doubt anyone would try to sell them on the open market; any reputable dealer would know they were stolen.”

“Japan,” Vincent said, “isn’t that where most of them go? There or Texas.”

“I should have given them to a museum,” Miriam Johnson said, “I realize that. That’s what was intended to happen to them, of course, when I died. It was all arranged in my will. The Castle would gladly have added them to their collection, they don’t have a single Dalzeil. I know it was wrong to cling onto them, especially once I couldn’t afford the insurance premiums. But I was so used to having them, you see. And I would look at them every day, not simply pass them by but really sit with them and look. Of course, I had the time. And each year I thought it can wait, it can wait, there can’t be long to go, just let me keep them for now.” Her eyes as she looked up at Resnick were bright and clear. “I was a foolish old woman, that’s what you’re thinking.”

“Not at all.”

“Well, Inspector, you should be.”

Like many in the Park, the house had been built in the latter half of the last century, testimony to the wealth which coal and lace had brought to the city. Not converted into apartments like so many of the others, it lingered on in drab high-ceilinged splendor, slowly declining into terminal disrepair. The burglar-and they were assuming it was one person acting alone-had risked the rusting fire escape and forced entry into an unoccupied second-floor bedroom. The window frame had been so rotten the catch had been easy to prize away whole. In the drawing room, pale rectangular patches on the heavy wallpaper showed clearly where the paintings had hung, one above the other. Nothing had disturbed the owner, asleep at the rear of the ground floor.

“Careful,” Vincent remarked. “Professional.”

“Yes.”

“Professional enough for your friend Grabianski?”