Val Mcdermid - Clean Break

One of Ballantrae’s ancestors either had a hell of a sense of humor or a few bricks short of a wall.

I pulled up on the gravel between a Range Rover and a top-of-the-range BMW. What they call in Manchester a “Break My Windows.” Like Henry, Lord Ballantrae clearly kept the trippers’ coaches well away from the house. By the time I’d got out of the car, I had a spectator. At the top of a short flight of steps like a giant’s mounting block a tall man stood staring at me, a hand shielding his eyes from the sun. I walked toward him, taking in the tweed jacket with leather shooting patches, cavalry twills, mustard waistcoat and tattersall check shirt. He was even wearing a tweed cap that matched the jacket. As soon as I was in hailing distance, he called, “Miss Brannigan, is it?”

“The same. Lord Ballantrae?”

The man dropped his hand and looked amused. “No, ma’am, I’m his lordship’s estate manager, Barry Adamson. Come away in, he’s expecting you.”

I followed Adamson’s burly back into a comfortable dining kitchen. Judging by the microwave and food processor on the pine worktops, this wasn’t part of the castle’s historical tour. Beyond the kitchen, we entered a narrow passage that turned into a splendid baronial hall. I don’t know much about weapons, but judging by the amount of military hardware in the room, I’d stumbled upon Bonnie Prince Charlie’s secret armory. “Through here,” Adamson said, opening a heavy oak door. I followed him through the arched doorway into an office that looked nearly as high-tech as Bill’s.

A dark-haired man in his early forties was frowning into a PC screen. Without looking up, he said, “With you in two shakes.” He hit a couple of keys and the frown cleared. Then he pushed his chair back and jumped to his feet. “You must be Kate Brannigan,” he said, coming round the desk and thrusting his hand toward me. “James Ballantrae.” The handshake was cool and dry, but surprisingly limp. “Pull up a seat,” he said, waving at a couple of typist’s chairs that sat in front of a desktop that ran the length of one wall. “Barry, Ellen’s in the tack room. Can you give her a shout and ask her to bring us some coffee?” he added as he dragged his own chair round the desk. “How was your journey?” he asked. “Bitch of a drive, isn’t it? I sometimes wish I could ship this place stone by stone to somewhere approximating civilization, but they’d never let me get away with it. It’s Grade Two listed, which means we couldn’t even have satellite TV installed without some bod from the Department of the Environment making a meal out of it.”

Whatever I’d been expecting, it wasn’t this. Lord Bal-lantrae was wearing faded jeans and a Scottish rugby shirt that matched sparkling navy blue eyes. His wavy hair fell over his collar at the back, its coal black a startling contrast to his milky skin. There was an air of suppressed energy about him. He looked more like a computer-game writer than a major landowner. He sat down, stretching long legs in front of him, and lit a cigarette. “So, Henry Naismith tells me you’re looking for his Monet,” he said.

I tried to hide my surprise. “You know Henry?” I asked. Let’s face it, they both spoke the same language. Their voices were virtually indistinguishable. How in God’s name do Sloanes know who’s calling when they pick up the phone?

He grinned. “We met once on a friend’s boat. When my wife told me about your call yesterday, I put two and two together. I’d already spoken to a reporter on the Manchester evening paper about these art robberies and when she mentioned a Monet going missing in Cheshire, I could only think of the Naismith collection. So I gave Henry a ring.”

“The reporter you spoke to is a friend of mine,” I said. “She passed your number on to me.”

“Old girls network. I like it,” he exclaimed with delight. “She did the right thing. God, listen to me. My wife tells me that arrogance runs in the family. All I mean is that I’m probably the only person who has an overview of the situation. The downside of having locally accountable police forces is that crime gets compartmentalized. Sussex don’t talk to Strathclyde, Derbyshire don’t talk to Devon. It was us who brought to the police’s attention the fact that there had been something of a spate of these robberies, all with the same pattern of forced entry, complete disregard of the alarm system and single targets.“

“How did you find out about the connections?” I asked.

“A group of us who open our places to the public get together informally…” I heard the door open behind me and turned to see a thirty-something redhead with matching freckles stick her head through the gap.

“Coffee all round?” she said.

“My wife, Ellen,” Ballantrae said. “Ellen, this is Kate Brannigan, the private eye from Manchester.”

The redhead grinned. “Pleased to meet you. Be right back,” she said, disappearing from sight, leaving the door ajar.

“Where was I? Oh yes, we get together a couple of times a year for a few sherbets, swap ideas and tips, that sort of thing. Last time we met was a couple of weeks after I’d had a Rae-burn portrait lifted, so of course it was uppermost in my mind. Three others immediately chipped in with identical tales-a Gainsborough, a Canaletto and a Ruisdael. In every case, it was one of the two or three best pieces they had,” he added ruefully.

“And that’s when you realized there was something organized going on?” I asked.

“Correct.”

“I’m amazed you managed to keep these thefts out of the papers,” I said.

“It’s not the sort of thing you boast about,” he said dryly. “We’ve all become dependent on the income that comes through the doors from the heritage junkies. The police were happy to go along with that, since they never like high-profile cases where they don’t catch anyone.”

“What did you do then?”

“Well, I offered to act as coordinator, and I spoke to all the police forces concerned. I also wrote to as many other stately-home owners as I could track down and asked if they’d had similar experiences.”

“How many?” I asked.

“Including Henry Naismith’s Monet, thirteen in the last nine months.”

I took a deep breath. At this rate, the stately homes of Britain would soon have nothing left but the seven hundred and thirty-six beds Good Queen Bess slept in. “That’s a lot of art,” I said. “Has anything been recovered?”

“Coffee,” Ellen Ballantrae announced, walking in a with a tray. She was wearing baggy khaki cords and a shapeless bottle green chenille sweater. When she moved, it was obvious she was hiding a slim figure underneath, but on first sight I’d have taken her for the cleaner.

I fell on the mug like a deprived waif. “You’ve probably saved my life,” I told her. “My system’s still recovering from what they call coffee in Hawick.”

Both Ballantraes grinned. “Don’t tell me,” Ellen said. “Warm milk, globules floating on top and all the flavor of rainwater.”

“It wasn’t that good,” I said with feeling.

“Don’t let me interrupt you,” she said, giving her husband’s hair an affectionate tousle as she perched on the table. “He was about to tell you about the Canaletto they got back.”

Ballantrae reached out absently and laid his hand on her thigh. “Absolutely right. Nothing to do with the diligence of the police, however. There was a multiple pileup on a German autobahn about a fortnight after Gerald Brockleston-Camber lost his Canaletto. One of the dead was an antique dealer from Leyden in Holland, Kees van der Rohe. His car was shunted at both ends; the boot flew open, throwing a suitcase clear of the wreckage. The case burst open, revealing the Canaletto behind a false lid. Luckily the painting was undamaged.”