Bernard Cornwell - Sea Lord

Jennifer glanced at me, and I wondered if I saw the faintest blush of shame on her face. Probably not.

“So what makes you think I didn’t nick it?” I asked Harry.

“It’s obvious, isn’t it? The painting belongs to you now, so why should you continue to hide it? If you had it, you could pretend that it had merely been mislaid all these years, discover it, sell it to Sir Leon, then go out and buy yourself a proper suit.”

Lady Buzzacott smiled. Jennifer, perhaps reluctant to discard her belief in my guilt, frowned. Sir Leon glanced from me to Harry, then asked the obvious question. “So who did steal it?”

“Johnny knows.” Harry, in his happiness, easily dropped my honorific. “Don’t you, Johnny?”

I think I did, but I wasn’t entirely ready to believe my suspicions, so I said nothing.

“Same motive, different villain.” Harry lit the cigarette he’d been holding for the last few minutes. He had clearly been nervous of offending Lady Buzzacott, but his craving for a smoke overcame his diffidence. He sucked gratefully at the smoke, then looked at me. “Who becomes the beneficiary of the family Trust if you die?”

“So long as I don’t have children,” I said softly, “Elizabeth.”

“The Lady Elizabeth Tredgarth,” Harry confirmed, “who is a bitter and disappointed lady. And a very ambitious one. And in her view you are a very unsuitable heir. You don’t care about the title, you never cared about Stowey, and you don’t seem to mind if the Rossendale family slides into poverty, yet those are things which your twin sister takes very seriously. It would suit her very well to inherit a Van Gogh which she could turn into ready cash. And who stood between Elizabeth and that tasty little fortune?”

“My mother and I,” I answered dutifully.

“Exactly. And now there’s just you. And if you died now, Johnny, your sister will simply claim to have found the painting in your baggage. That’s why she’s so busy telling everyone that she’s met your accomplice! She has to prove your guilt to establish her innocence.”

He was making Elizabeth into a very cold-blooded murderer, a West Country Lady Macbeth, and the portrait did not fit. Elizabeth was bitter, and she was proud, and she could be heartlessly ruthless, as the two caravans in a nettle patch proved, yet I could not see her as a murderess. “She’s no killer,” I protested to Harry.

“Women may not be collectors,” Lady Buzzacott observed mildly, “but they are not innocent of greed, and many have conceived of murder.”

“She’s an opportunist.” Harry took up the condemnation of my twin sister. “I don’t think she’s had this planned for ever. It was your mother’s death that sparked her. That and your return to England.” He paused to tap ash into his saucer. “And remember she has a partner, and he is a killer.”

“Garrard,” I said more to myself than to anyone else. I could understand Garrard being a killer, but that did not explain why he had beaten Jennifer Pallavicini on board Sunflower .

“That was fear!” Harry explained when I raised the objection. “I’ve no doubt Garrard went to Salcombe to kill you, but he discovered the Contessa instead. What was he to think?”

“That I was making a deal with her?” I ventured.

“Which implied,” Harry went on, “that your sister had made a deal with you. Garrard was scared that he was being double-crossed by a brother–sister agreement! He was frightened that Elizabeth would give you the painting to sell on condition that you shared the price with her. It wasn’t true, but I’ll bet my last brass farthing that’s what Garrard believed when he found the Contessa on your boat. Sometime in the next few days your sister must have reassured him, so he went to George’s yard to finish the job properly. Would your sister have guessed you might be at Cullen’s place?”

I nodded. Elizabeth would indeed have remembered my old association with Cullen’s yard. The pieces were falling into place, but I did not like the picture they made. It’s hard to see one’s twin as a killer.

“And when your friend Charlie Barratt stopped that second murder attempt,” Harry went on, “what happened?”

“I sailed away.”

“Which meant she and Garrard had failed,” Harry was pleased with his exposition. “You were still alive, you’d disappeared, so now Elizabeth has a problem. The painting is still not legally hers, but she’s desperate for the money. So she has to run the risk of a ransom. But she was a little too greedy. She tried to put the screws on to your little sister’s money as well, and that brought you home. Maybe she even wanted you to come home, because my belief is that she’d still rather have you dead.” He looked at Sir Leon. “The painting must be worth a great deal more than the amount demanded in the ransom note?”

Sir Leon hesitated, then nodded. “The value is around twenty million.”

“So there you are,” Harry looked back at me. “Your death is worth sixteen million quid to your sister. Not a bad profit.”

I stood and walked to the window. “But if she’s already got the painting” – I was seeking a loophole in Harry’s thesis – “why doesn’t she just fight me in the courts for possession? She’s got my mother’s will as ammunition?”

“Because she’ll lose,” Sir Leon said harshly.

“But she wasn’t even at Stowey when the painting was stolen.” I raised another objection.

“Garrard nicked it,” Harry said easily. “She must have given him keys and told him how to work the alarm system.”

“But Elizabeth wouldn’t know where to find men like Garrard and Peel,” I protested.

Harry dismissed that objection. “Horses. Garrard used to be a good amateur steeplechaser before he turned bad. And the racecourses are full of villains.” He looked happily at the Buzzacott family. “If you ever need a crook, that’s where to go: the racecourse.”

Lady Buzzacott smiled her thanks for the advice, while Sir Leon looked pained and Jennifer just frowned.

It all worked. I could see that. Harry had presented a wonderful concoction of greed, violence and inheritance, a very upper-class concoction indeed, but I still did not want to believe that my twin sister was a killer. That was not because I loved her, but rather because, just as Elizabeth feared the genetic taint of Georgina’s madness, so I feared the taint of Elizabeth’s murderous nature. I shook my head. “I don’t know, Harry, I just don’t know.”

“So let’s find out!” Harry said cheerfully. “You’re back now, so let’s see if she tries to knock you off again. After all, she’d much rather sell the painting legally than go through the risks of collecting a ransom. And if she and Garrard do try murder again, we’ll catch them red-handed.”

There was silence. So this was why they had wanted my return: to be a target? None of them looked at me, perhaps embarrassed by what they expected of me.

Sir Leon cleared his throat. “I fail to see why collecting a ransom should be riskier than committing murder?”

“Murder comes out of the dark, when you least expect it,” Harry said, “but if you want a ransom you have to specify a time and a place, which gives your enemies a chance to ambush you.”

Sir Leon shook his head impatiently. “For my part I find it hard to believe that the recovery of the painting is intrinsically bound up in an attempt at murder.” He shrugged, as though suggesting that his qualifications for making that judgment were not as good as Harry’s. “I do believe, however, in their willingness to exchange the painting for a ransom.” He turned his myopic gaze to me. “They have requested that we insert a coded message in the personal column of The Times , which message would indicate our willingness to pay the ransom of four million pounds. On receipt of that message, they will instruct us in the method to be used for making that payment.” I sensed that I was hearing the echoes of an old disagreement. Sir Leon was quite ready to pay any price for the painting, while Harry was more intent on trapping Elizabeth and Garrard. Sir Leon still looked at me. “I see no need for you to be a murder target, my lord. If you’re content, then I suggest you allow me to ransom the painting, then to negotiate a fair price with you.”