Bernard Cornwell - Sea Lord

“No!” Harry, with a surprising asperity, slapped the suggestion down. “Once you’ve agreed to pay the ransom, you’ve no assurance they’ll give up the painting. They’ll just soak you for another four million.” He looked back to me. “I’d rather trick the bastards into showing themselves. If you’ll help.”

“Oh, I’ll help you,” I said easily, “but there is a condition for my help.”

“I do assure you” – Sir Leon, perhaps piqued by Harry’s strong opposition, spoke very irritably – “that I will pay you the highest imaginable price for the painting. Indeed, I’m quite certain your eventual price will be far too high. I have, after all, conducted negotiations with your family before.”

Those final words whipped at my pride like the recoiling slash of a broken wire-rope. Sir Leon’s voice had been smug and scornful, implying that my family, though broken and poor, had shown nothing but greed. The words told me that Sir Leon despised me, and he was showing that derision by letting me know that my greed could never match his fortune. He had the power of new money over old families, but I would be damned before I would let him patronise me. “Bugger your price,” I said. That shook all of them. “I don’t give a toss about your price. And don’t equate me with the rest of the family. If you negotiate with me, then you satisfy my terms, and those terms are very simple, Sir Leon. You take care of Georgina’s future, all of it.”

Sir Leon blinked at me. He had clearly been astonished by my vehemence, but not so astonished as to forget that he was at a negotiating table. “Your price, as I understand it, is your younger sister’s security?”

“And happiness.”

He gazed at me. He had very pale eyes, and I suddenly saw that he was not a timid little man at all, but a very hard one. “And your monetary price besides?” he asked in his most mocking voice.

He must have known he would get under my skin. “You can have the bloody painting!” I matched his scorn with my own. “Why the hell do you think I’m here? Because I care about being rich? For God’s sake, I inherited Stowey and the painting four years ago, and I didn’t want them then and I don’t want them now. I came here, Sir Leon, not to save a painting, but to save my sister from a squalid caravan in a dripping wood.”

Jennifer was staring at me. I knew I’d overreacted to her stepfather’s patronising tone. I’d lost my temper, said far more than I had wanted to say, and now found myself on the brink of giving up a fortune just to prove to this small bastard that not everyone would lick his arse to become rich. But at least I had succeeded in astonishing Jennifer, who was now staring at me as though she had never quite seen me before.

Sir Leon smiled. “I accept your terms, my lord. One painting in return for your sister’s lifelong security.” He held out his hand.

“Think carefully, John,” Lady Buzzacott warned me in a soft voice.

Jennifer shook her head slightly, as though disbelieving that I would take the offered hand. Sir Leon smiled at my hesitation. “So you’re not as pure as you’d have us believe, my lord? You wish to amend the terms of the agreement?”

“Bugger your amendments.” I shook his hand.

Which meant that to surprise a multimillionaire, and to impress his stepdaughter, who was engaged to a squillionaire and despised me anyway, I’d just given away a Van Gogh. And I knew just how my ancestor, the seventeenth Earl, must have felt when he lost all the family’s Irish estates and all our rich sugar plantations in the Caribbean on the single turn of the ace of diamonds; I felt like a proper fool.

Harry was almost doubled over with laughter. We had left the family and gone into the garden where we were hidden from the house by a big yew hedge. “What a berk you are! Sweet Jesus! What a bloody berk!”

“Shut up.” I was far more angry with myself than I was with Harry.

“Sweet suffering Christ!” He laughed again. “You gave it away! And you only did it to impress that bird! How much is it worth? Twenty million?” He shook his head in wonderment. “You gave away a Van Gogh worth twenty millions!”

“I don’t care about the bloody money,” I said bitterly.

“Of course you care, Johnny, you just don’t want to admit it.” Harry gave a final hoot of delighted laughter.

“I don’t care about the money,” I insisted, “I never have. I wouldn’t be a blue-water sailor if I cared about money.”

“A blue-water sailor,” he mocked me with cruel mimicry. “But you care about the Contessa, don’t you? And it’ll take more than a shabby boat to get into her knickers. She’s the kind that needs a diamond necklace before every tumble, and I reckon you’ve just blown away your chances, Johnny.”

“You’re a crude swine, Harry.”

“But let’s hope I’m a clever one, my son.” He lit a cigarette and stared at a statue of a half-naked nymph which graced an alcove in the hedge. “Clever enough to stop Sir Leon paying the ransom. That’s all he wants to do, pay up, because he thinks that’s the surest way to get his picture. He can’t wait. He’s like a kid locked out of the toyshop, but I don’t believe it’s as easy as he thinks. If they can winkle four million out of him now, what’s to stop them going back to the well with a bigger bucket? They can’t be fools, they must know it’s worth more than four million.”

I didn’t answer. I was still trying to accustom myself to a belief in Elizabeth’s guilt. I didn’t like her, I’d really never liked her, but it was hard to think of her as wanting my death. Yet Harry’s arguments had been persuasive. “Why don’t you just search Elizabeth’s house?” I asked him. “If you find the picture, then it will all be over.”

“Funnily enough my grandmother taught me to suck eggs before you were born, Johnny. Don’t be a cretin. She won’t have a bloody Van Gogh tucked away in the attic. It’s been hidden away for four years, and we’re going to have to be clever if we’re to get it back.”

“Then find Garrard,” I suggested.

“I’m looking for Mr Garrard,” Abbott said grimly, “but he’s done a bunk. So we have to persuade Mr Garrard to find us.” He still squinted up at the nymph’s mossy breasts. “A nasty piece of work, Mr Garrard.”

“You know him?”

“Of course I know him.” Harry abandoned the nymph to walk slowly up the newly cut grass to where a fountain sparkled prettily in the afternoon sunshine. He sat on the wall that circled the fountain’s pool and looked at me quizzically. “He got slung out of the Paras for nicking the mess funds, then, because the Fraud squad found him monkeying about with some dodgy bonds, he did a bunk and joined one of those mercenary groups in Southern Africa. About five years ago he came home on leave, and he never went back. He’s been small-time ever since, bookies and winkling, which is very puzzling.” Harry tapped cigarette ash into the fountain’s pool. “Why does a top-drawer bastard with a good brain scratch around with lowlife villains? He was making good money in Africa.”

“He must be making more here.”

“Not now, he isn’t.” Harry frowned. “But I reckon Garrard’s bought a share of that picture. He’s not hired labour, Johnny, but a full partner with your sister. And he’ll be coming after you with a knife because he smells several million quid at the end of the road. How do you feel about that?”

“I’m not ecstatic at the prospect.”

“But at least you’d die in the knowledge that you’d helped me solve an old crime.”

“Up yours, too.”

“Because if I’m right,” Harry went on, “they’d still rather have you out of the way. With you dead Elizabeth can sell the painting on the open market and she won’t have to answer any awkward questions about where her fortune came from; she’ll be free, rich, and laughing.”