The Orangery alone was the size of Stowey. It was a long single-storeyed building, stuccoed white, that had once been a glasshouse, summer house and Arcadian retreat for the Duke and his guests. Now, at astronomical expense, Sir Leon had transformed it into an art gallery. Many people had criticised the gallery, claiming it was too far from any large city, and that it was an elitist exercise aimed solely at gaining Sir Leon the coveted peerage he desired, and maybe they were right, at least in the first criticism, for there was only a handful of cars in the huge car park.
I paid my pound at the door. A moving ramp led to the gallery floor which had been excavated twenty feet below the original ground level. The job had been done without disturbing any of the Orangery’s masonry. The air below the ground was conditioned to a consistent coolness and humidity. Automatic louvres controlled the sunlight entering the glass domes and tall casements which, now that the floor had been lowered, served as clerestory windows.
I hadn’t asked for Jennifer Pallavicini at the entrance desk. I first wanted to see this rich man’s fantasy for myself. Sir Leon’s critics snidely called him Britain’s second-rate John Paul Getty. It would have been better, they said, if he had donated his collection to one of the big London galleries. They said his museum was a white elephant, a monstrous underground irrelevance; yet, in truth, it was magnificent. I’d seen photographs of the galleries and I had read the newspaper accounts of their extraordinary construction, but I had never visited, so I had never experienced the uncanny sense of peace in the subterranean halls. That quietness had earned accusations that Sir Leon was making a shrine to art when, according to modern London thinking, art should be an integral part of everyday life. Meaning, I suppose, that if someone wanted to slash a Rubens to shreds, then the act should be seen as necessarily therapeutic as well as a valid criticism. For my money these paintings were well away from London.
The collection was not big. Sir Leon had bought selectively, but what he had bought was of the very finest. The scarcity of paintings made it possible to hang each to its best advantage. Instead of crowding jumbled swathes of pictures along a wall, each canvas was positioned within its own private area. Sometimes, when juxtaposition would help explain a painting’s provenance, it would be displayed with others, but most of the paintings hung in solitary splendour. They hung on the outer walls of the gallery, protected by a dry moat. Visitors walked to a small balcony which faced each painting. There were no attendants visible in the gallery, which added to the quality of privacy and peace. The corridors leading to each balcony contained displays which explained the context and importance of the painting beyond the deep moat. The corridors led from the gallery’s central spine down which an endless walkway silently moved. Everything had been done to the highest quality and with exquisite taste. It would, I thought, be a fitting home for Stowey’s Van Gogh.
There was already one Van Gogh in the collection. It was a drawing done with black chalk and showed a woman digging in a bleak field. The notes in the corridor frankly said it was not the finest of Van Gogh’s drawings, but that it was included in the exhibition because, for the moment, Sir Leon owned no other works by the artist.
“It’s an early work.” Jennifer Pallavicini’s sudden voice startled me. “He did it in 1883. It’s rather clumsy.”
“Is it?” I turned to face her. She herself looked anything but clumsy, instead she was chillingly pretty. She was wearing a simple cream skirt and a striped silk blouse. She looked crisp, cool, competent, and distinctly unfriendly.
“It’s self-conscious.” She was looking at the drawing rather than at me. “When we get a suitable painting by Van Gogh we’ll hang this in Sir Leon’s private quarters. What are you doing here?”
“I came to see you.”
The brown eyes’ gaze flicked towards me. “We feared you’d come to steal another Van Gogh, Mr Rossendale.”
I ignored the jibe. “How did you know I was here?”
She gestured upwards and I saw how television cameras were monitoring every balcony. “So far,” she said, “we haven’t had any fools trying to throw paint or worse at a canvas, but you can never tell. We keep a constant watch. Why did you want to see me?”
“Those two men,” I said, then faltered, for her gaze was so disapproving and so off-putting that I felt gauche.
“I do remember them,” she said icily.
“They tried to murder me two days ago.”
“And evidently failed.” She leaned on the balcony, her back to the drawing. “Did you come here for sympathy?”
“Do we have to talk here?” I asked. I had suddenly found the quietness oppressive. The barely audible hiss of the hidden air-conditioners seemed somehow threatening.
She shrugged; then, without saying anything, walked back through the corridor. I followed her. We crossed the slow-moving walkway to a door which she opened with a key. She led me up a white-painted stair, through another door, and so into a small formal garden. I walked silently beside her down the gravel path, round an ornately sculpted fountain, to a stone balustrade that looked out on the Wiltshire countryside. A tractor was harrowing a far field, but otherwise nothing moved. “Well?” she asked.
“I don’t like people trying to murder me,” I said, and immediately thought how lame it sounded.
“I imagine that’s understandable. I didn’t much like it when that man molested me.” It was the most sympathetic thing she’d said to me so far, and it gave me encouragement.
“They attacked you,” I said, “and now they’ve attacked me. I just thought that together we might find some reason for what they’re doing.”
“Isn’t that a job for the police?” she challenged me.
I half smiled. “You went to the police?”
She hesitated, then shook her head. “What happened in Salcombe was trivial. It certainly wasn’t attempted murder. I have to be flattered that you think I might be able to help, but I suggest you should approach the real experts: the police.”
I leaned on the mossy stone balustrade. “If I went to the police, I’d have to tell them what happened in Salcombe. They’ll want to talk to you.”
“I have nothing to hide, Mr Rossendale.”
“Nor do I.” I spoke with sudden vehemence. “You don’t seem to understand, no one does. I did not steal that painting, I had nothing to do with its theft, yet everyone, you included, seems convinced I did steal it. Why on earth would I want to steal it?”
“The usual theory, Mr Rossendale, is that you did it to spite your mother. You hated her, did you not?”
I hesitated. “I didn’t hate her. I just disliked her.”
“So the theory is partially correct. To that we add all the other evidence, and you must agree that you remain the likeliest suspect.”
“For God’s sake! That evidence was all circumstantial!”
She let that protest die away on the summer’s air, then began a remorseless cataloguing of the evidence. “A week before the painting was to be transported, you removed it from your mother’s room.”
“She asked me to. She didn’t want to be constantly reminded that it was leaving Stowey.”
“You claim to have stored it in the gun room, to which only you had a key.”
“Rubbish. There were a dozen keys. My sister had a key, half the servants had keys.”