“Why did they buy it, if it was so horrible?”
“Couldn’t tell you.”
“Why did you buy it?”
“Ah, you see, I didn’t. Now we come to the mystery. It seems that by chance, purely by chance, the bronze and the painting often ended up in the same collections. Someone would buy the painting, and a few months later the bronze would come up for auction, and they’d buy that. Or the other way round. Or they’d buy the one and then be given the other as a gift, or win it in a bet, or something. Without anyone intending it, the painting and the bronze would find themselves in the same room, time and time again. Falcondale was the first to notice it. He told me about it, and I was skeptical, of course, but he had the records. He’d followed it right back. I had to admit, there was something going on.”
“So who bought the monkey last?”
“A man who owed me some money. Bought a Charpentier mezzotint from me and never paid. Lawyer chased him up, and he offered the monkey instead. In Bonnier’s valuation, it was worth a fair bit more than he owed me, so I took it. I had no idea of the connection then. It was only last week, when I bought the painting, that Falcondale began to open up.”
“You’re sure he wasn’t making it up?”
“Pretty sure. The business was going on before he was born. Before any of us were born.”
“You were going to say something about a letter.”
“Oh yes. Falcondale had a letter—he gave me a copy of it—from a woman in Moscow to a distant cousin in London. A minor aristocrat of some sort. Written in French, about seventy years ago, before the revolution, anyway, about a scandal in her social circle. The husband of a friend of hers was a diplomat, and he’d been representing Russia at some high-level talks in Paris, and somebody had shown him the monkey and he’d rather fancied it. So he made an offer and they accepted it, and the bronze went home to Moscow in his baggage. As soon as his wife saw it, she hated it and wanted it out of the house. She thought it was an embodiment of pure evil. But the husband dug his heels in and refused to get rid of it, so the wife consulted her priest, who tried to exorcise it. He spent the night in the salon where the husband kept the thing, praying and, you know, whatever they do, and when the wife came down in the morning, there was the priest dead on the floor, head bashed in, and the monkey on the sideboard, covered in blood.”
“Good God,” said Grinstead. “Who did it?”
“They never found out. Husband was badly shaken, of course, and when the police took it away as evidence, he never asked for it back. They couldn’t find anyone to charge, so after a year or so, they put it up for auction, and it was bought by a collector, who gave it pretty sharpish to a Moscow gallery, where it found itself in the same room as the painting. Again.”
Grinstead drank the last of his brandy. “And now it’s yours,” he said. “They’re both yours.”
“Yes, both mine.”
“Are you going to keep them?”
“I thought what I’d do,” said Horley, “just to be mischievous, is adjust my will and leave the painting to this college and the monkey to Merton.”
There was an ancient rivalry between Merton and Horley’s college.
Grinstead nodded. “Sound plan,” he said. “Are you going to show me these things?”
“Oh, would you like to see them?” said Horley in mock surprise. “I haven’t even unpacked the monkey yet. It arrived this morning.”
“Well, let’s go and do that,” said Grinstead. “This room’s getting colder and colder.”
A fine freezing rain was drifting down into the quad as they left for Horley’s rooms. There were only two windows lit in the old buildings, and as Grinstead looked around, one of those went out.
“Who was this chap who owed you money for the mezzotint?” Grinstead said.
“Rainsford. I was never sure I could trust him. D’you know him?”
“I bought a drawing from him once. A Vernet. It was a fake.”
They climbed the stairs to Horley’s rooms. The light was on a timer switch, and by the time Horley was fumbling with his keys, the light went out.
“More penny-pinching,” he said. “What would it cost them to give us an extra thirty seconds of light? Anyway”—he opened the door and stood back—“welcome to the warmest room in the building.”
“My God, it is, too,” said Grinstead.
It was suffocating. It was actually hot. The gas fire was burning fiercely, the heavy curtains were drawn tight against drafts, and an electric fire with all three bars glowing red gave off an odor of toasted dust. Grinstead took off his overcoat at once.
Horley was bustling around, hanging up his gown, throwing his keys on the desk, taking out some wineglasses, clearing some books off the table next to the sofa, switching on a lamp.
“Perhaps we could economize a little,” he said, and switched off one bar of the electric fire.
“I’m certainly warm enough. Is this how you live, Horley, at this Turkish-bath temperature?”
“Only out of mischief. I like imagining the bursar’s expression as he sees the utility bills. Claret?”
“Go on, then. Not a large glass. Where’s this picture?”
“All in good time,” said Horley, sounding almost skittish.
Grinstead sat as far away from the gas fire as he could get, and took the glass Horley handed him. The wine was sour and unpleasant, but so was the wine they’d had at dinner.
“D’you remember the first picture you bought?” said Grinstead.
Horley was adjusting the angle of the lampshade so as to shine clearly on the table opposite. “Yes, I do,” he said. “It was a dirty postcard. I bought it in Egypt during my national service. I kept it for a week, and then I felt rather ashamed and threw it away. I mean, the composition was lamentable. Never looked back, really.”
“Start of a great career.”
“Well, here she is, that not impossible she, whatever her name is….”
The picture was resting on a little easel on the table, a small thing, no more than fifteen inches tall and twelve across. Horley removed a black velvet cloth with a silly flourish that Grinstead completely ignored. The painting, oil on canvas in a pretty gilt frame, glowed in the lamplight as if there was a bloom on the colors. The young woman stood modestly, hands entwined, head slightly tilted, fair curly hair loosely restrained behind her neck with a red ribbon. Grinstead’s eyes were fixed on the face in the picture, and Horley was taken aback by the intensity of the visitor’s gaze, until he remembered that the man was a collector, after all. But this was more than acquisitive connoisseurship: it was feral. Grinstead’s jaw was working—Horley could see the muscles tightening—and his lips were drawn back, so that his clenched teeth were bared.
“D’you—er—have you seen her before?” Horley said.
“Yes. I know who she is.”
“Good Lord. How d’you know that?”
“We were lovers.”
“Oh, come on,” said Horley. “What’s her name, then?”
“Marisa van Zee.”
Grinstead’s eyes had not left the young woman’s face. As Horley followed the other man’s gaze, the painted expression seemed to be showing another of its characteristic shifts of meaning: there was a little curve of happy triumph somewhere in the lines of the model’s mouth and her eyes, though he found it impossible to see precisely where.