“Reverting,” said Miss Teatime, “to the general subject of provenance...”
“Yes?”
“And to the more particular subject of Mr Loughbury’s belongings...”
Purbright waited in silence.
“...my own brief observation and limited inquiries have produced some rather interesting results. I regret that relics do not enter into the matter, but a number of genuinely valuable objects certainly do.
“I am speaking of various paintings, one or two small pieces of sculpture, some silver, candlesticks, snuffboxes and so on—all of which are to be seen in the big drawing room at the house. You may well have noticed them yourself.”
Purbright said that he had, but without paying particular attention to them.
“Of course,” resumed Miss Teatime, “when I said that I made no inventory of what I saw, it was not to suggest that I ignored it. Once Mr Harrington and I had withdrawn from the house of mourning, we compared observations and noted down a number of articles—for professional reference.
“Over the weekend, with the aid of various colleagues in the trade, we did a little research.”
“Into provenance?” prompted Purbright.
Miss Teatime beamed, then became solemn again.
“Now, the odd thing is this. In the case of nearly all the choicest articles, the last traceable owner was not merely someone in the same general area—that might not seem unreasonable—but an actual inhabitant of the same little village.”
“And that does seem unreasonable?”
“When things of this nature change hands, Mr Purbright, one does not expect the sale to be a casual deal between neighbours. Experts are involved usually, and even if auction procedure is not employed the details are recorded. Mr Loughbury was a solicitor: he, of all people, might be expected to have been meticulous in such matters.”
“Is it your suggestion that the man’s title to these things is questionable?”
“I certainly do not suggest that he pinched them. Not in a policeman’s sense of the word.”
“In whose, then?”
Both smiled.
“Let me give you an illustration, inspector. There is hanging now in Mumblesby Manor House a picture called Staircase with Valves by Paul Klee. It is worth a great deal of money. Art dealers who make it their business to know the whereabouts of such things believe it to be in the possession still of the gentleman who was left it in a relatives will about twenty years ago—a Mr Robin Cork-Bradden.”
“Of Mumblesby.”
“Precisely.”
“Is there no record—within the trade, as I think you would put it—of the transfer of the picture to Mr Loughbury?”
“None—and Mr Harrington has extremely reliable sources of information. If money passed, the transaction was kept extraordinarily secret.”
“Could not the painting have been a gift?” Purbright asked.
She smiled. “Upwards of fifteen thousand pounds’ worth of gift?” A little later: “One or two other items from Mr Cork-Bradden’s collection appear also to have found their way to the Manor House without anyone’s noticing. Some quite outstandingly fine Bristol glass, for instance. I do hope that the bereaved lady will not wash it up with the tea things.”
“You could offer to relieve her of the responsibility.”
“Not, I fear, at present market prices.”
“Did Mr Loughbury acquire things from any other close neighbours?”
“So it would seem. The candlesticks, for instance—a most unusual pair in silver gilt, French, early seventeenth century—belonged to a Mr Bishop. He lives in that lovely Georgian house in Church Lane. Mr Harrington remembers seeing the candlesticks there when he first came to the village.”
The tinkling of a little bell and the sound of the street door being pushed open signalled fresh custom. Miss Teatime prepared to receive (“serve” was scarcely the word in the context of fin de siècle lemon-squeezers) the new arrival.
Purbright thanked her and they moved together towards the door. On the way, he indicated with a nod the initialled biscuit tin.
“Rather a backward boy,” he remarked.
“Backward?”
“Yes, Lawrence of Arabia. Still attending infants’ school in 1907. He would have been nineteen.”
There was only the briefest of pauses. Miss Teatime laughed.
“No, no, inspector—evening classes. In navigation, I think it was.”
Chapter Six
Although Decective Sergeant Sidney Love had an auntie living in a remote country area near Strawbridge, whom he fondly visited from time to time, he was an urban dweller by upbringing and by preference, and retained many of the townsman’s ideas about rural life.
Upon his arrival in Mumblesby at eleven o’clock on Tuesday morning, he made his way immediately towards the village inn, confident that beyond a door marked BAR PARLOUR, or even SNUG, there awaited him in bucolic carouse as many of the local peasantry as could be spared from the harvest field, stables and kitchen.
The Barleybird, formerly the Red Lion, had been built in the eighteenth century as a coaching inn, but there came no coaches now, nor even buses. Behind the tall windows in the high, handsome stone frontage were rooms mostly empty. A barrier had been set across the arched entrance to the yard, for latter-day customers in motor-cars, while lacking nothing of the elan of the coachman atop the old Lincoln Flyer, were a good deal less skilful at negotiating the passage. There was, in any case, plenty of parking space on two sides of the Market Place, where no market had been held since Victorian times.
Love found the present-day entrance to the Barleybird was a porched door at the side of the building. It led to a lobby, carpeted in deep green and smelling of lavatory deodorant. On his left was a little office with a sliding glass window. No one was in the office. Two doors marked PRIVATE were on his right, a pair of glass doors immediately in front of him. No intimation so far of Snug, nor yet Bar Parlour. Love looked through the glass. He saw a big undivided room with a bar running its whole length. The woman behind the bar looked up from rinsing a glass. She had a black dress and yellowish hair.
It was clear that Love had chosen the wrong day to meet Mumblesby’s retainers and body servants. The only other customer in the bar was a woman of sixty or so, with white, wiry hair that contrasted strikingly with the deeply tanned, leathery skin of her narrow, alert face. She was wearing a shabby tweed jacket and a pair of voluminous, chocolate-coloured slacks. A silk Paisley scarf was tied close to her throat. As she sat cross-legged on a tall bar-side chair, she held a cigarette between long, bony fingers and thumb and examined it with fierce concentration.