False Picture (3 page)

Bea opened her mouth to suggest that Oliver might do it, and closed it again. Oliver was only eighteen, looked even younger and hadn't even learned the alphabet of socializing yet. No, Oliver was out of the question.

‘Maggie might do it,' said Bea, feeling guilty but unable to stifle her longing for a bit of peace and quiet at home. ‘One of my live-in assistants. She's early twenties, been divorced already. Not much in the way of computer skills but a brilliant cook and housekeeper.'

Velma wrinkled her nose. ‘They're all professionals and we'd want a newcomer to fit in.'

‘She could call herself a project manager; she's currently organizing new wiring, plumbing and decorating for the agency rooms in the basement at home, and she's not bad at that. Anything practical.'

Tears stood out in Velma's eyes, and she dabbed them away with a tissue. ‘Oh, my dear, the relief! Bea, you are wonderful, I can't begin to thank you. I
knew
you'd come up with something. Just wait till I tell Sandy.'

‘Don't tell him, not yet,' said Bea, wishing she'd never suggested Maggie could help. ‘Look, if Maggie's going to go undercover the fewer people who know about it the better. You can tell Marsh and Parsons you've found a fifth person. I suppose they'll have to take up references—'

‘This is an emergency, Bea. I'll tell the estate agents I've checked her out and she's OK, so they'll let her in. They'll need a deposit of a month's rent, and I'll see to that, too. How soon could you get her in?'

Bea wanted to say ‘tomorrow' but had some degree of caution left. ‘In a couple of days, I suppose. Are you sure this is what you want?'

‘I'm not a fool, dear. I know that covering up a murder is just not on, but if we can only find some extenuating circumstances, perhaps we can get the case reduced to manslaughter. Perhaps it was an accident. That's what I'm hoping. But somehow or other we've got to get Philip to open up about it and that's where this Maggie person comes in. She's personable enough, isn't she? I think I met her briefly at that charity do the other month. Tall girl, looks like a model.'

Bea nodded. She'd been responsible for Maggie's make-over from Barbie doll to crop-haired model. The girl was quite presentable nowadays, and though still gauche, she was gaining enough self-confidence to socialize on a limited scale.

‘Here!' Velma took a packet from her large handbag and shoved it at Bea. ‘All you need, a cheque, a photo and as much information as I could get from Sandy about him. Ring me on my mobile, will you, when you've got going.' She fished out a mirror and lipstick, gave a little shriek at what she saw, and applied make-up. ‘I'll go straight down to the estate agents, fix that end up. Oh, I hope, I do so hope you can prove it wasn't murder.'

‘And if it was?'

Velma snapped her mirror shut. ‘It has to be an accident. Right? I'm counting on you to prove it.'

Rafael was surprised her body had been found so quickly. The newspapers didn't say who had found her, but it hadn't been Philip or he'd have told them all about it. What with the drink and the pills, Philip was incapable of keeping his mouth shut, which was a teensy bit of a worry.

Philip was boasting that she'd given him a valuable picture on his last visit, When questioned, Liam had said that yes, Philip had got an old-fashioned picture in his room, but that it didn't look like anything much to him. Liam didn't have the background to know if it were valuable or not. If, as Philip claimed, it were a genuine Millais, then it would indeed be a passport to happiness. Though not for Philip, of course. Philip didn't deserve to profit from his theft … and it must have been theft, mustn't it? The old woman would hardly have given a loser like Philip anything worthwhile.

Tonight he'd get Philip to show him the painting and if it were anything half decent, he'd make him an offer for it. A couple of hundred, say.

The man in Amsterdam was avidly awaiting the gold boxes which Rafael had lifted the week before, plus the miniatures from an earlier incident. Rafael hadn't worked with him before, but he'd come highly recommended. Rafael was sure the Dutchman would be delighted to have a halfway decent Millais as well.

The only problem was how to get them there, for Rafael never carried the goods himself. He had been using a reliable man as carrier, but a car crash had put him in hospital.

Should he break his rule and take them himself? On balance, no. The risk was too great. Besides, he had an open night to organize for the gallery where he worked. What he needed was a willing, innocent girl to act as a mule. Now, who did he know who'd fit the bill?

Friday afternoon

B
ea walked back up Church Street, wondering whether she'd suffered a senior moment by agreeing to help Velma, or had acted with prudence and foresight. She was inclined, as she turned in to her own road, to think she ought to ring Velma and tell her the deal was off.

The Abbot Agency did not, emphatically
not
, do murder cases. They were a domestic agency, pure and simple. Well, all right, sometimes they had to disentangle misunderstandings between client and employee; but they did not handle divorce work and they were not a detective agency.

Granted, with the help of her two young assistants Bea had recently exposed and dealt with a nasty charity scam, but that was only because the agency had been partly responsible for involving one of their clients in the first place. Check, check and check again had been Hamilton's mantra, which Max had failed to do.

Various other things had gone wrong during Max's time at the agency. He wasn't perhaps best suited to the job, but when Hamilton had become so ill, Max had taken over and had done his best. Sort of. His heart really had been in politics and when he finally got into parliament, he'd let the agency business run down, assuming that Bea would not wish to keep it on after Hamilton's death.

Max had left a lot of loose ends for Bea and her two new and untried assistants to tidy up on her return, and some of them – like the income tax affair – were serious. But that didn't mean they should stop doing what they were renowned for and start up a detective agency, did it?

Bea looked at her watch. Would Max be in the Commons now? No, wait a minute; the Commons had closed for its summer recess, and he'd be on his way north to his constituency for the holidays. She set her teeth. She simply must speak to him, straight away. That income tax problem … and one or two other loose ends.

‘Whoo-hoo, I'm back.' Bea dumped her wet umbrella in the hall, bracing herself to meet an onslaught of noise. Maggie was in and seemed to have turned on every noisy machine in the house; television, radio – why did she need both television and radio on at the same time? – hoover and coffee grinder. Maggie was a natural born homemaker who aspired to be a high-flying businesswoman, or astronaut, or brain surgeon … any career, in fact, that she was least fitted for.

The girl appeared in the kitchen doorway, talking on her mobile phone. String-bean thin and bouncy with it, Maggie flashed a splendid set of teeth and waved at Bea. The hoovering continued. Maggie mimed ‘Just a mo' at Bea and returned to the kitchen. The sound of the hoover did not cease. It was lying on its side in the living room, sucking in air not dust. Bea turned it off. And the television. This reduced the noise level somewhat, but not completely.

Maggie brayed a laugh, and clanged saucepans about in the kitchen. She was probably gossiping to her new friend in the nail salon nearby; recently Maggie had taken to wearing false nails when she went out in the evenings.

Bea ground her teeth, fighting with herself. On the one hand Maggie was free, white and over twenty-one and therefore if she agreed to go undercover, it was no skin off Bea's nose. On the other hand, the girl was only just beginning to recover from the damage inflicted on a too tall, too sensitive girl by a destructive ex-husband. Though reasonably bright, Maggie wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer, and her attitude to life in general could be compared to that of an untrained but willing puppy.

Naïve was her middle name, and if unchecked, she'd dress from head to foot in DayGlo Lycra.

Would it be fair to ask her to go undercover? The coffee grinder stopped. For this relief much thanks. But the radio continued to churn out its tom-tom of doom and gloom.

Maggie shouted from the kitchen. ‘Want some coffee? Oops, I've just remembered. Someone rang for you earlier, and I said I didn't know when you'd be back.'

‘Who was it?' Bea dumped her bag on the table in the window – Hamilton's old card table, placed where she could sit and overlook the garden below.

‘Dunno. I asked Oliver where you were, but he didn't seem to know. Oh, and the man came round to see about the rewiring and he wants to know if you need Wi-Fi or something. It costs extra, of course. Oh, bother, that's my phone again. Hello …?' Another burst of laughter.

Bea took the packet Velma had given her, and trod down the stairs to the agency in the basement. Definitely she must have these dingy rooms redecorated. Rewiring, yes; though she didn't understand about Wi-Fi. Oliver would know. She went through to the big back room which had once been Hamilton's office. Because the house was built on a slope, this room had access to the garden through French windows. She dumped Velma's package on the desk which was now hers, and bent to pick all that tiresome correspondence out of the wastepaper basket … which was empty.

Feeling stupid, Bea picked up the basket and shook it. It remained empty.

She began to panic. The letter from the tax people, the invoice from … that letter of complaint which must be answered, the communication from a solicitor about a case she'd never even heard of …

Gone.

Maggie came clattering down the stairs, and rushed through the hall to the agency reception office at the front of the house, still talking on her mobile.

Bea ran after her, short of breath. ‘Maggie, did you empty the wastepaper basket?'

‘What? Oh. Hold on a mo … Uh-huh. Dustbin day today.'

Bea told herself to take long, slow breaths. Recycling was the thing. All paperwork went into a green box in the well outside the basement steps leading up to the road. Of course the paperwork would be in there, safe and sound.

Maggie had turned on her computer, while still talking on her phone. Bea went through the tiny vestibule and out into the open air at the bottom of the steps. Maggie's perky little bay tree was doing well, and the steps were swept every day. The green recycling box was there, and the bag with paper for recycling was in it. Good.

Not so good was the fact that the most important letters were not in it. Including the ones from the taxman and the solicitor.

The rain had turned to a mild sort of drizzle.

Bea went back inside and stood over Maggie till the girl looked up from her phone call and realized something was up. She told her caller to hold on a moment and smiled up at Bea, all eager beaver.

‘Maggie, have you been doing some shredding?'

‘Uh-huh. Anything with our details on it. OK?'

During his time in the office Max had bought a new shredder, one that turned paper into confetti, and not strips. Bea closed her eyes for a moment. She told herself it wasn't Maggie's fault. The girl had merely been doing her job.

It was Bea's fault, and heaven alone knew how she was going to get out of this one. A grovelling letter to the taxman for a start. That is, if she could remember which tax office she was supposed to be dealing with, which she couldn't. Perhaps there was something in the back files … oh, and the solicitor's letter must be attended to, somehow.

‘Maggie, how would you like to go undercover on a special job?'

They dragged Oliver away from his computer and sat in Bea's office with the lights on, for the rain hadn't let up.

Bea opened the packet Velma had given her, and extracted the cheque. She hid the shock which the total gave her, and put it in her top drawer without comment. Nevertheless the amount made her pulse beat fast. Why, it would cover almost all the bill from the tax people and wouldn't that be a good thing!

She emptied everything else out of the envelope on to the desk. ‘We've been asked, as a special favour, to undertake an investigation into an incident in which an elderly lady died. It may have been an accident, or manslaughter, or murder. The death was reported last week. Here's the cutting from last Friday's local paper.'

Bea laid it on the desk and they both leaned forward to read the print, and look at the Forties-style photograph of a glamorous blonde.

‘But we don't “do” that sort of thing,' said Maggie.

Oliver gave her a sharp look. ‘It would make a change from finding people a new nanny or housekeeper.' Oliver liked a challenge.

Bea hid a smile. ‘That's an old photograph. The subject was Lady Farne, widow of a man who left her very well off. When she died she was in her eighties, reclusive, miserly, sitting on a fortune in antiques in a large flat nearby. Oliver, would you like to see if you can dig up a more recent photograph and any other information about her? I expect there were obituaries in some of the better class papers.'

Oliver nodded. ‘It says the death was due to a burglary that went wrong.' He flicked at the paper. ‘There's a lot about her lurid life, but hardly anything about her death.'

‘The police are probably working through their list of professional burglars who might have had a go.' Bea teased out another photograph from the pile. ‘You don't need to know who our client is for the moment but she's done a good job assembling information for us. She suspects that a family member called Philip Weston knows more about the death than he should.'

Bea glanced sharply up at her two assistants. Oliver, swarthy, fidgety, still wet behind the ears, had a good memory and a clever mind. His eyes narrowed and sought Bea's. She could see him notching up the information that a Mrs Velma Weston was one of Bea's friends. He'd made the connection all right.