Sidney Chambers and The Problem of Evil (The Grantchester Mysteries) (12 page)

‘I’m not sure I want to talk about it.’

‘You mean you can’t be sure?’

‘It’s not that.’

‘You mean you
had
seen her before?’

‘I wouldn’t like to say.’

Sidney produced one of his kindly confessor looks. ‘As a man of God, I hope you can trust me.’

‘Well then I think so, sir. Yes, I have.’

‘And when would that have been, if you don’t mind my asking?’

Francelle interrupted. ‘Be careful what you say this day, Omari. We don’t want no trouble.’

Her brother was less concerned. ‘Trouble comes and trouble goes. It’s only this world. We’re not here for long.’

‘But what we do while we are here matters,’ Sidney cut in. ‘Our actions have implications.’

Omari relented. ‘It was last Saturday I saw her first, sir. The girl was looking at the painting that’s gone.
The Trapeze
, they call it.’

‘You’re sure it was her? The same girl?’

‘Pretty sure.’

‘Could you swear in a court of law?’ Sidney asked.

‘I wouldn’t like to go to no court of law, sir. I could swear on the Bible.’

‘That is good enough for me. And was she on her own, this girl?’

Omari paused. ‘I cannot tell a lie. But I don’t like to speak the truth about this.’

‘Then let me speak it for you. I imagine she was not.’

‘You could be right assuming that.’

‘And who was her companion?’ Sidney pressed.

‘That’s hard for me to tell you out loud.’

‘I don’t think it is.’

‘I don’t want to get in no trouble. I can’t lose my job.’

‘It was a man?’

‘I can’t answer, sir.’

‘I think you are telling me that it was a man. Did you know him?’

‘Again, I wouldn’t like to say.’

‘That means, Omari, I think, that you did know him. Could you hear what they were saying to one another?’

‘I could hear but I couldn’t always understand.’

‘And why was that?’ Sidney asked.

‘They were speaking in French.’

‘You are sure?’

‘As I say, I don’t want to get into no trouble.’

‘You won’t. I can assure you.’

Francelle was not convinced. ‘I don’t know how you can assure us. The police have been here talkin’ all kinds of things already, treating us like criminals when we’re no such thing.’

Sidney thought to himself that there were only so many excuses he could make for his friends in the force. ‘I know the police can be impatient. They have their job to do.’

‘I’ve no time for impatience,’ Omari replied.

Sidney realised he should leave while he still had this man’s trust. ‘I cannot say that this will go no further, but I can promise that I will look after you in all eventualities. Inspector Keating is a good friend of mine and I am sure you had nothing to do with the theft of the painting.’

‘He did not, as God is his judge, nor did he know that girl,’ Francelle interrupted. ‘Parading around in all her glory like the day she was born. Has she no shame?’

‘It seems not,’ said Sidney. ‘Omari, I feel I must ask you again to tell me this. Who was the man with the girl last Saturday?’

‘I’m sorry, sir. It’s hard for me to answer.’

‘Was it the director of the museum, Mr Anderson?’

‘I can’t tell no lie if you ask me flat out.’

‘So can I assume that I am correct without you telling me directly?’

Omari sat back in his chair. ‘Have you just been playing with me? Did you know the whole time?’

‘I did not.’

‘Lord knows you did.’

‘Don’t take the name of the Lord in vain, my brother.’

‘I don’t mean to do that. Only I don’t like to be played with.’

Sidney apologised. ‘I meant you no harm. All I want is to understand the truth of this case and to protect you in all necessary ways.’

‘How did you know what I had seen?’

‘It is the only explanation for your fear. I recognised that you were a man who was anxious about losing his job; and Mr Anderson is the one person who can take that away from you.’

‘Maybe I lost that job for sure now. But I want you to remember. I haven’t told you nothing.’

‘You have been the soul of discretion, Omari, and I am grateful for your honesty and for the hospitality you and your sister have shown me. I will not forget that. I will leave you in peace. Please don’t worry.’

‘We’re always nervous. If it’s not the bills or the job there’s always the end of the world to worry us. These are the last days and I don’t need this trouble.’

‘There won’t be any more difficulty, I am sure. You have done nothing wrong.’

‘It won’t be long until we reach the Kingdom, Reverend. The atomic bomb is telling us now. As Jesus said, we must keep awake for the time and the hour.’

‘Indeed he did. We must watch and pray. I am sorry to have troubled you.’ Sidney leant forward and laid his hand on his host’s head. ‘God bless you, Omari.’

After Inspector Keating had been given a full report of this encounter, the two men decided to visit the Director of the Fitzwilliam once more. Sidney worried that he had no proper pretext for joining his friend during the inquiry but Geordie told him to concentrate on his role as a witness and to keep asking the suspect, for that was what Graham Anderson was, a series of questions that would look as if he was simply checking that he had his own story straight.

The Director started by telling them that understanding a crime such as this one was a lengthy process and that it could often take years to solve a mystery and return an artwork. Provided the painting had not been stolen to order, in which case there was little hope of recovery, they just had to wait and keep a close eye on the auction houses, most of whom had already been asked to look out for a masterpiece on the cheap. It was even possible for the thief to pretend not to know that it was a Sickert in order to give the buyer a sense of superiority. The potential purchaser might then offer more in the mistaken enthusiasm that he was getting a bargain. An interim price in the case of this particular picture might be between four and five hundred pounds, giving the newfound accomplices a tidy profit if the work could be sold on a second time.

The other possibility, Graham Anderson continued, was to wait for a ransom demand, but he did not think that this was likely. The work was not sufficiently famous. He concluded that, in his opinion, there were only two motives: the theft to order or the quick, and hopefully thwarted, sale.

‘It could also be an insurance scam,’ said Keating.

‘In which case,’ the Director replied, ‘I think you are implying that I might be responsible.’

‘I’m not so much implying it as stating it,’ Keating began before Sidney gave him a ‘be patient’ look.

‘If I ever did such a thing I would be ruined, Inspector; and I am hardly likely to risk my livelihood for a minor work. I come from a family with three Rembrandts in our ancestral home. If I was a criminal I think I could do a good deal better than an unpretentious Sickert.’

‘Miss Kendall mentioned Jack the Ripper
.
.
.’

‘That is, I am afraid, a very fanciful theory. The man who is putting that story about came to see me a few years ago when he knew that we had something of a collection here. It’s absolute nonsense. Sickert liked drama and scandal and gave dubious titles to his paintings, it is true; but he was also interested in the case of the Tichborne claimant, the Camden Town Murder and in Dr Crippen’s crimes. He could just as well have been involved in any or all of those. He may have lodged in the same boarding house once occupied by the Ripper, but he was on holiday in France at the time of the first four murders.’

‘In Dieppe?’

‘No. At Saint Valéry-en-Caux.’

Keating cut in. ‘I agree. This whole thing has got absolutely nothing to do with Jack the Ripper. There’s a whole file at Scotland Yard and everyone there knows it was Aaron Kosminski and not a poor old painter.’

‘I keep wondering about the girl,’ said Sidney. ‘She had such confidence. She moved through the gallery as if she was in a dream. She did not pause at all but knew exactly what she was doing and where she had to go. Are you sure you have never seen her before, Mr Anderson?’

‘I am.’

‘One of our witnesses is convinced that she was in the museum last Saturday.’

‘I do not work at weekends.’

‘The girl was in an animated conversation with a man he thought might have been you.’

‘Then he must have been mistaken.’

‘He said that she was talking to you in front of
The Trapeze
.’

‘I was on my way to the opera in London with my wife at the time. Have you been speaking to our security guard, Mr Baptiste, perhaps?’

‘I can’t say.’

‘If so, then you would do well to remember that he might simply be covering up for his failure to prevent a theft.’

‘If it wasn’t you, and the girl was in the gallery, then I wonder who the man was?’ Sidney asked. ‘Perhaps, like her, he was involved in the art world. If they were, then where do you think we could find them?’

‘I’ve no idea. People come here from all over the world.’

‘In London, perhaps?’

‘Or Paris. Or New York.’

‘I don’t think she’ll have got as far as New York,’ said Keating. ‘But Paris is interesting. She sang in French. Do you have contacts at the Louvre and the galleries over there, Mr Anderson?’

‘It’s part of my job,’ the Director replied. ‘I am considered to be something of an expert in French Impressionism.’

‘So you speak the language fluently?’

‘I’m not too bad at it.’

‘Like the girl. You could even have spoken to her in French when you saw her then?’

‘As I say, I didn’t see her.’

For the next day or two Sidney let his thoughts settle and did not involve himself in Inspector Keating’s investigation. The staff at the railway station had been questioned, garages and workshops were searched and a reward announced, but the routine pattern of inquiry yielded no results. There was no sign of the painting and no ransom demand.

Sidney returned to his duties, attending school assemblies, taking his tutorials at Corpus, and visiting Mrs Maguire’s ninety-year-old mother, a woman who had been bedridden for the past four years and was steadfastly refusing to die. He interviewed several candidates to replace Leonard Graham, none of whom came up to the mark; and he began to amass a rota of volunteers for the church fête. He even contemplated offering his services as a stand-in wicket keeper for the Grantchester cricket team.

His wife accompanied him on many of his walks through the village, by the river and across the meadows. The couple had begun to establish something of a routine that was their bastion against the criminality and violence that sometimes threatened to overwhelm them. Hildegard now ran regular coffee mornings and had secured a part-time teaching job at the Perse School. She also continued to give private piano lessons after school on three afternoons a week. It was still extraordinary, Sidney thought, to acknowledge the change she had brought to his life; her cheerfulness, her company, her music and the smell of baking in the vicarage. He sometimes stopped to wonder what it was that he loved most about her; the light in her eyes and the smile that was meant only for him. For he knew that she smiled differently when she was in his company; it was a particular look, a knowing confidence, a partially public yet elusive acknowledgement of the love that they shared.

He set to work on a series of meditations on the nature of Christmas, of which he was secretly rather proud, and he was able to listen to a little jazz while he did so, relaxing to Miles Davis’s
Sketches of Spain
, and Art Blakey’s
Mosaic
. He even found time to finish Iris Murdoch’s latest novel,
An Unofficial Rose
, enjoying the irony and pathos of nine intertwined lives. This is what the life of a vicar should be like, he thought. At last he had the time to stop, listen, learn, pray, and be himself.

He also began to find out a little bit more about Sickert. It was not the small matter of people thinking, unconvincingly, that the painter had been Jack the Ripper, but his fascination with the female form, and his interest in the polar opposites of seediness and show business, that attracted our amateur sleuth. This was an artist who had reclaimed the figurative tradition from the mire of Victorian taste and prudery; who introduced narrative using shocking and topical subject matter, and who gave Post-Impressionism its bite and pathos. Like Sidney, Sickert was intrigued by the difference between the hidden and the revealed, public confidence and private misery, loneliness and companionship.

Sidney tried to think in a similar manner to the artist, looking for composition and compelling narrative in what he saw. He even considered how he might turn his life into a work of art. Could that be possible?