Sidney Chambers and The Problem of Evil (The Grantchester Mysteries) (16 page)

‘The Harland murders were something of an exception.’

‘And everyone is grateful to you. But perhaps we should let the police get on with their business, while we continue with ours. I have been to see Inspector Keating.’

‘Really? What did he say?’

‘He was surprisingly grumpy,’ the Archdeacon confessed.

‘There’s nothing surprising about that.’

‘He said that you were in the middle of a very difficult case which he could not solve without you and I should mind my own business. I pointed out that it was rather my business, and that I did not take kindly to distracted clergymen. I informed him, as I am telling you now, that I think it would be in your own best interests to abandon your gallivanting in search of stolen paintings and naked women.’

‘That is something of an exaggeration.’

‘You need to give it up, Sidney.’

‘I’m not sure I can promise to do so.’

‘May I then simply suggest that you reread the Parable of the Talents? It would be a pity if you didn’t make full use of your spiritual potential
.
.
.’

No one could accuse Sidney of being a negligent priest, but sometimes he would be so involved in one aspect of his work that he was unable to do anything else. Before he had Dickens, for example, he would frequently mistime visits to parishioners or fail to fulfil his daily duties because he was so preoccupied by the items on his desk. He would continue to work on a sunny day, for example, determined to complete his correspondence and his paperwork and get to the end of whatever he was doing. But once he had finished, it would either be dark and too late to go out, or the weather would have changed for the worse. Telling himself not to mind, and that he would not make the same mistake the following day, he would awake to gloom and thunder. Now, however, with his beloved Labrador, he had no choice but to get out of the house and walk regularly every day, never minding the conditions, where he found that the exercise cleared his head and improved his mood.

He was on one such walk, on the following Monday, when Inspector Keating intercepted him and said that he had had enough. He insisted that his friend come with him, dog or no dog, to the Fitzwilliam Museum immediately. ‘We need to search the whole ruddy thing.’

‘But if we start rummaging through the place Anderson will guess straight away that we suspect him of lying.’

‘He knows that already. They must have a painting store; and we know the canvas has been removed from the frame. It could have been rolled up in a cardboard tube and posted to France; or hidden in the attic of the Director’s mother’s house for all we know. They could even pretend to discover it having switched it with a fake, like that mad bloke did to the Holbein in Locket Hall before he kidnapped Miss Kendall. I hardly need to remind you of that.’

‘The Lost Holbein’ had been one of Sidney’s earliest forays into detection and had necessitated Amanda’s rescue from a remote farmstead outside Ely. ‘I don’t think we are dealing with anything as dangerous as that. The Fitzwilliam Director seems normal enough.’

‘By Cambridge standards, that is true. But you must have realised by now, Sidney, that this town contains nothing but madmen.’

‘Including us?’

‘Especially us.’

Once inside the museum they ignored all protest about the lack of an appointment and the appearance of a Labrador in the galleries and proceeded straight to the Director’s office. There, Keating made his position clear. ‘We are going to go through the whole place and even close it down, if necessary, unless you start telling us the truth.’

Graham Anderson remained behind his desk. ‘I don’t think you will be able to do that. I have provided as much help as I feel I have been capable of giving.’

The Inspector was adamant. ‘That is an evasive answer and it is not enough. You need to stop the nonsense. We have discovered the girl’s name. It is Celine Bellecourt. We know that you met her the Saturday before the work was stolen. There’s no point denying it. How well do you know her and what did she want? Any more lies and I’ll have you banged up right now.’

‘Please don’t threaten me.’

‘Then answer our questions properly. You knew who that girl was, didn’t you?’

‘I met Celine Bellecourt for the first time last Saturday. She had been doing some research. She wrote to me and asked if she could come and see me. She had some questions.’

‘What kind of questions?’

‘Well, to put it simply, she thought that
The Trapeze
was a portrait of her mother.’

‘And is it?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘I thought people like you were supposed to know that kind of thing?’

‘Sometimes, Inspector, the answers are not so simple. You have to do a bit of detective work and trace the painting back to its origins.’

‘You don’t need to lecture me about investigation, Mr Anderson.’

‘
Dr
Anderson. We acquired the painting as a bequest from a Lancashire mill owner called Frank Hindley Smith in 1939. It was framed in Paris by Paul Foinet but we don’t know who first had it. Sometimes you have to use your experience and take these things on trust. An ideal provenance history would provide a documentary record of owners’ names, dates of ownership and means of transference after inheritance. To be absolutely sure you have to trace all the past sales through dealers and auction houses; and know all the locations where the work was kept, from the time of its creation by the artist until the present day.’

Dickens began to show signs of impatience. There was only so much sitting down in an art gallery he could take. Anderson rather touchingly tried to include him, clearly hoping that getting a Labrador onside might help matters.

‘It’s a bit like establishing the pedigree of a dog. But even this does not always identify the subject. There are similar presentation drawings that are titled
Mademoiselle Alexis
. So that is a clue. If the girl’s mother was called Alexis that would be one link, but this could equally well be a stage name; especially because when the painting was exhibited at Agnew’s in 1923 it was called
Mademoiselle Leagh
, possibly in homage to a work by Degas called
Mademoiselle La La at the Cirque Fernando
. So, you must understand that it’s a complicated story and very easy to jump to the wrong conclusions where titles are concerned: hence all that Jack the Ripper nonsense.’

‘This may seem a ludicrously fanciful theory,’ Sidney began. ‘But, I wonder, is it at all feasible that Celine also thought Walter Sickert might be her father?’

‘Why do you ask that?’

‘She told me that she was an orphan, that both her parents were dead.’

‘I think that’s unlikely. Sickert died in 1942. He was over eighty. Celine’s only twenty-six.’

‘It’s still technically possible,’ said Keating.

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Why not?’

‘I just know it isn’t.’ The Director did not return Sidney’s questioning. He breathed heavily and was just about to speak when Sidney interrupted.

‘I’m curious. You have just been very specific about Celine’s age. You said she was twenty-six. That is very exact. How do you know? Did she tell you?’

‘Yes.’

‘That is unusual. Women don’t normally tell men their age the first time they meet them; unless of course you know more than you are saying?’

‘I have told you all I can.’

Keating banged on the table. ‘For God’s sake, man, you’ve come out with enough lies. Let’s get to the truth. How well do you know her? Is she your girlfriend? Don’t let us make it unpleasant for you.’

There was a silence. ‘I’m sorry,’ said Sidney, shocked by the outburst from his friend, the like of which he had never seen before. ‘Tell us.’

Graham Anderson stared down at the floor and answered the question. ‘She is my daughter.’

He had met Celine’s mother, Alexis Ducroix, in Paris in the 1920s. It was the summer before he went to university and his father had paid for the trip, saying that it would make a man of him, and Graham Anderson had assumed that one of the points of this extended holiday was to lose his virginity.

‘I rented a studio in the Rue Descartes and went to all the nearby bars, cafés, cabarets and eventually the circus where I finally drank enough absinthe to summon the courage to ask Alexis if she’d like to go dancing at the hall in Rue Cardinal Lemoine. After that evening I went to see her on the trapeze every night. The show people had such stories. One of the older members claimed that he had even seen Blondin’s great act of making an omelette while on a tightrope. I was thrilled by the excitement and the danger and yet, at the same time, I felt protective of Alexis. I wanted to be the one to catch her if she fell; I told her that I wanted to be her net, that I would always be able to support her. It was a ridiculous idea, really, since I had only just stopped being a schoolboy. But we were young and in love, walking hand in hand on the quays by the Seine, drinking Chambéry cassis in the Closerie des Lilas, sharing cassoulet at the Rotonde. But the timing was wrong, as any fool could have predicted
.
.
.’

‘So you came home.’

‘I had no more money and there was a university to go to. Alexis went on the road with the Cirque Rancy and eventually the letters stopped and we lost touch. We only met again in the 1930s by which time both of us were married to other people.’

Sidney guessed that Celine had been the result of an all-too-temporary reunion.

‘We can’t be sure that the woman in the painting is the same Alexis,’ the Director continued. ‘She’s seen from below and afar, her features are indistinct and it’s a work of Impressionism.’

‘I can’t believe you think that,’ Keating began. ‘You know it’s her.’

‘It’s true that Celine’s mother trained at the Cirque d’Hiver in Paris and joined a troupe that toured Normandy and the Seine-Maritime every summer. She would have been about seventeen when Sickert was there and so it’s possible that she is the subject. But I’m pretty sure she never saw the finished painting, and we never spoke about it
.
.
.’

‘That, too, seems strange.’

‘It was before we knew each other. But it’s a pity, I’ll admit. I’d like to have known what she made of him.’

‘She must have seen him at work?’

‘Not necessarily. He could just have been sketching and worked up the painting later. Besides, you can’t concentrate on anything else if you’re doing a double somersault between two trapezes thirty feet in the air.’

‘She will have had a taste for the dramatic: like her daughter.’

‘I see what you are driving at, and yes, she was a show-woman. I used to think about her every time I passed the painting. I was never completely sure that it was she but I liked to pretend it was and that I could still see her every day. It’s why I couldn’t possibly have stolen it. Why take a painting that you can look at all the time? Then Celine arrived. She’d done the research, convinced herself that it was a portrait of her mother, and telephoned to make an appointment.’

‘Which was the Saturday before last?’ Keating checked.

‘That is correct. I am sorry I did not give you this information before.’

‘And you still didn’t tell her the story?’

‘I couldn’t. I didn’t want to have to go into all this.’

‘You could have saved us valuable time. So now, at least, we know why she would have wanted to steal the painting.’

‘If she genuinely thought it was of her mother then that is, of course, possible, but I don’t want to incriminate my own child.’

Inspector Keating cut in. ‘She’s done quite a good job of incriminating herself.’

‘Why did you keep the fact that she is your daughter a secret?’ Sidney asked.

‘Cowardice, probably; or because the story of her past had been so clearly and tragically explained to her that I didn’t want to confuse it further.’

‘Tragically?’

‘Alexis was killed in Dieppe shortly after Operation Jubilee in 1942. Her husband had already died of drink. Celine was six years old when she was taken in by the owners of one of the hotels in Dieppe.’

‘Which one?’ Sidney asked.

‘The Hotel de la Plage.’

‘So she was born in 1936, which makes her twenty-six today. Did you ever meet her as a little girl?’

Inspector Keating interrupted. ‘How can you be sure that she’s your daughter?’

‘Her mother wrote to me at the beginning of the war, just after the German tanks took over Paris. She remembered that my parents lived in a stately home and sent the letter there. She didn’t want money, she was very firm about that, but she wanted to tell me the truth just in case anything happened. Which it did.’

‘How did you know she had died?’

‘I didn’t at first. I tried to find her after the war. My wife and I weren’t getting on well and I found it difficult to adjust to peacetime. I went to the circus and one of the old boys told me everything.’

‘And you weren’t tempted to find your daughter?’