The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds: An Isabel Dalhousie Novel (9) (7 page)

“The Barnes,” said Isabel.

“That’s it. He gave the lot, didn’t he?”

“Yes. And will you?” asked Isabel.

For a moment a shadow passed over his face, and she
realised that her question, which had just slipped out, was intrusive, even rude.
You did not ask people just how charitable they intended to be.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked you. It’s none of my business.”

He smiled. “Not at all. It’s a reasonable question, and I’d raised the subject anyway.
No, I’m not going to give everything away. I’m going to pass some on to the next generation.”

“Fair enough.”

“But the more important things will go to the Scottish National Gallery.” He stopped,
and looked at her, lowering his voice. His tone, now, bore a note of apology. “The
Poussin, for example.”

“The one that was stolen?”

“Yes, although I suppose that’s very much in doubt now.” He paused again. “And that
makes me feel extremely regretful. After all, I promised it to them.”

Isabel felt that he hardly needed to reproach himself over that, and told him as much.
He listened attentively, but she could see that her words did not persuade him. It
was something to do with honour, she thought; this man was out of his time, barely
at home in an age as casual as ours. There were people like that.

“Tell me about the painting,” she said. “I looked it up but one can never really tell
from a photograph.”

He responded enthusiastically to her comment. “I couldn’t agree more about photographs.
You don’t get any sense of the presence of the painting—the atmosphere it creates
just by being there in the room. For that, you have to see it in the flesh, so to
speak.”

He sat back in his chair. The waitress had arrived with their
order—an open sandwich for Isabel and a slice of quiche and a salad for Duncan.

He seemed suddenly to have remembered something. “Have you noticed something about
Caravaggio?”

She was not sure how to answer. One could hardly be unaware of Caravaggio, but to
notice something … His use of light?

“It’s just this business about seeing a painting in a room, in front of you. Caravaggio
is so powerful he sterilises any other paintings on the wall in the same room. It
just doesn’t work. He overpowers them.”

“Poussin doesn’t?”

“The opposite. Poussin is a tremendously courteous painter. He doesn’t shout at you.
Far from it.”

They began their lunch. She saw that he ate delicately, and slowly, which surprised
her. She had imagined that he would have a hearty appetite; country people usually
did. But then she remembered that Duncan Munrowe was very far from being a typical
country landowner.

“The Poussin we have lost,” he went on, “is a late one. Like many of his paintings
of that period it has what the experts call a ‘cool palette.’ In other words, it’s
not very bright. Those lovely, rather faded colours.”

“Like
A Dance to the Music of Time
?”

He nodded. “Yes. Or that other one—you know, the one where the giant is carrying the
man on his shoulders, the one in the Louvre?”

Isabel did know it. “One of my absolute favourites,” she said. “The man standing on
the giant’s shoulders is just so utterly extraordinary. But it’s not in the Louvre—it’s
in New York, in the Met.”

He blushed. “Of course. I forget what’s where. For me, the Louvre’s …”

Isabel knew what she thought of when she thought of the Louvre. There was a certain
inevitability to it. “The
Mona Lisa
?”

He shook his head. “No. I’m afraid that painting does very little for me—I suppose
because it’s become so well known. And the room it’s in is always full to the brim
with parties of teenagers on their Paris trip. You can hardly breathe.”

“So you search out Poussin?” she prompted.

“Yes,” said Duncan. “And also that wonderful Ghirlandaio—the one in which the young
boy is looking up in wonderment at his grandfather with the very bulbous nose. Youth
and old age. It’s such a lovely painting and the look in the old man’s eyes is just
extraordinary. How do you capture a look of such fondness? How do you get that in
paint? Yet he does. It’s a magnificent painting.”

“Which is what great painting is about,” said Isabel. “Capturing those profound human
emotions.”

Duncan agreed. “That’s right. And it makes one ask if we have any great artists among
us at present. Who are they? Who’s doing that sort of thing now?”

“David Hockney can,” said Isabel. “Look at the emotion in those paintings of young
men, and some of the portraits too.”

“And Lucian Freud?”

“Yes, him too.”

He looked thoughtful. “But great painters seem to be thin on the ground, do you think?”

“Perhaps.” She steered the conversation back to the Poussin. “So, what happened?”

“The theft?”

“Yes.”

He put down his knife and fork. “You may know that we open the garden—and the house—to
the public on a couple of days each summer. It’s a great way of sharing. We’ve always
done it at Munrowe House.”

“And that’s when it was stolen?”

“So it seems. We were quite busy—there were almost two hundred people who came and
had a look round. Maybe more.”

She asked whether they were free to wander around the house as well. Was nothing done
about watching them?

He looked at her ruefully. “Of course we had arrangements. There were five or six
volunteers—friends of ours, or people who work on the estate next door. We tried to
make sure that there was somebody in each of the rooms that was open to the public.
There were six of those—the main drawing room, the dining room, the library and so
on. But the system didn’t work, I’m afraid, and there were spells in between shifts
when there was nobody in a room.”

Isabel was curious as to how a painting could have been carried out in broad daylight,
with people milling around.

“I’m afraid that was very simple,” said Duncan. “The Poussin was in the drawing room,
and that room has a French window that opens on to the garden. But the bit of the
garden in question is secluded, and there’s a sort of hedged corridor that goes round
to the back of the house. It would have been very easy to take the painting out by
that route and then bundle it into a car parked near the kitchen. Very simple, I’m
afraid. We didn’t check beforehand to see whether that door was locked—and it wasn’t.”

He sighed. “The insurance people hit the roof when they came round. I pointed out
to them that if it had been as obvious as all that, then why had they not raised it
with me when their
man came round last year to look at the alarm system? They wanted to check that we
had proper alarms and they had a good walk round the house. They said things seemed
fine then.”

“And how did they respond to that?”

“Silence. They answer the questions they want to answer and ignore the others. They’ve
been very tight-lipped about this.” He paused. “I’m afraid I’ve been seriously distressed
by these people. Seriously …” His voice faltered.

Isabel reached across to touch him gently on the forearm. He looked down at her hand,
surprised, but did not draw back. She left her hand where it rested for only a moment
or two, but it was enough to establish a connection of sympathy.

“It’s obviously been pretty upsetting for you,” she said. “The loss of the painting
in itself must be bad enough, but to have it compounded by a row over insurance must
make it all so much worse.”

He gave her an appreciative look. “Yes, I’m afraid you’re right. I should perhaps
have been a bit more robust about it all, but I’m afraid I just found the whole thing … well,
a bit tawdry. I feel dirtied by it. It’s odd, I know, but that’s the way I feel.”

“But that’s the way that anybody who’s been burgled feels,” Isabel said. “It’s a violation.
Your space has been invaded. It’s a shock. And then along come insurance people who
make you feel guilty about it, although you’re the victim. It’s entirely understandable.”

They were silent for a while. Then Duncan said, “That’s why I asked to speak to you.
I wanted to have somebody on my side, if I could put it that way. Lawyers are all
very well, and I could have asked Douglas Connel—he’s very helpful, but he’s doing
a lot of other things for me at present and I felt it would be burdening him unduly.”

“I know Douglas,” said Isabel. “I’m sure he wouldn’t mind.”

“Maybe not. But I also thought that for this it might be better to have somebody who
isn’t a lawyer.” He looked at her cautiously. “And there’s a reason for that.”

Isabel waited for him to explain. He picked up a paper napkin and folded it carefully,
and then refolded it.

“We’ve had an approach, or rather, the insurance people have had an approach. It’s
tentative at the moment, but it looks as if something might be happening.”

“An approach from the thieves?”

“Possibly.”

“And are they going to talk to them?”

“I imagine so. The insurance company wants to avoid paying the claim if at all possible.
If they can get the painting back from the thieves for less than the claim, then that
suits them just fine.”

“I see.”

“Remember those Turners that were stolen in Germany?”

Isabel remembered it, but only vaguely.

“They got them back through negotiation with the thieves,” Duncan said. “In our case,
though, there’s something unusual going on.”

She waited. The waitress had come to clear their plates.

“They want to talk to me,” he said quietly. “They’ve made the initial approach to
the insurance company, but they seem to have gone off them for some reason. Maybe
it’s something the insurers said. Perhaps they rather scared the thieves off. Anyway,
they’re now talking directly to me.”

She asked what the insurance company thought of that. They were surprised, he said,
and unsure what lay behind it. They felt it might be unwise for him to talk directly
to the thieves
and they were also at pains to stress that Duncan had no power to negotiate in relation
to the return of the painting. That was their affair as insurers and the thieves would
have to go to them for that. After a while, though, they had changed their tune when
it came to initial talks, especially after the thieves had gone quiet for a few weeks.
Duncan could talk directly to anybody, as long as he kept them informed and did not
try to commit them to any payment.

“So what would you like me to do?” Isabel asked.

Duncan stared at her uncertainly.

“I’m perfectly happy to help,” she prompted. “You needn’t feel awkward about asking.”

“I have to meet them,” he said. “They’ve told me they’re going to be in touch about
a meeting. I don’t yet know where it’s going to be.”

“How did they contact you?”

“Initially by letter. Anonymous, naturally. Printed on a plain sheet of paper and
postmarked Glasgow. It told me nothing.”

“You showed it to the insurance people?”

He nodded. “They photographed it. I’m not sure if they showed it to the police. The
police have been informed, of course, but seem to be taking a bit of a back seat at
present. It seems the insurance company doesn’t think it helps to involve them too
closely at this stage, as far as I can tell.”

“You said—‘initially.’ Have they been in touch again?”

He shifted in his seat uneasily. “They telephoned me. At three in the morning.”

She waited for him to continue.

“They asked me if I had received their letter. That’s how I knew it was the same people.
The insurance people say that you get all sorts of cranks phoning up pretending to
be the thieves,
trying to get in on things. At least we know this is the same group.”

It occurred to Isabel that they might still be impostors who had nothing to do with
the theft. How could he tell?

“The letter had a photograph with it. It was a close-up of a section of the painting
under strong light. It couldn’t have been taken when it was in our possession, on
the wall—the lighting was quite different.”

Their coffee had arrived. Duncan took a sip, looking at Isabel over the rim of his
cup. “They said they’d phone to make the arrangements quite soon. They said it wouldn’t
be them I would be meeting—it would be somebody acting for them. I thought I might
tell them that I’ll be accompanied by a friend. I’ll stress that you have nothing
to do with the insurance company.”

He waited expectantly. “All right?”

Isabel nodded. “All right.”

He looked relieved. “Thank you. And I’m sorry that this has all been about me and
I haven’t asked you anything about yourself. I know that you edit a journal—Martha
told me that—and I know that you have a reputation as being somebody who sorts out
people’s difficulties. But apart from that?”

“I live in Merchiston,” Isabel said. “Just round the corner from here. I run the journal
from the house. And I’m married to a musician. He plays the bassoon.”

Duncan listened politely. “I see.”

“And I have a three-and-three-quarter-year-old son called Charlie. And that, I suppose,
is it. And you? Do you have family?”

“I have two children by my first wife,” said Duncan. “My daughter is thirty and I
have a son of twenty-seven. Both live in Edinburgh—my daughter lives in Nelson Street.
I’m going down there immediately after this. We see each other regularly.”

“And your wife?” Isabel asked.

“Frederika. Freddie for short. I remarried about ten years ago. I had lost my first
wife to cancer a few years earlier. The children were still at school. Alex—that’s
Alexandra—was just about to leave and Patrick had a couple more years to go. It was
very difficult for him. Had he been a little older, he would have coped better, I
think.”

Had his words been written, the last sentence would have been underlined in red, thought
Isabel.

“It’s always difficult,” said Isabel. “I lost my mother at quite an early age. I was
twelve.”

“Yes, it’s not easy. Alex says that her memories sometimes get jumbled up—even though
she was almost eighteen when her mother died.”