Long Time Coming (8 page)

Next day was his first in the gallery. Little more was required of him than to mind the shop during Cardale’s frequent absences. The knowledge of the art world he had picked up from Meridor would have been an advantage if there had been many customers to impress with it, but they were few and far between. He looked the part, according to Cardale: that was all that really mattered.

The direness of the current trading climate drove them to an early lunch at L’Escargot in Soho, where it was possible to imagine for a pleasant couple of hours that there was no war under way in the world. Cardale disclosed he was a widower who had also lost a daughter, though he had a young grandson to remember her by. ‘I rattle round a too-big-by-bloody-half house in Richmond with the nipper, his nanny and a grumpy cook. It’s not exactly how I imagined it would turn out.’ The daughter, it emerged, had died in childbirth. The father of her child went unmentioned. He was evidently not on the scene. Swan felt genuinely sorry for Cardale,
though he was aware that the second bottle of Pomerol might have contributed to the sentiment.

He also became aware, late in the proceedings, that Cardale was gently pumping him for information about Meridor’s Picassos. When were they bought? Which dealer were they bought from? How much had they cost? Swan could not help. The pictures had all been acquired before his appointment as Meridor’s secretary. It was Cardale’s turn to be vague when Swan asked what Meridor had bought from
him
. ‘Second-division Impressionists, as I recall, old man. He probably sold them all on at a healthy profit. Shrewd fellow, your boss.’

Cardale had plans for the afternoon that did not involve returning to the gallery. Swan volunteered to open up for a couple of hours solo. It promised to be an undemanding stint.

And so it was, until the arrival of a customer whose manner and appearance were not those of the average St James’s gallery browser. He was a lean, sleek-haired, sallow-skinned fellow in a pale suit and two-toned shoes, with a heavy five o’clock shadow. Swan liked the look of him not at all.

‘Can I help you, sir?’

The man broke off from ogling a bathtime-in-the-harem piece of Victorian kitsch and treated Swan to a hostile glare. ‘Where’s Cardale?’ he growled.

‘Out at present, sir.’

‘I’ll bet. Well, give him a message when he crawls back, will you? Tell him patience is on ration like everything else and he’s had as much from us as he’s going to get.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘You heard. Tell him.’ The man levelled a stubby forefinger at Swan. ‘Got that?’

‘Very well. Who shall I say the message is from?’

The man smirked. ‘He’ll know.’

Swan felt strangely unsurprised by this turn of events. No one, in his experience, was ever as wealthy or as honourable as they cared
to imply. Meridor; Cardale; his own father: they all had feet of clay. But maybe his father was right about one thing. Maybe he should follow his brother’s example and join the Army. War service was an escape route of sorts.

He assumed it would be the following day before he had the chance to pass on the message to Cardale and gauge his reaction to it. As it was, however, he saw Cardale much sooner than that.

He had locked up and was en route to Piccadilly, with the half-formed intention of kicking off his evening with a cocktail at the Ritz, when he saw Cardale bearing down on him along St James’s Street, clutching a newspaper in his hand.

‘There you are, Swan.’ He was breathless and clearly agitated about something. He looked, indeed, like a man who had just received a great shock. ‘I … I was on my way to see you.’

‘I’m sorry. I thought you said you weren’t coming back this afternoon.’

‘I wasn’t intending to. But—’ He broke off and grasped Swan’s elbow. ‘You obviously haven’t heard.’ He flapped the newspaper. It was that day’s
Evening Standard
, folded open at an inside page. ‘Awful. Perfectly bloody awful.’

‘What is?’

‘This, man. Here.’ Cardale stabbed at a side-column headline. ‘See?’ And Swan saw.

Belgian liner
Uitlander
torpedoed in mid-Atlantic
– no survivors

Eldritch’s idea of telling me everything I needed to know hadn’t amounted to a lot by the time we reached London the following Monday. His spell as Isaac Meridor’s secretary had ended with Meridor’s flight from Antwerp in the face of the Nazi menace in May 1940. Eldritch had been diverted to London with the most precious part of Meridor’s art collection, his Picassos, to be lodged with the dealer Geoffrey Cardale for safekeeping. As a precaution against the U-boat threat to transatlantic shipping this had proved all too prescient. The liner carrying Meridor had gone down, with the loss of everyone aboard. That had left Eldritch thanking his lucky stars and working as Cardale’s assistant while he decided what to do next.

I had little doubt there was much more he could have told me about the circumstances surrounding these events, but he was a hard man to extract information from. He gave only what he wanted to give. Already, on the train ride up from Paignton, I’d begun to question the wisdom of accepting his offer. My mother, originally inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt, had reacted with dismay to my announcement that I was accompanying him to London. ‘If he insists on stirring up the past, you should let him get on with it, Stephen. I don’t want you getting into any trouble on his account. There’s your career to consider. And London’s a dangerous place these days. Only last week the IRA tried to bomb another Tube train. They killed the poor driver, you know.’

I did know. The IRA had been targeting London more and more of late. But nursemaiding Eldritch in return for a cut of the reward he stood to gain if he could prove the Brownlow Picassos had been stolen from the Meridor estate had sounded to me worth the remote risk of being blown up: at worst a waste of time, at best an exciting and lucrative proposition. More attractively still, it delayed my return to that career of mine Mum was so worried about but from which I badly needed an extended break. What can I say? I was young then, too young to let wisdom in on the act. Eldritch was leading me on. I knew that. But sooner or later he’d have to tell me the truth.

The first surprise he had for me was undeniably pleasant: the destination he named when we climbed into a taxi at Paddington station. He announced it with the relish of someone who’d waited a long time to be able to roll the sound around his tongue. ‘The Ritz.’

‘Are you out of your mind?’ I demanded of him as the cab started away. ‘Twisk’s never going to pay us to stay somewhere as swanky as that.’

‘Oh, but he is. In fact, I’m assuming he already has. I made it a condition of agreeing to do what his client was asking. Insist on the best when someone else is paying. It’s always been a motto of mine.’ He smiled. ‘Besides, it’s handy for the Royal Academy.’

Eldritch entered the Ritz with the air of one returning to his natural domain after a lengthy absence. As promised, Twisk had booked us in for the week, with the rooms paid for in advance. I must have had a look of incredulity plastered on my face going up in the lift, because Eldritch said to me as we stepped out, ‘I didn’t mention this before because I didn’t want it to sway your decision.’

The quip was a sign of the change that had crept over him since that evening at the Redcliffe. He’d recovered some confidence. He’d realized it wasn’t all over for him quite yet. The old fox was sniffing the breeze and wondering if his legs and lungs would support him for one last run in the open air with the sun on his back.

But the change only went so far. It was left to me to tip the porter.

I didn’t dally over unpacking, but still Eldritch was back downstairs ahead of me, sitting by the entrance to the Palm Court, happily watching the smartly dressed couples and quartets arriving for tea.

‘I used to dream about this hotel quite often while I was in the Portlaoise Hilton,’ he said, rising to meet me. ‘The tiny crustless sandwiches; the strawberries; the mirrors; the chandeliers; the champagne: the opulence.’ He shook his head. ‘I’ve missed a lot of opulence these past thirty-six years.’

‘Maybe you should have kept your hands off Meridor’s Picassos, then,’ I said, keen to prevent his balloon of nostalgia inflating still further.

He smiled. ‘That wasn’t my mistake, Stephen. But it is why we’re here. So, let’s go and see those famous Picassos, shall we?’

The Brownlow Collection was doing healthy business at the Royal Academy. There were in fact too many visitors for proper viewing of the paintings. This didn’t bother Eldritch unduly. He had no wish to peer and pose and cock his head in front of the late multi-millionaire’s sumptuous array of art in general. He was interested in one room only, to which we threaded our way through the goggling ruck.

There were eighteen Picassos in all: nudes twisted out of shape; portraits with dismantled features; still lifes in which nothing was still; collage-like assemblies of disparate objects; colourful explosions of form and figure. They spanned a period of about twenty-five years, from 1907 through to the early thirties. I recognized some of them from reproductions I’d seen. There could be no doubt they were a prime selection.

Eldritch went slowly round, scrutinizing each one in turn, often having to wait while someone else moved out of his way. I stood by the door after a brief circuit, wondering what exactly he was looking for. The attendant, a silver-haired, flush-faced fellow who
looked to have put on a couple of stone since being measured for his uniform, was slumped in a chair next to me. He stifled a yawn at frequent intervals. Eventually, I took pity on him.

‘Picasso not your thing?’ I murmured.

‘You said it, sir,’ he replied in a gravelly undertone. ‘I mean, what was he getting at? Give me Constable any day.’

‘Time hangs heavy, I imagine, sitting here for hours on end.’

‘Oh, they move us around a bit. And you never know. Someone might try to grab one of the pictures and leg it. Then I’d have to earn my money.’

‘But it hasn’t happened yet?’

‘No, sir. Though we do have a young woman who comes in just about every morning as soon as we open and makes a bee-line for this room. She likes to see the pictures before there’s anyone else in, so she tells me. Pleasant girl. But cracked as my coronation mug. She reckons as she’s the rightful owner of this lot. Or her family are. I forget exactly. Anyhow, I wouldn’t be altogether surprised if she tried to steal one.’

‘Take it back, you mean. If she’s telling the truth.’

‘Exactly, sir.
If
. Either way, it’d be no hardship to have to rugby-tackle her.’ He chuckled. ‘I should be so lucky.’

It was a snap decision of mine not to tell Eldritch about the persistent young woman. He was holding things back. Most things that mattered, I strongly suspected. Now I’d been donated my own secret, to share as and when I judged appropriate. The girl had to be related to Meridor. That was obvious. Maybe, if I could engineer a meeting with her, in Eldritch’s absence, I’d be able to find out more than he currently wanted me to know. Best of all, it paid him back for keeping me in the dark.

‘They’re Meridor’s all right,’ said Eldritch as we left the Picasso room. ‘No question about it.’

‘Are you going to tell me now how you went about stealing them?’

‘There’s more to learn first. Let’s take a look at the catalogue.’

*

We each perused a copy of the catalogue in the gift shop. The official version of the Picassos’ provenance was what he wanted to check. I watched him squinting at the page on the opposite side of the stack from me, flimsy old glasses perched on his nose. What we both read was that Jay Brownlow had acquired the paintings ‘
in the years immediately after the Second World War through dealers in Paris and Geneva
’. The dealers weren’t named. It was thin stuff. We went out on to the front steps, where Eldritch delivered his verdict in a conspiratorial whisper.

‘Brownlow bought the pictures from Geoffrey Cardale. I don’t doubt that for a moment. These dealers in Paris and Geneva the catalogue mentions would have been intermediaries, nothing more. It was crucial Cardale’s name shouldn’t appear on any documents.’

‘Because it was Cardale you delivered the pictures to on Meridor’s behalf.’

‘Exactly.’

‘But surely there was plenty to prove they belonged to Meridor. Before and therefore after the war.’

‘Ah, that’s where Cardale was undeniably clever.’

‘In what way?’

‘It’s a complicated story, Stephen.’ He looked at his watch. ‘And it’s going to have to wait a little longer.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I’d like to call in at the Cardale Gallery before it closes. It’s time to find out who minds the shop there these days.’

It looked no different from several other galleries in St James’s. A couple of Rodinesque figurines and a murky oil painting of a stag being set upon by hounds occupied the window. The external paintwork was maroon, with
G. Cardale Fine Art
proclaimed in gold lettering. Eldritch glanced up at the higher floors for a recollective moment, then said, ‘I suppose we should be grateful it’s still here,’ and led the way in.

The interior would have benefited from better lighting – or cleaner pictures. Heavy-framed Napoleonic sea battles and
Georgian hunting scenes that might once have sparkled but did so no longer dominated the display. Pop Art had made no inroads here.

As the jangling of the bell died away, a figure emerged from a room to the rear: a thick-set man of about forty, dressed in a tweed jacket, striped shirt, cravat and corduroy trousers that appeared to have been chosen for their match with the maroon frontage. He had the flushed, fleshy, floppy-haired look of a sporty public schoolboy sliding into sedentary middle age.

‘Can I help you?’ he asked, genially enough.

‘Mr Cardale?’ Eldritch countered.

‘Yes. That’s me.’

‘But not, I’d guess, Mr G. Cardale.’

‘No, no. He was my grandfather. Long gone, I’m afraid. I’m Simon Cardale.’

‘Some nice stuff you have here,’ I said in a sudden moment of sympathy for the fellow.