A Place of Safety (20 page)

Dear Henry,

You may already have persuaded Toby to tell you what is going on. I very much hope that you have because I am
convinced that there is nothing else I can do for you. And something must be done.

If you are still not prepared to go to the police, or Customs & Excise, I think you should seriously consider employing a genuine investigator. I have come to the end of my always limited usefulness and I can see nowhere else to go.

All I have managed to discover is that, irrespective of whatever he may be doing now, Toby has definitely been involved in art fraud in the past. This afternoon I met Martin Chanting (the father of Toby’s Cambridge friend), who virtually confirmed my suspicions that the Clouet drawings Toby identified at Cambridge were in fact fakes, deliberately produced for the purpose.

As you know, Toby and Peter Chanting sold the drawings through Goode & Floore’s and achieved a record price. I have reason to believe that Peter’s father bought them from the purchaser so that he could destroy them and therefore the evidence they represented. Which means, obviously, that we will never be able to prove anything. But I don’t think Toby knows this.

I can only imagine the rows that must have taken place between Martin Chanting, his son and Toby, but they ended with Peter’s exile to Nepal. His father says they have not spoken since, even though Peter now owns a shop in Clerkenwell and must therefore spend at least some of his time in the UK.

Given that, I imagine that he and Toby must have been in touch again and could be up to their old tricks. The Gregory Bequest is relatively close to Clerkenwell. I’d have thought they could easily have met in the street, even if they hadn’t actually planned an encounter.

For a while I thought that Martin Chanting could be behind what has been happening to Toby, taking revenge
on him for the loss of his son by forcing Toby to create another fake to sell through Goode & Floore’s. I imagined that it wouldn’t be hard to expose the modern fake and so ruin Toby’s reputation or even have him arrested and tried for fraud.

However, I am now almost sure that his son must be involved in Toby’s current problems. Peter seems to have disappeared, leaving his shop in a state of chaos. Whether he went back to Nepal of his own volition, having done what he wanted, or whether someone (?Toby) could have got rid of him in some other way, I do not know. And, once again, I do not have the resources to gather the evidence that would prove anything.

But I am concerned because, as I told you, Toby has recently been showing signs of violence. We know he has been hitting his wife. I have also discovered that his son, Mer, has a broken arm. He’s been telling his schoolfriends that a giant attacked him. If his father assaulted him, I can understand why he should have made up the story of the giant to make it seem bearable. A lot of children would rather create a mythical bogeyman than blame one of their parents for hurting them. Of course, the so-called giant could be real and working with whoever has been making Toby himself so afraid. Either way, the child’s broken arm seems to me a most serious danger signal.

I ought to have been firmer when we last talked, Henry, but I have to say now that I think the policy of terrifying Toby into making a confession is too dangerous to pursue. I cannot take any further part in it.

Please let me know, however, if there is anything I can ever do for you – in my professional capacity.

With best wishes,

Trish Maguire

My dear Miss Maguire,

I have remembered the first time my mother told me about the paintings. I said, I think, that I’d grown up hearing about them, but that’s not quite true. I had grown up hearing about my amazing father, the love of her life and great connoisseur, but not that we had his collection in our house. That news came one night in the Blitz.

I had come off duty from fire-watching. I was dog-tired. Up half of every night during the bombing and trying to do two or three men’s work at the bank all day took it out of me, even when my asthma wasn’t bad. Some bombs were still falling when I got back home, so I filled one flask with tea and another with whisky and soda, collected my novel – Dickens, I think – and took them with some blankets to the cellar.

My mother was already there, and in the kind of state I’d never seen. She’d always been so brave, but that night something had happened. I didn’t know until later that one of her favourite patients had killed himself. He had long left the nursing home where she worked, but she visited him in his tiny flat whenever she could. It seemed that the sound of the bombing night after night had brought back all his old shell shock and he had hanged himself. She’d found him that day and had had to organize the removal of the body and so on.

The shock had made her very shaky herself and she was talking much more freely than she ever had before about
the trenches and the men she had nursed, and her meeting with my father. She talked about her fear and her horror of some of the wounds she had to deal with and the bliss of being clean and warm and loved by a man like him.

Then she began to tell me how he’d first told her about his paintings, about how they had become lovers and she had become pregnant and they had been married by a French priest in a small village behind the front line.

That was the first occasion, incidentally, that I had heard about their marriage postdating her pregnancy. It didn’t seem to matter much then. So I asked what happened to the paintings.

‘They are here,’ she said, pointing upwards. ‘In the attic.’

I took my lantern (it all sounds very primitive, doesn’t it?) and climbed up into the roof space. There, stacked under the eaves, were these tubes. Piles and piles of them. Some had brown stains on the outside, which made me think someone must have bled all over them. My father, perhaps. Or some of the wounded men in her care. Then I decided I was being fanciful. The marks could equally have been some form of mould.

When I got down to the cellar again, I asked her why she had never unpacked them. She told me she had never felt she had the right to touch them. They were his and it was her duty to keep them for him. But she also admitted that night that she had lost her faith that she would see him again.

In her distress, she poured out her hatred of the paintings, telling me that they were worth nothing to her without him, that she would willingly set fire to them if that could bring him back. She also confessed that she had been praying the house would receive a direct hit that night so that she would not have to go on without him any longer.

Later in the night, when she was calmer, she apologized and asked if she had hurt me by talking of the destruction of my unknown father’s life’s work. I told her that I was too busy and too tired at that point to care one way or the other about any damned paintings that belonged to a man I had never known.

I wish I hadn’t done that. She turned away, very hurt herself. But when the asthma sewed my lungs together again later that night, she tended me as gently as she always had during my childhood. She was truly a great lady, and she did not have the life she deserved.

Yours etc.

Ivan Gregory