Read Losing Ground Online

Authors: Catherine Aird

Losing Ground (2 page)

BOOK: Losing Ground
9.7Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

‘I expect the planning people wouldn’t wear any development,’ said Fixby-Smith. ‘Listed building status and all
that. All they ever want is for everything to stay “as is”. Still do.’

‘Then?’ asked Sloan patiently.

Hilary Collins screwed up her eyes in the effort of recollection. ‘After that I think it was empty for a long while – got thoroughly neglected. The damp got in and then wet rot.’

‘Disgraceful,’ said Fixby-Smith automatically.

‘I have an idea the local council tried to serve repair notices on the owners but they couldn’t find them.’

‘Neither could the bank, I expect,’ put in Crosby.

‘No responsibility, some people,’ said Fixby-Smith.

‘No money, more like,’ offered Detective Constable Crosby, who lived nearer the ground.

‘I heard that a rather dodgy printing firm moved in after that,’ said Hilary Collins steadily. ‘They put one of their heavy presses in the old billiard room – that sort of thing but who they paid their rent to, I couldn’t say.’

‘If they did,’ said Crosby.

The curator gave a snort and said, ‘Disgraceful, when you come to think about it. Pure sacrilege.’

‘Needs must,’ contributed Crosby. ‘Or the march of progress or something.’

Fixby-Smith looked at the detective constable as if he was seeing him for the first time. ‘I may say that if that’s what you are pleased to call progress, Constable, then…’

‘Sir,’ Detective Inspector Sloan interrupted him swiftly, turning away from the blank space on the wall where the portrait had been and pointing instead at the damaged display cabinet below it. ‘Do you know what will have been in that?’

The curator frowned. ‘Anglo-Saxon artefacts, I think. That right, Hilary?’

‘Yes, Mr Fixby-Smith. Local ones from the site near Larking. Part of the Professor Michael Ripley bequest.’ She advanced on the display case and peered in. ‘I know there was a bronze shield in it – yes, that’s still here. I’d have to check the other items in our records to see if anything is missing.’

‘That’s the Dark Ages, isn’t it?’ said Detective Constable Crosby chattily. ‘The Anglo-Saxons, I mean.’

The curator immediately launched into hortative mode. ‘Calleshire was quite an important place in post-Roman times. There was a big Anglo-Saxon settlement over Larking way and another one near Almstone, both excavated by the late Professor Michael Ripley, a well-known local archaeologist.’ He waved an arm. ‘There is some suggestion that the name relates to the re-use by the Anglo-Saxons of Roman stone there beside the river Alm.’

‘Waste not, want not,’ observed Detective Constable Crosby to no one in particular.

Detective Inspector Sloan who, among other problems, had a complicated case of transactional fraud on his hands back at the police station, returned to the matter in hand. ‘As you will know, sir,’ he said to the curator, ‘there are well-established mechanisms for informing the art world of thefts such as these…’

‘Yes, yes,’ Marcus Fixby-Smith interrupted him testily, ‘the Art Loss Register, but I want that portrait back and I also want to know why it has been stolen.’

‘So do we,’ Sloan reassured him. Actually the police priority was to find out who it was who had done the stealing and
then charge him – or sometimes, but not often, her – with burglary but he saw no reason to say so. His own priority just now was to get back to work on the more pressing matters awaiting him back at the police station.

Marcus Fixby-Smith tossed his flowing mane back like an irate horse. ‘Even so, Inspector…’

‘And this means, sir,’ he said firmly, ‘that you will have to keep this gallery closed for the time being.’

Hilary Collins nodded intelligently while the curator snapped, ‘How long for exactly?’

‘Until our enquiries are complete,’ responded Detective Inspector Sloan smoothly, silently acknowledging to himself that well-worn formulae did have their uses. ‘May I take it that this was just a straightforward portrait?’

‘Typical painting of the period,’ the curator came back promptly. ‘Portrait of Sir Francis Filligree leaning against a tree near the house, his new wife at his side, with a distant view of the village church at Tolmie in the background and some lobster shells at his feet.’

‘Lobster shells?’ said Sloan. Kinnisport and the sea were quite a distance away from Tolmie.

‘Lobster and crab shells, actually,’ Hilary Collins made the correction diffidently. ‘I believe there are similar shells in the Filligree coat of arms, too.’

‘In his day,’ explained the curator, ‘Sir Francis was a member of a group of young rabble-rousers called the Crustaceans.’

‘A sort of Hellfire Club, I’m afraid,’ supplemented Hilary Collins.

‘So what’s new?’ observed Detective Constable Crosby,
victim of several Saturday night fights with the young and drunk with nothing else to do.

Hilary Collins coughed. ‘I rather think that there was also a particularly good view of Tolmie Park in the upper left hand corner of the painting.’

‘That’s what I said,’ trumpeted Marcus Fixby-Smith. ‘Absolutely typical for its time. Think Thomas Gainsborough’s famous painting of “Mr and Mrs Robert Andrews”…’

‘Who they?’ asked Detective Constable Crosby predictably.

‘A nouveau riche couple – he married money – wanting the world to know how well they’d done,’ said Fixby-Smith.

‘There’s a lot of that about,’ said Crosby.

Not as much, thought Sloan to himself, if the Proceeds of Crime Act got to them first. He had high hopes of this new piece of legislation – and the Assets Recovery Agency – succeeding with the fraud case he was working on now. When he could get to it, that is.

‘In 1748 in the case of the Andrews,’ added Fixby-Smith, pedantically. ‘I’m not sure offhand of the date of Peter de Vesey’s portrait of Sir Francis Filligree.’

‘Nothing changes, anyway,’ said Crosby, patently unimpressed.

Hilary Collins kept her gaze on the damaged door to the gallery. ‘I believe the view of the house in the painting was thought to be an unusual one. We will have a photograph of it in our records – I’ll look it out for you, Inspector.’

Detective Inspector Sloan looked up alertly. ‘Unusual?’

‘As Mr Fixby-Smith has pointed out,’ she said with careful loyalty, ‘it was – I mean, is – typical for its time but I see from
their notes that there was something our predecessors here in the museum found noteworthy when they accessed it all those years ago…’

Detective Inspector Sloan listened with attention as Hilary Collins balanced the difficult tightrope between tact and toadying. The curator obviously hadn’t found anything interesting about the portrait at all.

‘It was the particular view of the house,’ she said. ‘Apparently Tolmie Park couldn’t be seen in the ordinary way later – certainly not in our time – from the aspect in the painting.’ Unlike that of the curator, Hilary Collins’ mousecoloured hair didn’t need tossing about to make a point. ‘Not afterwards.’

‘Afterwards?’ queried Sloan.

‘After some subsequent improvements by Humphry Repton,’ she said.

‘And the Victorians,’ snapped the curator. ‘Mustn’t forget them. If they could ever be said to have improved anything.’

‘Later drawings and photographs always show the front of the house flat on,’ persisted Hilary Collins in a detached way.

‘Full frontal,’ murmured Detective Constable Crosby almost – but not quite – inaudibly.

‘And the view in the portrait?’ asked Sloan swiftly. Informality might be the watchword for today’s policing but it could go too far.

‘If my memory is right, Inspector,’ said Hilary Collins, primly ignoring the detective constable’s observation, ‘that showed the house as seen from the south-east as it was in the beginning.’

‘Before Humphry Repton got his hands on the landscape.’
The curator reasserted himself with practised ease. ‘There should be one of his little red books about it here in the museum somewhere.’

‘Really, sir?’ The only little red book that Sloan knew about had political rather than architectural connections but all information was grist to the police mill. He tucked the fact away in the back of his mind. ‘Now, about your alarm system here…’

Hilary Collins waved a hand in the direction of the window but before they could get near enough to look at it Detective Inspector Sloan’s personal mobile telephone started to ring.

It was Superintendent Leeyes from the police station at Berebury on the other end of the line. ‘Get yourselves over to Tolmie Park as quickly as you can, Sloan,’ he commanded. ‘The house there is on fire.’

CHAPTER TWO

Somewhere where they most definitely did think of change as progress was at the firm of Berebury Homes Ltd. The local development and construction company had its offices in Berebury’s business quarter down by the river. A Project Team meeting was in progress there now.

There were four people present. One of them, Robert Selby, their financial controller, was in full voice. As was usual with those of that ilk, the money man was downplaying anything in the nature of good news. Since the others there knew only too well of Selby’s infinite capacity to cast a decided blight on any proceedings involving money, the downside of what he had to say was accordingly discounted by them all.

‘So the finance for the Tolmie Park development project is now at an important juncture…’ Selby was saying, tapping the notes on the table in front of him for greater emphasis, when he was interrupted by the arrival of Lionel Perry, Chairman and Managing Director of Berebury Homes, Ltd.

‘Sorry to be late, everybody,’ Perry said breezily, slipping into the empty chair at the top of the table. Hung on the wall behind him was a photograph of Mont Blanc, the Swiss mountain. ‘Puncture. Haven’t had one for ages. Do carry on Robert. You were saying something about Tolmie Park, I think…’

‘Yes, Lionel,’ lumbered on Robert Selby ponderously, ‘I was just about to point out that the development there is only going to come right financially if we get planning permission for the whole area from the word go to do it our way.’ He looked round at them all. ‘I hope that you all realise that. Otherwise…’

‘I’m sure they do,’ said Lionel Perry. He glanced round with a quick complicit smile at all the others. ‘That’s very important.’

‘And getting planning permission itself costs a lot as well,’ continued Robert Selby, his pencil still beating a steady tattoo on the outside of his file. Like the chairman, he was dressed in a sober business suit. On the wall behind him was a photograph of the Jungfrau.

‘Bean counter,’ whispered Derek Hitchin, their project manager.

Selby, who hadn’t heard him, carried on. ‘I’ve got my people working on some additional figures now but as you know Section 106 agreements are no help to man nor beast.’

‘Would someone please have the goodness to explain to me what a Section 106 agreement is?’ Auriole Allen was the only woman present at the meeting and didn’t pretend to be knowledgeable about building development, only about advertising and public relations. The photograph behind her chair was of the Silberhorn bathed in the evening Alpenglow.

‘Legally binding agreements between local authorities and developers and landowners,’ spelt out Robert Selby.

She looked bewildered. ‘But we own the land at Tolmie and we’re also the developers of it, aren’t we?’

‘Too right, we are,’ said Selby sourly. ‘That means it’s just us and them.’

‘I don’t think any of us need any reminding of the initial costs, Robert,’ intervened Perry, effortlessly resuming the lead. ‘It’s not new. It happens every time we start talking about a major development project like this.’

He might not have spoken, so quickly did Selby go back to his theme. ‘And quite apart from the application charges, Lionel, there’s what Berebury Council are going to sting us for in the way of all the new roads they’ll want putting in,’ he persisted. ‘Let alone roundabouts.’

‘Require us to put in, you mean,’ said Derek Hitchin, giving a little snort. He was a short peppery man and the mud-spattered donkey-jacket he affected was as much a statement as what he was saying. The photograph on the wall behind his chair was as craggy as his personality: the north face of the Eiger. ‘At least they’re not charging us for planning gain any more.’

‘But you all know that roundabouts cost a bomb, too,’ said Robert Selby, reasserting his role as the finance man. ‘You’re talking big money there.’

‘They’ll want one of those where our land meets the road to the village.’ Derek Hitchin banged the pile of papers on the table in front of him and said sharply, ‘Bound to. We all know that the existing entrance won’t do, coming out on a blind corner like it does. May I point out, too, Lionel, that straightforward outline planning permission is not the only thing that this Tolmie Park undertaking is dependent on. Don’t forget that the final planning footprint isn’t even fixed yet.’

‘Go on,’ said Lionel Perry, stealing a surreptitious glance at his wristwatch. He was due on the first tee of Berebury Golf Course in exactly ninety minutes’ time but had no intention of saying so.

‘And if we don’t get enabling permission for the land beyond the ditch…’ resumed Hitchin.

‘The ha-ha, if you don’t mind,’ put in a man called Randolph Mansfield in a pained voice. He was an architect and had never taken to wearing a collar and tie. He did, though, favour shaggy pale blue denim trousers that he thought made him look younger than he was and really with it. ‘It’s called a ha-ha, not a ditch and it’s designed to make gardens look bigger while keeping the livestock out.’

Derek Hitchin pointedly ignored him, going on, ‘As I was saying, we must get planning permission for all the land beyond the ditch, outside the village envelope or not. We need it to make the project viable. Every bit of it.’

‘The Muster Green, you mean,’ put in the chairman, demonstrating how conversant he was with the matter in hand.

‘If we don’t get planning permission for the Muster Green on top of the go-ahead for the rest of the parkland then we won’t be able to do anything with the old heap because we won’t have enough decent access to satisfy the Highways people and that’s that,’ finished Derek Hitchin flatly. ‘Knockdown bargain or not.’

BOOK: Losing Ground
9.7Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Betraying the Duke by Sophia Wilson
Why Shoot a Butler by Georgette Heyer
The Melody Girls by Anne Douglas
Valley of the Moon by Melanie Gideon
Joan Wolf by A London Season
PUCKED Up by Helena Hunting
Demon Child by Dean Koontz