In the Frame - By Dick Francis Page 0,18

incredulous and angry. This time, incredulous and frightened.

She knocked over her gin, slid off her bar stool, and covered her open mouth with four trembling red-nailed fingers.

‘You didn’t!’ I said disbelievingly.

‘How do you know?’

‘I don’t…’

‘Are you from Customs and Excise?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Oh dear. Oh dear…’ She was shaking, almost as shattered as Donald.

I took her arm and led her over to an armchair beside a small bar table.

‘Sit down,’ I said coaxingly, ‘and tell me.’

It took ten minutes and a refill double gin.

‘Well, dear, I’m not an art expert, as you can probably guess, but there was this picture by Sir Alfred Munnings, signed and everything, dear, and it was such a bargain really, and I thought how tickled Archie would have been to have a real Munnings on the wall, what with us both liking the races, of course, and, well, Archie’s sister egged me on a bit, and I felt quite… I suppose you might call it high, dear, so I bought it.’

She stopped.

‘Go on,’ I said.

‘Well, dear, I suppose you’ve guessed from what I said just now.’

‘You brought it into this country without declaring it?’

She sighed. ‘Yes, dear, I did. Of course it was silly of me but I never gave customs duty a thought when I bought the painting, not until just before I came home, a week later, that was, and Archie’s sister asked if I was going to declare it, and well, dear, I really resent having to pay duty on things, don’t you? So anyway I thought I’d better find out just how much the duty would be, and I found it wasn’t duty at all in the ordinary way, dear, there isn’t duty on second-hand pictures being brought in from Australia, but would you believe it they said I would have to pay Value Added Tax, sort of tax on buying things, you know, dear, and I would have to pay eight per cent on whatever I had bought the picture for. Well, I ask you! I was that mad, dear, I can tell you. So Archie’s sister said why didn’t I leave the painting with her, because then if I went back to Australia I would have paid the tax for nothing, but I wasn’t sure I’d go back and anyway I did want to see Sir Alfred Munnings on the wall where Archie would have loved it, so, well, dear, it was all done up nicely in boards and brown paper so I just camouflaged it a bit with my best nightie and popped it in my suitcase, and pushed it through the ‘Nothing to Declare’ lane at Heathrow when I got back, and nobody stopped me.’

‘How much would you have had to pay?’ I said.

‘Well, dear, to be precise, just over seven hundred pounds. And I know that’s not a fortune, dear, but it made me so mad to have to pay tax here because I’d bought something nice in Australia.’

I did some mental arithmetic. ‘So the painting cost about nine thousand?’

‘That’s right, dear. Nine thousand.’ She looked anxious. ‘I wasn’t done, was I? I’ve asked one or two people since I got back and they say lots of Munningses cost fifteen or more.’

‘So they do,’ I said absently. And some could be got for fifteen hundred, and others, I dared say, for less.

‘Well, anyway, dear, it was only when I began to think about insurance that I wondered if I would be found out, if say, the insurance people wanted a receipt or anything, which they probably would, of course, so I didn’t do anything about it, because of course if I did go back to Australia I could just take the picture with me and no harm done.’

‘Awkward,’ I agreed.

‘So now it’s burnt, and I dare say you’ll think it serves me right, because the nine thousand’s gone up in smoke and I won’t see a penny of it back.’

She finished the gin and I bought her another.

‘I know it’s not my business, Maisie, but how did you happen to have nine thousand handy in Australia? Aren’t there rules about exporting that much cash?’

She giggled. ‘You don’t know much about the world, do you, dear? But anyway, this time it was all hunky dory. I just toddled along with Archie’s sister to a jewellers and sold him a brooch I had, a nasty sort of toad, dear, with a socking big diamond in the middle of its forehead, something to do with Shakespeare, I think, though I