In the Frame - By Dick Francis Page 0,30

in Paris, France, you can’t get near the Mona Lisa for those irritating students.’

She had blue-rinsed puffed-up hair, uncreasable navy and green clothes, and enough diamonds to attract a top-rank thief. Deep lines of automatic disapproval ran downwards from the corner of her mouth. Thin body. Thick mind.

‘It depends what you are copying for,’ I said. ‘If you’re going to try to pass your copy off as an original, then that definitely is a fraud.’

Mrs Petrovitch began to say, ‘Do you think the young man was forging…’ but was interrupted by Wyatt Minchless, who smothered her question both by the damping hand and his louder voice.

‘Are you saying that this young artist boy was painting a Munnings he later intended to sell as the real thing?’

‘Er…’ I said.

Wyatt Minchless swept on. ‘Are you saying that the Munnings picture he told us we might be able to buy is itself a forgery?’

The others looked both horrified at the possibility and admiring of Wyatt L. for his perspicacity.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I just thought I’d like to see it.’

‘You don’t want to buy a Munnings yourself? You are not acting as an agent for anyone else?’ Wyatt’s questions sounded severe and inquisitorial.

‘Absolutely not,’ I said.

‘Well, then.’ Wyatt looked round the other three, collected silent assents. ‘He told Ruthie and me there was a good Munnings racing picture at a very reasonable price in a little gallery not far away…’ He fished with forefinger and thumb into his outer breast pocket. ‘Yes, here we are. Yarra River Fine Arts. Third turning off Swanston Street, about twenty yards along.’

Mr and Mrs Petrovitch looked resigned. ‘He told us, exactly the same.’

‘He seemed such a nice young man,’ Mrs Petrovitch added sadly. ‘So interested in our trip. Asked us what we’d be betting on in the Cup.’

‘He asked where we would be going after Melbourne,’ Mr Petrovitch nodded. ‘We told him Adelaide and Alice Springs, and he said Alice Springs was a Mecca for artists and to be sure to visit the Yarra River gallery there. The same firm, he said. Always had good pictures.’

Mr Petrovitch would have misunderstood if I had leaned across and hugged him. I concentrated on my fancy coffee and kept my excitement to myself.

‘We’re going on to Sydney,’ pronounced Wyatt L. ‘He didn’t offer any suggestions for Sydney.’

The tall glasses were nearly empty. Wyatt looked at his watch and swallowed the last of his plain black.

‘You didn’t tell us,’ Mrs Petrovitch said, looking puzzled, ‘why your friend called the young man a criminal. I mean… I can see why the young man attacked your friend and ran away if he was a criminal, but why did your friend think he was?’

‘Just what I was about to ask,’ said Wyatt, nodding away heavily. Pompous liar, I thought.

‘My friend Jik,’ I said, ‘is an artist himself. He didn’t think much of the young man’s effort. He called it criminal. He might just as well have said lousy.’

‘Is that all?’ said Mrs Petrovitch, looking disappointed.

‘Well… the young man was painting with paints which won’t really mix. Jik’s a perfectionist. He can’t stand seeing paint misused.’

‘What do you mean, won’t mix?’

‘Paints are chemicals,’ I said apologetically. ‘Most of them don’t have any effect on each other, but you have to be careful.’

‘What happens if you aren’t?’ demanded Ruthie Minchless.

‘Um… nothing explodes,’ I said, smiling. ‘It’s just that… well, if you mix flake white, which is lead, with cadmium yellow, with contains sulphur, like the young man was doing, you get a nice pale colour to start with but the two minerals react against each other and in time darken and alter the picture.’

‘And your friend called this criminal?’ Wyatt said in disbelief. ‘It couldn’t possibly make that much difference.’

‘Er…’ I said. ‘Well, Van Gogh used a light bright new yellow made of chrome when he painted a picture of sunflowers. Cadmium yellow hadn’t been developed then. But chrome yellow has shown that over a couple of hundred years it decomposes and in the end turns greenish black, and the sunflowers are already an odd colour, and I don’t think anyone has found a way of stopping it.’

‘But the young man wasn’t painting for posterity,’ said Ruthie with irritation. ‘Unless he’s another Van Gogh, surely it doesn’t matter.’

I didn’t think they’d want to hear that Jik hoped for recognition in the twenty-third century. The permanence of colours had always been an obsession with him, and he’d dragged me along once to a course on their