In the Frame - By Dick Francis Page 0,7
to move.’
‘The firm is a limited company,’ I said. ‘If it went bankrupt, Donald’s own house and private money would be unaffected.’
‘You know a good deal about it, don’t you?’
I said neutrally, ‘I live in the world.’
‘I thought artists were supposed to be unworldly.’
‘Some are.’
He peered at me with narrowed eyes as if he were trying to work out a possible way in which I too might have conspired to arrange the theft.
I said mildly, ‘My cousin Donald is an honourable man.’
‘That’s an out of date word.’
‘There’s quite a lot of it about.’
He looked wholly disbelieving. He saw far too much in the way of corruption, day in, day out, all his working life.
Donald came hesitantly down the stairs and Frost took him off immediately to another private session in the kitchen. I thought that if Frost’s questions were to be as barbed as those he’d asked me, poor Don was in for a rough time. While they talked I wandered aimlessly round the house, looking into storage spaces, opening cupboards, seeing the inside details of my cousin’s life.
Either he or Regina had been a hoarder of empty boxes. I came across dozens of them, all shapes and sizes, shoved into odd corners of shelves or drawers: brown cardboard, bright gift-wrap, beribboned chocolate boxes, all too potentially useful or too pretty to be thrown away. The burglars had opened a lot but had thrown more unopened on the floor. They must, I thought, have had a most frustrating time.
They had largely ignored the big sunroom, which held few antiques and no paintings, and I ended up there sitting on a bamboo armchair among sprawling potted plants looking out into the windy garden. Dead leaves blew in scattered showers from the drying trees and a few late roses clung hardily to thorny stems.
I hated autumn. The time of melancholy, the time of death. My spirits fell each year with the soggy leaves and revived only with crisp winter frost. Psychiatric statistics proved that the highest suicide rate occurred in the spring, the time for rebirth and growth and stretching in the sun. I could never understand it. If ever I jumped over a cliff, it would be in the depressing months of decay.
The sunroom was grey and cold. No sun, that Sunday.
I went upstairs, fetched my suitcase, and brought it down. Over years of wandering journeys I had reversed the painter’s traditional luggage: my suitcase now contained the tools of my trade, and my satchel, clothes. The large toughened suitcase, its interior adapted and fitted by me, was in fact a sort of portable studio, containing besides paints and brushes a light collapsible metal easel, unbreakable containers of linseed oil and turpentine, and a rack which would hold four wet paintings safely apart. There were also a dust sheet, a large box of tissues, and generous amounts of white spirit, all designed for preventing mess and keeping things clean. The organisation of the suitcase had saved and made the price of many a sandwich.
I untelescoped the easel and set out my palette, and on a middling-sized canvas laid in the beginnings of a melancholy landscape, a mixture of Donald’s garden as I saw it, against a sweep of bare fields and gloomy woods. Not my usual sort of picture, and not, to be honest, the sort to make headline news a century hence; but it gave me at least something to do. I worked steadily, growing ever colder, until the chillier Frost chose to depart; and he went without seeing me again, the front door closing decisively on his purposeful footsteps.
Donald, in the warm kitchen, looked torn to rags. When I went in he was sitting with his arms folded on the table and his head on his arms, a picture of absolute despair. When he heard me he sat up slowly and wearily, and showed a face suddenly aged and deeply lined.
‘Do you know what he thinks?’ he said.
‘More or less.’
He stared at me sombrely. ‘I couldn’t convince him. He kept on and on. Kept asking the same questions, over and over. Why doesn’t he believe me?’
‘A lot of people lie to the police. I think they grow to expect it.’
‘He wants me to meet him in my office tomorrow. He says he’ll be bringing colleagues. He says they’ll want to see the books.’,
I nodded. ‘Better be grateful he didn’t drag you down there today.’
‘I suppose so.’
I said awkwardly, ‘Don, I’m sorry. I told him the wine was missing. It