The Obsessions of Lord Godfrey - Stephanie Laurens Page 0,57

mask to slip. He stared, utterly nonplussed, at the painting. Despite the evidence of his eyes, he remained mired in disbelief. He shook his head. “How the devil could this have happened?”

The Albertinelli painting that, apparently, had hung on the wall in the upstairs parlor of Hinckley Hall, unsighted and undisturbed for decades, was a fake.

A forgery.

The following morning, having left the conservatory only to grab a few hours’ sleep, Godfrey was back, pacing the green-and-white tiles from side to side before the painting, which he’d propped upright on a chair. Every now and then, he halted and stared at the canvas in sheer frustration.

How on earth had it come to be there?

A careful scrutiny of the canvas itself and the specific paints used—as attested by the relative smoothness of the dried surface—plus the distinctive brushstrokes that had first caught his educated eye had confirmed his initial fears.

What hours of subsequent cogitation had failed to elucidate was how a painting with such indisputable provenance, that had been brought into this house and had, apparently, never left it, had been replaced by a forgery by Henrik Hendall.

Godfrey knew Hendall’s work. The Amsterdam-based forger produced superb copies, and in recent years, his works had started popping up all over Europe and England. Consequently, Godfrey had studied Hendall’s technique extensively and was arguably the reigning expert when it came to detecting the otherwise very-difficult-to-detect forgeries. As he’d mentioned to Pyne, it was all about one’s eye. Given his chosen occupation, Godfrey had ensured his eye was up to the task of picking out Hendall’s work.

He was immutably certain the forgery was Hendall’s.

But Hendall was relatively young and had been active only over the past five years.

And, most tellingly, the master forger worked only from the original.

As Godfrey was prepared to swear this work was a Hendall forgery, then it inescapably followed that, at some point over the past five years, the original Albertinelli had been removed from the house.

“Likely,” he muttered, “it was removed from the frame, rolled up, and spirited out.”

The postulation sent him back to the painting. He tipped it forward and examined the tiny nails that secured the backboard to the outer frame, confirming that the nails were relatively new.

He resettled the painting on the chair. Based on the condition of the nails, he revised his estimate of when the Albertinelli had been taken. “More like three years ago, not five.”

Regardless, someone had removed the painting, and no one in the house had, apparently, noticed.

What was seriously confounding was that, instead of simply making away with the painting—highly valuable and easy to sell to unscrupulous collectors, even without the provenance—whoever stole it had arranged to have Hendall copy it, which had to have taken place either in Amsterdam or in some nearby English town like Hull, easily reached from Amsterdam by ferry. Hendall wouldn’t have taken the risk of not being able to quickly flee back to the relative safety of his home base.

“And then”—Godfrey halted before the painting and glared at it—“whoever the thief was, he went to the considerable risk of smuggling the copy back into the house, replacing it in its frame, and rehanging it on the wall in that parlor.”

He couldn’t see any other way of explaining the presence of the Hendall copy other than via that sequence of events. “But why go to the trouble—let alone the expense—of getting the copy made?”

Another question niggled. The time Hendall would have taken to make his copy meant that the spot on the parlor wall where the Albertinelli had hung would have been empty for weeks. “At absolute minimum, three weeks.”

Hendall was good, but work of that quality, forgery or not, took time.

Why had nobody noticed the painting was missing?

Godfrey thought back to the room he’d entered with Ellie. He might have become almost instantly fixated on the painting, but out of habit, he’d noticed the other furniture.

There had been no dust on the polished surfaces, and none had swirled into the air when Ellie had drawn back the curtains.

Perhaps knowing he would be shown into the room, the staff had dusted and cleaned.

But the room hadn’t possessed that musty smell that permanently closed rooms inevitably developed.

“I’ll have to ask how frequently the staff clean that room.”

Regardless of the answer, how had the thief—presuming it was someone who didn’t know the family and the house—known where the painting was hung? It hadn’t been displayed in a main reception room and, as he understood it, had been hidden away