A Trace of Deceit Read online

  “The hair, I know.”

  “And the eyes.”

  Green like pond scum, Edwin had once said, his voice derisive. But how did the inspector know? Had Edwin’s eyes been open in death? A vision of my brother’s body sprawled, his eyes wide and fixed on the ceiling, a knife handle protruding from his abdomen, appeared in my mind with the clarity of a completed picture. Horror constricted my throat like a drawstring on a reticule.

  “Was he expecting you today?” Inspector Hallam asked.

  I forced the words out: “Yes—well, no. I mean, we usually see each other on Tuesdays but not here.”

  “Were you worried about him?”

  That was impossible to answer briefly. “Why do you ask?”

  “Your expression when you arrived.”

  I hesitated.

  “That happens with siblings sometimes,” he said. “They sense when something’s amiss.”

  Amiss was such an inadequate word, for all that had gone badly with Edwin for so long.

  The inspector said something, but my thoughts were far away from this room and didn’t return in time to draw the words out of the air.

  “I beg your pardon?” I asked.

  “Er—it’s no matter.” He shook his head. “How old was he?”

  I knew this was a question I should be able to answer. Still, it took a moment. I strained to recall that it was mid-September. His birthday was the ninth of October. “Nearly six-and-twenty.”

  “The landlady said he lived alone. Was he engaged? Or did he have any special attachments?”

  The question struck with the force of a blow. At our last meeting, Edwin had mentioned almost too casually a young woman he’d met—someone’s sister—Charlotte or Caroline—

  But he would never be engaged or marry now. Never have children—

  “Miss?”

  I looked up.

  “Any special attachments?” he repeated patiently.

  “No.”

  “And what did he do for work?”

  “Any number of things.” My gaze brushed the stacks of framed canvases around the room. “He’s a painter.”

  “Yes. There are a variety of styles and topics.”

  Though his voice was mild, I heard the implicit question. “Obviously, most of these are copies, which he’s done legally,” I said, a note of defensiveness creeping into my voice. “People commission him to reproduce artwork because he’s adept at matching techniques and colors. But he also paints originals sometimes, and lately, he’s cleaned and restored paintings for several galleries here in London.”

  He gestured to the space on the wall behind me. “Is that one of his?”

  I craned my neck to look. It was a painting I’d done of a young girl and her father at a fruit stall in a market. Goodness knows why Edwin had saved it. The man’s hands were choosing the fruit for a well-dressed woman with a pretty wicker basket—but at the time I hadn’t been able to properly paint the shape of his curved fingers, or the age spots on his hands, and they came out looking misshapen and diseased. And I hadn’t been able to capture his daughter’s feelings to my satisfaction, either. Her loyalty to her father, her boredom at the end of a long day, and her shame at observing his need to please this woman had come out a muddle.

  I turned back. “No, it’s mine. Edwin would have done better.”

  He let that pass. “Two weeks ago, where did you see him?”

  “We met at a pub near the Slade. I’m a student there.”

  “And how did he seem?”

  I wasn’t sure how to answer. But he waited silently, and finally I sighed. “He wasn’t a lighthearted person. If you don’t know already, I imagine you’ll find out soon enough. He was caught forging a while back, by one of yours, and put in prison for nearly a year. He was released a few months ago.”

  A look of sudden comprehension. “I see.” He tipped his head sideways toward the broken frames. “Do you have any idea what happened here?”

  “None at all,” I answered helplessly.

  “Hallam.”

  We both looked up. The chief inspector beckoned, and as the two men vanished behind the torn curtain, I went to the window to look out. Immediately below was a rusty metal gutter filled with the detritus of the city—gray dust and ash, sticks and bits of string, the scraps of what looked like old pigeon nests, now empty.

  “Goodbye, Miss Rowe.”

  I turned. The chief inspector was standing near the door, his hat in hand.

  “Goodbye,” I echoed uncertainly, for Mr. Hallam showed no signs of departing.

  As the door closed behind the chief, I turned to the inspector.

  “You’re staying?” I asked in some dismay, for I desperately wanted to be alone.

  “Yes.” He rested a hand lightly on Edwin’s desk. “And if you’re feeling up to it, I’d like your help.”

  “With what?”

  “Searching this room. We’ve examined the bedroom, but we’d only just begun in here when you arrived. We want to find anything that might provide a hint about”—the briefest hesitation—“why this happened. It sounds as if you’re his closest relation, and you might notice something out of place, or something missing.”

  I winced. I didn’t like the idea of going through Edwin’s things. I dreaded what I might find.

  “I know this might be difficult, and perhaps it’s too much to ask right now.” His expression was solicitous, even apologetic. “But the sooner we begin to gather a sense of your brother’s life, the more likely it is we’ll find who did this. Unfortunately, in these cases, time often matters.”

  I felt my head bobbing mechanically.

  “If you’d rather, I can look while you sit here.” He righted the wooden chair. “And if I have questions, I can ask. I’ll try to bother you as little as possible.”

  I swallowed. “No. I’ll help you. I’m all right.”

  He let me see his appreciation. “Thank you.”

  The inspector and I searched for the next hour or so, looking for anything that might hint at a motive for killing Edwin or anything out of the ordinary. Edwin’s furnishings offered little in the way of comfort, but he had dozens of canvases, a trunk, a bookcase with sketchbooks, a desk and worktable laden with notes and papers. Every so often Mr. Hallam would ask me about something he found, or attempt to engage me in some sort of conversation. Perhaps he found the silence awkward, but I had no wish to talk and answered largely in monosyllables. Dutifully I examined Edwin’s items of correspondence, sifted through the meager contents of his wardrobe, examined the paintings, and paged through his copy of Osborn’s Handbook on oil painting and a tattered pattern book of frame styles. I inspected brushes, knives, pots of gesso, bottles of turpentine, the long slender gilder’s blade, an agate burnisher, horsehair cloth, and two aprons stained with colors from tawny turmeric yellow to rose madder. But they told me nothing, and my overwhelming feeling was of remorse mingled with grief, a sense of erasing Edwin’s presence. With each object I touched, Edwin’s hands were no longer the last to hold them.

  As daylight faded, I began to tire. My nerves had been taut for too long. Perhaps the inspector sensed my exhaustion, for as he replaced various items in Edwin’s trunk, he said, “I don’t think there’s much else to be done here.”

  He laid the faintest emphasis on the last word, and in my state of heightened anxiety, I heard a demand. “Where do we have to go next?”

  He looked at me rather blankly.

  “Do you mean the morgue?” I asked.

  “Goodness, no.” He shifted a few items about so the lid would close, and he let it down with a soft thump. “There’s no need. He’s been identified adequately.”

  “But—but I need to see him,” I said with a sudden desperation.

  The skin around his eyes tightened in sympathy, and his voice was gentle: “You’ll see him at the funeral, properly, won’t you? I imagine you’ve a church?”

  I nodded. “Y-yes. St. Barnabas in Wilkes Street.”
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  “Then I suggest you wait until then. Truly, it’s for the best.”

  Numbly, I nodded. “All right.”

  “May I take you somewhere?” he asked as he reached for his large black overcoat. “To a friend’s house, perhaps?”

  I’d formed a few casual friendships among the women students, and if I’d shown up on their doorstep, they’d certainly have been kind. But I didn’t want their company. I needed to be alone.

  I shook my head. “I can manage. I don’t live far.”

  As I donned my coat, a constable arrived, took a seat on the wooden chair, drew a lamp close, and opened a newspaper. Clearly he was there to keep watch over Edwin’s room.

  I walked home slowly in the lowering dusk. A lamplighter was making his way down the other side of the street, and the sight of the woolly circles of light working against the foggy darkness halted me. If I’d had to paint a scene that suggested the quality of my memories of Edwin, I might not have found a more fitting image than this deepening gray world lit too sparsely by pale gold. I only knew portions of Edwin’s life myself, and from those, I had furnished Mr. Hallam with the most cursory sketch of my brother’s character and habits. Of course even in a completed portrait, some attributes are put forth—etched onto the countenance or signaled by the presence of a family crest or a musical instrument—while other aspects are merely suggested or left off the canvas altogether. I heard Mr. Poynter’s voice in my mind: No portrait is ever a complete representation of its subject.

  The lamplighter passed me by, and I watched his receding figure. He raised his stick to illuminate one lamp at a time, each one smaller and dimmer than the last, until he vanished from view.

  I willed the tears away and kept on for home.

  Chapter 2

  In my own room, I lit a lamp, laid a fire in the stove, wrapped a blanket around my shoulders, and sank into my comfortable armchair, one that belonged to my mother before she died.

  My eyes must have traced the crisscross pattern on the stove’s cast-iron door dozens of times, in an attempt to find something familiar, a perception that remained constant rather than shifting from moment to moment. Night had fallen, and the shadows thrown onto the walls by the lamp merged and darkened at the edges as I tried to fix in my mind the fact of Edwin’s death. While I’d felt the truth of it when I stood in his rooms, now it eluded me, like something caught out of the corner of my eye, vanishing when I turned to look at it straight on. Perhaps if we had met more regularly, his absence would carry more weight. As it was, it merely felt like another of the many days in the past decade when I hadn’t seen him.

  But sitting in my mother’s chair, my mind turned to her and how, if there was something to be grateful for, it was that she wasn’t here for this. She loved Edwin more than she loved anyone, including my father. Spoilt but charming, Edwin was quick with a smile, and when he was a child and had transgressed one of my father’s strict rules, a few words of excuse usually won Mother to his side and led her to intercede with my father to reduce his punishment. Mother said once that Edwin could wheedle his way out of a box nailed shut. She’d said it with a sort of amused pride; my father retorted sharply, that was precisely what worried him, for Edwin might go on in this way until he ended up in the sort of nailed box one put underground. Mother’s lips had pressed together, and she’d replied shortly, “Albert! That isn’t funny in the least!” But I’d seen that Father hadn’t been joking.

  Edwin wasn’t yet seven when his abilities became apparent. Almost immediately, the atmosphere in the house became filled with a peculiar excitement and tension. My father began to demand hours of practice from Edwin, while my mother intervened, pleading for moderation as Edwin began to resent my father’s coercion. I was mostly left out of that fraught triangle—beyond the frame, as it were. For years, I watched as my parents grew increasingly bitter toward each other, with my mother’s indulgence attempting to compensate for my father’s frustration over Edwin wasting his God-given talent. Now all of them were gone, and the irony was this: from what I’d seen in Edwin’s room, it seemed he had perhaps begun to devote himself productively and sensibly to his art, in a way both of my parents might have approved—

  A knock at the door startled me. The sky outside my window was black, the lamp had gone out, and the only light in the room came from around the edges of the stove’s door.

  “Who is it?” I called.

  “Annabel, it’s Felix.” His voice was taut, and I knew he’d somehow heard about Edwin.

  “Just a moment.” I laid aside the blanket and opened the door. Our family friend, Felix Severington, who’d been with my father at Oxford, stood with his right palm against the door-frame, as if in need of its support. His coat was buttoned over his portly figure; his thinning brown hair was windblown; and his fleshy face—he often reminded me of a jowly, sad-eyed bloodhound—was florid from the climb up the stairs. His expression was severely distressed.

  “Your landlady—let me up,” he said, in two separate breaths.

  I nodded. Mrs. Trask knew him by sight. “You heard about Edwin, then.”

  “Just now. I wasn’t sure you were here,” he said. “Your windows are dark.”

  “Yes. I was . . . just sitting.”

  I drew the door wide so he might enter and lit two lamps while Felix undid the buttons on his coat, shrugged out of it, and hung it and his hat on the rack by the door.

  There was a time when I was afraid of Felix—when my memories of him were inextricably tied to my father’s irritable bouts of whiskey drinking in the parlor. But Felix had been nothing but decent to me since my parents’ death, and from what Edwin said Felix hadn’t taken anything stronger than ale in years. I believe Felix felt a special affinity for my brother, for Felix had once revealed that he had been a disappointment to his own father, who had urged him to enter the family business of steel manufacturing. Felix had refused, choosing to study art and history in Paris. Now Felix worked at Bettridge’s auction house, where he specialized in European paintings, consigning them for auction and preparing them for sale.

  I pulled over a wooden seat, leaving the comfortable armchair for him. “Who told you?”

  He lowered his bulk, crushing the cushions. “I stopped by his flat on my way home. There’s a constable stationed there, keeping watch.”

  I felt a poke of surprise. “Do you visit Edwin often?”

  He shrugged. “Once or twice a week, since he was released. Tonight I wanted to check on the painting he’s restoring for us. For Bettridge’s, that is. Did he tell you about it?”

  Edwin had never mentioned either Felix’s visits or his work for the auction house, and the omission gave me a vague feeling of being excluded. “No, he didn’t,” I replied. “It was kind of you to give him work.”

  He looked at me oddly. “Well, he’s extraordinarily adept, as you know.”

  “Yes, of course,” I said. There was a moment of silence, and then I added, “I’m sure you’ll be allowed to retrieve the painting soon.”

  “I hope so.” His broad forehead furrowed with worry. “I hope it isn’t gone.”

  “Was it valuable?”

  A snort. “It’s the most important lot in our forthcoming auction of eighteenth-century French paintings.”

  I rewrapped the blanket around me. “What is it?”

  “A Boucher.”

  “A Boucher?” I attempted to reproduce his nuanced French pronunciation, but it came out “boo-shay,” and he winced.

  “It’s a portrait of Madame de Pompadour, done not long after she was made the royal courtesan.”

  His words made my mouth go dry. At the auctions I’d attended, Bettridge’s had offered paintings valued at two or three hundred pounds at most. A portrait of King Louis XV’s mistress rendered by François Boucher would be worth at least two or three thousand.

  “It’s an unusual portrait because although he painted Madame several times, as you know”—he turned a palm toward me—“those canvas
es were done later. They were also much larger, and they showed her in formal dress. This one is the size of a kit-cat”—his hands sketched a frame approximately three feet high and a little more than two feet wide—“but in the style of a three-quarters, and it includes her hand, here.” He touched his collarbone. “You know Boucher does perfect hands. Your brother recognized it immediately, of course. He said it wouldn’t take long to clean as the owner had treated it with care. I was supposed to return for it the day after tomorrow. I do hope it’s still there.”

  I gnawed at my lip, dreading telling him. “Felix, I don’t think it is.”

  His eyebrows shot up in alarm. “Why do you say so?”

  “I was in his flat all afternoon, looking through his things, and I didn’t see a Boucher. And now that I think of it, there was an empty frame of the proper style and size. Gilt on wood, about four inches thick, probably eighteenth century. It was one of several in pieces on the floor.”

  He rubbed his fingertips over his forehead so hard it went white and then red. “Oh God,” he said heavily. “Yes, that could have been it.”

  “I’m sorry, Felix. I hope I’m wrong, but—”

  “No, I’m sorry, Annabel,” he interrupted. “I don’t mean to suggest you should be worrying about a painting when of course Edwin’s death is devastating.” He pushed himself to standing and paced slowly around the room.

  “What is it?”

  He turned to face me, the lines of strain cutting deep into the flesh around his mouth. “I’m . . . well, what if the painting was the reason someone killed him?”

  I sank backward into my chair as I took in his words.

  The thought that Edwin might have been murdered in the process of a theft hadn’t even occurred to me. I’d assumed his death had been the result of some more personal dispute. My breath came shallow and fast as I remembered the signs of struggle in Edwin’s room. “You think someone might have broken in to steal it? And Edwin found him there—and tried to prevent him—” I didn’t finish the thought. A wave of icy horror swept over me, followed by a searing—and wholly unfair—feeling of anger toward Felix for having Edwin clean such a valuable painting in his rooms in the first place.