The first indication of trouble was the light burning in the kitchen window of Wexford Cottage. Vera Hobbs, owner of the Cornish Bakery in Gunwalloe, spotted it at 5:25 a.m. on the third Tuesday of January. The day of the week was noteworthy; the owner of the cottage, Professor Charlotte Blake, divided her time between Cornwall and Oxford. Typically, she arrived in Gunwalloe on a Thursday evening and departed the following Monday afternoon—three-day workweeks being one of the many perquisites of academic life. The absence of her dark blue Vauxhall suggested she had decamped at her usual time. The glowing light, however, was an aberration, as Professor Blake was a devout environmentalist who would sooner stand in the path of a speeding train than waste a single watt of electricity.
She had purchased Wexford Cottage with the proceeds of her bestselling exploration of Picasso’s life and work in wartime France. Her withering reappraisal of Paul Gauguin, published three years later, fared even better. Vera had attempted to organize a book party at the Lamb and Flag, but Professor Blake, after somehow getting wind of the project, had made it clear she had no wish to be fêted. “If there is indeed a hell,” she explained, “its inhabitants have been condemned to spend the rest of eternity celebrating the publication of someone else’s latest waste of paper.”
She had made the remark in her perfect BBC English, with the ironic drawl that comes naturally to those of privileged birth. She was not, however, from the upper classes herself, as Vera discovered one afternoon while stalking Professor Blake on the Internet. Her father had been a rabble-rousing trade unionist from Yorkshire and a leader of the bitter coal miners’ strike in the 1980s. A gifted student, she had won admission to Oxford, where she had studied the history of art. After a brief stint at the Tate Modern in London, and an even briefer one at Christie’s, she had returned to Oxford to teach. According to her official biography, she was considered one of the world’s foremost experts in something called APR, or artistic provenance research.
“What in heaven’s name does that mean?” asked Dottie Cox, proprietor of the Gunwalloe village store.
“Evidently, it has something to do with establishing a painting’s history of ownership and exhibition.”
“Is that important?”
“Tell me something, Dottie, dear. Why would someone be an expert in something if it wasn’t bloody important?”
Interestingly enough, Professor Blake was not the first art world figure to settle in Gunwalloe. But unlike her predecessor, the reclusive restorer who had lived for a time in the cottage down by the cove, she was unfailingly polite. Not the talkative sort, mind you, but always a pleasant greeting and an enchanting smile. The consensus among Gunwalloe’s male population was that the professor’s author photograph had not done her justice. Her hair was nearly black and shoulder length, with a single provocative streak of gray. Her eyes were an arresting shade of cobalt blue. The puffy pillows of dark flesh beneath them only added to her allure.
“Smoldering,” declared Duncan Reynolds, a retired conductor for the Great Western Railway. “Reminds me of one of those mysterious women you see in the cafés of Paris.” Though as far as anyone knew, the closest old Duncan had ever come to the French capital was Paddington Station.
There had been a Mr. Blake once, a painter of minor note, but they had divorced while she was still at the Tate.