As requested, they had all assembled in the Library before dinner. There were not enough seats for everyone, and someone wondered jokingly if they were going to play musical chairs.
"Do you think we will?" Major Liversedge asked, perking up a little at the idea. The Major and Sir Lancelot Hardwick had done the gentlemanly thing and elected to stand.
"What on earth is this about, do you suppose?" the Reverend Smallbones asked. "I hope there's going to be a good dinner to make up for all the waiting," he added querulously.
"And where are those drinks?" Guy Burroughs wondered out loud.
"Dreadful man," Countess Voranskaya murmured, unable to conceal her dislike of the brash American film star.
"Yes, where is Addison with the sherry?" Sir Lancelot said. He rang the bell again. Catching sight of the expression of distaste on the face of the fastidious little Swiss detective, René Armand, he laughed and said, "Don't worry, Monsieur. I have some excellent cognac."
"I fear we must make the best of things," the Reverend Smallbones said. "This snowstorm means that we're all going to be stuck here together for quite some time."
"Trapped!" Countess Voranskaya declared in gloomy Slavic tones.
The company fell into a rather awkward silence. There was an audible sigh of relief when Addison entered and said to Sir Lancelot, "You rang, sir?"
"Yes, Addison. We would—"
"I'm sorry to be so dim," Lady Milton whispered, "but I'm rather confused. Who is Addison?"
"He's the butler," Reggie whispered back.
"It's confusing. There are so very many of them."
"I know, Lady M, but I expect they're going to get picked off one by one. That's what usually happens."
"Is it?"
"Dear God Almighty," Jackson Brodie muttered. "If this goes on much longer I'll kill them all myself."
"It hasn't even begun properly yet," Reggie said.
The Mysterious Affair at the Willows
in fact, it had begun over a week ago when Jackson acquired a new client. Two new clients actually, although they came as a pair—twins, in fact—Ian and Hazel, the pensionable-aged progeny of the recently deceased Dorothy Padgett. Jackson had not warmed to Hazel when she contacted him on the phone, but she wanted to meet in Ilkley, the "scene of the crime" as she referred to it, and Ilkley boasted a Bettys Café Tea Rooms that Jackson had never visited. It wasn't the siren call of a toasted teacake that drew him so much as the promise of order, of sanctuary even. "A clean, well-lighted place," his ex, Julia, said when he had tried to explain the attraction. "That's Hemingway, and don't pretend you know that, because you don't." He didn't, but he was fairly sure you would never find Hemingway in Bettys, chomping on an iced fancy. Hemingway's loss.
"And this is where the painting hung? In your mother's bedroom?" Jackson had asked, contemplating the ghostly outline, as if whatever had been on the wall had been vaporized. He was reminded of Hiroshima. He was in a dark mood, feeling the weight of history on his back. His teenage son, Nathan, clearly wasn't going to take up the burden.
"Yes," Hazel Sanderson, née Padgett, said. She had been a geography teacher before retiring. When Jackson was at school, "Geography" had consisted of tracing maps and colouring them in and getting a whack on the back of your hand with a wooden ruler if you made a mistake. Perhaps it had advanced since then. Perhaps not.
"It was a portrait," Ian said. "Small—about ten-by-ten without the frame. Approximately," he added, in case he sounded as though he had measured it. (He had, Jackson thought.) Ian was retired from "insurance" and had the dull, faded patina of someone who had spent their life indoors. "You could add on another two inches for the frame," he went on. "It was fancy—gold."
"Not real gold," Hazel intervened hastily. "Obviously."
"The whole thing's missing," Ian continued. "Not cut from the frame the way that thieves usually do." (He'd been on the internet, Jackson thought.) "It was very . . ." Ian searched for a word. "Portable," he concluded.
Portable? Jackson didn't think he'd ever heard that word used for a work of art. Made sense though if you were going to steal one.
"Dated from the Renaissance," Hazel said.
"Renaissance?" Jackson hadn't expected that either. Surely "Renaissance" equated to "worth a shedload of money." But what did he know? He would have been hard put to tell a Rembrandt from a Renoir. In the house Jackson grew up in, a Woolworths print of Tretchikoff's Chinese Girl was considered high art.
"Fifteenth, perhaps sixteenth century," Hazel elucidated, giving him a long look as if she was already doubting his capabilities. He supposed she was the sort of woman who thought he was an idiot from the get-go, although he seemed to meet no other kind these days. Hazel had a defensive stance, her folded arms resting on the rotund barrel of her middle. Visceral fat, Jackson thought darkly. He'd been learning, thanks to his daughter Marlee, the Ghost of the Future.
"It was the portrait of a woman," Hazel continued. "Of course, we've no idea who she is or who the artist was." The two Padgetts stared at the space on the wall as if they could magic the anonymous subject back to life.
"Oh, we have no idea," Hazel said airily. "Probably not very. Its value was sentimental rather than monetary." Hazel didn't give the impression of being someone who had much time for sentiment.
"It was never valued or put on the insurance," Ian added, tag-teaming with his sister. "Nothing like that."
No insurance? To Jackson, the Willows seemed like a house that put its faith in insurance. Ian certainly did, it had been his job for, what—forty years? "Forty-five," Ian said. "Man and boy." Jackson's soul shrank at the thought of nearly half a century of indentured labour.
"The painting had no provenance, as they say," Hazel said, approaching the word carefully, as if it might be dangerous in some way. The word meant something to her, Jackson thought. "Dad bought it cheap at an auction after the war, in a house clearance."
"Nobody wanted old stuff in those days, did they?" Ian said.
Jackson had the distinct feeling that the two of them were reading from a script. One they'd agreed on beforehand. They were leaden actors, Ian particularly.
"Its origins are lost in the mists of time, I'm afraid," Hazel said. "It's been hanging in Mum's bedroom for as long as we can remember. Hasn't it, Ian?"
Ian responded eagerly to his sister's prompt. "Yes, yes," he said, nodding in strenuous agreement. He was going to hurt his neck if he wasn't careful, Jackson thought. "Mum said she liked to see it when she woke up," he said. "And when she fell asleep as well, I suppose. She loved that painting."
The spectral remainder—a square of wallpaper framed by a faint nebula of dust—was on the wall opposite the small double bed that their mother had died in. Deathbed, Jackson thought. No more waking up for Dorothy Padgett. Ever. She must have slept with the door shut. That was the only way she would have been able to see the painting.
He contemplated the frilled and flowery duvet cover with its matching pillowcases. A crocheted bed-jacket lay across the counterpane, and he had an urge to touch it to see if it was still warm.
Most poignant of all somehow was the pair of spectacles that were neatly folded on the bedside table and would never be needed again. They had the thick bottle-bottom lenses of the semi-blind. It would have taken some effort for Dorothy Padgett to see that painting when she woke in the morning.
Dorothy Padgett, ninety-six-year-old widow of this parish, had died in her sleep of a worn-out heart just a couple of days ago and now the vultures were picking at the remains. Jackson didn't want to die in his sleep, didn't want the Grim Reaper sneaking slyly up on him, he wanted to face him with his eyes wide open. Not that he was ready to die yet. He still had work to do—see his daughter happy, keep his granddaughter safe, persuade his son to get off his arse and put his phone away.
In the brief time since their mother had travelled on to whatever lay beyond, Hazel and Ian had gone around her house in Ilkley sticking coloured dots on her goods and chattels—red dots for Hazel, blue for Ian. Jackson wondered what colour would have gone on the missing painting, as the two of them seemed to be making an equal claim on it. Red and blue made purple. The imperial colour. He'd been reading Robert Harris.
This speedy pair had already been to the solicitors. "We knew what was in the will, of course," Hazel said. "We just wanted to check everything was in order."
"No surprises!" Ian had laughed as if they had perhaps been worried that their mother might have set an ambush in her final testament—her worldly goods to go to a cat shelter, or perhaps worse, her carer, Melanie Hope. But no, "Everything to be divided equally between the two of us," Hazel said. "Split right down the middle," Ian chimed in helpfully and received an icy stare from his sister for his trouble. There seemed to be a lot going on between the lines of their shared script.
Dorothy Padgett’s home was an old-fashioned, chintzy kind of house in a quietly expensive street. From the upper storey you could see countryside and beyond that Ilkley Moor, of “Baht ’At” fame. “On Ilkley Moor Baht ’At” was a song they used to sing at Jackson’s school, millennia ago. A hatless man catches his death of cold up on the moor, the worms eat him, the ducks eat the worms and then we shall have etten thee. The circle of life, long before The Lion King.
A house like the Willows wouldn’t stay on the market long. It was worth way over a million (Jackson had become a connoisseur of property websites) although, apart from the view, there was nothing about it that he found attractive. Stone-built between the wars, four bedrooms, detached, with an enormous garden. No one built houses with enormous gardens any more. Jackson had become quite the connoisseur because he had been house-hunting lately. Most of his work these days was in this part of the world, his love life (such as it was, and love didn’t have much to do with it) was also here and it seemed as good a time in his life as any to put down roots again. He was a grandfather now, after all, the head of a dynasty. (Get over yourself, his father would have said.) He congratulated himself for being so sensible and mature.
He had spent a good several weeks being sensible and mature and then he bought a Land Rover Defender instead. It was a rugged, blokey kind of vehicle. Brand-new, the model that had the top-of-the-range specs, 518bhp supercharged V-8 engine, plus every whistle and bell available to man. Cost an arm and a leg. No regrets. You could live in a Defender if you had to, but you couldn’t drive a house. The whole macho construct only slightly spoiled by his granddaughter’s baby seat in the back.
It wasn’t so long since he had spent a month in his daughter’s cramped, expensive London flat looking after that granddaughter. Marlee’s childcare arrangements had fallen through just as she was due to return to work and he had been called up for service. It had been a baptism of fire for all three of them.
His granddaughter was called Niamh, after Jackson’s murdered sister. Jackson wasn’t sure it was a good idea to be named for the tragic dead, but Marlee had insisted that her baby be called after the aunt she had never known.
Shattered, knee-deep in nappies and various kinds of bodily fluids, Jackson realized how little he had contributed when his own children were babies. In Marlee’s case hardly anything, in Nathan’s case nothing at all (not my fault, he thought). A woman’s world.
“Well, you’re an honorary woman now,” Marlee laughed.
“Have been for a long time,” he said.
“Not really,” Marlee said.
“Shall we go into the living room?” Hazel ushered him out of the bedroom and downstairs into a room with large French windows and a view of the patio and the garden beyond. A well-worn, high-backed armchair looked out on to the leafless trees. The Willows did indeed have a couple of big weeping trees in the back garden, their branches winter-bare. “I remember Dad planting them when we moved here,” she said. “They won’t last much longer, willows aren’t long-lived. Not like oaks, or pines.”
“Beeches,” Ian said, nodding his head sagely. “Sycamores.” Were they going to name all the trees? Jackson wondered.
It was a big house for one small, very old lady (the bed-jacket was tiny, like a large doll’s), but of course it had been the family home, “where we grew up,” Ian said. “Me and Hazel. We moved here from Leeds in the Fifties.”
School portraits had been dutifully hung on the walls, a variety of toothy children in uniform, shined and polished especially for their official photo. “Mrs. Padgett’s grandchildren?” Jackson asked.
“She had great-grandchildren as well,” Hazel said. “Ian and I both have two children and each of them has two children.” It sounded more like a mathematical puzzle than a family tree.
There were more photographs on display on the sideboard. The sideboard was one of those sleek teak ones that had signalled the introduction of Scandinavian style into the grim post-war décor of Britain. It was probably some kind of modern antique now, if that wasn’t a contradiction in terms. There was a matching shelved display unit and a table and six chairs in the dining room. The Padgetts must have considered themselves quite avant-garde back in the day. Jackson knew from his own forays into house-hunting that dining