The Hon. Peregrine Slade was one of those who preferred not to travel in August. The roads, airports and resorts were a congested nightmare in his view. Not that he stayed in London; he retired to his country seat in Hampshire. Lady Eleanor would depart for her friends’ villa at Porto Ercole and he could be alone with his heated pool, broad acres and small but adequate staff. His contact numbers were also on the holiday rosters log, so Benny knew where he would be.
Slade left for Hampshire on the 8th. On the 11th he received a letter, handwritten and posted at Heathrow. He recognized the writing and signature immediately: it was from Alan Leigh-Travers.
‘My dear Perry, in haste from the departure lounge. In all the bother of trying to get away and leave the department shipshape for the September sale there was a matter I forgot to mention to you.
‘Ten days ago some unknown brought a picture into the Bury office for valuation. When it reached London I had a glance at it. Frankly, a quite ghastly late-Victorian oil showing a couple of dead partridge and a gun. Utterly talentless and normally it would have gone straight back. But something about it seemed odd. It intrigued me.
‘You will know the late Victorians painted both on panel and on canvas. This was on a panel that seemed extremely old, several centuries before the Victorian period.
‘I have seen such panels before, usually in Seb’s department. But not oak, that was what intrigued me. It looked a bit like poplar. So it occurred to me that some Victorian vandal might have painted over a much earlier work.
‘I know it will cost a few quid and if it is all a waste of time, a big “sorry”. But I have sent it to the Colbert to ask Steve Carpenter if he will have a look and give it an X-ray. Because I shall be away and Steve told me he is trying to get off as well, I asked him to send you his report direct to Hampshire.
‘See you at the end of the month, Alan.’
Peregrine Slade lay on a lounger by the pool and read the letter twice while sipping his first pink gin of the day. He too was intrigued. Centuries-old poplar wood was never used by the British, even when they painted on panel. Northern Europe used oak. The Italians used poplar, and broadly speaking the thicker the panel the greater its age because the sawing techniques of centuries ago made thin panels almost impossible to cut.
Using someone else’s old painting and painting over it was not uncommon, and it was quite well known in the history of art for some talentless idiot to overpaint an earlier work of genuine merit.
Thankfully modern technology had made it possible to age and date tiny fragments of wood, canvas and paint, to identify not only the country of source but sometimes even the school from which they came, and to X-ray an overpainting to see what lay underneath.
Leigh-Travers was right to do what he did, just in case. Slade intended to go up to London the next day for an exquisitely painful visit to Marina; he thought he would also pop into the office to check the records.
The records confirmed everything the letter from Heathrow had said. A certain Hamish McFee had blown into the Bury office and left behind a Victorian still life entitled The Game Bag. It had been accorded a storage number of F 608.
The storage records showed that the oil had arrived in London on 1 August and been collected by the Colbert on the 6th. Slade closed down the system, reflecting that he would await with interest the report from the legendary Stephen Carpenter, whom he did not personally know.
Glancing at his watch he saw it was six p.m. in London or one p.m. in the Caribbean. He spent an hour trying to raise Leigh-Travers on his mobile or his marine radio, but kept finding himself speaking to someone else. Finally, he gave up and went off to his rendezvous with Marina.
On the 18th a shortish porter in the dust coat of the Colbert Institute walked through the front door of the House of Darcy and presented himself at the front desk. He bore a small oil painting in protective bubble wrap.
‘Morning, luv. Delivery from the Colbert as arranged.’
The young woman behind the desk looked blank. The delivery man fished out a docket from his pocket and read from it.
‘Darcy storage number F 608,’ he read. Her face cleared. She had a number for the computer on the table behind her.
‘One moment,’ she said, turned and consulted the fount of all wisdom. The oracle explained matters to her. She saw that this item had left the store for examination at the Colbert on the authority of the absent director of British Modern and Victorian art. And now it was being returned. She rang for a porter of her own.
Within minutes she had signed the Colbert man’s receipt form and the wrapped painting had been taken back to store.
‘If I spend any more time in that building,’ thought Trumpington Gore as he emerged onto the hot pavement, ‘I ought to start paying them rent.’
On the 20th Professor Stephen Carpenter’s report arrived by recorded delivery at Peregrine Slade’s manor in Hampshire. He took delivery of it over a late breakfast after a pleasing swim in the pool. As he read it his eggs went cold and his coffee formed a film of skin. The letter said:
‘Dear Mr Slade, I am sure you will know by now that before he departed on holiday Alan Leigh-Travers asked me to have a look at a small oil painting purporting to be of the late-Victorian period and executed in this country.
‘I have to say that the task turned out to be most challenging and finally very exhilarating.
‘At first sight this picture, apparently titled The Game Bag, seemed to be of impressive ugliness and lack merit. A mere daub by a talentless amateur about a hundred years ago. It was the wooden panel on which it was painted that caught Alan’s attention and therefore it was to this that I turned my principal attention.
‘I removed the panel from its Victorian frame and studied it closely. It is undoubtedly of poplar wood and very old. Along its edges I discovered traces of ancient mastic or glue, indicating that it was probably a fragment panel, once part of a much bigger work such as an altarpiece from which it has been broken away.
‘I took a tiny sliver of wood from the rear of the panel and subjected it to tests for age and place of probable origin. You will know that dendrochronology cannot be used for poplar, since this tree, unlike oak, has no rings to denote the passing years. Nevertheless, modern science has a few other tricks up its sleeve.
‘I have been able to establish that this piece of wood is consistent with those used in Italy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Further examination under a spectromicroscope revealed tiny nicks and cuts left by the blade of the cross-saw used by the sawyer. One minuscule irregularity in the blade created marks identical to those found on other panels of the period and the place, again consistent with fifteenth-and sixteenth-century Italian work.
‘The Victorian painting of two dead partridge and a shotgun has beyond any doubt been painted over a much earlier work. I removed a tiny fragment of the oil, too small to detect with the naked eye, and established that the paint beneath is not oil but tempera.