Ellie searched his face, but could read absolutely nothing in his professionally uninformative expression. “Natural light?” When he nodded, she mentally reviewed the possibilities; in this season, most rooms in the house suffered from poor light, but one might do. “How about the conservatory?”
He thought, then nodded. “That might work well.”
“Of all the rooms in the house, it has the best natural light.” She started for the door. “I’ll take you there.”
Carrying the frame, he followed. As she led him along the corridor and around to the side stairs, she noticed his gaze constantly dipping to dwell on the painting.
Poor light or not, he was being drawn into his study of the canvas, becoming absorbed with the painting, just as he had with the documents.
The bottom of the side stairs lay only a few yards from the short corridor that led to the glass-walled conservatory. She opened the door and led the way inside.
Shaped like the nave of a church, the conservatory extended outward from the end of the central wing. Hip-high redbrick walls ran away from the house, eventually angling inward to form a half-hexagonal end. Above the walls, panes of glass set in lead frames soared upward, then inward, to meet along the roof’s leaded spine. Green-and-white tiles covered the floor, laid in a chequerboard pattern.
Walking down the room, she spoke over her shoulder. “My father built the conservatory for my mother—it was his wedding gift to her. During winter, the room’s heated by hot water from a boiler in the cellar that circulates through pipes in the walls and floor.”
“I see.”
He sounded distracted, literally absentminded.
She smiled to herself and halted in the sparsely furnished area toward the end of the room. During the colder months, the ferns and palms that, in summer, were sited all around the conservatory were gathered in the room’s center, away from the chilled windows.
She turned to Godfrey as he halted a yard away; predictably, his gaze remained locked on the painting. “Will you need anything more by way of furniture in addition to what’s already here?”
Godfrey raised his head, stared at Ellie as he replayed her words, then glanced around. There were two round white-painted wrought iron tables and eight matching chairs, deeply cushioned, arranged around the room’s perimeter. He looked past Ellie to the end of the room where strong, steady light—not just direct light from the sky but also light reflected off the snow—poured in through the glass panes. “No.” He glanced around again. “In fact, this will be perfect. The fewer visual distractions, the better.”
The painting claimed his attention again.
Ellie shifted. “In that case, I’ll leave you to it.”
He nodded, but she didn’t walk away. He realized and, still holding his mask firmly in place, looked at her.
She smiled gently, as if amused. “How long do you think your examination will take?”
He looked down at the canvas. After a moment, he said, “Given what this is, I’ll need to be thorough.”
Exceedingly thorough.
“So.” She tipped her head and waited for him to look at her again. “Does that mean hours?”
He couldn’t hold back a disbelieving grunt. “Hours certainly. Possibly days.”
“Oh. I see.” She studied him for an instant, then said, “I’ll let Papa know. I’ll send Wally to summon you for meals.”
He nodded noncommittally, but he wasn’t going to be eating with the family until he sorted this out.
His attention once more drawn—mesmerized—by the painting in his hands, he listened as Ellie walked away. He heard the door open and click shut—waited until he was certain she wouldn’t, for some reason, return.
Then and only then did he allow his rigid 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?”