In the Frame Read Online Free Page A

bedrooms?’ I said.
    ‘To estimate the value of the house.’
    ‘Good grief.’
    ‘They’ll all get it different.’ Frost was near to amusement. ‘They always do.’ He looked up the stairs in the direction Donald had taken, and, almost casually, said ‘Is your cousin in financial difficulties?’
    I knew his catch-them-off-guard technique by now.
    ‘I wouldn’t think so,’ I said unhurriedly. ‘You’d better ask him.’
    ‘I will, sir.’ He switched his gaze sharply to my face and studied my lack of expression. ‘What do you know?’
    I said calmly, ‘Only that the police have suspicious minds.’
    He disregarded that. ‘Is Mr Stuart worried about his business?’
    ‘He’s never said so.’
    ‘A great many middle-sized private companies are going bankrupt these days.’
    ‘So I believe.’
    ‘Because of cash flow problems,’ he added.
    ‘I can’t help you. You’ll have to look at his company’s books.’
    ‘We will, sir.’
    ‘And even if the firm turns out to be bust, it doesn’t follow that Donald would fake a robbery.’
    ‘It’s been done before,’ Frost said dryly.
    ‘If he needed money he could simply have sold the stuff,’ I pointed out.
    ‘Maybe he had. Some of it. Most of it, maybe.’
    I took a slow breath and said nothing.
    ‘That wine, sir. As you said yourself, it would have taken a long time to move.’
    ‘The firm is a limited company,’ I said. ‘If it went bankrupt, Donald’s own house and private money would be unaffected.’
    ‘You know a good deal about it, don’t you?’
    I said neutrally, ‘I live in the world.’
    ‘I thought artists were supposed to be unworldly.’
    ‘Some are.’
    He peered at me with narrowed eyes as if he were trying to work out a possible way in which I too might have conspired to arrange the theft.
    I said mildly, ‘My cousin Donald is an honourable man.’
    ‘That’s an out of date word.’
    ‘There’s quite a lot of it about.’
    He looked wholly disbelieving. He saw far too much in the way of corruption, day in, day out, all his working life.
    Donald came hesitantly down the stairs and Frost took him off immediately to another private session in the kitchen. I thought that if Frost’s questions were to be as barbed as those he’d asked me, poor Don was in for a rough time. While they talked I wandered aimlessly round the house, looking into storage spaces, opening cupboards, seeing the inside details of my cousin’s life.
    Either he or Regina had been a hoarder of emptyboxes. I came across dozens of them, all shapes and sizes, shoved into odd corners of shelves or drawers: brown cardboard, bright gift-wrap, beribboned chocolate boxes, all too potentially useful or too pretty to be thrown away. The burglars had opened a lot but had thrown more unopened on the floor. They must, I thought, have had a most frustrating time.
    They had largely ignored the big sunroom, which held few antiques and no paintings, and I ended up there sitting on a bamboo armchair among sprawling potted plants looking out into the windy garden. Dead leaves blew in scattered showers from the drying trees and a few late roses clung hardily to thorny stems.
    I hated autumn. The time of melancholy, the time of death. My spirits fell each year with the soggy leaves and revived only with crisp winter frost. Psychiatric statistics proved that the highest suicide rate occurred in the spring, the time for rebirth and growth and stretching in the sun. I could never understand it. If ever I jumped over a cliff, it would be in the depressing months of decay.
    The sunroom was grey and cold. No sun, that Sunday.
    I went upstairs, fetched my suitcase, and brought it down. Over years of wandering journeys I had reversed the painter’s traditional luggage: my suitcase now contained the tools of my trade, and my satchel, clothes. The large toughened suitcase, its interior adapted and fitted by me, was in fact a sort of portable studio, containing besides paints and