In the Frame Read Online Free Page B

brushes a light collapsible metal easel, unbreakable containers of linseed oil and turpentine, and a rack which would hold four wet paintings safely apart. There were also a dust sheet, a large box of tissues, and generous amounts of white spirit, all designed for preventing mess and keeping things clean. The organisation of the suitcase had saved and made the price of many a sandwich.
    I untelescoped the easel and set out my palette, and on a middling-sized canvas laid in the beginnings of a melancholy landscape, a mixture of Donald’s garden as I saw it, against a sweep of bare fields and gloomy woods. Not my usual sort of picture, and not, to be honest, the sort to make headline news a century hence; but it gave me at least something to do. I worked steadily, growing ever colder, until the chillier Frost chose to depart; and he went without seeing me again, the front door closing decisively on his purposeful footsteps.
    Donald, in the warm kitchen, looked torn to rags. When I went in he was sitting with his arms folded on the table and his head on his arms, a picture of absolute despair. When he heard me he sat up slowly and wearily, and showed a face suddenly aged and deeply lined.
    ‘Do you know what he thinks?’ he said.
    ‘More or less.’
    He stared at me sombrely. ‘I couldn’t convince him. He kept on and on. Kept asking the same questions, over and over. Why doesn’t he believe me?’
    ‘A lot of people lie to the police. I think they grow to expect it.’
    ‘He wants me to meet him in my office tomorrow. He says he’ll be bringing colleagues. He says they’ll want to see the books.’,
    I nodded. ‘Better be grateful he didn’t drag you down there today.’
    ‘I suppose so.’
    I said awkwardly, ‘Don, I’m sorry. I told him the wine was missing. It made him suspicious… It was a good deal my fault that he was so bloody to you.’
    He shook his head tiredly. ‘I would have told him myself. I wouldn’t have thought of not telling him.’
    ‘But… I even pointed out that it must have taken a fair time to move so many bottles.’
    ‘Mm. Well, he would have worked that out for himself.’
    ‘How long, in fact, do you think it would have taken?’
    ‘Depends how many people were doing it,’ he said, rubbing his hand over his face and squeezing his tired eyes. ‘They would have to have had proper wine boxes in any case. That means they had to know in advance that the wine was there, and didn’t just chance on it. And that means… Frost says… that I sold it myself some time ago and am now saying it is stolen so I can claim fraudulent insurance, or, if it was stolen last Friday, that I told the thieves they’d need proper boxes, which means that I set up the whole frightful mess myself.’
    We thought it over in depressed silence. Eventually, I said, ‘Who
did
know you had the wine there? And who knew the house was always empty on Fridays? And was the prime target the wine, the antiques, or the paintings?’
    ‘God, Charles, you sound like Frost.’
    ‘Sorry.’
    ‘Every business nowadays,’ he said defensively, ‘is going through a cash crisis. Look at the nationalised industries, losing money by the million. Look at the wage rises and the taxes and the inflation… How can any small business make the profit it used to? Of
course
we have a cash flow problem. Whoever hasn’t?’
    ‘How bad is yours?’ I said.
    ‘Not critical. Bad enough. But not within sight of liquidation. It’s illegal for a limited company to carry on trading if it can’t cover its costs.’
    ‘But it could… if you could raise more capital to prop it up?’
    He surveyed me with the ghost of a smile. ‘It surprises me still that you chose to paint for a living.’
    ‘It gives me a good excuse to go racing whenever I like.’
    ‘Lazy sod.’ He sounded for a second like the old Donald,but the lightness passed. ‘The absolutely last thing I would do would be to use my own personal assets to prop up a dying