Silver Guilt (12 page)

I thought of the cracked plant pots and rusty tools and grimaced.

‘Exactly. Never knock your gift, Lina. You never know how it will manifest itself. Now, at the risk of sounding like your father, I think you deserve a glass of champagne. You and your gift.'

There was no point in arguing, but I still didn't feel quite right. It hung over me, like a little grey cloud, for a couple of days. Then I had a nice note from Farfrae telling me how delighted his wife was with the anniversary present and asking me to keep my eye open for others of the same village, and little by little the cloud drifted away.

Restoring the Meissen lady for Josie's friend took well over a week. The worst part was making her a new hand, though at least I had the left one to go by. She ended up looking pretty good, and certainly cleaner than when she'd arrived. It always gave me a funny feeling when I returned a figure to its owner, as if I were a doctor returning a patient. She was feeling better, but she'd never be quite her old self, I said. And just to be on the safe side, I gave the owner a complete rundown of what I'd done, keeping a record for myself, too. I used the computer – my own handwriting was still liable to wobbles and slips, especially when I was using a duplicate pad and trying to press hard.

I'd just got back from delivering the figure to Josie when I got another restoration job, one I leapt at. I had a phone message from Mary Walker, a contact at Bossingham Hall – she needed a favour, she said, in a voice that sounded tearful. Would I care to drop in next time I was over in Bossingham? Would I not! Perhaps after all my guardian angel had decided that I hadn't been so very bad at Ardingly.

Mrs Walker was a widow who'd not all that long ago moved to the village; finding time heavy on her hands, she'd become a volunteer guide at the hall – not a terribly hard task, since the wily trustees had screwed the maximum of grants out of the Lottery and other funds, but had managed to keep the public opening hours they had to give in return to a minimum. When I'd first visited the hall, before I'd met my father, she'd wangled me extra time in the place for free, and even stood me tea and cake. Perhaps she'd been kind because she'd been lonely, but kindness is kindness, and needs to be passed on. She was still a guide, and now she'd obviously become one of the spring-cleaning team too.

She was a nice woman, but couldn't stop talking: I suppose it was a nasty combination of having talked for her living as a teacher and having no one to talk to at home. From time to time, when I had to go and see my father anyway, I joined her in the tea room for a scone, but I always cut short the chat by pretending I had another appointment. What Griff called a tactful lie.

I phoned back immediately. Tears meant something broken. And that might mean trouble for her. If she'd broken something herself and was in a hole I'd do any repair for free.

If it was an official breakage, then I'd charge full price, of course.

‘They say I must have broken it, but I really, truly didn't,' Mrs Walker said. Her eyes were red and she was on the verge of more tears. ‘The trouble is, if I admit it I'm damned and if I don't they'll say I'm lying so I'm damned too.'

That was the trouble with what struck me as a really amateurish set-up. They didn't seem to have enough insurance and blamed staff personally if things went wrong – which meant the sack.

By now she was weeping properly. ‘And I really, really don't know what I'd do without this place to occupy my time. They say I should have got used to being on my own by now, but I can't seem to. Thirty-eight years we were married.'

She needed so much help with so many different things I didn't know where to start. I supposed the obvious place was the damaged plate itself.

We were in what the trustees rather grandly called the administrative hub of the estate, in other words a clutch of underground rooms still painted in cream and green gloss which was filthy and beginning to lift. Whatever had they been used for originally? They weren't the servants' halls or kitchen because those were part of the tour; as for the old steward's office, that was in my father's wing. I'd have to do some research.

Why they'd not been made presentable was beyond me. After all, people spent their working days in them. Computers hummed in one, coats were hung in another and in a third a few chairs even my father might have sniffed at were available for the guides to rest their weary bones, as Mrs Walker bravely joked. She'd laid a large Jiffy bag on an early Victorian burr-walnut card table that had once had something hot placed on it. Surely someone should have had a shot at restoring it? Wasn't there a woodworking version of me somewhere around?

But I was supposed to be concentrating on what the bag held. I eased a bundle of bubble wrap on to my knee.

‘It's like passing the parcel,' Mrs Walker said with a pale smile. ‘You know, the children's party game.'

It was one I'd never played, not as far as I could remember, anyway. But I smiled and nodded, as if giving the best of my attention to what I could now see was a pretty plate, now in two pieces.

This time my smile was warmer. ‘So far, so good, Mrs Walker. It looks straightforward enough.' I put one half down on the table and inspected the other. ‘The plate's delft, but I'd say it was English. Possibly Bristol. Late eighteenth century. This pretty raised design, here on the rim, see? It's called
bianco-sopra-bianco
.' I didn't need to say all this but clients sometimes liked me to sound like an expert.

‘So it was very valuable, like they say? Two thousand or more?'

It actually might have been, but I didn't want to upset her. ‘These chips round the edges – old ones, nothing to do with you – will have taken away some of the value.' I looked again, this time at the break. ‘Ah! If you look here, along the edge of the pieces, you can see two different colours.' I held them up so that she could see. ‘So I'd say there'd been a crack in it for a long time, and whatever you did just ex . . . exass . . . made it worse. It was an accident waiting to happen. And I can fix it very easily.' I smiled warmly as I packed it up. ‘How did it happen, anyway?'

‘I told you, I don't know. It was just lying like this when I found it. It was on a table in one of the corridors.'

‘Let's go and have a look,' I said, as if I had scene of crime officers' skills. I meant just to help her, truly, but after all I had wanted to check the place over, and I didn't really deserve her watery smile and her gabbled thanks. ‘Come on, you know how I love the place.'

She led the way through some of the backstairs areas that always fascinate me more than the grand public rooms. They were freezing – well, that was the servants' lot. But when we reached the state rooms, they were cold too, and felt damp – not what you'd expect in a grade one listed building, where the temperature and humidity were supposed to be strictly controlled.

‘This is my corridor,' she said, when we eventually reached a broad first floor corridor running right across the front of the house. ‘At least as far as cleaning is concerned.' A long feather duster and a shorter fluffy duster lay on a marble-topped pier table.

‘Where was the plate?'

‘On the next table. I saw it, dropped everything and ran.'

‘Taking the pieces with you?' Morris would have been proud of me. I strolled along the corridor, trying to make myself focus on the task, not on what I was fairly sure was a fake Vigée Le Brun. Did I see any footprints? Was anything else broken?

Total failure, of course. And try as I might I couldn't see why a plate lying flat on a table should take it into its head to break in two. And then my brain clicked in. ‘If you'd dropped it, wouldn't it show up on CCTV?'

‘I suppose so.' She looked round vaguely for a camera. ‘Oh, over there.'

I tried to attract its attention, but for some reason it didn't track me.

‘Shall we talk to the security people and ask to have a look?'

Mrs Walker looked scared, then pulled her shoulders back and put on a brave smile. ‘Yes, why not? I've nothing to lose!'

It seemed security was answerable to the administrator, a woman I'd heard of but never met. I wasn't about to meet her today: she had a day's leave. Away from the place when everyone else was working their socks off? I didn't think much of that.

Now what? Mrs Walker was still looking at me as if I had a solution tucked into my trousers pocket. Perhaps I had. A business card.

‘Is there a computer I can use? Because I could type a letter saying that in my opinion the break was caused not by careless handling but because of pre-existing damage.' The terms sounded good. I'd seen Griff use them on a couple of insurance evaluations.

It seemed even the computers were sacrosanct. At last, despite being visibly scared, Mrs Walker switched one on and hovered, as if she were acting as look out, while I typed. You've never seen so many typos, but at last I sorted everything out. For good measure, I added an estimate of how much it would cost to repair it, and stapled a business card on to the finished letter.

‘You're a star!' she declared, giving me a hug. ‘Now, have you got time for a coffee to warm you up?'

I looked at my watch. ‘I'd love one. But I really ought to go and see my father.'

A
lthough it was
Countdown
time, and I knew I wouldn't be particularly welcome, I did nip round to my father's wing to check up on him. It was nice and warm there, too, since he didn't believe in stinting on heat. Especially as the trustees got to pay the bills.

He was too engrossed in the TV show to do more than raise his champagne flute in my direction, so I set off for the kitchen. I was pleased to see sheets in the tumble dryer – I'd have been more pleased to see them blowing on a clothes line, but my sights weren't set very high. He'd even washed up a couple of days ago, but in the sink, still awaiting attention, were several glasses. In pairs again. He'd even emptied the swing bin, which for some reason I thought was suspicious, not good housekeeping.

I took my nose for a sniff for pot round the storage rooms. Nothing in most. Then I caught a gust of skunk in the room with all the Staffordshire figures. And stopped dead. I didn't have to be a white-clad SOCO to see that the door to their cupboard had been unlocked and the Meissen stranger in their midst removed. Somehow I didn't think it was because someone didn't think they belonged together.

Apart from that, only a couple of not very good jardinières had gone – ugly things that I wouldn't have given shop room to. And there was a spliff end stubbed out in a pretty little Royal Worcester ashtray. OK, it was meant to be an ashtray, but it was a William Powell ashtray, dated 1930, and though it wasn't worth a king's ransom, the little chaffinch Powell had painted deserved better than that.

I steadied a pile of books and dusted the top one. I had to sit somewhere to think, and that should do. I didn't think the spliff-smoker was an expert. Unless, of course, he'd hidden the Meissen figure in one of the jardinières just to get it out of the place. He? It might be a she, of course, but I tended to think of cannabis smoking, skunk especially, as a male thing.

So who was it? When the police had been investigating the place, my father had mentioned something about being proud of all of them. I'd interpreted that as being proud of all his wrong-side-of-the blanket brood. Then I persuaded myself I'd misheard. But perhaps I hadn't. Perhaps one of my half-brothers or sisters had turned up.

I could have done with a good swig of my father's champagne to help me think. Or feel. One of my social workers had said I wasn't very good at sorting out my emotions, so I mixed them up. At least I knew I was mixed up this time. Why should I be furious? And jealous? When Lord Elham had sold
Natura Rerum
for all that money, I'd made sure that all of us were treated fairly: the million pounds plus was in trust so there was a nest egg for each of us, even though I was the only one who'd ever cared enough to search him out.

That sounded as if I'd cared enough for him to search him out. I hadn't. I'd cared for me – I needed to fit a piece into my pretty thin history. Now perhaps one of the others had felt the same. I should feel generous and welcoming. A brother or sister was something I'd never had. We might become mates.

Or had someone simply been flushed out of the woodwork by the prospect of getting his hands on some of the
Natura Rerum
bonus? None of us could have anything till the age of thirty – my puritan suggestion, as it happens. Perhaps one of us had had the right birthday and decided to make it a special one, courtesy of the trust fund. And why not? That was what the money was there for. But I still felt miffed: if it hadn't been for me Lord Elham might have been in jail and there'd have been no money. Or I might have kept all the proceeds from the sale, as Lord Elham had wanted me to do.

So why hadn't I been introduced to this new . . . Sibyl? (Griff had told me there was an overall term for brothers and sisters, and I'd even written it down. But I couldn't place it now.) All the same, why hadn't I met him or her?

I couldn't really credit Lord Elham with tact and diplomacy. So I couldn't tell myself he hadn't wanted me to be upset.

I tried to put myself into the newcomer's head, not all that easy given I didn't know anything about him except that he smoked pot. Had he found out I was selling his father's stuff and suspected I was lining my pockets? Well, I was, of course, but only by helping the old guy to make money he wouldn't otherwise have had. And to stay alive. Let's not forget that. I was surprised he hadn't died twice over, his kitchen being so filthy when I'd turned up. Not to mention personal hygiene.

I checked my watch.
Countdown
should just be ending. Maybe I could get my father to listen to my direct questions and answer them. But I had as much chance, I reckoned, as I did of getting the number puzzle right. So maybe a sideways approach was best.