Barbara ducked inside what appeared to be not a gallery—as she'd originally supposed from the card, the address printed upon the card, and Terry's artistic aspirations—but instead an auction house not unlike Christies. Apparently, an auction was in some stage of preparation and the goods on offer were what was being unloaded from the lorry that was parked outside. These were paintings in ornate gilt frames, and they were everywhere: stacked in crates, propped against counters, hanging on walls, and lying on the floor. Stepping around them and among them, blue-smocked employees with clipboards in their hands made notations which seemed to relegate each piece to areas signposted with the words Frame Damage, Restoration, and Suitable.
Behind a counter, a glass notice board was hung with posters that advertised past and future auctions. In addition to paintings, the house had sold to the highest bidder everything from farms in the Irish Republic to silver, jewelry, and objets d'art.
Bowers was much larger than it looked from the street, where two windows and a door suggested entrance to a humbler establishment. In reality, inside, one room appeared to open into another and that one to another, all the way to the top of Old Bond Street. Barbara wandered through, looking for someone who could point her in the direction of Neil Sitwell.
Sitwell turned out to be the major-domo of the day's activities. He was a rotund figure with a rug on his head that made him look like a bloke wearing yesterday's road kill. When Barbara came upon him, he was on his haunches inspecting a frameless painting of three hunting dogs capering beneath an oak tree. He'd placed his clipboard on the floor and stuck his hand through a large rip in the canvas that ran from the right corner like a bolt of lightning. Or a commentary on the work itself, Barbara thought: It looked to her like a fairly dismal effort.
Sitwell withdrew his hand and called out, “Take this to Restoration. Tell them we'll want it in six weeks,” to a youngish assistant who was rushing by with several other paintings stacked in his arms.
“Right, Mr. Sitwell,” the boy called back. “Will do in a tick. These're going to Suitable. I'll be right back.”
Sitwell shoved himself to his feet. He nodded at Barbara and then at the painting he'd been inspecting. “It'll go for ten thousand.”
“You're joking,” she said. “Is it the painter?”
“It's the dogs. You know the English. Can't abide them myself. Dogs, that is. What can I do for you?”
“I'd like a word, if there's a place we can talk.”
“A word about what? We're overwhelmed at the moment. And we've two more deliveries coming in this afternoon.”
“A word about murder.” Barbara offered him her identification. Presto. His attention was hers.
He ushered her up a cramped stairway, where his office occupied a cubbyhole overlooking the showrooms. It was furnished simply, with a desk, two chairs, and a filing cabinet. Its only decorations—if they could be called such—were the walls. These had been covered with cork board from floor to ceiling and on them were pinned and stapled a veritable history of the enterprise in which Mr. Sitwell worked. It appeared that the auction house had a distinguished past. But like a less noticed child in a home of high-achieving siblings, it needed to shout about itself to be heard above the notoriety given to Sotheby's and Christie's.
Barbara brought Sitwell quickly up to speed with regard to the death of Terry Cole: A young man—found dead in Derbyshire—had evidently kept a business card with Neil Sitwell's name on it among his belongings, she said. Would Mr. Sitwell have any idea why that was the case?
“He was something of an artist,” Barbara added helpfully. “A sculptor. He banged about with gardening tools and farming implements. For his sculptures, I mean. That's how you might have met him. P'rhaps at a show … Does this sound familiar?”
“Not in the least, I'm afraid,” Sitwell said. “I attend openings, naturally. One likes to keep abreast of what's current in the art world. It's rather like honing one's instincts for what will sell and what won't. But that's my avocation—following the latest trends—not my main line of work. Since we're an auction house and not a gallery, I'd've had no reason to give a young artist my business card.”
“Because you don't auction modern art, you mean?”
“Because we don't auction work by unestablished artists. For obvious reasons.”
Barbara mulled this over, wondering if Terry Cole had attempted to present himself as an established sculptor. This seemed unlikely. And while Cilia Thompson had claimed the sale of at least one of her rebarbative pieces, it didn't seem likely that an auction house would be trying to win her over by wooing her flatmate instead. “Could he have come here—or even met you elsewhere—for another reason, then?”
Sitwell steepled his fingertips beneath his chin. “We've been looking for a qualified picture restorer for the past three months. As he was an artist—”