Barbara Havers zoomed round the corner of Anhalt Road and hoped her luck would hold for another few hours. She'd managed to find Cilia Thompson in her railway arch studio applying her talents to a canvas on which a cavernous mouth with tonsils like bellows opened upon a three-legged girl skipping rope on a spongy-looking tongue. A few questions had been enough to ascertain fuller information about the “gent with good taste” who'd purchased one of Cilia's master-works the previous week.
Cilia couldn't remember his name off the top of her head. Come to think of it, she reported, he'd never told her. But he'd written her a cheque which she'd photocopied, the better—Barbara thought—to prove to the world of artistic doubting Thomases that she'd actually managed to sell a canvas. She had that photocopy taped to the inside of her wooden paintbox, and she showed it off willingly, saying, “Oh yeah, the blokes name's right here. Gosh. Look at this. I wonder if he's any relation?”
Matthew King-Ryder, Barbara saw, had paid an idiotically exorbitant amount for one dog of a painting. He'd used a cheque drawn on a bank in St. Helier on the island of Jersey. Private Banking was embossed above his name. He'd scrawled the amount as if he'd been in a hurry. As perhaps he had been, Barbara thought.
How had Matthew King-Ryder happened to turn up in Portslade Street? she'd asked the artist. Cilia herself would admit, wouldn't she, that this particular row of railway arches wasn't exactly heralded throughout London as a hotbed of modern art.
Cilia shrugged. She didn't know how he'd happened upon the studio. But obviously, she wasn't the sort of girl who looked at a gift horse cross-eyed. When he'd shown up, asked to have a look about, and demonstrated an interest in her work, she was as happy as a duck in the sun to let him browse right through it. All she could report in the end was that the bloke with the chequebook had spent a good hour looking at every piece of art in the studio—Terry's as well? Barbara wanted to know. Had he asked about Terry's art? Using Terry's name?
No. He just wanted to see her paintings, Cilia explained. All of them. And when he couldn't find anything he liked, he asked if she had any others tucked away that he could see. So she'd sent him round to the flat, having phoned Mrs. Baden and told her to show him up when he arrived. He went straight there and made his selection from one of those paintings. He sent her a cheque promptly by post on the following day. “Gave me the asking price as well,” Cilia said proudly. “No dickering about it.”
And that point alone—that Matthew King-Ryder had gained access to the digs of Terry Cole, for whatever reason—made Barbara push the accelerator floorward as she whipped through Battersea back to Cilia's flat.
She didn't give a thought to what she was supposed to be doing instead of reversing into a parking space at the end of Anhalt Road. She'd got the search warrant as directed, and she'd put together a team. She'd even met them in front of Snappy Snaps in Notting Hill Gate and put the whole boiling kettle of them in the picture on what the inspector wanted them to look for in Martin Reeve's home. She'd merely omitted the information that she was supposed to accompany them. It was easy enough to justify this omission. The team she'd assembled—two members of which were amateur boxers in their free time—could shake up a house and intimidate its inhabitants far better if they had no female presence among them, diluting the threat implied by their imposing physiques and their tendency to communicate in monosyllables. Besides, wasn't she killing two birds—three or four, perhaps—by sending officers to Notting Hill to shake up and shake down the Reeves without her? While they were doing that, she would be using the time to see what information could be harvested from the Battersea end of things. Delegation of responsibility and the mark of an officer with leadership potential, she called the situation. And she pushed from her mind the nasty little voice that kept trying to call it something else.
She pressed the bell for Mrs. Baden's ground floor flat. The faint sound of hesitantly played piano music halted abruptly. The sheer curtains in the bay window flicked an inch to one side.
Barbara called out, “Mrs. Baden? Barbara Havers again. New Scotland Yard CID.”
The buzzer sounded to release the lock. Barbara scurried inside.
Mrs. Baden said graciously, “Goodness me. I'd no idea detectives were expected to work on Sundays. I hope they give you the time to go to church.”