Page 47 of Old Girls Behaving Badly

19

GINA

The room took you back in time to the seventeenth century. It was dark with oak panelling on the lower part of the walls and rich, red velvet covering the upper part. There was a gilded leather wall hanging with images of fruit and birds, plants and dragonflies. I stepped closer for a better look, but found myself sidetracked by the sight of a large tapestry. The leather work on the wall hanging was made to look ancient, but actually seemed to have been done recently. The tapestry, however, appeared very much like a seventeenth-century original. It was a scene depicting Greek figures and I felt sure I’d seen it or certainly something like it before. I began to wonder how deep Leonard was into the criminal underworld of art theft. This piece looked as if it should be in a private collection of someone far more deserving than him. I pulled out my phone and took a photograph then noticed the humidity detector on the wall beside it. At least he was looking after it.

Juliet was going through drawers and cupboards, but came back to stand beside me, empty-handed.

‘It’s not here,’ she said.

We both looked around the room in silence until I began to walk towards the windows. I pulled back the curtain to peer behind it, then stepped back and began to feel along the wooden panelling, away from the window and towards the corner of the room.

‘Can you see?’ I said. ‘Can you see that the windows aren’t even?’

Juliet looked to where I was pointing, to where there was a good foot or two more wall to the left of the second window.

‘So? What does that mean? The room is wonky, so what?’

‘You’re the one who mentioned secret panels. Help me look.’

Juliet joined me in the corner of the room and began feeling around the panelling for anything unexpected.

‘And why is the oak covering the whole wall here, when it’s only on the lower part around the rest?’

‘Gina!’ Juliet said. ‘Feel here.’

Juliet took my hand and made me run my fingers over a hole in the wood. I pushed in my forefinger, pulled and the wall of oak began moving towards us. We both stepped back to see what we’d uncovered.

‘Wow! I think we’ve found his stash,’ Juliet said.

We were looking into a secret room behind the oak panel and it was full of what I had expected to see in the loft. Vases, sculptures, both modern and antique, silverware and furniture. Nothing was displayed as such; it was purely a storage area. Some things were bubble-wrapped; others had sheets draped over them. What I could see, though, was quality. Like the tapestry in the sitting room these were all items of worth. I went to pick up a ceramic jug and stopped myself.

‘Don’t touch anything,’ I said to Juliet. ‘We don’t need our fingerprints contaminating what could well be a crime scene.’

I took out my phone and snapped a couple of pictures, then I scrolled through my photo library until I found the one of the hidden objects painting, or rather the Vanitas. There in the corner of the secret room was something I’d recognised from the painting: a sliver jug. In the painting itself it had a snake coiled around it, but I was pleased to see that the actual jug here did not. I zoomed in on the photo and saw a ceremonial sword, which was also in this secret room. Did Leonard have his prize possessions painted on canvas and displayed in plain sight when the actual items were hidden? I took careful photos of everything without touching anything. As I did, I noticed that there were paintings stacked against an antique mahogany ottoman and both Juliet and I made a beeline for them.

I used my sleeve pulled down over my hand as a glove, which I wasn’t sure was all that effective, before I riffled through them. It wasn’t there. Plenty of wonderful pieces were in front of us but not the damn watercolour.

‘It’s not here,’ I said, frustrated.

‘What’s not here?’ said a voice behind us, and both Juliet and I spun around to see Harry standing in the doorway. ‘Don’t worry, he’s still downstairs and won’t be coming up until I go down to get him. What are you both doing?’

‘Perhaps it’s time we had a chat, Harry,’ I said, and was surprised to hear how confident I sounded, because my legs had turned to mush.

‘Possibly so, but not here and not now. You need to close that up and get out of here. I need to get Leonard to bed and if he finds you up here it won’t be pretty.’

‘What do you think he’d do?’ I asked. ‘Hurt us?’

‘No,’ he said, quickly. ‘He wouldn’t do that, and besides, I wouldn’t let him. He’d get you out of his house and move all of this before you could get the police here, so don’t even bother. You need to be smarter than that.’

His phone buzzed in his pocket and he pulled it out to read the message.

‘That’s him now. I need to go down and you’ll both be gone by the time I get back up here with him. Is that clear?’

‘But I need to talk to you,’ I said again.

‘Okay, but later. I’ve still got a whole lot of food to prepare for the hordes coming tomorrow. Give me half an hour and come and see me in the kitchen.’

He didn’t wait for a response, but just left us standing in the middle of Leonard’s secret room.