The Missing Dovedale Topaz Portrait

Chapter One — The Empty Frame

The Cheltenham Gallery of Fine Arts smelled of fresh paint, beeswax, and Sir Basil Overton's nerves, which were the strongest of the three.

"Lady Verity! Lord Alexander! Thank heavens." Sir Basil seized Alexander's hand and pumped it as though trying to draw water. "It is gone. Vanished. Stolen in the night, and the unveiling is TOMORROW."

Before them, hung in the place of honour on the gallery's great crimson wall, was the largest, handsomest, emptiest picture frame Verity had ever seen. Gilt enough to blind a magpie, and containing precisely nothing.

"The portrait," said Verity.

"The portrait!" Sir Basil wailed. "Mr. Thaddeus Wren's masterpiece. Lady Amelia Dovedale, wearing the famous Dovedale topaz parure, painted for the exhibition's centrepiece. Three months of sittings. And this morning — air! A frame with no face!"

Alexander leaned close to the empty frame and peered at the wall behind it, as though the painting might be hiding there out of shyness.

Verity was already examining the frame itself. The hanging wire was intact — not cut, not frayed. "It was lifted off," she said. "Carefully. Whoever took it knew how pictures hang."

"And the parure?" asked Alexander. "The actual topazes?"

"Safe!" Sir Basil drew himself up. "Locked in its case in the gallery office, not a stone disturbed. Which only deepens the mystery! Who steals a painting of jewels and leaves the jewels?"

Verity produced her peppermint tin, selected one with the gravity of a judge. "Someone," she said, "who wants the picture more than the stones. That is a very particular sort of someone."

At that moment a small, round man in a porter's uniform hurried in, wringing his cap. This was Digby, the night porter.

"My lord, my lady, I never heard a thing," Digby said miserably. "I does my rounds at ten, and at midnight I has my cocoa — Miss Fenn brings it, bless her — and then I must have nodded off, for I woke at dawn with my cheek on the duty book and the word 'waltz' wrote across my forehead in ink."

"You were drugged?" asked Alexander.

"Or merely Digby," said Sir Basil unkindly.

"Tell me about the cocoa," said Verity.

"Half past eleven, regular as church. Last night it tasted uncommon sweet. I drank it down, sat by the front door, and dreamed I was waltzing with a duchess. When I woke —" he gestured helplessly at the empty frame.

"Did you see anyone? Hear anything? Half-wake, even?"

Digby screwed up his face. "There was... a gentleman. Carrying a picture under his arm, big as a tea tray. I waved him through. I thought — the frame man, come back for something. Apron all dusty with gold."

"The frame man," Verity repeated. "Mr. Jonas Flick, who made this frame?"

"That's him, my lady. Though I only half saw him. My eyes was full of waltz."

Alexander volunteered to demonstrate how the thief must have lifted the painting off its hooks, and in doing so caught his sleeve on a neighbouring landscape and was obliged to catch it with his foot, his knee, and finally his chin. The landscape survived. Alexander's dignity did not.

"Most instructive," said Verity, offering him a peppermint. "Our thief lifted the canvas straight up and off — no yanking, no cutting. A professional picture-handler."

Sir Basil was wringing his hands again. "Lady Amelia is prostrate. The artist is — well, you shall meet Mr. Wren. He is taking it remarkably well, which I find suspicious in itself."

"Artists," said Alexander, rubbing his chin, "are always suspicious. It is the berets."

"Mr. Wren does not wear a beret," said Sir Basil. "He wears a smock with seventeen pockets, and he keeps saying the oddest thing. He keeps saying, 'The likeness was true. Every jewel faithful.'"

Verity stopped with the peppermint halfway to her mouth. "Every jewel faithful?"

"His boast, my lady. He claims a jeweller could set stones from his canvas — that he paints gems so truly you could tell each stone apart."

"Could you indeed," Verity murmured. "Alexander — I think we should meet Mr. Wren. And after that, I want to see the parure. And after that, Digby, I am going to want a word with your cocoa."