From London Far by Michael Innes Page B

healthy – which makes me feel that I must take a sporting view of the uncomfortable things which happened later.’ Jean Halliwell paused. ‘I’m like you,’ she continued presently. ‘If those people didn’t have, besides a great deal of efficiency, a rich vein of sheer muddle I should be worms’ meat at this moment.’ She uncurled her legs from under her, stretched them out before the fire as if for Meredith’s contemplation and her own, and nodded. ‘Worms’ meat,’ she repeated. ‘But I anticipate. And, really, the yarn is stretching out interminably.
    ‘So let me hurry on. The problem was to get a fresh line on the criminals, since the scent of the Pentlands affair was a bit cold. Now, it could hardly have been an isolated enterprise. For simply to come by an eighth-century pirate hoard would not be at all an easy road to wealth unless one had an extensive connexion in the whole trade – the whole trade of illicit trafficking in works of art, that is to say. You probably know that there has always been such a trade and that the war produced quite a boom in it. Well, here were fairly large-scale operators, and they had a distinctive technique. Could I come on any trace of it elsewhere? Suddenly I remembered an extraordinary story that had been told me by a man in the AMPC here in town. It was about Horton House.’
    Meredith sat up. ‘And the Venus ?’
    ‘Well, yes – in a way. Some months before the house received a direct hit and was destroyed there was a very queer false alarm immediately after a heavy raid. A time-bomb had been located just between the house and the river, all the appropriate personnel turned up, and there was the regular evacuation – which meant, it seems, just the old Duke and a few servants. Everything looked quite as it should do when the Duke went off in a taxi – but when he got tired of sitting in his club and decided to go back and see if his Town house was still in existence he found that the whole circus had just faded out. Being an intelligent old person, he had decided within ten minutes that the affair was an elaborately planned screen for robbery. So he hurried about the house – a great barn of a place it must have been – and was astounded to find that nothing was missing. He even went down to a deep cellar where he had stowed his Titian. But here the lady was – vulnerable to attack, you might say, but safe and sound, nevertheless. Or so he thought. And of course he had to decide that his shrewd notion of a robbery was fallacious, after all, and that there had just been a glorious muddle. So he held his peace, feeling that to clamour for an investigation would merely be getting in the way. Now, what do you think of that? It struck me at once as a coup of a very high-class order indeed. There must have been masses of valuable stuff to lift for the asking. But nothing was actually taken except one extremely valuable painting – of which a copy had been prepared, at least good enough to stand the scrutiny of an old gentleman in a cellar. I don’t doubt that the Duke knew the lady’s every curve and dimple, but the light would be bad and the circumstances agitating.’
    Jean Halliwell paused, perhaps to observe the effect of this sally on a respectable student of Juvenal and Martial. ‘I don’t know what happened when Horton House was really bombed, but I believe it is supposed that the Titian escaped. By that time, however, the real Titian was in hiding while awaiting disposal. And you and I are the only honest people who know its whereabouts – or its whereabouts three hours ago.
    ‘So here was a not altogether dissimilar affair. At Horton House there had been another concealing of theft under cloak of a hazard of war. And these people were equally pleased with one of the world’s greatest paintings or a collection of Viking helmets and Iberian bronzes. In other words, they were in business on a grand scale. And with uncomfortably large tracts of Europe