Giotto's Hand

And so, reporting his position on the radio, and deciding that Farmer Thompson’s cattle had probably already been turned into hamburgers and could wait, he drove into the driveway of the Old Mill House, with the man who’d stopped him jogging along behind.

“Now, sir,” he said as he got out of the car, “would you mind telling me your name?”

“Argyll. Jonathan Argyll. I came up to see someone called Forster, and when I got here there was no reply. The door was ajar, so I walked in and there he was. Still is, I imagine.”

“Aha! Shall we go and see then?”

PC Hanson walked over to the door, pushed it open lightly, and stepped into the hallway.

There was no trouble with Mr. Argyll’s powers of observation, at least. The body at the bottom of the stairs was most definitely dead, and the unnatural, skewed angle at which the head joined the neck instantly suggested a reason, as did the way in which the thinning, fair hair was matted with blood. PC Hanson had known Geoffrey Forster at a distance; he knew the man was something arty, who worked for the people at Weller House. Had done so, anyway, until Miss Beaumont died.

As there had been a spate of burglaries in the area in the past few weeks, his immediate thought was that this was another, or it was quite simply an accident. These old buildings that city dwellers so liked were, to his mind, hopelessly inconvenient, uneconomical and dangerous. Pretty enough, he supposed, with their thatch and whitewash, but nothing would ever persuade him to live in one. The staircase, now, was twisted, highly polished and slippery. He walked up it, and noticed that the top stair was loose and wobbly. It struck him, as he walked out of the house to radio for assistance, that it was well within the bounds of possibility that the man had simply slipped downstairs, bashing his head and breaking his neck as he went. He would have to wait before he could tell if anything had been stolen.

“Oy!” he called after he’d sent the radio message and emerged from the police car once more. “Where do you think you’re going?”

Argyll, who’d been walking in the direction of the front gate, looked back nervously. “Just looking around, you know,” he called back. “To see if I could find anything useful.”

Oh God, Hanson thought. One of those. He reckoned this stranger had a bit of explaining to do in any case.

“Well, don’t. Come back here where I can see you. Who are you, anyway?”

Argyll crunched his way back up the gravel path until he was next to Hanson, then explained himself. “I’m an art dealer. I came here to talk to Mr. Forster about a picture.”

“And what picture was that?”

“It’s a picture he may have owned. Had. Stolen, in fact,” he said apologetically. Hanson’s eyebrow lifted in response.

“Oh, yes?” he said flatly.

“Yes,” Argyll went on nervously. “So I was going to ask him about it. That’s why I’m here.”

“And what concern might this be of yours? Do you own this picture?”

“Oh, no.”

“Did he steal it from you?”

“Heavens, no!”

“I see. Well, sir, I suggest you just stand there. Don’t touch anything, and wait until we’re ready to take a statement.”

“Would it be useful for me to look around the house, to see if I can spot anything?”

“No, sir,” Hanson said with exaggerated patience. “Just don’t move. All right.”

And so Argyll, hands in pockets, spent the next half hour shivering in the wind, wishing he’d remembered what a cold thing an English summer was, and standing mournfully next to the police car, waiting for reinforcements to come and take his statement.

He did, however, provide one or two useful services for the police, the main one being fending off the spectators who walked past on the way out of the village, noticed the police car, stopped and came in to ask what was going on.

“Accident. Best leave it to the experts.” he told an old scruffy man with a mangy dog and a plastic bag full of frozen food who appeared at the gate first of all. This one raised an eyebrow with a knowing look, then ambled off.

“Accident.” he said again to a thuggish, thickset young man who came along a few moments later and stared at the scene with an air of almost malicious fascination. “Maybe a burglars.”

He noticed that this made the man scowl and hurry away in a furtive sort of way.

“Accident. Move along, please,” he said again to a greying woman in her mid-fifties with bright, curious eyes who also walked in to see the events. He’d always wanted to tell someone to move along, please.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” this one replied briskly, brushing aside his spurious authority with the contempt it deserved. “I’ll do no such thing. Hanson!” she called out in an unexpectedly loud voice to the policeman who’d disappeared back into the house. “Come out of there.”

And Hanson did, with surprising speed. Argyll was impressed. The man didn’t quite touch his forelock, but he was plainly very much more friendly than he had been when dealing with him.

“What in God’s name is going on here?” she asked briskly.