“Is this it?” asked Bella, a note of disappointment in her voice.

“Yes. This is all there is.” I glanced around. Several windows were open. When Bantock was alive, that wouldn’t have meant much. Now it implied occupation. His family, perhaps? If so, I didn’t want them to notice us. “Shall we walk on?”

“Aren’t we going to take a closer look?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, I didn’t drive a hundred and fifty miles just to walk on. Let’s see if there’s anybody in.” She started towards the door.

“Bella!”

But she wasn’t to be deterred. Pausing only to stick out her tongue at the statue, she rapped the knocker. Then, when several silent seconds had passed and I’d begun to hope she might give up, she rapped it again, louder.

At which the garage door slowly swung up and a figure appeared beneath it, craning across the bonnet of an old Triumph sports car to operate the handle. He was a slightly built man in corduroy trousers and check shirt, a narrow squirrel-like face framed by tufts of ginger hair. He peered out at me with raised inquisitive eyebrows and all I seemed able to say was a weak “Good morning.”

“It’s afternoon, actually,” he replied. “The afternoon of a long and trying day. I’d be grateful-enormously grateful-if you didn’t make it any more trying than it already has been.”

“Sorry. I-”

“Was just nosing around the scene of the crime? Believe me, you’re not the first. And it would be unreasonable of me to expect you to be the last, wouldn’t it?”

“We are sorry,” said Bella, walking boldly across to him, hand outstretched. “But we’re not what you think.”

“No?” He sounded sceptical, but Bella’s smile was hard to resist. His head twitched slightly, as if he were about to bow, even kiss her hand. Instead, he merely shook it. “What then, might I ask?”

“My brother-” She glanced towards me, acknowledging the misrepresentation with a faint flick of the eyebrows. “Knew Lady Paxton.”

“Really?” Doubt wrestled for a moment with susceptibility, then gave way. “Well, pleased to meet you, Mr…”

“Timariot. Robin Timariot.”

“Henley Bantock.” We shook hands. “Nephew and heir of Oscar Bantock.”

“My… er… sister, Bella… Timariot.”

“Delighted, I’m sure.”

“Lady Paxton’s death came as a… a terrible shock. I… felt I had to…”

“That’s quite all right. Why don’t you both come inside?” He led the way and we fell in behind, Bella treating me to a triumphant smirk. “I’m sorry if I was a little curt. This is the first day the police would allow me past the door and I’ve been attempting to sort things out. But the interruptions have been continual. Neighbours thinking I might be a squatter. Tradesmen flapping unpaid bills under my nose.” We were heading for the rear of the house, taking the same route the postman had that fateful morning. “And, just before you came, a well-dressed middle-aged man weeping-yes, I do mean weeping-on the doorstep. He was in floods of tears. It was quite pitiful.”

“Who was he?” I asked.

“I really couldn’t say. You might have known him. I’m surprised you didn’t meet him in the lane.” The studio was in front of us now, commanding a broad view to the south, where the garden sloped away. It was an airy structure, lit by enough windows to resemble a conservatory. The blinds were half down, but, through the gaps beneath them, I could see disorderly piles of canvases, large and small, covered in aggressive swirls of colour; Oscar Bantock had been nothing if not prolific. “As a result, I’ve made scant progress. Which is inconvenient, to say the least.” He opened the kitchen door and ushered us in. “Call me superstitious if you like, but I’ve no intention of staying here overnight.”

And so we entered the house where two people had died-violently and recently. But their deaths had left no presence there, not one I could detect anyway. There were no bloodstains, of course, but, even if there had been, I’m not sure it would have helped me conjure up what had happened. The studio, bathed in sallow light, filled with half a lifetime’s unappreciated work and its impedimenta: canvases, frames, brushes, paints, palettes, easels, rags, pots of varnish, bottles of turps and a spattered smock gathering dust in its folds. I’d never seen Oscar Bantock alive and I couldn’t imagine him dead, a stark slumped form beneath one of the benches. There was no helpful chalk outline of the corpse to tell me where he’d been found and I hadn’t the heart to ask his nephew. Not that Henley Bantock looked or sounded like a man gripped by grief. He stood between us in the kitchen, watching calmly as we stared through the open doorway into the room where his uncle had been choked to death with a noose of picture-hanging wire. Then he sighed heavily.

“It’s going to be quite a task, shifting that lot. And cataloguing it, of course. I can’t abide the stuff myself. I mean, why couldn’t he have turned out tasteful landscapes? But it sets some people’s pulses racing, so who am I to complain?”

“Lady Paxton liked his work,” I murmured.

“Yes. So I believe. You could say she died for his art.” Catching my eye, he added: “I’m sorry. That was unfeeling of me.”

“The picture she wanted. Black Widow. Is it here?”

“Wrapped up in the lounge. I haven’t moved it. Uncle Oscar must have had it ready for her, I suppose.”

“Could we see it?”

“Why not? Who knows, you might want to…” He frowned. “Were you a close friend of Lady Paxton, Mr. Timariot?”

“Not close, no.”

“A friend of the family, perhaps?”

“Not really.”

“Only one of her daughters is due to meet me here this afternoon. I wondered if…”

“We would like to see the painting,” put in Bella with a winning smile. “If that’s possible.”

“Certainly. Follow me.” He led us out of the kitchen, down a short passage and into a sitting-room. It was comfortably if untidily furnished. There were well-stocked bookshelves and several paintings by Bantock-or fellow Expressionists-lining the walls. A parcel stood on the only table, the wrappings folded open to reveal the back of a canvas, already hooked and strung with copper-coated wire. Henley lifted the picture out and propped it against the wall behind the table, then stepped back to let us admire it. “The English Rouault, they said of him in the sixties. I think this one dates from that period. No better or worse than the rest, in my opinion. But, happily, my opinion counts for little.”

Black Widow measured about three feet by two foot six. It depicted a woman’s face-or a young boy’s-seen against a pale blue background. The hair and shoulders were splashes of black and purple, the face yellow tinged with red, the eyes nowhere save in the contrivance of dab and daub, their gaze-solemn, averted, downcast, defiant-a haunting mix of whatever you wanted to read there: the spider, the widow, the murderess, the victim. There was nothing pretty or comforting about it. Louise Paxton hadn’t wanted this picture to brighten her wallpaper. But precisely why she’d wanted it we’d never know now.

I stepped back to view it from the doorway. As I did so, Bella moved closer to Henley, cocking her head to squint at the image before her. “I’d have to agree with you, Mr. Bantock,” she said with a chuckle. “Not quite my idea of art.” I saw Henley glance appreciatively at the smooth T-shirted outline of her breasts beneath her linen jacket. His idea of art was fairly obvious: more Ingres than Rouault, I’d have guessed. “Inheriting all this must have caused you quite a few problems.”

“It certainly has. The police. The press. You wouldn’t believe it.”

“Have you travelled far today?”

“From London.”

“You must have made an early start, then.”

“Indeed I did.”

I edged out into the passage. There were the stairs, leading up to the room she’d died in. Why not go up and take a look? Henley would tell Bella his entire life story if she continued to encourage him. She was assessing him, of course. I knew that. Worth getting to know, or not? Not, I suspected. But clearly she hadn’t yet reached that conclusion. And until she did…