Joe had the clear impression she was trying to provoke him.

“There are others perhaps more attainable … Did the Stubbs take your fancy? The Gainsborough? Cecily Lady Truelove is, as we speak, locking up her Lancret, secreting her Seurat, I believe.”

He meant it to sting and, hearing her sharp intake of breath, he guessed he’d been successful. She disengaged with a fencer’s flourish and stepped between him and the painting. Her eyes locked on his in disdain. “What are you? Cecily Truelove’s guard-dog? You are very rude, even for a policeman!”

“I apologise. I acknowledge that the goods you deal in are vastly more expensive than a pound of pippins. The last thing I’d want to do is ruin Truelove’s chances of selling off his birthright. Suffering from straightened financial circumstances, as he is at the moment, he may be minded to do just that.”

She had not known.

The pallor of her face, the long silence before she replied told Joe all he wanted to know. Was he being an utter cad, revealing Truelove’s position? Yes, he was. He could make out a case with no difficulty. It was a caddish thing to do and far outside his usual meticulous manners. But the rebellious streak in Joe took up arms alongside his unfashionable belief in the rights of women to live their lives with the freedom accorded their male counterparts. The men in Truelove’s world could learn of his imminent destitution by the simple exchange of information from one deeply buttoned arm chair to the next in a St. James’s club, between the rows of leather-covered benches in the Houses of Parliament, between shots on the grouse moor. Who would whisper a lifesaving truth in Dorothy’s ear? No one. She and her father were not on the circulation list when it came to scurrilous confidences, distanced from the English establishment as they were by class and nationality. Even set apart by their wealth, which brought with it a certain mistrust and, in these hard times, envy. If Joe slipped away into the dark now and left this girl, however worldly and uncongenial, to be hoodwinked by Truelove, he would hold himself guilty of neglect of duty for ever more.

At last, Joe had chosen to pick up the gauntlet thrown down at his feet some time ago. A l’outrance, Truelove! To the end, however bitter!

“What are you trying to say?” she asked.

“That Lavinia Truelove, who largely—and generously—financed her husband’s activities during their married life, died having almost exhausted her resources. James may have been her sole heir but he inherited no more than the few thousand that remained of the marriage settlement with which to run his estate and his academic and altruistic concerns.” He kept his voice level, the tone that of a trusted family lawyer. “A Lavinia remaining alive might well have been able to intercede with her father on her husband’s behalf when the bottom was reached, but with her death in questionable circumstances being whispered about on all sides, it’s unlikely that he would find himself able to help a man suspected of killing his daughter. The pay of a government minister will hardly maintain a staff of five in Town, let alone the fifty he presently employs in the country. You will be aware of the present straightened circumstances of the English landowner, indeed, the whole nation? James Truelove, I think, will have calculated to the nearest thousand what he can get for his Canaletto and all the other glories. I suggest that if you have an interest, you seek out the man himself and verify what I have just told you. If I correctly understand your circumstances, the truth ought not to be kept from you.”

He would have sworn she hadn’t known about Truelove’s dire financial circumstances and he thought, from her silence, that she was in confused retreat but her answer, when it came, parried his attack. It was delivered with a growing assurance, even scorn. “Oh, old news! Yes, you’re right. James is contemplating auctioning off one or two of his paintings, but we’re hardly talking of a closing-down sale. He’ll be buying others to replace them. More modern in taste maybe. Pictures degenerate. They have to be moved on before they near the end of their useful existence. Before boredom and decay set in. I would certainly advise James to dispose of this Canaletto. It’s of England but it’s not English. It’s … displaced. Rootless. A refugee. Like me,” she added, revealing an unexpected crack in her confidence. “Maybe you’d like to buy it? You don’t seem to be a friend of his, but he could probably let you have it for … ten thousand pounds. Do you have ten thousand pounds, Commissioner?”

“If I had cash to spare I’d spend it on a Whistler,” he said blandly. “Tell me, now you’ve done your audit—how do you value the ancestors in the Great Hall? There are some impressive signatures on those canvasses.”

At last a feeling look and a half smile. “No idea. I’ve looked, of course. But I’m not very keen on selling off … people. One’s own people. I have no ancestors I can name, let alone look at. My father doesn’t even remember who his grandparents were. I feel the lack of background acutely. At home, I drink cocktails with men whose people crossed the ocean aboard the Mayflower; here, I take tea with the bony descendants of the Norman Conqueror. I expect you know—we are …” She reached for a word and came up with two—both of them French. “Parvenus … arrivistes … Why does it sound so much less insulting to confess it in French?”

He realised she was waiting for a response. An acknowledgement that she had just surrendered more than a confidence: an advantage. “I can’t for the moment come up with an English word for what you’re describing, Miss Despond. ‘Johnny-Come-Lately’ doesn’t quite do it—he’s a character from a nursery rhyme, surely? Perhaps that tells you something of our national character. We have always accepted that talent, wherever it has its roots, will transplant and flourish in our soil.” He added, teasingly, “Handel … Disraeli … our Royal family … and, yes, Canaletto, for starters.”

She listened patiently to his burbling, still getting his measure, he thought.

“But surely there were painters in your homeland? Hungary, it’s rumoured. Somewhere in eastern Europe?”

“Refugees travel light, Commissioner. If I had portraits of my ancestors I would never sell them. It smacks of the slave market. Oh, I know that they are no more than dabs of oil on canvas but I can’t bear to see faces and figures that must once have been dear to someone coming under the hammer. Being valued by the likes of Clarence Audley, ogled in the sale-room by any rag-tag-and-bobtail.” Her sneer made it clear that he answered this description.

“Were you aware that two miniatures of Truelove’s came up at Christie’s this week? Ancestors who disappeared from the house nearly thirty years ago?”

“Yes. It was I who drew Papa’s attention to them. I research the catalogues for him. He decided to buy them and present them to James as a token of our esteem this weekend.”

“A delicate gesture. A ‘sweetener,’ as it’s called in the trade.”

The half smile became a full one. “He was thwarted on the day by a low-down trick—a ‘spoiler,’ as it’s called in the trade. Performed by yourself, I believe?”

“I was, indeed, the bobtail in question.”

She appeared to relent slightly. “Anyway, no more of James’s pictures will suffer that ignominy. It was wrong of me to dangle the Canaletto in front of your nose. There are more ways than one, Commissioner, of righting a listing ship and getting it safely to harbour.”

The implication was unmistakable. Joe sighed. How could clever girls like Dorcas and Dorothy be so taken in? Why would they refuse to see the truth when it was spelled out to them?

“Shovel on fresh cargo? Or jettison the existing load? Both?”

“You’ll have to wait and see, won’t you, Commissioner?” She left him with a smile he could have sworn she’d learned from Leonardo.