Free This Thing of Darkness by Harry Bingham Page B

sign in, take a lift. A reception desk, then a corporate meeting room. Views out over the Bay.
    We’ve not been here a minute before Watkins is smouldering with impatience.
    ‘We could go and kick the door down,’ I say.
    ‘Fiona, the charge is wasting police time.’
    ‘So we kick a door down. Waste a bit less.’
    She unlooses a scowl at me, but it misses its target and goes through a couple of walls before burying itself in a secretary somewhere. What my eminent superior means is that wasting police time is a summary offence only. Triable in a magistrate’s court, and then only with the consent of the Director of Public Prosecutions. The DPP is most unlikely to think that prosecuting basically law-abiding citizens for minor charges is a sensible use of resources. So whatever it is we’re doing here will not lead to a conviction.
    That’s her logic, but I think it’s flawed.
    ‘Fossicking,’ I say. ‘We’re fossicking.’
    I’d like to tell her all about fossicking, but I can tell she’s not interested, so I shut up and watch the boats.
    A young secretary arrives shortly before Watkins detonates. She leads us down a hallway, taps at a door, steps back. We are admitted into The Presence.
    The Presence, aka Galton Evans, is a somewhat portly fifty-two-year-old. Greying beard, round the mouth and chin only. Short, slightly messy hair. Suede jacket, white open-necked shirt, desert boots. It’s a look – the clothes, the hair, the sleekly furnished office – which is trying to say, as loudly and clearly as possible, ‘I’ve got money and I don’t for a second want that to go unnoticed, but I’m cool too. Uninhibited and spontaneous.’
    There’s an appraising way in which he runs his eye over me that adds, ‘And sexually available too, by the way.’ The sort of man who might touch his lower lip with his tongue and inadvertently call me ‘babe’.
    He spreads his hands and says, ‘Ladies.’
    Watkins – mid-fifties and no heterosexual man’s idea of a good night out – says, ‘Mr Evans, you know why we’re here.’
    ‘The amazing reappearing etchings.’
    ‘Please tell us the whole story, starting with when you heard the pictures were gone.’
    Evans shrugs a little. He’s maintaining the pose, but he’s not a stupid man and he thinks carefully before answering. ‘I got a call from Marianna, my ex-wife, saying the pictures were gone. Those candlesticks too. Mustn’t forget those.’ He glances at me as he says the last bit. Wrinkles his eyes and offers a half-smile.
    ‘You were still living with Mrs Lockwood?’
    ‘No. Joint assets and all that, but the divorce hadn’t yet come through.’
    ‘And the pictures were insured with . . .?’
    ‘With my own company. We were primarily agricultural – protecting barns and crops and that sort of thing – but we had a majority stake in a small household insurance operation. The pictures were insured through that.’
    ‘So although Mrs Lockwood recovered money from the insurers, she was effectively recovering money from you?’
    Evans’s answer was sort of yes, but essentially no. I don’t quite understand the intricacies, but various reinsurance arrangements moved most of the risk on elsewhere. I don’t know why these things always have to be so complex.
    Watkins summarises. ‘OK. So you’ve lost the pictures. Your insurance company has paid up, but most of those costs are borne by third parties. Did you send a claims investigator to the scene?’
    Evans laughs. ‘No. This was my wife.’
    ‘From whom you were separated.’
    ‘Marianna wouldn’t . . . She liked those pictures. She bought them. Why contrive a theft for . . .’ He doesn’t finish his sentence, just waves his hands, but his meaning was, ‘for such a small sum of money?’
    ‘She could have pretended to lose the pictures, claim the money, then rehang the pictures once it had all blown over.’
    ‘Why? To get at me, you mean? She did get at me. Through the divorce