Holly Lester by Andrew Rosenheim Page A

space on the wall, low down in the corner. A single picture hook remained, forlornly.
    The missing picture was a Burgess watercolour, a lovely landscape of the Vale of the White Horse, using improbable colours (orange for a meadow, a sinuous green for a stream in the foreground) that somehow worked. A snip at £750, though now it seemed someone had got it for free. Why steal this, when upstairs a Tyson fetched twenty times that, and a Leonard Starker near the gallery’s front was even dearer still? In fact, you would have been hard pushed to find a cheaper picture for sale in the whole of the spring show.
    He opened the door to the vault room, thinking hard. The Burgess had been hanging there the day before at closing – he was sure he would have noticed the gap on the wall when he went to lock the vault room. So it must have gone in the night, and he opened the vault room with trepidation, expecting its window to be broken, the metal covering bars cut, the room’s contents gone.
    But nothing was amiss. The window was undisturbed, locked and safely barred; the canvases stacked against the wall looked very much like the same canvasses there when he had locked up sixteen hours before. The only odd item was a tin of Coke, half-empty, sitting on a counter top.
    He took this with him upstairs and showed it to Tara when she came in. ‘You left this downstairs,’ he said.
    She shook her head immediately. ‘Never touch the stuff. Too much sugar, too much exploitation of innocent Third World appetites. I’d ban it, if it were up to me.’
    â€˜I found it in the vault room. If it isn’t yours, who’s been in there?’
    Tara shrugged. ‘No one that I know of. Maybe Mrs D’Olivera.’
    The cleaner, but she’d left before he’d shut up shop. ‘Well, unless you’ve sold the Burgess downstairs, someone’s gone and pinched it.’
    â€˜Sold the Burgess? You don’t mean the one your friend Mrs Lester bought?’ He shook his head. ‘You mean the watercolour?’ She looked at him with the mixture of incredulity and pity that entered her voice when any watercolour was the subject of discussion.
    â€˜I think I’d better phone the police.’ Now she looked at him with even greater amazement. He could see why: half a tin of Coca-Cola and an unoccupied picture hook would seem insufficient reason to ring Inspector Plod.
    But what else could he do? he asked himself as a customer approached and saved him from further ridicule by asking Tara for help. Billings walked downstairs and went into the vault again. He examined the paintings stacked against the wall one by one; halfway through them, he found the Burgess.
    The non-theft was not the only odd occurrence, and Billings had found the usually sedate routine of his professional life punctured by a succession of unsettling events. He had arrived one morning to find a large brick on the pavement outside the gallery, and a visible dent in the metal grill that shielded the gallery’s window panes during the night. Then his post had arrived the next morning with a note from the Bolivian jewellers next door, explaining it had been mistakenly delivered there. When Billings had popped his head in at the neighbouring shop to say thank you, he had discovered that neither the receptionist nor the proprietor had any idea what he was talking about.
    And then one evening he had found Marla on his doorstep off the Goldhawk Road, holding the lead of an uncharacteristically healthy-looking Sam. ‘Yes, Marla,’ he greeted her testily.
    â€˜It’s not what you think,’ she said.
    â€˜What is it then?’
    â€˜I just thought you should know. Three times now I’ve seen a van parked just here,’ she said motioning at the kerb. ‘One time the driver was knocking on your door. I thought he must be trying to deliver something, but when I asked if I could help he said no. He wasn’t