The Messiah Secret

He looked round. ‘Now, we’ll be making a start in here first thing tomorrow morning. The other chaps are checking the rest of the house, making sure that we know what else there is to be assessed. The good news for you is that there’s a very large kitchen, and almost all of the china and ceramics we’ve found so far are already in there. I don’t think it’ll take you all that long to check them over. In the meantime, let me introduce you to the other chaps and give you the guided tour. It’s a fascinating old house with some very interesting features.’

He led the way back into the hall and across to the foot of the staircase.

‘What the devil happened here?’ Angela asked, stopping short when she saw a missing banister halfway up the staircase.

Mayhew coughed, and turned an alarming shade of puce. ‘That is where the old man . . . er, died,’ he said. ‘Apparently he was found hanging from that piece of banister. Terrible business.’

Angela noticed a large brown stain on the flagstones near her feet, and looked away. There had obviously been a lot of blood. She decided it was time to change the subject.

‘Roger told me about the multiple wills Wendell-Carfax made.’

Mayhew smiled and relaxed a little. ‘Mischievous old sod. He was the last of the line, you know. Never married, no children. Just a few cousins who’re now all busily fighting each other over their share of the inheritance.’

He led the way up to a wide corridor on the first floor, spacious bedrooms opening up on both sides of it. ‘As you’ve probably guessed, Oliver was a quite a character, probably slightly mad. But his father – his name was Bartholomew Wendell-Carfax – was as nutty as a fruitcake. That’s him at the end of the corridor.’

Where the corridor ended was a small sitting area, tall windows offering a view of the parkland outside the house. Between the two windows was a painting, almost life-sized, that showed a middle-aged dark-haired man wearing what looked like a tweed suit. He was seated in a chair and looking slightly away from the painter, towards a roaring wood fire, a coat of arms cut into the wall above the inglenook.

‘He doesn’t look mad,’ Angela said, stopping in front of the painting and staring up at it. ‘In fact, he looks rather attractive, in a sort of avuncular, country-house kind of way. He reminds me of a character you’d find in a P.G. Wodehouse novel.’

‘Perhaps,’ Mayhew said, ‘but he was definitely odd. He had several portraits painted of himself and, even though he was running pretty low on funds, he commissioned four self-portraits from a very minor local artist named Edward Montgomery, and apparently paid quite a lot of money for them.’

‘Maybe he didn’t know how bad his financial situation was,’ Angela said.

‘Oh, he knew, all right, but that wasn’t what was odd – it was the subjects he chose. According to the guidebook we found in one of the boxes in the salon, two of the pictures were like this one, conventional portraits. But in the other two, Bartholomew was depicted as a young man, in one dressed like a Sioux chief, feathered headdress and all, and in the other like a member of Indian royalty. The artist had to work from photographs Bartholomew supplied of himself when he was about twenty-five. That’s what I mean by nutty – what was the point of having a portrait painted showing him when he was young when he was already well over seventy? And why was he wearing such extraordinary outfits?’

‘You know, that kind of thing was quite the fashion in the early part of the twentieth century,’ Angela said. ‘A lot of society figures had their portraits done in exotic outfits. So where are the paintings now? Somewhere here?’

‘The conventional portraits are in the house, but not the other two. Bartholomew managed to sell them soon after they were painted.’

‘Well, maybe it was just a money-making exercise after all. So why was he so short on funds?’

Mayhew stepped over beside Angela and they both looked out over the acres of peaceful parkland, so much in contrast, Angela thought, to the chaos of the house.

‘According to the guidebook – which is quite a good read, by the way – Bartholomew’s parents were very comfortably off. They owned huge tranches of land in East Anglia and had a couple of hundred tenant farmers, plus stock market investments, all that kind of thing. After that, the family fortune shrunk considerably, for all the usual reasons – the First World War and the Depression, plus Bartholomew’s Folly. And that’s another reason for the damage you saw. There are bits of panelling torn off in various areas of the house, and even a few holes dug through some of the walls.’

Mayhew paused, clearly waiting for Angela to ask the obvious question. She raised her eyebrows, but said nothing. He sighed.