Blood on the Wood Read Online Free PDF Page B

luck?’
    â€˜Can’t do any harm. Enjoy the camp.’
    He probably would, in spite of the countryside. Eight hours of political discussion would be Max’s idea of a day well spent and he’d be capable of finding somebody to play chess with on an Arctic ice floe, let alone among all that earnest youth. I waved to him and went on up the hill to the house, wishing I’d had time to draw him out on Harry Hawthorne’s interest in the Venns. This time, although the sun was on the house again and the stonework glowing as before, I liked it less. Smug and privileged, it seemed to me, curled up round its secret. I’d worked up a useful head of anger against Oliver Venn by the time I was ringing the doorbell.
    *   *   *
    It was wasted. I could feel it oozing away like seawater from a beached jellyfish once in the atmosphere of that well-ordered household. The maid opened the door to me, entirely polite although I’d given them no warning I was coming. Would I care to wait while she went up and told Mr Venn I was here? She put me in the studio and while I was there Felicia Foster came running in, fresh and cool in a pale green dress with a broad ribbon belt, an annoyed look on her face.
    â€˜Daniel, you might have—’ She stopped short when she saw me. ‘Oh, I’m sorry. I heard Annie opening the front door and I thought it was him at last. He was supposed to be back yesterday but he loses all sense of time when he’s out collecting.’
    She sounded more like a bossy sister than a girl longing for her lover’s return but she recovered and went into hostess mode. Had Annie offered me tea? Mr Venn would be down in a minute. She made no attempt to find out what I wanted with him or why I was back so soon, uninvited. I’d been wondering if the rest of the family knew about Oliver Venn’s deception and thought probably not. Steps in the hall. She stood up, said she’d leave me with Mr Venn and whisked out in a swirl of cotton and lace.
    â€˜Good afternoon, Miss Bray. It’s nice to see you again.’
    But Oliver Venn’s face said something else entirely. He knew the game was up.
    I said politely but firmly, following Emmeline’s instructions, ‘I’m afraid there seems to have been a mistake.’
    *   *   *
    Stubbornness I know about. If you’re in the campaigning business you come to recognise all varieties of it. Emmeline’s stubbornness, simply refusing to accept that things won’t arrange themselves the way she wants them. The padded stubbornness of a statesman (Tory or Liberal variety, they’re each as bad as the other) whose family hasn’t changed its mind in three generations and sees no reason to start now. The bone-headed stubbornness of somebody who believes what his daily paper tells him and won’t hear otherwise. Oliver Venn’s stubbornness was a new kind to me. He sat there on the fruit and leaf patterned sofa in his old smoking jacket with ink stains on his fingers, listened courteously to what I was saying and denied everything. Denied it as if the whole thing had happened in a different universe and it concerned him only because I would insist on talking about it. Round one, he flatly denied that the picture was a copy.
    â€˜Christie’s say so.’
    A wave of his plump little hand dismissed Christie’s.
    â€˜I’ve actually spoken to the man who copied it, John Valentine Dent. He stayed in this house and did it just a few weeks ago.’
    Widening eyes and a brief pursing of the lips suggested I was guilty of bad taste.
    â€˜I can see that it was hard for you to part with the picture, but we’re sure we could come to some arrangement about that. If you could invite the man from Christie’s down here…’
    A small shake of the head.
    â€˜Well, what do you suggest, then?’
    So it was round two and he went on the attack, if you