Rembrandt's Ghost Read Online Free PDF

were decorated with dour hand-tinted foxhunting prints.
    There was a thin, worn rug on the wide-planked polished floor and a brick fireplace on the left. An electric fire brooded coldly in the hearth. Everything was paneled in dark-framed squares of exotic woods like lime, black walnut, and Brazilian cherry. The old-fashioned office chair behind the desk was upholstered in the same deep morocco leather as the desk inlay. There was an old-fashioned inkstand on the desk, complete with an onyx base, and an ebony straight pen with a bright gold nib. There was a green-shaded desk lamp on the left and a pipe rack and a tobacco jar on the right. The tobacco jar was blue Delft with a brass lid and the painted figure of an Indian in a headdress. There was a crest on the side facing Finn showing three letters, VOC, intertwined.
    The man seated in the chair was dressed in a dark suit and a shirt with a high collar. He looked like something out of a Merchant Ivory film; an Edwardian face to match the furniture: dark gray eyes above sagging pouches of seamed skin, long cheeks, thin, bloodless lips, and thinning iron gray hair swept back from a broad, heavily lined forehead that at the moment served as a resting place for a pair of very heavy-looking horn-rimmed reading glasses.
    “Sir James,” said Billy.
    The man creaked up out of the chair and bowed slightly. “Your Grace,” he replied. He held out his hand and Billy shook it. Tulkinghorn was in his seventies at least, the hand skeletal and gnarled with arthritis. Finn noticed how gently Billy took it in his.
    “This is Miss Fiona Ryan,” said Billy, introducing her.
    “Finn.” She smiled, and took the old man’s hand lightly. Tulkinghorn lowered himself into his chair and gestured toward the leather armchairs set in front of his desk. There was no small talk. The gray-haired man looked down at a pile of papers on his desk, adjusted the reading glasses, and pursed his thin, unhappy-looking lips. This, Finn thought, was not a man who smiled very much and probably never laughed.
    “This present matter is in regard to your cousin on your mother’s side, Your Grace, a Mr. Pieter Boegart, residing at, among other places”—here he glanced down at his desk and rustled through the papers—“flat nine, 51 South Street, Mayfair, W1.”
    “He disappeared as I recall,” said Billy.
    Tulkinghorn nodded. “Quite so. Precisely twelve months ago. Somewhere in the Far East as I recall, Sarawak or Brunei or some such.” Tulkinghorn slid open a drawer in his desk and took out a three-by-five color photograph. It looked like an enlarged copy of a passport picture. It showed a middle-aged man with a narrow face, thinning red hair, and a full beard. He looked like a Viking.
    “A bit of an adventurer,” Billy said.
    “That is certainly one way of describing the man,” murmured the lawyer, clearly insinuating that he had some other word for him. “At any rate Mr. Boegart left instructions for me in the event that he had not returned to London within a year or had not somehow contacted me to change those instructions. These instructions were also to apply in the event of his death by violence rather than natural causes. The year was up Wednesday week.”
    “How old was… is this Boegart person?” Finn asked.
    “Mr. Boegart is fifty-eight, or he was as of the third of this month.”
    “And what does he have to do with me?”
    The old man neatened the pile of papers in front of him. His lips thinned a little more and his frown deepened. He reached out to the pipe rack, chose a curved briar, and filled it from the jar. Reaching into the pocket of his jacket, he removed a plain kitchen match and lit it on a sulfur yellow thumbnail. He puffed, filling the air with aromatic smoke.
    He took the pipe out of his mouth and coughed briefly. Then he spoke. “As I understand it, Mr. Boegart was your mother’s lover for a number of years, her paramour, so to speak.” Tulkinghorn cleared his