The Rembrandt Secret Read Free

telephone call which had brought him back to London, his father asking him to return from his work in Holland.
    ‘I need to talk to you,’ Owen had said, his voice shivering on the edge of panic. ‘If you could just come home.’
    He had done so at once, because his father had never been possessive or demanding. Marshall might have longed for more closeness as a child, might have grieved alone for the loss of his mother, but in his teens he realised that his father’s affection had never been withheld. Just neutralised. Having lost his wife so unexpectedly in a plane crash, Owen had spent the next decade in waiting, almost as though some other plane – real or ephemeral – might bring her back. As though, if he refused to accept her passing, she would one day arrive at some spiritual terminal. Where he would be waiting by the gate to bring her home.
    But she never did come back, and Marshall watched as his father finally faced the truth, ten years after her death. He watched the grief, sitting with his father in the country house, staring into country fires or country views. He listened to old memories that had never been his, memories from before his birth, and realised that inside some men there is one space for one woman. And if that woman is lost, the space is never filled again. With a father so bereft, Marshall absorbed his own grief alone, and by the time Owen invited him to talk about his mother’s death,she had been parted with. As beautiful, but out of time, as his grandfather’s old French paintings.
    His thoughts coming back to the present, Marshall prompted, ‘You said the money had gone.’
    ‘All gone,’ Owen said, nodding.
    ‘How?’
    ‘Debts.’
    ‘
Debts?
’ Marshall was shaken. His father had never intimated that money was tight. ‘You never said you were struggling. The last show was a success—’
    Still seated, Owen turned his face upwards to his son, fixing his gaze. ‘I’ve been cheated.’
    I’ve been cheated
… The words seemed to swell in the gallery, skim along the picture rails, slide across the red silk on the walls, and then slither up the staircase into the dark beyond. A creeping sense of unease swept over Marshall, the same feeling he had had as a boy sleeping in the flat above, remembering the old story of the building. And listening for the ghost of the unknown soldier. The young man who came out at night, who walked around the gallery below, then crept up the stairs in the darkness.
    ‘Who cheated you?’
    ‘I should never have believed him.’
    ‘Who? Who are you talking about?’
    ‘Manners.’
    Manners. The name fell like a corn thresher, slicing the air between the two men. Tobar Manners, one of hisfather’s oldest friends and a fellow dealer. Tobar Manners, with his small pink hands and dandelion hair. Tobar Manners, quick, clever, mercurial, always so charming to his father, but another man to Marshall. Indeed, it was Manners who had told Marshall about the murdered soldier, taking delight in frightening a child with stories of a ghost and then laughing, insisting he was only teasing, but knowing that he had planted a poisonous thought. Many disturbed nights of his childhood Marshall put down to Tobar Manners. Many times, waking at a sudden noise, he blamed his unease on his father’s changeling friend.
    ‘What did he do?’
    Owen shook his head.
    ‘Dad, what did he do?’
    ‘I’ve been in debt for some time,’ Owen said slowly, the words crisp, as though he could keep back his panic by the control of his delivery. ‘Business has been bad. The collectors aren’t investing, and the auctions have been hit too. A couple of galleries have even closed down.’ He paused, grabbed at a breath. ‘In the last few years, I overbought. I came across some good paintings and thought I’d have no problem selling them. But then there was the credit crunch. Not many people buy at these times …’
    ‘But the big collectors?’
    ‘Are holding back.’
    ‘All of