The Moon Tunnel(29)

‘Richard Dadd. A Moonlight Vision. There’s a sketch for the work in the Ashmolean at Oxford.’

‘And that would have been worth…?’

Tobias shrugged: ‘The sketch is worth £600,000 today. We could be talking twice that – perhaps a lot more. The work was unsigned – but then so was the sketch, and most of Dadd’s output in his later life. There would be no doubt about the authenticity. His style and technique are unique – in the true sense of the word.’

‘Insurance?’

‘I don’t think so. Many private collectors took the view that their pictures were irreplaceable and to the confident Victorians insurance was often seen as expensive. I suspect it was a decision they regretted. Anyway, when Sir Robyn picked up the Dadd it was practically worthless – Dadd was in many ways a futuristic painter. Closer to our tastes today, in my view.’

‘Did the burglars get away with anything else?’

Tobias shrugged: ‘Frankly, I’m not an expert. You could try one of the guides.’

‘And the Dadd was part of the collection because of the moonlight subject?’

‘Yes, perhaps. There’s another theory – my theory, actually – that Sir Robyn’s purchase was double-edged. The Victorians loved moonlight for the romantic effect, of course, but also there was its association with madness, another obsession of the time. Richard Dadd died in Broadmoor Hospital in 1886. He’d spent most of his life in asylums. He killed his father with a kitchen knife. He was a lunatic.’

Dryden glanced out of one of the tall, elegant Long Gallery windows and saw the moon rising over the box hedge. He wandered aimlessly through the rest of the house. Celia Johnson was by the exit, a bouncer in tweed.

‘I do hope you enjoyed your visit,’ she said.

‘The wartime burglary here – does anyone remember the details? What else was taken besides the pictures – that kind of thing?’

She clutched at the silk scarf at her throat: ‘No. No, not at all. I think everyone has gone – Miss Hilgay, perhaps?’

Outside the sun had set, but the waxing moon had risen now, and floated in the moat like a drowned face.





12


Humph’s cab flew back towards Ely and at precisely 6.00pm they saw the Octagon Tower on the distant cathedral light up, the silver-white halogen floodlights picking it out clearly on the horizon. The smog had seeped away from the town streets along with the warmth of the day and now the darkness of the Fens crowded in, pushing the light back into shop doorways or into amber pools at the base of lampposts. It was one of the things that Dryden loved about the place: the way that, unlike the big cities, the night brought a relief from the intrusion of light as shadows filled the alleyways of the old town.

Humph dropped Dryden outside The Crow and set off for one of his regular weekly runs – ferrying a nightclub bouncer from Prickwillow out to his job in Newmarket. The Crow was closed but Dryden used his key to enter by the back door. The newsroom brought its familiar feeling of claustrophobia: you could have played five-aside football in his old office at the News – home to more than 100 journalists. The Crow’s version could just about accommodate a game of table tennis. He felt a pang of loss for a once-glamorous career, closely followed by a rush of guilt when he considered what the crash had done to Laura’s life; at least he could still hold a Biro.

He logged on to his PC, secured an internet connection and browsed the local council site. He called up the electors’ roll and punched Hilgay into the search box. Four names appeared: three in one household out on the Fen in a nearby village and one in an address on the Jubilee Estate. If this was the last living member of the family which had once owned Osmington Hall then they’d certainly fallen on the hardest times of all. The Jubilee gobbled up about 80 per cent of the county’s social services budget in the city and about 75 per cent of police time – benefits for which the residents were less than appreciative.

He switched to Google and typed in ‘Richard Dadd’. From artcyclopedia he found a link to artprice.com and found a Dadd auctioned in New York in 2003 – a canvas ten inches by six, it had fetched $2.6m. Dryden looked at his ruler, whistled, and searched for the website of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. There he found that many of its works were reproduced online. Dryden tapped in ‘Dadd’ and ‘moonlight’.

A picture appeared and Dryden felt a sudden cold-ness: the sketch showed a moon rising through the leaves of a forest, an adolescent boy in rustic smock was watching it rise, as if witnessing a vision. The scene was dreamlike, and the nearby woods hid half-seen faces of elves and fairies. The picture held a spell, and Dryden understood why someone might have killed to get it. He hit the printout button, pocketed the A4 reproduction and closed down the PC.