CHAPTER FIVE — A VERY EXPENSIVE EMPTY ROOM
Carol had avoided the old loading yard for so many years that Daniel had to drive slowly while she recognized the streets.
A supermarket now occupied the site of Bellweather’s warehouse, but a narrow brick annex survived behind the loading docks.
The annex had become a frame shop operated by a cheerful woman named Nessa, who greeted Carol like an unexpected relative.
Nessa was Peter’s niece, and she still kept his stoneworking apron hanging above her counter.
She listened without interruption while Julian explained the auction and the brass plate.
Then she locked the front door and brought them into a workshop crowded with picture frames, clamps, and stacks of discarded hardwood.
She opened a cabinet and removed a plaster cast of the pear seller’s base.
Daniel saw the shape of an empty rectangle where the brass plate belonged.
Nessa said Peter had made casts of each base shortly before the statues were scattered.
He had been concerned that Bellweather might replace the figures with copies and then accuse the workers of taking objects that were never theirs.
The cast included a narrow groove crossing the underside of the rectangle at a strange angle.
Julian placed a photograph of the surviving plate beside it.
The groove matched a thin line concealed under the stamped numbers.
Nessa explained that Peter added the grooves while installing the plates, using an irregular steel scraper he had fashioned from a broken clock spring.
No two grooves were identical, and each reflected a specific gesture of his hand.
It was an eccentric authentication method rather than a sophisticated security system.
Peter had wanted a way to distinguish his work from anything a wealthy collector could order from a commercial workshop.
Daniel began to understand why Carol was afraid of the metal fragments.
“If somebody gets one plate, they know how to imitate the others,” he said.
“Or how to convince buyers they already have,” Julian added.
Carol admitted that she had told Kells about the grooves several years earlier while trying to persuade him to stop selling an obvious forgery.
Kells had pretended to listen and had left with a photograph she later regretted giving him.
“What did you think would happen?” Daniel asked.
“I thought a man selling fake sculptures might stop if I explained how easily he could be caught.”
“Did he stop?”
“He stopped answering my calls.”
Nessa fetched a portable lamp and directed its light across the plaster cast.
A tiny hand-carved pear appeared inside the base cavity, just below the place where the brass had covered it.
Carol smiled despite herself.
“Ada put those there,” she said.
“Every figure had a little mark that belonged only to the person who posed.”
Nessa identified the pear seller as Mabel Hart, a widow who had brought baskets of bruised fruit to unemployed families during the town’s last factory shutdown.
Ada had modeled Mabel without asking her to pose formally, then persuaded her to visit the workshop to correct the position of her shoulders.
Mabel had insisted on adding the bruised pear to the base because she did not want anyone to imagine that charity was always beautiful.
Daniel remembered staring at the sculpture for six years without noticing the small dent on the fruit in the basket.
Julian took notes, but Carol asked him to put the notebook away while Nessa spoke.
“She’s telling you about a person,” Carol said.
“Not an inventory item.”
Nessa pointed out that both things mattered when a collector intended to sell a false story.
They agreed to visit Vale’s preview, which was open to invited buyers that evening, and inspect the alleged recovered pieces without announcing what they knew.
Julian could enter as an independent buyer, and Nessa knew a caterer who might be able to add Daniel to the guest list as a volunteer.
Carol refused to stay behind.
“Vale knows my face,” she said.
“He’ll know I’m coming for him.”
“That might be exactly what we need,” Julian answered.
Daniel was surprised by the confidence in his voice.
Julian finally admitted that his firm had originally been hired by Vale to investigate the missing collection.
Vale had dismissed him after he questioned whether the sculptures in a confidential photograph were genuine.
“I’ve been trying to get in the same room with those pieces ever since,” Julian said.
Carol stared at him.
“That’s why you came to Daniel’s house in such a hurry.”
“Yes.”
“And that’s why you didn’t tell him who paid for your first investigation.”
“Yes,” Julian repeated.
Daniel looked from one visitor to the other.
“If we’re doing this, nobody gets to withhold the important parts until the worst possible moment.”
Nessa extended her hand across the table.
“That’s a sensible rule for a very foolish evening.”
They each shook it, including Carol, who squeezed hard enough to make Nessa laugh.
Before they left, Nessa opened another cabinet and revealed a shallow stone tray containing a fresh-looking wax impression.
She had found it outside her workshop two days earlier, wrapped in a towel with no name attached.
Its shape matched the base of the statue called The Baker, but the inscription showed the wrong volunteer number.
Somebody had been practicing the brass plates nearby.
