The Barker Street Regulars

wanted rehung. Hugh rose to his feet, assured himself that I’d brought a dog, and immediately put on a padded canvas jacket. Robert donned a heavy black wool coat that made him look like an undertaker. Then the three of us followed Ceci into a living room the size of a banquet hall. At its far end, the room became a sort of miniconservatory: a series of French doors overlooking the backyard formed a large bay or alcove. A forerunner to today’s sun spaces, the area had a floor of burgundy tiles, tubs of potted palms, and the kind of natural-colored rattan furniture that obviously hadn’t been bought at some discount department store’s spring sale on wicker. The two chairs and an ottoman had cushions covered in a deep green and rose floral prints: fat peonies about to turn blowsy. The low table was topped with glass. Robert and Hugh trailed after Ceci as she made her way to the alcove and began to question her about Jonathan’s movements. Where had he been when she had gone to bed? Had she no premonition of evil? What had she observed the next morning?
    Turning a rheostat that lowered the lights in the bay, Ceci said, “I feel that Jonathan left this way.”
    “You feel? ” Robert inquired. “And what grounds do you have for—”
    “Ceci, dear,” Hugh interrupted, “which of these doors did you, in fact, find unlocked?”
    Pointing to a French door in the center of the alcove, Ceci said, “Ajar. Ever so slightly open. It was really very naughty of Jonathan to have done that.” She talked on. I didn’t follow what she said. Indeed, so transfixed was I that I didn’t even follow her to the alcove. I stared at an immense oil painting that hung over the baronial fireplace in the living room. The painting was a beautifully executed life-size portrait. Its subject posed right in front of this same fireplace. During his lifetime, when he’d actually sat on the hearth directly beneath his portrait, he must have given people the uncanny impression that they’d been struck by double vision on a giant scale. Maybe the artist had intended precisely that effect. In any case, as rendered in oil, the subject was a handsome, noble fellow. The portrait was illuminated from above by a small light mounted on an elaborate gilded frame. The bottom of the frame bore a brass plate that read LORD SAINT SIMON.
    An end table near the fireplace held a collection of crystal knickknacks and china shepherdesses arrayed around a small photograph in a correspondingly small silver frame. The frame wasn’t cheap-looking—nothing in Ceci’s house was—and it was tasteful, but it was only about two inches wide and four inches high. Like the massive gold frame over the fireplace, it displayed a portrait. This one showed a bald-headed man with wire-rimmed glasses. The man wore a morose expression. I assumed that he was Ceci’s late husband, Ellis Love. If so, he had a right to look slighted.
     

Chapter Twelve
     
    H UGH AND ROBERT HAD brought what I suppose should be called a scene-of-crime kit: Robert’s camera, two powerful lanterns, tweezers, small paper envelopes, paper and plastic bags, labels, indelible markers, little glass jars and test tubes, measuring tape, a yardstick, plaster of Paris or perhaps of somewhere else, a fingerprint kit evidently purchased at a toy store, a laptop computer that sat like a mechanical bird in a homemade-looking nest of insulation, and exactly the kind of oversize magnifying glass depicted in caricatures of Sherlock Holmes. With misogyny worthy of Holmes, they forbade Ceci to go anywhere near the equipment arrayed on the floor of the immense central hallway of her house. I, they decided, might make myself useful by lugging gear, but would probably drop it.
    I felt a senseless urge to prove myself worthy of a key role in the charade. “Toby,” I announced, “was spaniel and lurcher. Lurcher, as you probably know, refers to a sighthound cross, usually greyhound. The term connotes—”
    “Poachers,” Robert said.
    “Gypsies,” I finished.
    Hugh was tinkering with the laptop computer. Robert pointed menacingly at it and apologized for Hugh’s insistence on wasting time.
    “ The neatest and most orderly brain,” quoted Hugh, peering up, “ with the greatest capacity for storing information —”
    Robert interrupted. “Not neatest! Not information ! Tidiest! Facts! The tidiest and most orderly brain with the greatest capacity for storing facts of any man.” He added emphatically,