Lot 114

Eleanor Whitlock had been cleaning paintings at Ashby & Lyle for six years, and she had learnt not to expect surprises. Most of the pictures that passed through the workroom were dark, spotted with damp and easy to forget. Lot 114 was typical: a small seascape in a chipped gilt frame, with an estimate of three hundred pounds and a catalogue note that said only “English school, nineteenth century”.

She was removing a layer of old varnish from the lower corner when the cotton swab came away yellow, and something underneath it caught the light. It was a signature, but not the one printed in the catalogue. Beneath a clumsy “J. Smith” in dark paint, she could just make out a second line of fine, careful letters: E. Carrow. Eleanor put the swab down very slowly.

Edwin Carrow was not a household name, but nobody who had studied Victorian painting could have taken it for a coincidence. Carrow had painted six seascapes, known as the Carrow Tides, which were supposed to have been destroyed in a fire in 1923. Collectors had been searching for them for a century. If this was one of them, Lot 114 was worth not three hundred pounds but several hundred thousand.

She photographed the signature under ultraviolet light and asked herself the question that mattered: was it genuine, or had somebody forged it years ago to raise the value of an ordinary picture? Only a laboratory could tell. But the paint had cracked in the same pattern as the rest of the canvas, which suggested that it had not been added recently.

She took the photographs to Julian Ashby, the senior auctioneer, who in twenty years had never once raised his voice. He studied them in silence. “Remarkable,” he said at last. “Of course, we cannot be certain.” “That is why we should send it for analysis,” said Eleanor. “The sale is in nine days.” Ashby smiled and handed back the photographs. “Then let us not allow enthusiasm to spoil a perfectly good auction.”

It was a polite sentence, but Eleanor understood it perfectly. As she left the office, the telephone on his desk began to ring. She heard him answer in a very different voice: “Yes, Crispin. I thought you might call.”