The Fire of 1923

Dr Miriam Frost had spent thirty years among the county’s documents, and she greeted Eleanor with the cheerful impatience of someone who is always about to be interrupted. “Carrow?” she said, putting down a cup of cold tea. “The Carrow Tides? Come with me. I have been waiting for someone to ask about those for twenty years.”

In the basement she opened a long grey box and spread out a set of yellowing newspaper cuttings. “In March 1923, Carrow’s studio at Hallam House burnt to the ground. The newspapers said that all six paintings were lost. But look at this.” She pointed to a line in a letter from the insurer. “Only five frames were found in the ashes. Five, not six. And none of them contained a canvas.”

“So the paintings were removed before the fire?” Eleanor asked. “Somebody carried them out,” said Miriam. “Five of them were never seen again. But a sixth appears in a sale catalogue in 1958, described only as ‘a seascape, English school’. The seller was a railway porter who claimed that he had found it in an unclaimed parcel.”

Eleanor stared at her. “An unclaimed parcel at a station.” “That is what the record says,” said Miriam, turning over another page. “If I am right, the painting was never destroyed. It was taken from the burning studio by the night watchman, Samuel Pike, who sent it by train to a relative and died before he could collect it.”

Eleanor felt dizzy. A painting rescued from a fire, forgotten in a parcel for thirty-five years, sold for five pounds, hung above a staircase for sixty years and nearly auctioned for three hundred. “Who owns it now?” she asked. Miriam considered the question. “Legally, Mrs Lang does. She bought it in good faith, and she has kept it for decades. Morally, it belongs to the history of this county, and I would love to see it in a museum.”

Eleanor wrote down the references and photocopied the cuttings. As she left, Miriam called after her, “Be careful. The Carrow Tides are exactly the kind of discovery that makes honest people greedy.” Outside, it was raining. On the steps of the archive, a man was waiting under an umbrella. It was Crispin Vale. “Good afternoon, Miss Whitlock,” he said pleasantly. “I hear you have been doing some research. Shall we talk?”