The Portrait in the Stairwell

The boot had been found that morning in the waste bin outside the Quillon hostel, which is a converted motel on the shore road that rents rooms by the week to fishermen, and it had been found by the manager, who had recognized it not as anything belonging to anybody, but as an oddity: a single boot, in the bin, resoled, size eleven, in good condition.

The room from which it had come had been let for nine days, under a name that was not a name, to a man who paid in cash, kept the curtains shut, went out at night, and had left at four in the morning on the day the boot was found.

"There is no dog," said Deputy Marshal Ozer, standing in the rain at the edge of the road with her notebook out. "There is no dog in the room, there is no dog hair in the room, there is no dog smell in the room, there is no dog licence in this county to a man matching the description. What there is, is a room with a man's boot in it and ten days of somebody's fingerprints on the light switch, which I have photographed and sent to be run, and a receipt from a hardware store in Eureka for forty feet of galvanised chain, a pair of leather gloves, and two cans of a spray-on animal repellent, and I want to know from you, doctor, whether those are the purchases of a man who keeps a dog or of a man who wants to be thought to keep one."

"Either," I said. "He'd have to buy chain for a dog he already had, and gloves and repellent to look innocent."

"Which," said the deputy marshal, "is what I said to the sergeant, and the sergeant said: get a warrant for the room and check the hostel register, and we did, and the name is false, and the handwriting on the register is — " she flipped a page — "block capitals, printed by hand, in a hand the examiner says was deliberately made formless. The man wrote a false name and he wrote it like a man who has been taught that handwriting convicts people."

Cole Vandermeer was standing with his hands in his coat pockets, looking out at the fog, and he said, without turning round, "He wore my boot."

"He wore your boot, sir?"

"He wanted the scent on him." Cole looked at me. "Doctor, the man in the hostel is the man who took the boot. And the man who took the boot is the man who wants to be in the dark next to me somewhere on my own land, and he is working for somebody who has a dog, or he is working for nobody and he has a dog of his own, and either way he is not trying to frighten me, he is trying to place me. That's survey work. That's what I'd do if I wanted to put something on the ground where a person used to walk."

"Mr. Vandermeer," said Ozer, "you need to come down to Quillon with me and give a statement."

"I will. Tomorrow." He turned to her and he was very calm. "Tonight I'm going to do the thing I came here to do, which is to go through this house until I know what is in it. There was a man written out of this family in 1889 and nobody has ever told me what became of his children, and I have begun to think that the whole of this county knows and nobody will say it. So I am going to look at the pictures on the wall, deputy marshal, because in a place like this the pictures on the wall are the only honest inventory."

The portraits hung in the stairwell of the east wing, which is the part of the house the son built with the state legislature's money, and it is a proper gallery: oak panelled from floor to ceiling, two flights, with fourteen portraits hung in a rising line up the wall, oil on canvas, the early ones dark and cracked and the later ones merely ugly, and every one of them looking at whoever came up the stairs, and at the bottom of the flight, at the height of a man's eye as he starts up the stairs, the biggest of them all.

That was Absalom Vandermeer, painted in 1836, in the last year of his life, by a man who had come up from the city for the salmon and stayed to eat. He is standing in the portrait in a long coat with his hand on the head of a dog. He is a big man with a wide face and a heavy jaw and pale eyes set close together, and the dog under his hand is a grey hound of the old sort, tall and flat-ribbed, with its head turned back over its shoulder toward the painter as though it had heard something behind the canvas.

Cole went up the whole flight slowly, with the lamp in his hand, and then back down, and then he stopped in front of the first portrait and did not move for a long time, and I came and stood beside him, and then I saw it.

There was a small watercolour, unframed, pinned into the corner of the great portrait's frame — a thing a later hand had put there and never taken down. It was not a Vandermeer. It was dated 1911, and it was the painting of a young man of about twenty in a shirt with no collar, and it had been made by somebody who was not much good at painting but who had been very careful about the face.

I have spent my professional life looking at faces, and I know how much of a man is bone. The young man in the watercolour had a narrow face with a high colour and a long upper lip and grey eyes set wide, and the set of the eyes in the bone was the set I had seen that morning at the field station on a man of forty-five in a flat cap, and the line from the brow to the bridge of the nose was the same line, and if you had put the two of them side by side in a photograph a police artist would have said the same thing without being prompted, which is that they were of one family.

"1911," said Cole Vandermeer.

"There was a woman who died on the beach road in 1911," I said. "Dr. Cray counted her among the dead."

"Then there is a child of Ozro Vandermeer's line, and he is alive, and he is on this coast, and he is forty-five years old." Cole took the watercolour down from the pin with two fingers, very carefully, and looked at it in the lamplight, and then he turned and held it up against the big portrait, so that the young man of 1911 stood beside the old man of 1836, and the two faces came together at the eyes.

"Doctor," he said. "Do you know what a man in my line of work calls a person who turns up on the neighbouring property and runs a survey block on the very land he wants?"

"No."

"An easement problem," said Cole Vandermeer. "But what a lawyer would call him is a claimant. And what a court would call him, if he had a lawyer of his own, is a party in interest."