‘For pity’s sake,’ Troy said, ‘don’t take my word for anything. I’m not an expert. I can’t tell, for instance, how old the actual canvas may be though I do know it’s not contemporary and I do know it’s the way he signed his major works. “John Constable. R.A.f.” and the date, 1830, which, I think, was soon after he became an R.A. The thing may be a copy of an original Constable. I don’t think there’s an established work of his that has Ramsdyke Lock as its subject. That doesn’t say he didn’t paint Ramsdyke Lock when he was in these parts.’

‘And it doesn’t say,’ Mr Lazenby added, ‘that this isn’t the Ramsdyke Lock he painted.’

Miss Hewson, who seemed never to have heard of Constable until Troy made her remark at Ramsdyke, now became madly excited. She pointed out the excellencies of the picture and how you could just fancy yourself walking up that little old-world lane into the sunset.

Mr Hewson woke up and after listening, in his dead-pan, honest-to-God, dehydrated manner to his sister’s ravings asked Troy what, supposing this item was in fact the genuine product of this guy, it might be worth in real money.

Troy said she didn’t know—a great deal. Thousands of pounds. It depended upon the present demand for Constables.

‘But don’t for Heaven’s sake go by anything I say. As for forgeries, I am reminded—’ She stopped. ‘I suppose it doesn’t really apply,’ she said. ‘You’d hardly expect to find an elaborate forgery in a junk-shop yard at Tollardwark, would you?’

‘But you were going to tell us a story,’ Bard said. ‘Mayn’t we have it?’

‘It was only that Rory, my husband, had a case quite recently in which a young man, just for the hell of it, forged an Elizabethan glove and did it so well that the top experts were diddled.’

‘As you say, Mrs Alleyn,’ said Mr Lazenby, ‘it doesn’t really apply. But about forgeries. I always ask myself—’

They were off on an argument that can be depended upon to ruffle more tempers in quicker time than most others. If a forgery was ‘that good’ it could take in the top experts, why wasn’t it just as good in every respect as the work of the painter to whom it was falsely attributed?