The Rembrandt Secret by Alex Connor Page B

only one place he could go – the gallery. And under the kindly but forceful tutelage of his father, Timothy Parker-Ross tried very hard, but learned very little.
    However, Timothy Parker-Ross had one talent – for friendship. He was constant and caring, and for a lonely child like Marshall, he was the ideal ally. Often the boys spent long afternoons at the British Museum, staring at the Egyptian mummies and telling each other stories about how No. 657 had been put away, out of reach. Because it was cursed. Everyone who had ever looked at the female corpse had died … And Marshall had let Timothy tell the story in his own time, responding with a tale of his own, about the soldier ghost in the Zeigler Gallery.
    ‘D’you die if you see it?’ Timothy had asked.
    Bemused, Marshall had thought for a moment. ‘I dunno. I suppose not, otherwise how could you tell anyone you’d seen it? You’d be dead.’
    At other times the boys went to the cinema in Leicester Square, where Marshall developed an addiction to sci-fi and Timothy watched the screen with an expression of bland confusion. And afterwards they would catch the nearest bus, seeing how many stops they could go before the conductor asked them to pay. When they were caught out, they jumped off …
    Marshall’s thoughts slid on. When his father bought the country house and moved his family there, Marshall had missed London. Missed the smell of packing and sawdust. Missed the muttered curses as the delivery men tried to get larger paintings through the gallery doors, or round the back entrance. Missed the plane trees coming into leaf as the Ritz grinned its pillared smile at Piccadilly. Missed the newspaper seller at the end of the street who told him stories about the celebrities who had come to stay in the capital’s finest hotels; told him about how he had been a chauffeur: Oh yeah, I drove them all, when I was a chauffeur … Marshall had even missed the ghost. The lost faint shadow of the unknown soldier who had punctuated his dreams. But most of all he had missed his friend.
    They had kept in touch, but it was never the same. Timothy had started to be trained up in the gallery business and when Marshall’s mother died, life changed irrevocably. It seemed that within one summer Marshall lost most of the little family he had. Weeks after his mother died, his grandfather – the shadowy, slightly frightening Neville – had succumbed to a blood clot on the lung. Suddenly life shifted gear. There had been no more time for looking at mummies, for sci-fi, or dodging buses. He had grown up. Childhood had come to its end.
    Marshall looked at the Zeigler Gallery, his gaze travelling down from the flat to the ground floor. The light was on in the porch doorway, but the blind was down on the door and he couldn’t see in. If he was honest, he was dreading walking in and talking to his father. The thought shamed him, but it was there nevertheless. Owen had been so distracted, so desperate, and Marshall had never seen his father like that. Never seen the urbane Owen Zeigler out of control … He sighed, opened the car door and got out. His father was getting older and he was in shock. He needed his son. The roles had suddenly shifted. As they did with all children and parents, and in all generations. Now Owen needed help. In the past, it had been Owen offering help to his son. This time, it was his son’s turn to give support.
    As he walked to the gallery door, Marshall considered what Samuel Hemmings had told him. He would ask his father about Rembrandt’s monkey. Samuel was right, it would give them something to talk about, something to take Owen’s mind off his problems. Marshall knocked on the door, listened, but there was no answer and so he unlocked it with his own key and walked in.
    ‘Dad?’ he called out.
    No reply.
    Looking round, he turned on a desk lamp and then flinched. Papers had been pulled out of shelves and files, drawers turned over, the main gallery