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probably slightly mad. But his father – his name was Bartholomew Wendell-Carfax – was as nutty as a fruitcake. That’s him at the end of the corridor.’
    Where the corridor ended was a small sitting area, tall windows offering a view of the parkland outside the house. Between the two windows was a painting, almost life-sized, that showed a middle-aged dark-haired man wearing what looked like a tweed suit. He was seated in a chair and looking slightly away from the painter, towards a roaring wood fire, a coat of arms cut into the wall above the inglenook.
    ‘He doesn’t look mad,’ Angela said, stopping in front ofthe painting and staring up at it. ‘In fact, he looks rather attractive, in a sort of avuncular, country-house kind of way. He reminds me of a character you’d find in a P.G. Wodehouse novel.’
    ‘Perhaps,’ Mayhew said, ‘but he was definitely odd. He had several portraits painted of himself and, even though he was running pretty low on funds, he commissioned four self-portraits from a very minor local artist named Edward Montgomery, and apparently paid quite a lot of money for them.’
    ‘Maybe he didn’t know how bad his financial situation was,’ Angela said.
    ‘Oh, he knew, all right, but that wasn’t what was odd – it was the subjects he chose. According to the guidebook we found in one of the boxes in the salon, two of the pictures were like this one, conventional portraits. But in the other two, Bartholomew was depicted as a young man, in one dressed like a Sioux chief, feathered headdress and all, and in the other like a member of Indian royalty. The artist had to work from photographs Bartholomew supplied of himself when he was about twenty-five. That’s what I mean by nutty – what was the point of having a portrait painted showing him when he was young when he was already well over seventy? And why was he wearing such extraordinary outfits?’
    ‘You know, that kind of thing was quite the fashion in the early part of the twentieth century,’ Angela said. ‘A lot of society figures had their portraits done in exotic outfits.So where are the paintings now? Somewhere here?’
    ‘The conventional portraits are in the house, but not the other two. Bartholomew managed to sell them soon after they were painted.’
    ‘Well, maybe it was just a money-making exercise after all. So why was he so short on funds?’
    Mayhew stepped over beside Angela and they both looked out over the acres of peaceful parkland, so much in contrast, Angela thought, to the chaos of the house.
    ‘According to the guidebook – which is quite a good read, by the way – Bartholomew’s parents were very comfortably off. They owned huge tranches of land in East Anglia and had a couple of hundred tenant farmers, plus stock market investments, all that kind of thing. After that, the family fortune shrunk considerably, for all the usual reasons – the First World War and the Depression, plus Bartholomew’s Folly. And that’s another reason for the damage you saw. There are bits of panelling torn off in various areas of the house, and even a few holes dug through some of the walls.’
    Mayhew paused, clearly waiting for Angela to ask the obvious question. She raised her eyebrows, but said nothing. He sighed.
    ‘Anyway, just after the end of the Great War, Bartholomew went off on a Grand Tour of Europe and the Middle East. At the time, that was still a very fashionable way for a wealthy young man to finish off his education, and lucky for us that he did, because a lot of the relicsOliver has now bequeathed to the museum were bought by Bartholomew on that Grand Tour. I gather he went as far east as Syria, and into what was then Persia, and acted as a bit of a shopaholic everywhere. He must have spent thousands, maybe even tens of thousands, of pounds, and at that time a thousand pounds was serious money.’
    ‘And Bartholomew’s Folly?’
    ‘One of the things Bartholomew brought back from his grand shopping