Satya managed to get hold of the police report on Peter’s murder. As he read through it, Axel saw that the investigation had been pretty thorough — interviews with all known associates, customers, neighbours, people from both the personal and professional sides of Peter’s life — but it had all turned up nothing. Death by poison, inflicted by person or persons unknown. Strange, thought Axel. And worth filing away for future reference.
For the last few months, Axel had been working through Satya’s alphabetical list of possible smuggling operations, which included his own suggestion of art galleries. There were many in Singapore, and there had been another alphabetical list to work through in that category. Peter Stone’s gallery was pretty far down the list, but it was the only one in which the owner had been murdered. Could there be a connection?
He had enjoyed his dinner with Dinah and Maris, and found himself thinking about Maris. She was very attractive: tall, big-boned, but graceful and kind of sexy. She had worn a gauzy blue dress that swirled and clung to her at the same time: very feminine without being girlish. Axel wasn’t attracted to thin girls who never seemed to enjoy food and usually smoked to kill their appetite. He’d grown up in Sweden where girls were health-conscious but not to the extreme of working out five times a week and eating only raw foods, or whatever fad diet was current. Maris had enjoyed her food and didn’t seem self-conscious about it. She had joked about Dinah being so slim and not overeating, but it had been with affection, not malice or envy.
Axel decided to wait a while, then go back to the gallery, purchase the Indonesian piece, and take them up on their offer of a hawker crawl, as they called it. That way he could see Maris again, and find out more about the workings of Peter Stone Gallery.
Satya’s research had revealed that the gallery had opened in May of 1989 and had quickly become successful. Stone’s taste and his instincts for what people would like were undisputed, and it hadn’t taken long for word of mouth to spread among well-to-do Singaporeans, expats, and tourists. A good part of the business involved distributing artworks (mainly sculpture) from mainland China, Thailand, Burma, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam to Europe and America.
Stone had been born in England in 1959 and had moved to Singapore with his parents as a child, where his father worked as a tea exporter. Raised and schooled in Singapore, Peter had met his future wife in Germany where he was taking a fine arts course at Berlin University of the Arts. They had married in 1986 and moved to Singapore. Shortly after that, they set out on a tour of Southeast Asia. Their interests in art and sculpture, especially South and Southeast Asian, had coincided and, during their trip, they had shipped back numerous artifacts, including sculpture, jewellery, paintings, and handicrafts, both modern and ancient.
The decision to open the gallery had been a joint one, and they became equal partners in Peter Stone Gallery in 1989. As time went on, Peter spent more and more time at the gallery and Angela spent more time in Germany, where she contracted a number of agents to travel and buy for the gallery — young, adventurous travellers like she and Peter had been.
Eight years after they married, Peter and Angela divorced, although they remained business partners. Peter’s half-sister, Dinah, had been hired in 1993 as Peter’s assistant. Dinah also had a degree in fine arts, from the Malaysian Institute of Art. As she had told Axel, she was not a partner in the business, but she had taken over the day-to-day running of the gallery after Peter’s death.
Axel finished reading the file and wondered if it could be a front for a smuggling operation. If it was, it seemed doubtful that Dinah knew about it. Although why he thought that, he wasn’t sure. He had liked her and had not detected anything of a devious nature in her. She had seemed open and honest and genuine. That didn’t mean she was, of course, it only meant she seemed that way. Axel had known very charming and seemingly guileless people who were actually pathological liars and thieves. If you were going to operate in the world of international smuggling, you had to be good to survive and not get caught. Being personable was part of the game. Still, his instincts were telling him that Dinah was not a liar and a thief.
Maris seemed to have no part in the business, other than that her paintings were sold through the gallery. She seemed to have taken Peter’s death hard, and it had blocked her from working for several months. Could she be the connection? Was there more at stake for Maris in the gallery’s continuing than met the eye? Maybe Peter had been the mastermind all along. And maybe his untimely death had nearly put an end to the whole operation. And what about the ex-wife? Where was she in all this?
He would definitely have to meet her.