The Missing Modigliani

221B Baker Street
“Watson, I fancy we have a client. Thank you, Mrs Hudson, show him up.

Come in, come in, sir. I see that you are a man of independent means, living in an upstairs flat in St James’s.”

”Bless my soul, yes. We’ve not met, how do you know?”

”Your suit is from Huntsman in Savile Row, you are carrying a Berry Bros bag and you are not out of breath so used to climbing stairs. Now, how may I be of assistance.”

”It is a matter of some delicacy, Mr Holmes. I have a lodger, an old friend from university, and a cleaner of excellent character who has been in my service for more than ten years. Nobody else has access to my flat. I am a collector and my most prized possession is a Modigliani. It hangs on my sitting room wall, or at least it did. It has vanished. I have questioned my friend and my cleaner and neither can explain its disappearance.”

Holmes pressed his fingers together forming a steeply pitched roof and shut his eyes. Either he was taking a nap or was considering the evidence. “Sir, your case is trivial, not worth Dr Watson chronicling. Ask your lodger to call on me.”

Sherlock Holmes enjoyed a little theatre; accordingly he and Watson took a brougham to St James’s Street to visit the flat from where the Modigliani had vanished. His client received him, eager for news of his picture. Holmes was brusque: “Sir, you have wasted my time. Look behind that sofa.” Indeed the missing Modigliani was there.

Watson was astonished. “It was obvious to me, dear Doctor. When the lodger visited me he readily confessed the truth. He had entertained a lady of the street on an evening when his host was away and in a mood heightened by alcohol and post-coital pleasure gave her the picture as a keep-sake. He was not prepared to tell this to his friend. So he eventually found his lady friend and recovered the picture, the value of which she was unaware, as he had been. He decided to put it behind a sofa for eventual discovery.”

******

This story, dressed up in a deerstalker, is essentially true. The lodger, who became a Life Peer, told it, ruefully, late in his life.