The Stolen Legacy is the first case in the Leila Voss & Associates files. Set in 1920s Britain, it follows detective Leila Voss, Josh Thorne, and Pete Smith as they unpick a theft that runs deeper than anyone expects. Each chapter will appear here as the story unfolds in the shadows.
Chapter 3 – Whispers in
the Halls
Glasgow, The Hunterian Gallery – Second Day
Morning came slowly to the gallery. Light
through the high, dust-flecked windows in pale, reluctant beams, casting long
shadows across the parquet floor. To any casual visitor, the building had
resumed its ordinary rhythms — quiet footsteps, low voices, the occasional
scratch of a pencil on a catalogue card. To Leila, every sound carried weight.
She had claimed an archive desk before the doors opened,
arranging herself among the leather-bound ledgers like someone who belonged
there. Her green eyes moved steadily across the pages: mismatched dates,
smudged signatures, gaps in the guard rosters that no one had thought to
explain. The theft had not been impulsive. Whoever had taken the portrait had
spent months preparing the ground — planting false entries, quietly shifting
patrol routes, hiding their alterations in the dull camouflage of administrative
routine.
Someone inside this building had helped them. She was
certain of it now.
Pete, meanwhile, moved through the gallery as though he
had always belonged to it. As Julian Laurent — a visiting art historian from
Edinburgh, charming and slightly vague — he drifted from the main hall to the
studio wing, his easy manner opening doors that a blunter instrument would have
found firmly closed. By mid-morning he had positioned himself beside a display
case, deep in conversation with two art students who had been present the
morning the theft was discovered.
“Such a tragedy — the golden portrait,” he said
softly, letting his gaze drift to the empty wall. “I had studied it quite
closely before the week was out. It felt almost alive, didn’t it? The way the
light caught the gilding.”
One of the students — a young woman with ink-stained
fingers and a careful expression — glanced over her shoulder before she
answered. “They say it wasn’t only stolen for money,” she said, her
voice dropping. “Old Mr. Hale. The senior curator. He’s been acting
strangely for weeks. Locked rooms. Meetings at odd hours. And he knows every
hidden passage in this building.”
Pete smiled pleasantly and said nothing. He was already
thinking.
Josh completed his rounds near dusk. His footsteps were
steady and unhurried on the stone floors, his eyes moving across every shadow,
every seam in the wainscoting, every door that sat a fraction less than flush
with its frame. At the back service entrance he crouched and examined the lock
— a single fresh scratch, barely a hair’s width, invisible unless you were
looking for it. Someone had been through here recently, and not with a key.
Further along the corridor, half-concealed beneath a
wooden bench, he found the paper. A rough sketch on cheap stock: a floor plan
of the gallery, quick and confident, drawn by someone who knew the building
well. The portrait’s former position was marked in faint pencil. Beside it, a
small cross. Somewhere else entirely.
That evening, they gathered in their rented rooms above a
chemist’s shop on Byres Road, the window cracked against the smell of
turpentine and coal smoke drifting up from the lane below. Pete laid out what
he had. “Hale is the key,” he said. “He’s in serious debt — and
he’s been meeting with a man the students couldn’t name but I can. A known
smuggler. Works the Clyde.”
Leila set the floor plan sketch on the table beside the
ledger notes, smoothing both flat with her palm. “He didn’t act
alone,” she said. “But he made mistakes. The rosters, the scratch on
the lock, this sketch — he was careful, but not careful enough.” She
tapped the small cross on the plan. “And the portrait isn’t far. They
haven’t moved it yet.”
Josh nodded, his hand resting near his jacket. “I’ll
watch Hale’s quarters tonight. If he moves, I’ll know.”
Outside, the fog had returned — thick and close, settling
around the university buildings like a held breath. The city was quiet. But
somewhere inside the gallery, behind a locked door or beneath a flagstone, the
portrait was waiting. And so, Leila suspected, was whoever had put it there.
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