The Professor Has No Face

How it begins

The professor's face had vanished from the oil portrait, but his expression remained unpleasant.

Marian Fox stood beneath the gallery lights and considered how that was possible. The jaw, collar and expensive academic gown were intact. Where the features should have been, the canvas showed a precise rectangle of pale ground.

Someone had removed the face without disturbing the varnish.

She checked the security log. No alarm. No unexplained visitor. The gallery had been locked since six.

David Crane arrived carrying a stone fragment wrapped in felt.

'Before you say anything,' he began, 'the bust was like this when I opened the workshop.'

He unwrapped it. The marble head had a rectangular hollow in the same place as the missing painted face. Its edges were so clean they looked manufactured.

Marian set the log down.

The professor's centenary exhibition opened in four days. It had taken eighteen months to obtain loans, persuade donors and write captions nobody could object to. She had used the word pioneering eleven times.

David put the head beneath the portrait. Together they looked less like vandalism than a matched set.

'Any enemies?' he asked.

'He's been dead forty years.'

'That wasn't the question.'

Marian looked toward a case of notebooks. Three displayed pages contained meticulous drawings of excavated objects. The captions credited the professor. The handwriting changed halfway through the second notebook. She had noticed it during cataloguing and accepted the donor's explanation that he employed assistants.

David lifted the bust again. Inside the hollow, faint pencil marks crossed the stone.

'Workshop measurements,' he said. 'But not mine.'

Marian bent closer. Beneath the measurements was a name she had removed from a draft caption because there had been no space.

Behind them, another portrait gave a soft, dry click. A rectangle of painted face fell onto the gallery floor as neatly as a calling card.