Shifting Coasts
A Jacob Kincaid Short
The sky had spent the morning switching between grey and a darker shade of grey and although the rain had held off, the wind carried an autumnal chill. Jacob was glad his destination was only a ten minute walk from his office as he stepped into the warm, curated hush of the Red Door Art Gallery.
The sole occupant was a woman behind the counter who looked up as he entered. By Jacob’s guess she was early forties, maybe a touch older. Her hair was chestnut brown, cut in a sleek bob that brushed her jawline. She wore a tailored navy blouse tucked into slim beige trousers.
“You must be Jacob.” Sharp grey-green eyes took his measure as he approached.
“No danger of being confused with a potential customer?”
She gave an easy shrug. “Helen told me watch out for someone who looked like he needed sleep.”
“Well, Helen can be devastatingly direct.”
The woman extended a hand. “Eleanor Voss. Owner, curator, sole person who gives a damn about this place.”
Jacob shook the offered hand. Elenaor Voss had a firm grip. “Nice to meet you, Eleanor. So, what was taken?”
“A Mullen, ” Eleanor said, leading Jacob back down the gallery. “Shifting Coasts. Oil on canvas, nineteen eighty-seven. Not his best known piece but it has value.”
“Insured?”
“Of course. But I don’t want the insurance money. I want the painting back.” She stopped and gestured toward the piece on the wall.
Jacob eyed the painting. Moody coastline, definitely on a canvas and perhaps oils had been used. “Uh…It’s still here.”
“No,” Eleanor said flatly. “That’s a print. Not even a good one.”
Jacob took a closer look and decided he’d need to take her word for it. “When did you notice the swap?”
“Two nights ago. I was prepping for an upcoming exhibition and realized that I was looking at a fake. It was one of those coincidences. I had heard from someone at the tennis club that Helen had recently gone into business with a private eye. I give her a call, find out it’s true and lo and behold, I’m hiring your services.”
Jacob nodded. He was coaxing the details of who Helen was in increments. The tennis club was new information. “When’s the last time you’re sure the real one was on display?”
“That’s the problem. I don’t. It could’ve been three days ago. It could have been three weeks.”
“No sign of a break-in? No recent alarms that you put down as faults or accidents?”
“No, no alarms. Doors and windows are all secure.”
“Staff?”
“Two. Siobhan Quinn and Douglas Topping.”
Jacob stepped back, took a moment to properly appraise his surroundings ,noting the alarm keypad in the door and two cameras in the ceiling. “I take it these record?” he asked, pointing to the cameras.
“They do.”
“Alright, let’s get a look.”
Eleanor led him through a door at the rear of the gallery. There was a small office, a store room, and a cramped kitchenette.
A flatscreen monitor sat on the desk in the office, already displaying the gallery’s camera feed. The footage showed the main gallery floor from two different angles. A third feed was an external shot of the front door,
Jacob produced a notebook and biro from his coat pocket and scribbled a few quick notes of what Eleanor had already told him. He then took his phone out and checked the time on it against the gallery feed. The minutes matched. A call to the speaking clock told him the gallery feed was only five seconds slow.
“Tell me about a normal day,” Jacob said, noting down the camera angles and what they recorded.
Eleanor crossed her arms. “We open at nine. I usually get in about half an hour before, Douglas and Siobhan, if they’re working, not long after.”
“Anyone else on staff apart from Douglas and Siobhan?”
“No. It’s just the three of us.”
“What about cleaners?”
“Oh, Geraldine comes Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. She’s contracted. Usually in and out by eight-thirty.
Jacob kept writing. “So would all three have their own means of access?”
“They do.”
“Key and security code?”
“Yes. Are you suggesting one of them would be a suspect?”
“Are you suggesting you hadn’t considered that?”
“No,” Eleanor admitted with a sigh. “Just waiting for someone else to voice it.”
Jacob looked up from his notebook. “I can think of three possibilities, Eleanor. One, a member of staff came here after hours and swapped the painting for the print. Two, a member of staff provided the key and alarm code to a third party who carried out the theft, or three, the thief took advantage of someone being distracted to switch the painting.”
“That seems unlikely.”
“Highly. In my experience, the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. I think one of the three people who work here had a hand in this.”
“Do you think you can find out who?”
“I think I can try.” Jacob turned back towards the monitor. “How long are these saved?”
“Three days.”
He winced. “Let’s hope you noticed the swap early.”
“Sorry, what I mean is they stay on the system for three days. We then upload them to a backup drive and retain them for three months.”
In Jacob’s former policing career, the general rule of thumb for CCTV was thirty days before a recording was wiped. He voiced this to Eleanor and asked why the gallery held onto their recordings for so much longer.
“Liability and insurance,” she answered.
“Do they upload automatically?”
“No. We have to do it. It’s simple enough. Export the file, label it by month, day and year and the computer does the rest.”
Jacob puffed his cheeks. “Looks like I’ll be diving in.”
Eleanor seemed to appreciate the monotony of the task he faced. “Is there an easier way? Maybe fingerprinting the frame on the print?”
“It’s a nice idea,” Jacob said, “But, even if we had a way for Siobhan, Douglas and Geraldine to provide their fingerprints, all would have a reasonable alibi of having touched the fake in the course of their normal work. Unfortunately it’s a deep dive into the CCTV.”
Eleanor’s look was sympathetic. “Sorry,” she said.
“Don’t be silly. This is what I do, as much as it pains me to admit.”
She left him to it and he settled into the sole chair in the little office. He decided to work backwards, starting two days previous, when the theft had been discovered. He skipped through the footage until he found Eleanor standing in front of the switched painting and watched the subtle shift in her stance, the tilt of her head. Although he couldn’t see it, Jacob could sense her eyes narrowing, the faint crease of her brow as she reached out to touch the print.
With his starting point set, he let the footage roll back at quadruple speed. The gallery became a blur of movement as patrons drifted between the paintings, each person reduced to a flicker, gestures repeating in rapid succession.
He watched Eleanor opening in reverse, Geraldine whizzing her mop over the floor. The grey morning gave way to dawn as the day darkened into night, without a whisper of motion or hint of human shape drifting across the lens in the long hours until closing the night before.
The previous day followed in similar fashion and the repetition quickly became numbing. Jacob slowed the footage down whenever something caught his eye, usually someone stopping near the Mullen, a would-be buyer giving it some attention before moving on.
After an hour his eyes burned. He was considering a leg stretch when Eleanor appeared in the doorway holding two mugs.
“Caffine boost.”
“Lifesaver,” Jacob said, taking one of the mugs.
“How are you getting on?”
“Nothing obvious yet.”
Eleanor nodded, perched herself on the edge of the desk. “You must have a lot of patience for your line of work.”
“Bit of a necessity for a job like this. The world doesn’t like to give up its secrets fast.”
She tilted her head just enough to make him notice the line of her jaw. “That sounds like something a writer would say.”
“I tried writing once,” Jacob said. “Didn’t take.”
“I’m surprised. You’ve got the look of someone who doesn’t do things halfway.”
“I’m not sure if that’s flattery or accusation.”
“Maybe a little of both,” Eleanor said. “Depends on whether you want me to be honest.”
“Honest tends to land me in trouble.”
Eleanor brushed a strand of hair behind her ear. “Is that why you’re no longer a policeman?”
Jacob caught the faint spark in her eyes. There was an enjoyment here, of having someone outside her usual orbit. She was measuring him and relishing it. He felt a flush at the realisation combined with his own sudden strong desire for her.
“Well,” Eleanor said with a knowing smile as she slipped toward the door. “I should leave you to it.”
Jacob leaned back in the chair, took a long sip of his coffee and turned once more to the screens. For the next few hours, he tried to ignore any thoughts of Eleanor Voss as he lost himself in the footage again, letting the repeated frames of empty gallery walls and milling visitors blur together as he hunted for the smallest irregularity.
“You’re still at it.”
The voice made him jump. He hadn’t heard the door opening again and now Eleanor stood beside him, glass of wine in hand.
“Almost in body only at this stage,” Jacob said, rubbing at tired eyes. “How’s business out there?”
“I’ve just locked up.”
Jacob blinked. He knew he’d lost track of time but not to that extent.
“You’ve been at it all day. Do you want to stop and come back tomorrow?”
He shook his head. “If it’s ok with you, I’d like to keep going a while longer.”
Eleanor swirled the wine idly. “You always work yourself this hard, or is this just for me?”
Jacob’s fingers paused on the mouse. He looked up and found her smiling faintly, one eyebrow raised. “I try not to play favourites,” he said, after a beat.
“Oh, the detached professional.”
Jacob eased back in the chair, stretching his shoulders. “Something like that. Can’t afford to get tangled up.”
“Is that what this is? A tangle?”
There it was. The deliberate push. Her voice was soft but steady, her eyes holding his.
“I think I’m supposed to say yes.”
Eleanor smiled. “But you’re not sure?”
“I’ll have to check the private investigator handbook.”
“There’s a handbook?” she asked, playing along.
“Mostly unwritten. The first rule is probably don’t flirt with clients.”
“And the second?”
“Don’t let them distract you while you’re working.”
Eleanor leaned a little closer. “You’re doing a terrible job of that.” Her perfume, something faintly citrus, understated, lingered in the air between them.
“You’re not wrong.”
She stepped back. “Well then, I should let you concentrate.”
“Yeah,” agreed Jacob. “Probably wise.”
It was maybe twenty minutes later when he caught it.
Half a heartbeat of dissonance in the repetition.
Jacob paused, brought it back and let it play again. Night. The gallery still. A skip and then back to how it was but somehow different.
He played it a few times, watched the jump each time. It was there and yet he couldn’t place what was different.
Exiting out of the footage, he brought up the folder the videos were held on. Rows of identical icons, all fixed with the same date system..
The mouse flicked down, searching for the video he had just played. Jacob hovered the cursor over it.
He straightened, the fatigue falling away in an instant. “Oh, you fucker.”
“What am I looking at?” Eleanor asked, leaning slightly over his shoulder after Jacob had called her in.
“These are all the videos you retain for three months,” Jacob said, the screen open on the video folder of the back-up drive.
“Right.”
“All in date order.”
“Right,” she affirmed again.
“Notice anything?” Jacob asked as he let the cursor hover over a random video. A second delay brought up the video spec. He waited a few seconds before moving onto another and then a third.
“Should I?”
“What about this one?” He stopped on the video with the jump and again let the cursor idle and bring up the specs.
Eleanor leaned closer, studied it but shook her head.
“It’s an AVI. All the videos you save are MP4.”
Her eyes narrowed. “A fake?”
“A fugazi. I think that’s what you guys call it.”
“We definitely don’t.”
Jacob clicked on the video, rewound it to a few seconds before the skip and let it play. “Your thief has spliced two videos together. I wager this is the night of the theft and this,” he paused until the flicker on the screen happened, “is a different night entirely.”
He came out of the player and back into the video folder. A right click brought up the video properties. He touched the screen. It’s labelled the 20th October but look at the date created.”
“October twenty-first.”
“Whereas all the rest of the videos have a creation date corresponding to the day they were recorded.”
“Jesus,” said Eleanor.
“I assume your cleaner doesn’t have access to the computer?”
“She does not.”
“So we can narrow the culprit down between your two employees.”
“Actually, we can narrow it down further. Siobhan was on holiday with her girlfriend. Florence.”
“You’re sure?”
“Positive. They left on the twentieth and went for ten days. I remember because Siobhan said they wanted to be back for Halloween in Derry.”
“Then it sounds like Douglas is our man,” said Jacob.
Eleanor nodded slowly. “So, where does that leave us?”
“Go to the police. Give them the story, show them this. Probably enough for a warrant on any address Douglas has control over.”
“No.”
“No?”
“I want to look him in the eye.”
“Well, that’s very dramatic, but what happens when you look him in the eye, then he denies everything, tells us to get out of his house before he calls the police himself and then promptly gets rid of the painting.”
“He wouldn’t be stupid enough to keep the painting at his place,” said Eleanor.
“I don’t know,” said Jacob, “I’ve dealt with a lot of stupid in my time. But if Douglas is smarter than your average crim and he has stashed it somewhere, us confronting him would still tip him off.”
Eleanor folded her arms.
“I’m not making a dent, am I?
“I’m afraid not.”
“Well, it’s your call.”
“It is,” said Eleanor.
“Can I least insist on accompanying you just in case Douglas gets angry?”
Eleanor agreed and they took her Fiat 500 across the city battling the worst of rush hour traffic.
Douglas Topping was in his mid-thirties with a tidy beard. He wore a tidy wool-knit jumper and lived in a tidy apartment just off the Ormeau Embankment.
“Eleanor,” Douglas visibly blanched as he opened the door. “This is, it’s unexpected.”
“We just need a word, Douglas,” said Eleanor. “Won’t take long.”
“I mean sure,” Douglas said, eyes flicking from his boss to Jacob as his brain scrambled. “Whose this?”
“Jacob Kincaid,” Jacob replied. “Private investigator.”
“Private-”
“-Mind if we come in? Thanks”
He didn’t hear much of a protest as he stepped into the hallway and then the living room. He quickly scanned the room, taking note of the tv, the umbrella stand, the sofa, the original Shifting Coasts.
“Well,” Jacob said, looking at the painting Douglas had hung on his wall, “guess that saves us some time.”
Eleanor’s breath caught beside him. “Douglas.”
Jacob shook his head. “I mean, Doug, a little outside thinking. An attic. A storage unit. Under the bed at a push.”
Douglas swallowed. “I can explain.”
Jacob snorted. “Oh yeah?”
“I was going to put it back.”
“When?” Eleanor demanded. She turned her eyes away from the painting and looked at Douglas directly. There was no anger in her expression, just cold disappointment.
Jacob cut in, “Before or after the buyer you had lined up got cold feet?”
Douglas’s shoulders sagged, telling Jacob he had guessed correctly. “He wanted provenance paperwork. Transfer documentation. I couldn’t provide it. He said he’d report it if I pushed further.” He stopped and then asked feebly, “What happens now?”
Eleanor didn’t answer immediately. She glanced at Jacob
“You have the painting back and it doesn’t appear damaged,” said Jacob. “I suppose you could draw a line under it.”
Douglas looked between them. “You’re not calling the police?”
I didn’t say that,” said Elanor. “You understand that you’re finished at the gallery.”
Douglas closed his eyes briefly. “I know.”
“That might be enough,” Eleanor said. “I’ll have to think about it.”
“That’s fair,” said Douglas.
“Shut up, Douglas,” said Eleanor.
Jacob lifted the painting carefully. “Shall we get this home?”
“Let’s,” agreed Eleanor.
“It looks better here,” Jacob said as he watched Eleanor carefully affix the original Shifting Coasts back to its rightful place.
“It does.” Eleanor said, stepping back and taking in the painting before turning to Jacob.“I have wine in the kitchen.”
Eleanor retrieved two proper glasses and poured a generous amount in both. She raised hers. “To recovered art.”
“And flawed criminals,” Jacob added.
She smiled at that. They both drank. The wine was good. Dry, crisp, a little too easy to drink. They stood close, not quite touching, but near enough that Jacob was aware of the warmth of her arm beside his.
“You were very calm back there,” she said.
“Douglas was hardly a hardened villain.”
“And you noticed something most people wouldn’t.”
“Lucky,” he said lightly.
“Still, I was impressed.” She stepped closer.
There it was again. The deliberate narrowing of space. The citrus note of her perfume threaded through the air. “You enjoy this,” she said softly.
“What’s that?
“The chase.”
“Yeah,” Jacob said, feeling overmatched but not in any way opposed to what was going on here.
“And winning?”
“Depends what the prize is.”
Her lips curved slowly. “And what do you think it is?”
Jacob set his glass down. “I think,” he said, voice lower now, “it might be impolite not to find out.”
Eleanor’s laugh was quiet but unmistakably pleased. She closed the remaining distance, fingers brushing his sleeve before sliding to rest lightly against his chest. There was no hesitation in her now. Whatever game she was playing earlier, she had now decided the outcome.
She kissed him, her hand moving to the back of his neck, drawing him closer.
Jacob broke away after a few seconds but held her close. “My place isn’t far.”
“Then let’s go.”She finished her wine in one smooth movement, set the glass down and reached for her coat as Jacob did the same. There was no awkwardness, no overthinking. Just momentum.
They made it to his apartment at Saint Anne’s square in five minutes. Jacob unlocked the door and stepped aside to let her in first.
The apartment was tidy but not styled. A leather sofa that had seen better days, a low oak coffee table, a tall bookshelf crammed unevenly with crime novels. The kitchen was open-plan, stainless steel and clean lines, though the counter held a lone mug and an unopened stack of post.
It was a place that was slowly becoming his. A framed print of Hopper’s Nighthawks on one wall, a rug softening the echo of the wooden floors, but it still carried the faint emptiness of somewhere not fully lived in.
“Nice,” Eleanor said, glancing around.
“It’s getting there.”
She set her bag down carefully on the table, walking toward the wide window that overlooked the piazza
“You live alone,” she said.
Jacob turned to her. The alone carried more than just his living situation. It spoke to an individualism and loneliness that had set in so suddenly that he never quite realised it.
“Yeah.”
The thought spurned him on as he crossed the room quickly. When he reached her, he brushed a hand along her waist, giving her time to pull away if she wanted to.
She didn’t.
The kiss began softer than before, exploratory. The earlier urgency replaced by something slower, more deliberate. Her hands slid up his chest, fingers curling into the fabric of his sweater, drawing him closer. He felt the tension in her, a contained energy finally allowed to fire.
They moved without speaking, jackets discarded, shoes kicked aside. The room seemed to narrow around them, the outside world dissolving entirely. Eleanor’s composure loosened in increments. A catch of breath, a gasp of pleasure. Her careful control giving way to base instinct.
Jacob felt the shift in himself too. The edge he had been carrying eased. When he lifted her, she didn’t hesitate, legs wrapping around him as he carried her toward the bedroom.
The rest unfolded in fragments. Warmth, skin, breath, the slow loss of distance. It wasn’t hurried, nor was it restrained. There was an intensity in Eleanor that surprised Jacob, a decisiveness that matched her earlier boldness.
Outside, a siren wailed somewhere far off and faded. Inside, the only sounds were quieter, the rhythm of movement, the soft scrape of fabric against sheets, her voice low and close to his ear.
Jacob feel asleep with Eleanor curled against him and woke as she shifted, her weight on the mattress lifting entirely.
It took his dulled senses a moment to understand what was happening as he shook himself out of his reverie.
Eleanor stood by the foot of the bed, back to him, fastening the clasp of her bra. Her blouse hung loose in one hand.
For a moment, Jacob just watched.
“You’re up,” she said, without turning. Her voice was level, as if they were back in the gallery discussing camera footage.
“Just,” he said, his voice rough with sleep.
She slipped the blouse on, smoothing it down.
Jacob sat up a little more, rubbing his face. He squinted at the time on his phone. It was a little after midnight. “You don’t have to go,” he said, quieter than he intended. “Stay here, we can get breakfast in the morning.”
She paused and then turned, not fully facing him, one hand adjusting the cuff at her wrist. “That’s not what this is.”
“So, what is it?”
“Two people who wanted the same thing, at the same time.”
“And now?”
“Now we don’t.”
It wasn’t cruel. There was no edge to her words. Just a clean line drawn, neat as a frame in her gallery.
Jacob leaned back on his hands. Outside, a car rolled past, tyres hissing on wet pavement.
“I’ll sort payment in the morning,” Eleanor said as she picked up her bag. “Transfer or cash, whichever you prefer.”
Jacob huffed a quiet laugh. “Right back to business.”
She paused. “Listen, you did really good work. I’m genuinely thankful.”
“Happy to be of service.”
“Take care of yourself, Jacob,” Eleanor said and then left.
He followed the sound of her footsteps across the living room. The soft click of the door as she closed it behind her. And then she was gone.
The apartment was suddenly too small. The bed still held the shape of what had happened in it, and the quiet after Eleanor’s departure had only sharpened. He tried sitting for ten minutes with a glass of water and the television on mute, but the restlessness grew teeth and gnawed at him.
So he did what he’d started doing more often in recent months when sleep wouldn’t come and his thoughts refused to lie down.
He walked.
Belfast at night had a different face to the one it wore during the day. The traffic thinned to almost nothing. The city centre emptied out. Metal shutters were down across most of the shopfronts. Dark windows. Locked doors. Bits of litter moving in the gutters when the wind caught them.
Jacob kept his hands in his coat pockets and walked
There were still a few places clinging to life. A takeaway with a bright menu board and too-white strip lights. Another with steamed-up windows and two young lads waiting outside in hoodies, shoulders hunched, one checking his phone every few seconds. Somewhere farther off, a bottle clinked against pavement.
He turned onto North Street. The pavements gleamed under the sodium lights from earlier rain. The whole street looked as though it had been scrubbed back to its bones. A row of shuttered units stood in shadow, graffiti half-caught in the light, old posters peeling behind glass.
Jacob walked slowly, not hurrying to get anywhere. This had become a habit, though he wouldn’t admit to it. A walk when he was too wired to sleep. A way of burning something off without having to name it. Sometimes after a dead-end day. Sometimes after too much comfort eating. Sometimes after a conversation that kept replaying in his head in cleaner, sharper versions than the one that had actually happened.
Tonight it was Eleanor.
The way she’d stood in his room getting dressed as if she’d come to collect something she’d already paid for. Cool, composed, putting herself back together while he was still waking up. Deciding their time together was done while Jacob was thinking about next day plans.
He passed a darkened off-licence and kept going.
He knew he had read too much into her before. The way she enjoyed his presence, as an oddity from her normal day, something a bit rougher and less refined than the majority of her gallery patrons.
And yet, something in the way she’d leaned close in the office, the way she’d looked at him when he found the tampered file, the faint charge that had sat between them and then broken loose, had put any such concerns out of his mind. Until he was lying in bed afterwards, waking to find the temperature gone from the room,an uncomfortable sense of having been briefly useful in a way he hadn’t anticipated.
Useful, then finished with.
A breeze moved down the street, cold enough to cut through the opening of his coat. He turned his collar up and kept walking. Ahead, on the opposite side of the road, light poured out onto the pavement in a long pale rectangle.
Narrow frontage Long window. Jacob stood for a moment on the pavement, hands in his coat pockets. He could see his own reflection faintly overlaid on the interior
Inside, a few people sat at the counter facing the glass, all appeared to be alone, each in their own pool of thought.
A man in a dark jacket with both hands wrapped round a mug. A young woman with her hair pinned up, staring at a phone she wasn’t touching. Someone farther down with a paper cup and a rucksack at their feet, looking not tired exactly but paused, as if they’d stepped out of one life for an hour and hadn’t yet decided to go back. Behind the counter, a woman in a white shirt moved between chrome surfaces and stacked cups, wiping down as she went.
The place had that peculiar late-night stillness that made it seem less like a business than a stage set after the real audience had gone home. Warm light. Clean lines. Bright glass against the dark street.
Jacob pushed opened the door and entered slowly, as if expecting to be told to get lost. No one looked up as he moved to the counter and took an empty stool, the leather cool beneath him. From here, the glass felt less like a barrier and more like a frame. The street outside receded, reduced to passing headlights and drifting shadows.
“What can I get you?” the woman behind the counter asked quietly.
“Black coffee,” he said. “No sugar.”
She nodded and turned to the machine.
Jacob rested his forearms on the counter, staring out at the reflection of himself layered over the city beyond. The other customers remained in their separate orbits, connected only by proximity and the shared agreement not to intrude.
For the first time that night, the first time in a long while, he felt the edge of something like equilibrium.
The coffee arrived and was set in front of him with a soft clink. He wrapped his hands around the cup, mirroring the man a few seats down, and let the heat seep into his fingers.
Outside, Belfast carried on. Taxis sliding past, a distant shout echoing off stone, the street washed in sodium light.
Jacob took a sip and watched the city through the glass, content, for once, not to be looking for anything at all.