Death of an Old Master

19

Imogen Foxe was thinking of all the words she knew that meant black. Jet-black, inky black, Stygian gloom, dark as pitch, darker than the gates of hell. She could not see. She had travelled to London and made her rendezvous with the mysterious Mr Peters in the hotel near Waterloo station. There she was taken to a bedroom on the second floor where her eyes were covered with a black mask, and then so tightly bandaged that she could see nothing at all. A different man, she thought from the smell, had brought her to a different railway station and helped her to her seat in what she suspected was a first class carriage.

The man watched her all the time, especially her hands. If she moved a hand to her face he leant forward as if to restrain her. ‘Terrible accident, terrible,’ he had said to the guard on the train. ‘The doctors think she will recover her sight in the end. It’s rest in the country she needs now.’

Imogen’s world may have been black but her heart was dancing with joy. At the end of this mysterious journey, there was Orlando, Orlando she had not seen for months. She tried desperately to catch the announcements at the stations where they stopped. Maybe they could give some clue to their destination. But just as the announcer reached the words, ‘This train is calling at,’ her companion coughed loudly or began talking to her so she missed the names of the stations.

Her other senses, she noticed, seemed to have improved. She could smell the tobacco smoke in her companion’s clothes even though he wasn’t smoking. She heard the rumble of the wheels on the rails in a way she had never heard it before. Occasionally she heard the sound of footsteps in the corridor outside, crisp and precise. She wished those feet would stop and talk outside her door, then she might catch a clue about where they were going.

But in spite of the bandages over her eyes and the mask which made her feel like a circus performer or a harlequin in a parade, Imogen was happy. She might have been in the darkness. But she was travelling towards Orlando.

Johnny Fitzgerald, never an early riser, was having a late breakfast in Markham Square the day after the Powerscourts’ return and the Powerscourt interview with Edmund de Courcy Johnny devoured a couple of eggs, embellished with bacon and a squadron of mushrooms, while he listened to the Powerscourts’ Corsican adventure.

‘Did you believe that story, about the Traitor’s Run?’ he asked Lady Lucy.

‘I don’t know if I believe it or not,’ said Lady Lucy, consuming a small piece of buttered toast, ‘I just don’t know.’

‘Suppose it’s not true,’ said Johnny, between mouthfuls, ‘that can only mean one thing.’

‘What’s that?’ said Powerscourt looking gloomily at more bad news from South Africa in his newspaper.

‘It must mean that Edmund de Courcy, or persons working for him, are the killers. They have this forger, hidden away somewhere, producing fake Titians or Giorgiones for that exhibition in Old Bond Street. They hear a whisper on the street that Christopher Montague is about to produce an article denouncing the things as fakes. They get rid of Montague. Then they hear that his friend up in Oxford may have known what was in the article. He is sent off to meet his Maker too. Then, out of the blue, the two of you turn up in Corsica, asking questions about forgers of all things. The one place they could kill you both off with no questions asked is on that bloody island. So out come the guns. It’s a miracle you survived. Maybe they’re so used to taking pot shots at the wild boar they aren’t so good with humans. But it’s obvious, surely. De Courcy must have had a wire from that man Lady Lucy liked so much, the policeman in Calvi. Wire goes back from Old Bond Street. Exterminate Powerscourts. Coast now clear for further forgeries and further fleecing of American millionaires.’

Johnny leaned back in his chair with a triumphant smile. ‘I think I could manage a little more bacon,’ he said, reaching forward to refill his plate. ‘Hungry work solving mysteries at breakfast time.’

Powerscourt glanced up from a dramatic account of the siege of Kimberley, Cecil Rhodes and his diamonds locked up together by the Boers. He wondered what the Boers would do if they captured Rhodes. Ransom him? For diamonds?

‘I wish I could agree with you, Johnny,’ he said. ‘I just don’t know if that story about the Traitor’s Run is true or not. But the whole thing looks too bloody obvious to me. We go and see Mrs de Courcy and the pining daughters. The coachman disappears. Happens all the time, they say. Scarcely are we out of the front door than the bullets start pinging off the rocks. Whoever killed Montague was pretty smart about it. We’re still not sure who did it. Same thing with Thomas Jenkins. The murderer is almost an invisible man. If we’d have been killed on the Aregno road, it would have been too obvious for words.’

‘You don’t think you’re being too clever, Francis?’ said Lady Lucy. ‘Just because it looks obvious doesn’t mean it’s not right.’

Powerscourt laughed. ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘There is one thing we must do,’ he went on, folding the newspaper into a neat square, ‘we must find this young woman, Alice Bridge, who accompanied Christopher Montague to the Venetian exhibition. Do you have any ideas about her, Lucy?’

Lady Lucy smiled an enormous smile. ‘I shall ask around my relations, Francis. All of them, if necessary. They do have their uses, you see.’

Powerscourt laughed. ‘A hit, Lucy, a very palpable hit.’ He stopped suddenly. There was something at the back of his mind. He felt it might be important. His eyes drifted off to rest on the curtains where he had found Olivia in hiding. Hiding, that had something to do with it. Johnny Fitzgerald and Lady Lucy stared at him, wondering where his mind had gone to now. Perhaps he had travelled to South Africa or gone back to Corsica.

‘That’s it,’ said Powerscourt suddenly, returning from his reverie. He hadn’t been abroad at all, merely half a mile or so away in the offices of de Courcy and Piper in Old Bond Street. ‘It’s something de Courcy said to me yesterday,’ he went on, pausing while he remembered the exact words.

‘Out with it, man,’ said Fitzgerald, well used to these leaves of absence. Sometimes it took an irritatingly long time for his friend to return.

‘It was when I asked him about his house in Norfolk,’ Powerscourt went on, ignoring the interruption. ‘I said I understood it was abandoned at present. This, I think, is what he said. ‘Oh yes, it is, abandoned, I mean. There’s nobody there at all. The place is completely empty. There’s nobody there.’

‘What of it?’ asked Lady Lucy.

‘Well,’ said Powerscourt, surprised that it wasn’t totally obvious to his listeners, ‘he says the same thing four times. Abandoned. Nobody there. Place completely empty. Nobody there. Why should he say it four times? As if he was trying to convince me.’

‘I see,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald. ‘You think that the place may not be empty?’

‘And that inside,’ Lady Lucy carried on, ‘there might be somebody with a lot of old canvases sent from Corsica, forging away in the middle of nowhere in North Norfolk. That’s where the forger is.’

‘Well, he might be,’ said Powerscourt. ‘I think you ought to take a trip to de Courcy Hall, Johnny. Discreetly, of course, very discreetly. Have a look around. I shall be too busy here, analysing the replies of Lucy’s relations about the whereabouts of Alice Bridge. I expect there will be hundreds of them. But if you find anything of interest let me know at once and I will come and join you.’

‘Please check in the local guidebooks before you go, Johnny,’ said Lady Lucy. ‘Make sure there aren’t strange local customs up there at this time of year. Shooting strangers, for instance. I’d hate to think of an East Anglian version of the Traitor’s Run.’

The Committal Hearing for Horace Aloysius Buckley at Bow Street Magistrates Court was very brief. The magistrate was an elderly man, completely bald, with a disconcerting habit of taking his spectacles off and replacing them almost instantaneously. Sir Rufus Fitch was in ponderous mood, presenting his witnesses and taking them through the evidence very slowly and very carefully. Chief Inspector Wilson provided much of it, principally an account of his various interviews with the defendant in which Horace Buckley confessed to being in Montague’s room on the night of the murder. Edmund de Courcy and Roderick Johnston testified to seeing Montague on the day of his death. Mrs Buckley gave her deadly evidence about the tie. There was a witness who had seen him in Brompton Square round about the time of death. Other witnesses, a college porter and a delivery man, attested to Buckley’s presence in Oxford on the day of Jenkins’ death.

Charles Augustus Pugh had decided to present no witnesses at all at the hearing. He read through all he knew about the case for the third time the night before. He had no idea what sort of defence to offer. Rather than show any of his hand, he had resolved to keep quiet until the real trial. But as he listened to the evidence, he knew how poor his hand really was. I certainly don’t have any aces at this stage, he said to himself. I don’t have any Kings or Queens. I don’t even have a jack. The best I can do, for now, is something like the three of clubs. He resolved to call on Lord Francis Powerscourt at the earliest possible opportunity.

Cornelius P. Stockman was the tallest man William Alaric Piper had ever seen. He was about six feet nine inches tall, probably even taller than Captain Ames of the Horse Guards, the tallest man in the British Army, who had led the procession on Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee Parade two years before. Piper wondered if they put something in the water supply to produce this race of giants. The man looked as though he would have to bend down to pass through most English domestic doors.

‘Stockman’s my name,’ he said to Piper, stooping slightly to shake Piper’s hand as they met in the reception of the Old Bond Street gallery. ‘Been hearing you’ve got some pretty fine pictures here, Mr Piper. My friend Bill McCracken gave me good reports of you.’

Piper smiled to himself as he remembered his last meeting with the railroad millionaire. He had handed over the Gainsborough in his own little office, McCracken towering above him.

‘Fifteen thousand pounds, I’m afraid, Mr McCracken,’ he had said. ‘The previous owner took a lot of convincing, I’m afraid. But the Gainsborough is yours.’

William Alaric Piper firmly believed that the higher the prices the more genuine the paintings appeared to their new owners. He remembered the story of the American millionaire who had refused to buy a Velasquez because it was on offer for only five hundred pounds. If the dealer had doubled or trebled the price, Piper was certain it would have been sold.

McCracken had picked him up in an American bear hug and danced around the room.

‘Mr Piper, how can I ever thank you? Perhaps when you come to Boston you will be our guest in our house in Concord! Mrs McCracken and the Misses McCracken will be so delighted with this here Gainsborough!’ With that he wrote out a cheque and departed back to his hotel where the McCracken Gainsborough could join the McCracken Raphael to delight and enchant their new owner on their easels in room 347 of the Piccadilly Hotel.

Stockman was dressed rather like a cowboy going to church on Sunday, with great boots and a wide-brimmed hat.

‘What sort of pictures do you like, Mr Stockman?’ said Piper hesitantly. ‘Our gallery is full of these Venetian pictures at present, but we do have other things stored elsewhere.’

‘Let me be frank with you, Mr Piper. Stockman’s my name, Cornelius P. Stockman. My grandfather came from someplace out in the Ukraine – the family’s name was Rostowskowski or some damned thing like that. People out Kansas way couldn’t be pronouncing that. Grandpa Rostowskowski worked with cattle so they changed the name to Stockman and that’s what we’ve been ever since. We’re simple people in Kansas, Mr Piper. I tell you what I don’t like. I don’t care for any of those religious pictures. No, sir.’

Piper reckoned that a quarter or more of the paintings in his exhibition were no use on this occasion.

‘Those holy women give me the creeps, Mr Piper, I don’t mind telling you. And those damned portraits of all those noblemen all dressed up in their finery.’ Piper had a sudden vision of a Venetian Doge in cowboy boots, guns strapped to the leather trousers at his side, striding across the Piazza San Marco for a final shoot-out at the Bridge of Sighs. ‘They give me the creeps too. My grandfather left the Ukraine because of the tyranny of all those damned nobles. Our country fought with yours long ago to get rid of a King, why, I don’t think nobles and counts and marquises have any place in a democratic society like America.’ Piper thought about suggesting that an aristocracy of wealth might have replaced one based on birth, but felt the moment was inopportune. He also felt there might be only half a dozen pictures on the walls that would appeal to his transatlantic visitor.

Certainly Cornelius P. Stockman was moving round the exhibits at considerable speed. Five Titians, three Giorgiones and a host of works by lesser masters were circumnavigated in less than two minutes. A quartet of nobles were dismissed in about fifteen seconds flat. Piper was on the point of asking precisely what sort of pictures Stockman did like when the Kansas giant stopped. He stopped at precisely the same point as William P. McCracken some weeks before when the sight in front of him summoned up the memories of the elders of the Third Presbyterian in Lincoln Street in Concord, Massachusetts. Piper wondered wearily which of the innumerable varieties of American religion was about to be invoked now. Fifteenth Methodist on Washington Boulevard perhaps? Kansas First Baptist? Lutheran Memorial on Jefferson Drive? Maybe Mormons. Was Kansas anywhere near Salt Lake City? He didn’t think so but he wasn’t sure.

But Cornelius P. Stockman seemed to have different beliefs. He stared reverently at the painting in front of him. The background was an idyllic landscape in the Veneto, a plain in the centre with some distant mountains. On the right a small town in brown climbed lazily up a hill. Lying across the centre of the picture on a satin sheet with a dark red pillow was a young woman. She was completely naked. Sensuous and sensual, the sleeping Venus looked as though she had dropped down from heaven for a peaceful afternoon nap in the Italian countryside.

‘My word, Mr Piper, my word. That’s so beautiful. This Giorgione fellow, did he paint any more of these women?’

Piper was desperately trying to remember if the painting was real or a forgery. If it was forgery, he could take a lower price.

‘I think there is one other painting called Leda and the Swan,’ Piper said, ‘but Leda is not as prominent as the sleeping Venus. She occupies a much smaller space in the painting if you follow me. And I think it’s in an Italian museum, very hard to get things out of Italian museums, Mr Stockman. But,’ Piper brightened up as he thought of it, ‘Titian, another of the great masters, painted a number of women au naturel, as we say.’

‘Au naturel, did you say? In Kansas, Mr Piper, we call them nudes. Tell me, did these pictures go on display in Venice or wherever it was? I reckon the locals must have been queuing round the block to get a sight of them.’

Piper smiled. ‘I don’t think they went on display. They were painted for the private quarters of the rich where the nobility and the wealthy merchants could enjoy them in private.’

Stockman bent down at least a foot and a half to take a closer look at the Sleeping Venus. ‘Why, Mr Piper,’ he said, ‘that’s just what I propose to do. I live alone, apart from the staff, and I’ve got one huge room where I hang my pictures. I can enjoy them in peace there.’

Piper had a sudden inspiration. ‘Could I make a suggestion, Mr Stockman? I always think of these paintings as being like a person, you see, an old friend perhaps, that you enjoy having in your house. Maybe this Sleeping Venus would look and feel rather lonely on your walls. Maybe I could collect some more nudes, of the highest quality, of course. A group of them would surely look better in your private gallery than a single Giorgione?’

Cornelius P. Stockman was still peering intently at the Venus. ‘It’s a long way from Venice, Italy, to Kansas City, Kansas,’ he said. ‘I tell you what, Mr Piper, you get me as many of these as you can. I’ll take a bundle of them. I’ve got some rather dreary pictures of French peasants somebody advised me to buy in Paris a couple of years ago. Man called Tryon, I think, somebody called Rosa Bonheur. Reckon they could move house to make room for the ladies.’

‘What sort of numbers were you thinking of?’ asked Piper, angry with himself once more that his mental arithmetic wasn’t as good as it should have been. ‘Three? Four?’

‘Four?’ said Cornelius P. Stockman derisively. ‘Don’t think four would make much of an impact.’ Piper suddenly remembered a terrible American painting he had refused to buy some years before. It showed some everlasting plain in the American Midwest, the entire surface covered with cattle moving stupidly but purposefully towards what might have been a railway depot in the distance. Men on horseback patrolled the outer reaches of the herds. Clouds of dust covered the plain. If you dealt in that number of cattle, four Venetian women, naked or not, might seem a trifle.

‘Get me a dozen,’ Stockman said decisively. ‘I’ll buy the lot.’

‘I am dying,’ the letter had said. ‘I mean we are all dying all the time, but my portion of days is now very short. Very soon I may have to go into hospital. Please come and see me at my home before it is too late. I have some information for you about forgers.’

Sir Frederick Lambert’s handwriting was very shaky. On some of the letters, the ‘y’s and the ‘p’s, the downstrokes hurtled unstoppably down the page. Powerscourt, hurrying towards Lambert’s house in South Kensington, hoped he wasn’t too late. There was a slight drizzle falling on the pavements, glistening off the backs of the horses as they pulled their masters through the squares of Chelsea.

A middle-aged nurse in crisp white uniform showed Powerscourt into the study. This was a small room, entirely lined with books and tapestries. Powerscourt was slightly disappointed there were none of Sir Frederick’s own paintings on the walls.

Sir Frederick had looked unwell every time Powerscourt had seen him in his offices in the Royal Academy, coughing blood into an endless supply of clean white handkerchiefs, hiding them in a secret cache behind his desk. Now his body seemed to have collapsed completely. The flesh on his face had been sucked inwards, his cheeks hollow with the disease. The skin on his wrists and hands looked like dirty parchment scarcely able to cover the bones below. His eyes, which had been so full of life, were glazed. Powerscourt wondered if he was full of drugs to ease the pain.

‘Powerscourt,’ said Sir Frederick, just able to raise himself from his chair and shake Powerscourt’s hand, ‘how good of you to come.’

‘You are looking well, Sir Frederick,’ lied Powerscourt. ‘No doubt you will be up and about again soon.’

‘Nonsense, man,’ said Lambert, just able to raise a smile. His face looked even more gaunt. ‘The doctors tell me I have less than a month to go. I get frightened, you know.’ He looked down at the wrecks that had been his hands, the hands that had made all his paintings with such touch and delicacy, the hands that had brought him fame and fortune. ‘When I look at myself in the mirror, I don’t recognize myself at all. I doubt if the Good Lord would admit anybody who looks as wasted as I do. The other inmates might not like it.’

‘You never know who you might meet up there,’ said Powerscourt, ‘maybe Michelangelo is doing them another ceiling.’

‘We do not have much time, my friend,’ said Lambert. ‘That nurse is such a bully, I wonder she doesn’t go and work in a prison. I am only allowed fifteen minutes with you.’

The President of the Royal Academy produced a package from his pocket. ‘Look at all these stamps,’ he said. Powerscourt looked down at them, wondering if the old man had lost his mind as well as his body. French stamps, Italian stamps, Russian stamps, German stamps. There must have been more than fifty of them.

‘Ever since you first came to see me,’ the old man said, ‘I’ve been inquiring about forgers. I’ve now had over sixty replies from all the leading museums and authorities in Europe.’

Powerscourt remembered that the old man was still President of the Royal Academy. Even now the vultures would be circling round his job, lobbying here, promising favours there in order to take over the most prestigious post in British art.

‘I’ve narrowed it down to two,’ Lambert went on, shuffling his stamps into neat piles. ‘The first one is a Frenchman called Jean Pierre Boileau. He’s about fifty years old. They say he tried to make a career in Paris as a painter but he never sold anything at all. Then he disappeared somewhere in the Auvergne and wasn’t heard of for years. It transpired that he had an arrangement with a gallery in Florence for old paintings he could pick up on the trips he took around the south of France. The point was there weren’t any trips. There was only a trip to the barn beside his little house which he had converted into a studio. He specialized in Italian paintings.’

‘What happened to his arrangement with the gallery in Florence?’ asked Powerscourt.

‘Somebody smelt a rat, somebody from one of the big galleries in Rome. It was all hushed up. There was no publicity about the fact that the gallery had sold a heap of fakes.’ Sir Frederick was arranging his stamps into piles from their country of origin. About fifteen French ones were mustered on the left-hand side of the little table in front of him.

‘It’s a curious thing, Powerscourt,’ he went on, ‘whenever there is a forgery or a fake is discovered, everybody in the art world closes ranks. Thing gets hushed up as quickly as possible. The victims of the fraud get their money back. Very quickly, sometimes with the proviso that they keep their mouths shut.’

‘Do you think Monsieur Boileau is back in business now?’ asked Powerscourt, watching with fascination as a small regiment of German stamps took up their position before him.

‘I do not,’ said Lambert, shuffling slowly with the Russians, all adorned with the head of the Tsar, ‘I think he would be too old. I think his nerve might have gone if he’d been caught once.’

‘And the other forger? Is he French too?’

Only the Italian stamps remained. ‘The other one,’ Lambert spoke slowly, as if talking was becoming difficult, ‘is English. Quite young. Extraordinarily talented. He studied here at the Royal Academy not so long ago. Then he went to study in Rome. I think he worked for a time for the leading picture restorers in Paris – restoration, some say, is a cousin, if not a brother or a sister, to forgery. Then he disappeared. There were stories about gambling debts, about an unhappy love affair, about drinking to excess. But he has simply disappeared off the face of the earth. He may be dead, of course, but I doubt it.’

Maybe he’s hidden away somewhere in la France profonde or some remote mountainous area in the Apennines, Powerscourt said to himself. Maybe he’s in Corsica. Maybe he’s locked up on the wild coast of Norfolk, in the crumbling splendour of de Courcy Hall. Abandoned. Nobody there. Place completely empty. Nobody there at all.

The four great powers of Europe were now assembled in neat piles on Lambert’s table. Powerscourt wondered briefly about alliances, Triple Ententes between Rome, Paris and St Petersburg perhaps, as Lambert swept them all into the jumbled heap they had been a few minutes before. Powerscourt thought he must repeat this process over and over again. Rather like the diplomats of Europe.

‘Do you know his name?’ said Powerscourt, mesmerized by the new kaleidoscope of stamps.

As Sir Frederick smiled his cheeks became almost completely hollow. He might have been a ghost. ‘He is called Orlando Blane,’ he said, ‘and a very charming young man he was. I met him, you know, when he was studying at the Academy. Very quick, but not quite stable. Always liable to go off the rails.’

‘And none of your informants have any idea where he is at present?’ asked Powerscourt.

‘Nobody has any idea at all. But if you can find him, you may have solved the mystery, or part of the mystery. I think I have told you before that I was very fond of Christopher Montague. His death is such a loss to the art world. May I ask you a question, Powerscourt?’ The voice was beginning to fade. ‘Do you know who killed him?’

Powerscourt thought briefly about lying, about saying that he was on the very edge of a great discovery. But he knew Sir Frederick deserved better than that.

‘No, I do not, Sir Frederick,’ he said sadly, ‘it is a very difficult case.’

‘Can I ask you one favour, Powerscourt? Can you find the answer before I go? I’m not sure I could find out once I’m dead, if you see what I mean. And I’d hate to pass on without knowing the answer.’

Sir Frederick’s eyes were pleading with him, a last plea from a man who thought he had less than a month to live.

‘I shall do my best, Sir Frederick.’ Powerscourt suddenly got up and took the old man’s two hands in his own. They were very cold. The surface felt like marble. ‘I shall do more than my best to find the answer for you. The next time I come, I pray you will be better than you are today. And I shall tell you who killed Christopher Montague.’

As he walked home through the wet squares of South Kensington, the light fading fast from the streets of London, Powerscourt thought he now had two deadlines. One was to find the murderer before Horace Aloysius Buckley was wrongly convicted of the crime and hanged by the neck until he was dead. The other was to find the murderer before death came to call for the President of the Royal Academy, Sir Frederick Lambert, arranging the stamps of the Great Powers of Europe into neat piles on his table.