Death of an Old Master

2

Lord Francis Powerscourt had just sat down in his favourite armchair by the fire in the family’s London home in Markham Square. It was early evening. A black cat was asleep at his feet. Something was rubbing at his back. He turned round and extracted a very small Russian doll from behind the cushions. It was brightly painted in red and blue. Powerscourt looked at it affectionately. It must be one of Olivia’s collection, he said to himself, and opened his newspaper.

Footsteps were sounding along the hall outside. Lady Lucy Powerscourt stepped slowly into the room. Even after seven years of marriage the radiance of her presence often gave Powerscourt a sort of warm glow inside. She was reading a letter.

She smiled at her husband. ‘It’s from one of my cousins,’ she said.

Powerscourt felt a moment of exasperation as he contemplated his wife’s relations. There were so many of them. He had already met over a hundred and fifty. There were still twenty or thirty to go. He thought that by the law of averages one of these relations must one day become Prime Minister or the Archbishop of Canterbury or, better still, Captain of the England cricket team.

There was a sudden gasp from Lady Lucy. ‘Oh no,’ she said very quietly, ‘how terrible. He’s been killed.’

‘Who has been killed, Lucy?’ Powerscourt felt a quick stab of professional interest. He had often joked with Lucy in the past that one day some member of the tribe would be involved in a terrible crime and he, Powerscourt, would have to investigate. Now it was coming true.

Lady Lucy composed herself and sat down by the fire. ‘It’s Christopher,’ she said. ‘Christopher Montague. You know Christopher.’

Powerscourt racked his brains. Sometimes he wished he could have an instantly accessible filing system with all the relations neatly tabulated beside their photographs. It would make life so much easier. Montague, Christopher Montague, had he ever met this Christopher Montague? He couldn’t remember.

‘Oh, Francis,’ Lady Lucy said sadly, ‘you are hopeless. You met him at Sarah’s wedding.’

Which Sarah, Powerscourt thought desperately. There were at least four if not five of those. Then it came to him like the mist clearing on a spring morning. He saw a slight young man in his early thirties at a wedding reception, glass of champagne in hand. He was quite short and perfectly turned out in a grey morning suit. He had a small moustache. The mental image of the late Christopher Montague was telling his companions about the beauties of the Italian countryside.

‘Youngish sort of chap, not very tall?’ said Powerscourt hesitantly. Privately he felt that there must be at least ten of Lady Lucy’s relations who would fit that description.

‘That’s him,’ said Lady Lucy sadly. ‘That was him.’

‘How did he die?’ asked Powerscourt, relieved that the question of identification had been resolved.

‘He was garrotted. I think that’s what his sister said. Garrotted means having a rope or something similar pulled tight round your throat until you die, doesn’t it?’

Powerscourt felt embarrassed that his wife’s knowledge of his macabre profession meant that she knew the meaning of the word. ‘That is what garrotted means, Lucy. Where did it happen?’

Lady Lucy wiped her eyes. ‘He lived with his sister in Beaufort Street in Chelsea. Christopher wasn’t married. But he had a little flat in Brompton Square where he used to work. That’s where he was killed.’ Lady Lucy looked sadly at her husband. ‘You will investigate his death, Francis, won’t you? I’m sure the family would want you to.’

‘Of course I will, Lucy. But what did Christopher Montague do for a living? Did he have private means?’

‘I think he did have a little money of his own,’ said Lady Lucy, ‘but he did quite well out of his writing.’

‘Did he write for the newspapers? Was he a journalist with one of the papers?’

‘I think he did write for the Morning Post sometimes. But always about exhibitions and that sort of thing. You see, Christopher was just beginning to make a name for himself as an art critic.’

Powerscourt wondered what it might be about an art critic’s life that could lead to his violent death. Surely, he thought, their days were spent in galleries and libraries, their eyes fixed on the higher glories of the Quattrocento or the allegorical masterpieces of Poussin. Then he remembered all those heads of John the Baptist presented on a plate to Salome, Judith and Holofernes, the terrible torments of the damned in Hieronymus Bosch. Maybe death and art were not so far away. But it could also have been Christopher Montague’s private life that had led to his end.

‘Francis, Francis, come back, come back.’ Lady Lucy brought him out of his reverie. ‘There’s something else.’ She pulled a key out of the envelope. ‘His sister has given me the key to his flat. I thought you might want to go and see for yourself.’

‘Surely Lucy,’ said Powerscourt, ‘the dead man is not still there?’

‘I don’t know,’ Lady Lucy replied. ‘He was only found this morning.’

Powerscourt took the key to Number 29 Brompton Square and set out across the London twilight. He passed crowds of people outside South Kensington underground station. He could see the Brompton Oratory rising in its Catholic splendour at the junction of the Cromwell and Brompton Roads. The square was tucked in behind the main road, a pleasant collection of late Georgian houses with a garden in the centre.

Number 29 was in the far left-hand corner, Montague’s flat on the first floor. A policeman was on guard inside the porch. After a quick conversation to establish Powerscourt’s credentials, he let him pass inside the house. Inspector Maxwell, the constable informed his visitor, was the officer in charge of the case.

‘Good evening to you, sir,’ said the Inspector warily. ‘May I ask what is the nature of your business here?’ The Inspector was in the kitchen, staring at a couple of clean glasses on the draining board. Maxwell was a tall, pencil-slim young man with a mop of curly black hair.

‘My name is Powerscourt. I am an investigator. The family have asked me to look into Montague’s death. I am a distant relation of his.’

Inspector Maxwell shook him by the hand. ‘The Commissioner has often talked about you, sir. Good to have you on board.’

Powerscourt had been involved with the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police on a number of his previous cases. He had always taken great care to maintain good relations with the police force of London.

‘The basic facts are these, my lord,’ said Maxwell, checking in his notebook. ‘The body was discovered by Mrs Carey, the lady who comes to clean the flat, at about eleven o’clock this morning. The doctors think he was killed sometime yesterday evening. They think the murder weapon was probably piano wire or picture cord, something very simple the murderer could have carried in his pocket. There’s another doctor coming any minute before the body is removed. Perhaps you’d like to have a look, my lord. It’s not a pretty sight,’ he went on, ‘but I’m sure you’ve seen lots of dead bodies in your time, my lord.’

Powerscourt felt nervous as he opened the door of the main room of Montague’s flat. Heaven knows, he had seen enough bodies in his time, some mutilated in war, others desecrated in peace, but the prospect of finding another one in a pleasant London square within walking distance of his home did not appeal.

The room must have been the drawing room when the house was a single unit, before it had been turned into three flats. It had high ceilings and fine windows. Bookshelves lined the walls. Slumped at a desk, his head fallen low on to his chest, there was the figure of a man. Christopher Montague might have been working when his killer struck. Powerscourt looked with distaste at the fatal marks on his neck, great weals of purple and black where the murderer had pulled the cord or the wire tight round his neck. Death must have been pretty quick, he thought. He noticed a mark on the leg of the chair where the killer might have placed his shoe to gain extra purchase on Montague’s throat.

But the strangest feature of the drawing room of Number 29 Brompton Square was what had happened to the possessions. A number of books had been removed, gaps in the shelves sticking out like recently extracted teeth. Any papers left on or inside the desk had gone. Gently Powerscourt opened the drawers on either side of the knee-hole desk. They were empty.

Powerscourt crawled along the floor, trying to see if any scraps of paper, any notes, might have fallen into one of the dusty corners. There was nothing. He checked the single bedroom. A fine collection of Montague suits and shirts still hung in the cupboards, but there were no books or documents to be seen. Gingerly Powerscourt checked all the pockets. Somebody had been there before him. They were completely empty. Powerscourt thought it impossible that anybody could have completely empty pockets in their jackets. He was always finding old bills, theatre ticket stubs, currency notes in his own pockets. Here there was nothing.

He went back to the kitchen. ‘I presume, Inspector,’ he said, ‘that you and your men have not removed anything from the drawing room?’

‘Certainly not, my lord.’ Inspector Maxwell was quick to defend the professionalism of his team. ‘We haven’t moved a thing. And Mrs Carey, the cleaning woman, left everything exactly as she found it. She hasn’t touched a thing. Somebody seems to have removed some of the books, mind you. And the desk is empty too. Mrs Carey says he was always scribbling away there, as she put it. Do you suppose the killer took Montague’s writings away?’

‘We can only assume that he did,’ said Powerscourt. ‘But why? The man wrote about art, for God’s sake. It’s not as if were a spy or a diplomat writing out the clauses of some secret international treaty.’

‘I’m worried about these wine glasses,’ said Inspector Maxwell. ‘Mrs Carey says Montague hardly ever had any visitors here. He lived somewhere else. This was where he worked. But here are two glasses which must have been used since Mrs Carey’s visit yesterday. She says her Mr Montague never washed anything up in his life. But here we are. Two clean glasses. Two people having a drink.’

‘One of them the killer, perhaps?’ said Powerscourt. ‘And if that is the case then Montague must have opened the door to let him in. He must have known the person who killed him.’

‘My thoughts exactly, my lord. Not that it takes us much further forward, mind you. People usually know their killers after all.’

Powerscourt took another look at the glasses. Had Montague cleaned them before he was murdered? Unlikely, he thought, if Mrs Carey was to be believed. Or had his killer cleaned them up after committing the murder? Surely the killer would have wanted to get away as fast as possible. Or had he a particular reason for cleaning the two glasses?

‘May I take a last look in the drawing room?’ said Powerscourt. ‘And I shall keep you informed about anything I find out from the family.’

Powerscourt sat down in a large rocking chair and thought about the life and death of Christopher Montague, one-time art critic. Why had some of the books been removed? Why had his desk and his pockets been so scrupulously emptied of their contents? And why some of the books? Why not all of them? And what about those glasses?

As he made his way back towards Markham Square, he wondered if Montague’s private life held the key to his demise. Perhaps the books had been removed as a means of demeaning the dead, to strip him of his most cherished possessions, to leave him mentally naked before his maker. All he could do, thought Powerscourt, was to find all the people who had known him in his last days, to tease out of his relations whether any private scandal had brought sudden and terrible death to Brompton Square.

William Alaric Piper and Edmund de Courcy were sitting in Piper’s little office behind the paintings in their gallery in Old Bond Street.

‘I think I’ve found a Raphael, William,’ said de Courcy.

‘A Raphael, by God!’ William Alaric Piper’s eyes lit up. His brain hurtled through the prices paid for Raphaels over the past hundred years. He rubbed his hands together in anticipation. ‘Where is it? Is it real? How broke is the owner?’

‘It’s in a decaying Elizabethan mansion in Warwickshire,’ replied de Courcy, smiling as he saw the torrents of greed rushing across his partner’s face. It was always like this with anything worth more than ten thousand pounds. ‘I had a pretty good look at it,’ de Courcy went on. ‘For my money I should say it is genuine but I couldn’t be sure. There’s the usual collection of Old Master fakes and forgeries, a couple of Van Dycks that can’t be more than fifty years old, a very doubtful Fragonard, a hopeless attempt at a Caravaggio. As for the owner, his house is almost falling down. And he’s the only man I’ve ever met with a reaction like that.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Piper, thumbing through one of the cards on his desk, checking the Raphael valuations.

‘Normally, William, when you tell them that you might, just might, be interested in buying a painting, they tell you first of all that it was purchased by great great great great grandfather James in Rome or some other Italian bazaar over two hundred years ago. They tell you how much he paid for it. Then you get all the rubbish about how long it’s been in the family, how they couldn’t bear to part with it, how it has to be passed on along with the house and the estate and the port to future generations. One man who never sold actually got quite tearful when he thought of the family Titian being taken off his walls. But this Hammond-Burke fellow asked straight away how much it was worth. Rather like he was selling a horse.’

‘Not much money in Titians,’ said Piper sorrowfully. He had a soft spot for Titian. ‘Too many of the damned things. Silly old man lived till he was nearly a hundred, as you know. If only he’d died young like our friend Giorgione in the exhibition, he wouldn’t have left so many damned paintings. Then the prices would be better.’

‘The point is this, William,’ said de Courcy, familiar with Piper’s normal reaction of applying the laws of supply and demand to the artistic heritage of the Western world. ‘James Hammond-Burke’s house is falling down. I should say it needs at least twenty thousand pounds spending on it.’ De Courcy’s expertise in restoration costs for old houses was based on the annual estimate for restoring his own de Courcy Hall in Norfolk. His agent supplied him with these costs every year from an experienced firm in Norwich. Norfolk alone had enough crumbling piles to keep a number of building companies in profitable employment for decades.

‘I checked in the village next to the house as well. The general opinion was that the Hammond-Burkes were virtually bankrupt.’

‘So, Edmund, so.’ Piper was planning his campaign. ‘We write to this Hammond-Burke fellow. Do we ask him to bring the painting up to London so our experts can look at it? Or do we go there?’

William Alaric Piper always wanted to bring his victims to London. He doubted if they were used to the capital. He would show them the paintings currently on display in the de Courcy and Piper Gallery. He would assure them that he could make no final decision until he had consulted his experts. He would sound rather doubtful about the provenance of the Raphael or the Rubens. He would send them back to their damp and their decay with hopes slighter than when they arrived. But he would not cast them into total despair. ‘We shall see,’ he would say, as he ushered them out of his office. ‘So many of these paintings turn out to be merely copies of the original and are worth nothing at all. Or they’re forgeries. But we shall have to wait a little while. These experts have to take their time examining the work. I have known them wait a month or so before they give their judgement. Once we know, I shall be in touch at once. A very good day to you, sir.’

‘I am sure Hammond-Burke would come to London. Absolutely sure of it,’ said de Courcy.

‘How long ago did you see him, three days ago, did you say?’

De Courcy nodded. He watched his partner calculating the problems in landing this particular fish, a fish that might be worth over fifty thousand pounds profit to the gallery.

‘Let’s leave him a little longer, Edmund. Let’s leave him for three or four days more. Then Mr Hammond-Burke or Burke-Hammond or whatever he’s called, will get a letter from us.’

De Courcy had seen many of these letters. They were masterpieces of manipulation. The gallery regretted that the owner was contemplating selling his Raphael. The gallery firmly believed that Old Masters should be left in their ancestral homes, to bear witness to their past and to be a beacon to future generations. However, it was always the policy of the gallery to be of succour to owners who might wish to dispose of their paintings. The gallery always attempted to ensure that they moved on to reputable owners who would guard and cherish the work as it had been guarded and cherished in the past. If Mr Hammond-Burke could bring his painting with him, the gallery, at its own expense, would ensure that it was examined by the foremost experts in the land. If necessary, other experts would be summoned from Paris or Berlin. The gallery believed that every care should be taken to ensure the correct attribution of the work. Then Piper would suggest a date. The date was always very close to the time of arrival of the letter. Get their hopes up, Piper would say. They can work out the cost of repairs on the train on their way here. Once they’re here, they’re caught. They’re in the net of William Alaric Piper.

Very few of them escaped.