Giotto's Hand

11

He got back to Byrnes’s gallery about half an hour after Flavia, and the two of them then slogged their way across central London to get to the station. Liverpool Street Station at five-thirty in the evening requires a strong stomach and nerves of steel even when you’re used to it; for Flavia it resembled nothing so much as a scene from Dante’s Inferno. A post-modern, recently-restored Inferno, no doubt, but even the fine restoration work on the station could not disguise the basic chaos of the transport.

“Dear God,” she said as she followed Argyll towards what was flagged as the 5:15 to Norwich, but which was still hanging around in the station, “are you serious?”

She looked at the ancient carriages with the doors hanging open, the windows filthy with years of grime and the paint peeling off, then shook her head in disbelief. Then she peered through the caked mud and saw the hundreds of commuters crammed in with barely a square millimetre of space, each one gamely reading a newspaper and pretending this was a civilized way of spending their brief sojourn on earth. “Is this the express service to Belsen, or something?” she asked.

Argyll coughed with embarrassment. It’s always awkward, being in the position of feeling patriotically obliged to defend the indefensible. “It’ll get us there,” he said lamely. “I hope.”

“But why don’t these people just get off and put a match to the thing?” she asked with the incredulity that only someone who lives in a country with an effective train service can muster.

Argyll was halfway through explaining that British Rail would just transfer the charred wrecks to the Brighton line when a loud crackle was followed by an incomprehensible booming around the station.

“What?” asked Flavia, frowning and trying to make it out.

“I don’t know.”

The grunting and mumbling seemed to be understood by the passengers on the train, however. With one huge collective sigh, they folded their newspapers, picked up their briefcases, got off and organized themselves on the platform. None seemed particularly perturbed by the fact that the train should have pulled out of the station twenty minutes ago.

“Excuse me,” Flavia asked a well-dressed, fifty-year-old man who had come to stand placidly nearby. “What did that announcement say?”

He raised an eyebrow, surprised at the disturbance. “The train has been cancelled again,” he explained. “The next one’s in an hour.”

This is ridiculous,” she said firmly after she’d digested the information and decided that patience could be overdone. “I’m not hanging around here for an hour to be squeezed into a cattle truck. If these people want to stand around like a bunch of sheep, that’s their problem. I’m getting out of here.”

Suppressing a desire to point out that sheep don’t travel in cattle trucks, Argyll trooped after her, out of the station and into a car rental place around the corner.

He reckoned they averaged about three miles an hour all the way to Norwich. He still thought they would have arrived faster if they’d waited for the train, but, in the circumstances, didn’t want to say so. It did give them plenty of time to talk about the late Geoffrey Forster, and the varying possibilities that he was either a major criminal or, alternatively, the biggest waste of time for years. Argyll summarized his findings in the afternoon.

“So?” Flavia said as they slowed to a halt somewhere. “What do you think?”

“Well. It’s interesting, isn’t it? All these little hints.”

“Which ones?”

“Forster busied himself for several years selling paintings from Weller House. Right?”

She nodded.

“Now, when Uncle Godfrey shuffled off the mortal coil fifteen years back, there were seventy-two paintings listed in the inventory taken when he died. When Cousin Veronica followed suit another inventory was taken. And guess what?”

She shook her head. “Amaze me.”

“Still seventy-two pictures in the collection.”

The queue of traffic got moving again, and Flavia paused while she tried to manoeuvre herself into a position to burst mightily through the twenty miles-an-hour barrier.

“Which means,” she resumed as she gave up the effort a few moments later, “that either he was buying new ones, which I assume you can check from comparing the two lists. or he wasn’t selling anything.”

Argyll nodded enthusiastically.

“Using Weller House as a sort of Laundromat?” she suggested. “Is that what you’re getting at?”

“That’s it. Forster steals a painting, which is bought by someone. Problem: how to disguise where it comes from, so it can satisfy the curious. For a picture not to have any provenance is a bit suspicious these days, and the last thing you want is to give the impression it might have come from Italy. So, you find an old country house collection that hasn’t been examined by anyone for years. If there is any old documentation, you burn it so no one can double check. Then you begin to sell the pictures, perhaps going through an auction house to be doubly sure, claiming they came from there.”

“And” Flavia continued, “although some people might wonder, no one can ever prove it was stolen because Forster has made sure his targets were from badly catalogued, uninsured collections. And the new owners will be cautious enough to make sure no photographs of their new possession are taken either.”

“Exactly. There’s some risk, but given the number of pictures in the world and the small number of people able to recognize them, it’s not that big.”

Flavia nodded. “This woman is going to send you a list of his sales and purchases, is she?”

“In a couple of days. She doesn’t want anyone else to know.”

“I could do with the evidence now.”

Argyll thought this over. Some people are in such a hurry all the time. They’d only heard of Forster less than a week ago, after all.

“The statements about him aren’t good enough?”

“One person, thirty years out of date and with a grudge. Sandano I’m not sure we can use: I promised him confidentiality. Della Quercia is too batty to be relied on. All Winterton says is that Forster recognized a possibly stolen painting. It’s a pity Veronica Beaumont is dead. Evidence that Forster was selling pictures supposedly from Weller House, and proof that they didn’t come from there would be very useful. We might then be able to find out where they got to. Was there anything in his papers about his sales?”

“Not so far. But I haven’t finished them yet.”

Then it was her turn to think and to change the subject. “What do people in this village think of him? Nobody this afternoon seemed to have a high opinion. Winterton thought he had bad taste—which Bottando’s Giotto most certainly did not have, if he existed. Byrnes sneers about Forster being charming. Why would anyone sneer at someone being charming?”

“Because this is England, my dear, and that’s what we do here.”

“Why? I like people to be charming.”

“But you’re Italian,” he explained patiently, as she slipped the car into gear and lurched forward a few hundred yards. “In this country charm means you’re superficial, have a tendency to flattery, are probably a bumptious social climber and, moreover, the term carries very distinct implications that you like women.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“A ladies’ man,” Argyll said darkly. “Few things can be worse. It suggests a propensity to slobber over people’s hands and pay compliments like some continental. You can do that sort of thing with dogs, but not with the opposite sex.”

“You do come from a very strange country, you know. Tell me about my new hostess. Am I going to enjoy her company?”

“Mrs. Verney? Very much, I think. At least, I do. She’s quite charming. And, before you ask, women can be charming. That’s perfectly acceptable, even in England.”

“I see. And in what does her charm consist?”

“Comfort. She makes you feel relaxed and at home, even in that chilly great barn of a house. She’s very intelligent, I think; a wry sense of humour, rather quick on her feet.”

“Why is she so obliging?” she asked suspiciously.

“Curiosity about you, probably. But as you’re curious about her as well, that’s all right. Besides, I suspect the real truth is that she’s a bit lonely. She doesn’t really have much of a life up there, you know.”

They arrived at the village at well past nine, and Flavia drove straight to Weller House. The rain was finally stopping as a way of welcoming them to Norfolk, and Mary greeted them like long-lost friends, led them into the kitchen—you must be hungry, so I kept a little food over for you—then settled them down so she and Flavia could cast an eye over each other and see what was mutually in store for them. Flavia was tired, Mary seemed unusually quiet and cautious.

But they got the measure of each other fairly quickly; Flavia was better with a drink beside her, and Mary relaxed. Argyll, in fact, felt rather left out, and a little affronted by the way they hit it off. Neither of them bothered to talk to him very much at all; rather, they chattered away, discussing the state of British transport, the weather, the horrors of living in London, Rome and Paris and the problem of getting good materials for salad to grow in an English climate.

“And have you reached a conclusion about Geoffrey?” she asked after a while.

“Not really,” Flavia said. “Enquiries are continuing.”

“We may have linked him to another picture,” Argyll added, for no particular reason except for the fact that he hadn’t been able to say anything for nearly quarter of an hour and needed to make his presence felt a little. “A Pollaiuolo. But there is a bit of bad news for you as well, I’m afraid.”

“How’s that?”

Flavia explained. Personally, she wasn’t absolutely convinced that she wanted to talk about this case to someone she’d only met half an hour previously, but as Argyll seemed already to have told her everything, as she was her hostess and as she did indeed seem an eminently agreeable soul, there seemed to be little point in holding back.

“Forster might have been disguising the pictures he sold by saying they came from here,” she said.

Mary looked interested. “Why? What would that accomplish?”

“You know crooks launder money so it can’t be traced?”

“Of course.”

“Picture thieves often launder paintings. Give them a false pedigree to explain where they came from. An old collection like yours, full of pictures that no one has seen for a hundred years or more, would be absolutely perfect. Unless somebody checked with your family.”

“Which would have been a waste of breath. As I told Jonathan, Veronica wasn’t exactly coherent all the time.”

“Even better.”

Mary looked thoughtful. “That would explain why he hid the documents on what actually was in the house, I suppose.”

“Probably.”

“Anything going on here while I’ve been away?” Argyll asked. “More murders, arrests or anything?”

“No,” the older woman replied almost sadly. “Quiet as the grave. Jessica’s here, though.”

“Is that the wife?” Flavia asked.

“That’s right. She came back this morning, poor thing. She’s in a bit of a state; I suppose it must be a shock. So I asked whether she wanted to be put up as well; I couldn’t imagine she wanted to stay in that house. But she said she was fine.”

“That was very kind of you.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “It was. I must confess I was terrified that she might accept the offer. I’m all for helping the afflicted in their hour of need, of course, but frankly”—here she lowered her voice as though too many people might hear—“the woman is so wet she makes me want to scream.”

“Have the police talked to her?”

She shrugged. “How should I know? Even George Barton is in the dark about what’s going on. And if he doesn’t know, then a mere amateur like myself is unlikely to find anything out.”

After about another half hour of idle conversation — Argyll’s lack of opportunity to talk meant he finished his food very much faster than did the other two—he decided to go to bed, leaving them comfortably ensconced in the sitting room wondering whether to have a brandy.