The Immaculate Deception

16

Age had withered her somewhat, but what remained was still decidedly handsome. Mary Verney had the sort of face that improved as it settled into an age that revealed more of the bones. She was as oddly dressed as she often was, with what looked very much like a drying-up cloth wrapped around her head to fend off the sun, but such eccentricities were for private moments; when on display she could be remarkably elegant.

She also had the charm and manners that come from years of practice, although, it seemed, surprise could occasionally put even this well-honed instrument under some strain. She was not expecting a visitor. When Argyll finally gave up postponing and presented himself at her house an hour later, the welcome was not as wholehearted as it might have been had she been given a few moments’ notice.

Even so, she did quite well, enthusiastically presenting both cheeks for a peck, chirruping about delightful surprises, how pleased she was, do come and sit down. The matter taken out of his hands, Argyll smiled, and let himself be led up the four worn steps to the terrace, forward towards the table, and then to be introduced to the guest. Not that any introduction was needed.

‘Good afternoon, Jonathan,’ said Taddeo Bottando, rising to his feet to greet him. ‘I’m most surprised to see you here. What can we do for you?’

‘Just passing. Thought I’d drop in,’ he said, then smiled foolishly. ‘No. In fact, I came to ask you about a painting,’ he said, thinking that in the circumstances, dithering and polite talk really ought to be dispensed with. ‘You’re the only people who can help.’

A good start, which he then went and spoiled with delaying tactics. ‘I tracked you down, you see, and was in the area. Just down the road, in fact. I had lunch in that little restaurant in the square. Very agreeable. And saw the church. Have you seen the church? The altarpiece? Liked it enormously.’

‘Many times,’ Mary Verney said patiently. ‘Are you here on your own?’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘And where is your wife?’

‘Flavia?’ Argyll asked.

‘You have more than one?’

‘Oh, no. Just the one. Quite enough, really. She’s back in Rome. Trying to tidy up after this Claude business. Not very happy, I must say. A bit discouraged, in fact. Disillusioned, you know.’

‘Why is that?’

Argyll thought. ‘I don’t know, really. She’s been a bit off-colour recently. Distracted. Grumbling. She has discovered what General Bottando has known for years, I suspect, that her superiors are almost as pernicious as the art thieves themselves. Just less straightforward.’

‘I did mention it to her,’ Bottando said with a faint smile.

‘But you rather protected her from the direct experience,’ Argyll commented. ‘And she’s just coming round to realizing how grateful she was. But your going, and the way you went, removed the last illusions. That and the Claude thing, of course. She’s more fed up than I’ve ever seen her.’

Bottando looked sad for her.

‘Now,’ Argyll went on, reinvigorated now that that part of the conversation was disposed of, ‘this painting I want to ask you about.’

Mary Verney poured him another glass of wine, and smiled encouragingly. He drank. In fact, he thought, he’d had quite a few of these today. The heat didn’t help either.

‘And a crime,’ he added, in order to make them more comfortable, to bring both back into a world with which they were all too familiar. The comment did not succeed, however; rather they just sat there, side-by-side. Had Argyll been less in turmoil, he would have found it touching. And would have been glad for both of them, that they could take such comfort from, and pleasure in, each other’s company.

For they were a perfect match, if you looked at it elliptically and disregarded all the practical details of why they shouldn’t even be talking to each other. Like the fact that Mary Verney had spent her life stealing pictures, and Taddeo Bottando had spent his trying to get them back again. Both were kindly, intelligent, with, as far as Argyll knew, many of the same interests, even if they did approach them somewhat differently. Both (Flavia had long suspected, as she was given to speculating on such matters) were desperately lonely, and growing more so as the years went by.

This train of thought had made him drift off a little, while the other two sat there patiently, waiting for him to get his bearings.

‘Now, then,’ he resumed with an attempt at decisiveness. ‘This painting. And theft…’

‘Do get on with it, Jonathan,’ said Mary Verney a little tartly. ‘I know you like to affect absent-mindedness, but you really are overdoing it a little. Say what you’ve come to say. Then do whatever you’ve come to do.’

Argyll peered at her, wondering whether to take offence, and decided she was probably right. ‘Very well, then,’ he said. ‘Buonaterra. Nineteen sixty-two.’

The look of surprise on both their faces was carefully controlled, but just enough sneaked through for Argyll to realize that all the connections he’d been making were correct. So he went on.

‘A perfect crime,’ he said. ‘Or very nearly. That is, a crime hidden inside another one. But it is the point of it, and the ending of it, that confuses me. That’s why I’m here.

‘So, the events. Someone steals a painting for reasons that have nothing to do with money, and hides it. Then Mary Verney comes along and steals it from the thief. The first bit I know; the second bit I guess. Perfect cover. The thief can’t complain, and the police are hardly likely to connect you with the matter. After all, you weren’t around when the original theft was committed. You were here.

‘Now, the matter that confuses me was that the picture was then returned to its owner. Considering that the person who took it was, by then, well into her career as a professional thief, and that she was perfectly in the clear, this is the bit that doesn’t make a great deal of sense.

‘If,’ he went on vaguely, ‘there was a ransom paid for it – a big ransom – then I could see the point of giving it back. Much better to have the cash and not have to worry about getting rid of the picture, which is always the tricky bit, so I understand. But there was no ransom. So it doesn’t make sense, you see.’

Not a very impressive performance, in Argyll’s opinion. He’d imagined himself delivering a more incisive summary of the business, not the inchoate ramble that in fact came from his mouth. No matter, it worked. What he said made the right impression; what he didn’t say made an even bigger one.

It seemed that Bottando had ceded the lead role here to Mary Verney; he sat quietly and let her do the talking, perhaps because all his years as a policeman had made him better at asking questions than answering them. Or perhaps it was because it was her house.

‘What’s your interest in this picture, by the way?’ she asked.

‘It was meant to be a retirement present for the general here,’ he said sadly. ‘He’d always said it was valueless. I thought it might be worth something. Flavia said he was worried that retiring a little earlier than he’d anticipated would dent his pension, so I was going to present him with provenance, and all that stuff, so that if he wanted to sell it…’

‘That was very kind of you.’

‘But then, of course, it all got wrapped up in other things. And raised lots of questions which have been nagging at me. I have established that it is quite possibly hugely valuable – important, anyway. Bulovius said so, just before he died. But I don’t know what it is yet; I can’t prove it, anyway, and I don’t know exactly where you two fit in, although fit in you do.’

‘You’re sure of that, are you?’ she said, with a faint smile. ‘Well, then, I suppose you might as well know the rest, as well. Have some more wine.’

‘No. Thank you.’

She shrugged, thought for a minute, then began.

‘I feel terribly sorry for the youth of today, I really do,’ she began. ‘Their lives are so cramped in comparison to ours. And everything is increasingly the same. Wherever you go, all you see are the same disgusting fast-food restaurants that seem to have originated in Kansas and should never have been allowed to leave. When I was young, foreign lands were still foreign, life was terribly inexpensive and jobs two a penny, if you were unfortunate enough to need one.

‘And people were so very trusting; now if you even go into a church you’re lucky if there is not a camera watching your every genuflection, just in case. I do believe that I had the great fortune to be young at the highest point that civilization has ever reached. It will just about see me out, but when I go I will not regret the pleasures my death will deny me. Well, maybe some,’ she added with a sidelong look at Bottando.

‘Anyway, from the end of the fifties until the end of the sixties, life was a delight. Age, combined with selective memory, make it seem better than it was, no doubt. But, in my opinion, it was a period of a few years where wealth had not yet brought tawdriness, freedom had yet to descend into self-indulgence and the freshness of change was hopeful rather than a desperate search for repetitive novelty. And I, with no one to please but myself, was determined to make the most of it.

‘And so I did. As you know all too well, I embarked on a career for which I was eminently suited, and ensured myself an income which was more than generous. But for all that, I was in every other way utterly respectable; what I really wanted, I think, was the sort of life that everyone else seemed to have. A husband who looked after me, two children, a nice house, preferably with roses growing up the outside. I was even prepared to consider coffee mornings with the girls. My rather disrupted childhood, no doubt, contributed to this desire of mine, and I put it into practice more or less at the first opportunity. I met Jack Verney and, although I knew quite well he was unsuitable in every way, I married him. He was – and is – a nice man. He is also the most boring man who has ever walked the face of the earth. I do him no injustice here; he says it himself, and is rather proud of his ability to make entire dinner parties fall asleep under the impact of yet another of his interminable golfing stories.

‘He travelled a great deal, fortunately, leaving me to my own devices and, when he was off on one tour, I took the opportunity to go to Italy, where I bought this house. It cost me one hundred and fifty pounds – not much, even then – and I had this fond notion of spending time here, with my husband and children, when I had them. For the rest of the time, I set about supplementing my little Swiss nest egg.

‘I was not what you might call truly operational at this stage, you understand. I had stolen one painting in my youth, on which I had made no money for myself, and followed up with a couple of others to keep body and soul together, but turned over a new leaf on my marriage. Then Ettore Finzi approached a dealer about a commission, and the dealer approached me. Would I, for a generous sum, steal a picture of an Immaculate Conception from the Stonehouse villa? It seemed he’d had a pair of pictures and considered he’d been cheated out of both of them. If I would recover the first, then he would also give me a substantial sum later to recover the second.’

‘Where’s the second?’

She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. We never got to the second. I was going to be in Italy anyway and, once I thought about it, it seemed an easy enough thing to do; private houses back then were so easy to rob that it was almost embarrassing. So I agreed, wangled an invitation to visit Buonaterra, and was all set.

‘I may say, by the way, that I had no idea what the picture was. Still have no idea. Finzi was old and sick and terribly suspicious. All I got was a description of what I was to take. I knew, of course, that the rivalry between him and Stonehouse had been bubbling away for longer than anyone could remember, and I didn’t really need to know more than that in any case.

‘So I arrived, settled in, made myself useful and began to prepare myself. Then that idiot Bulovius showed up and ruined everything. Not only did he spend much of his time chasing me round the rose bushes, so I scarcely had a moment on my own to blow my nose, let alone steal a painting, he then decided off his own bat to show Finzi what a good boy he was. He had ingratiated himself with the old man in a quite disgusting fashion – I think he already had ideas about the will – and it occurred to him that bringing him the picture would be just the sort of display of loyalty that would finally secure him his place in the list of beneficiaries. I don’t suppose this was the interpretation he gave you, though.

‘Anyway, I had everything set up; I’d figured out the way to get the picture out of the house; a runner was going to be waiting down the lane to take it off my hands so that I wouldn’t have to hold it for more than a few minutes; another one was going to collect it from the left luggage at the railway station and get it out of the country. Everything was set; Stonehouse had invited me to dinner, and I would have needed about five minutes to leave the table, go to the room, into the garden, hand over the picture and be back for pudding. So I went back home for the night, and arrived the next day to discover the picture had already vanished, the police were everywhere, and Bulovius had this sickly, green look of terrified guilt plastered all over his face. His behaviour the next day was so laughable that it was hard to resist just asking him to hand it over.

‘I was not concerned about the police very much; they did not seem likely to give me much serious competition. The man in charge – what was his name?’

‘Tarento,’ Bottando said, speaking for the first time.

‘Tarento. Yes. He was a perfect fright, and quite the stupidest policeman I had ever met. But quite sweet and amiable in his way,’ she went on, demolishing part of Argyll’s imaginary reconstruction, ‘and dreadfully kind to Taddeo here,’ she added, flattening another.

‘So I didn’t really think there was much to worry about from that direction. Which was a mistake, as while his superior lacked investigative drive and enthusiasm, Taddeo had both in abundance. And early on I saw him watching Bulovius with a level of interest that only flickering suspicion could arouse. So I took the trouble to engage him in conversation to try and get his measure. It was a bad mistake. Quite simply, I fell completely in love with him.

‘Now, I am not a romantic soul; quite the opposite, in fact. I always thought myself immune from such feelings; this was why I married my husband, as I thought mild affection was more than enough. To fall in love, so unexpectedly, so instantly and with the most inappropriate person in the world, simply took my breath away. It made me foolish in a way I have never been before. Even worse, Bottando was utterly unresponsive as far as I could see and, moreover, was taking far too close a professional interest in me. He watched me like a hawk; even had I been capable of coherent action, it would have been quite difficult to do anything. I had wild imaginings that there was a file on me, and that they had already earmarked me as the likely thief; that I was going to spend several years in gaol for the one picture I didn’t steal. The only thing I didn’t remotely consider as a possibility is that I had had the same effect on him as he had on me. I had a high notion of my abilities; but I never thought of myself as someone people fell in love with.

‘The worst moment was when I forced myself to go into Florence to have a meeting with the runner, to reschedule getting the picture out of Italy should I get hold of it. It was stupid – the one and only time I ever had direct dealings with such people. Fortunately, the man I had chosen was not well known, otherwise seeing me come out of his apartment block would have been enough to make even the thickest policeman suspicious.

‘And Bottando was not stupid, which was why, when I saw him standing across the street, looking at me when I emerged, I came as near to panic as I have ever done. Even worse, he wouldn’t come to the point, just talked to me, said he was off-duty, and would I care to go for a walk? It was the oddest interrogation I have ever been through because, I suppose, it wasn’t one. Instead, we just walked. And walked and walked. We visited churches, and we visited museums and courtyards and by-ways and alley ways. You do the same with Flavia, I know you do. There is nothing better in the world than to share the pleasure of a little discovery, a new sight or a new picture with someone. I had never felt so happy in anyone’s company before in my life. I will not go into any further details, if you don’t mind. I will merely say that we came back here to my little house, and spent a lovely weekend together.

‘Except for the fact that he was a policeman. And that was a major stumbling block. I decided that he was warning me. We know about you, he was saying. Watch yourself.

‘So I did. I was not about to pay the price of someone else’s folly, thank you very much. It was a ticklish situation, as you can imagine. On the one hand, I wanted to get that picture; on the other, the risks were large, and I have always disliked risks.

‘So I waited, and slowly became reassured. The police seemed to lose interest, everything went quiet. I had already figured out by watching Bulovius, and the way he got nervous every time someone sat on the sofa, where the picture was, and late one night, after I had spent an hour in the garden waiting for everyone to go to bed, I slipped back into the house, put it in a little bag, and walked out.

‘Straight into the arms of Taddeo. He had been sitting in the garden all night for days. Waiting for something to happen. It was a lovely night, with a beautiful moon, and I could see the look of vague amusement on his face. I was speechless, so he did the talking.

‘“Congratulations,” he said. “You found it.”

‘I said I had, and that I could explain.

‘“No need to. I know what happened. You were looking for an earring, peered under the settee and there it was. So you picked it up and decided to take it yourself to the police station.”

‘It seemed a perfectly reasonable explanation to me, so I nodded.

‘"It might be difficult, however,” he went on, “to explain that to Mr Stonehouse. He might ask why you were taking it out of the house at all. He might become angry about the whole business, and wonder whether in fact you took it in the first place.”

‘I said it would be terribly unkind of him even to think such a thing.

‘“Maybe it would be better, if you were willing to forgo thanks for recovering the picture, if we didn’t say how it was recovered? Perhaps if it was just found?”

‘I agreed to the inevitable and we left it, wrapped in a bag for protection, in a ditch, where Bottando duly picked it up the next morning with me there as a witness, and handed it in to general applause. It was a terrible wrench, but I left that same afternoon, went back to England, and steered clear of Italy for some time. When I started working again, it was a full decade before I took any commissions for Italy.

‘But, for old time’s sake, when I heard that the Stonehouse collection was to come up at auction, I looked in the catalogue, saw the picture was there, and bought it. I sent it to Taddeo as a little keepsake – complete with the invoice so he wouldn’t be concerned. I was glad to see he still had it when we met again. That meant a lot to me.

‘Anyway, for the thirty-five years in between I put Taddeo Bottando behind me and got on with my life, which was perfectly satisfactory until Flavia began investigating me and I met him again. Then I realized that some things simply cannot be put behind you. And as he let it be known that he felt exactly the same, we decided we were too old for any more delay. I was already in retirement, he decided to take his as soon as possible, and here we are. And here, I very much hope, we stay.’

Bottando said nothing during this lengthy exposition; simply sat and looked benignly from one to the other, smiling occasionally, and sipping his drink. When Mary Verney finally finished, Argyll stared glumly at both of them. It was not what she had not mentioned that bothered him, it was the fact that, on what was in some ways the central point, she was clearly and obviously telling the truth. When he saw Bottando looking at her, he knew the expression well, and knew what feeling lay behind it. It was the way he looked at Flavia. He knew just enough about them to realize that both had led lives that had a deeply unhappy core, for both were naturally affectionate, and neither had any proper object for their affection.

They had tasted it once, walking the streets of Florence, and now they were grabbing it with both hands, and with a desperation only the truly deprived can manage. Was he going to spoil it for them? Was it really supposed to be his job to snatch it all away?

‘Do you know,’ he said, staring hazily in the direction of the sun, which was beginning to sink behind some pine trees halfway up the next hill, ‘Flavia has always had a considerable admiration for you. Professionally, that is.’

‘I’m flattered to hear it.’

‘Hmm. She once told me, you know, that of all the thieves she had ever come across, you had one quality that set you apart from all the others.’

‘And that was?’

‘Discipline. Rigorous self-discipline. Most are caught, you see, because they become lazy – these are her words, not mine, you understand – so they repeat themselves. One particular way of stealing something works, so they do it again. And again. You were the only one to have infinite variety, beyond the fact, as the general here once noted, that none of the things you stole were photographed or, until recently, recovered.’

‘We all have our little trademarks.’

‘Apart from that, almost nothing. Which is just as well, really.’

She looked at him and smiled sweetly. ‘I suppose it is,’ she said.