The Raphael Affair

9

At seven the next morning, Flavia walked into Bottando’s office to see what was going on, and to arrange for the speedy interviewing of their suspects. As usual, she forgot to knock, and the General looked up at her angrily as she came in. Very unlike him.

‘Tired and moody, are you?’ she asked breezily.

He didn’t reply, but handed over the last editions of the morning papers. Flavia glanced at them, and conceded inwardly that maybe he had a right to be moody. ‘Oh. Hadn’t thought of that,’ she said apologetically.

‘I had,’ he snapped. ‘But I didn’t think it would be as bad as this.’

She looked over them again. Until yesterday, Bottando’s known fondness for food had always endeared him to the press. Now they laid into him with some violence, and in remarkable detail. In truth, he did look a little silly over the affair. Head of the art squad quaffing champagne and having a good time while mad arsonist destroys world’s greatest masterpiece in the next room.

‘You have to admit, it’s got a funny side,’ she began, knowing it was the wrong thing to say.

‘Flavia,’ said Bottando sternly.

‘Yes, boss?’

‘Shut up, dear.’

‘OK. Sorry.’

He leaned back in his seat and sighed heavily. ‘It isn’t funny at all,’ he said. ‘We don’t have much time. Either we get someone soon, or the department will be massacred. We are caught,’ he observed acidly, ‘on the horns of a dilemma.’

‘Meaning that if you say it was a fake, Tommaso will tear you limb from limb, and if you don’t, the press will?’ Bottando nodded at her summary.

‘Couldn’t you just tell the minister, and get him to keep quiet?’

Bottando laughed. ‘A minister? Keep quiet? Contradiction in terms. I’d sooner take out a full-page advert in il giornale.’ He gestured vaguely at the most hostile of the newspapers. ‘No, I’m afraid we’ve no alternative. We’ll just have to get results quickly. Besides, our case about Morneau is beginning to look a little feeble.’

‘Why’s that?’

He handed over a sheet of paper. ‘Telegram from Janet. He screwed the log out of the Swiss.’

Flavia looked at it with disappointment. Morneau’s box had last been opened in August by someone else. They didn’t know who. But it was well after the painting had been revealed to the public. ‘Damn it,’ she said. ‘Still, it doesn’t mean that those sketches were put in then, though.’

‘No, but it weakens our case somewhat. That evidence is now very inconclusive. I’m sure it’s also dawned on you that after last night we can’t run any more tests on the picture to see if it really was genuine.’

‘You could always arrest someone. Last refuge of the incompetent, I know, but it would win us some time. Looks good for a few days, even if it’s the wrong person.’

‘I was thinking about that. Maybe pulling in Argyll. Mad Englishman. Disappointed hopes. It would go down very well. The press think all Englishmen are lunatics.’

Flavia looked worried. ‘Oh, no. Not Jonathan. That’s not a very good idea.’

Bottando regarded her dubiously. ‘Jonathan? Jonathan? What’s this Jonathan bit?’

She disregarded the question. ‘If Byrnes didn’t produce the real thing, that means that the genuine article is still out there. Somewhere, someone has a Raphael hanging on their wall, even if they don’t know it.

‘Argyll,’ she continued carefully, minding her words, ‘is probably our best chance of finding it. After all, if the thing exists, it’s under a Mantini, and he’s the only person who would know where to begin looking. If you lock him up he won’t be able to help at all.’

‘True. But if the press finds out that we are relying on one of our prime suspects to help us in this, it’ll make matters worse, not better.’

She smiled at him. ‘That’s easy enough. You don’t need to have anything to do with him. I’ll do that. I’m not in the force, so you can honestly say that the polizia has no contacts with this man. If anyone asks.’

Bottando grunted. ‘All right. But he’ll need watching carefully.’ He picked up a sheet of paper he’d been writing on earlier and gazed at it mournfully. ‘We have quite a lot of suspects to talk to today.’

‘Such as?’

‘Anyone who might have known Morneau, which is, in theory, almost anyone in the art world. People who didn’t like Tommaso, again everyone in the art world. People who wanted to be very rich. Again, everyone in the art world. Universal motive, universal opportunity.’

‘Except that whoever burnt the picture must have been at that party,’ she pointed out, sitting down and putting her feet on the low coffee table.

‘That still leaves us with an embarrassing surfeit,’ he responded. ‘Dear me, what a mess. And if we don’t get results pretty fast we’re going to be roasted ourselves.’

He looked round at her. ‘I suppose we’d better get going. So get your feet off my desk, damn you, and start dogging Argyll’s steps.’

‘We need to prove the picture was a forgery, which is difficult now it’s destroyed. The notebooks help, but they’re not conclusive. So we have to find the original original, so to speak.’

Flavia was sitting in the kitchen of Argyll’s new apartment. He’d explained when she knocked on the door that he’d taken up the offer by his old friend, Rudolf Beckett, of a spare room. He looked tired and told her that he had not, in the circumstances, slept very well. Flavia might have been more sympathetic had she not been so alarmed at the possibilities suggested by the fact that suspect number one was living in the same flat as a journalist.

Argyll, however, reassured her. His flatmate was at the moment in Sicily on an extended trip to write stories about the Mafia. Flavia wondered whether any reporter ever went to Sicily to do anything else. He would not be back for several days, at least, so she stopped worrying and got back to the subject of Argyll’s chance to rehabilitate himself.

‘If the evidence about the forgery is so weak, why are you convinced?’

Flavia held up her hand and counted off the points, one by one. ‘Firstly, I want to be, because I hate the idea of a genuine Raphael being charred. Secondly, because otherwise we’re looking for a real nutcase, and I don’t want to believe that either. Thirdly, because we’ve got to explore all the possibilities anyway. Fourthly, intuition. Fifthly, because I trust your judgement.’

Argyll snorted. ‘Sixthly, you’re also crazy. Certainly you’re the only person who trusts my judgement. But I’m just a graduate student. I can’t really see myself wandering around looking for picture forgers.’

‘Indeed not. But you know more about that damned man Mantini than anyone else. He’s now very much the artistic flavour of the month. The end of our troubles probably lies somewhere in your file cards.’

Argyll brushed his fingers through his hair, hummed a little, then twiddled his thumbs, all symptoms that Flavia now recognised as symptomatic of embarrassment on his part.

‘Yes, lovely. Glad to oblige. But, I mean, I hardly like to raise the subject and all that, but, well...’

‘Why should you bother when you could possibly find it yourself and make a fortune?’

‘I wasn’t going to put it quite like that...’

‘But I got hold of your general line of thought, correct?’

‘Suppose.’

‘Simple enough,’ she said sweetly. ‘Step more than a centimetre out of line and Bottando will arrest you as a prime suspect, and throw you to the wolves to get the press off his back. I had a very hard time this morning,’ she added with some exaggeration, ‘dissuading him from locking you up immediately. He found your reasoning about why he should very convincing. And, of course, if you are innocent, you would earn the immense gratitude of almost everyone from the prime minister down to myself, if you helped.’

Argyll reached for another slice of toast, buttered it, and covered it with about a quarter inch of Beckett’s expensively imported marmalade. ‘Oh, all right, then,’ he said grudgingly. ‘You have a persuasive way with you. But I must warn you that even my inestimable services don’t guarantee success.’

‘There is your catalogue of Mantini’s paintings.’

‘As yet incomplete. And that only deals with paintings that still exist. The number that must have been destroyed, or forgotten about, is probably huge.’

‘Do your best. We can talk about it this evening when you’ve thought about it. I must go off on my errands.’

‘One thing you can do for me. Could you use your contacts to ask around all the auction houses and dealers in order to trace any pictures that might have been bought by Morneau? And anyone else you might suspect?’

‘Where?’

‘All over Europe. Or at least the main centres.’

‘All over Europe for all our suspects? Is that all?’

He nodded. ‘I suppose it’s a big task. But if you could find that one of them bought a picture the same size as that Raphael, it would help.’

‘I see. Anything else you want, by any chance?’

‘Just tell me one thing. Do you think I had anything to do with this?’

Flavia picked up her bag and slung it over her shoulder, brow furrowed for a moment as she weighed up the options of being truthful or of upsetting him with her lack of confidence in his honesty.

‘Pass,’ she said eventually, and headed off before he could reply.

After Flavia had run down the stairs in search of a taxi, Argyll wandered about his new apartment, tidying up in a half-hearted manner, wondering how best to go about his new task. It was hard to concentrate on the matter with the omnipresent thought that the slightest slip-up could land him in jail for much of the rest of his life. If he helped find the picture he might damn himself. But if he didn’t, he would surely do so. It was not what had been in his mind when he thought of the pleasures of living in Rome once again. One thing was clear, however. He wasn’t going to be able to confine himself to looking through file cards. He’d have to be a bit more active than that. Flavia, he thought, was basically well-disposed towards him, and disinclined to believe him responsible for all this. Her boss appeared to be of a different frame of mind.

Not that this one was going to be easy. He had never counted, but he reckoned that he had records of about five hundred pictures by Mantini. He knew that around half of these had been painted before 1724, before the painter covered over the Raphael. All the rest were either after that date or uncertain. He went to the shoe boxes of white cards which contained the records of the past three years’ work and started flicking through. After a few minutes he decided that it would be easier simply to take cards out; putting them back in the right order could be taken care of later. Desperate situations require reckless remedies. About an hour’s work produced a depressing result: even after the pictures which had been bought by the owner and stayed in the family’s hands thereafter had been taken out, the pile of possibles was still about two inches thick — at about fifty cards to the inch.

Then he remembered Lady Arabella’s letter, and went through again, removing everything but ruins and things that might get called ruins; this more than halved the problem to around forty-five pictures. He settled down, clamped his Walkman over his ears, put on a tape, and began to make a list. Not because it was especially vital, but because he couldn’t think what to do next, and listening to music and making out lists he always found very therapeutic.

The rest of the day passed in industrious boredom for all concerned. At the museum, Tommaso and his cohorts were doing their best to retrieve the situation, pumping out press releases. Bottando spent some of his time in similar pursuits, but eventually gave up what appeared to be a losing battle and turned his mind to more immediate tasks.

Clearly someone in the museum — and it had to be Tommaso — was working furiously to shift the blame on to the police, Spello, and the ill-fated security council. He cursed the day he’d ever heard of that infernal committee. Not that he really blamed Tommaso, he thought in a fleeting moment of charitable objectivity, the man was trying to survive a calamity which had not been his fault. Perfectly understandable; it was simply that he wished the director wasn’t trying to do so by offering Bottando’s head as a substitute for his own. Perhaps Bottando would have done the same thing, in similar circumstances. Perhaps. But he was sure he would have been more tactful about it, and not tried to torpedo someone who, at the moment, was doing his damnedest to track down the real culprit.

His rivals in the various police forces were also well in to a campaign against him, and he realised that the only effective answer to them was an arrest or two. So he dictated a bland statement about pursuing all possible investigations and being confident of making an arrest soon — which they could do, he thought gloomily. It was just that they would have no idea whether they’d collared the right man.

Then he deployed his forces to interview the partygoers, and himself went over to the National Museum to brief the director, as well as to talk to the man’s principal enemies. Not all of them. There weren’t enough hours in the day.

The briefing was tense, with Tommaso feigning concerned affability and Bottando pretending he hadn’t noticed anything, so it was with considerable relief that he turned to the miscellaneous witnesses and suspects, whom he suspected would be more agreeable company. He started with Manzoni, summoning him to Ferraro’s office, which he’d taken over for the duration. The restorer came in, moving uneasily and looking like a wreck. Bottando wasn’t certain whether it was from emotional distress about the picture or the after-effects of his drinking the night before. He didn’t ask.

The questioning, on the whole, was routine. Where was he, who did he talk to, and so on. All accounted for up to the moment when he had wandered away from Bottando. ‘And then?’

‘To be perfectly frank, I can’t remember. I haven’t the faintest idea who I talked to. I remember lecturing someone about the restoration of prints. I know that, because I thought to myself that, if I’d been sober, I’d realise I was being extraordinarily dull.’

Bottando considered this and then, with apparent indifference, started off on another tack. ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘were you one of the people who did the tests on that picture? I looked through the report the other day. You signed it, didn’t you?’

Manzoni nodded. ‘I did. I was in charge of the operation. The actual tests were carried out by the English experts called in by Byrnes who were more familiar with the machinery.’

‘I see. So Byrnes’s people actually had their hands on the painting?’ The man nodded.

‘And you were entirely satisfied?’

‘Of course,’ he said a little primly. The question had evidently pricked at his pride. ‘If I hadn’t been I would have said so. They were men of the highest reputation. The picture passed every test with room to spare. I didn’t have a shred of doubt.’ He stopped and bit his thumbnail thoughtfully, then looked up. ‘At least I didn’t until about thirty seconds ago.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Bottando uncomfortably, conscious of a certain lack of subtlety in his interviewing technique.

‘Not all technicians are idiots, you know,’ the man continued, the slightly priggish air growing, rather than fading in strength as he spoke.

‘Tommaso’s reputation rested on that Raphael. But if there’s something wrong with it, Tommaso’s credit-rating falls and Spello will get the job. It was burnt either as a way of getting at him or for some other motive. You, for no apparent reason, are spending some time reading the technical reports when presumably you have more urgent things to worry about. Which leads me to suspect...’

‘Which leads you to suspect nothing whatsoever. But you’ve got a good imagination.’ Bottando hurriedly got up to end the interview, feeling slightly alarmed at the way the conversation had run away from him. Hung over or not, that young man had forged connections far too fast. He didn’t like it.

He accompanied the restorer to the door, showing him out into the small anteroom that was normally occupied by the secretary. His next candidate sat there, placidly waiting.

‘I see you’re going to have a busy day,’ Manzoni said by way of farewell, ‘but I’d like to talk to you again, if you don’t mind. If you want I’ll go through the report again and see if there were any holes.’

‘Could there be any?’

‘I’d rather read it again first, to make sure of my facts. And give it a bit of quiet thought. Besides, I don’t want to disrupt your schedule. Maybe I could come round to your office after work to give you my impressions? About seven this evening?’

Bottando agreed, watched him go, then turned to ask Spello to come in. One down, eighty to go, he thought. Maybe Flavia can help out this afternoon. He watched the Etruscan specialist sit himself cautiously into the chair, and considered how best to start the questioning.

He needn’t have bothered. Spello began on his own, with a forthright statement of fact. ‘You’re talking to me because I’m one of your more promising arsonists,’ he stated. ‘Jilted out of my rightful job as the next director by Tommaso’s machinations.’

‘So, burned up inside, you took your revenge by burning up his prize picture?’

Spello smiled. ‘And thus, at a stroke, creating a scandal, wrecking Tommaso’s power to recommend anyone and assuring myself of the job. Easily done, especially as you’d already told me it was a fake, so there was no harm done. No. I did nothing of the sort, but I admit it’s a convincing hypothesis.’

‘Except, of course, that our main evidence of faking has been considerably weakened. The painting may well have been genuine.’

The man blanched visibly at the statement. Why was that? Simple objective distress at the loss? Bottando felt intensely awkward. Spello seemed positively eager to explain why he should be arrested immediately.

‘Were you ever alone yesterday evening? Could you have slipped off without anyone noticing?’

‘Nothing simpler. I hate those gatherings. I have to turn up, but I find the heat, the conversation and the company oppressive. I normally sneak off and go and read a book or something to recover myself, then go back again. I was up here for about an hour yesterday evening. All on my own. No one saw me come, no one saw me go.’

How distressingly honest. If he’d wanted to make life easy for the police, he should either have come up with a cast-iron alibi, or with one that could be undermined. Candidly admitting he had none at all made everything very much more difficult.

‘When I told you about the possible forgery, you kept it to yourself,’ Bottando began, swinging on to a new line. He was not happy. So far his performance at these interviews, where he was meant to be so masterfully in charge, was not at all good. He had lost the upper hand with the restorer, and seemed to be repeating the process with Spello. Perhaps the pressure was beginning to tell on him. ‘If you’d really been after the directorship you would have started spreading rumours, surely?’

Spello shook his head. ‘Not necessarily,’ he said in a reasonable and distant tone. ‘Firstly, it could have been traced back to me. Secondly, without proof, Tommaso could brazen it out and put the rumours down to a smear campaign by the discontented — which it would have been. I’m still very doubtful. No matter what Manzoni thinks, I doubt he’ll be able to punch a hole in those tests.’

Bottando grunted, and tried again. ‘The fire alarm,’ he pointed out. ‘How did you do that?’ He noticed that he’d stopped using the hypothetical language of conditional clauses. Spello noticed it as well, and for the first time the policeman saw a flicker of unease on the old man’s face.

‘If I did,’ he replied with emphasis, ‘I did what was actually done. Removed the perfectly good fuse, and replaced it with one that was burnt out. Thus, it would seem as though the fuse blew at random.’

Bottando sat up in his seat. ‘How do you know that’s what happened?’ he asked.

‘I talked to the electrician. He’s an old fogey like me. Been here for years, like me. We’ve always got on well. He was a bit upset when he saw the fuse. Said he was sure he’d changed it over and put a new one in. Not at all like the well-used one found in the slot. I thought it was obvious; they’d been swapped. Chances were that no one would notice, or draw any conclusions if they did.’

Bottando sat silently, thinking it over. Spello’s account made perfectly good sense, and at least solved one problem of how it was done. It also tended to swing suspicion more firmly on Spello. Who realised it.

‘So you see. Motive, opportunity and no alibi. Enough to arrest me on, if that’s what you feel like doing.’

‘Yes,’ he agreed, then went on more formally. ‘For the time being, however, we’re not arresting anyone. But I must warn you not to leave Rome for the next few days. Any attempt to do so will be treated as attempted flight. Do you understand?’

‘Perfectly, General,’ came the equally stiff reply, which then turned into a conspiratorial smile. ‘But I can tell you that if you do arrest me, you’ll be making a big mistake. It’ll be all Tommaso needs to restore his reputation. Because of that committee, you’ll go down with me.’