The Raphael Affair

11

Not to be outworked by his assistant, Bottando was sitting down at his desk, the inevitable coffee before him, around the same time that Flavia and Argyll were boarding the plane for London. In the cold light of dawn, he was less than convinced that letting either of them go was a good idea.

But he’d allowed himself to be persuaded by her arguments. Which were, essentially, that as things stood they had no real evidence of anything at all; that if Argyll was guilty he had to be allowed to make some mistake, and if he was innocent he had to find that picture, or prove that it didn’t exist and the one in the museum had been genuine. Besides which, as she somewhat tactlessly pointed out, they’d made so many mistakes so far in this business, one more would hardly make any great difference.

The comment accented the still ferocious assaults in the newspapers that lay before him. They had discovered about Manzoni, and were painting lurid pictures about what they had now dubbed the ‘museum of murder’. Tommaso had been no friendlier when he’d told him of the latest developments. He’d been clearly upset about the restorer’s demise, no doubt concluding that, if this whole thing was a plot against him, then he might be next in line for a knife in the back.

Bottando had misjudged that man, it was clear. In the immediate aftermath of the party, the director had presented a humble, subdued, almost likeable side, though this was evidently an uncharacteristic reaction brought on by shock, because it wasn’t lasting. Tommaso was now getting very nervous, tense and short-tempered; not that such a condition stopped the politician in him operating at full power. He was manoeuvring with all the grace of a synchronised swimmer, rapidly and successfully shifting all blame on to the committee, Spello, and Bottando’s department. Already stories hinting something along those lines had appeared in one of the papers.

One thing was certain. Bottando felt himself getting too old for this sort of thing. Wearily, he counted up the forces and assessed his chances. On his side, he had the ministry of defence, who could be counted on to look after him. He thought. Against him, he had the newspapers, the arts ministry, the interior ministry, and Tommaso. The treasury represented a floating vote, whose mind would be made up by the chances of getting its money back.

If they ever got that far. According to the legal department in the arts ministry, the contract stated clearly that if the picture was a fake, the seller — that is Edward Byrnes — would have to refund. Any loss of a genuine picture would be borne by the state. If Byrnes was telling the truth, if he hadn’t owned the picture and didn’t have the money, he’d still have to refund. But, as the man had told Flavia, the picture was gone. So the only way of proving it was a fake was to find the original.

Essentially, it came down to the fact that the future of his department and of his career now depended on a foreign graduate student, who had already made one mistake and who might very well be an arsonist, forger, conspirator, murderer, and half-cracked as well. The thought did not bolster the General’s confidence. He was starting to suspect that, at long last and after many campaigns, he was outnumbered, outflanked and outgeneralled.

And Bottando’s sense that he was missing something still nagged away at him. He’d paced the streets, sat in armchairs, tossed and turned in bed. All to no avail. He was missing something and was no nearer to discovering what it was. The more he tried, the more the wisp of memory receded. Hence the vast piles of dossiers on his desk. The personnel files of everyone in the museum, combined with what they knew about Morneau, Byrnes, Argyll, and anyone else concerned.

He picked up Tommaso’s file. Might as well start at the top, he thought as he opened it. Cavaliere Marco Ottavio Mario di Bruno di Tommaso. Born March 3, 1938. Father, Giorgio Tommaso, died 1948, aged forty-two. Mother, Elena Maria Marco, died 1959, age fifty-seven. He jotted idly on his notepad and sighed heavily.

Pages and pages of the stuff, a monument to the excessive zeal of an overstocked bureaucracy with nothing better to do. Education, careers, opinions, recommendations. All repeated hundreds of times in each dossier on everyone. And he was going to go through the lot of them, for the one piece of information that might jog his memory.

Bottando had polished off the Renaissance department when the plane touched down, and was progressing on to Early Medieval Painting by the time the taxi drew up outside the Victoria & Albert Museum to let Argyll out.

As agreed, he gave her a detailed itinerary; a couple of hours there, followed by a brief stop at the Courtauld in Portman Square, with an option on a visit to the British Museum later on. She told him to meet her at six, and concluded with dire warnings of the potential penalties should he miss the rendezvous again. He grinned nervously at her and made his way up the steps.

He had always hated the V & A, especially the library, which was his present destination. It was not just the fact that it was cold; nearly all libraries he had worked in were underheated. Nor was it particularly the clear evidence of a chronic lack of funds: — the little donation boxes hopefully primed with five-pound notes to give visitors the right idea; the lack of proper lighting; the general air of woebegone neglect.

But in he went, walking through the museum along the echoing corridors, resisting the temptation to buy an overpriced bun in the café, up the stairs and into the library. For the next ten minutes he rummaged around in the catalogues, occasionally scribbling call numbers on bits of paper and handing them in at the desk. Then he gave in to temptation, took his newspaper and went down for a coffee. Long experience had taught him that no books would turn up for at least forty-five minutes.

Feeling oppressed and out of place, he took his coffee and soggy doughnut and sat in a far corner of the room, away from the other students and the small number of miscellaneous tourists. He concentrated on the paper and pretended, as best as he could, that he was somewhere else. His thoughts on the subject were interrupted by a clattering of plates as someone sat down at his table. The newcomer instantly fished out a packet of Rothman’s from the pocket of his old, battered jacket — which had clearly once been the top half of a suit — and lit up.

‘Thank heavens for that. First today. I’ve almost been chewing my fingers off up there.’

‘Hello, Phil. How are you?’

The newcomer shrugged. ‘As ever,’ he replied. He puffed furiously on his cigarette. He was one of Argyll’s oldest associates. As Philip Mortimer-Jones, he was a child of privilege, public schools, and superlative contacts through his father, who was some big wheel in the National Trust. As plain Phil, he was short and stocky, abominably dressed, with dark greasy hair and a look on his face which made you suspect he was about to fall asleep, or that his eyes were caked with grime, or that he had just eaten some substance of which the police would disapprove: in all the five years he had known him, Argyll could never decide. Possibly all of the above. But for all his dormouse-like appearance Phil was a bright lad. He was also more finely tuned into the nuances of academic gossip than anyone else Argyll knew. He confirmed this with his next statement.

‘Surprised to see you here. I thought you’d still be mourning over your great Italian disappointment.’

Argyll groaned. If Phil knew then everybody would know. ‘Who told you about that?’

‘Can’t remember. Heard it somewhere.’

How did he know, though? Argyll was certain he had told only one person, and that had been his ever-so-civil and discreet supervisor. It had been an awkward meeting, because his idleness had finally caught up with him. His university had become somewhat impatient and had threatened to wipe his name off the books. His supervisor, old Tramerton, had been asked for a recommendation one way or another, and he had asked Argyll for evidence that any sort of mental activity was still flickering.

He’d had to produce something convincing quickly. So in the space of four days he had gathered the only material to hand, accumulated an impressive-looking bibliography and posted off to Italy his tentative conclusion that underneath the Mantini rested a genuine, lost Raphael.

It seemed now, of course, that it was the wrong conclusion, but he refused to take responsibility for that. If the university authorities had not been so unreasonably demanding, the little paper would not have been written and Byrnes would not have got to the picture before him. Quite a pleasant chain of events, if you thought about it. Anyway, Tramerton had been convinced — of his efforts if not his scholarly merits — and had done the decent thing. The threat of execution was withdrawn and Argyll had thought no more about it.

Until now. Evidently either Tramerton had given the paper to someone or had told someone about it. Find who it was and the route to Byrnes would open up like magic. But who? His supervisor had been out of circulation in Italy; staying at a colleague’s house west of Montepulciano, so a letter had said. How had Byrnes got at him there? He’d write and ask. Maybe that would produce something useful.

It would all have to wait for the time being; the aromatic confines of the library awaited him. He stopped his colleague just as he was getting into conversational second gear, astounded him with the announcement that he was desperately keen to get back to his desk, and dragged himself up the stairs again. A brief conversation, and not at all a satisfying one.

Working proved less easy than he’d anticipated. The excitement of the previous couple of days wrought havoc on his concentration. As did the pressure he was working under. As Flavia had pointed out to him, find that Raphael and all was well. The penalty for failure was not, however, merely a raised eyebrow from his supervisor this time. This is not, he told himself as he flipped through the books he’d ordered, what academic work is meant to be like. The marines would be less dangerous at the moment. It was all very well to say ‘find a Raphael’. But if it was that easy, it would have been found years ago.

Of course, he’d made progress, but only of a negative sort. He knew better where the painting wasn’t. That, however, was not going to bring him many congratulations. From the initial two hundred and something or other possibilities, it was now down to a few dozen. What was he meant to do? Visit every one with a sharp knife and give it a little scrape? Apart from the fact that the owners might protest, presumably someone else was also on the same course. If Byrnes had destroyed that picture so it wouldn’t be revealed as a fake, he was smart enough to know he’d have to get rid of the real thing as well, which was the last possible proof of his initial fraud.

The idea made him think; he paid less attention to his books and stared up at the wire netting strung across the ceiling to stop falling bits of roof from the decaying building hitting the students below. The books didn’t seem quite so important now. He could accumulate information for months, and still never find anything convincing. If he was going to get anywhere, he’d have to work with what information he already had. He had to find the picture to catch a culprit. But what if he did it the other way round? Lateral thinking, it was called, and once he started thinking along these lines, everything began to seem quite simple. And after a few hours, he even began to get a smell of where the picture might be.

Later that evening he met Flavia on schedule and in the right place, and the two of them walked into a cutesy little winebar in a street running parallel to Wardour Street. It was called the Cockroach and Cucumber, or somesuch, which prompted Argyll to make a few disparaging comments. ‘It’ll probably be full of the elder brothers of the students who work in the V & A,’ he sniffed at Flavia, who missed the reference and smiled politely. She’d had a tiresome day, talking to the other restorers. Not that it had done her much good. They’d all taken refuge in technicalities and refused to come out of their shells. This was her last chance to make the trip worthwhile. It made her determined, and sliced the edge off her sense of humour.

The clientele around the bar generated a rubicund air of confident and artificial jollity that settled around Argyll like a suffocating smog. He felt unhappy already. ‘Hardly the place for a quiet and confidential chat,’ he bellowed into Flavia’s left ear.

‘What?’ she yelled back, then sighted the Tate restorer. ‘Doesn’t matter. Tell me later.’ She weaved her way over to the bar. Anderson, her target, was standing there, waving a five-pound note in a hopeful fashion. Flavia rapped him on the shoulder firmly, just at the moment his long vigil was rewarded, and the barmaid was headed in his direction. He turned to greet the Italian, lost eye-contact with the other side of the bar, and the woman drifted off to serve someone else.

‘Goddamn,’ he exclaimed. ‘Missed her again. No matter. We can go next door where it’s quieter. They have table service through there.’

As they walked through, Flavia introduced Argyll. Anderson looked disappointed. ‘Oh. I thought you were coming alone.’ Argyll was instantly offended and found himself disliking the man intensely. They sat down at one of the few remaining tables and ordered a bottle of white wine of uncertain origin. ‘You see? It’s a lot quieter in here. Nice place, eh?’

Argyll smiled and nodded. ‘Remarkable. Nice is not the word.’ He’d wanted to say that for years. Flavia smiled at him and trod heavily on his toe with her heel. They were not called stilettos for nothing. Tears came into his eyes from the pain.

She then went on to try and rescue the conversation, parroting out a largely erroneous explanation of her presence in England.

‘And you want my help. Willingly. If, of course, you tell me why.’

‘Just routine enquiries, as I believe they say in this country.’

‘Nonsense. Nothing I could possibly say would be of the slightest use to you unless there was more to it than that. I knew nothing about the painting except that I was called in by Sir Edward Byrnes to clean and restore it. Apart from the occasional incursion by television cameras, I worked alone with the other restorers. Why send someone all the way from Rome just to ask about that?

‘And of course, you turn up here bringing Mr Argyll — ’ for some reason Argyll disliked that Mister bit, ‘ — who Sir Edward once told me was miffed about the whole business. Why search for motives when you take the number one suspect along with you? Unless, of course, there is something else going on. Cheers.’ He raised his glass to salute his cleverness, and screwed his face up in an exaggerated demonstration of disgust.

‘I never realised that I had achieved such fame,’ commented Argyll, uncertain whether Anderson’s facial antics referred to the wine or him.

‘Don’t worry. You haven’t. But Byrnes mentioned you once and I have a very good memory for minor details.’

Argyll decided to retire from the conversation as much as possible. Minor details, indeed. He leant back in his chair, nursed his glass of wine, and tried to look nonchalant. If it hadn’t been for his afternoon’s labours he would be in a bad mood. However, what he had to tell Flavia made him feel smug. It would be agreeable to be in control of events for once.

‘Will you give me your word that this conversation will be confidential?’ Flavia asked.

‘I can give you my word and you can decide how much it’s worth,’ Anderson replied. Flavia thought some more. She not only wanted information, it would be nice to rattle this little bugger’s confidence a little. Suggesting he might have been one of the prime victims of a hoax might sober him up a bit. Also, she didn’t like that crack about Argyll: maybe he had been a little objectionable, but basically she agreed with him. This worried her. Becoming protective was always a bad sign.

‘It was a fake,’ she announced bluntly.

The statement did the trick nicely. Anderson didn’t exactly turn pale, but clearly felt like it. ‘Oh shit,’ he said, very slowly and distinctly. ‘Are you sure?’

Flavia shrugged and smiled prettily at him, but didn’t reply.

‘And can you tell me why you think that?’

She shook her head. ‘No. I’m afraid not. Just take it that we’re right.’ It was a gross and unreasonable exaggeration, but Bottando had always instructed her that the one golden rule about police work was never ever seem uncertain of your facts. Besides, she reckoned that the more upset Anderson was, the more he’d talk. She switched into concerned and attentive mode.

‘I think I ought to buy you something to eat here. I’m pretty hungry.’

So was Argyll. And he appreciated that the little gesture was, perhaps, a good way of establishing a better rapport with Anderson. He was the sort of tactless person who not only can’t resist a free meal, but who is also made hungry by bad news. For the next hour he munched his way steadily through a large plate of jumbo prawns, a sizeable slice of fish pie, two plates of vegetables, a dessert that was meant to be pecan pie but wasn’t quite right somehow, two cups of coffee and an unfair share of a second bottle of wine. Flavia also matched him pretty much forkful for forkful. As on the first occasion when he had watched her prowess in this field, Argyll wondered how on earth someone of such a delightfully trim shape could possibly stuff that much food inside her.

To help Anderson in the right direction, Flavia began telling him about the scientific study of the picture. The scientist waved her aside. ‘I know all this. I was in charge.’

‘I thought Manzoni was?’

‘Him?’ Anderson said contemptuously. ‘He never came near it. Just read the report afterwards, said he was sure we’d done it all correctly, and signed the thing. Scarcely lifted a finger.’

Flavia was quite unjustifiably irritated at the aspersions cast on her fellow-countryman by this large and cocky Englishman. His comments smacked too much of anti-Italian prejudice for her taste. Moreover, it meant one of her pet theories was weakened. If Manzoni hadn’t directed the tests, he couldn’t have fixed them either. Her focus came back to Anderson, who was pronouncing at great length, not noticing she hadn’t been paying any attention.

‘...That’s why I’d like to hear your evidence. I can’t see any way that picture could be a fake. It looked right and tested right. The evidence would have to be absolutely overwhelming to make me change my mind,’ he concluded.

She evaded again. ‘Just tell me, how would someone fake a thing like that?’

‘In principle it’s easy. It’s just doing it that’s the trouble. From what I remember of the report, the forger would have had to get hold of a sixteenth- or late fifteenth-century canvas to start off with. One the right size as the final picture so there wouldn’t be any new strain marks from the new shape of the stretcher. You clean off some, but not all, of the original paint. Then you start painting your own picture, using the same techniques and the same paint recipes as the original artist.’

Flavia nodded. So far what he was saying fitted in exactly with the jottings in the Swiss sketchbooks.

‘Once you’ve painted it, then it has to be artificially dried and aged. An oil painting takes years to dry completely, sometimes half a century. There’s no bigger giveaway than a Renaissance picture which is sticky. That, incidentally, is how Wacker, the Van Gogh forger, got caught in the 1930s.

‘Drying can be done in several ways,’ he continued. ‘The traditional method is to bake it — preferred temperatures vary from forger to forger — then roll it up in several directions to crack the surface, then dip it in a solution of ink to darken the cracks and make them look dirty. That, at least, was the Van Meegeren method, and he was one of the greatest. Couldn’t paint for tuppence, but a great forger.

‘Of course, there are ways of checking all that. The Elisabetta was analysed for the way it had dried, the direction and type of the cracking were examined, bits of paint were scraped off and tested in a dozen different ways, the dirt boiled up and analysed chemically. All perfect, as I say.’

‘So you’ve told us how to get caught. How about not getting caught?’ Argyll suggested.

‘There are some ways, I suppose,’ Anderson replied reluctantly. ‘As far as drying goes, you might try a low-voltage microwave oven, perhaps. That would produce a different method of drying out. Not foolproof, by any means, but it wouldn’t produce the tell-tale signs one looks for to indicate normal baking. Cracking is also relatively simple if you are careful to preserve the original pattern on the host painting. Doing it is incredibly hard, but it is possible.

‘In the case of the Raphael, you could dissolve the dirt from the original painting in some solution of alcohol and spread that over the surface. When it was tested it would be seen as being of a mixture of different substances, which is what it should be. The alcohol would also show up, but in this case might be confused with the substances we used to clean the thing.

‘But it’s paint itself which proves it. It’s difficult to see how to get round that, and we tested it endlessly. Spectroscope, electron microscope, dozens of different routines. There can be no doubt. It was sixteenth-century, Italian, painted with Raphael’s techniques. Genuinely old paint. Not just new paint mixed with old recipes. Old paint. Everything worked out perfectly. Which is why I don’t really believe it was a fake.’

‘I know how it was done,’ said Argyll quietly. They both looked at him. ‘It’s just occurred to me. Flavia, you told me the tests on the paint were done from a thin, long strip from the left-hand side of the picture?’ She nodded.

‘So why couldn’t the painter have left that bit from the original sixteenth-century picture? Paint over the central portion and match the background and portrait up. Then you could test to your heart’s content, and the tests would have been positive every time.’

‘Is that possible?’ Flavia asked Anderson.

He considered the matter. ‘Technically, I suppose so. Of course it would be a bit difficult to hide the joins from X-rays, but that might be done if you add a small amount of metallic salt to blur the picture. If I remember, there was some blurring, but we were in a hurry, it was a new machine, so everyone assumed it was just a glitch. The real problem with that interpretation is how could any forger be sure the right bit of paintwork was tested?’

‘That was no trouble at all. You were told to test that bit, weren’t you? And who told you, eh?’

‘The museum did.’

‘You spoke to the museum yourself? They wrote to you?’

‘No. Sir Edward told us. He said the museum didn’t want any damage...’

‘Aha.’ Argyll leaned back in his chair once more, crossed his arms and nodded at Flavia. ‘There you are. Problem solved. Glad you brought me now?’

Argyll was in an excellent mood as he wandered round shops and libraries the next day, collecting the final bits and pieces he needed. In truth, the previous evening had been a triumph. Not only had he put that insufferable restorer in his place and come up with a nifty idea to prove Byrnes’s guilt, he had compounded the achievement by giving Flavia his startling news as they walked back to the hotel she had chosen. He had, he told her, found the picture.

She was impressed. No doubt about it. Of course, she did insist on asking awkward questions like where was it? how had he tracked it down? and things like that. But he managed to sidestep those, saying mysteriously that she’d have to wait and see. That irritated her, but he stuck to his position. After all, he wasn’t quite as sure as he’d implied.

So, whistling contently to himself, Argyll flitted in and out of art supply shops, accumulating equipment; and visited the literary-memoir, travel and history sections of the London Library, gathering an impressively filled plastic bag of possessions.

He looked at his watch. Eleven o’clock. Ten minutes to go, a brief visit to Byrnes as he’d arranged by telephone earlier that day, then back to Rome on the two o’clock flight. Perfect. He began to feel he was quite good at this sort of thing.

Inside the Byrnes Gallery he gave his name to the assistant, mentioned he had an appointment, and looked at the pictures while he waited. Five minutes later he was ushered into Byrnes’s inner sanctum and shown to a seat. He declined the offer of a cup of coffee.

‘Jonathan. I didn’t know you were back in London quite so soon. How can I help you?’ Byrnes smiled gently over the half-moon glasses he used for reading. Argyll disliked them; they always gave the wearer the opportunity to peer over them at you as if he was looking at some anatomical specimen. Very affected.

‘Hardly at all,’ he said. ‘I was just passing so thought I’d drop in and say hello. Just to let you know I was around.’ He smiled inanely. He’d always been told he overdid the foolish look, but it came in decidedly useful now.

‘And why are you around? I thought you would be hard at work in Rome by now. Or have you been roped into this Raphael business as well?’

Argyll shook his head with what he hoped was a look of despair. ‘Yes. Blasted thing. I curse the day I ever thought of it. The police of course suspect me, and you, and just about everyone else. So I’m here trying to work my way into their good books — by finding the real one.’ He said it lightly, then paused significantly, looking at the plaster ceiling as he did so.

Byrnes’s left eyebrow shot up in a creditable look of astonishment. He did it well. Argyll was all admiration. ‘The real one? What are you talking about?’

‘Did the police not tell you?’ Argyll said in surprise. ‘The picture was a fake. A genuine Jean-Luc Morneau, may he rest in peace. It’ll be a very great scandal when it all comes out. If it does, that is.’ They looked at each other with the glimmerings of mutual understanding.

‘If?’

‘No proof, you see. Except for the picture, which isn’t there any more. Manzoni might have known something...’

‘But someone knifed him, it appears,’ Byrnes continued. He was now leaning on his desk, having abandoned the air of easy relaxation that had greeted Argyll on his entry. ‘I see.’

‘So now,’ Argyll continued, getting to the point in a circuitous fashion which, on the whole, seemed justified by results, ‘it’s all up to me. I’ve been asked — told might be a better word — to find the original. Prove the first one was a fake. The police think this will lead to the culprit and to Manzoni’s murderer. Simple.’

‘If you can do it,’ Byrnes pointed out.

‘I already have,’ he said smugly.

‘Where is it?’

Argyll paused once again. That, of course, was the crucial question. He was not meant to tell anyone at all about this. If Flavia ever discovered, ever even suspected, that he’d mentioned so much as a word of it to Byrnes, she’d clap him in jail without a second thought. Even alluding to the painting as a fake was bad enough. On the other hand, Argyll had to think about saving his own neck. Reaching a careful understanding with Byrnes about what was going to happen next seemed the best way of doing it. He took a deep breath and stepped off the edge.

‘Siena,’ he said. ‘But I’ve been told not to go into details.’

‘Of course, of course,’ Byrnes replied reassuringly. ‘Quite proper.’ There was no need to go into details, of course. He could see that by the thoughtful look in Byrnes’s eyes. He’d said enough. The rest was up to Byrnes.

The conversation dragged on for a few more minutes, then, pleading urgent business, Argyll got up, made his farewells and left.