Giotto's hand

by Iain Pears

  “Hmm. Anything there to indicate he was a bit light-fingered?”

  “Not as far as Jonathan knows. On the other hand, he rightly points out that the police aren’t exactly going to take him into their confidence. Relying on him for information isn’t the best thing to do.”

  Bottando nodded thoughtfully. “Which, roughly translated into clear and unadorned prose, means you think you ought to go and see for yourself. Is that what you’re getting at?”

  Flavia confessed it had crossed her mind.

  “And what about friend Argan? He thought you going to the other side of Rome a gross waste of resources.”

  She looked at the ceiling and studied the cobwebs growing across one comer. “He hasn’t got your job yet, has he?”

  Bottando scowled. “You know what I mean. Will this be worth it? Or will it merely provide Argan with more evidence to be used against us?”

  She shook her head. “That’s politics, not policing. From my lowly point of view, there is enough to look at Forster. You have to decide about Argan. Do you want me to give up a perfectly legitimate enquiry because he wants your job?”

  Bottando sighed and rubbed his face. “Curse the man. And you. Of course I don’t. But make it quick, eh? Either find something or get back here. Don’t mess about. I’m not going to be hanged by the neck until dead by your expense account.”

  Flavia did her best not to look happy; it was some time since she’d been let out of the office on a jaunt, and it would make a nice change. Besides, there was a small possibility that it might even produce something of interest. She drained the dregs of her coffee cup, and went off to get down to business.

  As far as the Norfolk police were concerned, the lad called Gordon Brown was the most likely place not only to start but also to end the investigation into the murder of Geoffrey Forster, if that was what his death was going to be.

  At first sight, there was a lot going for him. Even his friends agreed that he was a bit of an oaf, and inclined to violence when roused or with a pint or two too many inside him. Next, of course, came his reputation as the local burglar, the man who had done over several of the houses in search of unearned income. He was a well-connected village figure in his way; the son of Mary Verney’s part-time housekeeper and married to Louise, the elder daughter of George Barton. Relations between the Brown and Barton families had never recovered from the union, George Barton being the sort of person who did not approve of the likes of Gordon Brown, especially the way he treated his daughter.

  While nobody seriously doubted that Margaret Brown the housekeeper had, as she’d claimed, spent the evening with her feet up in front of the television, and that Louise the wife couldn’t possibly help in any way due to the fact that she had spent the entire evening with her sister and knew nothing whatsoever about her husband’s activities and didn’t want to either, such credulity did not extend to the mother’s insistence that Gordon, the loyal and devoted son, had been by her side all the time. If he was. Constable Hanson said, it would be the first time in living memory, except for those occasions when he was so blind drunk he couldn’t move.

  In his favour, however, was the expressed opinion that young Gordon was far too cowardly to go around killing people, and that robbing art dealers was not really his style. If a colour television or video recorder vanished, then Gordon was your man. Everybody knew that, although unaccountably no one had yet managed to catch him at it. But not more.

  Undeniably, however, he was someone who needed to be eliminated from police enquiries, so they hauled him out of bed at ten in the morning and carted him off for a good going-over.

  Much to police merriment, the fact that he and his mum hadn’t managed to synchronize their stories helped enormously. Although he started off being obstinate, then angry, it required little skill on the part of the policeman interrogating him to note that there was something of a discrepancy between his mother’s account of a blissful evening together, and Gordon’s memory that he had, instead, spent the entire period in his bedroom listening to music.

  Even when Gordon obligingly changed his story to try and help out, the policeman was, with barely controlled delight, able to point out that while he maintained they had watched the football on BBC-1, his mother was strangely convinced they’d been watching the film on ITV.

  “Film about football, was it, Gordon? Or maybe you’ve got two televisions, one in each comer of the room?”

  Gordon, however, was not someone who knew how to give way gracefully. “We watched the film, then the football,” he explained.

  The policeman pulled a copy of yesterday’s paper out of his pocket, and opened it at the television guide. “Odd,” he said, “I can’t see any football on offer yesterday. What match was this, Gordon?”

  Gordon snarled, and lapsed into a sullen silence.

  “Have it your own way, then. But I must tell you, Gordon boy, it’s not looking too good for you. Why don’t you just tell us what you were up to?”

  “Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “And killing that man. Tut, tut. I’m surprised at you. Not your sort of thing, really, is it? Murder, that is, Gordon. Nasty.”

  Gordon blanched. “Didn’t kill no one,” he said. “What are you talking about? Who said anything about murder?”

  The policeman ignored the question. It had been worth a try after all, even if the pathologists had still not made up their minds. All they knew so far was that he’d broken his neck by falling down the stairs, had a reasonable amount of alcohol in his blood supply and appeared to have eaten lamb chops and carrots for dinner. All very interesting; unfortunately, they were dithering and taking refuge in technicalities when it came to the important question.

  “Of course,” the policeman went on, trying one last time to hurry things along. “We might accept manslaughter. Or even self defence, if you ask us nicely, and make our lives simple.”

  But Gordon’s limited mental faculties had shut down. He sat there morosely, words like “brutality,” “persecution” and “harassment” half forming on his lips.

  The policeman sighed and got up. “Ah, well. I’ve no doubt we’ll be seeing you later, Gordon.”

  “These police are a bit secretive, dear,” Mary Verney said when Argyll ambled back to Weller House after a morning stroll and hung around the place wondering what to do. He ended up helping her chop vegetables for lunch. “It’s the modern age. Ask them the time and they look as though you’re a spy or something. You have to be firm with them. And talking of being firm, your fiancée rang. Flavia, is that right?”

  “Yes,” he said, a bit surprised at the connection.

  “She sounds quite charming,” she went on. “Very good English. She asked me to tell you she’d be coming to England this evening and would call when she got in. After she’s seen the police in London.”

  “Aha!” Argyll said brightly.

  “Which means you have a little explaining to do, if you please.”

  “About what?”

  “The seeing the police in London bit.”

  Argyll considered this, and decided it was a reasonable request. “Simple enough,” he replied after a moment. “She’s in the Italian police. The Art Squad. And recently there have been one or two little questions about Forster.”

  “Oh, yes?”

  “It’s all a lot of nonsense, really, but I gather they’re quite keen to find out whether he stole lots of paintings, starting with an Uccello in Florence years back. The man in charge had this theory about some shadowy professional criminal working for umpteen years, and then some little old lady in Rome pointed the finger at Forster.”

  “Really? And is there anything in it?”

  “How should I know? But, of course, there are billions of unsolved thefts they would dearly love to pin on to somebody.”

  “No doubt. But I’d drop Geoffrey if I were them,” Mary said after giving the idea careful thought. “I’ve always had this idea that master criminals shoul
d be dashing, flamboyant, romantic figures. If a little runt like Geoffrey Forster turned out to be one I would be profoundly disillusioned. I mean, he was a cheat and a bit of a bastard. But I don’t think he would have had the endurance to plan anything and carry it through.”

  “No. On the other hand, people have been talking, and so it has to be investigated.”

  “I suppose so,” she said meditatively. “But that’s something else you have to explain.”

  “What?”

  “What has this got to do with you?”

  “Nothing. I was merely asked to find out what I could as I was in England. I rang, Forster said he wanted to talk to me, and…”

  “Pop. Dead on arrival, so to speak,” she said “Now, don’t you think that’s a bit odd?”

  “I do. More annoyingly, so do the local police. Which is why I’m still here.”

  “I’m not cooking up a nice meal for a murderer, am I?”

  Argyll shook his head.

  “Oh, good. That is a relief. Now, what are you going to do while you wait for your Flavia to turn up?”

  Argyll opened his mouth to mention having a good look at her family art collection. But before he could even begin, she went on: “How are you at plumbing?”

  “Plumbing?”

  “There’s a leak in the roof. It’s coming through into one of the bedrooms, and I’m a bit hopeless at that sort of thing. Electrics I can manage. Plumbing’s a closed book.”

  Argyll began a lengthy anecdote about what happened last time he tried to change a washer on a tap in his apartment, using lots of biblical allusions to Noah and arks to get across the idea that trusting him with water tanks was not the best idea. Paintings, he said. That was more his line of business.

  But she brushed the idea aside; far more urgent matters to hand than a bunch of old pictures, she said; the chances of there being anything valuable in the house after Geoffrey had swept through it were minuscule. Believe her, she’d looked. Come and look at the water tank instead, at least.

  So he dutifully followed her up the grand staircase, then diverted into the bedroom where the large drip was coming through the ceiling, which was stained and growing a greenish mould from excessive damp.

  “You see?” she said plaintively. “Look at it. The ceiling will come down soon if I don’t do something. And the prices that plumbers charge these days. Outrageous.”

  Argyll listened to the first part of the complaint, but completely missed the second. Instead, his attention had drifted off to contemplate a drawing on the wall.

  It was love at first sight, which happens, every once in a while. It was badly framed, tucked away in a dark comer, forlorn and neglected and scruffy, a little ragamuffin of a thing, and all the more endearing for it. Byrnes, no doubt, had he been aware of the way in which Argyll studied it so obviously, would have instantly pointed out that this was his great weakness as an art dealer. Argyll did not see it, and scent a profit. Nor did he recognize the likely author, and wonder who it could be sold to. He merely saw and liked: the more so because the poor little thing was so anonymous and untended. It was its lack of value that attracted him. A failing of his.

  It was just a sketch of a man’s palm, with one finger and a thumb. The sort of thing art schools have drilled their students in for hundreds of years: there is probably no part of the human anatomy more difficult to get right. Small, no signature, covered in damp spots and foxing.

  “What’s this?” he asked Mary Verney, with no attempt to hide his appreciation. Another weakness of his.

  “That?” she said. “I’ve not a clue. I think it’s always been there. Done by a member of the family in the days when young women were taught that sort of thing, I expect.”

  “Isn’t it sweet?”

  She shrugged. “I can’t say I’ve ever looked at it.” She moved over and peered more closely. “Now you mention it, it is handsome, if you like thumbs.”

  Argyll did not reply, but merely examined more closely. It looked a bit better than the average family amateur class of thing to him.

  “Valuable?” she went on. “I don’t remember the men from the auctioneers noting it; it was Forster’s last service before I kicked him out. They came in to tot up the house after Veronica died and paid no attention to it. More to the point, I can’t remember Veronica ever enthusing about it. She was the one who claimed to have taste and discernment.”

  “And did she?”

  “I don’t know. But she did make a fuss about running around gurgling over galleries.”

  “Oh, yes? She didn’t go to a finishing school in Florence, did she?” he asked, obeying orders to the letter.

  “I’m sure she did. Just the sort of silly snobby nonsense she’d go in for. Why do you ask?”

  “This woman who mentioned Forster also referred to a woman called Beaumont.”

  “Ah. Well, there you are, then.”

  “Listen, there wouldn’t be any documentation on your pictures, would there? I might be able to find…”

  She shook her head. “Doesn’t exist. Forster looked and reported that there was nothing at all. No inventories, no account books, nothing. God knows what happened to them. But surely, if this is a good drawing…”

  “Irrelevant,” Argyll said airily. “People aren’t prepared to spend money on pictures. It took me a long time to learn that. They buy pedigree. Like dogs. Or horses. Or aristocrats,” he went on, wondering whether he was pushing his metaphors a bit too far. “A signature and a provenance are worth ten times as much as a painting, and works without pedigree are often treated with suspicion.”

  “Aren’t people silly?”

  “They are. Maybe Forster missed the papers?”

  She shrugged. “Maybe. Although he wasn’t that much of a fool. And he had a good reason to find them if they were there. I suppose it would have helped him get a better price for all the stuff he sold.”

  “Could I check? Just to make sure?”

  She sighed at his persistence. “Oh, very well. But you won’t find anything. What there is will be in the attic. If there’s anything.”

  “Wonderful.”

  “Along with the water tank,” she went on.

  “Oh. All right,” he conceded. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  So he followed her up the next, more rickety staircase, then up what was little more than a stepladder into the attic, where the air was filled with the sound of nesting pigeons.

  “Bit dusty, I’m afraid,” she observed, with a true and sure grasp of the art of understatement. “And smelly. But I think the tank is over there. And the boxes of archives and things ought to be in the other direction. Might not be, of course,” she added doubtfully.

  Argyll reassured her that he would do his best on both counts. In the case of the water tank, it wasn’t a great deal. It took about five minutes to locate the leaky joint that was causing all the trouble, realize that it was far beyond his level of competence and conclude that a plumber was necessary. This task completed to his satisfaction, he then turned his attention to more interesting matters, and began poking around in the pile of boxes at the other end of the attic. Huge quantities of paper. Fired by a brief flicker of optimism, he quickly glanced through them, in the hope that all the stuff that Forster hadn’t been able to find was in there.

  It didn’t take that long to realize it wasn’t. Some concerned marriage settlements, the eternal haggling over property that was the solid foundation of love in the seventeenth century; and, it seemed, well into the twentieth, as the last batch concerned cousin Veronica’s betrothal. Others were very routine documents concerning the management of the estate in the nineteenth century and more recent correspondence to and from members of the family. Not a reference to pictures in any of them, he thought, picking up one box at random and peering in. The contents were bound up in string with a little label attached. “Mabel,” it read.

  No, he told himself as he opened it up, none of your business. No time to waste on this, he
added as he took out a bundle of letters which he rapidly realized had been written by his hostess’s mother. Besides, he thought as he settled down for a good read, Mary Verney would not forgive such a gross violation of her privacy. And quite right too.

  His conscience registered its protest and, for once, was ignored, leaving Argyll to read with growing astonishment about Mabel Beaumont who, although she had made a promising start as the dutiful eldest of five daughters, slowly transformed in the course of dozens of letters into someone who, to put it mildly, manifested a certain eccentric streak in her character. She was, it seemed, a woman at war with herself and everybody else, and the battle took her away from home and the prospect of a life spent marrying, raising children and opening fêtes, and instead made her roam across Europe until she died, according to the death certificate which was the last document in the box, in a hotel room in what Argyll knew was a particularly seedy part of Milan. Her daughter, just turned fourteen, was the only person with her and had tended the sick woman herself as there was no money to pay for doctors. There was a letter in a girlish hand, asking for help; the box contained no reply.

  Argyll sneezed meditatively as he digested this cautionary tale of inter-war wildness, and absentmindedly flipped through the rest of the box, most of which concerned family negotiations to have Mary placed under their guardianship and sent to school. “She is wild, intelligent but apparently immune to discipline,” said the one and only school report. Good for her, he thought briefly before remembering that this was not what he was there for. So he tied the whole lot back up, replaced the box, and reluctantly applied himself once more to the plumbing, and after another half hour, with little bits of plastic and string and much struggling and stubbing of fingers, he eventually managed to slow the flow of water. But, as he said later when fending off her thanks, it wasn’t a very good job. Sooner or later, she’d have to call a plumber.