Giotto's hand

by Iain Pears

  “People do.”

  “They do. But if she’d killed him, she would have had to go to her sister, sneak back to push him down the stairs, then slip away again. Which would need a bit of forward planning. That sort of cold calculation is not her style.”

  Argyll gave her a disapproving glance, and she smiled reassuringly.

  “You look sceptical. You shouldn’t be. You haven’t met her. Besides, as far as I can tell, it’s far from certain he was killed deliberately. Why do you assume he was?”

  “Simply because it’s an awful coincidence that he died just before I got to talk to him.”

  “Look on the bright side: it spared you an unpleasant encounter.”

  “I’m being serious.”

  “I know. But it’s only a coincidence if Geoffrey was indeed a thief.”

  “He said he’d talk to me about a stolen painting.”

  “Probably just to threaten to sue you for slander.”

  “But you didn’t like Forster. Or trust him?”

  “That’s about it. He used people, and dumped them when he’d finished, and he was a liar and a cheat. Maybe that’s helpful if you’re an art dealer. Perhaps you should try it.”

  “So what did your cousin see in him?”

  “He had a certain charm. If you like that sort of thing, which I don’t very much,” she conceded. “Handsome enough in a sort of slick fashion. And poor old Veronica was a bit unhappy. She married and her husband died young. Silly ass got drunk at their fifth anniversary junket, fell into a pond and drowned in five inches of water. Too sozzled to roll over. Even Veronica thought he was a bit hopeless; that was why she went back to using her own name: she reckoned the Beaumont was more worthwhile preserving than Finsey-Groat. And she never found anyone else worth sacrificing the family name for.

  “So, no husband, no children, no friends. Easy meat for someone to come along and fleece her.”

  “Is that what he did?”

  “Well, he was selling stuff off, never producing any accounts, and I’m certain he was keeping a large chunk of money for himself. I tried to make her see sense, but she was too goggle-eyed. Dimwit.”

  “When did she die?”

  “January. I was here; she’d had an attack and I was summoned by Dr. Johnson yet again to see what was to be done with her this time. No one else would come. She was a depressive, you know.”

  “It was mentioned.”

  “She had these turns. For ages she’d be fine, then she’d go crazy.”

  “What sort of crazy?”

  “Oh, all sorts of crazy. She’d go on a fugue; just disappear for a week or so; nobody ever knew where she’d been. Or she’d lock herself in the house and refuse to see anyone. Or she’d sit and drink. Or something. When she died, she was in a big one and just overdid the drink and the pills.”

  “Why did you look after her?”

  She shrugged. “There was no one else. She refused proper treatment and when she was really bad I was the only person who could do anything with her at all. She was virtually intolerable, I must say. I went out one day and she killed herself. I like to think it was an accident, although I’m not sure.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, it’s silly, but we’d just had a fight. About Forster, in fact. It was beginning to dawn on her that he wasn’t that wonderful after all. She asked me what I thought, and I told her to get rid of him. At which point she blew up and called me all the names under the sun. I marched out in a huff, and she consoled herself with half a bottle of whisky and half a bottle of pills. Had I been a bit more resilient…”

  “You feel you’re to blame?”

  She shook her head. “Only when I’m in a bad mood. When I’m in a good mood I realize it was a disaster waiting to happen. Sooner or later she would have pushed it too far. It’s just a pity she couldn’t have left me out of it. Typical of her, really.”

  “Were you close?”

  “Not so you’d notice. In fact, I don’t suppose we liked each other, if truth be told. But she left this place to me simply because she wanted it kept in the family, and I was the closest relation who wasn’t a total deadbeat. Although I can’t say I have enough to keep it up, or the inclination either. More rabbit?”

  “I couldn’t.”

  “Some summer pudding, then? It’s very good.”

  “I’d love some.”

  She spooned it out, covered it with thick cream, and allowed Argyll a few moments to eat, admire and eat some more.

  “Where do you fit into this family of yours?” he asked, desperate for a bit of context into which he could place his nosing through the family papers.

  “On to me now, are we? OK. I’m the daughter of the family black sheep, Mabel,” she said, “who went to the bad. Although she had a much more interesting life than anyone here. Until she got sick, at least.”

  “That sounds interesting.”

  “It was, in a way. Mother was artistic, which in gentry-speak is always a euphemism for being unbalanced, if not actually certifiable. This is why I always had more sympathy for Veronica than most people. More practice. Mother spent a typical youth and was supposed to inherit Weller House—there were no sons, despite my grandmother’s conscientious efforts—find a rich husband who would rebuild the finances and generally do her duty. Instead, she got all sorts of ideas, and suddenly upped and left to become a war nurse in Spain, which shocked the family enormously. Being bountiful to the unemployed was one thing; wiping Bolshevik bums was quite another, and so naturally they disinherited her. From their point of view it was a natural thing to do, and I don’t know that Mother minded much. I was born under what you might call ambiguous circumstances just before the war started. She died when I was fourteen. The family, very reluctantly, took me over and tried to make a lady out of unpromising material, and I suppose failed quite badly. End of story. Am I boring you?”

  “Lordy, no. Tell me more.”

  “Not much else to tell, really. I married, had children and my husband and I parted company, giving me an adequate settlement.”

  “That’s the Verney bit?”

  “That’s it. He was a decent soul, really. I just hated him. At which point my life story becomes very dull and uninteresting. I moved around from place to place, settled in London, did this, that and the next thing.”

  “You never married again?”

  She shook her head. “No suitable candidates presented themselves. Not for the long-term, anyway. By the way,” she went on, making one of those leaps of the imagination which Argyll was beginning to find alarming. “Flavia rang again.”

  “Oh?”

  “Could you meet her in London tomorrow at lunch-time?”

  “Oh. That’s a pity. I was quite beginning to enjoy myself here.”

  “Are you indeed? Splendid. In that case you can come back. Will she be coming here as well?”

  “I’ve no idea. Wouldn’t surprise me.”

  “In that case, I hope she will make less of a fuss about staying here than you did. Coffee?”

  10

  Flavia began her researches into the life and times of Geoffrey Forster after an amiable lunch the next day with Argyll and Edward Byrnes at the dining club. Inspector Manstead, who never passed up an opportunity of either a free lunch or meeting a possibly important contact, came as well, and then decided to accompany her on her travels just to add a gloss of officialdom, as he put it, to her efforts.

  Fortunately, London still retains its old local character for some of its trades. Many other occupations, which used to cluster together for protection, have long since been scattered to the winds: not many tailors still sew around Savile Row, journalists are too dispersed to fill the pubs of Fleet Street and complain about how they are unappreciated, and publishers have been cast to the winds, no longer making Covent Garden an interesting place to visit. Doctors do still dominate Harley Street, but are much too fine a bunch of people actually to talk to each other.

  But enou
gh art dealers do hang out in the area around Bond Street and St. James’s to give the place a particular character and, even though they might not like each other much, mutual interest and propinquity ensures that at least some show of professional solidarity remains. Thus, when Edward Byrnes made a face and telephoned Arthur Winterton for her, Winterton reluctantly made time to see Flavia.

  One might think that the fact that both men were of advancing years, both had enjoyed as much success as they could reasonably desire, and both were quite unfairly wealthy, would have had a mellowing effect on them, blunting the competitive edge and allowing them to survey the art scene with the detachment that comes of total security. Not a bit of it. Both men had been profoundly jealous of each other for decades, and neither was going to give up now. Without the desire of Winterton to beat Byrnes, and without the fervent wish of Byrnes to trounce Winterton, both men might well have remained modest dealers of only limited prominence, rather than the two contesting giants of Bond Street.

  For Argyll, who wanted little out of life except to be left in moderately affluent peace, watching how easily the veneer of urbanity was stripped off Byrnes by the mention of the word Winterton was a never-ending source of instruction. He had always assumed a couple of million in the bank would bring peace and contentment. It was a shock to realize that it did nothing of the sort. Winterton’s superior contacts on the American museum circuit could still make Byrnes incandescent with a jealousy of a very primitive variety. Byrnes’s knighthood, on the other hand, was quite capable of keeping Winterton awake until dawn if he should chance to think about it late at night.

  He had, on occasion, mentioned his former employer’s Achilles heel to Flavia in the past and so she, as she walked into Winterton’s rival gallery three hundred yards up the street, was keenly looking for reasons to explain how such rivalry could be generated.

  Certainly, style was important, she decided as they waited for the great man to appear. Whereas Byrnes’s gallery self-consciously cultivated the slightly old-fashioned, scholarly air, the high-quality faded look, Winterton had gone very much for the modern style in which everything was restored and interior designed to within an inch of its life. The difference was reflected in the men themselves, she realized as Winterton emerged; Byrnes had gone grey at least ten years previously and much of his hair had vanished, while Winterton had a full head of suspiciously black stuff despite his nearly sixty years. Byrnes, in a word, was expensively shabby in appearance, Winterton was expensively elegant. She had learnt—or rather Argyll had explained to her—that such things can indeed trigger conflict in a country like England which, despite its reputation, is more concerned with appearance than any other. The English may not dress well by continental standards, but the way they dress badly is of enormous importance.

  Flavia and Inspector Manstead (himself a member of the cheap and dowdy tendency in couture) were whisked off into Winterton’s office and plied with tea and coffee.

  Winterton sat himself behind his desk and placed the tips of his fingers together to indicate that he was taking the proceedings seriously and would, of course, do his best to help the police with their enquiries.

  “Inspector Manstead and I are attempting to get some details about paintings which passed through the hands of the late Geoffrey Forster,” Flavia began. Winterton nodded to indicate that he was paying attention.

  “To be frank, there is a question mark over the provenance of some of them.”

  “You mean some were stolen?”

  “Just so.”

  Winterton nodded impatiently. “Yes, yes. I see. Might I ask what these paintings were? I do very much hope you are not going to ask me whether I knew about this?”

  Flavia shook her head at the very idea. “No. But obviously we do need to know about Forster. Friends, associates, that sort of thing. We need some sort of idea how this might have happened. Did you know him well?”

  Winterton shook his head. “Oh, no,” he said with clear relief. “Fortunately, our association was only very loose.”

  “And your impressions?”

  Winterton thought carefully. “He was a man utterly devoid of anything that might be termed the finer feelings. To him, the value of everything was in how much cash you could get for it. To use the old cliché, he knew the price of everything, the value of nothing. I know it is old-fashioned, I can think of no better way of describing him than to say he was a scoundrel and a fake. Geoffrey Forster was just the sort of person who would expect to buy stolen works of art.”

  “But Mr. Winterton, you have a high reputation, I believe. Why would you go into business with someone of whom you had such a low opinion? Surely that could only have harmed your standing in the art world?”

  Winterton frowned with annoyance at the question, probably because it was quite a good one. He waved his hand vaguely to indicate the passage of time and the vagueness of the art dealing business.

  “A sign of the times,” he said with a sigh. “We must all try to make the best use of our assets, until the economy picks up. In my case, I had this large building which was rather under-used, so I rented out a couple of rooms at the top to people who want an impressive business address but can’t afford their own gallery. Forster is one of three; he very rarely used the place: that was one of the conditions of letting him have it in the first instance, to be frank.

  “And once he did me a favour, which saved me some potential embarrassment. I must say, I didn’t like the man, but I owed him in return. You know how it is.”

  “Aha. I see. Could you tell me what this favour was?”

  “I don’t think that is at all relevant.”

  Flavia smiled sweetly, and Manstead scowled threateningly. Between them, they managed to convey how pleased the police would be with an answer, and how much trouble they might cause if he kept quiet.

  “Very well, then. It was about three years ago. I had undertaken to dispose of a painting for the executors of the estate of a Belgian collector who had recently died. A very distinguished man. Whose name I will not provide. Forster heard about it as I was arranging for it to go to Christie’s. He alerted me to the possibility that it was not all it seemed.”

  “What did it seem?”

  “It seemed to be a fine, but undocumented Florentine school painting of the mid-fifteenth century. Quite valuable, in its way, although, without any proof of identity, not in the first league. Which is why I was not proposing to try and find a private purchaser.”

  “And what was it?”

  “I could never prove it, of course.”

  “But…”

  “But it did appear to bear a superficial resemblance to a painting of St. Mary the Egyptian by Antonio Pollaiuolo which was stolen in 1976 from the Earl of Dunkeld’s Scottish house.”

  “And so you instantly reported this to the police?”

  Winterton smiled grimly. “Certainly not”

  “Why not?”

  “Because there was absolutely no proof one way or the other. I could not in good conscience undertake to sell the painting myself, of course. But to drag the name of a famous collector through the mire—for that is what would have happened—by calling in the police over a painting which might very well have been bought quite legitimately, seemed irresponsible. I did check, and there was no indication of how the painting had arrived in the collection.”

  “So you walked away?” Manstead interrupted indignantly.

  Winterton grimaced with slight pain at the vulgar way this was put.

  “Where is the picture now?” the English policeman went on.

  “I do not know.”

  “I see. So, let’s get this straight. You were selling a hot picture, Forster takes one look at it and tells you it was stolen. You pull out in case someone notices it. And you didn’t for a moment consider you might have been doing anything wrong?”

  Winterton raised an eyebrow in surprise. “Of course not. I knew the Pollaiuolo painting had been reported stolen, of course. On
the other hand, I didn’t know it actually had been stolen.”

  Manstead positively fulminated at this comment. “That seems like splitting hairs to me.”

  “I don’t care one way or the other what it seems to you. But I suspect Miss di Stefano here knows exactly what I mean. A painting is stolen; the owner registers the loss and collects on the insurance. Has it really been stolen? Or has the owner sold it through a dealer and faked the theft so he can be paid twice? Does the new owner think he is buying a stolen work, or does he think he is buying a legitimate painting which is being sold discreetly for fear of having to hand over too much to the taxman? What some previous owner has done fifteen years ago and in another country is not my concern: making a living at art dealing is hard enough without going out of your way to find trouble. In my case, I decided the best thing to do would be not to get involved.”

  “And give Forster office space upstairs as a little thank you for heading you away from trouble?”

  Winterton nodded. “I would prefer to say that my opinion of him lifted a little after that. But not that much.”

  Manstead felt decidedly ruffled at this, but noticed that Flavia remained perfectly calm, dealing with Winterton’s explanation as though it was the most natural thing in the world. Indeed, he got the distinct impression she even approved of his decision. Certainly, she didn’t bother to follow it up.

  “Now,” she said, taking control of the questioning once more, ”how did Forster know it was stolen? That’s the important thing, isn’t it? If he had no finer feelings, spotting something as obscure as a Pollaiuolo would hardly come easily to him. So how did he know? Not a famous theft, or a famous collection.”

  Winterton shrugged.

  “He didn’t say, ‘I know it’s stolen because I stole it myself?’ ” she suggested.

  Winterton looked ruffled, a state which Flavia found a great improvement. “Of course not,” he said eventually. “Firstly, I doubt he had it in him. And if he did, he would hardly tell me, would he? A bit stupid, even for him?”