by Amy Myers
‘Mark Priest’s been arrested.’
Chapter Thirteen
Mark Priest? What had been going on? Georgia wondered. It was only two weeks since she had seen him in the Pad and Palette. The investigation had obviously moved on quickly. But which investigation?
‘Arrested for what?’ she asked when she reported in the next morning. ‘For the art-thefts scam or Sandro’s murder?’ She’d assumed the former, but now this more sinister thought had occurred to her.
‘Organizing the art scam, according to Mike,’ Peter told her. ‘At present, anyway. If Sandro got in Mark’s way of course it might become a murder charge as well, provided there’s forensic evidence against him. Sandro is firmly tied into it, since the copies replacing the stolen artworks are all by the same hand as Sandro’s legit work. The Met has had its sights on Priest for a long time, because he has some connection to every house or museum suffering from the scam.’
‘One could say the same of Zac.’
‘Do you see him successfully masterminding a scam on this scale?’
‘No,’ she admitted. Even so she couldn’t get her mind round its being Mark. An organizer yes, but a crooked one has to see round more corners than a straight one. It was true she’d only met Mark once, however, which wasn’t a lot to go on.
‘Mark Priest fits the frame,’ Peter continued. ‘Outwardly unassertive, he’s in the middle of the game, and could have set up the thefts to switch the originals with copies, and dealt with the insurance problems later.’
‘Are the Cooks involved too?’ Somehow Georgia couldn’t see Ratlike Roy or Kinky Kelly working avidly for Mark Priest, and yet if Sandro was working for them surely they couldn’t be sparkling clean.
‘Not proven. Priest has to talk first and at the moment he’s putting on a fine show of complete innocence.’
‘What about the Benizis?’ she asked reluctantly. ‘Do they come into it?’
‘Question marks over the business, if not your chums in particular. There’s nothing to link them with the Kentish art thefts, only the tenuous connection of the Daks family and Roberto Benizi in Budapest.’
‘And Zac,’ she pointed out.
‘As you say, Zac. Who at the moment isn’t in the frame, let alone the picture. That might be because nothing directly leads to the Benizis or to the Daks family, except Sandro. And if he chose to copy masterpieces and someone bought them – so what? There’s nothing illegal in copying. It’s a question of what you do with it and how you present it. I’m quite sure Sandro would have put a discreet mention of his own name on the back of each copy, which has no doubt been picked up by the Met. No intention to deceive, ladies and gentlemen, none at all.’
Georgia had mixed feelings. At the moment she would undoubtedly be persona non grata with Antonio and Madeleine, thanks to her Budapest caper. There would be a price on her head at least. She could visualize Antonio shaking his head sadly, even as he signed the execution order. That’s enough, she told her imagination firmly.
‘This will be another almighty blow to Jago,’ she said.
‘With luck King Arthur will help keep his mind off it. Look at this.’ Peter passed her the morning’s newspaper and she quickly scanned the item he pointed out. It carried the headline ‘England’s Hour of Need’:
Speculation grows on the Internet that King Arthur is preparing to come to the aid of the nation. The late king still reclines in a coma after his mortal wound at the Battle of Camlann, but his supporters are claiming that his return is imminent. According to his spin doctors, his loyal party activist Sir Gawain has offered to reveal the whereabouts of his own bones and grave goods in the hope of discovering His Majesty’s long-lost golden goblet, a magnet which, it is hoped, will draw the king from his resting place. Sir Gawain, best known for his epic battle with the gigantic Green Knight, expired off the Channel coast some years ago, and is now thought to be slumbering close to his former liege lord in Kent.
The article continued in this vein for another two paragraphs, concluding:
His Majesty’s followers are preparing for Gawain’s resurrection by meeting on Barham Downs near Canterbury on 6 July. Reports that a magician by the name of Merlin is expected to attend are as yet unconfirmed. A spokesman for the local archaeological society made it clear that the society had no plans to take part in the dig but would be keenly interested in the outcome.
Georgia laid the newspaper down. ‘Do you think they really plan to dig?’ she asked incredulously.
‘Almost certainly.’
‘Is this Jago’s big moment? While the Arthurian world and his wife are digging on Barham Downs, he might be scuttling off to his own selected site.’
‘Probably – with or without his son.’
*
Georgia could hardly wait to push the newspaper under Luke’s nose, and took the rare step of suggesting he join them for lunch at the White Lion on the grounds that it might affect the contract he was drawing up. It was rare only because Luke preferred to remain glued to the oast house during his so-called lunch break.
‘At least King Arthur’s in command now,’ he said cheerfully, once they were settled at the White Lion, Haden Shaw’s local. ‘Either he turns up with Gawain next week waving his sword and clutching his goblet under his arm, or he doesn’t. You can’t do a thing about it.’
‘Thank heavens for that,’ she said fervently. ‘Shall we go along to watch the fun?’
‘Jago’s movements might be more interesting,’ Peter said.
‘Perhaps, although he might leave it for a few days, even weeks or months, before he makes his own move.’
‘How will they organize this thing?’ Luke had been reading the article carefully.
‘According to the blogs, admission to the sacred spot is by ticket only,’ Peter said. ‘They can’t be pleased at this wide publicity. Someone must have leaked it.’
‘But what if the meeting’s a practical joke? Remember the magician who heralded his arrival with a big poster campaign advertising “He is coming!”, sold all the tickets, and when the eager audience arrived they simply found another poster announcing: “He has gone!”?’
Georgia duly laughed. ‘Suppose something is dug up. Bits of Gawain’s bones, as in the Piltdown fraud.’
‘Modern tests would dispose of that.’
‘Technology might have moved on since Piltdown days, but human beings are just as daft. It’s a question of what people want to believe. If enough want to believe something is genuine, then the scam succeeds.’
‘No,’ Luke said. ‘I don’t agree. With this announced in the press, there are going to be doubters out in force.’
‘Doubters have been overruled before,’ Peter pointed out. ‘Despite all the museums, including the Hermitage, who refused to buy Ruchomovski’s Tiara of Saitaphernes, the Louvre went ahead and bought it.’
‘Times have changed,’ Luke argued, ‘and that’s where Arthur’s goblet will fall down – that’s if it ever pops up. There’d be so much ridicule that no one would dare stand up and proclaim it the real thing.’
‘By real,’ Peter came back at him, ‘do you mean really King Arthur’s or really genuine gold? I’ve no doubt about the latter, it’s the former I’m more interested in.’
‘How do you define real,’ Georgia asked, deciding to stir it, ‘where King Arthur’s concerned? Do you mean King Arthur as portrayed by tradition, or a minor leader who repelled a horde of Saxons?’
Both Peter and Luke turned on her, but before either of them could demolish her, Charlie Bone appeared at their table out of the blue. ‘Guessed you’d be here,’ he said, ‘skiving as usual.’
‘Look who’s talking.’ Georgia moved up on the bench and her cousin slid in beside her. She hadn’t seen him since Gwen’s wedding, and his arrival was opportune.
‘I’m not.’ Charlie looked injured. ‘Peter asked me to come. I’m early, that’s all, so eager am I to help you at all times.’
‘Blogs,’ Peter explained
succinctly. ‘I asked Charlie if he could trace them back to source.’
‘I haven’t got far,’ Charlie said blithely. ‘Terry and I played for hours this morning, but no more success than you did, Peter. They’re all such secretive sods that no one wants to stick a head above the parapet in case he loses his fifteen minutes of fame.’
‘So one of them could well be Jago himself.’ Peter beat Georgia to the obvious conclusion.
‘You mean Jago deliberately whips up this furore over a site well away from his own patch, so that he can keep all the glory for himself?’ Luke said. ‘Wow, what a gent.’
‘I doubt if he would put it in those terms,’ Peter said drily. ‘He is an academic protecting his research, after all.’
‘Picturing himself holding up the goblet as if he’d won the Grand Prix?’
‘Good publicity,’ Charlie observed.
Charlie had a knack of expressing the obvious that had been too obvious to see for herself, Georgia thought. That could be exactly what Jago had in mind. ‘So,’ Charlie continued, ‘are you all off to Barham Downs next Thursday, shovels and metal detectors in hand? Good pub at Barham.’
‘No doubt King Arthur stepped down for a pint in the midst of the Battle of Badon,’ Luke joked.
‘There’ll be another bunfight next week,’ Charlie said happily. ‘According to those blogs, half the lads think the goblet has nothing to do with Gawain but was dropped in the middle of the battle as someone stopped to take a swig of ale, possibly Arthur himself. The others think Gawain died at Badon, aka Barham Downs, and not at Dover, so why couldn’t it be called Gawain’s cup and not Arthur’s?’
‘Let’s not spoil the story,’ Georgia said patiently.
‘What happened to that Lance Venyon you were investigating?’ Charlie asked. ‘Is he mixed up with this?’
Silence. How, Georgia thought, could they say yes, when they still didn’t know how he tied in with it, if at all.
‘No clues at all, Sherlock?’ Charlie persisted.
‘There might be,’ Georgia said, ‘but if so they’re locked inside the memories of (a) a scorned woman, (b) an antiques dealer who won’t speak in case it rakes up nefarious doings from his own past or (c) a professor in his nineties with Alzheimer’s.’
‘Ah. No way out?’ Charlie asked.
‘I’ll eat my own hat if there is,’ Peter said gloomily.
‘Don’t follow. Who else’s would you eat?’
‘The only words the professor could utter about Lance were Raphael, Michelangelo and hat. The Michelangelo could be a reference to the Kranowski family, known forgers of the 1950s. Raphael is perhaps a reference to Pre-Raphaelites and therefore to Rossettis, and the hat is a blank.’
Charlie looked interested. ‘Did you try them all together?’
‘Yes. Nothing interesting came out of it.’
He thought for a moment. ‘Let’s get back to your office and have a go.’
Luke decided to leave them in the interests of his own office, but Georgia was amused to see that he looked reluctant to do so. Could it be that he really was getting gripped by hidden treasure?
Once back in Peter’s house, Charlie sat himself down at Georgia’s computer – tactful of him not to usurp Peter’s, she thought – and his fingers were soon busily clicking.
‘Oh yes,’ he said after a few minutes. ‘Look at this, art and hat.’ Peter wheeled himself over to peer over Charlie’s shoulder as he scrolled through the list.
‘Oh yes, what?’ Georgia asked impatiently since her own view was impaired.
‘Bruno Hat,’ Peter crowed softly. ‘Of course. Thanks, Charlie.’
‘Who’s he?’ Georgia asked.
‘No one. That’s the point. It was one of the master scams of the 1920s when such jokes were highly rated in the fashionable world of celebs. Bruno Hat was a fictitious artist supposedly discovered in a small Sussex village and hailed by Evelyn Waugh and his chums as a genius. His work was sensational, and an exhibition was mounted of his frightfully avant-garde works. A catalogue was produced and Hat even made a brief appearance at the exhibition. The cognoscenti promptly bought paintings like hot cakes. Naturally they had to be pretty good anyway, and it’s still not certain who actually painted them. Hoskin was remembering that.’
‘But why?’ Georgia asked, though ideas were beginning to spark off in her mind. Hat and Kranowski, Michelangelo Kranowski, Domenico Kranowski, Richard Hoskin . . .
Obviously Peter was galvanized too for he was on his own mission. ‘Charlie,’ he said, ‘I have an important personal engagement with Google.’ He turned the wheelchair round and in a trice was busy with the search button.
‘The problem is that pretty nearly anything one feeds in comes up with something,’ he grumbled. ‘There’s too much information in the world.’
‘Or disinformation,’ Georgia pointed out. ‘The Internet’s only a medium.’
‘Hey presto,’ Peter cried. He stared at the screen. Before Georgia could see what had caught his attention, he clutched his head, and cried out again: ‘A fool, I met a fool in the forest and it was me!’ he said.
‘Never mind the Shakespeare quotes, what have you discovered?’ Georgia peered over his shoulder.
‘I knew those Benizis and Dakses were fooling us. There’s the link between them.’
‘Where?’ she demanded. All she could see was a site about faked art.
‘Domenico,’ he howled.
‘Explain.’ She was hopping up and down in frustration.
‘There was no Domenico Kranowski, and no Domenico Daks either. Part of the maze. He changed his name completely, naturally enough. He was heading a family of fakers, for heaven’s sake.’
‘So?’
‘Antonio Benizi knows the Daks/Kranowski family well. He never lost touch with Kranowski. He knew the change of name, forename and surname. It’s how the firm’s operated all these years between East and West, and be blowed to the Iron Curtain. He was misleading you, Georgia.’
‘Because of the paintings?’ She was still in the maze.
‘No,’ he snapped impatiently. ‘Look at this.’
She peered closely at the screen, with Charlie equally glued to Peter’s other side.
‘Raphael Kranowski,’ Peter read out. ‘Silver- and goldsmith. Faker of the Weimar Bowl and the Samos Rhyton, et cetera.’
‘Antonio spoke of him as an art forger,’ she stammered. ‘Domenico, anyway.’
‘There was no Domenico. We’ve both been fools, Georgia. You swallowing everything Benizi told you, and me’ – at least he was including himself, she thought wryly – ‘for not checking it on the Internet. How could I have been such an idiot? Am I getting old?’ He looked at her in appeal.
Georgia couldn’t answer. The sudden collapse of his usual confidence had shaken her and it was left to Charlie to come to the rescue. ‘Even Sherlock had to call in Brother Mycroft on occasion.’
That rallied Peter. ‘Very well, Mycroft. If it’s so elementary, where do we go next?’
‘Obvious,’ Charlie said blithely, ‘this chap forged the goblet.’
Peter’s eyes gleamed. ‘Which no doubt is the property Raphael was so eager to recover from Lance Venyon. So eager that Michelangelo pursued it in 1961 and Leonardo in 1990.’
‘Charlie,’ said Georgia fervently, ‘if I wasn’t in love with Luke, I’d marry you for this.’
‘Why punish me?’ he moaned. ‘What have you got against me?’
‘Nothing in the world,’ she replied happily. ‘You’ve given us the path forward.’
‘It’s Mum’s eclairs, you know. They’re good for the brain. Anyway, I’m getting interested in the Arthur story. I always fancied myself as the jolly fat one.’
‘I think you’ll find that’s Robin Hood,’ Georgia said gently, looking at Charlie’s scrawny figure.
‘So it is. Merlin, then.’
‘You’ve achieved magic this time,’ she said gratefully.
*
Georg
ia followed Peter into the garden after Charlie had taken himself off, rather regretfully, to return to his London flat. Hot days weren’t good for thought, but then neither were claustrophobic offices, so the garden was a good compromise. She was all too well aware that the gate through to her own garden was rarely used now. Perhaps the time had come to sell the house. Or should it wait until next season? Just in case . . .
‘Let’s put this together,’ Peter began. ‘Fact. Benizi misled you over Raphael Kranowski.’
‘He deliberately let me think Domenico was an art forger, because he didn’t want us to follow up the goblet. Why?’
‘A possible scam.’
‘Whose? We suspect that Lance was mixed up with it, but did he organize it, or the Benizis?’ Even now it cost her something to think of them as villains.
Peter took up the baton. ‘The Benizis must be at the heart of it, since it’s in their interests to develop the Arthurian market. If this goblet is first rumoured to exist, then proven, the provenance of that and the paintings is strengthened. If the chaplains’ script and Ruskin letter also turned up, the price would be sky high.’
‘The rumour is that the goblet was buried,’ Georgia continued, the bit between her teeth now. ‘It couldn’t be just any old gold cup, it had to be linked with Arthur. So they draw Lance into it, but why should Lance help them? He had his reputation to consider.’
‘Money. Friendship. And perhaps,’ Peter added, ‘he was killed because of this scam.’
‘Unless Lance brought the scam to Benizi.’ Yes, surely that was it? ‘You’re forgetting Richard Hoskin.’ Was there a ray of light at last?
‘In what way?’
‘He was a historian and interested in archaeology. It’s clear he knew about the scam.’ Steady. She tried to keep a cap on her words. No thesis ahead of the facts. But, oh, how those facts fitted. ‘He has a museum full of Arthurian-type artefacts.’
He caught her excitement. ‘Old bones. Sir Gawain’s bones, and,’ he gloated, ‘possibly his sword, belt buckle, shield, who knows what. Georgia, we’re on our way. The goblet might even be there.’
‘Where?’
