Death of an Old Master lfp-3

by David Dickinson

  ‘Not much money in Titians,’ said Piper sorrowfully. He had a soft spot for Titian. ‘Too many of the damned things. Silly old man lived till he was nearly a hundred, as you know. If only he’d died young like our friend Giorgione in the exhibition, he wouldn’t have left so many damned paintings. Then the prices would be better.’

  ‘The point is this, William,’ said de Courcy, familiar with Piper’s normal reaction of applying the laws of supply and demand to the artistic heritage of the Western world. ‘James Hammond-Burke’s house is falling down. I should say it needs at least twenty thousand pounds spending on it.’ De Courcy’s expertise in restoration costs for old houses was based on the annual estimate for restoring his own de Courcy Hall in Norfolk. His agent supplied him with these costs every year from an experienced firm in Norwich. Norfolk alone had enough crumbling piles to keep a number of building companies in profitable employment for decades.

  ‘I checked in the village next to the house as well. The general opinion was that the Hammond-Burkes were virtually bankrupt.’

  ‘So, Edmund, so.’ Piper was planning his campaign. ‘We write to this Hammond-Burke fellow. Do we ask him to bring the painting up to London so our experts can look at it? Or do we go there?’

  William Alaric Piper always wanted to bring his victims to London. He doubted if they were used to the capital. He would show them the paintings currently on display in the de Courcy and Piper Gallery. He would assure them that he could make no final decision until he had consulted his experts. He would sound rather doubtful about the provenance of the Raphael or the Rubens. He would send them back to their damp and their decay with hopes slighter than when they arrived. But he would not cast them into total despair. ‘We shall see,’ he would say, as he ushered them out of his office. ‘So many of these paintings turn out to be merely copies of the original and are worth nothing at all. Or they’re forgeries. But we shall have to wait a little while. These experts have to take their time examining the work. I have known them wait a month or so before they give their judgement. Once we know, I shall be in touch at once. A very good day to you, sir.’

  ‘I am sure Hammond-Burke would come to London. Absolutely sure of it,’ said de Courcy.

  ‘How long ago did you see him, three days ago, did you say?’

  De Courcy nodded. He watched his partner calculating the problems in landing this particular fish, a fish that might be worth over fifty thousand pounds profit to the gallery.

  ‘Let’s leave him a little longer, Edmund. Let’s leave him for three or four days more. Then Mr Hammond-Burke or Burke-Hammond or whatever he’s called, will get a letter from us.’

  De Courcy had seen many of these letters. They were masterpieces of manipulation. The gallery regretted that the owner was contemplating selling his Raphael. The gallery firmly believed that Old Masters should be left in their ancestral homes, to bear witness to their past and to be a beacon to future generations. However, it was always the policy of the gallery to be of succour to owners who might wish to dispose of their paintings. The gallery always attempted to ensure that they moved on to reputable owners who would guard and cherish the work as it had been guarded and cherished in the past. If Mr Hammond-Burke could bring his painting with him, the gallery, at its own expense, would ensure that it was examined by the foremost experts in the land. If necessary, other experts would be summoned from Paris or Berlin. The gallery believed that every care should be taken to ensure the correct attribution of the work. Then Piper would suggest a date. The date was always very close to the time of arrival of the letter. Get their hopes up, Piper would say. They can work out the cost of repairs on the train on their way here. Once they’re here, they’re caught. They’re in the net of William Alaric Piper.

  Very few of them escaped.

  3

  Lord Francis Powerscourt was walking along Piccadilly. The traffic on one of London’s most fashionable streets was so dense that a pedestrian moved faster than the vehicles but Powerscourt’s mind was far away. He had spent most of the past four days in and around Brompton Square. He thought he knew every blade of grass in the little garden by now. He had talked to the neighbours of the late Christopher Montague. None of them had seen anything unusual. Inspector Maxwell and his team had checked with the rubbish disposal men in case a parcel of books had been left for collection. No such pile had been observed. He and the police had knocked on every door in the square, searching for information that was not there. Or that the owners chose not to reveal. The killer seemed to have been an invisible man. The day before Inspector Maxwell revealed that the police had found two people who had seen Montague on the day of his death. An Edmund de Courcy had a brief conversation with him at the corner of Old Bond Street and Grosvenor Street late in the afternoon. A certain Roderick Johnston of the National Gallery had seen him leaving the gallery just before six o’clock in the evening. But there was no news of what Montague was working on at the time of his death.

  Powerscourt had inquired of all the reputable papers in the capital if Christopher Montague was writing an article for them. He was not. The papers regretted his death but had no clues to its cause. Originally Powerscourt had high hopes of the sister. Surely she, of all people, would know of any dark secrets in his private life that could have led to his death. She did not. Brothers, she had told Powerscourt sadly, did not usually confide their innermost secrets to their sisters. Powerscourt doubted this at first. Then he had thought of his own sisters and he asked himself if he would have told any of the three of them about his private life. On the very day he became engaged to Lucy, he reminded himself, he had taken great care not to tell his sisters the good news. The only intelligence the sister could provide was that Christopher’s closest friend was a history don called Thomas Jenkins at Emmanuel College, Oxford, and that he had been encouraged in his work by the President of the Royal Academy, Sir Frederick Lambert.

  Powerscourt had been to an exhibition of Lambert’s work the year before. Lambert specialized in vast canvases with historical or religious or mythological subjects. People said that he travelled to the countries where the events were supposed to have taken place to steep himself in the light and the colour. Powerscourt had thought they were quite terrible but resolved to keep his views to himself in his interview with the President.

  Lambert’s office was on the first floor of Burlington House. A couple of his own works modestly adorned the walls. Sir Frederick was a great bear of a man with a huge moustache and a very red face. Powerscourt remembered Lucy telling him that he took great time and trouble to curry favour with the rich and fashionable, presenting some of his own paintings to the Prince and Princess of Wales. Powerscourt doubted if either of them would have known who Agamemnon or Archimedes, regular subjects in the Lambert oeuvre, actually were. Lambert had painted Archimedes sitting in an enormous bath, designing siege engines for the battle of Syracuse while the warships surrounded the city. This incongruous vista was now hanging on the main staircase of the Waleses’ London home at Marlborough House.

  ‘How very kind of you to see me at such short notice, Sir Frederick,’ said Powerscourt, feeling rather giddy as he looked at some Lambert incident from the Trojan Wars on the wall above him.

  ‘Better have a glass of champagne, Powerscourt,’ Sir Frederick greeted him in expansive mood. ‘Lucky we’ve still got some at reasonable prices.’

  Powerscourt asked how the champagne had been in peril.

  Sir Frederick laughed. ‘It’s a very good story. The French Ambassador told it to me at a dinner last night at Lady Grosvenor’s. D’you know the Grosvenors, Powerscourt?’

  Powerscourt felt relieved as he told the President that the Grosvenors, like so much of London society, were distant relatives of his wife’s.

  ‘It’s these Americans,’ Lambert went on, taking a gulp from his glass. ‘The millionaire Americans, the ones who own all the banks and all the railways and all the shipping lines. One of them, fellow by the name of Graubman
, was in Paris, buying sculptures and paintings and tapestries to take home to Westchester County or wherever he lives. They say he was thinking of making the French Government an offer for the Louvre. Anyway, one of these French art dealers got him interested in fine champagne. Fellow asked where it came from. Art dealer takes out a map and shows him. “Why,” says Graubman, “that’s a very tiny area. You could put the whole lot into a small corner of New Hampshire!” The French Ambassador says that Graubman owns rather a large corner of New Hampshire. He thought he could make a new corner. In champagne. Buy up all the land and send up the price. The Ambassador says the millionaire took out a notebook full of figures. He asked the art dealer how many bottles of champagne are sold every year. He asked how much they fetched. “Look here,” he says to the art dealer, “in my country, once you control everything, you control all the prices. Once you’ve got all the steel, you can charge what you like for it. Why can’t we do the same with this champagne stuff? I’m sure we could make it for less money once we’d got control. Can’t see why they need so many bubbles for a start. I reckon” – he was apparently scribbling furiously at this point – “we could easily make a couple of million a year. Maybe more.”’

  Powerscourt smiled. ‘What stopped him, Sir Frederick?’ he asked.

  Lambert polished off his glass and poured himself a refill. ‘Numbers saved us all, Powerscourt. The American was all set to order a special train to take himself and his party to champagne country when the art dealer told him that there were sixteen thousand separate owners to negotiate with. At first he didn’t seem too taken aback. He talked apparently of the number of small steel manufacturers he had swallowed whole in his rise to fame and fortune. Then he shook his head. “Sixteen thousand of these French peasants,” he apparently said. “Some of them must only own a single vine, if that. I bought out over three hundred steel makers all over America. But sixteen thousand is too many. And they’re French. Mind you, I’m sure it could be done. Probably will be some day. It would just take a great amount of American enterprise and expertise. Integrated management, that’s the thing. Control the whole chain, from grape to bottling to distribution to selling point. What a lost opportunity!”’

  Sir Frederick laughed heartily at his own story. ‘Now then, Powerscourt, to business. You said in your letter that you wished to talk to me about poor Christopher Montague. What a sad end to such a promising career.’

  Powerscourt decided that flattery might be the best means of advance. ‘Sir Frederick,’ he began, ‘you stand at the very pinnacle of the London art world. From your lofty vantage point and with your long experience, you must have a better idea of what goes on in that world than any other man in Britain.’

  He smiled what he hoped was a flattering smile. ‘I have been asked by the Montague family to investigate the murder. At this stage I have absolutely no idea what caused his death. I do not know if it related to his personal or to his professional life. Nobody could inform me better about his professional activities than yourself.’

  Sir Frederick looked long at one of his paintings on the walls. Hector was being pulled round the walls of Troy, lashed to the back of a chariot, dust and blood running in brown and red trails behind the wheels.

  ‘I saw young Montague a month or so ago at the preview of that Venetian exhibition at the de Courcy and Piper Gallery. He seemed in robust form then. He asked my advice on the best place to stay in Florence. His book must be coming out quite soon. It’s on the Northern Italian Painters, a follow-up to his work on the origins of the Renaissance.’

  ‘Do you know by any chance what he was working on at the time of his death?’ asked Powerscourt. ‘Even his sister couldn’t tell me.’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t know the answer to that,’ said Sir Frederick.

  ‘Was his work good? What was your opinion of it?’ asked Powerscourt.

  Sir Frederick Lambert paused before he replied. ‘It is quite unusual in my profession for the old to praise the young, Powerscourt,’ he said. ‘Most of the time we think they are trying to destroy our reputations, the young steers battling for the leadership of the pack. But Christopher Montague was good. He was very good. I think he could have become the most distinguished scholar of his generation. The world of art is widening. More and more people want to know about it. Montague could write in a way that appealed to the intelligent public as much as it did to scholars.’

  ‘But surely that couldn’t have caused his death?’ said Powerscourt. ‘Surely nobody gets killed because they may become the foremost scholar in the country?’

  Sir Frederick Lambert paused again. He looked closely at Powerscourt’s face. ‘No,’ he said finally, ‘that’s how it would seem. That’s how it would appear. Maybe you should think of the world of art in London as being like some masterpiece of the High Renaissance. You stare, entranced by the drama of the scene, the gorgeous colours, the depiction of character, the composition of the work. But few people stop to think about the time the artist has devoted to creating that particular illusion, the months, even years spent in bewitching the eye of the beholder.’

  Sir Frederick pulled a small book from the shelves behind him. He riffled through the pages, searching for the passage he wanted.

  ‘This is Durer writing to a friend called Jacob Heller about one of his own paintings. “And when I come over to you, say in one or two or three years’ time, the picture must be taken down to see if it has dried out, and then I will varnish it anew with a special varnish that no one else can make; it will then last another hundred years longer than it would before. But don’t let anyone else varnish it. All other varnishes are yellow and the picture would be ruined for you. And if a thing on which I have spent over a year’s work were ruined, it would be grief to me.”’

  Sir Frederick took off his spectacles. ‘See the care, the concern, to maintain the illusion. Titian once went all the way back from Venice to Ferrara, quite a journey in those times, to readjust the final varnish on his Bacchus and Ariadne now on display in our own National Gallery. The art world, the dealers, the restorers, the curators in their galleries love to present themselves like those paintings, the glossy surface, the impeccable clothes, the illusion of perfection. It’s as if they hope some small particles of the glories of the past will rub off on to their own shoulders. But underneath, it is quite different. Beneath the surface, behind the fine paint and the varnish, there lurks a different world. Sometimes long ago, when painters mixed their own paints rather than buying them in the shops, trying no doubt for ever more dramatic results, they would invent a paint that nobody had ever tried before. But the outcome could be disastrous. The air, the dust, the surrounding atmosphere would erode the colours. After thirty or forty years, only the canvas would remain. The image upon it had vanished, like the smile of the Cheshire cat. So to a newcomer to the art world, I would repeat the words of Horace, caveat emptor, let the buyer beware. All is not what it seems.’

  ‘Do you think, Sir Frederick,’ said Powerscourt, ‘that all of that could lead to a man’s death?’

  Sir Frederick rose from his chair and stood by his window. A thin October sun was falling on the courtyard beneath. ‘I am an old man, Powerscourt. I have not been able to paint at all for the past three years. My doctors tell me that I have but a short time left to live. Soon I shall be swept away, just as the rubbish on our River Thames gets swept away by the tides to rest on some riverbank far away. So I can speak freely. I know too much about this art world. I would advise you to think of it as you would an Oriental bazaar, or the trading rooms of an unscrupulous financier in the City of London just up the road from here. I do not feel it appropriate to tell you of any of the dishonest activities that go on. But I make you this promise.’

  Lambert had turned round now, and looked down on Powerscourt like a benevolent uncle offering unwanted advice to a feckless nephew. ‘I hope very much that the world of art in this city did not lead to Christopher Montague’s death. I hope there are other causes
. But if, in the course of your investigations, you come across anything in the art world, anything suspicious or dishonest, I suggest that you return to me and I will help you. I will give you all the assistance in my power. I rather liked Christopher Montague.’

  4

  William Alaric Piper was going to a meeting with Gladstone. He descended from his train at Barnes railway bridge and set off beside the river. He was wearing a large overcoat and a hat pulled well forward over his eyes. He peered about him furtively as if he thought he might be followed.

  Gladstone was responsible for the secrecy. Not for the cover name, of course. All of de Courcy and Piper’s most important agents in the field had their own sobriquets. You could never be too careful, Piper had said to himself when he started his system. One word of who you had seen, one dropped bit of gossip, could lose business. More important, it could lose money.

  Only the authenticators, as Piper liked to call them, were named after former Prime Ministers. Some of these deceased statesmen had travelled further in death than they ever had in life. Liverpool had made it as far as Florence, Disraeli was reliving former diplomatic triumphs in Berlin, Peel had only progressed to Paris. But the word of these men, written rather than oral, could add tens of thousands of pounds to the value of a painting. If they said a Velasquez was a fake, it was worthless. But if they said it was genuine, William Alaric Piper’s bankers would be delighted. Most important, there could not be any visible link between expert and art dealer. If it was known that the expert was on the payroll of a dealer, his attribution would be worthless. Impartiality, the respected status of academic detachment, the quest for pure scholarship, these were the golden chips in the gambling saloons of the art world. That was why Piper created his cover names, that was why he checked his movements on his way to the Mortlake house this evening. Gladstone was an expert on the Renaissance.