Then he would apply a coat of size, and later, when the size was properly dry, he would put on a coat of varnish. By that time he hoped the two pictures would be indistinguishable. Orlando had only used paints that would have been available in Giorgione’s time. He had consulted a number of volumes in his library from Vasari On Technique to Methods and Materials of Painting of the Great Schools and Masters by Charles Eastlake. He felt sure that none of the so-called experts could tell which one was a fake. In three days the fake would be despatched he knew not where by his jailers downstairs.
The original would stay in the Long Gallery for a week or two to make sure there was no possibility of the original and the forgery being swapped over accidentally. Then it too would be despatched to an unknown destination from Orlando’s prison. Orlando suspected, but he did not know for sure, that the original had been sold. The unfortunate purchaser would eventually carry away not a Giorgione but a Blane. Of what his masters intended to do with the original he had no idea.
‘Let’s just run through the possibilities,’ said Powerscourt. ‘There seem to me to be a number of people, far too many people, in fact, who might have wanted to kill Christopher Montague.’ Johnny Fitzgerald and Lady Lucy were sitting on the sofa, Powerscourt on the chair by the fireplace. Dusk was falling over Markham Square.
‘Right,’ said Fitzgerald cheerfully. ‘Let’s begin with the most obvious candidate, Horace Aloysius Buckley, solicitor of Buckley, Brigstock and Brightwell, cuckolded husband of Rosalind. Consumed by jealousy, he decides to kill Christopher, the younger man. He must have felt ever so proud, Horace Aloysius, when he led his beautiful bride to the altar, an older man making off with one of the most attractive women in London. Then she betrays him. Think of the shame. Think of the gossip. Think of the sniggers behind his back. Think of his embarrassment when people begin to whisper about how she has deceived him. So he pinches the key from his wife’s dressing table, maybe he made her tell him where it was, he goes round to Brompton Square, out with the garrotte, end of Montague. How about that?’
Lady Lucy frowned. Even after years of living with her husband and Johnny Fitzgerald and their murders and their murderers she found the way they talked about the victims rather too flippant for her taste.
‘But why would he remove some of the books, Johnny?’ she said. ‘What was the point?’
‘Easy,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald, ‘all the books were about art. Art was what brought them together. Art made them fall in love. Art destroyed the husband’s married bliss, if bliss it was. Horace Aloysius decides to destroy some of the art, and the article, as he has destroyed Montague. Maybe the books are even now locked up in some storeroom at Buckley, Brigstock and Brightwell. Maybe he arranged for them to be dumped in the Thames, or taken away as rubbish. And, to cap it all, he hasn’t been at his offices since the day after Montague’s death.’
Lady Lucy got up to draw the curtains. Powerscourt watched her do it, admiring the grace of her movements over there by the windows. He smiled at her as she returned to the sofa. Lady Lucy could read his thoughts sometimes. She blushed slightly.
‘I’m not convinced,’ said Powerscourt. ‘It might be true. But it looks too plausible to me. What about this?’
He stared briefly at the Moghul chessmen on their table by the window, standing to attention, waiting for another battle.
‘Christopher Montague was about to become a very famous man in the world of art. Two books, the second due out very soon, on Northern Italian paintings. One article which demolishes most of the pictures in the de Courcy and Piper Gallery as copies, forgeries or fakes. So who would you turn to now to know if your Italian Old Master is genuine? Why, to Christopher Montague. He would have made a fortune charging for the correct attributions, maybe a percentage of the sale price every time a painting changes hands. Think of it! An income guaranteed for life! And if these Americans start buying up Old Masters in huge numbers, the prices will go up. Ten per cent of fifty thousand pounds could go a long way.’
Powerscourt paused and looked at Johnny Fitzgerald’s glass. It was, unusually, empty. ‘So this is the question, Lucy and Johnny. Who held that position before? Who was Christopher Montague going to depose, to displace? Who saw their livelihood, maybe not their livelihood, but their prospects for great wealth, suddenly removed from under their noses? Jealousy, professional not personal, and greed are a formidable cocktail.’
Lady Lucy looked at her husband again. ‘So, Francis,’ she said, ‘according to your theory, somewhere in London is an art expert who was going to be toppled from his throne. And he killed Christopher Montague?’
‘Correct. And that explains why the magazine article disappeared and some of the books were taken away. The murderer couldn’t leave anything behind which might allow somebody else to finish the article and ruin his own position.’
Johnny Fitzgerald helped himself to another bottle of claret from the sideboard. ‘I’m not convinced by that theory, Francis,’ he said, wrestling with the corkscrew. ‘Let’s try another one to do with the art world,’ he went on with a smile as the cork popped out of the bottle. ‘Let’s just think about that exhibition he was writing about. Suppose you were in charge of that. Suppose you hoped to sell lots and lots of lovely Venetian paintings. You hear on the grapevine that somebody is going to denounce most of them as fakes or forgeries. You are going to lose a great deal of money. Twenty Titians, was it, or something like that, they thought they had? Now down to three? Seventeen Titians would have made you pots of money. Now it’s all gone. So they trot round to Brompton Square with a piece of picture cord, ideal for garrotting, and wring Montague’s neck. And, for good measure, they destroy the article and get rid of the compromising books.’
‘That’s not bad, Johnny, not bad at all,’ said Powerscourt. Fitzgerald happily refilled his glass. ‘But there’s one more possibility we shouldn’t discount,’ Powerscourt went on. ‘The only problem is that it has to do with Montague’s will, and we don’t know what that contains. But it could work something like this. Let’s think about Christopher Montague. He has bought his villa near Florence. He has part of one fortune still intact and stands to make many more by attributing works of art for a fee. But somebody couldn’t wait for that to happen. Maybe the somebody was deep in debt and needed money in a hurry. The somebody was going to inherit all he had, including the Italian property. Christopher Montague’s heir was also his murderer.’
‘Have you two quite finished?’ said Lady Lucy. ‘I think all of your theories are perfectly plausible and I am more confused than I was when we started.’
‘I’m sure we could produce some more potential murderers, Lady Lucy,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald cheerfully. ‘Maybe four’s quite enough for now.’
Powerscourt had wandered over to the chessboard. He lifted the Moghul King from its position in the back row and placed it carefully in the centre of the board.
‘Christopher Montague was going to be a King,’ he said sadly, ‘in his own world.’ Powerscourt looked carefully at the chessboard. ‘Maybe his Italian villa was actually a castle. The bishops of the Church would have come to him to know about the authenticity of the pictures on their walls. The art dealers and the art experts would have been the knights, darting in unexpected directions around the black and white squares of his life. Maybe Rosalind Buckley was the Queen. The serried ranks of pawns are the books and the articles Christopher Montague had yet to write.’ Powerscourt picked up a knight and fingered it delicately.
‘For God’s sake,’ he was almost whispering, his mind far away.
‘. . . let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings:
How some have been deposed, some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed,
Some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping killed . . .’
Powerscourt picked up the King again and returned it gently to the back row.
‘All murdered.’
/> William Alaric Piper stared in amazement at the front of Truscott Park, home of the Hammond-Burkes. There were builders everywhere, repairing windows, men on the roof taking out the broken tiles, gardeners beginning the long task of restoring the grounds.
‘It does your heart good to see it,’ he said cheerfully to his companion. ‘The healing benison of the Old Masters comes to Warwickshire in the heart of the English Midlands!’
‘It does indeed,’ said Roderick Johnston, senior curator of Renaissance paintings in the National Gallery. Privately Johnston thought with even greater gratitude of the benison of his percentage in the final sale of Raphael’s Holy Family, purchased from Truscott Park for the princely sum of forty-five thousand pounds and sold on for a prince’s ransom, eighty-five thousand pounds, to Mr William P. McCracken, American railroad tycoon and senior elder of the Third Presbyterian Church at Lincoln Street, Concord, Massachusetts. Twelve and a half per cent of eighty-five thousand – he had made the calculation at least a hundred times – was ten thousand, six hundred and twenty-five. Pounds. Roderick Johnston could buy a new house. He could buy a place in the sun large enough to hide from the nagging of his wife.
‘Come,’ said Piper, alighting from the carriage, ‘we must find our host.’ Johnston struggled towards the house with a number of heavy bags, including a number of long metal tubes.
James Hammond-Burke too seemed to have been touched by the benison of the Old Masters. He greeted them warmly in his hall. He smiled. He offered them tea in the morning room, their conversation broken occasionally by the shouts of the builders.
‘Mr Hammond-Burke, good morning to you,’ said William Alaric Piper, in fulsome mood. ‘Allow me to introduce Mr Roderick Johnston, the art expert of whom we spoke earlier. Mr Hammond-Burke. Mr Johnston.’
Piper beamed happily round the room in proprietorial mood. ‘Work has already commenced, I see,’ he said. ‘How proud I am to think that the beautiful Raphael has enabled you, Mr Hammond-Burke, to beautify your own surroundings in this way.’
James Hammond-Burke might have been feeling more cheerful. But he was as keen on money as before. ‘You said that Mr Johnston was going to make a proper inventory of the pictures here,’ he said. ‘What do you think the chances are of finding some more Old Masters?’
Piper looked serious. ‘The quest for beauty is admirable indeed,’ he said, ‘but it will not be rushed.’ Don’t let them raise their hopes too high before we start, he said to himself. ‘Mr Johnston will look at the pictures on display. Then he will search the rest of the house to see if there may be some hidden away in the servants’ bedrooms or piled up at the back of an attic. Then Mr Johnston will work on his inventory. It may not be completed for some time. I see you have already looked out some of the papers and other documents relating to the purchase of the works.’
Piper jumped slightly as a loud crash from outside echoed round the room. It sounded as though an entire section of bricks from the roof had all come down at once. The dust was rising half-way up the windows.
‘My goodness me,’ he said, ‘the price of restoration may be temporary inconvenience, but it will pass. Is everything clear, Mr Hammond-Burke? My carriage is waiting and I propose to leave you in the tender care of Mr Johnston here. You could not be in better hands!’
As his carriage rolled through the countryside back to the railway station, Piper thought again of the asterisk system developed by his partner Edmund de Courcy These told the initiated how severe were the financial problems of the owners of the paintings. One asterisk meant major trouble, might be persuaded to sell. Two asterisks meant technically insolvent, desperate to raise money. And three asterisks meant that financial Armageddon was imminent and might only be averted by the judicious sale of some of the family heirlooms. The fourth asterisk meant a house where rather newer Old Masters could be planted to provide a history and a provenance that would convince unwary buyers. Creating a legend for the painting was how Piper put it to himself. For concealed in Johnston’s luggage was a remarkable Gainsborough, and an eighteenth-century frame, broken down into sections. Johnston was to leave the Gainsborough in an attic for a few days while he worked on the main body of the pictures on the walls of the house. Then it would be discovered. Johnston also had in his possession a couple of documents written on eighteenth-century paper with eighteenth-century ink. These concerned the commission and receipt of a full-length portrait of Mr and Mrs Burke of Truscott Park, Warwickshire, and their two children. The correspondence came from Bath. The signature at the bottom of the documents was of one Thomas Gainsborough, painter and Royal Academician.
Four asterisks, in the Piper code, meant that the owner was not to know that the painting had been planted on him, rediscovered, as Piper preferred to put it. He felt sure that Hammond-Burke would be perfectly convincing in defence of the picture, particularly when he had been shown the papers. The alternative, the fifth asterisk, was to pay the alleged owner a large sum of money to pretend the painting had been in his family for generations. William Alaric Piper didn’t like the option of the fifth asterisk. Think how much money he was paying out already. He had paid for the painting to come into existence. He might have to pay more for a correct attribution. He had to pay for his gallery. It was hardly worth the enormous amount of time and thought and trouble he took to bring new Old Masters into the world as it was.
As his train pulled out of Stratford station he thought again of Mr William P. McCracken. Piper had already promised him the possibility of a tasty morsel. How delighted, how generous McCracken would be when it was dangled in front of his nose!
Lord Francis Powerscourt was back in the Royal Academy offices in Burlington House. Sir Frederick Lambert, President of the Academy, was looking slightly better than on the last occasion, although the flesh was still sagging round his eyes. Powerscourt noticed that Dido preparing her pyre, one of Lambert’s own works, on view the previous visit, had been removed from the walls. Perhaps the pyre had consumed her. In her place was a rather plaintive canvas, of Ariadne standing on the beach at Naxos, surrounded by her handmaidens. All bore the marks of a night of debauchery, leaves and sections of bushes attached to their scanty robes, marks of wine, or perhaps blood, turning from purple into dark black. Just visible in the trees was Dionysus, a cluster of grapes in his hair, a stick in his hand, grinning salaciously at his new initiates. On the hill behind the god, a solitary bull stood, pawing the ground, a reminder perhaps of the Bull Ring and the Minotaur Ariadne had left behind in Crete. Higher up the hill a flock of sheep were grazing peacefully. Ariadne was staring sadly out to sea, one bloody hand raised to her forehead. Making good speed across the dark blue waters of the Aegean, a ship with black sails was heading for Athens. Ariadne had been abandoned by her paramour. Theseus had deserted her on the island.
‘Sir Frederick,’ said Powerscourt, ‘I have been thinking a lot about the late Christopher Montague.’
Sir Frederick bowed his head as if they were both attending a memorial service.
‘How damaging would his article have been to the firm of de Courcy and Piper? Could it have brought them down?’
‘Well . . .’ said Sir Frederick, pausing while a coughing fit racked his body. ‘Forgive me. The article would have caused a sensation. It might have brought them down – all would depend on the strength of their financial position, their reserves and so on. It is certainly likely that they would have lost a lot of sales. But they could have survived.’
‘And what of Montague’s own position?’ Powerscourt went on. ‘Would he have become the foremost authority on Venetian paintings, whether they were genuine or not, I mean?’
Another coughing fit reduced Lambert to silence. He took a clean handkerchief out of his drawer and wiped his lips. Powerscourt saw that the handkerchief was now flecked with blood. Was time running out for the President of the Royal Academy?
‘He would have become the leading expert on that period, yes.’
‘So how much would he
have been able to charge for these attributions, Sir Frederick? Presumably they could have added tens of thousands of pounds to the value of the painting? And, equally pertinent,’ Powerscourt was trying to make the interview as short as possible, ‘who would he have replaced as the main authenticator of such pictures?’
Sir Frederick looked at him sadly. A minor coughing fit gave rise to another handkerchief, produced as if by magic, from the drawer. Powerscourt wondered how many he had to bring with him each day. Ten? Twenty?
‘When I became President of this institution, Lord Powerscourt, I tried to introduce a code of conduct for the attribution of paintings. I was trying to take it out of the shadows of greed and secrecy where it has dwelt for so long. I failed. None of the participants would agree to it.’
Sir Frederick gazed sadly at his painting of the abandoned Ariadne. There had been no code of conduct for the behaviour of heroes, breaking all the rules as they swaggered across the ancient world.
‘The real problem, Powerscourt, is with what you might call the sleepers. Suppose you are the resident expert on Italian paintings at the Louvre. People come to you for attribution of the painting they have bought. You are a recognized authority on the subject. So far, so good. But what happens if the expert is also on the payroll of the dealer who is selling the painting? Then you are no longer impartial. You have a financial interest in the sale of the painting. You will receive a percentage of the final sale price. You are no longer impartial, you are a secret beneficiary of the sale. And a secret it had to be since your attribution would be worthless if the purchaser knew you were on the payroll of the dealer. The highest percentage I have heard of – rumour, alas, only rumour – was twenty-five per cent of the final sale of the painting. That may seem rather a lot, but, remember, the dealer still receives three-quarters of the money. I’m sure it has led to a general rise in prices in the art market.’
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