Death of an Old Master lfp-3

by David Dickinson

  I can hide all these things in my luggage, she said to herself. Orlando may not have any decent clothes at all. And with two hundred pounds, we could go anywhere in the kingdom.

  Lord Francis Powerscourt was dreading this interview. He knew he had put it off for far too long. He paused at the edge of Rotten Row in Hyde Park, the horses and their perfectly groomed riders trotting sedately along. He could still go home. He could be back in Markham Square in ten minutes or so. Then he remembered his last conversation with Lady Lucy the night before.

  ‘You must see him, Francis, you know that as well as I do,’ Lady Lucy had said.

  ‘What can I say to him?’ her husband pleaded. ‘Did you kill Christopher Montague? Did you also kill Thomas Jenkins? What did you do with the books?’

  ‘You’re being silly, Francis. And, what’s even more uncharacteristic, you’re trying to run away from something. Think of poor Mr Buckley, in his cell or wherever he is these days. Surely you owe it to him.’

  Powerscourt sighed and proceeded on his way to Old Bond Street where he had an appointment with the firm of de Courcy and Piper, art dealers. To be precise, with Edmund de Courcy, son and brother of the de Courcys of Aregno, Corsica. And the second last person to see Christopher Montague alive.

  De Courcy was surrounded by pieces of paper when Powerscourt was shown in.

  ‘Sorry for all this mess,’ he waved at his desk, ‘it’s our next big exhibition, The English Portrait. I’ve been making lists of all the places where the paintings might come from.’

  Powerscourt removed a couple of books from a chair and sat down. ‘I met your family recently,’ he said, ‘over there in Corsica. Your mother was well. Your sisters . . .’ He paused briefly. ‘How could I put it, I think they are a little starved of company.’

  Edmund de Courcy laughed. ‘Starved of the company of young men,’ he said, with an elder brother’s cruel accuracy, ‘but I understand that you had a rather unpleasant experience during your stay. I was in Aregno myself two years ago on the day of the Traitor’s Run. Guns going off all afternoon, people shouting at each other. We wondered at first if a revolution had broken out.’

  That was very neat, Powerscourt thought. Edmund de Courcy himself a witness at the Traitor’s Run. Yet again he wondered if the annual ritual was real or lies, genuine or fake. Rather like the paintings in de Courcy’s gallery, he said to himself. It all came down to a matter of attribution in the end.

  ‘Well, it was certainly an exciting afternoon,’ Powerscourt said with a smile. Then he moved on to more dangerous ground.

  ‘Tell me, Mr de Courcy,’ he asked, ‘how well did you know Christopher Montague?’

  De Courcy shook his head sadly. ‘Of course I knew him,’ he said, ‘what a terrible business. I saw him in the street on the afternoon he died. And that other poor man in Oxford too. Quite terrible.’

  ‘Did he come to the opening of your current exhibition here, Venetian Paintings?’

  De Courcy blinked several times. ‘I’m trying to remember if he did,’ he said slowly. ‘I’m sure he must have been here. Yes, I do remember him on that occasion. He came with a very pretty young woman.’

  Powerscourt summoned up his mental image of Mrs Rosalind Buckley, estranged wife of a man incarcerated for murder in Newgate Prison.

  ‘Quite tall?’ he said. ’Curly brown hair, big brown eyes?’

  De Courcy looked confused. ‘No,’ he replied, ‘she was quite small. She didn’t have brown hair, it was almost black. And the eyes were blue, I think, rather striking.’

  ‘Did you catch her name, by any chance?’ said Powerscourt.

  ‘No, I don’t think I did.’

  Outside they could hear the voice of William Alaric Piper telling the porters to be careful with a picture, apparently being moved down to the basement.

  ‘Tell me about forgers, Mr de Courcy.’ Powerscourt seemed to have lost interest in Christopher Montague’s companion. ‘I understand Mr Montague was going to say that most of these Venetian paintings were not original, that some were old fakes and some very recent fakes. Did you know about the article?’

  De Courcy blinked again. It seemed to be a mannerism of his, Powerscourt thought. ‘Oh, yes, everybody knew about that article before it was due to appear,’ de Courcy said. ‘Indeed, it was being produced with the help of one of our competitors along the street here.’ He nodded out of the window towards Old Bond Street.

  ‘But forgery is nothing new in the art business, Lord Powerscourt. The Greeks did a very profitable trade selling fake antique statues to the Romans, for heaven’s sake. Most of the rich English who went on the Grand Tour brought back forgeries with them, thinking they were genuine, hanging them happily on the walls of their homes. Believe me, Lord Powerscourt, I visit a lot of the great houses full of paintings. I’ve lost count of the fake Titians. There must be more Giorgiones in the Home Counties than the man ever painted in his lifetime. Velasquez is rife in Hampshire, there’s a house I know of in Dorset which claims to have six Rembrandts in their drawing room. I doubt if a single one of them was painted in Holland. Florence today could field a couple of rugby teams of forgers, Forgers United and Forgers Athletic perhaps. You can’t stop it.’

  Powerscourt smiled. Somebody on the floor above was hammering something into the wall, nails or picture hooks perhaps, to bear the weight of yet another painting, real or fake.

  ‘Would it have made any difference to the success of your exhibition,’ he said, ‘if the article had appeared just after it opened?’

  De Courcy shook his head. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said firmly, ‘I think the exhibition was always going to be a success. We’re taking it to New York, you know.’

  Rich pickings over there, Powerscourt thought. Some of the European buyers might be able to tell a forgery from the real thing. But he was doubtful about the buyers of Fifth Avenue.

  ‘Your house in Norfolk,’ he said, changing the direction of his attack. De Courcy sounded pretty impregnable on the subject of forgery. ‘Do you think you will be able to open it up again? I understand it is abandoned at present.’

  ‘Oh yes, it is,’ said de Courcy, ‘abandoned, I mean. There’s nobody there at all. The place is completely empty. There’s nobody there. I do hope to be able to bring my family back from Corsica, though. If things continue to go well with the business I might be able to do it quite soon.’

  ‘I’m sure your mother would like that,’ said Powerscourt diplomatically. ‘Do you have any Corsican links here, any Corsicans working as porters in the gallery or anything like that?’

  ‘We did have one Corsican here,’ said de Courcy, ‘but he had to go home only the other day. His mother died.’

  ‘Poor man,’ said Powerscourt, getting up from his chair. ‘Just one last thing, Mr de Courcy. The young woman who came to the opening night of the exhibition with Christopher Montague. Did you have a Visitors Book on that occasion? Might she have left a name in there?’

  De Courcy said he would fetch the Visitors Book from the other office. Powerscourt stared idly at some of the pieces of paper on de Courcy’s desk. There seemed to be some form of private code on them. Some had no stars, some had one, some had three.

  ‘Here it is,’ said de Courcy. ‘We’ll have to go right back to the beginning.’ He turned back the pages of the thick leather-bound book.

  ‘Here we are,’ he said, ‘half way down the page. That’s Christopher Montague’s signature. And underneath it, written with the same pen I should say, Alice Bridge. No address, I’m afraid.’

  19

  Imogen Foxe was thinking of all the words she knew that meant black. Jet-black, inky black, Stygian gloom, dark as pitch, darker than the gates of hell. She could not see. She had travelled to London and made her rendezvous with the mysterious Mr Peters in the hotel near Waterloo station. There she was taken to a bedroom on the second floor where her eyes were covered with a black mask, and then so tightly bandaged that she could see nothing at all. A diffe
rent man, she thought from the smell, had brought her to a different railway station and helped her to her seat in what she suspected was a first class carriage.

  The man watched her all the time, especially her hands. If she moved a hand to her face he leant forward as if to restrain her. ‘Terrible accident, terrible,’ he had said to the guard on the train. ‘The doctors think she will recover her sight in the end. It’s rest in the country she needs now.’

  Imogen’s world may have been black but her heart was dancing with joy. At the end of this mysterious journey, there was Orlando, Orlando she had not seen for months. She tried desperately to catch the announcements at the stations where they stopped. Maybe they could give some clue to their destination. But just as the announcer reached the words, ‘This train is calling at,’ her companion coughed loudly or began talking to her so she missed the names of the stations.

  Her other senses, she noticed, seemed to have improved. She could smell the tobacco smoke in her companion’s clothes even though he wasn’t smoking. She heard the rumble of the wheels on the rails in a way she had never heard it before. Occasionally she heard the sound of footsteps in the corridor outside, crisp and precise. She wished those feet would stop and talk outside her door, then she might catch a clue about where they were going.

  But in spite of the bandages over her eyes and the mask which made her feel like a circus performer or a harlequin in a parade, Imogen was happy. She might have been in the darkness. But she was travelling towards Orlando.

  Johnny Fitzgerald, never an early riser, was having a late breakfast in Markham Square the day after the Powerscourts’ return and the Powerscourt interview with Edmund de Courcy Johnny devoured a couple of eggs, embellished with bacon and a squadron of mushrooms, while he listened to the Powerscourts’ Corsican adventure.

  ‘Did you believe that story, about the Traitor’s Run?’ he asked Lady Lucy.

  ‘I don’t know if I believe it or not,’ said Lady Lucy, consuming a small piece of buttered toast, ‘I just don’t know.’

  ‘Suppose it’s not true,’ said Johnny, between mouthfuls, ‘that can only mean one thing.’

  ‘What’s that?’ said Powerscourt looking gloomily at more bad news from South Africa in his newspaper.

  ‘It must mean that Edmund de Courcy, or persons working for him, are the killers. They have this forger, hidden away somewhere, producing fake Titians or Giorgiones for that exhibition in Old Bond Street. They hear a whisper on the street that Christopher Montague is about to produce an article denouncing the things as fakes. They get rid of Montague. Then they hear that his friend up in Oxford may have known what was in the article. He is sent off to meet his Maker too. Then, out of the blue, the two of you turn up in Corsica, asking questions about forgers of all things. The one place they could kill you both off with no questions asked is on that bloody island. So out come the guns. It’s a miracle you survived. Maybe they’re so used to taking pot shots at the wild boar they aren’t so good with humans. But it’s obvious, surely. De Courcy must have had a wire from that man Lady Lucy liked so much, the policeman in Calvi. Wire goes back from Old Bond Street. Exterminate Powerscourts. Coast now clear for further forgeries and further fleecing of American millionaires.’

  Johnny leaned back in his chair with a triumphant smile. ‘I think I could manage a little more bacon,’ he said, reaching forward to refill his plate. ‘Hungry work solving mysteries at breakfast time.’

  Powerscourt glanced up from a dramatic account of the siege of Kimberley, Cecil Rhodes and his diamonds locked up together by the Boers. He wondered what the Boers would do if they captured Rhodes. Ransom him? For diamonds?

  ‘I wish I could agree with you, Johnny,’ he said. ‘I just don’t know if that story about the Traitor’s Run is true or not. But the whole thing looks too bloody obvious to me. We go and see Mrs de Courcy and the pining daughters. The coachman disappears. Happens all the time, they say. Scarcely are we out of the front door than the bullets start pinging off the rocks. Whoever killed Montague was pretty smart about it. We’re still not sure who did it. Same thing with Thomas Jenkins. The murderer is almost an invisible man. If we’d have been killed on the Aregno road, it would have been too obvious for words.’

  ‘You don’t think you’re being too clever, Francis?’ said Lady Lucy. ‘Just because it looks obvious doesn’t mean it’s not right.’

  Powerscourt laughed. ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘There is one thing we must do,’ he went on, folding the newspaper into a neat square, ‘we must find this young woman, Alice Bridge, who accompanied Christopher Montague to the Venetian exhibition. Do you have any ideas about her, Lucy?’

  Lady Lucy smiled an enormous smile. ‘I shall ask around my relations, Francis. All of them, if necessary. They do have their uses, you see.’

  Powerscourt laughed. ‘A hit, Lucy, a very palpable hit.’ He stopped suddenly. There was something at the back of his mind. He felt it might be important. His eyes drifted off to rest on the curtains where he had found Olivia in hiding. Hiding, that had something to do with it. Johnny Fitzgerald and Lady Lucy stared at him, wondering where his mind had gone to now. Perhaps he had travelled to South Africa or gone back to Corsica.

  ‘That’s it,’ said Powerscourt suddenly, returning from his reverie. He hadn’t been abroad at all, merely half a mile or so away in the offices of de Courcy and Piper in Old Bond Street. ‘It’s something de Courcy said to me yesterday,’ he went on, pausing while he remembered the exact words.

  ‘Out with it, man,’ said Fitzgerald, well used to these leaves of absence. Sometimes it took an irritatingly long time for his friend to return.

  ‘It was when I asked him about his house in Norfolk,’ Powerscourt went on, ignoring the interruption. ‘I said I understood it was abandoned at present. This, I think, is what he said. ‘Oh yes, it is, abandoned, I mean. There’s nobody there at all. The place is completely empty. There’s nobody there.’

  ‘What of it?’ asked Lady Lucy.

  ‘Well,’ said Powerscourt, surprised that it wasn’t totally obvious to his listeners, ‘he says the same thing four times. Abandoned. Nobody there. Place completely empty. Nobody there. Why should he say it four times? As if he was trying to convince me.’

  ‘I see,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald. ‘You think that the place may not be empty?’

  ‘And that inside,’ Lady Lucy carried on, ‘there might be somebody with a lot of old canvases sent from Corsica, forging away in the middle of nowhere in North Norfolk. That’s where the forger is.’

  ‘Well, he might be,’ said Powerscourt. ‘I think you ought to take a trip to de Courcy Hall, Johnny. Discreetly, of course, very discreetly. Have a look around. I shall be too busy here, analysing the replies of Lucy’s relations about the whereabouts of Alice Bridge. I expect there will be hundreds of them. But if you find anything of interest let me know at once and I will come and join you.’

  ‘Please check in the local guidebooks before you go, Johnny,’ said Lady Lucy. ‘Make sure there aren’t strange local customs up there at this time of year. Shooting strangers, for instance. I’d hate to think of an East Anglian version of the Traitor’s Run.’

  The Committal Hearing for Horace Aloysius Buckley at Bow Street Magistrates Court was very brief. The magistrate was an elderly man, completely bald, with a disconcerting habit of taking his spectacles off and replacing them almost instantaneously. Sir Rufus Fitch was in ponderous mood, presenting his witnesses and taking them through the evidence very slowly and very carefully. Chief Inspector Wilson provided much of it, principally an account of his various interviews with the defendant in which Horace Buckley confessed to being in Montague’s room on the night of the murder. Edmund de Courcy and Roderick Johnston testified to seeing Montague on the day of his death. Mrs Buckley gave her deadly evidence about the tie. There was a witness who had seen him in Brompton Square round about the time of death. Other witnesses, a college porter and a delivery man, attested to Buckley’s presence in
Oxford on the day of Jenkins’ death.

  Charles Augustus Pugh had decided to present no witnesses at all at the hearing. He read through all he knew about the case for the third time the night before. He had no idea what sort of defence to offer. Rather than show any of his hand, he had resolved to keep quiet until the real trial. But as he listened to the evidence, he knew how poor his hand really was. I certainly don’t have any aces at this stage, he said to himself. I don’t have any Kings or Queens. I don’t even have a jack. The best I can do, for now, is something like the three of clubs. He resolved to call on Lord Francis Powerscourt at the earliest possible opportunity.

  Cornelius P. Stockman was the tallest man William Alaric Piper had ever seen. He was about six feet nine inches tall, probably even taller than Captain Ames of the Horse Guards, the tallest man in the British Army, who had led the procession on Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee Parade two years before. Piper wondered if they put something in the water supply to produce this race of giants. The man looked as though he would have to bend down to pass through most English domestic doors.

  ‘Stockman’s my name,’ he said to Piper, stooping slightly to shake Piper’s hand as they met in the reception of the Old Bond Street gallery. ‘Been hearing you’ve got some pretty fine pictures here, Mr Piper. My friend Bill McCracken gave me good reports of you.’

  Piper smiled to himself as he remembered his last meeting with the railroad millionaire. He had handed over the Gainsborough in his own little office, McCracken towering above him.

  ‘Fifteen thousand pounds, I’m afraid, Mr McCracken,’ he had said. ‘The previous owner took a lot of convincing, I’m afraid. But the Gainsborough is yours.’

  William Alaric Piper firmly believed that the higher the prices the more genuine the paintings appeared to their new owners. He remembered the story of the American millionaire who had refused to buy a Velasquez because it was on offer for only five hundred pounds. If the dealer had doubled or trebled the price, Piper was certain it would have been sold.