Death of an Old Master lfp-3

by David Dickinson

  McCracken had picked him up in an American bear hug and danced around the room.

  ‘Mr Piper, how can I ever thank you? Perhaps when you come to Boston you will be our guest in our house in Concord! Mrs McCracken and the Misses McCracken will be so delighted with this here Gainsborough!’ With that he wrote out a cheque and departed back to his hotel where the McCracken Gainsborough could join the McCracken Raphael to delight and enchant their new owner on their easels in room 347 of the Piccadilly Hotel.

  Stockman was dressed rather like a cowboy going to church on Sunday, with great boots and a wide-brimmed hat.

  ‘What sort of pictures do you like, Mr Stockman?’ said Piper hesitantly. ‘Our gallery is full of these Venetian pictures at present, but we do have other things stored elsewhere.’

  ‘Let me be frank with you, Mr Piper. Stockman’s my name, Cornelius P. Stockman. My grandfather came from someplace out in the Ukraine – the family’s name was Rostowskowski or some damned thing like that. People out Kansas way couldn’t be pronouncing that. Grandpa Rostowskowski worked with cattle so they changed the name to Stockman and that’s what we’ve been ever since. We’re simple people in Kansas, Mr Piper. I tell you what I don’t like. I don’t care for any of those religious pictures. No, sir.’

  Piper reckoned that a quarter or more of the paintings in his exhibition were no use on this occasion.

  ‘Those holy women give me the creeps, Mr Piper, I don’t mind telling you. And those damned portraits of all those noblemen all dressed up in their finery.’ Piper had a sudden vision of a Venetian Doge in cowboy boots, guns strapped to the leather trousers at his side, striding across the Piazza San Marco for a final shoot-out at the Bridge of Sighs. ‘They give me the creeps too. My grandfather left the Ukraine because of the tyranny of all those damned nobles. Our country fought with yours long ago to get rid of a King, why, I don’t think nobles and counts and marquises have any place in a democratic society like America.’ Piper thought about suggesting that an aristocracy of wealth might have replaced one based on birth, but felt the moment was inopportune. He also felt there might be only half a dozen pictures on the walls that would appeal to his transatlantic visitor.

  Certainly Cornelius P. Stockman was moving round the exhibits at considerable speed. Five Titians, three Giorgiones and a host of works by lesser masters were circumnavigated in less than two minutes. A quartet of nobles were dismissed in about fifteen seconds flat. Piper was on the point of asking precisely what sort of pictures Stockman did like when the Kansas giant stopped. He stopped at precisely the same point as William P. McCracken some weeks before when the sight in front of him summoned up the memories of the elders of the Third Presbyterian in Lincoln Street in Concord, Massachusetts. Piper wondered wearily which of the innumerable varieties of American religion was about to be invoked now. Fifteenth Methodist on Washington Boulevard perhaps? Kansas First Baptist? Lutheran Memorial on Jefferson Drive? Maybe Mormons. Was Kansas anywhere near Salt Lake City? He didn’t think so but he wasn’t sure.

  But Cornelius P. Stockman seemed to have different beliefs. He stared reverently at the painting in front of him. The background was an idyllic landscape in the Veneto, a plain in the centre with some distant mountains. On the right a small town in brown climbed lazily up a hill. Lying across the centre of the picture on a satin sheet with a dark red pillow was a young woman. She was completely naked. Sensuous and sensual, the sleeping Venus looked as though she had dropped down from heaven for a peaceful afternoon nap in the Italian countryside.

  ‘My word, Mr Piper, my word. That’s so beautiful. This Giorgione fellow, did he paint any more of these women?’

  Piper was desperately trying to remember if the painting was real or a forgery. If it was forgery, he could take a lower price.

  ‘I think there is one other painting called Leda and the Swan,’ Piper said, ‘but Leda is not as prominent as the sleeping Venus. She occupies a much smaller space in the painting if you follow me. And I think it’s in an Italian museum, very hard to get things out of Italian museums, Mr Stockman. But,’ Piper brightened up as he thought of it, ‘Titian, another of the great masters, painted a number of women au naturel, as we say.’

  ‘Au naturel, did you say? In Kansas, Mr Piper, we call them nudes. Tell me, did these pictures go on display in Venice or wherever it was? I reckon the locals must have been queuing round the block to get a sight of them.’

  Piper smiled. ‘I don’t think they went on display. They were painted for the private quarters of the rich where the nobility and the wealthy merchants could enjoy them in private.’

  Stockman bent down at least a foot and a half to take a closer look at the Sleeping Venus. ‘Why, Mr Piper,’ he said, ‘that’s just what I propose to do. I live alone, apart from the staff, and I’ve got one huge room where I hang my pictures. I can enjoy them in peace there.’

  Piper had a sudden inspiration. ‘Could I make a suggestion, Mr Stockman? I always think of these paintings as being like a person, you see, an old friend perhaps, that you enjoy having in your house. Maybe this Sleeping Venus would look and feel rather lonely on your walls. Maybe I could collect some more nudes, of the highest quality, of course. A group of them would surely look better in your private gallery than a single Giorgione?’

  Cornelius P. Stockman was still peering intently at the Venus. ‘It’s a long way from Venice, Italy, to Kansas City, Kansas,’ he said. ‘I tell you what, Mr Piper, you get me as many of these as you can. I’ll take a bundle of them. I’ve got some rather dreary pictures of French peasants somebody advised me to buy in Paris a couple of years ago. Man called Tryon, I think, somebody called Rosa Bonheur. Reckon they could move house to make room for the ladies.’

  ‘What sort of numbers were you thinking of?’ asked Piper, angry with himself once more that his mental arithmetic wasn’t as good as it should have been. ‘Three? Four?’

  ‘Four?’ said Cornelius P. Stockman derisively. ‘Don’t think four would make much of an impact.’ Piper suddenly remembered a terrible American painting he had refused to buy some years before. It showed some everlasting plain in the American Midwest, the entire surface covered with cattle moving stupidly but purposefully towards what might have been a railway depot in the distance. Men on horseback patrolled the outer reaches of the herds. Clouds of dust covered the plain. If you dealt in that number of cattle, four Venetian women, naked or not, might seem a trifle.

  ‘Get me a dozen,’ Stockman said decisively. ‘I’ll buy the lot.’

  ‘I am dying,’ the letter had said. ‘I mean we are all dying all the time, but my portion of days is now very short. Very soon I may have to go into hospital. Please come and see me at my home before it is too late. I have some information for you about forgers.’

  Sir Frederick Lambert’s handwriting was very shaky. On some of the letters, the ‘y’s and the ‘p’s, the downstrokes hurtled unstoppably down the page. Powerscourt, hurrying towards Lambert’s house in South Kensington, hoped he wasn’t too late. There was a slight drizzle falling on the pavements, glistening off the backs of the horses as they pulled their masters through the squares of Chelsea.

  A middle-aged nurse in crisp white uniform showed Powerscourt into the study. This was a small room, entirely lined with books and tapestries. Powerscourt was slightly disappointed there were none of Sir Frederick’s own paintings on the walls.

  Sir Frederick had looked unwell every time Powerscourt had seen him in his offices in the Royal Academy, coughing blood into an endless supply of clean white handkerchiefs, hiding them in a secret cache behind his desk. Now his body seemed to have collapsed completely. The flesh on his face had been sucked inwards, his cheeks hollow with the disease. The skin on his wrists and hands looked like dirty parchment scarcely able to cover the bones below. His eyes, which had been so full of life, were glazed. Powerscourt wondered if he was full of drugs to ease the pain.

  ‘Powerscourt,’ said Sir Frederick, just able to raise himself f
rom his chair and shake Powerscourt’s hand, ‘how good of you to come.’

  ‘You are looking well, Sir Frederick,’ lied Powerscourt. ‘No doubt you will be up and about again soon.’

  ‘Nonsense, man,’ said Lambert, just able to raise a smile. His face looked even more gaunt. ‘The doctors tell me I have less than a month to go. I get frightened, you know.’ He looked down at the wrecks that had been his hands, the hands that had made all his paintings with such touch and delicacy, the hands that had brought him fame and fortune. ‘When I look at myself in the mirror, I don’t recognize myself at all. I doubt if the Good Lord would admit anybody who looks as wasted as I do. The other inmates might not like it.’

  ‘You never know who you might meet up there,’ said Powerscourt, ‘maybe Michelangelo is doing them another ceiling.’

  ‘We do not have much time, my friend,’ said Lambert. ‘That nurse is such a bully, I wonder she doesn’t go and work in a prison. I am only allowed fifteen minutes with you.’

  The President of the Royal Academy produced a package from his pocket. ‘Look at all these stamps,’ he said. Powerscourt looked down at them, wondering if the old man had lost his mind as well as his body. French stamps, Italian stamps, Russian stamps, German stamps. There must have been more than fifty of them.

  ‘Ever since you first came to see me,’ the old man said, ‘I’ve been inquiring about forgers. I’ve now had over sixty replies from all the leading museums and authorities in Europe.’

  Powerscourt remembered that the old man was still President of the Royal Academy. Even now the vultures would be circling round his job, lobbying here, promising favours there in order to take over the most prestigious post in British art.

  ‘I’ve narrowed it down to two,’ Lambert went on, shuffling his stamps into neat piles. ‘The first one is a Frenchman called Jean Pierre Boileau. He’s about fifty years old. They say he tried to make a career in Paris as a painter but he never sold anything at all. Then he disappeared somewhere in the Auvergne and wasn’t heard of for years. It transpired that he had an arrangement with a gallery in Florence for old paintings he could pick up on the trips he took around the south of France. The point was there weren’t any trips. There was only a trip to the barn beside his little house which he had converted into a studio. He specialized in Italian paintings.’

  ‘What happened to his arrangement with the gallery in Florence?’ asked Powerscourt.

  ‘Somebody smelt a rat, somebody from one of the big galleries in Rome. It was all hushed up. There was no publicity about the fact that the gallery had sold a heap of fakes.’ Sir Frederick was arranging his stamps into piles from their country of origin. About fifteen French ones were mustered on the left-hand side of the little table in front of him.

  ‘It’s a curious thing, Powerscourt,’ he went on, ‘whenever there is a forgery or a fake is discovered, everybody in the art world closes ranks. Thing gets hushed up as quickly as possible. The victims of the fraud get their money back. Very quickly, sometimes with the proviso that they keep their mouths shut.’

  ‘Do you think Monsieur Boileau is back in business now?’ asked Powerscourt, watching with fascination as a small regiment of German stamps took up their position before him.

  ‘I do not,’ said Lambert, shuffling slowly with the Russians, all adorned with the head of the Tsar, ‘I think he would be too old. I think his nerve might have gone if he’d been caught once.’

  ‘And the other forger? Is he French too?’

  Only the Italian stamps remained. ‘The other one,’ Lambert spoke slowly, as if talking was becoming difficult, ‘is English. Quite young. Extraordinarily talented. He studied here at the Royal Academy not so long ago. Then he went to study in Rome. I think he worked for a time for the leading picture restorers in Paris – restoration, some say, is a cousin, if not a brother or a sister, to forgery. Then he disappeared. There were stories about gambling debts, about an unhappy love affair, about drinking to excess. But he has simply disappeared off the face of the earth. He may be dead, of course, but I doubt it.’

  Maybe he’s hidden away somewhere in la France profonde or some remote mountainous area in the Apennines, Powerscourt said to himself. Maybe he’s in Corsica. Maybe he’s locked up on the wild coast of Norfolk, in the crumbling splendour of de Courcy Hall. Abandoned. Nobody there. Place completely empty. Nobody there at all.

  The four great powers of Europe were now assembled in neat piles on Lambert’s table. Powerscourt wondered briefly about alliances, Triple Ententes between Rome, Paris and St Petersburg perhaps, as Lambert swept them all into the jumbled heap they had been a few minutes before. Powerscourt thought he must repeat this process over and over again. Rather like the diplomats of Europe.

  ‘Do you know his name?’ said Powerscourt, mesmerized by the new kaleidoscope of stamps.

  As Sir Frederick smiled his cheeks became almost completely hollow. He might have been a ghost. ‘He is called Orlando Blane,’ he said, ‘and a very charming young man he was. I met him, you know, when he was studying at the Academy. Very quick, but not quite stable. Always liable to go off the rails.’

  ‘And none of your informants have any idea where he is at present?’ asked Powerscourt.

  ‘Nobody has any idea at all. But if you can find him, you may have solved the mystery, or part of the mystery. I think I have told you before that I was very fond of Christopher Montague. His death is such a loss to the art world. May I ask you a question, Powerscourt?’ The voice was beginning to fade. ‘Do you know who killed him?’

  Powerscourt thought briefly about lying, about saying that he was on the very edge of a great discovery. But he knew Sir Frederick deserved better than that.

  ‘No, I do not, Sir Frederick,’ he said sadly, ‘it is a very difficult case.’

  ‘Can I ask you one favour, Powerscourt? Can you find the answer before I go? I’m not sure I could find out once I’m dead, if you see what I mean. And I’d hate to pass on without knowing the answer.’

  Sir Frederick’s eyes were pleading with him, a last plea from a man who thought he had less than a month to live.

  ‘I shall do my best, Sir Frederick.’ Powerscourt suddenly got up and took the old man’s two hands in his own. They were very cold. The surface felt like marble. ‘I shall do more than my best to find the answer for you. The next time I come, I pray you will be better than you are today. And I shall tell you who killed Christopher Montague.’

  As he walked home through the wet squares of South Kensington, the light fading fast from the streets of London, Powerscourt thought he now had two deadlines. One was to find the murderer before Horace Aloysius Buckley was wrongly convicted of the crime and hanged by the neck until he was dead. The other was to find the murderer before death came to call for the President of the Royal Academy, Sir Frederick Lambert, arranging the stamps of the Great Powers of Europe into neat piles on his table.

  Part Four

  Titian

  20

  The carriage stopped. A harsh wind hit Imogen Foxe full in the face as she was ushered towards a house she could not see. They took her to a darkened room, where the shutters were drawn and no lights were lit. Very gently her escort removed all the bandages and the wrapping from her eyes.

  ‘You may find the light difficult at first,’ he said. ‘I suggest you wait here for about five minutes. It should seem easier then.’

  Orlando Blane was peering out of one of the windows of the Long Gallery. A full moon had come out from behind the clouds. The wind was rustling through the trees, blowing the leaves across the unkempt lawns. To his left the surface of the lake was uneven, small waves driven in towards the shore.

  Imogen winced as the man opened the door and shafts of light fell across the room. It was, she saw, a small sitting room with pictures lining the walls and a great globe standing inscrutably by the window. Gradually her eyes became accustomed to the light. She stepped into the hall, a huge high chamber with a great staircase leading
to the upper floors.

  ‘May I go to him now?’ she asked meekly. Great humility, she had decided, must be her watchword at the beginning with these guards, the keepers of Orlando. When she knew them better, other policies might prove more fruitful.

  ‘Up the stairs and turn left,’ the man said, ‘keep going to the end of the corridor. Then it’s the door in front of you.’

  Orlando was wondering how he could escape from his prison. His recent letters requesting release, pointing out how much money he must have earned from his captors, had gone unanswered. He wished he knew where he was – after a couple of weeks he had been so absorbed in his work that he hadn’t bothered to notice anything else.

  Imogen passed a couple of stags’ heads, dust lying across the antlers, at the top of the stairs. She checked the doors on her way down the corridor. They were all locked. She could see a little beam of light coming under the door at the end.

  Orlando moved away from his window and began walking the hundred and forty feet towards the far end of the Long Gallery. His footsteps echoed off the floorboards, small pieces of plaster still lying on the ground. He didn’t hear the first knock. The second was louder.

  ‘Come in,’ said Orlando, not bothering to turn round. He presumed it was one of the guards making sure he was still here. They usually checked every hour.

  The footsteps kept coming, very quiet footsteps now as if their owner was crossing the floor on tiptoes. Should she speak? Imogen saw that Orlando would reach the end and turn about in less than a minute. She stopped by the fireplace half-way up the Long Gallery. She was breathing very fast. Now, surely he must turn now. But he didn’t. Orlando stopped at the far window, gazing out at the bent trees around the lake, the dark water glistening in the moonlight.