Death of an Elgin Marble

by David Dickinson

  Powerscourt would smile to them all and set off on his business. Two trains of thought would go with him on his walk back to Markham Square through some of London’s richest streets. None of the leading art houses had, as yet, been approached by any thief. He felt sure that he could have told if they had been. The second train of thought never left him, day or night. Where was the Caryatid? How had the thieves got her out? How had they got the replacement in? Where was she now?

  They built a special coffin for the statue, the sculptor, the carpenter and the undertaker in the little town on the edge of the Brecon Beacons. This was no ordinary coffin, just under eight feet long, twice the normal width and twice the normal height. The sculptor’s eight-year-old son, who caught sight of it by accident one afternoon, thought his father was making a final resting place for a giant like Bendigeidfran fab Llyr, a mythological king of Britain in the time of legend, or Idris Gawr of the great mountain Cader Idris. Maybe it was a dragon, green or red perhaps, stretched out with the wings tucked in by her side.

  The sculptor consulted the only book in the local library about Egyptian mummies. They decided to wrap her in linen sheets alternating with blankets and three rolls of canvas on top of those. The statue was secured to the floor and sides of the coffin and the bottom and sides of the casket were lined with tightly packed straw. This adaptation of ancient custom by the Nile with human remains to current Welsh practice with marble subjects by the Brecon Beacons would, they thought, keep her in one piece on her journey. For the statue was not being well preserved for a journey to eternal life in the next world, she was going on a journey across the seas to the New World where a different kind of immortality awaited her. No cakes or ornaments were going with her.

  The coffin was black, with handles along the side. The story concocted for the journey was complicated, but credible, largely the work of the local schoolteacher who was sworn into the conspiracy with a fistful of notes, a couple of bottles of whisky and a year’s supply of tickets to the rugby internationals. The previous year, the legend went, a rich American had come home to visit his family and the tombs of his ancestors. On his journey he met a young sculptor who was his great-great-nephew on his mother’s side. It was the rich American’s special wish, before he went back to Baltimore, that the young man should carve something appropriate to adorn his tomb in the local cemetery after his death. The rich American only lasted three weeks after his return, for the journey must have taken more out of him than he realized. His funeral was held in his local church where he had been an elder for many years, the Third Presbyterian off Jefferson Drive in the wealthiest part of the city, and the body was duly interred in the cemetery. In the coffin was the offering from the young sculptor in Wales, a triumphant angel, wings furled, her arm aloft, pointing the way to heaven for the dead American relative. Surely she would see him to the last frontier and a better world.

  A firm from Bristol were to organize transport to that city and the transhipment to America. They were one of the most experienced companies in the country at this sort of work. They watched the great lorry moving slowly down the mountain road, the sculptor, the carpenter, the undertaker and the schoolteacher, until it turned the corner by the railway bridge and vanished from sight, the noise of the engine the last link to fade away. They decided to hold a wake for their departed friend in the snug of the Green Dragon next to the undertaker’s whose doors had only just opened for the day. How else could they mark the passing of a Caryatid, well over two thousand years old, on her journey of three thousand miles to a new home across the seas?

  ‘I’m afraid I’ve had rather an unconventional thought,’ said Inspector Christopher Kingsley, taking a cup of Earl Grey in the Powerscourt drawing room at about half past six in the evening. He now had a permanent invitation to call around this time.

  Powerscourt looked at him keenly. Policemen, even ones in the habit of reading modern novels, were not usually supposed to harbour such thoughts.

  ‘How unconventional?’ asked Powerscourt with a smile.

  ‘Well, I’m not actually ashamed of it, now I come to think about it,’ the Inspector said, ‘it could prove rather useful in our investigation.’

  ‘Tell us more, please,’ Lady Lucy chipped in.

  ‘Well, I was talking about the Caryatid to my children yesterday evening. I should have been reading them a bedside story but my mind was so full of the marble lady with the long tunic that I told them all about her instead.’

  ‘And what did they say?’ asked Powerscourt.

  ‘This is the interesting thing, my lord, Lady Lucy. James and Rosalind, he’s seven and she’s five, asked a whole lot of questions I don’t think we would have thought of.’

  ‘Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings,’ said Lady Lucy, remembering the psalm and hoping the words could help bring forth victory, ‘hast thou ordained strength because of thine enemies, that thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger.’

  ‘Probably,’ said the Inspector, slightly thrown by this display of biblical knowledge. ‘Anyway, Rosalind wanted to know if the Caryatid had to have her face washed. And her hair, the little one added after a second’s thought. James asked if she could talk to the other statues at night when all the people had gone away. Rosalind asked me if she had been a real person once. Did the sculptor copy a living lady to make his Caryatid? What sort of house would she have lived in? What sort of food would she have eaten? Would she be forced to have porridge for breakfast like everybody else? There were lots more queries along the same lines. I began to think I might have been better sticking to Toad’s adventures in The Wind in the Willows after a while.’

  ‘What interesting questions,’ said Lady Lucy.

  ‘I’m not sure I could have answered them all,’ Powerscourt added. ‘Forgive me, please, but I can’t for the moment discern how they might help us in this inquiry.’

  ‘That only came to me this morning, my lord. One of our problems, as you both know, is that we can’t talk to any of the people in the museum. As far as they know, the Caryatid standing on her plinth is the real one. Nobody’s told them or the public who come to see her anything different. Now consider this. If you are an academic, or a scholarly gentleman like the curators at the museum, there are learned articles you can look up about the Parthenon and the Elgin Marbles. I think they produce a catalogue of their sculpture holdings every few years, with considerably more footnotes than pages of text. That’s fine if you’ve got a university degree and a pair of thick glasses but they’re no earthly use to anybody else.’

  Powerscourt smiled. He thought he could see where the Inspector was heading.

  ‘Now then, my lord, who do you think are the most important clients of the British Museum? Not the middle-aged and the old, surely. Not even the younger people who flock there at the weekends. The most valuable visitors are the youngest, the ones who will be able to go back over and over again. There are children peering at the Parthenon frieze and the lapiths and the centaurs and the Caryatid all the time, depending on their teachers to be told what is going on.’

  Inspector Kingsley paused and took another sip of his Earl Grey. Neither Powerscourt nor Lady Lucy would have dared to interrupt him now.

  ‘I’m sure you can see what I am driving at,’ he went on. ‘The museum should produce a little pamphlet, a small book with lots of illustrations, aimed at eight- to ten-year-olds, that could be on sale for a few pence or given away free to young visitors. It would be a valuable contribution to the wider understanding of ancient Greece, surely.’

  ‘Do you have an author in mind,’ asked Powerscourt in the most innocent voice he could muster.

  ‘Why, yes. I would write it.’ The Inspector blushed a deep shade of red as he said this. ‘For the real reason behind such a plan is that it would give us the perfect excuse to talk to people all over the museum. The porters would have to tell us how the Caryatid was cleaned and so on, how she was moved from place to place, the others would have to tell us h
ow she fitted into the ancient world. But what a lot of questions we could ask! Anyway, I’ve always wanted to write something more interesting than police reports. This could be a start.’

  ‘Splendid,’ said Powerscourt, ‘splendid. I’ll speak to Ragg in the morning. If he agrees, you could start work on the project immediately.’

  Artemis Metaxas had never thought she would end up as a madame, a procurer of young girls for her clients. Certainly not at the tender age of twenty-seven. Her task, quite separate from her teaching duties at the school attached to the Greek Orthodox Cathedral of Santa Sophia in Notting Hill’s Moscow Road, came round once a month. She was to collect a group of respectable young Greek girls under the age of twenty in London, and bring them on a Saturday afternoon to a secret address in the Home Counties. Half a dozen or so would suffice, but eight would be better. They were to be returned to the capital on the Sunday afternoon under the same conditions of extreme secrecy, darkened windows in the special train, closed carriages to bring them from the station to the remote garden door of the house in the country. Quite what happened to them in their secluded stay, Artemis never knew. She was put up in a cottage on the estate some distance from the house and not allowed to leave. She only met her charges again on the return journey. She knew the girls were well paid. She knew they were sworn to silence with some ancient oath of terrible power. And, whatever went on, Artemis was sure that what took place was not too dreadful. A number of the girls volunteered to go back over and over again.

  Johnny Fitzgerald found only one regular at the Black Swan near the art dealers of Old Bond Street who remembered him from earlier times. This was a very old gentleman, universally known as Red Fred, widely believed to refer to a revolutionary period in his middle years, who had boasted only seven teeth when Johnny had first encountered him. Now he proudly pointed to his last remaining two, assuring Johnny, to Johnny’s great delight, that there was food enough in the drink if you remembered to order the right stuff. But he was able to direct Johnny to the Cock and Whistle off Southampton Row where the porters from the British Museum took their refreshments at the end of a working day. Johnny was surprised at the number of Greek porters on the staff. There was a Yannis with a limp and a Kostas with an enormous beard, an Evangelos who doubled up as a card sharp in the evenings and a Stavros with immaculate English, all working alongside more conventional Londoners with more conventional names. Some of them, Johnny decided, might have been on duty the day the Caryatid was switched and the original disappeared. The Greek contingent, he discovered, felt more at home in a different pub called The Fox and Hounds near the Greek Cathedral on Moscow Road in Notting Hill. Here the landlord’s brother-in-law was Greek and maintained a private drinking establishment in the basement serving a variety of Greek drinks, the aniseed-flavoured ouzo and tsipouro, mastika and kitron, a citrus-flavoured liquor from Naxos, and tentura, a lethal cinnamon-flavoured potion that came from Patras. On Saturday evenings his wife cooked a variety of Greek dishes, served with an assortment of wines from the homeland, which Johnny Fitzgerald believed produced the longest-lasting hangovers of any alcoholic liquid he had ever tasted.

  But here, Johnny felt, was a place where he might be able to catch the hidden pulse of the Greek community in London, their secret hopes, their dreams of home, the things from Athens and Thessaly and the islands the exiles missed the most. Sometimes he felt so much of an outsider, speaking no Greek, unaware of the nature and origin of the drinks they so kindly pressed upon him, that he wanted to go home right away and never come back. But these exiles from the Aegean saw something of a kindred spirit in the Irishman, his lust for travel, his sense of adventure, his love of fun. They nicknamed him the Green Odysseus behind his back. He reminded them, he was told one evening, of a famous character, well known to all Greeks in London, Sokratis Papadopolous, ostensibly a former art dealer, but believed by his fellow countrymen to have been a smuggler of antiquities, and a pirate in his better days. He was believed to have seen the interior of prisons in France, Italy and England. The Greeks from the Fox and Hounds took Johnny to see him in the hospital where Sokratis was dying, his liver now a thing of the past, his other organs shutting down one after another like flowers closing at the fading of the light. Only one visitor was allowed at a time. Johnny asked the emaciated figure about the theft of the Caryatid. Johnny didn’t think the man was in a position where he would be able to tell anybody anything ever again. An Irish nurse by the side of the bed was making clucking noises as if her patient should be left to die in peace.

  The man was muttering to himself and thrashing about in the sheets. ‘Remember the Riddle of the Sphinx, remember.’ A pair of mad staring eyes bored into Johnny’s skull. A violent coughing fit seized Sokratis at this point. Sometimes he shouted and pointed dramatically at the ceiling. Johnny knew some of the symptoms from the worst excesses of his own past, the voices in your head, the vivid flashes of lightning so intense you felt your head would burst, the spiders on the bedclothes crawling all over your skin, the rats hanging upside down from the ceiling above. Time had no meaning in this alcoholic half world, the only consistent feeling one of acute fear and terror. Sometimes the walls and the ceiling would start spinning round and continue even after you had closed your eyes. On one occasion, and even now Johnny was still ashamed of his younger self, he had to crawl to the bathroom with the decorations on the carpet and the pictures in the hall hurtling through his brain like a series of shooting stars. Sometimes Sokratis spoke in Greek. On other occasions a phrase would leap out and seem to hold some special meaning known only to the speaker. ‘The Isles of Greece’ occurred over and over again, spoken with a series of nods as if Sokratis expected his listeners to share his meaning. Fragments of poetry seemed to crop up time after time. ‘I hear the Echoes through the mountains throng, The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep,’ came five times in a row. It was followed by ‘where is it now, the glory and the dream’. After that a short burst of weeping and then, raising himself up till he was semi-upright in his bed, he screamed, ‘shades of the prison-house, shades of the prison-house,’ and sank back on his bed. The breathing was shallow and very fast. Beads of perspiration glistened on his forehead and ran down the side of his face. The nurse continued to hold his left hand as if he were a small child in the middle of a nightmare. Now Sokratis looked as though he might pass out or pass away. Johnny had to lean forward to catch the next words, ‘Got to go to the High City,’ got to go to the High City, the High City.’ Then he turned onto his side and spoke no more.

  The nurse showed Johnny to the door as quickly and as quietly as she could. ‘Let us all remember our God, whoever and wherever he is,’ she whispered, ‘now and in the hour of our death, amen.’

  5

  Inspector Kingsley had not yet heard of the Isles of Greece when he met with Deputy Director Ragg the following day to discuss the Booklet for the Young, as the policeman now referred to it.

  ‘Capital idea, capital!’ cried Ragg, rubbing his hands together. ‘Why didn’t we think of it ourselves? The Director will be so pleased, he’s always keen to involve the next generation. Our Head of Greek and Roman Antiquities should be back from the Alps in a couple of days, he too will be delighted. I shall issue instructions for everybody to give you their full cooperation. Perhaps you could wait twenty-four hours before you embark on your enquiries? That would be splendid.’

  ‘Thank you so much,’ said Inspector Kingsley. ‘I have some disappointing news, I fear, Mr Deputy Director. Not that I find it disappointing, for I had few hopes of success, but it does not take us any further forward.’

  He paused and drew a couple of letters from his pocket. ‘You will recall that my superiors wished to send the blackmail letter to a couple of so-called handwriting experts?’ It sounded as though he thought his superiors should have been arrested immediately and locked up in Newgate for even harbouring such an idea.

  ‘You will not be surprised to hear,’ Kingsley went on, ‘th
at their reports are totally without value.’ He looked down at them distastefully. ‘There’s a whole lot of nonsense about pressure of downward strokes, upward inclination of the line indicating an optimistic temperament, decisive dottings of the i’s and so on. The upshot, to conflate the two reports, is that the author is a middle-aged man, possibly with violent temperament, of determined and decisive character who may stop at nothing to get what he wants. Bravo, say I. Tom Thumb himself could have told us as much as that.’

  ‘Never mind,’ said Deputy Director Ragg, ‘I thought it might be unprofitable. But tell me this, Inspector. Your men are patrolling my house and watching over my family day and night. I am most grateful. Today or tomorrow, by my calculations, we should hear from the blackmailer again even though the museum has followed your Commissioner’s advice not to get in touch with him at all. Do you think I shall receive another letter? That the blackguard will write again?’

  ‘I’m sure you’ll hear from him again, Mr Ragg. Let’s just hope a letter is all we get.’

  Johnny Fitzgerald was rewarded with a large glass of Brunello di Montalcino, a new recommendation from Powerscourt’s wine merchant, when he brought the news of the Isles of Greece and the other Delphic messages from Sokratis Papadopolous to Markham Square shortly after 6.30 on the evening of his trip to the hospital. Lady Lucy had observed to her husband only the day before that Johnny seemed to be drinking much less than usual. She had heard a whisper from a distant outstation of her relatives in Warwickshire that Johnny was romantically involved with a rich and attractive widow resident in that county and in Flood Street, Chelsea, but no mention had been made of the putative love affair.