Ragg, Powerscourt thought, was making a pretty good fist of things, playing well with a bad hand. ‘Why did you keep it secret?’ demanded The Times. ‘Why were the police not called in?’
‘There have been a number of similar incidents across the world,’ Ragg had replied, ‘where the missing object is quickly returned once the thieves discover it is almost impossible to sell it. Publicity and policemen, in my judgement, would make such a course less likely.’
‘Were there any negotiations about the return of the maiden to the museum?’
‘Certainly not,’ had been Ragg’s reply. Technically right perhaps, Powerscourt said to himself, because Ragg had refused them, but an offer, however unreliable, had certainly been made.
‘Do you think the same thieves were at work here as in Paris with the theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre? Shouldn’t that have been a warning to you to take extra precautions?’
Powerscourt felt rather proud of Ragg for his next answer. ‘Of course,’ the Deputy Director had said, ‘how silly of me,’ and you could almost hear the sarcasm in his voice, ‘I should have realized that the two were obviously linked. You could pick the Mona Lisa off the wall and walk out of the Louvre with it under your coat and nobody would be any the wiser. The Caryatid is over seven feet high, made of marble, unable to walk on her own two feet. Only a giant of a size and strength not, alas, equalled in any of the museum’s vast collection of statuary from across the known world would be able to walk out of the British Museum with her under his arm. Apart from that, of course, the similarities between events in London and Paris are self-evident.’
The final question drew another firm response.
‘Are you able to reassure our readers and the wider population that you will now be taking all possible measures to secure the return of the statue? Perhaps you could tell us your plans?’
‘Certainly not,’ Ragg retorted, ‘you have accused me of incompetence and inactivity. That is your right as gentlemen of the press. But if you think for one second that I am going to share with you or your readers, however distinguished they might be, our plans to secure the return of the Caryatid, you are very much mistaken. Perhaps you would like me to write an open letter to the thieves outlining all our plans?’
‘Well,’ said Lady Lucy, ‘I think Mr Ragg did jolly well. It can’t be very nice having those horrid reporters firing questions at you, implying you’re completely hopeless.’
‘There may be another, even more unpleasant, helping tomorrow,’ said the Inspector.
‘What do you mean?’ asked Lady Lucy.
‘It’s the Daily Mail,’ replied the Inspector, ‘and all the rest of the newspapers. They’ll all want to dip their hands in the blood. But on this sort of form Ragg should be able to survive. The Commissioner has asked me to appear with him tomorrow when he talks to the other journalists. I’ll just have to pretend I haven’t known about things before today.’
Lady Lucy made a final cup of tea after the Inspector left.
‘I’m too wound up to sleep, Francis,’ she said. Her husband was still deep in the pages of The Times. ‘Is there another article in there about the theft?’
‘Not that I can find. But there is a short story on page nine about Lord Rosebery’s plans to move a very large number of his statues from Mentmore to Dalmeny, his house outside Edinburgh. The writer says that with all that beauty on the move it will truly be a Pilgrimage of Grace. And the advertisement, asking for bids for the removal work, is prominently displayed on the front page, next to the London property sales.’
‘Francis, I know it’s very late, but I’ve had an idea.’
‘Inspiration or even genius can strike at any time of the day or night, my love. Carry on, please.’
‘Well, I don’t think I’ve thought it through very carefully. But you know the theory that the theft may have been carried out to order, that the thieves may even have received part of their payment before the robbery took place and before they delivered the Caryatid to its new owners?’
‘I do, Lucy. I have to tell you that it does not meet with total favour from your friend of the peacock fan, the Head of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the British Museum.’
‘Why not?’
‘He muttered something about not theorizing ahead of the evidence. But what are you driving at?’
‘Do you think, if you were going to embark on such a high-profile theft, that this would be your first time, as it were? Wouldn’t you have had a few practice runs before the big one? Entered your horse, if you like, for a few preliminary gallops at the minor racecourses like Lincoln or Salisbury before the St Leger or the Derby?’
‘Do you mean that the thieves would have stolen some minor artefact from Great Russell Street as a sort of trial run?’
‘No, I don’t mean that at all. Let me try again.’ Lady Lucy sipped her tea quietly for a moment. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘suppose you’re a big-time criminal in the world of art and museums, or you want to be a big-time criminal in the world of art and museums. You probably don’t go round wearing knuckle dusters or a balaclava and you don’t beat your enemies to a pulp if they cross you. This criminal probably looks like you, Francis. Well dressed, well spoken, butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. So, he wants to play with the big boys. He’s not interested in knocking off a couple of family portraits by unknown persons on the wall of the vicarage, that sort of thing. He knows how difficult it has been for his brothers in Christ in the criminal world to sell on a famous painting after you’ve stolen it. Eureka! Whether he has the idea in the bath or not I don’t know, but this is his fresh contribution to the annals of crime. Surely, if you want to steal something as audacious as the Elgin Caryatid, you would have had a rehearsal or two? Suppose you stole a Constable, one of those Constables with carts going through the water in the sunshine and a lot of haystacks, a few cows and a couple of peasants. You would have learnt how to negotiate beforehand with the buyer you have in mind. You’d have worked out how to handle such people better next time. Perhaps there have been one or two or even three such trial runs by now.’
‘That’s very plausible, Lucy. Extremely convincing, if I may say. But how do we turn this to our advantage?’
‘That’s the easy bit. So far we have only talked about the criminal. We shouldn’t forget the victim. He wakes up one morning or he comes back after his holiday and his Constable has gone. Maybe it’s just one of his Constables. He might have three or four, a whole garage full of carts and haywains. Our man may or may not like Constables, though he would certainly not say so in public, even if he never looks at the thing from one year’s end to the next. It’ll be part of the family heritage. Not quite bought on the Grand Tour – even the Venetian art dealers would think twice before selling a British visitor a Constable – but maybe picked up by an ancestor at one of those great sales like the Marlborough or the Beckford. Anyway, our victim gets very cross. How dare they? An Englishman’s home should be sacrosanct! If he’d have been at home when the thieves called, he’d have horsewhipped them himself, that sort of thing. But there is one thing he more or less has to do. He has to tell the police. Otherwise people may think the owner himself had something to do with it. The insurance people will insist on it.’
‘This is all sounding very plausible, Lucy. I have to tell you, you have developed a very suspicious mind. I fear you may have been married to me for too long. But carry on, please.’
‘I would rather like to go on being married to you, Francis, if that’s all right with you. But there’s not a lot left to say. The police arrive. They plod round the doors and windows. They question all the servants. They may even arrest one or two of them if they’re foreigners and don’t speak English very well. They put the word out among the artistic salesmen and the auctioneers of New Bond Street and King Street and so on. But they don’t know that the criminal has simply bypassed all those normal routes. The Constable goes straight to the man who paid the money. Nobody else hears anything abou
t it, not even a whisper. The Constable, effectively, disappears. No records, no receipts, not even a crumb for the taxman. But, Francis, and now we must surely go to bed in a moment, the police must have records of the theft. It may have gone down in their books as an unsolved crime but it stays on the books. There must be names and addresses.’
‘Just one last question, Lucy. Do you think the master criminal carries out the crime himself? That he breaks into the house with his jemmy and his accomplice to carry the Constable away? Is he mastermind and chief operator?’
‘The honest answer is I just don’t know. I would guess that he is not likely to break the windows or slip the catches himself. He will hire other people to do it for him. Maybe by now he has a regular team who always do the dirty work. Perhaps the people who stole and replace the Caryatid are the same ones who carried the Constable away across the lawn in the middle of the night.’
‘If you’re right, Lucy, and you may well be, our next course is simple. We just have to ask the Inspector to send word to the police forces of England and request the records of all unsolved major art thefts over the past two or three years. Then I go a-calling.’
‘That’s it,’ said Lady Lucy. ‘You’re absolutely right.’
It took Johnny Fitzgerald five days to rise from his bed after the Brindisi food poisoning. To the end he had inveighed against the sea creatures of the Adriatic.
‘I’m still not sure, Lady Lucy,’ he said on the morning of his return, sipping a cup of coffee rather suspiciously in the Powerscourt drawing room. ‘I can still see that horrid little squid with its nasty eyes. I can still feel those ghastly oysters slivering their way down my throat to cause havoc in my innards, damn them all to hell.’
Once they knew Johnny was on the road to recovery the Powerscourt twins, Christopher and Juliet, eight years old, had found pictures in their books of various fish and other sea creatures. They would rush into Johnny’s bedroom, shrieking ‘I’m a squid, I’m a squid!’ or even worse, ‘Look at me, look at me, I’m an oyster, fiddle de dee!’ and waving the appropriate illustrations in the air. Johnny would retreat beneath the bedclothes and groan loudly until the children went away.
Powerscourt was at the British Museum with the Inspector. Lady Lucy brought Johnny up to date.
‘I see, I see,’ he mused. ‘So where do you think my talents could best be employed at this time? Francis no doubt has marked me down in his mind as the boon companion of those Greek porters from the museum, but there don’t seem to be any of those left alive just at the moment. Anyway, Lady Lucy, I could happily go to my grave without another glass of ouzo or the filthy Greek island wine at that place near the cathedral. There should be a ban on importing the stuff if you ask me. People should be asking questions in Parliament.’
‘Where do you think you should go, Johnny? Where do you see yourself being most useful?’
‘Well,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald, ‘you know about that fielding position in cricket called longstop? You don’t? It’s passed you by? Dear me, Lady Lucy, dear me. Longstop is a fielder placed between the wicketkeeper and the boundary, usually closer to the boundary. You only need a longstop if your wicketkeeper is hopeless, liable to miss every other ball that passes the bat. Longstop’s job is to stop the ball going to the boundary for four runs. That’s why he’s called longstop. You with me so far, Lady Lucy?’
‘I am, Johnny. I do believe I may have seen a cricketer in the position you describe. But I don’t see how this fits in with Francis and your investigations.’
‘I am a sort of longstop, Lady Lucy. It’s as if Francis is the wicketkeeper. I try to discover things Francis can’t or hasn’t got the time to find out. You and I can see him doing many admirable things but drinking all night with museum porters and the low life of the auction houses isn’t one of them. This is what I think I’m going to do. If your theory about the criminal is true, that he knows the world of art and the people in it very well, then it should be possible to catch a sniff of him or narrow the field down to three or four likely characters. I’m going to buy lunch for a man I know who works on the Burlington Magazine. Come to think of it I believe he actually owns the Burlington Magazine. That’s always full of the latest gossip.’
‘That sounds excellent to me, Johnny. I’ll let Francis know when he comes back. Just one thing, though.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Keep well clear of the fish.’
When the first visitors arrived at the British Museum the following morning the Caryatid had gone. The marble lady had vanished from her plinth and been taken to a secret place in a corner of the basement, referred to by those in the know as the Room of the Doubtful. In here were kept some of the frauds that had deceived earlier curators, statues of Hermes supposed to be from first-century ancient Corinth that turned out to have been manufactured in late-nineteenth-century Birmingham, fraudulent Aphrodites and at least three busts of Roman emperors that had been born in Munich rather than the Roman Empire. The fake Caryatid joined this bizarre conclave of the unreliable and the unloved. On the plinth a notice announced that the real Caryatid had been stolen. The museum was doing all it could to secure its safe return.
Powerscourt had gone to the British Museum with Inspector Kingsley. On his arrival he was hustled straight to the Deputy Director’s office.
‘Ah, Powerscourt, good to see you. I’ve got the man from the Daily Mail coming to talk to me in a few moments. I propose to tell them that not only do we have the services of the Metropolitan Police Force at our disposal, but that we have employed one of London’s top investigators to assist us and work alongside the officers of the law. That’s you. I take it you have no objection, my lord? I think it will give the appearance that we have the matter well in hand.’
Ragg paused to read a telegram his secretary had brought in.
‘We’re both for it,’ the Inspector whispered to Powerscourt. ‘If we fail, the press and the politicians will be baying for our blood. Hung drawn and quartered, I shouldn’t wonder. Heads impaled on pikes on Tower Bridge for a month like Thomas More.’
‘What’s that? What’s going on?’ Ragg looked up from his telegram. ‘This is from the British Ambassador in Istanbul. The Foreign Office wired him yesterday to see if his people could find and recall our Director, believed to be somewhere in ancient Mesopotamia. The Ambassador has no news about the Director’s whereabouts. He has sent messages to various local leaders but has little hope of a quick outcome. The people who might know where he is, Ambassador Henderson says, are not likely to read telegrams. They probably travel by camel.’
Before the Inspector had time to explain his whispers the man from the Daily Mail was shown in. Matthew Dawson was an aggressive young man of about thirty years with bright red hair and wearing a suit of doubtful cut. Dawson came straight to the point.
‘When are you going to resign, Mr Ragg? Today? Tomorrow?’
‘I have no intention of resigning, thank you. Allow me to introduce Lord Francis Powerscourt, one of London’s top investigators, who is helping us in the quest for the Caryatid. His appointment is further demonstration that the museum authorities have the matter well in hand.’
‘Pleased to meet you, I’m sure,’ snarled the man from the Mail, ‘another one for the chop if the statue isn’t found.’
The exchange continued in this bad-tempered fashion for some time until Theophilus Ragg moved into a different gear.
‘Look here,’ he said, glowering at the red-headed reporter, ‘this handing out of blame isn’t going to help anybody. It’s all very well implying that I and the police and Lord Powerscourt are incompetent fools who should all resign at once. That won’t bring her back. I have a responsibility in my position, to the Trustees of this great museum and, ultimately, to Parliament. If they tell me to go, I shall go. But that is their responsibility, not yours. The Daily Mail too has responsibilities, Mr Dawson. You have hundreds of thousands of readers out there. One or two, or maybe more, will have seen s
omething that could help us find the Caryatid. Somebody must have seen her go. Somebody may know where she is now. Appeal to your readers! Launch a crusade! Let’s find the Caryatid together! Think of the fame and glory that would attend upon your newspaper if it solved or helped to solve the mystery. Daily Mail praised in the House of Commons! My word, that would make a change! Being constructive is much more positive than being critical, carping for ever on the sidelines. Think about it, Mr Dawson. I suggest you return to your offices and lay the matter before your editor. I am sure he will know which way his duty lies. And now, I wish you a very good day.’ With a gesture to his companions Theophilus Ragg led his forces from the field. The reporter picked up his hat and his notebook and stared after the Deputy Director.
‘Christ,’ he muttered to himself, ‘they told me he was a little mouse of a man. No spirit, they said. Dried out like a human walnut. The chief sub editor offered me a pound if I could actually make him cry. No chance of that, no chance at all.’
10
Powerscourt was walking along the north bank of the Thames beyond Hammersmith Bridge in the direction of Chiswick. To his left the river was a twinkling blue in the afternoon sunlight. To his right he had passed the ancient pubs of the Blue Anchor and the Dove that had borne witness to the river life of London for centuries. He was heading for a grand house near the church of St Nicholas called Norfolk House. There, Inspector Kingsley’s men checking the details of London’s unsolved art crimes reported, lived a family called Wilson, proud possessors until the previous year of a Turner, said to have been one of the most beautiful Turners still in private hands.
Death of an Elgin Marble Page 11
