Death of an Old Master

by David Dickinson

  ‘Do you think, Sir Frederick,’ said Powerscourt, ‘that all of that could lead to a man’s death?’

  Sir Frederick rose from his chair and stood by his window. A thin October sun was falling on the courtyard beneath. ‘I am an old man, Powerscourt. I have not been able to paint at all for the past three years. My doctors tell me that I have but a short time left to live. Soon I shall be swept away, just as the rubbish on our River Thames gets swept away by the tides to rest on some riverbank far away. So I can speak freely. I know too much about this art world. I would advise you to think of it as you would an Oriental bazaar, or the trading rooms of an unscrupulous financier in the City of London just up the road from here. I do not feel it appropriate to tell you of any of the dishonest activities that go on. But I make you this promise.’

  Lambert had turned round now, and looked down on Powerscourt like a benevolent uncle offering unwanted advice to a feckless nephew. ‘I hope very much that the world of art in this city did not lead to Christopher Montague’s death. I hope there are other causes. But if, in the course of your investigations, you come across anything in the art world, anything suspicious or dishonest, I suggest that you return to me and I will help you. I will give you all the assistance in my power. I rather liked Christopher Montague.’

  4

  William Alaric Piper was going to a meeting with Gladstone. He descended from his train at Barnes railway bridge and set off beside the river. He was wearing a large overcoat and a hat pulled well forward over his eyes. He peered about him furtively as if he thought he might be followed.

  Gladstone was responsible for the secrecy. Not for the cover name, of course. All of de Courcy and Piper’s most important agents in the field had their own sobriquets. You could never be too careful, Piper had said to himself when he started his system. One word of who you had seen, one dropped bit of gossip, could lose business. More important, it could lose money.

  Only the authenticators, as Piper liked to call them, were named after former Prime Ministers. Some of these deceased statesmen had travelled further in death than they ever had in life. Liverpool had made it as far as Florence, Disraeli was reliving former diplomatic triumphs in Berlin, Peel had only progressed to Paris. But the word of these men, written rather than oral, could add tens of thousands of pounds to the value of a painting. If they said a Velasquez was a fake, it was worthless. But if they said it was genuine, William Alaric Piper’s bankers would be delighted. Most important, there could not be any visible link between expert and art dealer. If it was known that the expert was on the payroll of a dealer, his attribution would be worthless. Impartiality, the respected status of academic detachment, the quest for pure scholarship, these were the golden chips in the gambling saloons of the art world. That was why Piper created his cover names, that was why he checked his movements on his way to the Mortlake house this evening. Gladstone was an expert on the Renaissance.

  Gladstone lived in a fine Georgian house in Mortlake High Street with a great drawing room at the back looking over the river. Until a few years before, round about the time he first met Piper, in fact, he had lived in a tiny terraced house in Holloway. Now he had more space. The Gladstone butler, a small man who spoke as few words as possible, showed him into the study. The curtains were tightly pulled. On an easel by the window stood the Hammond-Burke Raphael, carefully lit. Hammond-Burke, even more morose in London than he had been in Warwickshire, had delivered it in person the previous week. It had been delivered to Mortlake in secret by one of Piper’s porters a couple of days before.

  ‘Well, Johnston’ – for such was Gladstone’s real name – ‘what is your opinion of this painting?’

  Johnston smiled. ‘I may tell you in a minute. Or I may not. It depends on the terms.’

  ‘What do you mean, terms?’ said Piper wearily, all too aware that another round of bargaining was about to begin. They were all the same, these art experts, he had decided long ago. There was not a single one of them who could not be bought. The only question was the price.

  Johnston was the exact opposite of what the public would have thought a librarian or a museum curator would look like. He was six inches taller than Piper and at least a foot broader. Piper often thought Johnston could model for one of those paintings of muscular Christians, staff in one hand, Bible in the other, marching resolutely across landscapes derived from The Pilgrim’s Progress, which sold well to less discriminating palates. Or Goliath before he met David.

  ‘Let us talk of the terms later,’ said Piper, peering steadily at The Holy Family with Lamb, the terrible innocence of the Christ child as he gazed up at his mother. ‘I presume from your initial remarks that you think it is genuine?’

  ‘I do,’ said Johnston, suddenly realizing that he might have weakened his hand. ‘It is undoubtedly a Raphael, probably painted during his time in Florence before he went to Rome. It is mentioned in Vasari and one or two other chroniclers. There’s nothing like a respectable past to convince the world that a painting is genuine, as you know.’

  ‘What then are the terms you refer to?’ asked Piper with a smile. Never fall out with these people had been one of his maxims from his earliest days, never offend them, never have cross words. Disagree by all means but a pleasant manner was worth at least five per cent off any particular transaction.

  ‘Our arrangement,’ Johnston spoke quickly, ‘was that I should be paid this annual retainer in return for advice on any Italian paintings worth under ten thousand pounds. This one, I’m sure, is worth rather more than that.’

  ‘And the holidays, Johnston, don’t forget the holidays,’ said Piper, seeking for marginal advantage. De Courcy and Piper picked up the bills for Johnston’s regular visits to France and Italy.

  ‘What do you say to twenty per cent of the value of the painting?’ said Johnston fiercely. ‘And I don’t mean twenty per cent of what you pay for it. I mean twenty per cent of what you sell it for.’ He had promised his wife that he would begin the bargaining at this level but inwardly he was doubtful of success.

  Piper reached for his hat which was lying on the table. He started out rather slowly for the door of the Johnston drawing room. ‘That would be quite impossible. I very much regret having to terminate this relationship as a guest in your house. But your request is simply impossible. I shall instruct my bankers to cancel the annual payments in the morning.’

  Piper was right by the door now, strangely reluctant to go.

  Johnston remembered his lines. ‘If you do that,’ he said, ‘I shall denounce your Raphael as a fake. I am one of the foremost experts on him and his school in the whole of Europe.’

  ‘Were you to denounce this Raphael as a fake, my dear Johnston,’ replied Piper, still not quite out of the room, ‘your career would be at an end.’ William Alaric Piper stared again at the Raphael. ‘There are always other experts who would say it was genuine,’ he said sadly, hoping that the pristine beauty of the picture would not be sullied by these transactions.

  ‘And,’ he went on, his hand on the door knob now, ‘I should be forced to write to the trustees of your gallery and inform them that one of their most valued employees had been receiving secret annual retainers from an art dealer in return for authenticating his pictures. I fear your employment would be terminated immediately. Other similar employment might be difficult to obtain.’ He opened the door and walked out, very slowly, into the hall, placing his hat carefully on his head. ‘A very good evening to you, Johnston. I deeply regret that our mutual association, so sensibly conducted until now, should conclude in these unhappy circumstances.’

  ‘Wait! Wait!’ Johnston was beaten now. His wife had not foreseen that he might lose not only his private retainer but his public position as well. He knew he could never face her with that news. ‘Come back, please!’

  Reluctantly, Piper returned. He closed the door. He did not take his hat off. ‘Well?’ he said.

  ‘I’m sure we could come to some other arrangement about the R
aphael,’ Johnston said defensively, hoping that the Piper goose might still have some golden eggs left in its nest.

  Piper realized that he could name his price. He could humiliate Johnston in his own drawing room. However much he might relish the prospect, he knew it would be bad for business. Johnston had to be brought back into the fold as gently as possible. There might be further Raphaels. Piper’s private fantasy had always been for a lost Leonardo. Only Johnston could put the official seal of approval on such a wondrous event.

  ‘I fully agree with what you said earlier about your retainer only covering paintings worth less than ten thousand pounds,’ Piper said affably, his hat still on his head. He had checked his notes of the earlier conversation with Johnston when the deal was struck. Nothing formal had been put down on paper. There were no Heads of Agreement, no correspondence conducted between lawyers or bankers to make the contract legal. That would have been too dangerous.

  ‘Did you have any figure in mind?’ Piper went on, taking off his hat and placing it carefully on a table.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Johnston was almost stammering now, ‘it would be better if you were to suggest a figure and we could take it from there?’

  Piper paused. He walked over to the window and opened the curtains a fraction. Outside there was a stiff breeze. A dark Thames was flowing peacefully towards the sea. Five per cent would be too small. Seven and a half per cent? Maybe that would be too much humiliation for Johnston and the absent Mrs Johnston to take. Ten? Quite a lot of money, possibly ten thousand pounds in Johnston’s pocket. Fifteen? He winced as he thought of that enormous sum departing from the accounts of de Courcy and Piper.

  ‘What do you say, Johnston . . .’ He paused, staring again at the Raphael. Johnston felt sick, wondering how much punishment he would have to take. ‘What do you say to twelve and a half per cent of the selling price? I think that’s a pretty fair offer.’

  Johnston felt relieved. Only a few minutes earlier professional catastrophe had been staring him in the face. ‘That sounds excellent to me,’ he said. ‘And I shall certainly recommend that the gallery makes a substantial offer for the picture.’

  William Alaric Piper clapped him on the back. The two men shook hands.

  ‘Splendid, quite splendid,’ said Piper. He knew that he could now conduct a dizzy round of bid and counter bid on the price of the Raphael. He could tell Johnston’s gallery that a rich American client was considering an offer of seventy-five thousand pounds or thereabouts. Then he could tell a rich American that the gallery were prepared to offer eighty thousand pounds. The game could go on as long as he dared play it.

  Johnston thought he would still be able to afford a substantial property somewhere in the Tuscan hills. That would keep Mrs Johnston at bay.

  Piper smiled to himself as he strode back to his railway station, hat still pulled well down over his forehead. Gladstone alias Johnston was senior curator in Italian and Renaissance art at London’s National Gallery. And, Piper’s smile broadened into a chuckle, he had got his services pretty cheap. He would have gone to twenty-five per cent of the sale value if it had been necessary. And now he had his authentication in his pocket, he could make a final offer to James Hammond-Burke to buy the Raphael. Thirty thousand? Thirty-five? Forty thousand? He settled himself happily into the corner seat of his train and dreamt of lost Leonardos.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about what you said in your letter, Lord Powerscourt.’ Thomas Jenkins of Emmanuel College, Oxford was drinking tea in the Powerscourt drawing room in Markham Square. Powerscourt had offered to meet him in Oxford, but Jenkins had to come to London on business. He was consulting some ancient documents in the British Museum. ‘I have to confess that I have no idea exactly what Christopher was working on when he died. His book was finished. That much I do know. I talked to the publishers this morning. I last saw Christopher three or four weeks ago. Look,’ he went on, delving into his bag, ‘I’ve brought a photograph of him. I thought investigators might like things like that.’

  ‘Thank you very much,’ said Powerscourt. The photograph showed two young men standing in the quad of an Oxford college. The one on the left was Thomas Jenkins. The one on the right was a younger, healthier Montague. He was of slight build and short height, with fair hair and a small neatly trimmed moustache. Looking at the Jenkins in front of him Powerscourt thought there was hardly any difference, the same curly brown hair, the air of diffidence, shyness perhaps in front of the lens. Jenkins looked like what he was, an Oxford history tutor, as slight as his friend. Montague looked as if he belonged in more worldly surroundings than the well-manicured lawn and ivy-covered walls of Emmanuel.

  ‘How long ago was this taken?’ asked Powerscourt, placing the photograph on a table beside him.

  ‘I think it was a couple of years ago,’ Jenkins replied. ‘Christopher had come back to Oxford for a party.’

  ‘Let me run through what I know of the bare facts of Christopher Montague’s life,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Then you can fill in the gaps, put flesh on the bones, if you could. Born in London in 1870. Father, now dead, a successful lawyer, left him a modest private income. Educated at Westminster School and New College, Oxford, where he met you. Took a first class honours degree in history. Taught for a couple of years in Florence where he learnt his fluent Italian. Wrote his first book on the origins of the Renaissance four years ago. Book sold well, now in its second edition. Second book, on Northern Italian art, due to be published shortly. Didn’t gamble. Didn’t live above his means. Lived with his sister in Beaufort Street. Had a small flat in Brompton Square where he worked. And where he was murdered. Not married. Sounds a pretty blameless life to me. Why should anyone want to kill him?’

  Jenkins shook his head. ‘I’ve been asking myself that question every hour of every day since I heard the news, Lord Powerscourt. And I can’t answer it any more than you could. I hadn’t seen Christopher for nearly three weeks when he was killed. He was going to come to Oxford for a week or so two days from now.’

  ‘What about his private life? Forgive me for asking these questions. It goes with my profession. It may help us find the murderer.’

  Again Thomas Jenkins shook his head. ‘Christopher Montague was the most normal person I ever met,’ he said. ‘He had fallen in love a couple of times but he never got married. When he was writing his books he said he had very little time for the affairs of the heart. But I know he did want to marry and have children. He was very fond of children. He liked playing with them. Sometimes he’d spend hours charging around with his young nephews up in Scotland.’

  Powerscourt tried to remember if those nephews might be relatives of his too, part of the national diaspora of Lucy’s vast family. He’d have to ask her. ‘You said that he’d fallen in love a couple of times. Would either of those affairs have left any scars, any wounds that might have a bearing on his death?’

  This time Thomas Jenkins smiled. ‘I think the scars would have been with Christopher, not the other way round. Once was with a young American girl he met in Florence. I think she and Christopher grew very fond of each other. Then her parents whisked her off. I think they were looking for a title or a great deal of money, not some relatively poor Englishman who wrote books about dead Italian artists. The second time was three or four years ago. Isobel, she was called. She was very beautiful. I think they met at a dance up in London. She was totally bewitching, mesmerizing, that Isobel. I always thought she cast spells on people, they became so infatuated with her. Then she abandoned Christopher and went off with a very wild young man. Christopher wasn’t exciting enough for her. Maybe not dangerous enough. Some girls like the whiff of danger about a man, don’t you think, Lord Powerscourt?’

  ‘I’m sure you’re right, Mr Jenkins,’ said Powerscourt diplomatically. ‘The more I know about him, the more innocent his life sounds,’ he went on sadly. He had rarely started a murder investigation with so few leads. ‘I just wish I could discover what he was doing in the days before his death.
His sister said he was working very hard, very fast. But she had no idea what he was writing about. And then some of his books and all his papers were taken away. Did he make any professional enemies with those books? Any academic jealousy? Any reputations ruined?’

  ‘Not at all,’ Jenkins replied. ‘He was always very careful not to offend people. He might imply that his theory was more plausible than theirs, but he never set out to destroy anybody else’s work.’

  ‘Have you any idea what he was working on at the time of his death? A book or an article for the newspapers or magazines?’

  Jenkins replied that he had no idea what his friend was working on at the time of his murder.

  ‘I mustn’t keep you any longer,’ said Powerscourt. ‘One last question. Did he belong to any clubs in London? Anywhere he might have gone to relax and chat to his friends?’

  ‘Christopher wasn’t a very clubbable sort of man,’ Jenkins said. ‘I think he belonged to the Athenaeum, but he didn’t go there much. He sometimes said that his favourite place in London was the reading room of the London Library in St James’s Square.’

  As Jenkins left, a puzzled Powerscourt asked if he could consult him again. ‘Of course,’ had been his reply. ‘I could take you to Christopher’s favourite place in Oxford. But it won’t give you any clues to his death.’

  5

  The Raphael Holy Family was going home. Not to Florence or to Rome, but to the English country house whose walls it had graced for the past two hundred years. Wrapped innumerable times in soft cloth and rolls of thick brown paper, tightly secured with heavy string, it nestled between two men in a first class railway carriage en route from London to Warwick.

  To its left, by the window, William Alaric Piper stared moodily at the passing countryside, wishing that the train could go faster. To its right sat Edmund de Courcy, searching for something in a great pile of papers on his lap.