A Study in Gold

by Annie Dalton

  ‘Quite soon there is a left turn,’ Thomas Kirchmann said at last. ‘Yes, let us out here, please. Thank you.’

  He led them past a magisterial Victorian building that could have given Mortmead Hall a run for its money, and then they had arrived at Pfeffers. Outside, striped blue and white awnings were hung and the name Pfeffers stencilled in gold across the windows. From the street, Anna caught a glimpse of brass lamps, dark wood and sparkling glass, everything expensively gleaming. She followed the others inside. Heady scents of strong coffee, melted chocolate, cinnamon and vanilla reminded her that it was hours since she’d eaten. The sounds of clinking crockery and the hiss of frothing milk competed with a grand piano, where a young man bent languidly over the keys. A waiter, with a pristine, white apron tied around his waist, showed them to their table and Anna sank gratefully into her squashy leather chair. Nearby, newspapers, in several European languages, hung from a wooden rack. On the dark panelled walls, sepia photographs of street scenes in old Vienna added to her feeling that she had crossed into a different time and country. She wouldn’t have been completely surprised to catch the masculine whiff of a cigar.

  Herr Kirchmann smilingly waved away the menus.

  ‘Just bring us a little of everything.’

  A little of everything turned out to be quite a lot: tiny sandwiches on sourdough rye bread, raspberry and poppy-seed cake, the famous perfect strudel in a brittle, wafer-thin pastry, Sachertorte and a blueberry and lemon Gugelhupf. Their waiter softly breathed their names, as he set down each exquisitely presented item. A pink-cheeked waitress brought coffee and hot milk in steaming silver pots.

  Anna reached hungrily for a sandwich, only to have Alice lay a discreet finger on her sleeve.

  ‘Only if you like liver,’ she said so softly that no one else could possibly have heard.

  ‘Oh, no. Thank you,’ Anna said equally softly and took a smoked salmon sandwich instead.

  Alice ordered mint tea and nibbled at a tiny tartlet, or rather reduced it to microscopic crumbs, whilst continuing to send and receive a steady flow of emails.

  ‘So what made you want to take over my father’s business?’ Anna asked Herr Kirchmann.

  ‘Well, as I said, I used to be a regular client, but after Julian’s death there was a time when Hempels’ future seemed—’ he hesitated ‘—uncertain,’ he finished at last. ‘Oh, there was no shortage of potential buyers, but Hempels has a tradition of excellence that goes back for over a hundred and fifty years. I found that I could not bear for that thread to be broken.’ Thomas Kirchmann gave her a quick smile and Anna was shocked to see tears standing in his eyes. ‘Can you understand that?’

  For a moment, Anna couldn’t find words. Herr Kirchmann’s obvious concern for her father’s legacy touched her more than she knew how to express. I should have known all this, she thought. Why had she not known?

  ‘Please, you must try the strudel,’ he said, the courteous host. ‘It is out of this world.’

  Anna tried it and it was.

  ‘Yes?’ he said. ‘Aren’t you glad I brought you?’

  Isadora would love Pfeffers, she thought. Not just because she had a sweet tooth, but because her parents came from a world where coffee houses like Pfeffers could once be found on every street corner.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Alexei said. ‘I must go and buy some strudel for my wife.’ She watched him make his way among the tables to the counter. He was different here, she thought, quieter, deferring to his larger than life boss.

  She became aware that Thomas Kirchmann was still explaining himself. ‘My father, my biological father, used to own a little gallery in Kerzenstaendergasse, in Innsbruck.’ He smiled at her. ‘In English that means Candlestick Lane. Innsbruck is full of such medieval streets even now. One day, my mother came into his gallery and my father fell in love with her. She was much younger, which caused some talk, but they were very happy, until – well, I’m sure you know what happened in Austria in the 1930s?’

  ‘I’m guessing something to do with the start of the Second World War?’ she said.

  He nodded. ‘Have you heard about the Entartete Kunst?’

  Anna tried to remember her high-school German.

  ‘Is that something to do with culture?’

  ‘Literally it means “degenerate art”. Did you know the Nazis held public burnings of paintings they judged too degenerate or seditious to exist?’

  Anna shook her head. She had only known of the book burnings.

  ‘The Nazis had a special military unit department known as the Kunstschutz,’ Herr Kirchmann said. ‘Literally the name means “art protection”, though in fact it was anything but. The Kunstschutz was devoted to tracking down and confiscating all artworks, specifically, but not exclusively, works of modern art.’ He deliberately met her gaze. ‘Over a thousand paintings and sculptures. Almost four thousand water colours and prints.’ He shook his head.

  Had her father ever mentioned these acts of barbarism by the Third Reich, Anna wondered?

  Alice had finally put away her tablet. She sipped at her second cup of mint tea with an expression of polite interest, careful not to intrude herself into this conversation.Yet she sat as alert as a cat, Anna felt, for the slightest sign that her services might be needed

  Thomas Kirchmann poured more coffee for himself and Anna.

  ‘It was all a cynical propaganda exercise,’ he said soberly. ‘The Nazis calculated that art experts from all over Europe would come running, with their cheque books, to save these priceless works of art. They had found the perfect way to fund their war machine. They continued to loot artworks from every country that they occupied; paintings, ceramics, jewellery and religious treasures. Of course, first and foremost, they plundered the homes of wealthy Jews.’

  Anna suddenly found she had lost all interest in her delicious strudel.

  ‘They were selling off stolen items to raise money for guns and planes?’

  Herr Kirchmann nodded.

  ‘And I suspect as future security for Hitler and his cronies, in case the unthinkable happened and they lost the war.’ He took a breath. ‘Well, when my father understood what was going on, he let it be known that his gallery had a basement in which he would hide artworks belonging to Austrian Jews, until the danger had passed.’

  ‘Your family is Jewish?’

  Kirchmann smiled.

  ‘No, my father was just a good man, what Jews call “a righteous gentile”. But, inevitably, in those dark times, someone betrayed him to the Gestapo. By this time, my father had managed to send my mother and me to Switzerland. Sad to say, my father was executed outside his gallery by a Nazi firing squad. The gallery was ransacked and every one of the paintings he had died to protect was spirited away by the Kunstschutz.’

  Alexei had returned to their table, with his beribboned box of pastries, in time to hear the end of Herr Kirchmann’s story.

  ‘So you never really knew your father?’ he said.

  ‘No. I was just a baby when we left.’

  Thomas Kirchmann told them that, like so many people after the war, he and his mother had lived in poverty for several years. Then his mother, still only in her thirties, had met and married a wealthy Swiss entrepreneur.

  ‘Did you like him?’ Anna said.

  ‘Very much. Like my mother, he made a point of telling me of my father’s bravery, his determination to do what was right. I think, over the years, my father’s story soaked into my bones. I wanted to make him proud of me. I wanted to be just like him and defy the Nazis. But these were different times, and possibly I was not as brave, so eventually I trained to be a lawyer.’

  ‘I didn’t know that,’ said Alexei, surprised.

  ‘In my spare time, I continued to dabble in the art world, which is how I eventually came to know Julian.’ He smiled at Anna. ‘But then some years ago, I had – you would call it – a kind of crisis. I realized that I had to do something to honour my father’s legacy. And then, when I saw that Julian’
s beloved Hempels was on the market …’ he sighed and gestured. ‘I was so sorry, Anna, I can’t tell you how sorry, but I also felt that here was my chance.’

  Anna looked across the table crowded with silver coffee pots and plates of elegant patisserie, in which they had scarcely made a dent, and found herself looking into his candid blue eyes. I like him, she thought. I’m glad he was the one who bought Hempels.

  ‘I apologise for making it such a long story,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m glad you told me.’ She thought she would always remember how he’d said: I found that I could not bear for that thread to be broken.

  Alexei and Thomas began to discuss the difficulties involved in restitution, locating and returning artworks looted during times of armed conflict, to their rightful owners.

  Anna knew she should try to join in, but by this time she was all talked out. She caught Alice watching her with her cool little half-smile.

  ‘Do you live in London, Anna?’ she asked.

  ‘Oxford,’ Anna said. Just at that moment, even Paddington Station seemed as remote as the moon.

  ‘What time is your train?’ Alice said in an undertone. ‘If you like I could call you a cab?’

  ‘Do you know, that would be wonderful,’ Anna said gratefully.

  Once she was on the homeward train with raindrops spattering on the dirty window, Anna began to revive. Alexei had given her his card. Anna slipped it out of her wallet. Alexei Lenkov. Hempels Auction House it said, in charcoal script, on stiff cream card and it supplied his contact details. She would call him soon. Now that they’d broken the ice it would feel easier to ask Alexei if he’d ever heard anything about Ralph Scott-Neville putting money into Hempels.

  She was suddenly ridiculously thrilled with herself. She had allowed herself to be swept off to a Viennese coffee house by Hempels’ exuberant new owner. She’d spent the afternoon with three complete strangers and survived. Even a few months ago this would have felt impossible. Anna sent a buoyant text to Jake.

  Just back from 1920s Vienna. Wish you’d been there.

  A moment later her phone pinged. Anna assumed it was Jake responding to her text but it was Tansy.

  Have u seen Oxford Mail?

  Puzzled, Anna replied.

  No. Been consuming yummy cakes in London. Why?

  Tansy’s reply drove everything else out of Anna’s head.

  That woman in the pond, she was murdered.

  FIVE

  Anna only went home to shower and change her clothes. Bonnie was overdue for a walk, so they walked over to Summertown through shining, rain-washed streets.

  Isadora came to let her in, her little dog Hero dancing at her heels.

  She just said, ‘Oh, darling girl,’ then wordlessly led the way back down the long gloomy corridor.

  In the kitchen, tall arched windows that would have been at home in a college chapel stood open, letting in light and birdsong. Hearing them come in, Tansy looked up from her chopping board and Anna saw a few curling strands escaping from her usual messy pony tail. She gave Anna a subdued version of her usual, warm smile, obviously shaken by the news.

  ‘I’m glad you could come,’ she said, then went back to chopping mint and parsley at the kitchen counter.

  Isadora hurried over to her cooker and bent to peer at something under her grill. Her feet were bare under a long, floaty purple skirt that had lost most of its sequins.

  ‘What can I do?’ Anna asked.

  ‘Your usual thankless task?’ Tansy suggested.

  ‘Oh, shush,’ said Isadora without looking up. ‘“A tidy house is a sign of a wasted life.”’

  With an inward sigh, Anna looked down at her friend’s kitchen table which had disappeared yet again under a familiar detritus of bills, scribbled coffee-stained notes, and copies of arcane medieval manuscripts in English and French, probably research materials for Isadora’s overdue book on Courtly Love.

  Outside, a gnarled, old apple tree was in blossom. Bluebells flowered amongst spring nettles, which looked almost luminously green in the evening light. Since she’d got Tansy’s message, Anna had felt as if all her senses were operating at higher than normal intensity. The piercing calls of the birds, the brilliant spring light after the rain, the horror of yet another violent death.

  She glanced over at Tansy, who was chopping olives, radishes and cherry tomatoes for some elaborate kind of salad. Around one fine-boned wrist, she wore a tiny jade Buddha threaded on to a thin strip of leather. The tips of her fingernails were coated with rose pink gels, thickly sprinkled with silver. Tansy looked nothing like you’d imagine the daughter of an infamous, London gangster ought to look.

  A few months ago, Tansy had briefly been homeless and Anna had offered to let her stay in her spare room. It was the first time since her teens that Anna had willingly shared her space and she’d been surprised and pleased at how well they’d got on.

  ‘I’m going to miss you so much,’ Tansy had said, the night before she left to move in with Liam. ‘You’re like my sister from another mister!’

  At this precise moment, though, Tansy seemed a little too focussed, Anna thought, concentrating all her energies on her salad. Anna wondered if it was just the murder that was upsetting her or something closer to home.

  She began the laborious process of transferring Isadora’s books and papers up to the far end of the long wooden refectory-style table, attempting to keep everything in some kind of order, all the while knowing that the next time they ate in Isadora’s kitchen, she’d have it all to do again. On top of the fourth and final pile, she laid the folded copy of today’s Oxford Mail, but couldn’t yet bear to read it.

  Isadora moved the chicken pieces around on their rack with her tongs, making sure they were all cooked through. The kitchen was full of the fragrance of hot spicy chicken. Both dogs closely watched these proceedings, nostrils working overtime.

  The door opened and Isadora’s lodger, Sabina came in with a canvas book bag slung over one shoulder and a bicycle helmet under her arm.

  ‘Wow, that smells amazing!’

  Isadora pulled out the spitting, bubbling pan of almost-blackened chicken, turning off the heat, then turned around to smile at her.

  ‘We’ll save you some, darling. Sabina has to babysit tonight,’ she explained.

  ‘And do some studying, I hope, if little Aubrey and Orlando will just stay in their cots!’ Sabina laughed, tossing back her long, squeaky-clean blonde hair as hundreds of thousands of pretty female undergraduates had done before her. ‘It’s amazing more of them don’t get whiplash,’ Isadora had commented once.

  Tansy looked up from mixing tiny bites of toasted flatbread into her salad.

  ‘Twin boys! That sounds like a tough gig!’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ Sabina said with a grin. Last year, Isadora had taken in two lodgers, to help pay for the upkeep on her rambling, North Oxford house. One had gone back to Korea after only two terms but, after a somewhat sticky start, Sabina had stayed on and was now very much at home. In many ways, Anna thought, she was the granddaughter Isadora had never had. Anna saw Sabina’s eyes look for and find the copy of the Oxford Mail.

  ‘I was so sorry to hear about that woman,’ she said awkwardly.

  ‘Awful,’ Tansy said. ‘I still can’t get my head around it.’

  Sabina went off to babysit. Isadora heaped the aromatic chicken pieces on a platter and brought it to the newly-cleared table. Tansy set the large blue salad bowl beside it. Anna fetched plates and cutlery. Isadora brought more toasted flatbread, with tiny bowls of ground spices and olive oil to dip it in, and they sat down to eat.

  In dark times, Isadora’s instinctive need to feed the people she loved became an overpowering compulsion. Like Anna, Isadora Salzman had survived when others close to her had died. Now someone had been murdered, a few hundred metres from where they’d been dancing and drinking champagne. But Isadora and her friends were still living, so she had brought them together to m
ourn and honour this dead woman and also, Anna suspected, to fortify herself against the unknowable mystery of death itself.

  Anna dipped a fragment of hot crisp flat-bread into the oil and then into some pungent middle-eastern spice. It was only when she put the piece of bread into her mouth that she realised she was ravenous.

  Isadora was suddenly anxious. ‘I hope Tansy doesn’t mind that this isn’t vegan?’

  Tansy laughed. ‘I lost my vegan credentials months ago – the first time Liam made me a bacon sandwich!’

  Isadora tutted irritably. ‘I knew that! What a forgetful old bat! I can’t think why I have this fixation that you’re still vegan?’

  ‘Probably because you have such a horror of tofu!’ Tansy teased her. ‘But seriously, this is all lovely, Isadora. I’m really glad we’re all here tonight.’

  ‘It didn’t seem right for us to be in our separate houses and all thinking about her.’ She turned to Anna. ‘She had such a pretty name. Lili. Lili Rossetti.’

  Hearing the name said out loud, it felt as if some invisible essence of Lili Rossetti herself had come into the room and Anna felt a little shiver go down her spine.

  Isadora lifted her glass of sparkling water. ‘To Lili Rossetti. Shalom. We never knew you, my dear, but may you rest in peace.’

  Her name made her real, Anna thought, someone with a story, not just an anonymous victim.

  ‘What do we know about Lili? Sorry,’ she said aloud, then added hastily, ‘maybe you’d rather wait until we’ve finished our meal?’

  Isadora shook her head. ‘Not at all.’

  ‘I couldn’t get hold of Liam for the latest info,’ Tansy said, ‘not that he’d tell me anything anyway. But the Mail said she wasn’t local. And – I thought this was quite weird – not only had she not signed up for the murder mystery weekend, but her name wasn’t on the guest list for the ball.’

  ‘That is weird,’ Anna said. ‘She was dressed up to the nines 1940s style when I saw her – if that was Lili I saw.’