by Iain Pears
Flavia said nothing in reply to this, but sat quietly, waiting to see if he would continue on his own. In a fit of what was either calculating revelation, or confessional zeal, he did so.
‘You see, I once sold Tommaso a Correggio. Doubts were cast on its authenticity, and Tommaso threatened me, saying that if I didn’t take it back, I’d never sell another picture in Italy. There was nothing in the contract which said I had to. But I did, out of a sense of pride. Nonetheless, he still made life as difficult for me as possible for the next fifteen years. So it was quite a triumph to get him to take that Raphael, even if the terms were stiff. He hated doing it, but his desire for the picture was too great.’
He shrugged as a way of showing his bewilderment with the ways of God and men. ‘Ah well. That’s all past history now. The terms of that contract seem to be redundant. The painting’s destroyed.’ He smiled gently at her. ‘So there’s nothing for me to take back even if they wanted me to, is there?’
That, essentially, had been the interesting part of the day; the rest was spent listening to people explain how – and why – they hadn’t seen anything interesting or significant at the party. Out of more than eighty people, some sixty-five, Flavia reckoned, could easily have slipped out of the room unnoticed, gone upstairs, set light to the picture and come back down again. Of that sixty-five, around fifty knew about the alarm system. Of the remaining fifteen, nearly all could easily have found out.
More frustrating and personally irritating was the fact that she found herself quite liking Byrnes and being seduced – well, perhaps seduced was not the right word – by his charm. She’d gone in to see him determined to be distant, cold and efficient, but despite these laudable intentions, she found herself enjoying talking to him, and warming to his odd combination of vagueness and business acumen.
And the man had taken advantage of the fact. As she was leaving, he’d casually mentioned he was going back to London that evening, and would he be required for the investigation any more? Damn right, he would; but she could find no pretext upon which to detain him. He was evidently intent on going and they could not require him to stay without announcing that he was a suspect. But on what grounds if she couldn’t mention the forgery? Equally, by politely asking permission to leave, he had countered any suggestion that he was hotfooting it to safety.
All she could do was lamely say that, of course, it was quite in order for him to go. He’d spent some time laying out his motives for destroying the picture – revenge, greed, the works – and all she could do at the end was wish him a safe trip home. He’d thanked her soberly, and wished her luck in the investigation. Was he laughing at her? Surely he was, but that poker face, moderated by thick glasses and clouds of smoke, had been impenetrable.
Then there had been the interminable interviews, often tramping over ground that - she found to her irritation - had already been worked over by Bottando, and, on top of that, her ears ringing and her head spinning, her useless visit to Argyll’s apartment. At quarter to eight, tired, weary and wanting only to go home and have a bath and an early night, she dragged herself up the stairs of the office to write up a few reports. This made her feel virtuous, but did nothing else to cheer her up at all. She had a feeling that disaster was just around the corner.
She was wrong, as she often seemed to be these days: it was lumbering down the stairs, in the shape of a perspiring, out of breath and evidently troubled Bottando.
‘Flavia. Good. Come with me,’ was all he said as he hurried past her. She turned round and followed him to his car in the square. Clearly it was serious; it took more than a small crisis to break the General out of his habitual slow amble. They both got in the back, Bottando gave the driver an address in Trastevere, and told him to hurry. He did so, complete with sirens, horn and screeching tyres for dramatic effect.
‘What’s happened now?’ she asked as she regained her balance after a particularly vicious corner.
‘I told you about Manzoni, the restorer?’ She nodded. ‘He was meant to come and see me at seven. He didn’t show up. The Trastevere police just rang: he didn’t come because he was dead. It seems that someone has murdered him.’
Flavia sat stunned. Things were going from bad to worse. ‘Are they sure it was murder?’
‘Knife in the back,’ he replied simply.
‘Oh dear,’ she said. Complications, nothing but complications. It wouldn’t make Bottando look any better to have a witness murdered under his nose. It made solving the case more difficult, and now there was a murder mixed up in it all, there would be demarcation disputes with the murder squad and others, as they squabbled over who should be in charge. The investigation could disintegrate into one of those well-known Italian situations where everybody spends their time fighting their colleagues, and nothing whatsoever gets done. She’d seen it before. The General was evidently thinking along the same lines.
‘Listen,’ he said as the car drew up at their destination. ‘Leave the talking to me here. Don’t say anything more than you need to, all right?’
Following behind him at a distance suitable for a junior tagging along, therefore, she climbed the stairs and entered Manzoni’s apartment. It was full of policemen, photographers, fingerprint men, neighbours and people just hanging around. The usual chaos. Bottando was spotted by the senior local detective, who came over and introduced himself.
‘When we discovered he worked at the museum I decided it might have something to do with you, so I called,’ he explained after relating how the body had been discovered by a neighbour peering in through the open front-door as she passed.
Bottando shrugged and walked over to the body, ignoring the invitation to talk. ‘Any idea when he was killed?’
‘After five-thirty, when he was seen coming home, and before seven, when the body was discovered. So far we can’t be more precise than that. Right-hand blow to the back and into the heart. Kitchen knife.’
‘No one saw any strangers hanging about, I suppose?’
The detective shook his head. ‘Any idea what it may be about?’
Bottando pursed his lips and shook his head slowly. ‘No,’ he lied. ‘My first inclination is to suggest coincidence, much as I dislike them. He certainly wasn’t a hot tip for our arsonist. Nor was there any connection I know of between him and any of our suspects.’
The detective looked disgruntled. He knew Bottando was being elusive, but in the very hierarchical police force, there is no way you can press a general without running the risk of getting yourself into trouble. He would have to find someone of equivalent rank to do that for him.
While the little interchange was going on, and while her boss wandered around the apartment looking vainly for hints, Flavia leant on the small round table in the sitting-room and pursued her own thoughts. They didn’t lead anywhere, except to the depressing conclusion that while they had had two crimes and too many suspects this morning; now they had three crimes and too many suspects. Not her idea of progress.
She told Bottando this after they left the apartment. He dismissed the car, explaining that walking helped him think. Besides, it was one of the few things he found pleasant at the moment. She fell in step with him and talked. He marched morosely by her side, not saying a word in reply for several minutes.
‘So what you’re basically saying is that we’re no further on at all? And in fact we’re more confused than ever?’ he said when her exposition was finished.
‘Well, yes, I suppose I am. But we could try and narrow it down a little.’ Bottando grunted, but kept quiet. Flavia was wearing baggy trousers and a jacket, and now thrust her hands into the pockets to help her concentrate. They crossed the Tiber as the dusk was deepening into dark. A thin but chilly wind was coming up the river, making her shiver as they walked.
‘OK then,’ she began after a few moments. ‘Either the picture was a forgery or it wasn’t. If it wasn’t, then we must look for a madman or someone in the museum. Correct?’ It was a rhetorical question. Even
had it not been it probably wouldn’t have got a reply from her companion, who was staring moodily at the pavement.
‘Main candidates, Manzoni, deceased, and Spello. Both disliking Tommaso, prompted into desperate action by the announcement of his retirement.’
‘Who killed Manzoni?’
‘Spello,’ she said firmly. ‘Realised Manzoni had wrecked the painting. Overcome with rage that he’d destroyed such a beautiful object. Or realised Manzoni knew he’d burnt the picture, so killed him to shut him up.’
‘This is narrowing it down, is it?’
Flavia ploughed on, ignoring the interruption. ‘Other candidate: Argyll, overcome with remorse at his lost opportunity…’
She got no further in what she considered a masterly exposition of the options. ‘Flavia, dear, this is not cheering me up. Do you, in fact, have the slightest idea who might be responsible for this?’
‘Well, um, no.’
‘I thought not. Now, why the timing?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, why was the picture burnt yesterday? After all, we’d just come across the evidence it was a fake and hadn’t told anyone. And the evidence, it seems, wasn’t as good as we thought. So why destroy it?’
This one stumped her, so he carried on on his own. ‘I think,’ he pointed out, mentally counting, ‘you have just listed about a dozen combinations of possibilities, without a shred of real evidence for any of them. Which goes to show that armchair detection is no good for anything. We need evidence of something. I reckon it’s about time you stopped thinking and started looking.’
‘Where do you suggest?’
‘Go to London. Manzoni seems to have come up with something, and we need to know what it was. If those tests have a hole, the only place you’ll find out is there. Go and see those restorers. That might provide something. Could you get on a plane tomorrow?’
She nodded. ‘As long as someone can keep an eye on Argyll while I’m away,’ she said. ‘Perhaps,’ she added, ‘I should nip off now and see if he’s back in. You never know, he might open the door covered in blood.’
‘And might stick a knife in you for good measure.’
‘I can’t see him doing something like that. But I can’t see any of them doing anything like that. That’s the trouble.’
‘Don’t let your intuition run away with you. If it wasn’t for the timing of all this, he’d be charged already. So watch yourself. Unless he comes up with a very good reason for what he’s been up to, let me know and I’ll pull him in.
‘I feel uncomfortable about all this,’ he continued. ‘I’m missing something which should be obvious. Something a long time ago which isn’t right. I woke up this morning and almost had it, but it slipped away. It’s driving me quietly crazy. Having an impossible task is bad enough, but when you suspect it’s because of your own failing memory it becomes insufferable.’
They parted at the next corner, Bottando walking northwards, slowly, absent-mindedly and morosely; she with the brisk step of a person who cannot remain bothered and overburdened for too long.
∗ ∗ ∗
Argyll was at home this time, let her in, and burbled happily about his day for the first few minutes, not letting Flavia get a word in edgeways. She sat quietly and waited for him to stop.
‘There’s nothing like the prospect of spending the rest of your life in jail to make you get a move on,’ he said. ‘I reckon if my supervisor had threatened to send me to Wormwood Scrubs for a year or two, I could have had my thesis finished ages ago.’
He gestured over to a desk piled high with files, filecards, used coffee cups and stacks of paper. ‘See that? I’ve been working like a demon all day.’
‘All day?’ she asked quietly.
‘Yup. Non-stop. Quite possessed I was. I’ve got it down to about twenty possibles. Assuming, that is, that it exists at all. But if I didn’t assume that, I’d lose heart. With a bit of luck I’ll be off your list of potential jail fodder within a week or so.’
‘All day?’ she repeated. ‘What about when I came round at seven?’
He paused. ‘Oh. I’d forgotten all about that. That’s what comes of concentrating. You were meant to come round, weren’t you?’
She nodded. ‘And I did. At seven. And you weren’t here.’
‘Yes I was. I’d just forgotten all about it. I had my Walkman on, so I suppose I didn’t hear the bell.’
‘Was anyone else here? Can anyone give you an alibi?’
Argyll looked flustered. ‘An alibi? For heaven’s sake! Of course not. I was here all on my own. I know it was careless of me. I’m sorry. But is it really such a big thing?’
‘Yes,’ she said. And explained why. The colour drained from his cheeks as she spoke.
‘So you think I slipped out, knifed him, came home and pretended I’d been here all the time, not hearing you because of the music?’
‘Fits the facts, doesn’t it?’
‘Rather well,’ he agreed unhappily. ‘Except, of course, that it’s not at all what I was doing. I was here.’
He rummaged around in Beckett’s drinks cupboard, pulled out a bottle of grappa and poured a healthy glassful. ‘I don’t suppose he’d object in the circumstances.’ He took a heavy suck on the glass, coughed slightly, then offered her a drink herself. She declined.
‘I suppose,’ he restarted with some hesitation, ferociously scratching the top of his head in a way that indicated profound misgivings inside, ‘I suppose that what I was planning to do next will make things worse.’
He stopped, and she gazed at him enquiringly. ‘I was about to tell you,’ he went on, ‘that to finish the search for this picture I would have to go to look at some things in London. I was thinking of going tomorrow.’
He looked at her hopefully. ‘Remarkable timing,’ she said sarcastically. ‘Especially considering that Byrnes headed off for England this evening as well.’
It was not the reassurance that Argyll had been looking for. Indeed, it made him even less comfortable. The drink rested on the floor, completely forgotten.
‘So it would look better if I stayed here?’
‘It would look better. But practically speaking, I suppose, it might be better if you went. As long as I go with you and you tell me exactly where you’ll be at every moment of the day. One more slip and I’ll pull you in. And I mean that. Depending on what turns up, I might do it anyway. Agreed?’
He nodded. ‘I suppose so. I’m grateful for your trust in me.’
‘Don’t be sarcastic. And I don’t trust you. Except, of course, that I find it difficult to believe that anyone could have forged a picture like that and act as dimwittedly as you have. At the moment the only thing you’ve got going for you is stupidity. You’re very lucky not to be in a cell already.’
So, sometimes you say the wrong thing. Flavia could, at times, be a little harsh in her conversational gambits, and the characteristic tended to show itself when she was tired or frustrated. This evening she was both of these, and worried as well. The combination eroded the natural kindness which generally masked her occasional tinge of verbal brutality.
Argyll, however, disregarded these extenuating circumstances and exploded.
‘I think we ought to get one thing clear here,’ he began coldly. ‘I never said that picture was a Raphael, I simply came out to Rome to check. I went by the rulebook, not making claims I couldn’t substantiate or prove. Whatever happened thereafter was nothing to do with me. So remember that. Secondly, it was me, not you, who first suggested it might be a fake. If it wasn’t for my research, which you sneer at so much, you’d be running around wringing your hands at the loss of a masterpiece. Thirdly, you don’t have any evidence against me at all. If you had, you’d have locked me up already. So don’t imply you’re doing me any favours.
‘And finally, at the moment, you need my help more than I need yours. If you think you can find that picture on your own, go ahead. But you can’t. I can, maybe. And I’m not go
ing to help you if I’m going to be subjected to sneering little taunts from you all the time. Is that clear?’
On the whole, it was not a bad speech at all. Later on, lying in bed, thinking about it and making little improvements for the benefit of posterity, he was struck by his simple eloquence. Forceful, no-nonsense stuff, in fact. He was quite pleased with himself. Opportunities for righteous indignation come up only very infrequently, and he normally never thought of the appropriately devastating response until, on average, about forty-five minutes afterwards.
More satisfying still, it stopped the voluble Italian woman dead in her tracks. He was ordinarily very mild-mannered; his expressions of rage were most visibly expressed in a faint look of distress or a mumbled sentence of mild disapproval. Oratory was quite out of character and the suddenness of the speech, combined with the real feeling that apparently went into it, momentarily caught Flavia unawares. She stared at him in surprise, dismissed the temptation to fire back a full broadside, then apologised.
‘I’m sorry. It’s been a bad day. Truce? No more comments until you’re cleared?’
He stumped around the room, closed the curtains, shut a cupboard door or two while he worked off his indignation, then nodded. ‘Or arrested, I suppose,’ he added. ‘OK. A deal. When do we leave?’
‘There’s a plane at seven-thirty. I shall pick you up here at six-thirty.’
‘That early? How horrible.’
‘Get used to it,’ she said as she got ready to leave. ‘In Italian prisons they wake you up at five…Sorry,’ she added quickly. ‘Shouldn’t have said that.’
11
Not to be outworked by his assistant, Bottando was sitting down at his desk, the inevitable coffee before him, around the same time that Flavia and Argyll were boarding the plane for London. In the cold light of dawn, he was less than convinced that letting either of them go was a good idea.
