by Iain Pears
But he’d allowed himself to be persuaded by her arguments. Which were, essentially, that as things stood they had no real evidence of anything at all; that if Argyll was guilty he had to be allowed to make some mistake, and if he was innocent he had to find that picture, or prove that it didn’t exist and the one in the museum had been genuine. Besides which, as she somewhat tactlessly pointed out, they’d made so many mistakes so far in this business, one more would hardly make any great difference.
The comment accented the still ferocious assaults in the newspapers that lay before him. They had discovered about Manzoni, and were painting lurid pictures about what they had now dubbed the ‘museum of murder’. Tommaso had been no friendlier when he’d told him of the latest developments. He’d been clearly upset about the restorer’s demise, no doubt concluding that, if this whole thing was a plot against him, then he might be next in line for a knife in the back.
Bottando had misjudged that man, it was clear. In the immediate aftermath of the party, the director had presented a humble, subdued, almost likeable side, though this was evidently an uncharacteristic reaction brought on by shock, because it wasn’t lasting. Tommaso was now getting very nervous, tense and short-tempered; not that such a condition stopped the politician in him operating at full power. He was manoeuvring with all the grace of a synchronised swimmer, rapidly and successfully shifting all blame on to the committee, Spello, and Bottando’s department. Already stories hinting something along those lines had appeared in one of the papers.
One thing was certain. Bottando felt himself getting too old for this sort of thing. Wearily, he counted up the forces and assessed his chances. On his side, he had the ministry of defence, who could be counted on to look after him. He thought. Against him, he had the newspapers, the arts ministry, the interior ministry, and Tommaso. The treasury represented a floating vote, whose mind would be made up by the chances of getting its money back.
If they ever got that far. According to the legal department in the arts ministry, the contract stated clearly that if the picture was a fake, the seller – that is Edward Byrnes – would have to refund. Any loss of a genuine picture would be borne by the state. If Byrnes was telling the truth, if he hadn’t owned the picture and didn’t have the money, he’d still have to refund. But, as the man had told Flavia, the picture was gone. So the only way of proving it was a fake was to find the original.
Essentially, it came down to the fact that the future of his department and of his career now depended on a foreign graduate student, who had already made one mistake and who might very well be an arsonist, forger, conspirator, murderer, and half-cracked as well. The thought did not bolster the General’s confidence. He was starting to suspect that, at long last and after many campaigns, he was outnumbered, outflanked and outgeneralled.
And Bottando’s sense that he was missing something still nagged away at him. He’d paced the streets, sat in armchairs, tossed and turned in bed. All to no avail. He was missing something and was no nearer to discovering what it was. The more he tried, the more the wisp of memory receded. Hence the vast piles of dossiers on his desk. The personnel files of everyone in the museum, combined with what they knew about Morneau, Byrnes, Argyll, and anyone else concerned.
He picked up Tommaso’s file. Might as well start at the top, he thought as he opened it. Cavaliere Marco Ottavio Mario di Bruno di Tommaso. Born March 3, 1938. Father, Giorgio Tommaso, died 1948, aged forty-two. Mother, Elena Maria Marco, died 1959, age fifty-seven. He jotted idly on his notepad and sighed heavily.
Pages and pages of the stuff, a monument to the excessive zeal of an overstocked bureaucracy with nothing better to do. Education, careers, opinions, recommendations. All repeated hundreds of times in each dossier on everyone. And he was going to go through the lot of them, for the one piece of information that might jog his memory.
Bottando had polished off the Renaissance department when the plane touched down, and was progressing on to Early Medieval Painting by the time the taxi drew up outside the Victoria & Albert Museum to let Argyll out.
As agreed, he gave her a detailed itinerary; a couple of hours there, followed by a brief stop at the Courtauld in Portman Square, with an option on a visit to the British Museum later on. She told him to meet her at six, and concluded with dire warnings of the potential penalties should he miss the rendezvous again. He grinned nervously at her and made his way up the steps.
He had always hated the V & A, especially the library, which was his present destination. It was not just the fact that it was cold; nearly all libraries he had worked in were underheated. Nor was it particularly the clear evidence of a chronic lack of funds: – the little donation boxes hopefully primed with five-pound notes to give visitors the right idea; the lack of proper lighting; the general air of woebegone neglect.
But in he went, walking through the museum along the echoing corridors, resisting the temptation to buy an overpriced bun in the café, up the stairs and into the library. For the next ten minutes he rummaged around in the catalogues, occasionally scribbling call numbers on bits of paper and handing them in at the desk. Then he gave in to temptation, took his newspaper and went down for a coffee. Long experience had taught him that no books would turn up for at least forty-five minutes.
Feeling oppressed and out of place, he took his coffee and soggy doughnut and sat in a far corner of the room, away from the other students and the small number of miscellaneous tourists. He concentrated on the paper and pretended, as best as he could, that he was somewhere else. His thoughts on the subject were interrupted by a clattering of plates as someone sat down at his table. The newcomer instantly fished out a packet of Rothman’s from the pocket of his old, battered jacket – which had clearly once been the top half of a suit – and lit up.
‘Thank heavens for that. First today. I’ve almost been chewing my fingers off up there.’
‘Hello, Phil. How are you?’
The newcomer shrugged. ‘As ever,’ he replied. He puffed furiously on his cigarette. He was one of Argyll’s oldest associates. As Philip Mortimer-Jones, he was a child of privilege, public schools, and superlative contacts through his father, who was some big wheel in the National Trust. As plain Phil, he was short and stocky, abominably dressed, with dark greasy hair and a look on his face which made you suspect he was about to fall asleep, or that his eyes were caked with grime, or that he had just eaten some substance of which the police would disapprove: in all the five years he had known him, Argyll could never decide. Possibly all of the above. But for all his dormouse-like appearance Phil was a bright lad. He was also more finely tuned into the nuances of academic gossip than anyone else Argyll knew. He confirmed this with his next statement.
‘Surprised to see you here. I thought you’d still be mourning over your great Italian disappointment.’
Argyll groaned. If Phil knew then everybody would know. ‘Who told you about that?’
‘Can’t remember. Heard it somewhere.’
How did he know, though? Argyll was certain he had told only one person, and that had been his ever-so-civil and discreet supervisor. It had been an awkward meeting, because his idleness had finally caught up with him. His university had become somewhat impatient and had threatened to wipe his name off the books. His supervisor, old Tramerton, had been asked for a recommendation one way or another, and he had asked Argyll for evidence that any sort of mental activity was still flickering.
He’d had to produce something convincing quickly. So in the space of four days he had gathered the only material to hand, accumulated an impressive-looking bibliography and posted off to Italy his tentative conclusion that underneath the Mantini rested a genuine, lost Raphael.
It seemed now, of course, that it was the wrong conclusion, but he refused to take responsibility for that. If the university authorities had not been so unreasonably demanding, the little paper would not have been written and Byrnes would not have got to the picture before him. Quite a pleasant chain
of events, if you thought about it. Anyway, Tramerton had been convinced – of his efforts if not his scholarly merits – and had done the decent thing. The threat of execution was withdrawn and Argyll had thought no more about it.
Until now. Evidently either Tramerton had given the paper to someone or had told someone about it. Find who it was and the route to Byrnes would open up like magic. But who? His supervisor had been out of circulation in Italy; staying at a colleague’s house west of Montepulciano, so a letter had said. How had Byrnes got at him there? He’d write and ask. Maybe that would produce something useful.
It would all have to wait for the time being; the aromatic confines of the library awaited him. He stopped his colleague just as he was getting into conversational second gear, astounded him with the announcement that he was desperately keen to get back to his desk, and dragged himself up the stairs again. A brief conversation, and not at all a satisfying one.
Working proved less easy than he’d anticipated. The excitement of the previous couple of days wrought havoc on his concentration. As did the pressure he was working under. As Flavia had pointed out to him, find that Raphael and all was well. The penalty for failure was not, however, merely a raised eyebrow from his supervisor this time. This is not, he told himself as he flipped through the books he’d ordered, what academic work is meant to be like. The marines would be less dangerous at the moment. It was all very well to say ‘find a Raphael’. But if it was that easy, it would have been found years ago.
Of course, he’d made progress, but only of a negative sort. He knew better where the painting wasn’t. That, however, was not going to bring him many congratulations. From the initial two hundred and something or other possibilities, it was now down to a few dozen. What was he meant to do? Visit every one with a sharp knife and give it a little scrape? Apart from the fact that the owners might protest, presumably someone else was also on the same course. If Byrnes had destroyed that picture so it wouldn’t be revealed as a fake, he was smart enough to know he’d have to get rid of the real thing as well, which was the last possible proof of his initial fraud.
The idea made him think; he paid less attention to his books and stared up at the wire netting strung across the ceiling to stop falling bits of roof from the decaying building hitting the students below. The books didn’t seem quite so important now. He could accumulate information for months, and still never find anything convincing. If he was going to get anywhere, he’d have to work with what information he already had. He had to find the picture to catch a culprit. But what if he did it the other way round? Lateral thinking, it was called, and once he started thinking along these lines, everything began to seem quite simple. And after a few hours, he even began to get a smell of where the picture might be.
Later that evening he met Flavia on schedule and in the right place, and the two of them walked into a cutesy little winebar in a street running parallel to Wardour Street. It was called the Cockroach and Cucumber, or somesuch, which prompted Argyll to make a few disparaging comments. ‘It’ll probably be full of the elder brothers of the students who work in the V & A,’ he sniffed at Flavia, who missed the reference and smiled politely. She’d had a tiresome day, talking to the other restorers. Not that it had done her much good. They’d all taken refuge in technicalities and refused to come out of their shells. This was her last chance to make the trip worthwhile. It made her determined, and sliced the edge off her sense of humour.
The clientele around the bar generated a rubicund air of confident and artificial jollity that settled around Argyll like a suffocating smog. He felt unhappy already. ‘Hardly the place for a quiet and confidential chat,’ he bellowed into Flavia’s left ear.
‘What?’ she yelled back, then sighted the Tate restorer. ‘Doesn’t matter. Tell me later.’ She weaved her way over to the bar. Anderson, her target, was standing there, waving a five-pound note in a hopeful fashion. Flavia rapped him on the shoulder firmly, just at the moment his long vigil was rewarded, and the barmaid was headed in his direction. He turned to greet the Italian, lost eye-contact with the other side of the bar, and the woman drifted off to serve someone else.
‘Goddamn,’ he exclaimed. ‘Missed her again. No matter. We can go next door where it’s quieter. They have table service through there.’
As they walked through, Flavia introduced Argyll. Anderson looked disappointed. ‘Oh. I thought you were coming alone.’ Argyll was instantly offended and found himself disliking the man intensely. They sat down at one of the few remaining tables and ordered a bottle of white wine of uncertain origin. ‘You see? It’s a lot quieter in here. Nice place, eh?’
Argyll smiled and nodded. ‘Remarkable. Nice is not the word.’ He’d wanted to say that for years. Flavia smiled at him and trod heavily on his toe with her heel. They were not called stilettos for nothing. Tears came into his eyes from the pain.
She then went on to try and rescue the conversation, parroting out a largely erroneous explanation of her presence in England.
‘And you want my help. Willingly. If, of course, you tell me why.’
‘Just routine enquiries, as I believe they say in this country.’
‘Nonsense. Nothing I could possibly say would be of the slightest use to you unless there was more to it than that. I knew nothing about the painting except that I was called in by Sir Edward Byrnes to clean and restore it. Apart from the occasional incursion by television cameras, I worked alone with the other restorers. Why send someone all the way from Rome just to ask about that?
‘And of course, you turn up here bringing Mr Argyll – ’ for some reason Argyll disliked that Mister bit, ‘ – who Sir Edward once told me was miffed about the whole business. Why search for motives when you take the number one suspect along with you? Unless, of course, there is something else going on. Cheers.’ He raised his glass to salute his cleverness, and screwed his face up in an exaggerated demonstration of disgust.
‘I never realised that I had achieved such fame,’ commented Argyll, uncertain whether Anderson’s facial antics referred to the wine or him.
‘Don’t worry. You haven’t. But Byrnes mentioned you once and I have a very good memory for minor details.’
Argyll decided to retire from the conversation as much as possible. Minor details, indeed. He leant back in his chair, nursed his glass of wine, and tried to look nonchalant. If it hadn’t been for his afternoon’s labours he would be in a bad mood. However, what he had to tell Flavia made him feel smug. It would be agreeable to be in control of events for once.
‘Will you give me your word that this conversation will be confidential?’ Flavia asked.
‘I can give you my word and you can decide how much it’s worth,’ Anderson replied. Flavia thought some more. She not only wanted information, it would be nice to rattle this little bugger’s confidence a little. Suggesting he might have been one of the prime victims of a hoax might sober him up a bit. Also, she didn’t like that crack about Argyll: maybe he had been a little objectionable, but basically she agreed with him. This worried her. Becoming protective was always a bad sign.
‘It was a fake,’ she announced bluntly.
The statement did the trick nicely. Anderson didn’t exactly turn pale, but clearly felt like it. ‘Oh shit,’ he said, very slowly and distinctly. ‘Are you sure?’
Flavia shrugged and smiled prettily at him, but didn’t reply.
‘And can you tell me why you think that?’
She shook her head. ‘No. I’m afraid not. Just take it that we’re right.’ It was a gross and unreasonable exaggeration, but Bottando had always instructed her that the one golden rule about police work was never ever seem uncertain of your facts. Besides, she reckoned that the more upset Anderson was, the more he’d talk. She switched into concerned and attentive mode.
‘I think I ought to buy you something to eat here. I’m pretty hungry.’
So was Argyll. And he appreciated that the little gesture was, perhaps, a good way of establis
hing a better rapport with Anderson. He was the sort of tactless person who not only can’t resist a free meal, but who is also made hungry by bad news. For the next hour he munched his way steadily through a large plate of jumbo prawns, a sizeable slice of fish pie, two plates of vegetables, a dessert that was meant to be pecan pie but wasn’t quite right somehow, two cups of coffee and an unfair share of a second bottle of wine. Flavia also matched him pretty much forkful for forkful. As on the first occasion when he had watched her prowess in this field, Argyll wondered how on earth someone of such a delightfully trim shape could possibly stuff that much food inside her.
To help Anderson in the right direction, Flavia began telling him about the scientific study of the picture. The scientist waved her aside. ‘I know all this. I was in charge.’
‘I thought Manzoni was?’
‘Him?’ Anderson said contemptuously. ‘He never came near it. Just read the report afterwards, said he was sure we’d done it all correctly, and signed the thing. Scarcely lifted a finger.’
Flavia was quite unjustifiably irritated at the aspersions cast on her fellow-countryman by this large and cocky Englishman. His comments smacked too much of anti-Italian prejudice for her taste. Moreover, it meant one of her pet theories was weakened. If Manzoni hadn’t directed the tests, he couldn’t have fixed them either. Her focus came back to Anderson, who was pronouncing at great length, not noticing she hadn’t been paying any attention.
‘…That’s why I’d like to hear your evidence. I can’t see any way that picture could be a fake. It looked right and tested right. The evidence would have to be absolutely overwhelming to make me change my mind,’ he concluded.
She evaded again. ‘Just tell me, how would someone fake a thing like that?’
‘In principle it’s easy. It’s just doing it that’s the trouble. From what I remember of the report, the forger would have had to get hold of a sixteenth- or late fifteenth-century canvas to start off with. One the right size as the final picture so there wouldn’t be any new strain marks from the new shape of the stretcher. You clean off some, but not all, of the original paint. Then you start painting your own picture, using the same techniques and the same paint recipes as the original artist.’
