Iain Pears - The Raphael Affair

Flavia was sitting in the kitchen of Argyll’s new apartment. He’d explained when she knocked on the door that he’d taken up the offer by his old friend, Rudolf Beckett, of a spare room. He looked tired and told her that he had not, in the circumstances, slept very well. Flavia might have been more sympathetic had she not been so alarmed at the possibilities suggested by the fact that suspect number one was living in the same flat as a journalist.

Argyll, however, reassured her. His flatmate was at the moment in Sicily on an extended trip to write stories about the Mafia. Flavia wondered whether any reporter ever went to Sicily to do anything else. He would not be back for several days, at least, so she stopped worrying and got back to the subject of Argyll’s chance to rehabilitate himself.

‘If the evidence about the forgery is so weak, why are you convinced?’

Flavia held up her hand and counted off the points, one by one. ‘Firstly, I want to be, because I hate the idea of a genuine Raphael being charred. Secondly, because otherwise we’re looking for a real nutcase, and I don’t want to believe that either. Thirdly, because we’ve got to explore all the possibilities anyway. Fourthly, intuition. Fifthly, because I trust your judgement.’

Argyll snorted. ‘Sixthly, you’re also crazy. Certainly you’re the only person who trusts my judgement. But I’m just a graduate student. I can’t really see myself wandering around looking for picture forgers.’

‘Indeed not. But you know more about that damned man Mantini than anyone else. He’s now very much the artistic flavour of the month. The end of our troubles probably lies somewhere in your file cards.’

Argyll brushed his fingers through his hair, hummed a little, then twiddled his thumbs, all symptoms that Flavia now recognised as symptomatic of embarrassment on his part.

‘Yes, lovely. Glad to oblige. But, I mean, I hardly like to raise the subject and all that, but, well...’

‘Why should you bother when you could possibly find it yourself and make a fortune?’

‘I wasn’t going to put it quite like that...’

‘But I got hold of your general line of thought, correct?’

‘Suppose.’

‘Simple enough,’ she said sweetly. ‘Step more than a centimetre out of line and Bottando will arrest you as a prime suspect, and throw you to the wolves to get the press off his back. I had a very hard time this morning,’ she added with some exaggeration, ‘dissuading him from locking you up immediately. He found your reasoning about why he should very convincing. And, of course, if you are innocent, you would earn the immense gratitude of almost everyone from the prime minister down to myself, if you helped.’

Argyll reached for another slice of toast, buttered it, and covered it with about a quarter inch of Beckett’s expensively imported marmalade. ‘Oh, all right, then,’ he said grudgingly. ‘You have a persuasive way with you. But I must warn you that even my inestimable services don’t guarantee success.’

‘There is your catalogue of Mantini’s paintings.’

‘As yet incomplete. And that only deals with paintings that still exist. The number that must have been destroyed, or forgotten about, is probably huge.’

‘Do your best. We can talk about it this evening when you’ve thought about it. I must go off on my errands.’

‘One thing you can do for me. Could you use your contacts to ask around all the auction houses and dealers in order to trace any pictures that might have been bought by Morneau? And anyone else you might suspect?’

‘Where?’

‘All over Europe. Or at least the main centres.’

‘All over Europe for all our suspects? Is that all?’

He nodded. ‘I suppose it’s a big task. But if you could find that one of them bought a picture the same size as that Raphael, it would help.’

‘I see. Anything else you want, by any chance?’

‘Just tell me one thing. Do you think I had anything to do with this?’

Flavia picked up her bag and slung it over her shoulder, brow furrowed for a moment as she weighed up the options of being truthful or of upsetting him with her lack of confidence in his honesty.

‘Pass,’ she said eventually, and headed off before he could reply.

After Flavia had run down the stairs in search of a taxi, Argyll wandered about his new apartment, tidying up in a half-hearted manner, wondering how best to go about his new task. It was hard to concentrate on the matter with the omnipresent thought that the slightest slip-up could land him in jail for much of the rest of his life. If he helped find the picture he might damn himself. But if he didn’t, he would surely do so. It was not what had been in his mind when he thought of the pleasures of living in Rome once again. One thing was clear, however. He wasn’t going to be able to confine himself to looking through file cards. He’d have to be a bit more active than that. Flavia, he thought, was basically well-disposed towards him, and disinclined to believe him responsible for all this. Her boss appeared to be of a different frame of mind.

Not that this one was going to be easy. He had never counted, but he reckoned that he had records of about five hundred pictures by Mantini. He knew that around half of these had been painted before 1724, before the painter covered over the Raphael. All the rest were either after that date or uncertain. He went to the shoe boxes of white cards which contained the records of the past three years’ work and started flicking through. After a few minutes he decided that it would be easier simply to take cards out; putting them back in the right order could be taken care of later. Desperate situations require reckless remedies. About an hour’s work produced a depressing result: even after the pictures which had been bought by the owner and stayed in the family’s hands thereafter had been taken out, the pile of possibles was still about two inches thick — at about fifty cards to the inch.

Then he remembered Lady Arabella’s letter, and went through again, removing everything but ruins and things that might get called ruins; this more than halved the problem to around forty-five pictures. He settled down, clamped his Walkman over his ears, put on a tape, and began to make a list. Not because it was especially vital, but because he couldn’t think what to do next, and listening to music and making out lists he always found very therapeutic.

The rest of the day passed in industrious boredom for all concerned. At the museum, Tommaso and his cohorts were doing their best to retrieve the situation, pumping out press releases. Bottando spent some of his time in similar pursuits, but eventually gave up what appeared to be a losing battle and turned his mind to more immediate tasks.

Clearly someone in the museum — and it had to be Tommaso — was working furiously to shift the blame on to the police, Spello, and the ill-fated security council. He cursed the day he’d ever heard of that infernal committee. Not that he really blamed Tommaso, he thought in a fleeting moment of charitable objectivity, the man was trying to survive a calamity which had not been his fault. Perfectly understandable; it was simply that he wished the director wasn’t trying to do so by offering Bottando’s head as a substitute for his own. Perhaps Bottando would have done the same thing, in similar circumstances. Perhaps. But he was sure he would have been more tactful about it, and not tried to torpedo someone who, at the moment, was doing his damnedest to track down the real culprit.

His rivals in the various police forces were also well in to a campaign against him, and he realised that the only effective answer to them was an arrest or two. So he dictated a bland statement about pursuing all possible investigations and being confident of making an arrest soon — which they could do, he thought gloomily. It was just that they would have no idea whether they’d collared the right man.