David Dickinson - Death of an Old Master

Powerscourt laughed and squeezed his wife’s arm. ‘I look forward to that, Lucy, I really do.’

Lady Rosalind Pembridge’s house was on the right of St James’s Square. They were just a couple of paces away when Powerscourt stopped dead in his tracks.

‘Lucy, do you mind going in ahead of me? There’s just something I’ve got to do.’

Lady Lucy gazed at her husband with a mixture of exasperation and affection. ‘You’re not going to be long, are you?’ she said anxiously. She remembered the stories of Francis disappearing through the kitchens at a very grand Foreign Office dinner some years before. She distinctly recalled him vanishing again at a reception given by the Archbishop of Canterbury in Lambeth Palace, leaving her alone making small talk with the Archbishop’s wife until he reappeared some hours later when the reception had long ended. Business, he had said cryptically. She looked desperately around St James’s Square. Had Francis spotted some old army acquaintance? Was his closest friend Johnny Fitzgerald, recently gone to Spain on holiday, returned to lurk beneath the trees in the central garden?

As her husband strode off to the opposite side of the square, she knew. The answer was over there in the corner. Did Francis have any books to return? He hadn’t brought them with him. Then she remembered him telling her of his conversation with Thomas Jenkins, closest friend of the late Christopher Montague. He, Montague, had sometimes said that his favourite place in London was the reading room of the London Library in St James’s Square.

Lady Lucy was shown into the grand drawing room on the first floor. Rosalind, Lady Pembridge greeted her effusively. ‘Lucy, my dear, how very nice to see you! How are the children?’ Lady Lucy had barely started to reply when the other two sisters chimed in, almost in unison.

‘Where is Francis?’ said Mary Burke and Eleanor, Powerscourt’s youngest sister, married to a sea captain in the West Country.

‘Francis? He said he’d be here in a moment,’ said Lady Lucy, knowing all too well there was nothing Powerscourt’s sisters enjoyed more than complaining about him.

‘He’s disappeared again. Honestly!’ said Rosalind.

‘I thought he’d grown out of all that by now,’ said Mary, looking at Lady Lucy as if she should have taught him better manners after seven years of marriage.

‘How very inconsiderate. Typical Francis, spoiling a nice luncheon party,’ said Eleanor.

‘He must have a new case,’ said William Burke who knew rather better than the three sisters how difficult Powerscourt’s job could be. ‘Is that so, Lucy?’

‘It is,’ said Lady Lucy, smiling gratefully at her brother-in-law. ‘He does have a new case. And at the moment, he’s completely in the dark.’

‘Luncheon won’t wait,’ said Rosalind imperiously. ‘The soup might keep but the lamb will not. Will Francis be here for the soup, do you think, Lucy?’

‘I’m sure he will,’ said Lucy bravely. Privately she rather doubted it.

Her husband had reached the inquiry desk that ran round half the entrance hall of the London Library. Portraits of Carlyle and Dickens, founder members, lined the walls. In the centre of the room a flotilla of index cards, housed in great wooden containers, filed away the secrets of the library’s contents. Was the librarian available to speak to him, he inquired? He assured the young man that he, Lord Francis Powerscourt, had been a member for many years. He wished to consult the librarian on a matter of the utmost delicacy. Michael Stock, the librarian, he was told, could speak to him in a few minutes. Powerscourt glanced anxiously at his watch. The first course was only minutes away.

‘How can we help you, Lord Powerscourt?’ Stock was a slim man of middle years with a worried expression and very strong glasses. He pulled from time to time at the corners of his large moustache.

‘I am an investigator, Mr Stock,’ he began. ‘At present I am looking into the death of a young man called Christopher Montague who was a member here. He was murdered. You may have read about it in the papers. I know he was a regular visitor here. One of his friends told me the reading room upstairs was his favourite place in London.’

‘I was truly sorry to hear of his death,’ said Stock. ‘The library sent a wreath, you know. He was very popular here with all the staff.’

‘The reason for my visit is this,’ Powerscourt went on, casting a surreptitious look at his watch. Damn! They must be on the first course by now. ‘I wonder if it would be a simple matter for you to discover which books he had recently borrowed from the library. Some of his books and all his papers were removed from his rooms when he was murdered. If I knew what he had been working on at the time of his death, then it might advance my cause. At present,’ he smiled a deprecating smile, ‘I am operating rather in the dark.’

‘I do hope’, said Stock, rather fiercely, ‘that none of our books were among those removed from his quarters. Members are only permitted to keep them for a month.’

Powerscourt wondered if the London Library had a system of fining deceased members for the books they had not returned.

‘It is not the normal library practice to disclose what volumes have been borrowed by individual members.’ Powerscourt suddenly wondered if there were secret stacks of erotica hidden away in the bowels of the building. ‘However,’ Stock hurried on, suspecting that his earlier comments might not have been altogether appropriate, ‘I am sure we can make an exception in this case. If you can give us a few minutes, I am sure we can help you.’

Stock hurried out into his entrance hall. Powerscourt could hear him giving instructions to his staff.

Across the square the soup plates had been cleared away. ‘Lucy,’ asked Rosalind Pembridge, ‘one course down, only three to go. Any prospect of Francis putting in an appearance, do you suppose?’

‘Too bad, too bad,’ chorused the other two sisters.

Lady Lucy was not going to join the accusations against her husband. She would stand by him, whatever barbs were thrown. ‘I think we should just carry on,’ she said. ‘As if he wasn’t here.’

‘That’s just the point.’ Eleanor was quick off the mark. ‘He isn’t here. Perhaps he’s been abducted by some villains.’

‘Don’t be absurd,’ said William Burke. ‘This is St James’s Square, not Shoreditch.’

Stock trotted back into his office, a pile of borrowing slips in his hand. ‘Now then, Lord Powerscourt. This is what we’re looking for. And I think Garson here may be able to help further.’ Garson was the young man Powerscourt had first talked to in the entrance hall.

‘Life of Giovanni Bellini. German author. Life of Giorgione. Another German author. Both translated. Life of Titian. Italian author. Vasari, On Technique. And there were two volumes he asked us to obtain from a good Italian source in London. He collected those shortly before his death.’

‘Forgive me for asking for yet more information when you have been so helpful already,’ said Powerscourt, ‘but do you have dates for these borrowings?’

Powerscourt was taking notes now. He saw that all the volumes had been taken out the day after the preview of the de Courcy and Piper Gallery’s exhibition of Italian Old Masters. He inquired about the Italian books on order from another source. Had they been ordered on the same day?

‘Yes, sir,’ said Garson the young assistant. ‘They were.’

‘And what,’ said Powerscourt eagerly, ‘were their titles?’

‘Roughly translated, they were called How to Make Your Own Old Masters ,’ said Garson, ‘and The Art of Forging Paintings. Both published in Rome in the eighteenth century, believed to be contemporary manuals on how to forge Old Masters for English visitors on the Grand Tour, sir.’