David Dickinson - Death of an Old Master

‘Are you all right, Francis?’ said Lady Lucy, worried suddenly that her husband might be ill.

‘I’m perfectly all right, my love,’ said Powerscourt, giving his wife a quick kiss. ‘I’m just in rather a hurry. I’ve got to get to the Royal Academy. And I want to ask your advice.’

Lady Lucy sat down on one of her dubious dining-room chairs. Powerscourt observed that there hadn’t been a moment’s hesitation. Were they all in perfectly good condition after all, he wondered? Did just one of them need repair? This was not a battle he was prepared to enter. He banished all thoughts of domesticity from his mind.

‘We’ve got to find somebody in Chelsea, Lucy,’ he began. Lady Lucy felt a quick thrill at the use of the word ‘we’. Not I. But plural. We.

‘Who is this person, Francis?’ Lady Lucy smiled.

‘All we have,’ said Powerscourt, ‘is a Christian name. Rosalind. She was having an affair with the late Christopher Montague. Her husband was apparently not compliant. And she lives in Chelsea, this Rosalind. That’s it.’

‘I could ask Montague’s sister,’ said Lady Lucy, relieved that the vast tribe of her relations, as Francis referred to them, might come in useful at last.

‘You could,’ said Powerscourt doubtfully, ‘but I have asked the sister already in general terms. She said she didn’t know anything about his private life.’

‘I see,’ said Lady Lucy. ‘It’s quite tricky, isn’t it? You can’t very well pin up a notice on Chelsea Town Hall asking for the Rosalind who was having an affair with Christopher Montague to pop round to Markham Square for afternoon tea.’

Powerscourt laughed. ‘I wonder about the post,’ he said. ‘People in those circumstances sometimes spend a lot of time writing to each other, arranging the next meeting, saying how much they miss the other one, that sort of thing. Liable to cause trouble if you leave any of the correspondence lying around, of course.’

Lady Lucy looked suspiciously at her husband. ‘Are you an expert in these matters, Francis?’

‘Certainly not. I promise you.’ Powerscourt laughed. ‘But I have been involved in a number of cases where this sort of thing goes on. One chap I heard of even had his messages delivered by carrier pigeon. Of ingenuity in affairs of the heart there is no end.’

‘Thomas is a great friend of our postman here,’ said Lady Lucy. ‘He takes Thomas on his rounds of the square sometimes on Saturday mornings. I’ve watched Thomas post the mail through the letterboxes. He thinks it’s tremendous.’

‘Well, the postman might be able to help. But we need Montague’s hand on a letter. Those murderers took every scrap of paper out of his flat. We don’t know what his handwriting looked like.’

Powerscourt looked at his watch. ‘Heavens, Lucy, I’m going to be late. Will you have those new chairs in position when I come back, do you think?’

Lady Lucy laughed. ‘Be off with you, furniture Philistine!’ she said. But she kissed him warmly as he left.

The gallery of de Courcy and Piper in Old Bond Street was temporarily closed to the public that morning. Opening at eleven o’clock, said the sign outside. All the doors were locked. Edmund de Courcy and William Alaric Piper were in the basement. That door was also locked.

‘Only two more to go,’ said Piper, panting slightly. He placed a small piece of cloth over a nail on the bottom of a picture frame. He pulled very slightly. The nail did not move. He tried again, pulling fractionally harder. Again the nail did not move.

‘Damn these nails!’ said Piper. He was reluctant to pull too hard in case damage was done to the painting or the frame. And, as both he and de Courcy knew only too well, one day soon they would have to perform the operation in reverse.

He tried again. Very slowly the nail agreed to part from the frame. De Courcy had a piece of paper ready for it. Bottom row, first from right-hand corner, said the piece of paper. De Courcy placed the nail reverently into its new home. Then he put it into a box. The nails were ordered in the box in the same way they had been in the frame.

‘There!’ said Piper. The last nail had come out. De Courcy pulled the painting very carefully from its frame. He rolled it into a cylindrical shape and wrapped it in two sheets of linen, specially cut for the purpose. It joined another cylinder on the floor. These two paintings had been part of the de Courcy and Piper Venetian exhibition upstairs. Both had been sold and removed from the show.

‘How long has he got?’ asked de Courcy.

‘I should say up to three weeks. But he works very fast so it may be less,’ said Piper, wiping his hands and sliding the box with the nails into a shelf in a safe on the wall. ‘I told the new owners they were going off to be cleaned, but that it could take some time. Can he do it in three weeks?’

‘Well,’ said de Courcy, ‘he’s going to be pretty busy. I’m sending these two illustrations up there as well.’ He showed his partner the two pages he had stolen from the basement of the Beaufort Club.

‘The family of William P. McCracken.’ Piper peered closely at the page to make sure William P. McCracken and family had not been represented outside the main entrance of the Third Presbyterian Church, Lincoln Street, Concord, Massachusetts. They had not. He breathed again.

‘And so this is Mr Lewis B. Black, the king of steel,’ said Piper, eyeing up his other prey. ‘And Mrs Black! And the Miss Blacks! I can see, Edmund, why you were so excited about the feathers. It’s going to be magnificent!’

De Courcy wrapped the two illustrations up. The package would leave London that afternoon, bound for a secret destination known only to de Courcy and Piper. The Black and McCracken families would be accompanied on their journey by the Portrait of a Man by Titian and the Portrait of a Venetian Gentleman by Zorzi da Castelfranco, better known as Giorgione.

Lord Francis Powerscourt stared in disbelief at the paintings on the walls of Sir Frederick Lambert’s office. They had been changed around since his last visit. Powerscourt found himself wondering if Lady Lucy had a secret contract to rearrange the furniture here too, popping over from Markham Square to switch round the paintings in the President’s office. Hector being dragged round the walls of Troy had disappeared. It had been replaced by an even vaster canvas. In the courtyard of a huge palace servants were rushing towards the centre and placing household objects on a pyre. A magnificent bed was being brought out of a courtyard towards it. Hiding behind a pillar upstairs a distraught Queen stared down below. A courtier was whispering in her ear. In the bottom left a huge man, clad only in a loincloth, his dark skin glistening with oil, was carrying a flaming torch towards the pyre. Dido, one-time lover of Aeneas, reigning Queen of Carthage, was preparing her own immolation.

‘Happens every month, Powerscourt.’ Sir Frederick had observed Powerscourt looking at the walls with amused interest. ‘We change the paintings round. Get fed up with looking at the same thing, even if you’ve painted it yourself. Maybe especially if you’ve painted it yourself.’

‘A very dramatic work, Sir Frederick,’ said Powerscourt politely.

Sir Frederick looked rather ill. His huge frame seemed to be collapsing inwards. The suit was now several sizes too large. The great moustache was still perfectly trimmed but it was drooping. He looked at Powerscourt’s letter on his desk.

‘Let me begin with these art dealers you asked about, Lord Powerscourt.’ He paused and looked up at the pyre on the opposite wall, wondering perhaps about his own more peaceful obsequies. ‘What you must realize about these art dealers is that they are in a permanent state of conflict and competition with each other. Clarke’s and Capaldi’s have been around a long time, of course. De Courcy and Piper are new. I believe de Courcy spends most of his time wandering round the great country houses looking for people who are almost bankrupt but could be saved by selling some of the Old Masters on their walls.’ Sir Frederick shook his head sadly. ‘Capaldi’s have a member of staff whose main job is to read the obituaries in all the major newspapers looking for families who may have to sell up.’