David Dickinson - Death of an Old Master

‘But you don’t believe it, Chief Inspector, do you?’ said Powerscourt.

‘I do and I don’t, if you see what I mean, my lord. There is absolutely no evidence, no witnesses, nothing. The Oxford killer seems to have been an invisible man, if you follow me. You don’t believe it, do you, my lord?’

Powerscourt paused for a moment. There were three squirrels chasing each other up and down the trees in the garden. Far off faint cheers could be heard from a college football field.

‘It’s the garrotting,’ he said finally. ‘It’s so very un-English, if you follow me. Bandits in Sardinia or Corsica or Sicily go round garrotting their enemies, and their friends too if the newspaper reports are to be believed. But I can’t see Mr Buckley doing it.’

‘I’m not sure I can hold them off for much longer,’ said Wilson rather miserably. ‘And this Evensong business, they’re just going to laugh at that.’

Small drops of plaster were falling from the ceiling, breaking into fragments on the floor. Orlando Blane stared moodily at the latest evidence of decay in his Long Gallery, the dust threatening to spoil his paintings. Rats, he decided, he could cope with. The rotting walls he could cope with. But this latest cascade of dust, small bomblets falling at the upper end of the vast room, threatened his very existence. There would have to be some kind of screen, he decided, staring helplessly at the beginnings of his Sir Joshua Reynolds of Mrs Lewis B. Black, wife of an American millionaire. He had finished his drawing for the painting two days before.

Orlando glanced briefly at another of the notes pinned round the walls of his prison. Seven people were released when the Bastille was stormed at the start of the French Revolution on the 14th July 1789, he read. Four of them were forgers.

His Reynolds was progressing well, a volume of Reynolds’ own writing acting as midwife to the birth from beyond the grave. Orlando had placed Mrs Black on a seat in an imaginary landscape. A delicious sunset, all soft pinks and scarlets, lay behind her, the dying light illuminating her hair and her hat. Orlando was pleased with the hat, the ostrich feathers shimmering above her golden curls. Now he had to improve the sweep of the long cream dress that flowed down to the ground. And the gloves lying in her lap. There was something wrong with the gloves.

Then he thought of Imogen. He had heard nothing since his letter some days past. Suddenly Orlando reached for his sketchpad and filled a page not with hats or gloves or sunsets but with figures. Orlando had tried not to think about money since he had lost so much of it at Monte Carlo. But now he tried to work out how much he had earned for his keepers. Four copies, two Titians, one Giovanni Bellini, one Giorgione had left his prison. Orlando suspected that they were going to be sold to unsuspecting Americans who would keep them in their homes or in their private museums, away from the inspection of the experts. They could be worth anything from five to thirty thousand. One fake Fragonard, probably about five thousand. One fake Gainsborough, say seven to ten thousand pounds. One fake Sir Joshua Reynolds, nearing completion, probably destined for another American millionaire, five thousand pounds minimum. Whichever way you looked at it, Orlando thought, he had easily repaid the ten thousand pounds he had lost.

He stared at the horizon beyond the rain falling on the ruined gardens. Where was he? When Imogen comes, he said to himself, it’s time to think about escaping.

Lord Francis Powerscourt was lying face down on his drawing-room carpet, peering at a large map of England. He had borrowed a red pencil from the children’s quarters and had drawn a series of lines connecting the cathedral cities of England to each other and to London. His map now looked like a diagram of the flow of the human blood round the body, red lines criss-crossing each other in regular patterns. Now then, he said to himself, if you were planning to attend Evensong in every single one, how would you do it? You can only take in one cathedral per day. Horace Aloysius Buckley had been in Oxford on a Thursday, five days before. The sensible thing to do would to be to carry on to Hereford, Worcester and Gloucester. That would take you up to Sunday. Assuming you went to Gloucester last, and Powerscourt was only too aware that his assumptions could all be wrong, you could attend Evensong in Bristol on Monday and Wells on Tuesday. Maybe even now Horace Aloysius Buckley was staring at the extraordinary carvings on the front of Wells Cathedral, preparing himself for another helping of Evensong. Then he would, presumably, return to London. Norwich beckoned. So did Ely and Peterborough in the Fens. Powerscourt knew that it would be hopeless to hop from one cathedral to another, trying to catch up with the wandering pilgrim. He would have to place himself across the route, waiting for three or four days perhaps for Buckley. Lincoln, he decided, staring gloomily at Lincoln on his map, that was where he would prepare his ambush.

‘Francis, whatever are you doing?’ Lady Lucy had entered the room without his knowledge and was standing by his side. She knew her husband was capable of eccentric behaviour from time to time, but this seemed a little excessive, even for Francis.

‘I am planning a journey, an interception, Lucy,’ said Powerscourt, rising to his feet and smiling apologetically at his wife.

‘Can I come too?’ said Lady Lucy practically.

‘Of course you can,’ said Powerscourt, ‘but it might be rather boring. Unless you like Evensong, that is.’

‘I’m very fond of Evensong, as a matter of fact, but I have something rather important to tell you. I’ve been talking to my relations.’

Powerscourt groaned inwardly. That could take weeks, months, even years. The main phalanx of his wife’s relations, the brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts and their varied progeny, would have constituted a reasonable congregation for Evensong in any cathedral in Britain. Add in the auxiliaries and the outriders of Lady Lucy’s family diaspora, the first cousins, the second cousins and their appendages, and there would be standing room only at the back of the nave.

‘There’s no need to make that face, Francis.’ Lady Lucy was smiling now. ‘I’ve been trying to help you in your investigation.’

‘I’m very grateful to you, Lucy,’ said Powerscourt, cheered by the thought that he didn’t have to make contact in person with the entire tribe, ‘and what have you discovered?’

‘Well,’ said Lucy, sitting in a chair by the fire, ‘I thought I’d ask around about these art dealers. The Clarkes have been there for years and years, no skeletons in their family cupboards apart from one earlier proprietor who ran away with his neighbour’s wife.’

‘What happened to him?’ asked Powerscourt. ‘How far did he get?’

‘He only got as far as Dover, I’m afraid. His sons went after him and persuaded him to come back just as he was about to board the packet to Calais.’

‘They must have been very persuasive, the sons, I mean,’ said Powerscourt, looking keenly at Lady Lucy’s eyes.

‘Pistols, not words, apparently, were the order of the day. They say the father never forgave them. However, that’s not important. Then there are the Capaldis, originally from Italy. Very devout Catholics, apparently, friendly with all those people at the Brompton Oratory.’

Powerscourt had a sudden vision of Christopher Montague, the empty bookshelves, the empty cupboards, the great wounds on his neck, just one hundred yards from the Oratory in Brompton Square.

Lady Lucy paused. ‘That leaves de Courcy and Piper,’ said Powerscourt, suspecting that some crucial piece of evidence was about to be revealed. ‘Which one of those two has the interesting past?’