David Dickinson - Death of an Old Master

Edmund de Courcy laughed. ‘Starved of the company of young men,’ he said, with an elder brother’s cruel accuracy, ‘but I understand that you had a rather unpleasant experience during your stay. I was in Aregno myself two years ago on the day of the Traitor’s Run. Guns going off all afternoon, people shouting at each other. We wondered at first if a revolution had broken out.’

That was very neat, Powerscourt thought. Edmund de Courcy himself a witness at the Traitor’s Run. Yet again he wondered if the annual ritual was real or lies, genuine or fake. Rather like the paintings in de Courcy’s gallery, he said to himself. It all came down to a matter of attribution in the end.

‘Well, it was certainly an exciting afternoon,’ Powerscourt said with a smile. Then he moved on to more dangerous ground.

‘Tell me, Mr de Courcy,’ he asked, ‘how well did you know Christopher Montague?’

De Courcy shook his head sadly. ‘Of course I knew him,’ he said, ‘what a terrible business. I saw him in the street on the afternoon he died. And that other poor man in Oxford too. Quite terrible.’

‘Did he come to the opening of your current exhibition here, Venetian Paintings?’

De Courcy blinked several times. ‘I’m trying to remember if he did,’ he said slowly. ‘I’m sure he must have been here. Yes, I do remember him on that occasion. He came with a very pretty young woman.’

Powerscourt summoned up his mental image of Mrs Rosalind Buckley, estranged wife of a man incarcerated for murder in Newgate Prison.

‘Quite tall?’ he said. ’Curly brown hair, big brown eyes?’

De Courcy looked confused. ‘No,’ he replied, ‘she was quite small. She didn’t have brown hair, it was almost black. And the eyes were blue, I think, rather striking.’

‘Did you catch her name, by any chance?’ said Powerscourt.

‘No, I don’t think I did.’

Outside they could hear the voice of William Alaric Piper telling the porters to be careful with a picture, apparently being moved down to the basement.

‘Tell me about forgers, Mr de Courcy.’ Powerscourt seemed to have lost interest in Christopher Montague’s companion. ‘I understand Mr Montague was going to say that most of these Venetian paintings were not original, that some were old fakes and some very recent fakes. Did you know about the article?’

De Courcy blinked again. It seemed to be a mannerism of his, Powerscourt thought. ‘Oh, yes, everybody knew about that article before it was due to appear,’ de Courcy said. ‘Indeed, it was being produced with the help of one of our competitors along the street here.’ He nodded out of the window towards Old Bond Street.

‘But forgery is nothing new in the art business, Lord Powerscourt. The Greeks did a very profitable trade selling fake antique statues to the Romans, for heaven’s sake. Most of the rich English who went on the Grand Tour brought back forgeries with them, thinking they were genuine, hanging them happily on the walls of their homes. Believe me, Lord Powerscourt, I visit a lot of the great houses full of paintings. I’ve lost count of the fake Titians. There must be more Giorgiones in the Home Counties than the man ever painted in his lifetime. Velasquez is rife in Hampshire, there’s a house I know of in Dorset which claims to have six Rembrandts in their drawing room. I doubt if a single one of them was painted in Holland. Florence today could field a couple of rugby teams of forgers, Forgers United and Forgers Athletic perhaps. You can’t stop it.’

Powerscourt smiled. Somebody on the floor above was hammering something into the wall, nails or picture hooks perhaps, to bear the weight of yet another painting, real or fake.

‘Would it have made any difference to the success of your exhibition,’ he said, ‘if the article had appeared just after it opened?’

De Courcy shook his head. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said firmly, ‘I think the exhibition was always going to be a success. We’re taking it to New York, you know.’

Rich pickings over there, Powerscourt thought. Some of the European buyers might be able to tell a forgery from the real thing. But he was doubtful about the buyers of Fifth Avenue.

‘Your house in Norfolk,’ he said, changing the direction of his attack. De Courcy sounded pretty impregnable on the subject of forgery. ‘Do you think you will be able to open it up again? I understand it is abandoned at present.’

‘Oh yes, it is,’ said de Courcy, ‘abandoned, I mean. There’s nobody there at all. The place is completely empty. There’s nobody there. I do hope to be able to bring my family back from Corsica, though. If things continue to go well with the business I might be able to do it quite soon.’

‘I’m sure your mother would like that,’ said Powerscourt diplomatically. ‘Do you have any Corsican links here, any Corsicans working as porters in the gallery or anything like that?’

‘We did have one Corsican here,’ said de Courcy, ‘but he had to go home only the other day. His mother died.’

‘Poor man,’ said Powerscourt, getting up from his chair. ‘Just one last thing, Mr de Courcy. The young woman who came to the opening night of the exhibition with Christopher Montague. Did you have a Visitors Book on that occasion? Might she have left a name in there?’

De Courcy said he would fetch the Visitors Book from the other office. Powerscourt stared idly at some of the pieces of paper on de Courcy’s desk. There seemed to be some form of private code on them. Some had no stars, some had one, some had three.

‘Here it is,’ said de Courcy. ‘We’ll have to go right back to the beginning.’ He turned back the pages of the thick leather-bound book.

‘Here we are,’ he said, ‘half way down the page. That’s Christopher Montague’s signature. And underneath it, written with the same pen I should say, Alice Bridge. No address, I’m afraid.’

Imogen Foxe was thinking of all the words she knew that meant black. Jet-black, inky black, Stygian gloom, dark as pitch, darker than the gates of hell. She could not see. She had travelled to London and made her rendezvous with the mysterious Mr Peters in the hotel near Waterloo station. There she was taken to a bedroom on the second floor where her eyes were covered with a black mask, and then so tightly bandaged that she could see nothing at all. A different man, she thought from the smell, had brought her to a different railway station and helped her to her seat in what she suspected was a first class carriage.

The man watched her all the time, especially her hands. If she moved a hand to her face he leant forward as if to restrain her. ‘Terrible accident, terrible,’ he had said to the guard on the train. ‘The doctors think she will recover her sight in the end. It’s rest in the country she needs now.’

Imogen’s world may have been black but her heart was dancing with joy. At the end of this mysterious journey, there was Orlando, Orlando she had not seen for months. She tried desperately to catch the announcements at the stations where they stopped. Maybe they could give some clue to their destination. But just as the announcer reached the words, ‘This train is calling at,’ her companion coughed loudly or began talking to her so she missed the names of the stations.

Her other senses, she noticed, seemed to have improved. She could smell the tobacco smoke in her companion’s clothes even though he wasn’t smoking. She heard the rumble of the wheels on the rails in a way she had never heard it before. Occasionally she heard the sound of footsteps in the corridor outside, crisp and precise. She wished those feet would stop and talk outside her door, then she might catch a clue about where they were going.