David Dickinson: Death of an Old Master

Inspector Maxwell shook him by the hand. ‘The Commissioner has often talked about you, sir. Good to have you on board.’

Powerscourt had been involved with the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police on a number of his previous cases. He had always taken great care to maintain good relations with the police force of London.

‘The basic facts are these, my lord,’ said Maxwell, checking in his notebook. ‘The body was discovered by Mrs Carey, the lady who comes to clean the flat, at about eleven o’clock this morning. The doctors think he was killed sometime yesterday evening. They think the murder weapon was probably piano wire or picture cord, something very simple the murderer could have carried in his pocket. There’s another doctor coming any minute before the body is removed. Perhaps you’d like to have a look, my lord. It’s not a pretty sight,’ he went on, ‘but I’m sure you’ve seen lots of dead bodies in your time, my lord.’

Powerscourt felt nervous as he opened the door of the main room of Montague’s flat. Heaven knows, he had seen enough bodies in his time, some mutilated in war, others desecrated in peace, but the prospect of finding another one in a pleasant London square within walking distance of his home did not appeal.

The room must have been the drawing room when the house was a single unit, before it had been turned into three flats. It had high ceilings and fine windows. Bookshelves lined the walls. Slumped at a desk, his head fallen low on to his chest, there was the figure of a man. Christopher Montague might have been working when his killer struck. Powerscourt looked with distaste at the fatal marks on his neck, great weals of purple and black where the murderer had pulled the cord or the wire tight round his neck. Death must have been pretty quick, he thought. He noticed a mark on the leg of the chair where the killer might have placed his shoe to gain extra purchase on Montague’s throat.

But the strangest feature of the drawing room of Number 29 Brompton Square was what had happened to the possessions. A number of books had been removed, gaps in the shelves sticking out like recently extracted teeth. Any papers left on or inside the desk had gone. Gently Powerscourt opened the drawers on either side of the knee-hole desk. They were empty.

Powerscourt crawled along the floor, trying to see if any scraps of paper, any notes, might have fallen into one of the dusty corners. There was nothing. He checked the single bedroom. A fine collection of Montague suits and shirts still hung in the cupboards, but there were no books or documents to be seen. Gingerly Powerscourt checked all the pockets. Somebody had been there before him. They were completely empty. Powerscourt thought it impossible that anybody could have completely empty pockets in their jackets. He was always finding old bills, theatre ticket stubs, currency notes in his own pockets. Here there was nothing.

He went back to the kitchen. ‘I presume, Inspector,’ he said, ‘that you and your men have not removed anything from the drawing room?’

‘Certainly not, my lord.’ Inspector Maxwell was quick to defend the professionalism of his team. ‘We haven’t moved a thing. And Mrs Carey, the cleaning woman, left everything exactly as she found it. She hasn’t touched a thing. Somebody seems to have removed some of the books, mind you. And the desk is empty too. Mrs Carey says he was always scribbling away there, as she put it. Do you suppose the killer took Montague’s writings away?’

‘We can only assume that he did,’ said Powerscourt. ‘But why? The man wrote about art, for God’s sake. It’s not as if were a spy or a diplomat writing out the clauses of some secret international treaty.’

‘I’m worried about these wine glasses,’ said Inspector Maxwell. ‘Mrs Carey says Montague hardly ever had any visitors here. He lived somewhere else. This was where he worked. But here are two glasses which must have been used since Mrs Carey’s visit yesterday. She says her Mr Montague never washed anything up in his life. But here we are. Two clean glasses. Two people having a drink.’

‘One of them the killer, perhaps?’ said Powerscourt. ‘And if that is the case then Montague must have opened the door to let him in. He must have known the person who killed him.’

‘My thoughts exactly, my lord. Not that it takes us much further forward, mind you. People usually know their killers after all.’

Powerscourt took another look at the glasses. Had Montague cleaned them before he was murdered? Unlikely, he thought, if Mrs Carey was to be believed. Or had his killer cleaned them up after committing the murder? Surely the killer would have wanted to get away as fast as possible. Or had he a particular reason for cleaning the two glasses?

‘May I take a last look in the drawing room?’ said Powerscourt. ‘And I shall keep you informed about anything I find out from the family.’

Powerscourt sat down in a large rocking chair and thought about the life and death of Christopher Montague, one-time art critic. Why had some of the books been removed? Why had his desk and his pockets been so scrupulously emptied of their contents? And why some of the books? Why not all of them? And what about those glasses?

As he made his way back towards Markham Square, he wondered if Montague’s private life held the key to his demise. Perhaps the books had been removed as a means of demeaning the dead, to strip him of his most cherished possessions, to leave him mentally naked before his maker. All he could do, thought Powerscourt, was to find all the people who had known him in his last days, to tease out of his relations whether any private scandal had brought sudden and terrible death to Brompton Square.

William Alaric Piper and Edmund de Courcy were sitting in Piper’s little office behind the paintings in their gallery in Old Bond Street.

‘I think I’ve found a Raphael, William,’ said de Courcy.

‘A Raphael, by God!’ William Alaric Piper’s eyes lit up. His brain hurtled through the prices paid for Raphaels over the past hundred years. He rubbed his hands together in anticipation. ‘Where is it? Is it real? How broke is the owner?’

‘It’s in a decaying Elizabethan mansion in Warwickshire,’ replied de Courcy, smiling as he saw the torrents of greed rushing across his partner’s face. It was always like this with anything worth more than ten thousand pounds. ‘I had a pretty good look at it,’ de Courcy went on. ‘For my money I should say it is genuine but I couldn’t be sure. There’s the usual collection of Old Master fakes and forgeries, a couple of Van Dycks that can’t be more than fifty years old, a very doubtful Fragonard, a hopeless attempt at a Caravaggio. As for the owner, his house is almost falling down. And he’s the only man I’ve ever met with a reaction like that.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Piper, thumbing through one of the cards on his desk, checking the Raphael valuations.

‘Normally, William, when you tell them that you might, just might, be interested in buying a painting, they tell you first of all that it was purchased by great great great great grandfather James in Rome or some other Italian bazaar over two hundred years ago. They tell you how much he paid for it. Then you get all the rubbish about how long it’s been in the family, how they couldn’t bear to part with it, how it has to be passed on along with the house and the estate and the port to future generations. One man who never sold actually got quite tearful when he thought of the family Titian being taken off his walls. But this Hammond-Burke fellow asked straight away how much it was worth. Rather like he was selling a horse.’

‘Not much money in Titians,’ said Piper sorrowfully. He had a soft spot for Titian. ‘Too many of the damned things. Silly old man lived till he was nearly a hundred, as you know. If only he’d died young like our friend Giorgione in the exhibition, he wouldn’t have left so many damned paintings. Then the prices would be better.’