David Dickinson - Death of an Old Master

Buckley looked reassured. Lady Lucy came back to take him under her wing once more.

‘I’m going to drink one more glass,’ Powerscourt said to Pugh, ‘and then I must go. I promised to tell the President of the Royal Academy what happened. He’s at death’s door, poor man.’

‘Of course,’ said Pugh. ‘I hope you realize, Powerscourt, that the people here may be drinking my health this afternoon. But the real credit, the real congratulations should be with you. You provided the bullets. I merely fired them.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Powerscourt with a smile and slipped from the room. Two minutes after his departure the party was interrupted. A bulky-looking man banged his cane on the floor and asked for silence.

‘I am a Government Messenger,’ he announced. ‘I am looking for a certain Lord Francis Powerscourt. I have reason to believe he is here. I have a letter for him from the Prime Minister.’

The curtains were tightly drawn in Sir Frederick Lambert’s study. Powerscourt noticed that the piles of foreign stamps were still lined up in rows on the table in front of him. He thought the President of the Royal Academy was looking slightly better this evening. He was still deathly pale but his eyes were bright. Maybe it was the drugs.

‘Only ten minutes at most,’ said the nurse, ‘he gets tired so quickly now.’

Powerscourt told the old man the details of the trial, the acquittal of Horace Buckley, the unmasking and discovery of Orlando Blane.

‘How strange that it should have nothing to do with the art world at all. Just a jilted lover. Hell hath no fury.’ Sir Frederick paused and began to cough. It had turned into a dry hacking cough now. There were no handkerchiefs stained with blood secreted down the side of his chair.

‘Tell me about Orlando,’ he said. ‘Did you say he was married now? That might settle him down.’

Powerscourt replied that Orlando seemed to be enjoying most of the benefits of the married state without actually going through the ceremony itself. A feeble laugh came from Sir Frederick. ‘Nice girl?’ he said.

‘Very beautiful,’ said Powerscourt. ‘I think her parents forced her into a marriage she did not want. Mama did not want her to marry Orlando.’

‘Some mothers in the past have been very taken with young Orlando, Powerscourt,’ said Sir Frederick. ‘Pity he didn’t find the right one.’ The old man suddenly heaved himself up in his chair. He reached over to his desk and brought over a number of sheets of his headed notepaper.

‘Could you write a letter for me, Powerscourt? As you did that affidavit? I might just be able to sign it.’

‘Of course, Sir Frederick, I’m more than happy to do that.’

Powerscourt began taking down the old man’s words. ‘To Signor Pietro Rossi, Senior Director, Rossi’s Picture Restoration Company, 217 Via Veneto, Rome.’ The old man paused, panting slightly. ‘Rossi’s are the leading picture restorers in Italy,’ he said, ‘do a lot of work for the Vatican.’ He paused again. Powerscourt thought his time must be nearly up.

‘Dear Signor Rossi, I would like to recommend most highly a young Englishman of my acquaintance called Orlando Blane. He was one of the most brilliant students we ever had at the Royal Academy. I believe you would find his talents most satisfactory in your business. With best wishes to you and your family . . .’

Powerscourt passed the letter and his pen over. Sir Frederick paused before he signed it. He hoped his hands would do what they were told. In the end he took it at a gallop. Frederick Lambert, he wrote as fast as he could and sank back exhausted in his chair. The nurse was looking angrily at Powerscourt.

‘And tell young Orlando,’ the President of the Royal Academy said, ‘that I’m going to change my will. Don’t see why I should give that much money to the Society for Distressed Watercolourists. Tell him I’m going to leave him twenty thousand pounds. That should set the two of them up in Rome.’

Piper was going through his third explanation of the day to Gregory Hopkin, the director of the National Gallery, at ten to four that afternoon. William P. McCracken, purchaser of a fake Gainsborough for fifteen thousand pounds and a real Raphael for eighty-five thousand pounds, was due in ten minutes’ time. Roderick Johnston, senior curator of Renaissance paintings, was sitting on the director’s left, hoping that he would not be interrogated about his role in the attribution of the Raphael.

Hopkin was virtually certain that he was being told a pack of lies. He did not see how it was possible for Piper not to have known what de Courcy was doing. He did not see how the instructions for the creation of the forgeries could have been devised without the approval of both of them. In an ideal world he would have thrown William Alaric Piper out of his office and left him to the wolves. But, as Gregory Hopkin reminded himself sadly while he listened to the flow of injured innocence and personal betrayal pouring out of his visitor, it was not a perfect world. There was nothing the art circles of London or any other international centre feared more than scandal. The dealers and the galleries knew far better than their customers how fine a line divided a fake Van Dyck from the real thing, a genuine Titian from one of Orlando Blane’s accomplished forgeries. The whole edifice depended on trust. It depended on the customers being reassured by the elegant offices, the fine suits, the languid tones of the English upper classes. The clients had to think they were dealing with a world with the highest possible standards, rather than one permanently on the edge of fraud.

If scandal broke, the whole London art market would be plunged into chaos. Clients would go elsewhere, to Paris or to Rome. The Americans who were reviving the market and bringing enormous prices to Old Bond Street would go elsewhere. Nobody would believe a word the London art market said. They would have the mark of Cain upon them. It could take years to recover, if they ever did. So far, Hopkin admitted to himself, Piper had extricated himself from his first two Americans rather well. But the third had paid the most money. Eighty-five thousand pounds for a Raphael was a world record at the time. Another fifteen thousand for an Orlando Blane purporting to be a Gainsborough. So, at whatever cost, William P. McCracken had to be placated.

The opening exchanges were not propitious. ‘What about these bloody forgeries then?’ said McCracken, no longer a rich foreign visitor in the National Gallery, but an American rail tycoon, a ruthless millionaire. He unwrapped a parcel and placed the two paintings on a chair beside him.

Piper went through his customary routine of how the rotten apple had been removed, the boils lanced, the Augean stables cleansed, how a bright new dawn had arrived for The Salisbury Gallery.

‘I’m seeing my lawyers in the morning,’ said McCracken. ‘That thing,’ he pointed to the Gainsborough, sitting innocently on their chair, ‘is a fake.’

‘Let me assure you, Mr McCracken,’ the director of the National Gallery thought that McCracken might respond better to a man with clean hands, ‘that if you wish to back out of the deal, Mr Piper here will refund you the money immediately.’

‘I have a cheque here, Mr McCracken. Made out to you.’ Piper fished about in his jacket pocket and produced a cheque made out to William P. McCracken for fifteen thousand pounds. He laid it on the table.

‘That’s peanuts,’ snarled William P. McCracken. ‘You took eighty-five thousand pounds of my money for this other forgery, conceived in your gallery, Mr Piper, and executed by your confederate, the forger, up there in Norfolk.’

‘That’s not a forgery, that Raphael, Mr McCracken, it’s real,’ said William Alaric Piper.