Conor Fitzgerald - Fatal Touch

“He was a collector of some sort as well as an artist?” said Caterina. “He seems to prefer unfinished drawings to paintings.”

“Art forgery,” said Blume. “The name had been bothering me for a while but I remember now. Treacy. My father mentioned him a few times. Admiringly, if I recall. Not an artist, an art forger.”

Caterina tapped a thumbnail against her bottom teeth. “That means corrupt dealers, theft, fencing goods, high prices. There is a possibility of some background to the death. At least we have a category of suspect.”

The pictures and the books in his room reminded Blume of his parents and their apartment, the one he still lived in. Their books, reproductions, and papers, most of which he had preserved after their death, remained in their study, but not gathering dust. He kept it clean, spending hours in there himself, like he did as a child, just looking at the pictures in the art books.

He went over to a leather-topped writing desk, picked up some papers, and looked through them. They consisted of bank statements, utility bills, discarded receipts, a few stubs from airplane tickets. He looked at the bank statements, and saw Treacy had a balance of € 243,722 in his Unicredit checking account. Not bad. The plane ticket stubs were all for London and Rome. Treacy had made at least two round trips in the last year. The utility bills were modest. An injunction demanding payment for a TV license lay on top of a brochure for holiday homes in Umbria.

“It’s legal to copy pictures, you know,” he said, dropping the papers back on the desk. “Only the moment a fake is offered for sale as an original does it become a crime, and even then it’s hard to prove intent. See this?” Blume pointed to a drawing of a nude male in red and black chalk on what looked like old paper.

“A naked man,” said Caterina. “He drew that?”

“It looks like a Pontormo, but it’s signed Treacy,” said Blume. “Also, it’s hanging here in his own room.”

“What does that signify?”

“Nothing. Just that he was a very good draftsman.”

Blume wandered over to a mahogany bookshelf. The lower shelves had been removed to make room for large volumes, mostly art books and reproductions, but Blume also saw coverless dictionaries, road maps, atlases, and journals piled up.

The upper shelves contained mainly novels. Amis, Arpino, Atwood, Banville, Barnes, Beckett, Bronte. An organized man. A man of leisure. A foolscap-size notebook with a marbled cover lay open on the writing desk.

“No date on this,” said Blume, looking at the spidery script. It was written with black fountain ink.

“Not great penmanship for an artist,” said Caterina, coming over. “I can’t make out a word.”

“He was getting on in years and if he was in pain, it would have an effect.”

Marking the open page with his thumb, he turned to the inside cover of the notebook, and saw Treacy had written his name. Below that he had written “Diary,” then crossed it out and written “Untitled,” which was crossed out and replaced with “Painting my Outward Walls,” also crossed out. The final title seemed to be “An (im)practical handbook for…” but he had evidently not decided who it was for. Blume returned to the page he had found lying open.

“I can see why it was hard for you to make out,” he said. “It’s in English.”

“I know English,” said Caterina. She sounded very offended. “My father was a NATO liaison officer with the army. I studied in English-language schools in Germany, Turkey, and Canada, till I was fifteen, and later I lived in London for four years. Didn’t you read my file?”

“Sure I did. I must have forgotten.”

“You didn’t read it. You didn’t know I had a kid, either.”

“OK, I didn’t read it, then. I just read the reports about you from the immigration department, two recommendations from magistrates, the details of a few cases. I skipped the rest. What you did in your childhood is not relevant.”

“How come you know so much about painting?”

“My parents were art historians, and so I used-ah, well done. Very clever. OK, sometimes the past is relevant. But only incidentally. Still, it’s good to know you speak English, if we’re going to have to read through this guy’s papers.”

He took the book in his hands and, frowning a little at the poor handwriting and crossings-out, read:

“Chemically, Cinnabar is also called Vermilion or cinnabarite is red mercury (II) sulfide (HgS), a common ore of mercury and an essential part of our palette. Make sure your cinnabar really comes from China, as Italian dealers have been known to fake the provenance by using Chinese papers to contain the powder. I got the perfect mix from a monk, of all people, whom I met one day on the bridge of San Francesco in Subiaco…”

Blume stopped reading, as he spotted the spines of two more notebooks of the same type among the novels and Giunti art books. Foolscap-size notebooks. Impossible to find in Italy. He had ones just like them at home. They had belonged to his father, one of whose nostrums to his unlistening son had been never to commit anything to loose-leaf paper. Well, maybe he had been listening despite himself if he remembered it now. Always use a hardback expensive lined notebook, his father had said. He had them sent over from New York, and this in the days before the internet made it easy. Then he had got himself killed in a bank raid and left half a shelf of them, unused and new then, unused and yellowing now.

The notebook on the desk was half full and seemed to be dedicated entirely to technical advice on oils, grinding, canvases. It contained some interesting illustrations in light pencil, including three versions of Durer’s hare and a page of practice signatures, such as Blume used to do when he needed to sign his own lousy school reports in his father’s name. The other two notebooks were full of entries, some of which seemed to have double dates, others none.

Every so often, Treacy had whited out the ruled lines and sketched on the page. Most of the sketches were of single body parts. A hand, a foot, the curve of a neck.

Caterina had picked up one of the first notebooks and was staring at it.

“It seems to be a manual for painters,” said Blume. “It’s full of recipes…” he flicked forward a few pages. “How to age paper… convincing spots. Freehand composition… We’re getting to the point where we should wait for instructions from the investigating magistrate. Still, I think we should take the notebooks.”

Blume found three plastic bags for the notebooks, packaged them, and was about to drop them into his bag when he noticed Caterina’s shoulder bag.

“What’s in your bag?”

“This?” said Caterina, giving it a pat and blushing slightly. “Nothing. It’s empty. I didn’t know what sort of bag would be best for working at a crime scene.”

Blume nodded sympathetically. “I’ve never worked it out either. I often use a bag, sometimes an old flat leather one that belonged to my father. But you can also use one of the official reinforced briefcases, they’re bulky, though. So you’ve nothing in that bag?”

“My wallet, a pen, phone. That’s it.”

“Here. Drop these notebooks in.”

Caterina lifted the flap of her bag, and angled in the notebooks. They were just too big to allow her to close the flap over them.

“Gives you the look of a student,” said Blume. “Suits you.”

“I’m too old to be a student.”

“We need to log the items we remove from here,” said Blume.

“Do we need to take these paintings, too? They must be valuable.”

“I’m not sure that they are,” said Blume. “I need to take another look at them. I think we might put a guard on this place. Someone to stand outside in the sun for hours making sure no one comes in here. Grattapaglia springs to mind.”