Caravaggio's Angel (21 page)

But although that was gratifying, it was also puzzling. If, as seemed almost certain, one of the pictures was ‘wrong’, that had to be the most likely candidate. That or Freddie Angelo’s – but his proof seemed incontrovertible. Which left the Louvre and the Getty – both equally unimaginable.

Perhaps there really were four versions. But that, too, seemed unlikely. Caravaggio had often made more than one version of a picture, but four? He was a painter, not a factory.

Meanwhile, I had other things to worry about.

19

London, October

The body was exhumed the day after my meeting with Lindsay. Juliette had been buried in the little cemetery at St Front, with its cypress trees and glass-roofed tombs. She’d have been stored in one of those stone drawers – did they cement you in? Would she have had to be chipped out? Not that anything would have set very hard quite yet . . .
Figaro
, which I now checked daily, carried a picture of gaping onlookers gathered around the police tent that had been erected over the Beaupré family vault. None of the faces meant anything to me. Oddly, the accompanying piece wasn’t by Olivier. It wasn’t anything very significant – merely a résumé of the proceedings to date – but even so, surely (if the
Fig
really was giving him a trial) this was his story?

As always seemed to happen these days, Olivier’s cell-phone switched me straight to voicemail. So I called
Figaro
. The switchboard seemed to recognize his name, and put me through, but the phone at the other end rang and rang. No one answered.

I rang off and dialled
Figaro
again. This time I asked the switchboard to put me through to the news editor. When he answered, I said I was trying to contact Olivier Peytoureau.

‘Ah, Olivier. He had some bad news – had to go back home.’

My mouth felt suddenly dry. ‘Bad news? Not too serious, I hope?’

‘His wife died,’ the news editor said shortly.

‘Delphine?
Died?
’ I thought of cutting up melons together, and nearly wept into the phone. However would he cope? And his children, poor things. ‘What happened? She wasn’t ill.’

‘No, it was a car accident, I believe. They called yesterday afternoon . . . Poor fellow’s stunned, you can imagine. Are you a friend of his?’

‘Sort of. Thanks, I’ll try and get in touch with him.’

No. It couldn’t be a coincidence.

Retching my breakfast into the lavatory bowl, I wondered how many people could say they literally turned their own stomach. I should never have touched Olivier. I’d known it from the first guilty moment: rule number one. When he phoned that morning I should have told him, no. Or met him in a restaurant. I didn’t have to invite him round. And now Delphine had died. All because of me.

I rinsed out my mouth and held my face under the cold tap, and promised her ghost that I’d get the bastard.

My friend Alice, coming into the Ladies just then, looked startled. ‘Did you say something, Reg?’

‘No, no. Sorry. Talking to myself.’

‘You look awful. Are you all right?’

‘Had a bit of a shock. I’ll be OK.’

A car accident. Well, it could happen to anyone. But the roads round St Front were as unthreatening as roads could well be in the twenty-first century – hardly any traffic, and none of it fast. Your most dangerous moment, generally speaking, would be trying to pass a combine harvester.

No wonder Olivier wasn’t answering his phone. I ought to leave him alone. I must be the last person he’d want to speak to. But somehow, I had to find out more.

I pulled out my Meyrignac folder, flipped through it to see if anyone possible might suggest themselves – and came across the note Olivier’s uncle Francis had slipped in with his package. It was scribbled on his builder’s headed paper, and it gave his number. I looked at my watch – eleven o’clock: but of course France was an hour ahead. If I tried in half an hour, he’d be home for lunch.

He was. ‘Laronze.’

‘Monsieur Laronze, it’s Régine Lee from London. I heard that Delphine Peytoureau was in a car accident. Is it true?’

‘I’m afraid so. God knows how they’ll manage, poor things. The funeral’s the day after tomorrow.’

‘What happened, do you know?’

‘Hit and run,’ said Francis laconically. ‘He forced her off the road and she ran into a tree. Died instantly . . . They haven’t caught him, the
salaud
. There’s a red mark on the car, that’s all they know. But there are a lot of red cars in France.’

I had a vision of Rigaut’s red BMW. You wouldn’t want a scratch on that expensive bodywork. If one appeared, you’d get it fixed. At once. I wondered if the same thought had occurred to Olivier.

I thanked Francis, then took a deep breath and tried the Les Pruniers number. Magali answered. I said, ‘Hello, is your papa there?’

She yelled, ‘Papa, it’s for you.’

Olivier said, ‘
Oui?
’ He sounded grave, distracted.

‘Olivier, it’s Régine. I heard . . .’

‘I can’t believe it,’ he said. ‘I just can’t believe it. I don’t know what I’m going to do.’

‘They haven’t found who did it?’

‘No. I don’t get the impression they’re looking very hard,’ he said bitterly.

‘Your uncle said there was a red mark on the car. I was thinking of that red BMW.’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you think –?’

‘No idea. Nothing would surprise me now.’

I remembered the mix of guilt, rage and impotence that had swamped me when I heard about Juliette. Olivier must be feeling the same, but raised to the power of a thousand. It was as if the spirit of Caravaggio, that unquiet and violent soul, had somehow infused itself into his pictures, as though anyone who touched them was condemned to experience something of his own lawless desperation.

‘My God, Olivier. What can I say?’

‘Not much,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing to say.’

‘I’ll get that bastard if it’s the last thing I do.’

‘It probably will be,’ he said, and rang off.

After the madness, my phone was now reduced to silence. Nobody called. And my passport remained in Paddington Green. Surely they’d have done the autopsy as soon as they’d exhumed the body? And surely, once it was done, I was entitled to know the results? Quite apart from anything else, I urgently needed, for both professional and personal reasons, to visit Paris again. Finally I lost patience and phoned Detective Sergeant Edmunds. Naturally he wasn’t at his desk, so I left a message and awaited his call. Two days later it came.

‘Dr Lee? John Edmunds here from the Metropolitan Police. I believe you wanted to speak to me. Is there some-thing I can do for you?’

What a time to play silly buggers – as though he and I didn’t know exactly what he could do for me. However, I recalled my father’s maxim – always be polite to police and customs officials: they have the upper hand. So I said mildly, ‘Oh, Sergeant Edmunds. Thanks for calling. I was wondering when I could have my passport back. They exhumed the body a while ago – there must be an autopsy report by now. I assume they haven’t found anything suspicious or they’d have got in touch. ‘ ‘That’s down to Lebrun,’ he said. I waited for him to say, I’ll give him a ring and get right back to you, but no.

Mildness was clearly wasted on Edmunds. ‘Then please get in touch with him and let me know what he says. Or I’ll ring him myself. Perhaps that would be better.’

That got him going. ‘
I’ll
ring him,’ he replied sharply. ‘I’ll get back to you.’

I told him, as evenly as I could manage, that I’d appre-ciate it if he did that, and the sooner the better.

Predictably enough, he did nothing of the sort. My sanity was saved, however, by an email from Lindsay Hillier.
Some results from the Louvre. Why don’t you come round
and see.

When I rang she said she was free for an hour that afternoon, if I wanted to come. Glad of any distraction, I hotfooted it to Bloomsbury, where I found her deep in conversation about resins with a man I recognized from the Gallery’s own technical department. I waited at the back of the room, where she kept the pictures she was currently working on – a stiff eighteenth-century portrait, a Russian-looking abstract from the agitprop period – and tried, inconclusively, to decide whether they were or were not what they purported to be. Finally the resins conversation drew to an end, and it was my turn.

‘Ah, Reggie, yes. Something quite interesting here, I think.’ Lindsay rummaged among her folders.

I tried to keep quiet but it was too much for me and I burst out, ‘You mean it’s a fake?’

‘Not exactly.’ She grinned, found the folder and laid it on the desk. It contained a list of pigments, a number of photographs, and various notes from the person at the Louvre. Lindsay scanned through it. ‘The period seems right – the right pigments, and hand-ground. It’s not on its original stretcher, so that doesn’t help us much. But it’s certainly not a modern forgery. But now look at this.’

She pulled out three photographs and laid them on the desk. One showed the Louvre picture, the next was an X-ray, showing where it had been blocked out in lead white on the dark ground. The third at first glance looked like another photo of the same picture, but when you looked .more closely, you could see that it was slightly different. I recognized my own photograph of the Jaubertie picture.

‘D’you see,’ Lindsay said, ‘there are no
pentimenti
on the X-ray.’ It was true: no ghost limbs or vanished figures pointed to the usual second thoughts and overpaintings. ‘Usually you’d say that pointed to a copy,’ she went on. ‘But of course that’s not necessarily true with Caravaggio. He often didn’t alter his compositions at all, even when they were quite complicated.’

I remembered Freddie Angelo’s demonstration. ‘Perhaps it’s because he used lenses.’

‘Perhaps,’ Lindsay said sceptically. ‘But now look at this.’ She produced a sheet of tracing-paper, on which were the outlines of the picture’s main features – the Angel, St Cecilia, the lute, the violin. ‘I traced this from your photo. And now –’ She superimposed the tracing on the Louvre picture. It fitted exactly. ‘That’s strange for a start – when he made a new version of a picture he usually changed some of the details. But not this one. The only difference is the placing of that flower on the music. Everything else is identical. It must mean someone requested an exact copy of a particular painting. So, that leaves us with two possibilities. One, Caravaggio makes his picture, someone comes to see it while it’s in his studio, or even when it’s been hung in his patron’s house, and likes it so much they want a copy. So he makes one. It’s by no means unknown – he did it more than once.’

‘And the other?’

‘The other is, he refuses to do it, or isn’t around, or maybe he’s already dead. So someone else makes the copy. So in that sense, although it’s not actually a Caravaggio, it’s not a fake either. That’s what I think seems to be most likely. It would explain the contemporary materials and the different quality. Look at the treatment of the fur here.’ She pointed at the Jaubertie picture. ‘It’s so delicate and alive in this one, and so flat and heavy in the other. And her face – and his. The Louvre one’s wooden by comparison. You could never prove it, of course.’

Of course. But now that Lindsay had offered a reasoned explanation for what had until this moment been no more than a feeling, the difference in quality between the Louvre picture and the Jaubertie one seemed so obvious, so glar-ingly apparent, that there could be no more doubt. Caravaggio could not possibly, even on a very bad day, have painted the Louvre picture.

‘Here.’ She gathered together the various items spread out on her desk, shuffled them back into their folder and held it out. ‘Why don’t you take them with you? They’re more use to you than me. I’d have expected it to take longer, but Judith said it was apparently all to hand. Somebody had already had all this stuff done, all she had to do was find the file.’

That made me sit up. ‘Really? Did she say who?’

‘I’m afraid I didn’t think to ask.’

Back at the office I pulled out my bulging Caravaggio file in order to add the folder to it. Something fell out, and when I bent to pick it up I saw that it was the
Partir, c’est
mourir un peu, Martyr, c’est pourrir un peu
pamphlet. As I leafed through it, something caught my eye.

I looked again. Surely it couldn’t be?

It was.

The photos in the pamphlet were not of the picture that hung in the Louvre now. They unmistakably showed the Jaubertie picture, with its little flower laid across the centre fold of the music book. At some point – presumably during the missing weeks between the picture’s theft and its reappearance – the two must have been switched. Juliette hadn’t said anything about this, whether by acci-dent or design I would now never know (and what else, I again wondered, had she left unsaid?) But there could be no other explanation. After they’d abducted the picture they’d driven it round Paris, taking the photographs that they’d use over the next few weeks. Then they’d taken it to La Jaubertie. While the photos were being teasingly sent to the press, and the police were vainly setting dawn traps to try and catch the thieves, the picture was hundreds of miles away. And when eventually a different picture was returned, nobody, in the excitement, noticed the substitution.

Had Juliette known? Impossible to imagine she had not. The one essential detail, unmentioned.

I rang the library and inquired whether they had any old illustrated books on Caravaggio. Something prewar.

Yes, they had one or two. If I wanted to come down, they’d get them out for me.

When I got there the librarian had two books waiting, one from 1907, one from 1928. Both were in German, but that didn’t bother me – it was the plates I was after. Staggering under their combined weight, I took them to a table.

The 1907 book didn’t show the St Cecilia, but the 1928 one did. It mentioned the three versions, the church’s, Del Monte’s and Doria’s, but pictured just one, the one belong-ing to the Louvre. The photograph was black and white, but it was good enough. There was the little flower, crisp and clear, lying across the centre of the music book; and the Angel had two fingers extended. It was incontrovertibly the Jaubertie picture. QED.

A day passed, and then another: still no word from Edmunds.

Before the exhumation I’d become relatively calm, but now, perhaps irrationally, the jitters returned in full force. Naturally I knew I hadn’t done anything, but in a battle with Jean-Jacques Rigaut mere innocence seemed a puny weapon. Who could have been more innocent than Delphine? When the phone didn’t ring, which was most of the time, I couldn’t concentrate, and when it did my heart leapt into my mouth.