Death of an Old Master (17 page)

He stared briefly at the Moghul chessmen on their table by the window, standing to attention, waiting for another battle.

‘Christopher Montague was about to become a very famous man in the world of art. Two books, the second due out very soon, on Northern Italian paintings. One article which demolishes most
of the pictures in the de Courcy and Piper Gallery as copies, forgeries or fakes. So who would you turn to now to know if your Italian Old Master is genuine? Why, to Christopher Montague. He would
have made a fortune charging for the correct attributions, maybe a percentage of the sale price every time a painting changes hands. Think of it! An income guaranteed for life! And if these
Americans start buying up Old Masters in huge numbers, the prices will go up. Ten per cent of fifty thousand pounds could go a long way.’

Powerscourt paused and looked at Johnny Fitzgerald’s glass. It was, unusually, empty. ‘So this is the question, Lucy and Johnny. Who held that position before? Who was Christopher
Montague going to depose, to displace? Who saw their livelihood, maybe not their livelihood, but their prospects for great wealth, suddenly removed from under their noses? Jealousy, professional
not personal, and greed are a formidable cocktail.’

Lady Lucy looked at her husband again. ‘So, Francis,’ she said, ‘according to your theory, somewhere in London is an art expert who was going to be toppled from his throne. And
he killed Christopher Montague?’

‘Correct. And that explains why the magazine article disappeared and some of the books were taken away. The murderer couldn’t leave anything behind which might allow somebody else to
finish the article and ruin his own position.’

Johnny Fitzgerald helped himself to another bottle of claret from the sideboard. ‘I’m not convinced by that theory, Francis,’ he said, wrestling with the corkscrew.
‘Let’s try another one to do with the art world,’ he went on with a smile as the cork popped out of the bottle. ‘Let’s just think about that exhibition he was writing
about. Suppose you were in charge of that. Suppose you hoped to sell lots and lots of lovely Venetian paintings. You hear on the grapevine that somebody is going to denounce most of them as fakes
or forgeries. You are going to lose a great deal of money. Twenty Titians, was it, or something like that, they thought they had? Now down to three? Seventeen Titians would have made you pots of
money. Now it’s all gone. So they trot round to Brompton Square with a piece of picture cord, ideal for garrotting, and wring Montague’s neck. And, for good measure, they destroy the
article and get rid of the compromising books.’

‘That’s not bad, Johnny, not bad at all,’ said Powerscourt. Fitzgerald happily refilled his glass. ‘But there’s one more possibility we shouldn’t
discount,’ Powerscourt went on. ‘The only problem is that it has to do with Montague’s will, and we don’t know what that contains. But it could work something like this.
Let’s think about Christopher Montague. He has bought his villa near Florence. He has part of one fortune still intact and stands to make many more by attributing works of art for a fee. But
somebody couldn’t wait for that to happen. Maybe the somebody was deep in debt and needed money in a hurry. The somebody was going to inherit all he had, including the Italian property.
Christopher Montague’s heir was also his murderer.’

‘Have you two quite finished?’ said Lady Lucy. ‘I think all of your theories are perfectly plausible and I am more confused than I was when we started.’

‘I’m sure we could produce some more potential murderers, Lady Lucy,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald cheerfully. ‘Maybe four’s quite enough for now.’

Powerscourt had wandered over to the chessboard. He lifted the Moghul King from its position in the back row and placed it carefully in the centre of the board.

‘Christopher Montague was going to be a King,’ he said sadly, ‘in his own world.’ Powerscourt looked carefully at the chessboard. ‘Maybe his Italian villa was
actually a castle. The bishops of the Church would have come to him to know about the authenticity of the pictures on their walls. The art dealers and the art experts would have been the knights,
darting in unexpected directions around the black and white squares of his life. Maybe Rosalind Buckley was the Queen. The serried ranks of pawns are the books and the articles Christopher Montague
had yet to write.’ Powerscourt picked up a knight and fingered it delicately.

‘For God’s sake,’ he was almost whispering, his mind far away.

Powerscourt picked up the King again and returned it gently to the back row.

William Alaric Piper stared in amazement at the front of Truscott Park, home of the Hammond-Burkes. There were builders everywhere, repairing windows, men on the roof taking out
the broken tiles, gardeners beginning the long task of restoring the grounds.

‘It does your heart good to see it,’ he said cheerfully to his companion. ‘The healing benison of the Old Masters comes to Warwickshire in the heart of the English
Midlands!’

‘It does indeed,’ said Roderick Johnston, senior curator of Renaissance paintings in the National Gallery. Privately Johnston thought with even greater gratitude of the benison of
his percentage in the final sale of Raphael’s
Holy Family
, purchased from Truscott Park for the princely sum of forty-five thousand pounds and sold on for a prince’s ransom,
eighty-five thousand pounds, to Mr William P. McCracken, American railroad tycoon and senior elder of the Third Presbyterian Church at Lincoln Street, Concord, Massachusetts. Twelve and a half per
cent of eighty-five thousand – he had made the calculation at least a hundred times – was ten thousand, six hundred and twenty-five. Pounds. Roderick Johnston could buy a new house. He
could buy a place in the sun large enough to hide from the nagging of his wife.

‘Come,’ said Piper, alighting from the carriage, ‘we must find our host.’ Johnston struggled towards the house with a number of heavy bags, including a number of long
metal tubes.

James Hammond-Burke too seemed to have been touched by the benison of the Old Masters. He greeted them warmly in his hall. He smiled. He offered them tea in the morning room, their conversation
broken occasionally by the shouts of the builders.

‘Mr Hammond-Burke, good morning to you,’ said William Alaric Piper, in fulsome mood. ‘Allow me to introduce Mr Roderick Johnston, the art expert of whom we spoke earlier. Mr
Hammond-Burke. Mr Johnston.’

Piper beamed happily round the room in proprietorial mood. ‘Work has already commenced, I see,’ he said. ‘How proud I am to think that the beautiful Raphael has enabled you, Mr
Hammond-Burke, to beautify your own surroundings in this way.’

James Hammond-Burke might have been feeling more cheerful. But he was as keen on money as before. ‘You said that Mr Johnston was going to make a proper inventory of the pictures
here,’ he said. ‘What do you think the chances are of finding some more Old Masters?’

Piper looked serious. ‘The quest for beauty is admirable indeed,’ he said, ‘but it will not be rushed.’ Don’t let them raise their hopes too high before we start,
he said to himself. ‘Mr Johnston will look at the pictures on display. Then he will search the rest of the house to see if there may be some hidden away in the servants’ bedrooms or
piled up at the back of an attic. Then Mr Johnston will work on his inventory. It may not be completed for some time. I see you have already looked out some of the papers and other documents
relating to the purchase of the works.’

Piper jumped slightly as a loud crash from outside echoed round the room. It sounded as though an entire section of bricks from the roof had all come down at once. The dust was rising half-way
up the windows.

‘My goodness me,’ he said, ‘the price of restoration may be temporary inconvenience, but it will pass. Is everything clear, Mr Hammond-Burke? My carriage is waiting and I
propose to leave you in the tender care of Mr Johnston here. You could not be in better hands!’

As his carriage rolled through the countryside back to the railway station, Piper thought again of the asterisk system developed by his partner Edmund de Courcy These told the
initiated how severe were the financial problems of the owners of the paintings. One asterisk meant major trouble, might be persuaded to sell. Two asterisks meant technically insolvent, desperate
to raise money. And three asterisks meant that financial Armageddon was imminent and might only be averted by the judicious sale of some of the family heirlooms. The fourth asterisk meant a house
where rather newer Old Masters could be planted to provide a history and a provenance that would convince unwary buyers. Creating a legend for the painting was how Piper put it to himself. For
concealed in Johnston’s luggage was a remarkable Gainsborough, and an eighteenth-century frame, broken down into sections. Johnston was to leave the Gainsborough in an attic for a few days
while he worked on the main body of the pictures on the walls of the house. Then it would be discovered. Johnston also had in his possession a couple of documents written on eighteenth-century
paper with eighteenth-century ink. These concerned the commission and receipt of a full-length portrait of Mr and Mrs Burke of Truscott Park, Warwickshire, and their two children. The
correspondence came from Bath. The signature at the bottom of the documents was of one Thomas Gainsborough, painter and Royal Academician.

Four asterisks, in the Piper code, meant that the owner was not to know that the painting had been planted on him, rediscovered, as Piper preferred to put it. He felt sure that Hammond-Burke
would be perfectly convincing in defence of the picture, particularly when he had been shown the papers. The alternative, the fifth asterisk, was to pay the alleged owner a large sum of money to
pretend the painting had been in his family for generations. William Alaric Piper didn’t like the option of the fifth asterisk. Think how much money he was paying out already. He had paid for
the painting to come into existence. He might have to pay more for a correct attribution. He had to pay for his gallery. It was hardly worth the enormous amount of time and thought and trouble he
took to bring new Old Masters into the world as it was.

As his train pulled out of Stratford station he thought again of Mr William P. McCracken. Piper had already promised him the possibility of a tasty morsel. How delighted, how generous McCracken
would be when it was dangled in front of his nose!

Lord Francis Powerscourt was back in the Royal Academy offices in Burlington House. Sir Frederick Lambert, President of the Academy, was looking slightly better than on the
last occasion, although the flesh was still sagging round his eyes. Powerscourt noticed that Dido preparing her pyre, one of Lambert’s own works, on view the previous visit, had been removed
from the walls. Perhaps the pyre had consumed her. In her place was a rather plaintive canvas, of Ariadne standing on the beach at Naxos, surrounded by her handmaidens. All bore the marks of a
night of debauchery, leaves and sections of bushes attached to their scanty robes, marks of wine, or perhaps blood, turning from purple into dark black. Just visible in the trees was Dionysus, a
cluster of grapes in his hair, a stick in his hand, grinning salaciously at his new initiates. On the hill behind the god, a solitary bull stood, pawing the ground, a reminder perhaps of the Bull
Ring and the Minotaur Ariadne had left behind in Crete. Higher up the hill a flock of sheep were grazing peacefully. Ariadne was staring sadly out to sea, one bloody hand raised to her forehead.
Making good speed across the dark blue waters of the Aegean, a ship with black sails was heading for Athens. Ariadne had been abandoned by her paramour. Theseus had deserted her on the island.

‘Sir Frederick,’ said Powerscourt, ‘I have been thinking a lot about the late Christopher Montague.’

Sir Frederick bowed his head as if they were both attending a memorial service.

‘How damaging would his article have been to the firm of de Courcy and Piper? Could it have brought them down?’

‘Well . . .’ said Sir Frederick, pausing while a coughing fit racked his body. ‘Forgive me. The article would have caused a sensation. It might have brought them down –
all would depend on the strength of their financial position, their reserves and so on. It is certainly likely that they would have lost a lot of sales. But they could have survived.’

‘And what of Montague’s own position?’ Powerscourt went on. ‘Would he have become the foremost authority on Venetian paintings, whether they were genuine or not, I
mean?’

Another coughing fit reduced Lambert to silence. He took a clean handkerchief out of his drawer and wiped his lips. Powerscourt saw that the handkerchief was now flecked with blood. Was time
running out for the President of the Royal Academy?

‘He would have become the leading expert on that period, yes.’

‘So how much would he have been able to charge for these attributions, Sir Frederick? Presumably they could have added tens of thousands of pounds to the value of the painting? And,
equally pertinent,’ Powerscourt was trying to make the interview as short as possible, ‘who would he have replaced as the main authenticator of such pictures?’

Sir Frederick looked at him sadly. A minor coughing fit gave rise to another handkerchief, produced as if by magic, from the drawer. Powerscourt wondered how many he had to bring with him each
day. Ten? Twenty?

‘When I became President of this institution, Lord Powerscourt, I tried to introduce a code of conduct for the attribution of paintings. I was trying to take it out of the shadows of greed
and secrecy where it has dwelt for so long. I failed. None of the participants would agree to it.’

Sir Frederick gazed sadly at his painting of the abandoned Ariadne. There had been no code of conduct for the behaviour of heroes, breaking all the rules as they swaggered across the ancient
world.