Pandora (76 page)

‘Goering knew little about painting,’ went on Zac disdainfully, ‘and often handed the most exquisite pictures, not realizing their true worth, on to his trusted advisors. He had already rejected one Raphael,
A Portrait of a Young Man
, looted from Cracow, in favour of a Watteau. Perhaps Hope and Pandora’ – Zac pointed across the rapt court at the picture – ‘were not nude or fat enough for the crude taste of the Reichsmarschall.’

‘Have you been back to Vienna?’ asked Naomi gently.

‘I went back to the family apartment in Singer Strasse and to Jacob’s gallery. They had both been bombed flat and replaced by modern buildings.’ For a moment Zac, white and cavernous-eyed as an El Greco, couldn’t speak. ‘All my life, I have had a sense of loss,’ he whispered finally. ‘The Raphael is the only part of my past left.’

A very good morning for Zac.

‘Poor boy looks awfully upset,’ sighed Raymond.

‘Ought to be given a scholarship to RADA,’ snorted Aunt Lily.

The judge called an adjournment and bore a clanking David off to lunch, which made the Belvedons very twitchy.

Outside the court, the photographers and reporters swooped on Zac.

‘Over thirty billion dollars of looted art is still missing,’ he was telling them. ‘We are determined to score a moral victory, so our case will give real support to other Jewish families for their own claims. Ouch,’ he howled as someone kicked him sharply on the ankle.

‘I hope you’re going to donate between eight and ten million pounds to helping their causes,’ mocked a voice.

Swinging round in fury, Zac found a ravishingly pretty girl, with a smooth brown face and Marmite-coloured hair drawn back in a neat French pleat. She was wearing a beautifully cut holly-green suit. Only the long legs were recognizable. It was Sienna, studless, ringless, tattoos concealed, Belvedon diamond hanging from her neck, pallor despatched by three days on the sun-bed, posing as a cool young Portia for the court.

‘Aren’t you sorry your side opted to cross-question me?’ she said, laughing in Zac’s face, before scampering off after Raymond for vegetable lasagne and a large vodka and tonic in the pub.

Zac was totally thrown. For the rest of the afternoon he couldn’t get his head together at all.

‘What on earth’s happened to Sienna?’ hissed an equally fazed Anthea.

‘Rupert Campbell-Black took her to the Ritz and told her to take the heavy metal off her face,’ said Jupiter in amusement.

‘Ay bet it wasn’t the only thing he asked her to take off,’ said Anthea furiously.

She had also noticed David engagingly crinkling his eyes at that uppity Naomi Cohen all morning. Life was very hard.

During a long hot afternoon, Sampson Brunning’s cross-examination took Zac apart. Why had he changed his name to Ansteig? Wasn’t it a shame his mother was dead and beyond a DNA test or Zac could have proved he was really Benjamin’s great-grandson rather than a wide boy on the make.

Naomi leapt to her feet. ‘That’s not a proper question,’ she cried reproachfully, then, peeping at Willoughby Evans under her lashes, ‘as my learned friend well knows.’

‘I agree. Mr Brunning,’ reproved Willoughby Evans, ‘you know how to behave; please do so.’

‘Sorry, m’lord,’ said an unrepentant Sampson.

Why, he asked, had Zac abused Emerald’s trust, using her to worm his way into the Belvedon household, accepting its generous hospitality as he snooped around spying?

‘I wanted my picture back, for Christ’s sake.’

How had he managed to photograph the Raphael?

Zac looked meditatively across at a terrified, tight-lipped Anthea. He would have been quite happy to drop her in it, but both Si and Naomi had persuaded him it would make him appear too much of a cad.

‘It was the day of Emerald’s birthday,’ he drawled. ‘Lady Belvedon must have been fazed because she was meeting Emerald’s mom and dad for the first time, and left the door up to the Blue Tower open.’

‘So you invaded her bedroom.’ Sampson must have put his upper lip in rollers during the lunch hour. You would have thought Zac had raped a Mother Superior.

‘A member of the family had told me I was getting warm. I had to check everywhere.’

‘Of course, ten million would come in very useful.’

‘The money was irrelevant.’

‘Are you acquainted,’ sighed Sampson, ‘with the English expression “pull the other leg . . .”? Why didn’t you take the painting at once?’

Everyone jumped as Lily’s mobile rang.

‘Hell-o?’ Lily held it like an unexploded bomb.

‘Lily,’ hissed Anthea in horror. An usher tapped Lily on the shoulder, waving a finger.

‘That was Rosemary,’ announced Lily, switching off. ‘She can’t make it. She’s awfully elusive at the moment.’

Everyone except David suppressed smiles.

Peregrine went back to playing Solitaire on his laptop.

‘That night of the theft,’ persisted Sampson, ‘you admitted, did you not, you had never loved Miss Cartwright and had used both her and her two families.’

‘I said,’ Zac answered bleakly, ‘that anyone who had reason to hate as much as I had, was incapable of love.’

‘And you admit you pressured her into the finding of her birth parents.’

‘I guess so.’

‘Shady, and cold as the grave,’ observed Lily, taking a swig from her brandy flask.

By the end of the afternoon, if Sampson had tarred and dropped him in soot, he couldn’t have blackened Zac’s character more effectively.

Keeping his laptop free for Solitaire, Peregrine, Sampson’s junior, wrote ‘Day two’ at the top of a lined foolscap pad. The temperature had plummeted. The day was grey and overcast, lamps were being turned on all round the court. Sienna was due first into the witness box.

‘Don’t let her near the media,’ Sampson had begged Jupiter, ‘or she’ll cook all our geese.’

Sienna, however, rolled up at court wearing a little crocheted suit in the burnt orange of a robin’s breast. She was greeted by a chorus of wolf whistles from the press and a large bunch of flowers sent by Rupert.

‘Saw you on television looking sensational,’ he had written on the card. ‘Go and annihilate them.’

‘I’ll put them in water for you, Sienna,’ said Peregrine, adoringly.

She’s got some guy, Zac thought furiously as he passed them on his way into the courtroom.

Rupert’s flowers apart, Sienna was bubbling over. Charles Moore, the editor of the
Daily Telegraph
, had just faxed her saying how much they all liked her drawing which had appeared on page five next to the report of the case. Judge Willoughby Evans’s clerk had also called her asking if the judge could buy the original. This showed him, Sampson and the new High Sheriff ogling Naomi as she quizzed Zac, or rather an arrogant head-tossing unicorn, in the witness box.

‘I don’t have a double chin,’ complained Sampson.

‘I don’t have eyes so close together,’ fumed Naomi.

‘I think it’s an excellent likeness,’ said Willoughby Evans, who’d been absurdly flattered.

David, who had not, queried whether Sienna should be allowed to do any more sketches, ‘Bearing in mind what side she’s on,’ he added pointedly.

‘Oh, I don’t think I could be influenced in any way by a cartoon,’ said Willoughby Evans, smiling warmly at Sienna as she entered the witness box.

After she had been sworn in and told Sampson she had nothing to add to her witness statement, Naomi took over. Clocking Zac’s and everyone else’s partiality, she prepared for battle.

‘Miss Belvedon, why did you steal the Raphael on the night of the seventh of July?’

‘Pandora’s been in our family for nearly sixty years,’ began Sienna gently. ‘The court has heard about Emerald being pushed into finding her natural parents. But taking Pandora away from us would be like wrenching a child away from adopted parents, who’d loved and brought her up.

‘People in museums walk past pictures. We looked at the Raphael and lived it every day. It may be part of Zac’s past, but it is also a part of a mother we all lost. It inspired four artists: my two brothers, myself and my mother. Her paintings were so full of light, you can see how she was influenced by the Raphael.’

Sampson Brunning was looking up at her in ecstasy. What a transformation. Perhaps he should bed her rather than Naomi on night three.

‘My brothers lay in my mother’s arms as it grew light,’ went on Sienna. ‘First they could see the moon, then Hope in her ivory dress, then Pandora in pale blue, a colour which emerges first from the darkness.’

With her back to the picture, Sienna described every detail.

‘My mother died when I was two days old, so I had to teach myself to love the Raphael.’ Her hands clenched on the brass rail to stop herself breaking down.

The windows had gone dark. Outside a deluge was assaulting the first soft leaves of the horse chestnuts. Willoughby Evans’s hands paused on his laptop.

‘Would you like five minutes to compose yourself?’ he asked Sienna fondly.

Sienna shook her head. ‘I’m fine.’

Good witness, thought Naomi, we’re not out of the woods yet.

Then she felt a tug on her gown and Zac was hissing in her ear, ‘She’s a hellcat, go bury her.’

‘Miss Belvedon,’ asked Naomi, ‘why did you really steal the Raphael?’

‘Because I was terrified someone else would. Zachary Ansteig had been prowling round the house for days. I kept finding him in upstairs bedrooms, so I searched his drawers, and found . . .’ Sienna ticked off the items on her fingers.

‘Do you usually snoop in the rooms of your guests?’

‘Not often, but I don’t often find them sauntering naked down the landing in the middle of the afternoon.’ She pulled a face at Zac, who scowled back.

‘You were worried about losing a ten-million-pound picture?’

‘No, a picture I loved.’

And so the sniping went on until finally Naomi said, ‘I suggest you stole the Raphael because you realized it was looted.’

‘In my father’s house,’ replied Sienna mockingly, ‘are many pictures. I have no idea how ninety per cent of them were acquired. I felt Pandora was in danger so I took her.’

At that moment a bright shaft of sunlight came through the window, falling on her face.

Raymond, who’d nodded off, woke up with a start.

‘Galena!’ he gasped.

‘Mum!’ muttered an unnerved Jupiter.

Is there no escape? thought Anthea despairingly.

‘Well done, Sienna darling.’ Sampson, who decided to forget about the double chin, hugged her afterwards.

Naomi didn’t fare any better that afternoon when she had to cross-examine Emerald who, also terrified of appearing, had been sustained only by the hope that Jonathan might be in court.

Emerald had been amazed how much she’d missed Sophy since she’d been in America. Today – solid, merry, reassuring – Sophy would have been the ideal companion. Patience, hanging precariously on to another barmaid’s job, hadn’t dared take the day off, so Emerald arrived alone.

Both press and public, having drooled over her photographs, had expected a raving beauty, and were appalled to see this stricken little ghost in last year’s flowered Joseph dress, now two sizes too big. The rose-red blusher and lipstick she’d slapped on to brighten her blanched face looked as incongruous as make-up on a corpse. The news that Jonathan hadn’t even showed up was the final straw.

In faltering tones she told the court how she had met Zac.

‘Only when he discovered Lady Belvedon was my natural mother did he start pushing me to find her.’

‘Can you speak up?’ demanded Naomi, as rain rattling on the roof and windows made Emerald almost inaudible.

‘Perhaps you could adjust Miss Cartwright’s microphone,’ reproved the judge, smiling at Emerald.

‘Sir Raymond and Lady Belvedon immediately admitted they were my parents and took me and Zac to their hearts,’ mumbled Emerald. ‘After that Zac became increasingly distant. The night the Raphael went missing, he went berserk, admitted he’d never loved me, and had only used me as a way to get into the household.’

‘Boo!’ shouted Sienna from the gallery.