Death of a Ghost (25 page)

She paused.

‘There's one point you've got to understand,' she said at last. ‘It may strike you as hard to credit, but it seems perfectly logical and natural to me at any rate. And it's this. The main reason why Grandfather did the thing at all was to get his own back on Charles Tanqueray. He really hated Tanqueray and he left the pictures to discourage him. He wanted to leave a lot. He wanted to sound as if he was going to be in the limelight for a long time. He only had eight canvases he could spare and so he labelled those nineteen twenty-four, nineteen twenty-five, and so on. But the last four parcels were fakes. Lisa says as far as she remembers one contained a kitchen tray, and one of the others a big cardboard sign advertising beer. Just anything, you see. The Victorians had that sort of humour, you know, It wasn't lunacy. He was that sort of old boy – a buffoon of a person.

‘Lisa told me all this quite solemnly,' she went on. ‘Apparently she promised him to keep quiet and helped him nail up the packing cases and couldn't understand what he was so amused about. She said he was in tremendously good humour when they'd finished and made her drink a whole bottle of Lafitte with him.'

‘But the hoax was certain to be found out,' said Campion.

‘Of course it was,' said Linda impatiently.

She seemed to share some of her grandfather's enthusiasm for the scheme.

‘But that wasn't the point. Don't you see, Tanqueray was younger than grandfather, and it had occurred to him that his hated sparring partner was only waiting for the Lafcadio demise to set up unpersecuted as the Grand Old Man of the art world. Grandfather gave him ten years to cool his heels, with the infuriating knowledge that at the end of that time Lafcadio was going to return with a spectacular stunt which would keep him in the public eye not for one year only but for another twelve. The fact that he only had eight canvases and hadn't the energy or the time to paint any more – he was portrait-painting right up to the time of his death, you know – made him slip in the faked packing cases for the last four years. I daresay he reckoned that eighteen years would about see the end of old Tanqueray. He over-estimated it, poor darling. Tanqueray didn't live to see the first picture. Have you got that far?'

Mr Campion signified that he had. The tangle was unravelling fast.

‘Well, now,' said Linda, ‘the rest is a sort of guess, I know, but it fits in perfectly. Some years ago someone at Salmon's, and I think it's pretty obvious who, had a peep into the packing cases and hit upon the obvious swindle. After all, as far as the authenticity of a picture is concerned, preconceived ideas are half the battle. If the fake's good enough you'd be surprised at the authorities who get taken in. Here was everything all ready. Everybody knew there were twelve Lafcadio pictures, everybody expected twelve Lafcadio pictures. Even if one of them was howlingly indifferent, why should anyone think that Lafcadio hadn't painted it? Whatever it was like it was worth its price. Lafcadio's reputation was made. One dud, or even four, couldn't hurt it much.'

‘Quite,' said Mr Campion, who found these revelations very enlightening.

‘Four years ago, before Tommy went to Rome, he took an extraordinary holiday. Matt'll tell you about it. He completely disappeared for about ten months. No one heard from him; no one saw him. At that time he was trying to be a portrait-painter, very much in the Lafcadio manner. When he came back he gave up oils suddenly and went to Rome to study tempera.'

‘He got the Prix de Rome, didn't he?' said Campion.

‘No. He didn't. That's the point. He got the other one, the Chesterfield Award, and Max was adjudicating that year.'

Mr Campion was silent for a moment, setting these facts in order in his mind.

‘Where was Mrs Potter when Dacre was on his mysterious holiday?' he enquired.

Linda nodded at him approvingly.

‘You're shrewder than I thought,' she said without discourtesy. ‘Quite remarkably, that period corresponds exactly with the time when Mrs Potter had what was, as far as I can gather, the one stroke of luck in the whole of her life. She got a commission to go curio-hunting in Middle Europe, and was away for ten months. I never heard of anything she brought back. She was supposed to be moving around the whole time and so no one wrote to her, nor did she reply. You know how casual people like us do that sort of thing. She did her curio-hunting for Max, of course. So you see she knew all about it, which probably accounts for … well, for everything.'

‘What about the last picture?' said Campion. ‘The Joan of Arc one.'

‘Oh, that's genuine. It was clever of Max, wasn't it, mixing the dud in with the others? There was a certain amount of criticism of last year's effort and so this year out comes the genuine thing again.'

‘But, look here,' protested Campion, still bothered by the technicalities, ‘surely an expert could tell the difference? There's the paint, for one thing. And hang it all, the genius of the man. That couldn't be faked.'

‘You're talking like an amateur,' said Linda. ‘Don't put too much faith in experts. They're only human. As for the rest, it was perfectly simple for Mrs Potter to get hold of the Lafcadio paint. She was always begging little tubes of this and that from Rennie anyway. The question of genius doesn't come into it. I've told you there was a certain amount of criticism of the seventh picture, but nobody thought of questioning its authenticity. It wasn't bad enough for that. As a matter of fact, it was very good. Grandfather might easily have painted it. He didn't turn out a masterpiece every time.

‘The question of technique is the most difficult of all. That had to be copied, of course. I think Tommy copied it deliberately. I think he was paid to. I've told you he used to imitate – or shall we say be influenced by? – Lafcadio, anyway. And he was particularly clever in oils. Really, I don't see why he shouldn't have done it. In fact I'm perfectly certain he did do it.'

‘It would explain –' began Campion.

‘It does explain,' the girl corrected him. ‘One of the things it explains is why Tommy suddenly chucked up oils. It was part of the bargain, you see. If ever the question of authenticity arose in future years, one of the first questions everybody would ask would be who had painted the damn things? And if there was a competent painter very much in Max's pocket, who worked very like Lafcadio, the answer wouldn't be far to seek, would it? So Tommy had to give up oils. I'll never forgive Max for that.'

‘There are other things that'll take a bit of forgiving,' pointed out Mr Campion.

The girl flushed.

‘I know,' she said. ‘I haven't assimilated all that yet. The full explanation of the whole ghastly business only occurred to me when Max and Belle were having that row this afternoon. That was why I decided to tell you all this. I didn't realize you knew already. Something's got to be done before Max takes Belle at her word. He's got four pictures, remember; three dud and one good one. He know his one real chance to dispose of them – and they're worth anything up to ten thousand pounds apiece – is to take them abroad and sell them before the hoo-ha dies down. It's a good selling tale, you know: “to be disposed of quietly because of scandal”. “All hush-hush, but the genuine thing, my dear boy”.'

Mr Campion pulled himself together.

‘You must keep quiet,' he said. ‘That's the main thing. Let one breath of this get about and we may lose him, if nothing else happens.'

‘You can trust me,' said Linda grimly.

‘And D'Urfey?'

Linda regarded the affable, blue-clad figure with affection.

‘It wouldn't occur to him to talk,' she said. ‘He's too lazy, for one thing.'

‘Not at all,' said Mr D'Urfey with dignity. ‘It's just not my affair, that's all.'

‘You'll do something, Albert?' Linda persisted. ‘You didn't see Max's face when he left Belle this afternoon. I did. He looked insane.'

But Mr Campion had seen and had formed his own opinion.

He went to see the Inspector.

–

‘Y
ES
, well, there you are,' said the Inspector, kicking the fire, which in spite of its brightness did not take the chill out of his grim little office. ‘There's the whole story. We know nearly everything now. But what can we do?'

Mr Campion looked as nearly excited as the Inspector had ever seen him. He sat on the visitor's chair set out in the middle of the square of dingy carpet, his hat on the ground by his side and his hands folded across the knob of his stick.

‘You can't leave it here, Stanislaus,' he said earnestly. ‘The man's a menace, a sort of malignant germ which may produce an epidemic at any moment.'

Oates rubbed his short moustache.

‘My dear fellow, I don't want you to think I'm not interested,' he said. ‘I am. We all are here. We've had conference after conference about this case. Your information completes a fascinating story. I can't promise to act upon it immediately because there's not a ha'porth of concrete evidence in the whole yarn. I needn't point that out to you: you know it as well as I do. You're not an amateur in the sense that you're a beginner. You must see the things as we do here.'

Mr Campion was silent. In his heart he had known that some such answer must meet his demands, but he could not rid himself of the growing conviction that the matter was urgent.

‘It would be most unfortunate for all concerned if a scandal about the Lafcadio paintings broke now,' he said at last. ‘But if it meant that you could put that fellow under lock and key, then frankly I shouldn't hesitate.'

‘Good heavens –' Oates was inclined to be querulous, ‘– that was the first thing that came into my head, naturally. That's why I've been questioning you so carefully about this latest discovery. But as far as I can see, the only thing you have which looks faintly like proof is the figure study for the picture on recently-made paper. What does that amount to in all conscience? Nothing at all. Fustian's only got to say that he gave the boy permission to see the pictures, confessing to a little irregularity, you see, and the mainstay of the whole case is swept away. It's not enough, Campion. There's no one more eager than myself to get an arrest. I'm badgered on all sides to make one. But one blunder now and we should lose him for ever. We've got to be canny. We've got to wait.'

Mr Campion rose to his feet and walked over to the window, where he stood looking down into the yard below.

‘I feel it's urgent,' he said obstinately.

‘I agree.' The Inspector came and stood beside him. ‘Can't you persuade the old lady to go away somewhere or make her let the fellow have his own way? Meanwhile, we've got our eye on him. Don't make any mistake about that. If he breaks the law in any way whatsoever – if it's only a motoring offence – we shall be down on him. And if he makes any serious attempt upon anyone we're not unprepared this time and we shall get him.'

He hesitated, his brow wrinkling.

‘If Mrs Lafcadio does succeed in getting those four cases from Fustian I very much suspect that at least three of them will contain the original junk which the old man packed. But if by chance Fustian should be foolish enough to send the three faked pictures, and she can detect them – really detect them, I mean, not just personal opinion stuff – she might possibly be able to hatch up some sort of case against him, though on what grounds I'm not quite sure. She'd have to go into that with a lawyer. However, in my opinion that'd be a dangerous proceeding in the present situation. As I think I've said before, when a man of that age suddenly takes to murder it means that there's a spanner in his mental machinery and God knows when he's going to stop. But then you know that, and that's probably why you came to me today,'

‘Yes,' said Campion soberly. ‘That's why I came.'

The Inspector walked over to the desk, where he stood idly digging a pen into a piece of blotting-paper before he spoke again.

‘Thinking it over,' he said, ‘I believe our only avenue of attack at the moment is through the pictures. There are one or two blanks we haven't filled in yet, you see. One is, why Fustian should choose to kill Dacre when he did and not before the boy went to Rome at all … that looks like blackmail to me. And two, why was it, exactly, that Mrs Potter came in for hers.'

‘I don't think we shall ever know that,' said Mr Campion. ‘I don't think it matters. I think it's fairly obvious that she was with Dacre while he did the work for Max, serving as general factotum, model, and guardian, I should think. But whether he killed her because she guessed he had murdered Dacre or because she had threatened to give the game away about the pictures I don't see that we can ever tell. Personally, I incline to the former.'

He looked at his friend helplessly.

‘I'm at a dead end, Stanislaus,' he said. ‘Man-hunting isn't my
métier.
It's a job for the police. I do see that you're hampered. If this fellow does it again you'll get him. You've only got to watch him until he makes the attempt and fails or succeeds. I'm in a slightly different predicament. I want to stop him attempting.'

‘Then concentrate on the pictures,' said Stanislaus Oates. ‘Concentrate on Dacre. And that reminds me; I meant to mention it, but your story put it clean out of my mind. That Rosini girl, the little Italian he married: early on in this business I got the police of the Saffron Hill district to keep an eye on that bunch and let me know if anything unusual occurred. I had no special reason for this, you understand. It was just part of the ordinary routine. We like to keep an eye on anyone connected with a murder case, however remotely. I'd forgotten all about it, as a matter of fact, but this morning I had word that the erstwhile Mrs Dacre, who seems to have an odd circle of friends, has been in the habit of going off for week-ends to the country with a whole crowd of them. It says on the report, “Alleged destination some property left to Mrs Dacre by her husband.”