Death of an Old Master (11 page)

Jenkins shrugged his shoulders. ‘I thought it better to let sleeping dogs lie.’

‘What was her name, man? What was she called?’

Thomas Jenkins stared helplessly at Powerscourt. ‘You’re not going to believe this, Lord Powerscourt. Please don’t be angry with me. I don’t know her name.’

Powerscourt wanted to bang his fist on the table. He refrained. ‘Do you mean that you don’t know her Christian name, or you don’t know her surname?’

Jenkins looked distraught. ‘I don’t know her surname,’ he said very quietly. ‘I never met her.’

‘But you knew her Christian name, didn’t you?’ said Powerscourt.

‘She was called Rosalind,’ Jenkins whispered.

‘And where did she live?’

‘She lived in Chelsea.’ Powerscourt had to lean forward to catch the name. Good God, he thought. Somewhere in Chelsea, not far from where he lived. Maybe her home was on the other
side of Markham Square.

‘Do you know what her husband does? Did she have any children? Was she involved in the world of art at all?’

Thomas Jenkins rose from his seat. ‘The answer to all those question is don’t know, don’t know, don’t know. And now, if you will forgive me, I am going back to my
college. I’ve done my best. But I’m not going to answer any more questions.’

The entrance hall of the Beaufort Club in Pall Mall was full of Americans. Edmund de Courcy passed quickly through the differing accents, New York, Boston, Chicago, the
Midwest. His business was not in the dining room or the smoking room with its large windows and the even larger cigars of the transatlantic visitors. His business was in the basement.

The Beaufort had realized earlier than their competitors along Pall Mall that there was money to be made from the Americans. They had links with the top clubs in all the major cities in America.
Financiers, importers, newspapermen, tourists came to the Beaufort and reported home that it was almost like being back in the States. There was American cooking, American whiskey, Cuban cigars.
Most important of all there were other Americans to talk to. There was no need in the Beaufort to catch at the nuances of English irony or eat their terrible food. You wouldn’t have to talk
about cricket. The Beaufort was a home from home, a slice of apple pie in the alien world of London. Many of the Americans felt homesick even going there.

And the Beaufort had the American newspapers and magazines, the
New York Times
, the
Washington Post
, the
Chicago Sun Times, Harpers and Queen, Vanity Fair, The American.
They kept the back copies of all these publications for a year. Sometimes Americans would arrive in London who had spent months in the even more alien climes of France or Italy, Egypt or St
Petersburg, Russia, and would want to catch up on events at home.

Edmund de Courcy sat at a small table in the basement with a great pile of America’s most fashionable magazines. Within these pages the advertisements for houses started at enormous
prices, and no jewellery was on display that cost less than fifty thousand dollars. Here rich America was on display, their mansions, their yachts, their possessions, their wealth flaunted before a
jealous world.

Edmund de Courcy was looking for illustrations of two very rich families. Not the husband, or the husband and wife, but husband, wife and children. One such family was the McCrackens, whose
husband was, of course, in London, doing business with Edmund’s own firm of de Courcy and Piper. The other was a man due to arrive in England in two weeks’ time. The Piper intelligence
service in New York had given warning that a Lewis B. Black, based in Philadelphia, was on his way. Mr Black may have dwelt in the city of brotherly love but he was said to be the most ruthless
steel magnate in all America. His personal fortune – the Piper intelligence service had checked the figures with three different sources – was in excess of one hundred million dollars.
And, even more enticing, Mr Black was interested in art. Nobody knew what kind of art, but a man with that kind of fortune has to collect something.

De Courcy read about society balls in New York. He read of charity dinners in Boston. He read of Lucullan birthday parties in Chicago, and glittering evenings at the Metropolitan Opera. He saw
illustrations of the American plutocracy on their yachts, at the weddings of their children and the Commemorative Masses for their dead.

He had gone through four whole months of
The American
before he struck gold. There, in the drawing room of a very grand house, he found an illustration of Mr and Mrs William P. McCracken
of Concord, Massachusetts, and their two daughters, aged about eight and ten, a small dog standing alertly beside them. De Courcy tiptoed carefully over to the door to make sure no one was coming.
Then he took a small pair of scissors from his pocket and cut the page out of the magazine. He put it inside a large red notebook he had brought with him. The book had slightly larger pages than
the magazine. De Courcy didn’t want to have to fold it.

Two hours later he was on the verge of giving up. Various Americans had come down to the basement to look up old financial results in the
New York Times
or the football scores in the
Boston Globe.
They had greeted him cheerfully, wishing him a good day as he ploughed through the pile in front of him. But when he found it he was overjoyed. A large photograph showed Mr and
Mrs Lewis B. Black, with their twin daughters, outside their new town house on Fifth Avenue. The girls looked about six years old. Mrs Black was wearing a hat composed largely of exotic feathers.
Feathers, thought Edmund de Courcy. Hats made of fancy feathers in English portrait paintings. How many of the English Masters had painted such hats in their time? Lawrence, Hoppner, Romney.
Gainsborough, Reynolds. What a treat! Out came the scissors. Mr Lewis B. Black and family joined Mr William P. McCracken and family in Edmund de Courcy’s special album.

Powerscourt was scribbling furiously at his writing desk. Jackson, the family footman who had served with his master in India, was waiting discreetly behind the chair.
Powerscourt had decided not to call upon Jason Lockhart of Clarke’s the art dealers in person. He felt Lockhart might feel constrained in his working surroundings and, for some reason he
couldn’t pin down, Powerscourt didn’t want to show himself yet in the rarefied air of Old Bond Street.

‘I am investigating the death of the late Christopher Montague,’ he wrote, ‘and I feel that you may be able to assist me.’ He said nothing of new magazines, of fakes and
forgers, of mistresses in the heart of Chelsea. ‘If you could fix a time with my man here I should be delighted to see you in 25 Markham Square at your earliest convenience.’

Jackson promised to wait for the reply. Powerscourt found Lady Lucy inspecting the dining room with a worried air. ‘Francis,’ she said, ‘these dining chairs. We’ve had
them for ever so long. But they’re beginning to look a bit shabby, don’t you think?’ Lady Lucy pushed hard at one of the seats. There was a slight wobble, implying that a very
heavy person might find themselves sitting unexpectedly on the floor.

Powerscourt was used to these continuous campaigns of domestic improvement. Sometimes he would return home and find that all the furniture in the drawing room had been rearranged. Or that a pair
of curtains, previously deemed perfectly satisfactory, had been transferred from his study to a spare bedroom. Once he found that his entire wardrobe had been removed from the bedroom and placed in
a closet some yards away down the corridor.

‘I just didn’t like that wardrobe, Francis,’ Lady Lucy had said on that occasion, ‘it was so ugly.’ Privately Powerscourt wondered if he himself might not be the
subject of one of these periodic fits of rearrangement, transferred for ever to the coal hole or the top floor of the stables, thereby guaranteeing the aesthetic perfection of the rest of the
house. Sometimes he replied with flippancy, suggesting that the kitchens would work much better if they were transferred into the attics, and that the children should all sleep in the front hall.
It would mean that they could get to school quicker. He was reproved for being a domestic Philistine, a non-believer in the search for domestic harmony. In vain did Powerscourt try to tell his wife
that perfection was an ideal, like one of Plato’s Forms, something to aspire to, a beacon on a distant hill, a vision that could never be achieved, and that all her efforts were doomed to
failure.

‘You’re being absurd, Francis,’ Lady Lucy would laugh at him. ‘All I’m trying to do is to make our home as nice as possible. You wouldn’t want the children
growing up surrounded by ugliness, would you?’

Powerscourt decided that instant capitulation was the only solution to the case of the dining-room chairs. ‘That looks a bit dangerous, Lucy. I think you’d better replace them
straight away.’

Lady Lucy was not accustomed to such rapid victories. Often there would be protests about furniture being able to last a few years longer, sometimes dire and apocalyptic male mutterings about
money. She stared hard at her husband’s face. Perhaps, as so often, he was teasing her.

‘Are you serious?’ she said incredulously.

‘Yes, I am,’ replied her husband. Lady Lucy resolved to try to find the cause of this immediate acquiescence. If she could identify the reason, then she could time future campaigns
to coincide.

‘Are you all right, Francis?’ said Lady Lucy, worried suddenly that her husband might be ill.

‘I’m perfectly all right, my love,’ said Powerscourt, giving his wife a quick kiss. ‘I’m just in rather a hurry. I’ve got to get to the Royal Academy. And I
want to ask your advice.’

Lady Lucy sat down on one of her dubious dining-room chairs. Powerscourt observed that there hadn’t been a moment’s hesitation. Were they all in perfectly good condition after all,
he wondered? Did just one of them need repair? This was not a battle he was prepared to enter. He banished all thoughts of domesticity from his mind.

‘We’ve got to find somebody in Chelsea, Lucy,’ he began. Lady Lucy felt a quick thrill at the use of the word ‘we’. Not I. But plural. We.

‘Who is this person, Francis?’ Lady Lucy smiled.

‘All we have,’ said Powerscourt, ‘is a Christian name. Rosalind. She was having an affair with the late Christopher Montague. Her husband was apparently not compliant. And she
lives in Chelsea, this Rosalind. That’s it.’

‘I could ask Montague’s sister,’ said Lady Lucy, relieved that the vast tribe of her relations, as Francis referred to them, might come in useful at last.

‘You could,’ said Powerscourt doubtfully, ‘but I have asked the sister already in general terms. She said she didn’t know anything about his private life.’

‘I see,’ said Lady Lucy. ‘It’s quite tricky, isn’t it? You can’t very well pin up a notice on Chelsea Town Hall asking for the Rosalind who was having an
affair with Christopher Montague to pop round to Markham Square for afternoon tea.’

Powerscourt laughed. ‘I wonder about the post,’ he said. ‘People in those circumstances sometimes spend a lot of time writing to each other, arranging the next meeting, saying
how much they miss the other one, that sort of thing. Liable to cause trouble if you leave any of the correspondence lying around, of course.’

Lady Lucy looked suspiciously at her husband. ‘Are you an expert in these matters, Francis?’

‘Certainly not. I promise you.’ Powerscourt laughed. ‘But I have been involved in a number of cases where this sort of thing goes on. One chap I heard of even had his messages
delivered by carrier pigeon. Of ingenuity in affairs of the heart there is no end.’

‘Thomas is a great friend of our postman here,’ said Lady Lucy. ‘He takes Thomas on his rounds of the square sometimes on Saturday mornings. I’ve watched Thomas post the
mail through the letterboxes. He thinks it’s tremendous.’

‘Well, the postman might be able to help. But we need Montague’s hand on a letter. Those murderers took every scrap of paper out of his flat. We don’t know what his handwriting
looked like.’

Powerscourt looked at his watch. ‘Heavens, Lucy, I’m going to be late. Will you have those new chairs in position when I come back, do you think?’

Lady Lucy laughed. ‘Be off with you, furniture Philistine!’ she said. But she kissed him warmly as he left.

The gallery of de Courcy and Piper in Old Bond Street was temporarily closed to the public that morning. Opening at eleven o’clock, said the sign outside. All the doors
were locked. Edmund de Courcy and William Alaric Piper were in the basement. That door was also locked.

‘Only two more to go,’ said Piper, panting slightly. He placed a small piece of cloth over a nail on the bottom of a picture frame. He pulled very slightly. The nail did not move. He
tried again, pulling fractionally harder. Again the nail did not move.

‘Damn these nails!’ said Piper. He was reluctant to pull too hard in case damage was done to the painting or the frame. And, as both he and de Courcy knew only too well, one day soon
they would have to perform the operation in reverse.

He tried again. Very slowly the nail agreed to part from the frame. De Courcy had a piece of paper ready for it. Bottom row, first from right-hand corner, said the piece of paper. De Courcy
placed the nail reverently into its new home. Then he put it into a box. The nails were ordered in the box in the same way they had been in the frame.

‘There!’ said Piper. The last nail had come out. De Courcy pulled the painting very carefully from its frame. He rolled it into a cylindrical shape and wrapped it in two sheets of
linen, specially cut for the purpose. It joined another cylinder on the floor. These two paintings had been part of the de Courcy and Piper Venetian exhibition upstairs. Both had been sold and
removed from the show.

‘How long has he got?’ asked de Courcy.

‘I should say up to three weeks. But he works very fast so it may be less,’ said Piper, wiping his hands and sliding the box with the nails into a shelf in a safe on the wall.
‘I told the new owners they were going off to be cleaned, but that it could take some time. Can he do it in three weeks?’