Death of an Old Master (29 page)

‘If you would like to come with me, Mr Black,’ said Piper, leading the way up the stairs past his gallery to the holy of holies on the second floor, ‘I think I have a painting
that might interest you.’

Piper opened the door and turned on the lights. There on the easel sat a Joshua Reynolds, Clarissa, Lady Lanchester, perched on a seat in an imaginary landscape with a glorious sunset behind
her. She was wearing a cream dress. Her small hands were folded in her lap. And on her head was a hat of the most expensive and exquisite feathers the London milliners of the late eighteenth
century could provide. But the face was not from the eighteenth century. Of course it had been painted to look like an eighteenth-century face. But the face that stared back at Lewis B. Black bore
an uncanny resemblance to Mildred, also known as Mrs Lewis B. Black of New York City. It had been copied from the page of the magazine Edmund de Courcy had stolen from the Beaufort Club.

Lewis B. Black rubbed his eyes as if he couldn’t quite believe what he was looking at. He took three paces to the left, then three paces to the right. He went so close that his nose was
almost touching the canvas.

‘This for sale?’ he said finally.

‘Yes,’ said Piper. He didn’t think the delaying tactics he had used on McCracken would work with Black. The man might simply disappear.

‘Fifteen thousand,’ said Black, putting his hand in his pocket as if to check he had that much cash about his person.

‘Pounds or dollars?’ said Piper.

‘Dollars,’ said Lewis B. Black.

‘Pounds,’ said Piper. His mental arithmetic was not strong – de Courcy looked after the accounts – but he knew that a pound was worth a lot more than a dollar.

‘Dollars,’ said Black again.

‘Pounds,’ repeated Piper.

‘Dollars,’ repeated Black. Piper thought Black might go on like this all day.

‘Fourteen,’ said Piper.

‘Fourteen what?’

‘Sorry, fourteen thousand pounds. That’s a whole thousand off for you, Mr Black.’

‘Ten,’ said Black.

‘Ten what?’

‘Ten thousand pounds, sorry,’ said Lewis B. Black.

Piper rejoiced that they had finally settled into pounds. He felt the Bank of England would have been proud of him.

‘Fourteen thousand pounds.’ He stuck to his guns.

‘Eleven,’ said Black.

‘Thirteen,’ said Piper.

‘Twelve,’ said Black.

‘Split the difference,’ said Piper, who would have settled for ten if he had to. Almost all of that was clear profit after all. ‘Twelve and a half thousand pounds.’

‘Done,’ said Lewis B. Black. But what he said next was music to Piper’s ears.

‘This Lady Lanchester woman in the picture,’ he said, nodding at his wife on the easel, ‘did this Reynolds guy do any more paintings of her? Or did anybody else at the
time?’

Piper felt like an early prospector who has just discovered a rich seam of gold. This was the California gold rush come to Old Bond Street.

‘I will have to check in our library,’ he assured Lewis B. Black, ‘but I think from memory that there are two other portraits of Lady Lanchester in existence, another one by
Reynolds, the other, I think, by Gainsborough. Would you like me to see if I can find them for you?’

The interview room was very small. There were no windows. A bare light bulb cast a miserable light over the occupants. Horace Aloysius Buckley had lost weight in prison. His
face was drawn. The drab grey of the prison uniform did not suit him. The clothes were several sizes too big for him, hanging loosely off his shoulders, the trousers sagging at the waist.

‘Horace,’ said his partner, George Brigstock, ‘your case may come up for trial sooner than we thought. Two cases scheduled for the Central Criminal Court have had to be
postponed. We must instruct a barrister at once.’

Buckley shuddered slightly at the news that his trial might be sooner than expected. Sometimes at night, tossing on the worn-out mattress in his cell, he dreamed of judges with black caps
chasing him down the nave of a cathedral, shouting at him to keep still so they could pass sentence.

‘Do you have any suggestions, George?’ said Buckley. The firm of Buckley, Brigstock and Brightwell, solicitors, did not deal in criminal cases, but the world of the law in London is
a very small one.

‘Sir Rufus Fitch will be taking the prosecution case. Do you know Sir Rufus, Horace?’

Outside the footsteps of the warder sounded loud on the stone floor as he paced up and down in the corridor outside.

‘I have met Sir Rufus, George, I thought he was rather pompous.’

‘What do you say,’ said Brigstock, consulting a sheet of paper in front of him, ‘to Sir Idwal Grimble? They say he’s very good in cases of this kind.’

Horace Buckley looked unblinking at the face of the warder, peering in through the glass slit. Sometimes he still couldn’t believe all this was happening to him.

‘Sir Idwal?’ he said. ‘He’s another pompous fellow. He and Fitch would be like a pair of battleships that take a couple of hours to change course. Too heavy. Can’t
manoeuvre.’

‘A number of people spoke very highly of Pemberton, Miles Pemberton.’ Brigstock tried another name. ‘Nobody thought he could get that fellow who was accused of murdering his
mother-in-law off last year, but he did.’

‘I think he was lucky,’ said Horace Aloysius Buckley. ‘The prosecution’s man hadn’t done his homework properly. And he’s pretty pompous too.’

‘My own personal choice,’ said Brigstock, beginning to despair of ever coming up with a barrister acceptable to his partner, ‘is for a younger man, a coming man.’

‘Do you have somebody in mind?’ asked Buckley, suddenly aware that his time in the interview room was nearly over.

‘Pugh,’ said Buckley, ‘Charles Augustus Pugh. He’s young, he’s quick, his brain probably works faster than Sir Rufus Fitch’s. They say he’s very good
with juries too.’

‘I have heard of this Pugh,’ said Buckley as the warder began the slow process of opening the door. ‘Instruct him, if you please. And tell him,’ the warder was repeating
Time’s Up as if it were some kind of mantra as he ushered George Brigstock towards the daylight, ‘tell him, for God’s sake, to get in touch with Lord Francis
Powerscourt.’

Mrs Imogen Foxe had taken her correspondence down to the lake again. Well, not the entire correspondence, just one letter, another missive from the mysterious Mr Peters in
London. It began with instructions for a meeting in five days’ time at the Bristol Hotel near Waterloo station in London. She was to present herself at the reception desk between one and two
o’clock and ask for Mr Peters. She had to understand that from that moment on, a number of unpleasant things were going to happen to her. Her eyes and the upper part of her face would be
wrapped in bandages. She would be given a stick to help her walk. She would have to rely on Mr Peters or one of his assistants to guide her on her journey. If she disclosed any of these details to
a single living soul, she would not meet Mr Orlando Blane on this occasion. She would never see him again. Her family – Imogen winced at this point – and her husband would also be
informed about what she proposed to do.

Imogen read the letter three times and resolved to burn it when she returned to the house. She walked slowly round the lake, a light breeze rippling across the surface. She thought she saw a
kingfisher shooting across the opposite side of the water. She couldn’t be sure. She hugged herself as she thought of Orlando. Another sonnet of Shakespeare’s came back to her, learnt
by heart under the unforgiving eyes of the nuns and the battered reproduction of the
Assumption of the Virgin
on the convent wall,

Thoughts of travel sent her into Blandford, the nearest town. She presented herself at the counter of Barnard and Baines, the best, the most expensive outfitters in the place. She ordered six of
their finest shirts.

‘Will those be for Mr Granville, madam?’ said the old assistant. Barnard and Baines had been clothing the Foxe family for generations. They had records of the neck sizes of all of
them for the past hundred and twenty years.

‘No, it’s for my brother,’ Imogen blushed slightly, ‘a size smaller than Mr Granville, I should say.’

She also purchased two pairs of dark gentleman’s trousers and a jacket. Then she went to the local bank where she withdrew two hundred pounds in cash. The cashier looked round as if to ask
for his superior, but Imogen’s most charming smile brought forth the money.

I can hide all these things in my luggage, she said to herself. Orlando may not have any decent clothes at all. And
with two hundred pounds, we could go anywhere in the kingdom.

Lord Francis Powerscourt was dreading this interview. He knew he had put it off for far too long. He paused at the edge of Rotten Row in Hyde Park, the horses and their
perfectly groomed riders trotting sedately along. He could still go home. He could be back in Markham Square in ten minutes or so. Then he remembered his last conversation with Lady Lucy the night
before.

‘You must see him, Francis, you know that as well as I do,’ Lady Lucy had said.

‘What can I say to him?’ her husband pleaded. ‘Did you kill Christopher Montague? Did you also kill Thomas Jenkins? What did you do with the books?’

‘You’re being silly, Francis. And, what’s even more uncharacteristic, you’re trying to run away from something. Think of poor Mr Buckley, in his cell or wherever he is
these days. Surely you owe it to him.’

Powerscourt sighed and proceeded on his way to Old Bond Street where he had an appointment with the firm of de Courcy and Piper, art dealers. To be precise, with Edmund de Courcy, son and
brother of the de Courcys of Aregno, Corsica. And the second last person to see Christopher Montague alive.

De Courcy was surrounded by pieces of paper when Powerscourt was shown in.

‘Sorry for all this mess,’ he waved at his desk, ‘it’s our next big exhibition, The English Portrait. I’ve been making lists of all the places where the paintings
might come from.’

Powerscourt removed a couple of books from a chair and sat down. ‘I met your family recently,’ he said, ‘over there in Corsica. Your mother was well. Your sisters . . .’
He paused briefly. ‘How could I put it, I think they are a little starved of company.’

Edmund de Courcy laughed. ‘Starved of the company of young men,’ he said, with an elder brother’s cruel accuracy, ‘but I understand that you had a rather unpleasant
experience during your stay. I was in Aregno myself two years ago on the day of the Traitor’s Run. Guns going off all afternoon, people shouting at each other. We wondered at first if a
revolution had broken out.’

That was very neat, Powerscourt thought. Edmund de Courcy himself a witness at the Traitor’s Run. Yet again he wondered if the annual ritual was real or lies, genuine or fake. Rather like
the paintings in de Courcy’s gallery, he said to himself. It all came down to a matter of attribution in the end.

‘Well, it was certainly an exciting afternoon,’ Powerscourt said with a smile. Then he moved on to more dangerous ground.

‘Tell me, Mr de Courcy,’ he asked, ‘how well did you know Christopher Montague?’

De Courcy shook his head sadly. ‘Of course I knew him,’ he said, ‘what a terrible business. I saw him in the street on the afternoon he died. And that other poor man in Oxford
too. Quite terrible.’

‘Did he come to the opening of your current exhibition here, Venetian Paintings?’

De Courcy blinked several times. ‘I’m trying to remember if he did,’ he said slowly. ‘I’m sure he must have been here. Yes, I do remember him on that occasion. He
came with a very pretty young woman.’

Powerscourt summoned up his mental image of Mrs Rosalind Buckley, estranged wife of a man incarcerated for murder in Newgate Prison.

‘Quite tall?’ he said. ’Curly brown hair, big brown eyes?’

De Courcy looked confused. ‘No,’ he replied, ‘she was quite small. She didn’t have brown hair, it was almost black. And the eyes were blue, I think, rather
striking.’

‘Did you catch her name, by any chance?’ said Powerscourt.

‘No, I don’t think I did.’

Outside they could hear the voice of William Alaric Piper telling the porters to be careful with a picture, apparently being moved down to the basement.

‘Tell me about forgers, Mr de Courcy.’ Powerscourt seemed to have lost interest in Christopher Montague’s companion. ‘I understand Mr Montague was going to say that most
of these Venetian paintings were not original, that some were old fakes and some very recent fakes. Did you know about the article?’

De Courcy blinked again. It seemed to be a mannerism of his, Powerscourt thought. ‘Oh, yes, everybody knew about that article before it was due to appear,’ de Courcy said.
‘Indeed, it was being produced with the help of one of our competitors along the street here.’ He nodded out of the window towards Old Bond Street.

‘But forgery is nothing new in the art business, Lord Powerscourt. The Greeks did a very profitable trade selling fake antique statues to the Romans, for heaven’s sake. Most of the
rich English who went on the Grand Tour brought back forgeries with them, thinking they were genuine, hanging them happily on the walls of their homes. Believe me, Lord Powerscourt, I visit a lot
of the great houses full of paintings. I’ve lost count of the fake Titians. There must be more Giorgiones in the Home Counties than the man ever painted in his lifetime. Velasquez is rife in
Hampshire, there’s a house I know of in Dorset which claims to have six Rembrandts in their drawing room. I doubt if a single one of them was painted in Holland. Florence today could field a
couple of rugby teams of forgers, Forgers United and Forgers Athletic perhaps. You can’t stop it.’

Powerscourt smiled. Somebody on the floor above was hammering something into the wall, nails or picture hooks perhaps, to bear the weight of yet another painting, real or fake.