5
Despite the concern that the presence of Elisabetta continued to create, the work of the department had to go on as much as possible. If the public was entranced by the picture, the art thieves paused only momentarily before getting back to their proper business.
In fact, the furore might have encouraged more activity; with contemplation on the value and transportability of a small piece of canvas tempting more people to try their luck on other, less illustrious objects. This was tiresome, but in some ways satisfying, as the department’s success rate improved by picking up the amateurs. Removing an Italian statue or picture is often very simple, merely a question of breaking down an often frail door, loading the work into a car and driving off. Any second-rate crook can manage it. Getting rid of it afterwards, however, is a different matter. You can’t just take a hot painting in to a sale room and sell it, and if you want to pass it on to a dealer you have to know the honest ones from the dishonest ones. Successfully stealing works of art is a highly skilled occupation which, unlike many others, continues to breed practitioners of great ability.
It was because of the quiet but persistent activity of a master craftsman that several months after the arrival of Elisabetta in state to Rome, and once much of the excitement had died away to little more than an expanded inflow of income to the Museo Nazionale’s coffers, Flavia returned once more to London.
It was for yet another liaison meeting, a gathering of policemen from France, Italy, Greece and Britain, all brought together because of one man, thought to be French and suspected of running a thriving business in the theft of Greek icons.
Icons are relatively little known outside the art world, an obscure area that interests only the enthusiast. The pictures, generally on wooden panels and hung in Orthodox churches to assist the focusing of attention during prayer, are often difficult to appreciate. With simple backgrounds of gold, their stylised appearance is an acquired taste, especially as the absence of perspective makes them difficult for viewers brought up on the dynamism of the Renaissance. But once the taste is formed, they can become a passion, the stark elegance and uncluttered forms giving an aura of peacefulness and tranquillity which the more robust, active pieces produced in the West rarely approach.
More importantly, perhaps, they command high prices and the market for them is notably more crooked than for other types of art. Because one of the major sources is the Soviet Union, smuggling them is commonplace. Russian icons are also regularly brought out by émigrés who are forbidden to take out currency. They are smuggled to Vienna and on to Tel Aviv, then sent on to the market via New York and London. Buying them is cast almost as a blow for freedom, and few dealers or collectors worry themselves about their origin.
All these factors help create a market which Jean-Luc Morneau evidently found attractive – assuming that the deductions of the Sûrété were correct and that it was this Paris-based dealer who was behind the thefts. When the monastery on the island of Amorgos in the Cyclades contacted the local policeman, who in turn passed a message to Athens, which in due course made enquiries around Europe, Morneau’s name kept on appearing, although no hard evidence could be produced to warrant any sort of action.
Whoever it was, the technique used was simple. A tourist appears on the doorstep of the monastery asking to see the church. Once inside, he takes photographs, and particularly snaps away at the icon above the altar. He then thanks the monk at the gate, makes a donation and departs.
He returns many months later, sporting a beard, moustache or dark glasses to make recognition unlikely. He is again left to wander as he pleases. He checks to see the church is empty, goes up to the altar and unzips the large camera case. He takes out the copy he has painted from the photographs, swaps it for the genuine one over the altar and puts this carefully into his bag. He leaves the island on the next boat – the visit is timed so that the boat leaves only an hour or so afterwards – heads for Crete or Rhodes where airport customs are scarce, and flies out of the country.
The copy left behind on Amorgos, and on about twenty other islands, as well as a few sites in the north-east of Italy, is detected as a fake the moment that experts examine it. But it is very competent and quite able to withstand the normal scrutiny it receives, half-hidden in the semi-twilight of the church, from both monks and the occasional sightseer. According to the best recollection of the monks, it had done so for more than a year. Other monasteries had been admiring their copies for even longer.
The finger pointed to Morneau firstly because he was a dealer in icons, secondly because he had been trained as a painter, and thirdly because he was not known for his honesty. But, there the evidence had dried up, and the meeting had been called so that efforts could be directed towards tracking down some of the paintings by discreet enquiries.
The Greek police also wanted help in the search for Morneau, who had vanished from sight. French checks had established that he had vacated his studio in the Place des Abbesses some time ago. Without knowing where he was, it was that much more difficult to establish where he had been. Certainly the evidence of the monasteries was of little help; one reported the visitor with the camera case as French, others as Swedish, German, American and Italian. They had all failed to identify him from photographs.
The meeting to discuss the matter was largely inconclusive, mainly because one young and none-too-serious Englishman had sighed and ventured that he wished he could have thought of a crime like that. The remark irritated the Greeks, who had responded by making remarks about crooked French dealers, which sent the Gallic contingent into a sulk. The encounter, indeed, was no great symbol of European co-operation.
It was also as an indirect result of this somewhat inconclusive meeting that Flavia met Jonathan Argyll once more. He had written to her several months before, asking to see her if she should come to England, and saying that he wouldn’t mind returning the favour and taking her to dinner. She had not written back, partly because there had been no immediate plan to go to England, and partly because she hated writing letters; which, to her mind, made up a pretty good reason.
But evenings alone in big cities can be very dull, especially when the days are short, the weather is cold and the rain, as always in London, is coming down in a light, but persistent drizzle. It was impossible to walk around either to see sights or to window-shop. Going to restaurants on your own has little attraction, the cinemas weren’t showing anything that interested her, the one play she wanted to see was booked solid and the thought of a lonely evening in a hotel room with an improving book made those little twinges of imminent depression noticeable.
So, having exhausted all other possibilities, she picked up the phone and gave him a ring. He was instantly delighted to hear her, and invited her to go and eat immediately. She accepted, and he suggested she come round to his flat. This she considered, assessed for possible trouble, and refused. Even Englishmen could act funny when in their own apartments and, while she had no doubts about her ability to deal with any awkward situation, it always ruined an evening.
‘Oh go on. I’m not sure which restaurant to go to and it would be much easier if you came here first. It’s not very far from the tube.’
A sort of uncalculating friendliness in his request made her change her mind. She agreed to meet him at his flat at seven-thirty, was given directions, and put down the phone.
Getting to Notting Hill Gate from her hotel was easy. On the whole, Flavia’s main objection to London was simply the size of the place and the inhuman way it was laid out. In Rome, she lived about fifteen minutes’ walk away from the office, in a quiet and inexpensive part of town near Augustus’s mausoleum that had an abundance of restaurants, innumerable shops and a boisterous population. But London was entirely different. Almost no one seemed to live anywhere near the centre and everyone spent hours every day on the tubes or trains either going to work or going home again. And the neighbourhoods they lived in were generally unutterably dull, with few shops and an a
tmosphere of respectability that made you think they were all tucked up in bed by nine-thirty with a glass of hot milk. The constant cavalcade of streetlife, of people wandering around for the sake of it, greeting their friends, having a drink, everything that made city life worthwhile, scarcely existed. London was not Flavia’s idea of a good time.
Argyll’s part of Notting Hill lay beyond the respectable bit that surrounded the tube station, in the less opulent regions beyond. The building was neither among the best nor the worst that the area had to offer. He lived on the top floor of a terraced house half-way along the street and, when she rang the doorbell, bellowed into a faulty, crackling ansaphone that she should keep walking up the stairs until she ran out.
His flat showed distinct signs of a very hurried and only partly successful attempt at flight. Mounds of notes lay in boxes; open suitcases, half filled with clothes and books, were on the floor; a pile of miscellaneous socks nestled up against the bottle of white wine that Argyll had evidently just been out to buy in her honour.
‘Moving, are you?’ she observed, noting that this was not the sort of conclusion that required the brains of a Sherlock Holmes to reach.
‘Yup,’ he replied, uncorking the bottle and peering into it to see how much cork was left floating in the wine. He frowned in disapproval at the debris, then looked up with a happy smile. ‘Farewell London, hello again Rome. For about a year, maybe more. Until I finish the damn thesis. I’ve done all the English end, so everything I need is in Italy. Which is pretty convenient, if you ask me.’
‘I thought you were impoverished.’
‘So I was. However, not at the moment. It’s one of the unforeseen spin-offs of that Raphael.’
‘How so?’
‘Well, you see, I was invited to a party, and there was Edward Byrnes. He sort of sidled up to me in a sheepish fashion and we got talking. The upshot of it was that he as near as dammit apologised for pinching the picture. Not, of course, that he admitted any double-dealing. Independent research leading in the same direction, and so on. Not his picture, anyway, you know. Entire coincidence, the whole thing. That’s as may be. I don’t believe it. He got wind of it through me, somehow. The important thing was, he offered a disguised form of compensation. His firm has a scholarship for art historians, and basically he said that if I applied for it, I’d probably be given it. So I did, and so I was.’
‘And you took it?’
Argyll paused for a moment. ‘Well, I thought, why the hell not? The picture’s out of my reach for ever, Byrnes has a lot of money thanks to me. I could have stood on my dignity and refused to touch his filthy money, how dare you insult me, sir. But he’d still be as rich, and I’d still be as poor. By rights, I suppose, he should have offered me a couple of million. But he didn’t, and it was this or nothing.’
‘What did he mean, not his picture?’
‘Just that, apparently. That’s the story he’s evidently putting around, probably because of jealousy in the trade. He was acting on commission. Someone else got him to buy it and so someone else now has the money, presumably.’
‘Who?’ asked Flavia, intrigued.
‘Didn’t say. I didn’t ask, to tell you the truth, because it’s such obvious nonsense. Besides, I was too busy fantasising about going back to Italy.’
‘You’d never make a very good policeman,’ she observed.
‘I know. But I don’t plan to. It struck me as such a silly story, I dismissed it instantly. I mean to say, can you see any self-respecting dealer having a Raphael on his hands and tamely letting it go?’ He paused for a moment while he fished for bits of cork with his finger, dredging them out a fragment at a time.
‘Disgusting of me. Sorry about that,’ he said apologetically.
He poured, she sipped, he sat on the floor and they talked inconsequentially about her trip, his research, how he found his flat. They spoke in Italian and about Italy, and Argyll grew gently and fondly enthusiastic. He loved it in the way that only the repressed, monochromatic inhabitants of cold northern countries can fall for the colourful exuberance of the Mediterranean. But his was no goggle-eyed, blind devotion; he knew the country well, warts and all. The inefficiencies, rigidities, narrow-mindedness of Italy he understood and accepted. He also knew its art, and could talk with nostalgic delight of the long and weary trips he had made by bus and by foot to the more obscure delights that Italy likes to secrete in inaccessible places. It occurred to Flavia that he might get on well with Bottando. Then he changed the subject back and they talked about London, work and museums. He held up a finger as he poured her another glass of wine. ‘There was, by the way, another reason for taking Byrnes’s money. It struck me as a sort of victory.’
She looked at him, puzzled. ‘Some victory,’ she said.
‘Wait and see,’ he replied, kneeling down by a large cardboard box and rummaging through dozens of bits of paper. ‘Now, where did I put it? That’s the trouble when you pack. You always need the things at the bottom of the boxes. Ah. Here it is. I must show you. I think you’ll find it funny.’
Argyll explained that on his return to England, after the débâcle in the carabinieri cells, he had thrown himself back into the subject of Mantini with vigour. His motives were not any great love of art history, nor any particular devotion to resurrecting the reputation of his chosen painter – a man who by any stretch of the imagination was fairly second-rate. Rather, it had become a matter of pride that, having spent a few years on the subject, he was going to get something to show for it all, even if it was just a piece of paper and the right to be called Doctor Argyll.
He went on to say how he had made a resolute attempt to forget about Raphael and associated subjects. His painter had been fairly popular among English tourists in Rome in the early eighteenth century, and many of them had commissioned some minor work from him as a memento of their stay; the eighteenth-century equivalent of buying a postcard of the Spanish Steps. Generally speaking, he turned out somewhat derivative landscapes in the style of Claude Lorrain or Gaspard Dughet which were held in high esteem at the time. As he was compiling a catalogue raisonné of the artist’s work, he had written to almost every country-house owner in England to ask whether they had any. He had also gone to visit several houses, to look through their archives for any evidence of when the works were bought, how they were acquired and at what price.
On one of these ventures he had ended up in Backlin House in Gloucestershire, a vast, chilly pile still lived in by the original family even though they could clearly no longer afford it. Had they been sensible, he said, they would have given the place away to the National Trust and gone to live in the South of France, like the Clomortons had done after the war.
The muniments room, where the family papers were kept in dusty, mouldy obscurity, had made the rest of the house seem positively jolly. One look had almost persuaded him to go straight back home.
‘A man from the Historic Manuscripts Commission came round in 1903 to catalogue the papers but died of influenza half-way through. I’m not surprised. If I hadn’t taken the precaution of bringing a pair of mittens, a woolly hat and a hip flask I might well have gone under myself. The experienced researcher is prepared for all eventualities,’ he added loftily.
Because of the poor gentleman’s untimely demise, the papers had never been sorted and a catalogue never published. And because of that, no one had been near them for years. So Argyll, when he finally made his way into the attic that contained four hundred years of miscellaneous memories, found a huge number of dust-covered rolls of documents, chests of estate vouchers, bundle upon bundle of legal materials, and a whole series of nineteenth-century cardboard boxes labelled ‘first earl’, ‘second earl’ and so on.
On the whole, the thousands of papers were arranged randomly, or if there were any order, he failed to grasp what it was. However, a few boxes bore the traces of the old archivist, and had evidently been arranged for examination before he died. These were given rough labels. One large
box was titled ‘eighteenth-century letters.’
‘This was my great discovery,’ Argyll said. ‘One sheaf was entirely of letters to the owner of the house, Sir Robert Delmé, from his sister Arabella.’
‘So?’ asked Flavia, her manners beginning to fight a battle for dominance over her impatience.
‘Arabella was a great lady, the sort that died out when the eighteenth century was through. She had four husbands in all, and outlived the lot. She was about to take on number five when she herself keeled over from excess cognac at the age of eighty-seven. The point is that husband number two was none other than our friend the Earl of Clomorton – that noted connoisseur of Raphael – and ten of the letters dated from this period.’
Argyll explained that most of the letters were of little interest - London gossip, details of the doings of the Prince of Wales, as well as scabrous comments about the innumerable inadequacies of her husband. Although wealthy, the second Earl clearly did not rate highly with his wife, was parsimonious to a fault and seemed greatly lacking in judgement.
‘He was exactly the sort of person the average Roman art dealer could see coming a mile off. It would have been a point of honour amongst them to foist rubbish on to him at vast expense. All he really cared about deeply were his haemorrhoids, if Lady A is to be believed. He seems to have kept up a non-stop monologue on the subject for years on end. Painful, no doubt, but they ruin the atmosphere at breakfast.’
Two of the letters came from the period in which the earl died, one immediately before, the second afterwards. ‘Here,’ said Argyll, shuffling through a set of papers in a manila folder, ‘I copied them down. Have a look.’
Flavia picked up the first sheet of paper and squinted at it to decipher Argyll’s rapid and untidy scrawl. Dearest Brother, it began, As I’ve no doubt you are acquainted from the Gazette, my Lord has returned to these shores from his travels. My! how he is changed! No more the ruddy sportsman; the soft airs of Italy have turned him into a true connoisseur of the arts! I cannot tell you how much his new occupation causes me mirth. He parades all day in his finest French lace, giving the servants orders in what he considers fine Italian. They do not understand him so do as they please, as usual. Worst of all, his fascinations have unclenched his fist. It appears he has been attempting to buy up all of Italy, and plunge his family into ruin in the process. Some of his baubles have already been brought to the house; I intend to hang them only in the darkest corners, so visitors will not easily discern how my husband has been impos’d upon by these foreign sellers. He promised me pictures by the finest Italian hands; he has brought me the merest daubs, the grossest of impositions. Only in price do his prizes rank with the fairest productions of the masters. The final blow is yet to fall, however; he has been in London with Mr Paris for the past three weeks fussing over one final consignment of ruins by those wretches of Roman scene-painters who delighted in taking his money. My Lord tells me – in his most mysterious voice – these will delight and amaze me beyond comparison. I confess, I do not see how I could be more amazed. It seems that he spent more than seven hundred pounds for one of these, which surely will turn out to be worth not more than half-a-crown.