Death of an Elgin Marble (2 page)

‘Maybe it’s just a mistake,’ he whispered, ‘I expect she’ll turn up in the end.’

‘What can I do to help, sir? I am in London for about a week and could stay longer if that would be useful. I’m desperately sorry to have been the bearer of such bad news.’

Theophilus Ragg sighed. ‘You have been most kind, Mr Lodge. Don’t think I am not grateful. I’m just shocked, that’s all. I shall have to conduct an inquiry to see if our experts agree with you and find out what has happened. We need to know how long ago the switch happened, if it did, and what we would have to do to make sure it could never happen again.’

‘Could I just ask you about the Head of Greek and Roman Antiquities, Mr Ragg? Will he be back soon? I should so like to meet him, you see. We have heard so much about him in New England.’

‘Dr Tristram Stanhope, you mean?’ Ragg replied, suddenly ceasing to doodle in his notebook. ‘I think he should be back soon. He is still suffering from youth, you know, suffering rather badly, I should say.’

‘Suffering from youth, sir? I’m not quite sure what you mean.’

‘Forgive me, I may not have expressed myself very well. When you have lived in seats of learning like Oxford and the British Museum, you watch the rhythm of the passing generations. There are fresh drafts of the young every autumn, of course, the hope of youth coursing through their veins. But you look at the dons as they too grow older. By the time they reach middle age the hopes of youth have been replaced with some kind of accommodation with this complicated world. Stanhope is in his middle forties now. You would expect him to have passed through the hope and the optimism of youth. But no, he still behaves as if he were twenty-one years old. Never mind. We have more important things to think about now.’

The young American felt his time was up. ‘I am staying at Brown’s Hotel, Mr Ragg. Just leave a message if I am not there and I will come at any hour of day or night.’

Stephen Lambert Lodge bowed slightly as he left. As he made his way out towards the front door, he heard the plaintive cry once more. ‘Maybe it’s just a mistake, I expect she’ll turn up in the end.’

The behaviour of the Deputy Director, left on his own, would have surprised Lodge. He shuffled next door into the Director’s office and locked the door. He searched in the desk until he found a small, dark blue address book. He copied the phone numbers and the addresses given there for members of the Maecenas Club, a small but select group of the top museum directors in London: National Gallery, the Tate, Natural History Museum, the Science Museum, the Victoria and Albert. The institution was named after the great artistic impresario Maecenas who worked for the first Roman Emperor Augustus, persuading poets like Virgil to compose works that would add to the lustre of Rome and the glory of Augustus. Members met in a private room at the Athenaeum once every three months. In emergencies, special meetings or special assistance could be called at twenty-four hours’ notice. This was what Theophilus Ragg proposed to do. He had to find a man who would bring his Caryatid back. He had no faith at all in the ability of the police to do it. One of these directors, surely, somewhere in their career must have needed a specialist who could solve a crime discreetly and without fuss. Money would be no object. The Maecenas members must help solve his problem. He gave no indication of what had happened when he wrote to the museum directors. He merely asked if, in the course of their professional lives, they had occasion to have recourse to a private investigator. The British Museum, he told them, needed the finest in the country and they needed him in the next twenty-four hours.

Few car salesmen have ever owned a house on the fashionable Old Mile at Ascot and maintained a stable of racehorses, thus keeping a foot, or hoof, in the quickest delivery of the oldest and the newest forms of human transportation at the same time. Octavius Stratton was also the sole representative of his tribe to ride to Ascot with the King in the Royal Landau. On this bright morning he was taking Lord Francis Powerscourt and his son Thomas for a drive in a new Daimler. Octavius, who really was the eighth child of his parents, was usually known as Eugene. He was a second cousin twice removed of Powerscourt’s wife, the mother of Thomas Powerscourt, Lady Lucy. Stratton was confident that his family connections would help deliver what would, for him, be a profitable sale. The Daimler was the finest car in its class, he assured the Powerscourts. It might be unfashionable to say so, he virtually whispered at this point in case he was overheard at the northern end of Hampstead High Street, but German engineering would soon be recognized as the best in the world. He regaled his clients with accounts of the great speed the vehicle could attain, its record as a hill climber in the annual Shelsley Walsh Hill Climb in Worcestershire, and a barrage of statistics about brake horse power, transmission and engine size. Octavius might have been slightly alarmed had he seen Thomas Powerscourt in the back seat taking extensive notes on his shirt cuffs about the mechanical details. For the young man was one of the best mathematicians Westminster School had produced this century. He was the finest shot of his year in the public schools rifle shooting championships and fluent in both French and German. This was his last term at school, with the entrance exams for Cambridge a couple of months away. Thomas began staring very hard at the driver’s back.

The cart was a nondescript sort of vehicle. It could have been carrying barrels of beer or crates of sausages. Nobody would have looked at it twice. The two men were wearing the most nondescript clothes they could find, dark trousers, shirts that had once been white and boots that had seen better days. They might have been a couple of shepherds taking their wares to market. But in the back of the van there were no sheep. There was a long, heavy bundle swathed in blankets and other soft materials going to a place that was a long way from the British Museum. They were in the Welsh mountains now, making for their destination, a large house near a series of caves in the Black Mountains of the Brecon Beacons. The two men had no idea what their cargo was. For them, it was just another package. They spent most of their days moving packets and parcels of one sort or another from place to place.

Theophilus Ragg went to the stationery cupboard after he had despatched his letters. He took out a large new black notebook and wrote the day’s date on the inside cover in red ink. He began a doodle on the opening page and stared out of his window. He had asked his experts for their views and he knew he had to wait for their report but he felt sure the young American was right. Where was the wretched Caryatid now? Was she still in one piece? Who on earth could have taken her? How on earth had they taken her? Where had they found a replacement? Had they made more than one?

Ragg had started his life after taking his degree at Oxford as a teacher of classics and junior housemaster at one of Britain’s leading public schools. After three or four years he found the prevailing spirit of hearty athleticism tinged with what he privately termed ‘the traditions of the philistines’ more than he could bear. He longed to hear eulogies of the odes of Pindar rather than of the triumphs of the football team and the military values of the combined cadet force. When a position was advertised as a Junior Fellow at one of the smaller Oxford Colleges, lecturing on textual criticism in the ancient Greek tragedians, Theophilus was accepted immediately. The conversation at the Shrewsbury College High Table, he told his parents, certainly took a turn for the better after the banalities of the school common room. Theophilus’s talents as an organizer, if not of genius, then certainly of very remarkable powers, only came about by accident. The College Bursar, an expert in the poetry of Sir Philip Sidney, dropped dead of heart failure at four thirty one summer’s day in the Fellows Garden, just as the dons in residence had assembled for afternoon tea. The Warden, a deeply impatient historian who regarded all his colleagues as ignorant fools, sought among his fellows for a replacement. Of newcomer Ragg he knew nothing at all. This was a virtue. He was appointed to the post immediately.

Like most great generals, Ragg moved slowly at first. He spent an entire term observing the working lives of the college staff, the cooks, the porters, those who waited at table and those who cleaned the young gentlemen’s rooms. Their hours and their movements were all written down in his notebook. When the workers returned to Shrewsbury for the Hilary Term, their hours had been changed. There were fewer of them. Most were working slightly longer hours than before. All were better paid than in the past. The College made considerable savings. Over the years Ragg turned his attention to other questions of detail, the supply of food and drink to the College and its members, where he discovered a mass of swindles and petty corruption, to the costs of maintaining the ancient buildings where he replaced most outside contractors with permanent masons and carpenters employed directly by the College. Eventually, after fifteen years in post, he screwed up his courage and asked the Warden, now a genial theologian with a great weakness for Château Margaux, if he could take a look at the College investments and financial strategy. The usual progress, slow but well thought out, was followed. By now, Theophilus Ragg, who had originally been a figure of fun, taking detailed notes of the college laundry lists as his early critics maintained, was the hero of the hour, particularly among the better informed heads of Oxford houses who regarded him as a financial Clausewitz and tried to lure him away to their own establishments. Ragg turned down all positions of bursar or newer, even grander, titles invented specially for him, at Merton, Lincoln, Exeter and New College. Only one institution was able to lure him away, and that was, in part, because it was an old boy of his own college who made the offer.

Andrew Cronan had read Classics at Shrewsbury. Ragg had been his tutor and had treated him well. When he became Director of the British Museum, Cronan realized that the administration of his empire was in chaos with costs out of control and prima donnas and private satrapies rampant among the Hittites and the Assyrians. But he thought he needed a bait to draw Ragg down to London. The museum had, somewhere in its vast archive, a store of the manuscripts of ancient Greek philosophers and playwrights. Early editions of Aristotle and Aristophanes and Aeschylus were snuggled down in the basements beneath the pavements of Great Russell Street and the regular traffic of the Piccadilly Line. He asked Ragg to combine the roles of bursar and archivist at a salary rather greater than that of most of the heads of Oxford colleges. Cronar knew the high costs would be recouped many times over. And he enlisted an important ally, one whose very existence always brought on dark sighs of ‘Who would have thought it?’ or ‘Well, I never,’ or even ‘I haven’t heard of anything so remarkable this year or last.’ Cronan’s ally was the key factor in Ragg’s decision to move. For, to the astonishment of his peers, he had, some years before, secured for himself a most beautiful wife who produced a small phalanx of equally beautiful children. Christabel Ragg was determined to conquer the larger field of literary London as she already had the academic communities of north Oxford. She would become, she told her husband proudly, the Zuleika Dobson of High Holborn and Sicilian Avenue.

After a quick trip up the Great North Road where the Daimler could show its paces, the little party returned to Markham Square. Octavius Stratton was hardly out of the Powerscourt front door when Thomas grasped his father firmly by the arm and made him promise not to buy the car. It was, Thomas assured his parent, a very bad investment. Octavius’s parents might have been very successful in the numbers of children produced, but their eighth had no grasp of figures or of engineering principles. If the physical details of the Daimler’s engine, as described by Stratton, were correct, said Thomas, shaking his light brown curls sadly as he spoke, the car would probably go backwards. Or possibly even sideways.

Powerscourt suddenly remembered the elation with which Thomas had greeted the arrival of the Rolls Royce Silver Ghost, the family’s first motor car, several years before. He would huddle into the corner of the back seat, his cap firmly placed on his head, and wave at the passing pedestrians condemned to travel by foot and even at the cows and the sheep in the Home Counties countryside. Once Thomas had disappeared completely from the house in Markham Square. It was some hours before he was discovered, sitting happily on the back seat of the Silver Ghost, doing his homework.

Thomas was prepared to carry on about the Daimler for some time when his mother appeared and gave Powerscourt a small cream envelope. This requested him to present himself at the address at the top of the page as soon as possible. It was a matter of the greatest consequence. It could, the writer said, be described without exaggeration as a matter of the utmost national importance. The author looked forward to seeing Powerscourt within the hour. The signature was that of Theophilus Ragg, Deputy Director and Principal Librarian of the British Museum, Great Russell Street, London WC.

The old port in Corfu is guarded by an ancient fort, one of two that stand sentinel over the island’s capital. The harbour front has the usual collection of cafés, bars, rundown tavernas and ship chandlers offering to sell you anything from fresh cordage to tinned food that will last for months in the hold of your vessel. And, hard by the oldest and most disreputable bar, the Hermes, stood a branch of the telegraph office. Sitting at a little table under the broken shade of the Hermes, a Greek sea captain was refilling his glass with ouzo and staring moodily out to sea. He was waiting for a message. He had been waiting for two days already but he knew he would wait as long as it took for the message to arrive. There was, he had been promised, a generous commission, a very generous commission awaiting him.

Captain Dimitri’s vessel, in theory, was a seaborne circus, travelling with her entertainments back and forth through the Corinth Canal, across the island towns and cities of the Aegean and the Ionian Seas. Sometimes she carried things that had little to do with circuses.