Death of an Elgin Marble (3 page)

The ship was old and dirty, the paintwork peeling with age, the sails no longer white but flecked with streaks of grey. There was a mangy lion in a twisted cage by the main cabin, flanked by a couple of querulous monkeys. A pair of jugglers practised with dirty plates, specially hardened in taverna ovens so they would not break. A dark acrobat tumbled about in the rigging from time to time. All kinds of strange-looking packages went aboard the first day, amphorae, presumably filled with wine that might have been thousands of years old, tiny decorated vessels filled with honey that could have inspired a poet to write an ode to a Grecian urn. The Captain spat expertly into the oily waters of the little harbour and refilled his glass. The message had not come yet, but the ouzo was cheap, the taverna served a fine if rather greasy moussaka, and the waitress, daughter of the house, was of remarkable beauty. Captain Dimitri prepared himself for a long wait.

Theophilus Ragg, Deputy Director of the British Museum, led Powerscourt straight to the last known home of the missing Caryatid. He didn’t let Powerscourt linger long by the replacement. He took him straight back to his office without saying a word. Only when he was sitting opposite his visitor on a long sofa in the centre of his office did Ragg speak. The Caryatid Powerscourt had just seen was a fake. British Museum staff had, with great reluctance, admitted to the Deputy Director that the American was correct. The original had been stolen, possibly during a fire alarm the week before. The only people who knew about it were the American scholar who had discovered the switch, now sworn to silence and awaiting instructions in Brown’s Hotel, and the Deputy Director himself. The Director himself was out of contact in the Middle East on a shopping expedition and not expected to return for some time. Would Powerscourt take on the case? Would he find the Caryatid? He would? Excellent. He, Deputy Director Ragg, would be happy to answer questions for the rest of the day, if need be.

Powerscourt began with the most obvious query. Why had the Director not sent for the police? Surely there must be stipulations in the insurance and so on? My decision and mine alone, the Deputy Director replied sadly. Men in uniform tramping through the museum would attract attention. The matter would appear in the newspapers. Publicity in a case as important as this could be ruinous. Other thieves might come calling for other treasures. The nation’s cultural heritage was in danger. Lord Powerscourt should be aware that this Caryatid was the best preserved of her kind in the world. She was unique.

‘Let me remind you, Lord Powerscourt, that it is only weeks now since the
Mona Lisa
was stolen from the Salon Carré in the Louvre. I do not know if you are aware of the tremendous outcry that has convulsed the city. The Parisian press have reports on the search for the criminal every day. Our own newspapers are also convulsed by the theft. The Director and staff of the Louvre have been vilified in a way France has not seen since the Dreyfus Affair. There is still no sign of the painting. Do you think we at the British Museum wish to be engulfed in such a firestorm? Our Caryatid may not be as famous as the
Mona Lisa
of Leonardo but she is still the finest example of her kind in the world.’

Powerscourt thought that the Museum Deputy Director was old and close to retirement. The prospect of a repeat of the controversy in Paris had turned his bones to water. He was a man of scholarship, not of the wider world that swirled around outside the walls of his museum. Theophilus Ragg could not, for the moment, see beyond the scandal that could ruin his reputation and sully his last days in office beyond repair. It was to be over a week before Powerscourt realized, as he told Lady Lucy rather sadly later on, that Ragg was not a brittle tree, liable to fall in the first gales of winter, but an oak, a sturdy oak that would be left standing long after the storms had passed.

Powerscourt reminded the Deputy Director, as gently as he could, that the Metropolitan Police were perfectly capable of appearing in plain clothes and being discreet. His new employer seemed astonished to hear of the existence of a plain clothes policeman. Caryatids, said Powerscourt, wore long sleeveless dresses with great folds at the waist. Greek heroes on the Parthenon frieze wore short tunics with swords to kill their enemies. Some policemen went about in dark uniforms with helmets. Some did not. Each to his allotted station.

Treading carefully now, Powerscourt asked what seemed to him at this early stage the two most important questions. How much was the Greek lady worth? And who might want to steal her?

She was priceless, Ragg said after a long pause, staring down at his notebook. Neither the finest bursar in Oxford or Cambridge nor London’s most experienced art auctioneer could put a price on a Caryatid. The Deputy Director could not imagine anybody wanting to steal such a rare and beautiful creature. Lord Elgin would surely be turning in his grave.

With great difficulty Powerscourt refrained from pointing out that the Caryatid had only reached Great Russell Street because Lord Elgin had stolen her in the first place. It was an hour and a half into the interview before Powerscourt realized that he had one last card left to play. This, he thought, might be his last chance.

‘Tell me, Mr Ragg,’ he ventured in his most affable manner, ‘have you met the present Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police?’

‘Sir Edward Henry, isn’t that his name?’ replied Ragg. ‘No, I have not.’

‘Well, as a matter of fact, I know him quite well. I first met him years ago when he was Inspector General of the Bengal Police Force and we have kept in touch since. I feel sure that he would be happy to help and provide one of his most discreet and intelligent officers to lead a plain clothes team to look into the vanished Caryatid. I could ring him on your behalf, if you like, to effect an introduction. I can promise you would be in good hands.’

The Deputy Director of the British Museum might have appeared as mouse rather than man to the outside world, but he was damned if some upstart investigator was going to introduce him to London’s senior police officer.

‘That won’t be necessary,’ he snapped, ‘I’m perfectly capable of ringing the man myself.’

‘Of course, of course,’ purred Powerscourt, ‘sorry if I gave offence. It was not intentional, I can assure you. Tell me this, please, if you would, Mr Ragg, before I go.’

Powerscourt decided that retreat in the current climate might be the better part of discretion.

‘Let us suppose that you were an art thief, one of the highest class, a Napoleon of crime. Let us suppose also that you stole the Caryatid with a view to selling her. Who would you approach? Which London firm would do the selling for you?’

‘Every single one of them, I suspect,’ replied the Deputy Director morosely. ‘I’m sure all the major art dealers and auctioneers, the ones with international links, Linfords, Gonzagos, Whites, would all tell you at the front door that they could not possibly undertake such a business and then readmit you immediately via the rear entrance to discuss terms and percentages. I have no faith in any of them.’

‘Thank you, Mr Ragg. As a matter of form I shall have to contact them all, but forewarned is forearmed. I am most grateful.’

Powerscourt was leaving a couple of calling cards on the Deputy Director’s desk when Ragg looked up at him with a pleading look in his eye.

‘Do tell me, Lord Powerscourt, you don’t think it’s all just a terrible mistake, do you? I mean you don’t expect she’ll turn up in the end?’

Powerscourt felt rather sorry for the man, plunged so suddenly into a world of which he knew so little.

‘No, Mr Ragg.’ He spoke as kindly as he could. ‘I don’t think it is just a terrible mistake. The Caryatid will only turn up when we find her.’

‘Did you have the time to ask him about Tristram Stanhope, Francis?’ Lady Lucy’s first reaction on hearing of the assignation and the interview back in Markham Square was to enquire about her distant relative, the Head of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the British Museum.

‘No, I didn’t,’ said Powerscourt rather stiffly, ‘we were discussing the disappearance of one of the most valuable pieces of sculpture in Britain, not the current whereabouts of one of the darlings of Mayfair. Tell me, Lucy, why is everybody so obsessed with this man? What is so special about him?’

Lady Lucy felt that she might have made a tactical mistake.

‘Of course, Francis, you are absolutely right. Please forgive me if I spoke out of turn. Tristram Stanhope? Why are people so obsessed with him, you ask. Maybe because that’s how he wants the world to be, to be obsessed with him.’

‘Can you give me some facts about the fellow?’

‘Of course. Born into an old aristocratic family. Tristram Stanhope has classic English good looks, blue eyes, blond hair, a fine figure. He went to Eton and Christ Church and scored a hundred for his school against Harrow at Lord’s. Elected to Pop and collected all the garlands of schoolboy glory. Our Tristram went to Oxford with the laurels of Victor Ludorum and all the rest. He took first-class honours in Greats as well as being a bulwark of the Bullingdon Club. They said he had the most glittering Eton and Oxford career since the young Rosebery at Christ Church a generation or two before. Then Stanhope went exploring in the Middle East and India for a couple of years after graduation. He was said to have discovered a previously unknown tribe speaking a previously unknown language somewhere at the back of the Hindu Kush. The language was thought to be very close to ancient Greek, so some scholars said it might have been left behind, as it were, by Alexander the Great.’

‘Good God,’ said Powerscourt, ‘what did he do next? Walk on water? Bring down the walls of Jericho?’

Lady Lucy laughed. ‘He might well have done both of those, Francis. You see, he went to work for the Foreign Office on a series of secret missions. When he finally resurfaced he had a slight scar on the left-hand side of his face which he refused to talk about.’

‘Would I be right in supposing, Lucy, that the women found the mixture of athletic and academic success, spiced with a tempting dose of danger and secrecy, virtually irresistible?’

‘You would, Francis, you certainly would. I’ve always remembered what one of my cousins said to me after a weekend spent in Tristram Stanhope’s company at some grand country house party. She said he was a professional Adonis.’

‘What did she mean?’

‘She thought that the whole performance was a colossal display of male vanity. It was, she said, like watching a male peacock with those iridescent tails with the markings of blue, gold, red, and other colours. They use the large train in mating rituals and courtship displays. It can be arched, as you know, into a magnificent fan that reaches across the bird’s back and touches the ground on either side. Females, believe it or not, are thought to choose their mates according to the size, colour and quality of these outrageous feather trains.’

‘Really?’ said Powerscourt, ‘the females do that? You don’t say, Lucy. And does your informant relate if the mating display was effective on this particular weekend?’

‘Good point, Francis. I was told, I’m afraid, that not one, but two female peacocks, known as peahens, succumbed on the weekend in question.’

‘God bless my soul,’ said Lord Francis Powerscourt.

New York millionaires like to stick together. Who wants to share their piece of sidewalk with a nobody after all? And only in close proximity to their fellows can the millionaires indulge in one of their favourite sports, that of conspicuous consumption. What would be the point of banquets the Roman epicure and glutton Lucullus would have been proud of if nobody was there to see them and join the queue for the vomitarium? And when New York grew too crowded for truly vast construction projects, what would be the point of extravagant palaces, fit for a Persian emperor, in Newport or the Hamptons if nobody else could look at them and marvel at the expense?

But there were exceptions to the clubbing together of the wealthiest in the land. Wilbur Lincoln Mitchell was one of them. He was probably richer than most of your average millionaires but he chose to live in upstate New York, a couple of miles from the military academy at West Point, in a very large farmhouse built by his grandfather to house eleven children, expanded and extended ever since. Riverside, for that was what his ancestors had christened it, looked down on the great sweep of the Hudson as it made its way to the Atlantic. There was a large garden, big enough for small children to get lost, and a tennis court for the more athletic of the adults.

Wilbur Mitchell made his first fortune in railway tickets. He invented a family of machines that could manufacture tickets of any size or shape required for use on the railway systems of America. By the year 1905 he had cornered the market all along the Eastern seaboard. Four years later he had penetrated the West as far as the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe. His second fortune, even larger than the first, came several years later with a formula for cheap but effective soap, discovered by accident when searching for the perfect liquid to oil the ticket printing machines. In the meantime, he went to Europe. Mitchell spent a long time working out his own itinerary. He was not going to travel in some expensive touring party where everything was prepared for you and special guides were on hand in all countries to ensure you only had to speak English wherever you happened to be at the time.

After a leisurely tour of southern England, he moved to Italy where he marvelled at the canals in Venice and the austere masterpieces of the Uffizi in Florence. In Rome he fell in love. He discovered a previously unknown passion for ancient Greek and Roman sculpture and the early glories of the Renaissance. The twirling torsos of the Baroque and the Rococo left him cold. And he discovered something more important than love in his quest for ancient sculpture. For some reason he never knew, Wilbur Lincoln Mitchell could tell the fake from the genuine with an unerring facility. He was like a water diviner with an infallible touch. The three ancient statues he bought from Rome’s most expensive dealer were, as their owner ruefully admitted after Mitchell had left, the only authentic pieces in his possession. He moved on to Greece. He watched the sun go down over Delphi, the colours fading fast from the peaks, the ancient force of the site pressing down upon him, the power of the gods numinous as the light faded and the mountains went dark against the sky. He climbed up to the Acropolis in Athens. He saw another sunset at Cape Sounion on the coast, the remains of Poseidon’s temple clear and bright, the blue sea stretching far away, speckled with islands, a glowing golden sky above with a glittering ball of fire in the centre of the horizon. At Olympia he purchased his fourth and last piece on this tour, a statue of a charioteer with vine leaves in his hair. In time all four were delivered to him in upstate New York, where he built an orangery with great windows to house them, modelled on the one at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, by the Thames in London. Here was the new home for the charioteer and Apollo from Mitylene, the Roman Emperor Hadrian and Athena from the first century
AD
. If they quarrelled or fought, if they went for walks or made love, they did so under cover of darkness.