Death of an Elgin Marble (33 page)

‘The Isles of Greece
is on the move again,’ Powerscourt told him. ‘She’s picked up a package, though our man doesn’t tell us what it was. The fact that it came as freight rather than through the postal service suggests it was something big. And she’s heading for Athens through the Corinth Canal. With four Greek Orthodox monks on board to keep the lion company. Maybe they’ll convert the monkeys.’

‘Do you think there’s another bloody Caryatid on board,’ asked the Inspector, ‘surely not?’

‘God knows,’ said Powerscourt cheerfully, ‘maybe Zeus knows, that’s his part of the world after all, but he’s not telling. And we have news of Dr Stanhope of the British Museum. You remember we discovered he was linked with the Hellenic College in Amersham? Well, Lucy here has been to check the place out. She was posing as a possible parent.’

‘Tell me more,’ said Inspector Kingsley.

‘Well,’ said Lady Lucy, ‘it’s all very interesting. To get there you have to go through the grounds of that big house, packed with replicas of ancient statues, ancient temples, ancient obelisks. There’s a pantheon and a Parthenon sitting there quite happily. The actual school seems to be very well run, but very Greek, very keen on teaching Greek customs and culture, all that sort of thing. I saw a couple of classrooms, one of them where the senior boys were reading aloud from Byron’s
Childe Harold
. And this is the interesting bit, Inspector. They were reading the passages where the poet is very rude about Lord Elgin for stealing the Marbles. Byron thought they should go home to Greece. And you’ll never guess who the teacher was.’

‘I won’t even try, Lady Powerscourt. Please tell me.’

‘Why, it was Mr Blakeway, Nicholas George Blakeway, the man who was sent to prison for his crimes.’

‘I was going to tell you about his time in jail,’ said the Inspector. ‘The Governor of the Scrubs filled me in. Blakeway fitted in very well, apparently. He taught a lot of convicts to play whist. They refused to play poker with him, presumably because he won all their matches or their cigarettes or whatever they were playing for.’

‘There’s more to do with our friend Mr Blakeway and the Hellenic College, Inspector.’ Lady Lucy was well into her stride now. ‘Dr Tristram Stanhope recommended him for the job there. Really. They sent us a lot of information about the school yesterday. They have just finished a new building, a replica of the Erechtheion, a temple on the Acropolis in Athens, the temple, as you well know, that was originally home to the British Museum Caryatid. The new building’s being declared open tomorrow evening. There’s no room for parents apparently, which I think is rather odd, none of them being invited to the ceremony. Have they got something they wish to hide? Anyway, Francis and I were going to see if we could watch from the shadows. Maybe Dr Stanhope will appear, dressed as Pericles for his Funeral Speech or ranting away like Demosthenes with his pebbles on the seashore.’

Before Inspector Kingsley could comment, Powerscourt cut in. He told the Inspector about his trip to the Cotswolds and his meeting with Blakeway. ‘He told me that he’d sold Burford Antiques three months ago. I’ve just realized I forgot to ask him for the name of the man who bought it.’

‘Did you believe him when he told you he’d sold it?’ Inspector Kingsley sounded as if he wouldn’t have believed a word of it himself.

‘I don’t know,’ Powerscourt replied. ‘He’s a very plausible fellow.’

‘I too have some news,’ said Inspector Kingsley. ‘You won’t be surprised to hear that it concerns Dr Tristram Stanhope. You remember I said earlier that our financial people were looking into all the key personnel at the British Museum? That’s how we found out about Kostas’s enormous savings account. Our financial wizard thinks that Dr Stanhope has recently received a very large sum of money, thousands and thousands of pounds. It hasn’t gone directly into his account, naturally, but into some trust fund we can’t at present open. Smaller lumps of money, hundreds at a time, have been transferred from this fund into his regular account. Even that was hard to get into. The Commissioner had to write to the chairman of the bank, threatening a major investigation of all the directors, before they agreed.’

Powerscourt jumped up from the sofa and began walking up and down the room. ‘I presume you have at present no idea where this money came from?’

‘None at all. All the same, if a relative had died, or some colleague had left you a packet in his will, you wouldn’t go to such lengths to conceal it, would you?’

‘But if some version of the Caryatid has been sold, possibly to our friend Lincoln Mitchell by the Hudson River in upstate New York, for example, you might receive heaps of cash for your part in the affair, might you not?’

‘That’s right. And there’s another thing that has just occurred to me. You mentioned Amersham just now, Lady Powerscourt. I’ve just remembered. When I put young Constable Smithson onto the freight records at Paddington, he mentioned that a couple came from Amersham. I’m sure of it. I’ll send him up to Amersham station the moment I get back. We should hear his report tomorrow.’

‘Could I ask you a question, Inspector?’

‘Of course, Lady Powerscourt. Fire ahead.’

‘It was the mention of Mr Blakeway that did it,’ she said. ‘Isn’t he one of the three people who went to prison and might be linked to the shades of the prison-house mentioned by old Sokratis in his wanderings?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Suppose you think of this case like a long piece of string,’ Lady Lucy went on. ‘At one end you have the three men who went to prison and possibly Dr Stanhope. The poor Mr Ragg and the Caryatid are in the middle. At the other end are the horrible Twins who went to Wales to kill the schoolteacher and may have pushed the porter under the train.’

‘That’s right, Lucy,’ Powerscourt said, wondering where his wife was going.

‘I think this idea comes from remembering the bit about the prison-house. Inspector, I presume your colleague in Deptford, Inspector Ferguson I think he’s called, knows who the Twins’ master and controller is, the man who gives them their orders?’

‘He most certainly does.’

‘Why then, don’t you see? Maybe the master and controller’s been in prison at the same time as one of the other three, Blakeway, Easton and Kennedy? It’s the same question you’re asking already but looked at from the other end, if you see what I mean.’

‘I do, indeed I do. An excellent suggestion, Lady Powerscourt. I shall get onto it right away.’

‘There’s one thing that’s always puzzled me about this case, especially with this new information about Stanhope’s money.’ The master of the house was still pacing up and down his drawing room.

‘You could just about envisage Stanhope having a hand in planning the theft, though I can’t see him knowing the contacts to produce the actual thieves. But connections with the Twins and their various murders? Surely not. And you can easily imagine the Twins or their controller going round the place murdering people. But it’s hard to think of them stealing the Caryatid. I doubt if the Twins have even heard of the British Museum.’

‘When we’ve answered that question, my lord, we’ll have solved the mystery. I must get back and set my men to work. Perhaps we could meet again after lunch tomorrow? I should have something to report by then. Perhaps you and Lady Powerscourt would care to think about whether you would like me and some of my men to accompany you to Amersham tomorrow? It could be a prudent move to have reinforcements on hand.’

That evening Powerscourt read Keats’s poem about seeing the Elgin Marbles for the first time. He read again Lord Byron’s poetic diatribe about Elgin’s theft of the Marbles.

He woke up shortly before four o’clock in the morning. He levered himself slowly out of bed and tiptoed over to the chair by the window. He peered slowly out through a crack in the curtains. Markham Square was silent. Even the leaves on the trees were still. Only the Markham cat, a battered and bedraggled beast from regular fights on the King’s Road, fed occasionally with milk from the Powerscourt kitchen by the Powerscourt twins, was on the prowl, checking that her enemies were not at large on this night. Behind him he could hear Lady Lucy’s breathing, slow and regular, like a well-made clock.

Powerscourt had just been visited by one of the most extraordinary dreams of his life. He wanted to fix it in his mind before it disappeared between now and the dawn, lost for ever in the secret filing cabinets of his brain. In his dream he was sitting by the ground-floor window of one of the Nash terrace houses in Great Russell Street, the young John Nash’s very first architectural commission, long before he went on to astonish the world with the great sweep of Regent Street and the improbable fantasies of the Brighton Pavilion. There was a noise outside, or a variety of different noises, coming closer by the minute. Then he saw them, the advance guard of a mighty army from many nations and of many different colours. In the vanguard was a phalanx of Homeric warriors from ancient Greece, dressed in the armour they wore to fight against the Trojans. They looked as though they had stepped out of one of the vases on display in the building up the street. Powerscourt thought he could recognize Achilles from the glory of his breastplate and the wily Odysseus, relying this time on a frontal attack rather than the ruse of the Wooden Horse. Every now and then one of these heroes would utter a fearful war cry and wave a spear towards their target, which, Powerscourt realized, could only be the British Museum. Behind the ancient Greeks in his dream marched a cohort of Roman legionaries with a trumpet call to make the blood run cold. But it was the people behind them who were the principal components of this invading army. They came in loincloths and in tunics, some wearing flowing robes and others clad in skimpy drawers, their bodies heavily oiled and glistening in the street lights. They came with primitive armour and leather shields. They came with spears and assegais and swords long and short, with axes and hammers and knobkerries that could smash a man’s skull, with sharp daggers and early bows and arrows. Looking out of his window Powerscourt saw that they stretched back along Great Russell Street into Southampton Row and presumably down Holborn to the river at the Victoria Embankment. Perhaps the motley army had come by boat, primitive canoes and coracles nestling along the banks of the Thames, early sailing boats tied up by Waterloo Bridge. All these different tribes were singing their battle hymns as they marched, some stamping their feet and raising their weapons in defiance at the enemy. And the enemy, Powerscourt, realized once the vanguard had reached their destination, was the pillared and porticoed front of the British Museum itself. Only when he watched what happened when the warriors climbed the steps and smashed down the great doors did he realize what was going on. Not long after their entry he saw some of the Greeks come out, waving sections of early Greek pottery and sculpture in the air and yelling cries of victory, closely followed by the legionaries, arms laden with ancient Roman coins and jewels and the heads of their emperors. This was the revenge of the subject peoples of the British Museum. Looking at the disparate mob of many colours and of many nations behind the Romans, Powerscourt knew now who they were. These were the descendants of the Hittites, the Assyrians, the Canaanites, the Phoenicians, the Egyptians, the Sumerians, the Chaldonians, the Sudanese, the Amorites, ancient civilizations all, their cultures plundered and ransacked centuries before to glorify the British Museum and titillate bored Londoners on wet weekday afternoons. Each and every tribe had a room or an area in the museum devoted to their statues, the ornaments of their temples, the adornments of their rulers, the likenesses of their fearful gods. These armies of the night had come out of a troubled and turbulent present to rescue their past as a bulwark and safeguard against the uncertainties of the future. Soon the great halls of the museum would be emptied of everything that could be carried away. Stolen the day before yesterday, stolen back today.

Powerscourt had found the sweat dripping down his temples when he woke.

The Isles of Greece
had to wait a couple of hours before she was allowed to enter the Corinth Canal and cross from one side of Greece to the other. Captain Dimitri himself took the helm as the circus ship inched her way very carefully down the four miles of the canal. The lion had shown absolutely no interest in the engineering marvel and had fallen asleep. The monkeys were pointing hysterically upwards at the 300-foot wall between the water at the bottom and the rough ground at the top. The monks were praying, staring straight ahead. The youngest monk was the brother of Kostas and Stavros. His superiors had not yet told him that one brother was dead and the other missing. Brother Andreas was part of the Orthodox community of St John the Divine on the Greek island of Kythnos, close to Patmos in the Cyclades. Andreas had waited in vain for
The Isles of Greece
to call at his island weeks before. Now, perhaps in atonement for his earlier vigil and the non-arrival of the ship, he and three of his fellow monks had been chosen to accompany
The Isles of Greece
on its voyage to the Greek capital.

Behind them, way to their left, stood the ancient site of Delphi, home to noxious vapours and ambivalent prophecies. Way up to the north Mount Olympus still stood, its gods silent now, their power impotent in the age of machines. On their right, to the south, lay Mycenae with its Lion Gate and the beehive tombs, and further south yet, the ancient city of Sparta, victorious over Athena’s city in the thirty years of the Peloponnesian War. At the far end of the canal the sea was open to the little island of Aegina and the port of Piraeus, now virtually a part of Athens. The railway container was lashed to the mast so it could not be washed overboard in a storm.

Lord Francis Powerscourt had consulted his friends in the Foreign Office when he received the message from the young reporter Antonio. He discovered that the Ambassador had been one year behind him in his college at Cambridge, a man famed for rowing both for his college and the university. As he composed his message, Powerscourt wondered if some splendid oar, adorned with the names of all the crew, was now sitting on a wall in the Ambassador’s office. ‘Ship arriving soon called
The Isles of Greece
,’ his message began. ‘May contain Caryatid or Caryatid-related objects. Please keep watch for any local reception or celebrations.’ He signed it Powerscourt and added the Trinity Hall Boat Club watchword, named after the college motto, ‘Our powers are crescent.’