Death of an Elgin Marble (6 page)

‘Well, Lord Powerscourt,’ the senior partner would reply, ‘this is certainly going to be an interesting commission! I can quite see that. Perhaps I could try for enlightenment point by point, if I may. You say you are acting as intermediary for a certain party. Could you perhaps fill in some of the details. An ancient family wishing to dispose of some assets? Death duties come to call in their usual disagreeable way? Two deaths of an incumbent in quick succession perhaps? Always difficult, those cases. Always expensive too. A foreign gentleman perchance, wishing to retain his anonymity? The Government in some shape or form? A member of the Royal Family maybe? They have enough art after all to keep us in business till the end of the century!’

With that, the senior partner usually laughed loudly at his own witticism. Powerscourt would smile.

‘I’m afraid I cannot be more precise at this point. Your list of possibilities is certainly comprehensive. Forgive me.’

‘Of course, Lord Powerscourt, of course. Could I now ask about the object in question? A possible work of art that has yet to come on the market, you say. That could mean almost anything. Could I assume, for the sake of clarity, that we are talking about a painting or an Old Master drawing or a piece of sculpture, something that would come within the normal compass of activities for a firm like ours?’

Powerscourt would pause at this point and rub his hands together. ‘I am going beyond my brief here,’ he would announce finally, ‘but you have been more than patient with this difficult enquiry. Yes, I can safely say that the work would fit into the categories you mention. But I dare not say any more. I am in breach of my undertakings already.’

‘That is certainly helpful, Lord Powerscourt. Could I ask you this also? Would your client or clients like to sell the object or objects in open auction or would you prefer a private sale, something more discreet.’

‘I am not an expert in these matters, Mr Senior Partner. What would your advice be?’

Now it was the turn of the man from the art dealers to pause. ‘Well,’ he would say, ‘you could probably obtain the highest price at an open auction, well publicized, heavily advertised before the event. On the other hand there might be advantages to a private sale, details that could be kept out of the public domain, away from the prying eyes of the tax authorities and the perils of publicity about the export of works of art, selling off the nation’s heritage, that sort of rubbish that always floods the newspapers when important works leave these shores.’

Powerscourt thought that a commission of ten per cent or more plus auctioneering expenses might be a sufficient compensation for temporary trial by newspaper.

‘Would I be right in assuming, Mr Senior Partner, that your firm would be prepared to act in either case, public auction or private sale?’

‘Why, of course. We are mere facilitators, the gears, if you like, which work to effect the connection of buyer and seller to mutual advantage. We would be delighted to offer our services.’

And that would be that. In one case the senior partner tried to obtain some more information about the object in question.

‘Let me hazard a guess, Lord Powerscourt,’ this managing director, considerably older than his colleagues, ventured, ‘could it be that the revelation of the type of work would be such that it could have an impact on the future price? A lost Leonardo would cause a sensation to start with, but interest might die down after a while. Better to keep the identity of the work secret until the last possible moment perhaps? Fetch a higher price that way, what do you say?’

Powerscourt would smile to them all and set off on his business. Two trains of thought would go with him on his walk back to Markham Square through some of London’s richest streets. None of the leading art houses had, as yet, been approached by any thief. He felt sure that he could have told if they had been. The second train of thought never left him, day or night. Where was the Caryatid? How had the thieves got her out? How had they got the replacement in? Where was she now?

They built a special coffin for the statue, the sculptor, the carpenter and the undertaker in the little town on the edge of the Brecon Beacons. This was no ordinary coffin, just under eight feet long, twice the normal width and twice the normal height. The sculptor’s eight-year-old son, who caught sight of it by accident one afternoon, thought his father was making a final resting place for a giant like Bendigeidfran fab Llyr, a mythological king of Britain in the time of legend, or Idris Gawr of the great mountain Cader Idris. Maybe it was a dragon, green or red perhaps, stretched out with the wings tucked in by her side.

The sculptor consulted the only book in the local library about Egyptian mummies. They decided to wrap her in linen sheets alternating with blankets and three rolls of canvas on top of those. The statue was secured to the floor and sides of the coffin and the bottom and sides of the casket were lined with tightly packed straw. This adaptation of ancient custom by the Nile with human remains to current Welsh practice with marble subjects by the Brecon Beacons would, they thought, keep her in one piece on her journey. For the statue was not being well preserved for a journey to eternal life in the next world, she was going on a journey across the seas to the New World where a different kind of immortality awaited her. No cakes or ornaments were going with her.

The coffin was black, with handles along the side. The story concocted for the journey was complicated, but credible, largely the work of the local schoolteacher who was sworn into the conspiracy with a fistful of notes, a couple of bottles of whisky and a year’s supply of tickets to the rugby internationals. The previous year, the legend went, a rich American had come home to visit his family and the tombs of his ancestors. On his journey he met a young sculptor who was his great-great-nephew on his mother’s side. It was the rich American’s special wish, before he went back to Baltimore, that the young man should carve something appropriate to adorn his tomb in the local cemetery after his death. The rich American only lasted three weeks after his return, for the journey must have taken more out of him than he realized. His funeral was held in his local church where he had been an elder for many years, the Third Presbyterian off Jefferson Drive in the wealthiest part of the city, and the body was duly interred in the cemetery. In the coffin was the offering from the young sculptor in Wales, a triumphant angel, wings furled, her arm aloft, pointing the way to heaven for the dead American relative. Surely she would see him to the last frontier and a better world.

A firm from Bristol were to organize transport to that city and the transhipment to America. They were one of the most experienced companies in the country at this sort of work. They watched the great lorry moving slowly down the mountain road, the sculptor, the carpenter, the undertaker and the schoolteacher, until it turned the corner by the railway bridge and vanished from sight, the noise of the engine the last link to fade away. They decided to hold a wake for their departed friend in the snug of the Green Dragon next to the undertaker’s whose doors had only just opened for the day. How else could they mark the passing of a Caryatid, well over two thousand years old, on her journey of three thousand miles to a new home across the seas?

‘I’m afraid I’ve had rather an unconventional thought,’ said Inspector Christopher Kingsley, taking a cup of Earl Grey in the Powerscourt drawing room at about half past six in the evening. He now had a permanent invitation to call around this time.

Powerscourt looked at him keenly. Policemen, even ones in the habit of reading modern novels, were not usually supposed to harbour such thoughts.

‘How unconventional?’ asked Powerscourt with a smile.

‘Well, I’m not actually ashamed of it, now I come to think about it,’ the Inspector said, ‘it could prove rather useful in our investigation.’

‘Tell us more, please,’ Lady Lucy chipped in.

‘Well, I was talking about the Caryatid to my children yesterday evening. I should have been reading them a bedside story but my mind was so full of the marble lady with the long tunic that I told them all about her instead.’

‘And what did they say?’ asked Powerscourt.

‘This is the interesting thing, my lord, Lady Lucy. James and Rosalind, he’s seven and she’s five, asked a whole lot of questions I don’t think we would have thought of.’

‘Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings,’ said Lady Lucy, remembering the psalm and hoping the words could help bring forth victory, ‘hast thou ordained strength because of thine enemies, that thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger.’

‘Probably,’ said the Inspector, slightly thrown by this display of biblical knowledge. ‘Anyway, Rosalind wanted to know if the Caryatid had to have her face washed. And her hair, the little one added after a second’s thought. James asked if she could talk to the other statues at night when all the people had gone away. Rosalind asked me if she had been a real person once. Did the sculptor copy a living lady to make his Caryatid? What sort of house would she have lived in? What sort of food would she have eaten? Would she be forced to have porridge for breakfast like everybody else? There were lots more queries along the same lines. I began to think I might have been better sticking to Toad’s adventures in
The Wind in the Willows
after a while.’

‘What interesting questions,’ said Lady Lucy.

‘I’m not sure I could have answered them all,’ Powerscourt added. ‘Forgive me, please, but I can’t for the moment discern how they might help us in this inquiry.’

‘That only came to me this morning, my lord. One of our problems, as you both know, is that we can’t talk to any of the people in the museum. As far as they know, the Caryatid standing on her plinth is the real one. Nobody’s told them or the public who come to see her anything different. Now consider this. If you are an academic, or a scholarly gentleman like the curators at the museum, there are learned articles you can look up about the Parthenon and the Elgin Marbles. I think they produce a catalogue of their sculpture holdings every few years, with considerably more footnotes than pages of text. That’s fine if you’ve got a university degree and a pair of thick glasses but they’re no earthly use to anybody else.’

Powerscourt smiled. He thought he could see where the Inspector was heading.

‘Now then, my lord, who do you think are the most important clients of the British Museum? Not the middle-aged and the old, surely. Not even the younger people who flock there at the weekends. The most valuable visitors are the youngest, the ones who will be able to go back over and over again. There are children peering at the Parthenon frieze and the lapiths and the centaurs and the Caryatid all the time, depending on their teachers to be told what is going on.’

Inspector Kingsley paused and took another sip of his Earl Grey. Neither Powerscourt nor Lady Lucy would have dared to interrupt him now.

‘I’m sure you can see what I am driving at,’ he went on. ‘The museum should produce a little pamphlet, a small book with lots of illustrations, aimed at eight- to ten-year-olds, that could be on sale for a few pence or given away free to young visitors. It would be a valuable contribution to the wider understanding of ancient Greece, surely.’

‘Do you have an author in mind,’ asked Powerscourt in the most innocent voice he could muster.

‘Why, yes. I would write it.’ The Inspector blushed a deep shade of red as he said this. ‘For the real reason behind such a plan is that it would give us the perfect excuse to talk to people all over the museum. The porters would have to tell us how the Caryatid was cleaned and so on, how she was moved from place to place, the others would have to tell us how she fitted into the ancient world. But what a lot of questions we could ask! Anyway, I’ve always wanted to write something more interesting than police reports. This could be a start.’

‘Splendid,’ said Powerscourt, ‘splendid. I’ll speak to Ragg in the morning. If he agrees, you could start work on the project immediately.’

Artemis Metaxas had never thought she would end up as a madame, a procurer of young girls for her clients. Certainly not at the tender age of twenty-seven. Her task, quite separate from her teaching duties at the school attached to the Greek Orthodox Cathedral of Santa Sophia in Notting Hill’s Moscow Road, came round once a month. She was to collect a group of respectable young Greek girls under the age of twenty in London, and bring them on a Saturday afternoon to a secret address in the Home Counties. Half a dozen or so would suffice, but eight would be better. They were to be returned to the capital on the Sunday afternoon under the same conditions of extreme secrecy, darkened windows in the special train, closed carriages to bring them from the station to the remote garden door of the house in the country. Quite what happened to them in their secluded stay, Artemis never knew. She was put up in a cottage on the estate some distance from the house and not allowed to leave. She only met her charges again on the return journey. She knew the girls were well paid. She knew they were sworn to silence with some ancient oath of terrible power. And, whatever went on, Artemis was sure that what took place was not too dreadful. A number of the girls volunteered to go back over and over again.

Johnny Fitzgerald found only one regular at the Black Swan near the art dealers of Old Bond Street who remembered him from earlier times. This was a very old gentleman, universally known as Red Fred, widely believed to refer to a revolutionary period in his middle years, who had boasted only seven teeth when Johnny had first encountered him. Now he proudly pointed to his last remaining two, assuring Johnny, to Johnny’s great delight, that there was food enough in the drink if you remembered to order the right stuff. But he was able to direct Johnny to the Cock and Whistle off Southampton Row where the porters from the British Museum took their refreshments at the end of a working day. Johnny was surprised at the number of Greek porters on the staff. There was a Yannis with a limp and a Kostas with an enormous beard, an Evangelos who doubled up as a card sharp in the evenings and a Stavros with immaculate English, all working alongside more conventional Londoners with more conventional names. Some of them, Johnny decided, might have been on duty the day the Caryatid was switched and the original disappeared. The Greek contingent, he discovered, felt more at home in a different pub called The Fox and Hounds near the Greek Cathedral on Moscow Road in Notting Hill. Here the landlord’s brother-in-law was Greek and maintained a private drinking establishment in the basement serving a variety of Greek drinks, the aniseed-flavoured
ouzo
and
tsipouro, mastika
and
kitron
, a citrus-flavoured liquor from Naxos, and
tentura
, a lethal cinnamon-flavoured potion that came from Patras. On Saturday evenings his wife cooked a variety of Greek dishes, served with an assortment of wines from the homeland, which Johnny Fitzgerald believed produced the longest-lasting hangovers of any alcoholic liquid he had ever tasted.