Death of an Elgin Marble (8 page)

‘There are no disagreements at all, my dear Lord Powerscourt. Why do you think the post of Ambassador to the Court of St James is one of the most coveted posts in the Greek Prime Minister’s gift? We have little to do here except attend official functions and represent our country on state occasions. It is a post for a lotus-eater rather than a real diplomat, I assure you!’

Powerscourt was anxious to meet with the Head of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the British Museum as soon as he returned from the mountains. He had remembered only the day before another account of Tristram Stanhope from his, Powerscourt’s, brother-in-law, the banker William Burke, who had sat next to him at some grand dinner in Guildhall.

‘There we all were, Francis, white tie and tails, course after course of French cuisine, decorations will be worn, the odd Victoria Cross on show amongst the baubles, and this fellow Stanhope beside me. He didn’t look out of place at all, cufflinks and shoes all passed muster, that sort of thing. But he had this air about him. I couldn’t put my finger on it for a long time. Then it came to me. Even there, in the beating heart of the City of London, Stanhope had the air of one forever looking to recover the dramatic excitement of some long forgotten sporting event like a cricket match. “There’s a breathless hush in the Close tonight, Ten to make and the match to win.” I rather had the impression he’s been playing the game for most of his life.’

Powerscourt longed to talk to classical academics, art dealers, sculpture experts, modern Greek historians. If you were a serious thief, he would have asked after half an hour or so, what would you do with a Caryatid if you had stolen one? Copy it? If so, how many copies? Who might want to buy it? Greeks in Greece? Greeks in America? Greeks in London? How much would it be worth? Were there any examples of other works of major importance walking out of European museums apart from the
Mona Lisa
? Tristram Stanhope would have to answer for them all. Powerscourt thought about the links between the worlds of art, scholarship, Greek nationalism and crime. Somewhere, he felt sure, they intersected. If he could find that point, he might be able to solve the mystery. Once again Stanhope would be his guide.

A bumping pitch and a blinding light,

An hour to play and the last man in.

Theophilus Ragg, Deputy Director of the British Museum, thought he recognized the handwriting. The envelope too looked familiar. Feeling a great wave of anger sweep through him, he slid open the letter with an elaborately carved Japanese paper knife, a gift from the National Museum in Tokyo.

‘Dear Ragg,’ he read, ‘you have dared to disobey my instructions. I have received no suggestions about the transfer of the monies mentioned in my earlier letter. The relevant sum is therefore going to increase by ten thousand pounds a day, starting today.’

Ragg felt that the anger coursing through him was growing stronger.

‘Furthermore,’ the writer continued, ‘your pathetic attempts to secure your own safety and those of your family through the intervention of the Metropolitan Police have been noted. Their plain clothes policemen stand out on the streets of London like giants in a land of pygmies.

‘As I said before, we know who you are. We know where you are. We have ways of making you pay and in ways you might not have thought of. Quite soon you will receive reminders that it is neither wise nor prudent to ignore our demands. It is not too late. Correspondence regarding the money transfers can still be sent to The Friends of the British Museum, Ritz Hotel, London W1.’

Ragg knew he ought to take a walk or read a Shakespeare sonnet or two, to calm himself down. Shakespeare sonnets, he had discovered some years before, were much more successful in assuaging his rages than any pill or potion. He remembered the last conversation with his doctor who had advised him that he should consider taking early retirement because of his health. His heart was not strong, the doctor said, and any strain or great upset could have severe consequences. But the wrath was upon him. He thought that if he had been younger and more martial he would have issued a demand for a duel. He grabbed a pen and wrote a reply:

‘Dear Blackmailer,’ he began. ‘Yet again you have insulted me and my family and the Museum I represent. You are beneath contempt.

‘“Rage – Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles” – these are the opening words of Homer’s great epic of ancient warfare
The Iliad
, which tells the story of the battle for Troy. May it contain a lesson and a warning for you. “Would to god my rage,” Achilles tells the Trojan hero Hector just before he kills him, “and my fury would drive me now to hack your flesh away and eat you raw, such agonies you have caused me.”

‘He then kills Hector, ties him to his chariot, and drags him behind it for a period of twelve days. I pray to the ancient gods of Achaea and the spirits of the Aegean that a latter-day Achilles may return from the dead and tear you into a thousand pieces.’

Ragg realized he was still shaking. He did not read his letter again. He called for a porter to take it immediately to the Ritz Hotel in Piccadilly.

He reached inside the top left-hand drawer of his desk and pulled out a well-worn leather volume containing the sonnets of William Shakespeare.

Inspector Kingsley felt he was progressing well with his work for eight- to ten-year-olds about the Elgin Marbles and the Caryatid. He knew now that the Caryatid was cleaned in a mixture of mild soap and water once a week, and that she didn’t seem to mind when her hair was washed. He learnt about the different time scales of the various pieces of statuary. The Parthenon frieze and the metopes that had been placed around the outer walls of the building were older than the Caryatid and had probably been created by a different generation of sculptors. The Parthenon, one of the young curators told him, was built at the height of Athens’s glory, when she had an empire that spread out all over the Aegean Sea, and when her temples and public buildings were the glory of the city. The Caryatid, the young curator said, was created a generation later when the empire was lost, public life debased, and the city about to lose its thirty-year struggle with Sparta known as the Peloponnesian War. Athens had fallen from the height of glory into ignominious defeat, and the Caryatid, in a way, had marked the passing. Like Icarus, perhaps, Athens had dared to fly too close to the sun. The Athenians could always erect another temple, the Erechtheion, on the Acropolis, but they could not bring back the past.

The Inspector wrote down what he was told in a special blue notebook with his name on the inside, written in a large, childish hand by his son to remind him of his duty. He took a special interest in the routines of the museum, what happened after dark, what happened before the museum closed last thing at night. Above all, he was interested in the fire alarm that had occurred some time before. It was, people discovered afterwards, a trial run to test some new equipment, but the porters had hurried everybody out of the building into the forecourt in front of Great Russell Street as if their lives were in danger. One or two of the more punctilious curators were able to tell him that they had been left standing about for at least forty minutes. The Inspector decided it was time for another fire alarm. This time he and a couple of his men would be left hiding inside the museum to see how easy it would be to move things about or to replace one object with another. He would talk to Deputy Director Ragg that afternoon about arranging a date. He thought his children would probably approve of fire alarms with their promise of fire engines and ambulances rushing to the rescue with their sirens at full blast.

‘I’m the bringer of bad news this evening, very bad.’ Detective Inspector Kingsley had refused the customary cup of tea on his evening arrival in Markham Square and was sipping slowly at a glass of brandy. Powerscourt thought he looked very pale.

‘It’s Kostas,’ he went on, ‘one of the Greek porters at the museum. He’s been killed, I’m afraid.’

‘How?’ asked Powerscourt.

‘Well,’ said Christopher Kingsley, ‘the official story is, and will continue to be, that he was killed by a tube train. The usual story, too many people trying to get on in the rush hour, somebody slipped and then there was a body on the line waiting to be run over by God knows how many tons of Piccadilly Line train. There was an off-duty police sergeant several carriages down and he managed to keep all the passengers at the front of the train back until he spoke to them. The driver was weeping uncontrollably in the stationmaster’s office. He’d only been in the job for two weeks and nobody had prepared him for anything like this. He kept saying that it was all his fault. The point is, the sergeant told his superiors that one of the passengers, a middle-aged woman in a fur coat, said she thought somebody was pushing the victim towards the front of the train, but she couldn’t be sure. She’s going to speak to us again in the morning when she’s calmed down. You know how confusing and chaotic these situations can be, my lord. Very hard to make a sensible narrative of what’s been happening.’

‘What do we know of the dead man, Inspector?’

‘Very little so far. Name of Kostas Manitakis, employed as a porter in the British Museum. Age, thirty-four, resident in a Greek boarding house, apparently, near their cathedral in Moscow Road in Notting Hill.’

‘I wonder if Johnny Fitzgerald has come across him,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Maybe he drank in the basement of that pub down there with the ouzo and the unspeakable Greek wines.’

‘I have made an appointment to go to his lodgings in the morning, my lord. I should be very happy if you would come with me. In the meantime, as a precaution, I have ordered his room to be sealed off and guarded and a watch kept on the house. All the other lodgers will be kept at home until they have spoken to us before they go off to work. The landlady is going to miss her normal cleaning duties in the cathedral.’

‘It sounds as if you expect foul play, Inspector.’

‘I do, and I don’t. I happen to have worked before with the sergeant who was on the train and organized the passengers for questioning. He’s a most reliable fellow. He wouldn’t have told us about the pushing if he didn’t think there was something funny going on.’

Powerscourt looked closely at the Inspector and remembered what Christopher Kingsley had said about his dislike of murders. Now it looked as though he might have been plunged right into the middle of another one.

Number six Moscow Road was a three-storey terraced house with steps up to the front door, guarded by a large cat with fierce black eyes and half a tail. The landlady, Mrs Olga Henderson, was of Greek extraction but married to a man from Yorkshire. She greeted them nervously at the door, as Kingsley introduced his sergeant and Powerscourt.

‘Come in, sir, my lord Powerscourt, Sergeant. Dear me, I never expected three of you all at once.’

‘Don’t worry, Mrs Henderson,’ said the Inspector, ‘nobody is suggesting anything illegal went on in this house.’ Powerscourt’s eyebrows rose a couple of inches at this point. ‘We just want to ask everybody a few questions,’ the Inspector continued, ‘that’s all. Perhaps we could begin with you and then you needn’t worry any more. Is there somewhere quiet we could talk?’

‘Yes, yes, come this way, please.’ The front hall was adorned with pictures of Greek saints. She now showed them into what was clearly the front room, overlooking the street, obviously not used very much and entirely dominated by a large reproduction of a Byzantine Christ, gazing sadly at his earthly kingdom of a battered sofa and a glass cabinet filled with children’s dolls.

‘Perhaps you could begin by telling us how many residents you have here, Mrs Henderson.’ Powerscourt was impressed by the way the Inspector avoided using the word ‘lodgers’.

‘Five at the moment,’ Mrs Henderson replied. ‘All my rooms are taken just now!’ She brightened slightly at this point as if a full house was a guarantee of innocence.

‘Perhaps we could begin with the late Mr Kostas, Mrs Henderson. How long had he been with you?’

‘About a year and a half, he came with his brother Stavros just after Easter last year. They shared the little room at the back of the house at the top. Very good guests they were too.’ Mrs Henderson looked as though she might be about to burst into tears at any moment.

‘Tell us, if you would, Mrs Henderson, what sort of people they were, these two brothers, what they liked doing in their spare time, that sort of thing.’

‘Well, it’s hard to say when you get to know people, isn’t it. They liked their work at the museum, I know that. They used to drink at that pub round the corner. Kostas liked playing football, there was some kind of informal Greek team that kicked a ball about in the park on Sunday afternoons.’

‘Is the brother here at present?’ asked Powerscourt. ‘In the house, I mean?’

‘No, Mr Stavros is away, he’s been away a week or more now. I don’t know where he’s gone or how to get in touch with him, I’m afraid. There was some talk of a long journey, I think, but I’m not sure.’

There was a pause while Mrs Henderson dried her eyes on a large purple handkerchief that looked as though it belonged to her husband.

‘Take your time,’ said the Inspector kindly, in his best bedside manner, ‘there’s no hurry.’

Powerscourt looked up again at the huge mournful eyes of the Saviour above the mantelpiece. Lady Lucy had always maintained that it was the foreknowledge of their own death that made these Greek Orthodox Christs so sad. ‘If you knew, Francis, that you were going to have a long and bloody death, stuck on top of a cross at the top of some hill with Roman soldiers abusing you, you’d look pretty miserable too.’

‘Were they regular with the rent, that sort of thing?’ asked the Inspector.

‘Yes, they were, they never missed a rent day all the time they were here.’

‘Were they religious, the brothers,’ asked Powerscourt, ‘living so close to the cathedral and so on?’

‘Now you mention, they were very keen on the Church. There’s another brother who’s a monk in a monastery on a Greek island somewhere in the middle of the Aegean. Kostas always tried to get home early on Fridays for Vespers in the early evening and they both went to church on Sundays, regular.’