Death of an Old Master (16 page)

‘It’s my aunt,’ said Johnny, ‘the lady who owns the painting, you see. Five years ago she decided to sell a Van Dyck. She took it to one of your competitors around here
– she was a lot more mobile in those days. The gallery said it was worthless and sent it back. Three years later her Van Dyck was sold for a very large sum of money. You see, the gallery
hadn’t sent her back the original at all. They sent her back a copy. They kept the original and then sold it after a period of time. It’s as well my auntie reads all the papers and the
magazines or she’d have never found out what happened.’

Clarke and his colleagues made sad and comforting noises. ‘What a breach of trust!’ ‘Abuse of clients!’ ‘Disgraceful behaviour!’ But they looked ever so
slightly guilty. Johnny took up his picture, wrapped it in its thick brown paper, and made his farewells.

‘Just let me know when your experts want to see it, then,’ he said cheerfully, as he headed for the door. ‘I’ll bring it back myself, I promise you. I look forward to
hearing from you, gentlemen. A very good day to you all.’

Out on the pavement Johnny Fitzgerald laughed loudly. The looks on their faces had been most enjoyable. He peered around the shopfronts of Old Bond Street. His eye fell on the offices of de
Courcy and Piper, ‘art dealers of quality’, said the legend on the door.

‘Good morning,’ Fitzgerald said cheerfully to the young man behind the desk.

‘Good morning, sir,’ said the young man. ‘How can we help you?’

‘It’s this Leonardo here,’ Fitzgerald said. ‘It belongs to my aunt . . .’

‘What do you think she’ll wear, Lucy?’ said Lord Francis Powerscourt to his wife.

‘That’s a most unusual question for a man to ask,’ said Lady Lucy.

‘Well, she can hardly turn out in black, can she?’ said Powerscourt. ‘But then again, she wouldn’t feel happy in pink or something like that, would she?’

Lady Lucy laughed. ‘I’m sure you’d get it right, if you had time to think about it, Francis. Even you. I bet you anything you like she’ll be in grey. Probably in dark
grey. Sad, but not actually mourning. Maybe a black hat.’

Mrs Rosalind Buckley had replied remarkably promptly to Powerscourt’s note inviting her to Markham Square. She was due in five minutes’ time. He had asked Lady Lucy if the
conversation would be easier with another woman present. Lady Lucy had thought about it for some time.

‘I think she might say more about her private life to a woman on her own than she would to a man. In fact I’m sure of it. But talking to a man and a woman would be difficult for her.
I think she would be more reluctant to speak in those circumstances. I think you need to speak to her on your own, Francis. Good luck!’

Mrs Rosalind Buckley was indeed wearing grey, dark grey, when she was shown into the drawing room on the first floor. She was tall and slim, an inch or two taller than Christopher Montague,
Powerscourt thought, with curly brown hair, full lips and very sad big brown eyes. She looked about thirty years old, but it was hard to tell. Powerscourt thought that men of all ages could easily
have fallen in love with her.

‘Mrs Buckley,’ he said, rising from his chair, dropping
The Times
on to the floor, ‘how very kind of you to come. Please sit down.’ He ushered her into the
armchair opposite his own. She began to take off her gloves. The gloves, he noticed, were black.

‘Lord Powerscourt,’ she said, trying vainly to manage a smile, ‘it was the least I could do after what happened to Mr Montague. Please feel free to ask whatever you wish. I
shall try to bear it.’

Christ, thought Powerscourt, she’s not going to start crying already, is she? Weeping women always upset him.

‘Perhaps I could begin with the simplest question of all, Mrs Buckley,’ he said. ‘How long have you been friendly with Mr Montague?’

They both knew what friendly meant.

‘About a year and a half,’ she said.

‘Really? As long as that?’ said Powerscourt. ‘How did you meet him, may I ask?’

‘We met at the preview of an exhibition of Spanish paintings in Old Bond Street. I’d gone with one of my sisters. Christopher, Mr Montague I mean, was entrancing about the
paintings.’

‘And did you know about the article he was working on at the time of his death?’ asked Powerscourt.

‘I knew about it,’ said Mrs Buckley proudly. ‘I had a key to that flat in Brompton Square. I used to go and see Christopher when it was dark.’

Powerscourt could see her now, hurrying along in the shadows, keeping out of the light, racing towards the sanctuary of her lover hidden away behind the Brompton Oratory.

‘Can you remember what it said?’ asked Powerscourt. ‘Forgive me if these questions are painful.’

Mrs Rosalind Buckley looked hard at Powerscourt. ‘I can’t remember the arguments,’ she began. ‘They were very learned with lots of references to Italian and German
professors in Rome and Berlin. But basically he said that most of the paintings on show in the exhibition of Venetian Paintings at the de Courcy and Piper Gallery weren’t genuine. Some of
them were copies and some were recent forgeries.’

Powerscourt had been reading Christopher Montague’s first book about the birth of the Renaissance. An idea suddenly struck him. For the one thing that rang out from the Montague writings
about Italian paintings was that he loved Italy, he loved the art, he loved the light, he loved the countryside, he loved the cities, he loved the food, he even loved the wine.

‘You know that Mr Montague inherited a very large sum of money abut six months before he died,’ he said quietly. ‘Do you know what he intended to do with it?’

There was a long pause. Powerscourt noticed that Rosalind Buckley’s hands were gripping the sides of her chair very tightly. Lady Lucy’s granddaughter clock was ticking softly in the
background. There was a sudden sound of crying as if Thomas or Olivia had fallen down the stairs.

‘I do,’ she said. She said no more. Powerscourt waited. The crying was dying down as the child was carried up to the nurseries on the top floor. Still Powerscourt waited. Then he
could bear it no longer.

‘Let me try to help you, Mrs Buckley, if I may.’ He was looking directly into the large brown eyes. ‘Please correct me if I’m wrong. I think Mr Montague was intending to
buy a house or a villa in Italy. Maybe he had already bought it. Somewhere in Tuscany, I would imagine, would have been his favourite. He wrote beautifully about Tuscany, and about Florence in
particular. Somewhere between Florence and Siena perhaps?’

There was another of those pauses. Rosalind Buckley looked as if she might cry.

‘You’re absolutely right, Lord Powerscourt,’ she said sadly. ‘Christopher, Mr Montague I mean, bought a villa near Fiesole up in the hills two months ago. He was going to
write his books there.’

Powerscourt felt the questions were getting more difficult.

‘And were you going to join him there, Mrs Buckley?’ he asked quietly. ‘Up there in the hills with those wonderful views across the mountains?’

This time there was no pause.

‘I was,’ she said defiantly. ‘Of course I was going to join him.’

Powerscourt thought they would have been very happy, Montague writing his articles under the shade of a tree perhaps, Mrs Buckley keeping house in the sunshine, tending the flowers in the
garden. But the worst part had now arrived.

‘I’m afraid,’ he said, ‘I have to ask you about your husband now, Mrs Buckley. It won’t take long.’

Rosalind Buckley bowed her head. Powerscourt couldn’t tell if it was shame or an invitation to proceed.

‘Did Mr Buckley know about your friendship with Mr Montague?’

Mrs Buckley kept her head bowed, staring at the patterns in the Powerscourt carpet.

‘He did,’ she said.

‘How long ago did he find out?’

‘About four or five weeks ago.’

That would be about a week before Montague’s death, Powerscourt reminded himself. Just a week. Long enough to make a plan.

‘Do you know how he found out?’ asked Powerscourt softly.

‘I think he found a letter from Christopher in my writing desk,’ she said sadly, her eyes now looking up at Powerscourt. ‘He had no business to do such a thing.’

‘Indeed not.’ Powerscourt was quick to sympathize. ‘May I ask what his reaction was?’ he said in his gentlest voice.

Rosalind Buckley replied in even quieter tones. Powerscourt had to lean forward to catch the words. ‘He said he was going to horsewhip the two of us,’ she whispered. ‘My
husband may be a lawyer but he can be very violent.’ Rosalind Buckley shuddered. ‘He said Christopher’s behaviour was unworthy of a gentleman.’

Powerscourt wondered whether he should ask the next question. He felt he had no choice. ‘Do you know where your husband was,’ he asked, ‘round about the time when Christopher
was killed?’

‘I wish I could help you there, Lord Powerscourt,’ she said, ‘but I can’t. You see, since the day when he found out about my friendship with Christopher, my husband
hasn’t been in the house. I haven’t seen him at all since then.’

After she had gone Powerscourt stretched out on the sofa. Damn, he said to himself, damn. I forgot to ask her about Christopher Montague’s will. Had she inherited all the money? The house
in the Tuscan hills? And he wondered about her phrase towards the end when he asked about her husband’s whereabouts at the time of the murder. I wish I could help you there, she had said. Was
that simply what it appeared? Or did she wish that she could implicate her husband in Montague’s death, and be rid of him once and for all?

I wish I could help you there.

Orlando Blane pulled two paintings away from the wall and into the light by the window in his Long Gallery. On the left was the
Portrait of a Venetian Gentleman
by Zorzi
da Castelfranco, better known as Giorgione. On the right was the
Portrait of a Venetian Gentleman
, by Orlando Blane in the manner of Zorzi da Castelfranco, better known as Giorgione. Through
a window in the top left-hand corner was a hazy outline of Venice’s Doge’s Palace, with the prisons to the right. Inside the room a man in dark clothes stood with a counter in front of
him. On the counter there rested a book, maybe an account book. The man’s right hand rested on the book, holding a blue package, possibly containing money. The man was looking sideways at the
painter, as if Giorgione, or Orlando Blane, owed the Venetian gentleman a substantial sum, late in repayment.

The two paintings were identical, except in one regard. Orlando pressed his thumb very gently into the paint on the left-hand portrait. It was hard, dried out over four hundred years. Then he
repeated the process with the painting on his right. It was soft. The hardening process would have to be speeded up. Tomorrow he would put the fake Giorgione in a specially adapted oven in the
stables.

Then he would apply a coat of size, and later, when the size was properly dry, he would put on a coat of varnish. By that time he hoped the two pictures would be indistinguishable. Orlando had
only used paints that would have been available in Giorgione’s time. He had consulted a number of volumes in his library from Vasari
On Technique
to
Methods and Materials of
Painting of the Great Schools and Masters
by Charles Eastlake. He felt sure that none of the so-called experts could tell which one was a fake. In three days the fake would be despatched he
knew not where by his jailers downstairs.

The original would stay in the Long Gallery for a week or two to make sure there was no possibility of the original and the forgery being swapped over
accidentally. Then it too would be despatched to an unknown destination from Orlando’s prison. Orlando suspected, but he did not know for sure, that the original had been sold. The
unfortunate purchaser would eventually carry away not a Giorgione but a Blane. Of what his masters intended to do with the original he had no idea.

‘Let’s just run through the possibilities,’ said Powerscourt. ‘There seem to me to be a number of people, far too many people, in fact, who might have
wanted to kill Christopher Montague.’ Johnny Fitzgerald and Lady Lucy were sitting on the sofa, Powerscourt on the chair by the fireplace. Dusk was falling over Markham Square.

‘Right,’ said Fitzgerald cheerfully. ‘Let’s begin with the most obvious candidate, Horace Aloysius Buckley, solicitor of Buckley, Brigstock and Brightwell, cuckolded
husband of Rosalind. Consumed by jealousy, he decides to kill Christopher, the younger man. He must have felt ever so proud, Horace Aloysius, when he led his beautiful bride to the altar, an older
man making off with one of the most attractive women in London. Then she betrays him. Think of the shame. Think of the gossip. Think of the sniggers behind his back. Think of his embarrassment when
people begin to whisper about how she has deceived him. So he pinches the key from his wife’s dressing table, maybe he made her tell him where it was, he goes round to Brompton Square, out
with the garrotte, end of Montague. How about that?’

Lady Lucy frowned. Even after years of living with her husband and Johnny Fitzgerald and their murders and their murderers she found the way they talked about the victims rather too flippant for
her taste.

‘But why would he remove some of the books, Johnny?’ she said. ‘What was the point?’

‘Easy,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald, ‘all the books were about art. Art was what brought them together. Art made them fall in love. Art destroyed the husband’s married bliss,
if bliss it was. Horace Aloysius decides to destroy some of the art, and the article, as he has destroyed Montague. Maybe the books are even now locked up in some storeroom at Buckley, Brigstock
and Brightwell. Maybe he arranged for them to be dumped in the Thames, or taken away as rubbish. And, to cap it all, he hasn’t been at his offices since the day after Montague’s
death.’

Lady Lucy got up to draw the curtains. Powerscourt watched her do it, admiring the grace of her movements over there by the windows. He smiled at her as she returned to the sofa. Lady Lucy could
read his thoughts sometimes. She blushed slightly.

‘I’m not convinced,’ said Powerscourt. ‘It might be true. But it looks too plausible to me. What about this?’