Death of an Old Master (22 page)

‘So Johnston might have a motive for wishing Christopher Montague out of the way?’

‘Yes, he might have such a motive. Montague would probably have become the leading expert, the one everybody wanted to consult.’

An enormous fit of coughing overtook Sir Frederick. He got up from his chair, clutching a couple of handkerchiefs, and staggered around the room, bent almost double from his spasms. Powerscourt
waited.

‘There’s something else I’ve got to tell you, Powerscourt,’ he went on, as he finally regained his desk. ‘I only heard this the other day. In the weeks before
Montague’s death there was a rumour going round the auctioneers and the art dealers that his article was going to denounce most of the paintings in that exhibition as fakes. Nobody knows
where the rumour came from, but it circulated widely.’

A whole circle of suspects floated past Powerscourt’s brain. Horace Aloysius Buckley, on his knees at Evensong. He remembered Inspector Maxwell telling him that a man called Johnston from
the National Gallery had been the last person to see Christopher Montague alive. He could see Roderick Johnston, a great bear of a man, turning over a length of picture cord in his hands. Someone
from Clarke’s or Capaldi’s or de Courcy and Piper, peering intently at a scene from one of their paintings, a Cain and Abel maybe, David and Goliath. Ever present in his mind were the
terrible marks on Christopher Montague’s neck.

Mrs Imogen Foxe was sitting in the morning room of her great house in Dorset. The wind was swirling round the terrace outside the tall windows, blowing the leaves away. Beyond
it lawns and gravel stretched for a hundred and fifty yards to a small lake with an island in the centre. In her left hand she held a bundle of letters. The top one was from her mother – how
well she knew that handwriting – probably another missive telling her to be a proper wife. The next one was from her sister, and probably carried the same message. The third was from a cousin
in America, the fourth was in an unknown hand, almost certainly male. As she opened it, two letters fell on to her lap. She almost stopped breathing. Then her heart was beating very fast. She
looked around to make sure she was alone and hurried out into the garden, clutching the letters in her hand.

The first was a very formal note, indicating that if she wished to reply to the other letter, she could do so to the above address. The correspondence would be sent on. The second was from her
former lover, Orlando Blane.

‘My darling Imogen,’ it began, in Orlando’s rather flowery hand,

Imogen felt her emotions running away with her. She read the letter again. It was all very mysterious, very romantic. Sonnets. She remembered the trip up the Thames from Windsor, Orlando rowing
away, looking impossibly beautiful with those blue eyes sparkling against the water. When she was twelve years old she had decided that she could only ever fall in love with a man with blue eyes.
She hadn’t broken her vows yet. Sonnets, Shakespeare sonnets, whispered under the leaves of a weeping willow on the bank, her hand trailing in the cool water.

It sounds as if Orlando is a prisoner somewhere, she said to herself. He cannot say where he is or what he is doing. Why would anybody want to kidnap Orlando and lock him up in a dark tower? She
remembered the man who had paid his debts in the casino. Maybe he had Orlando under lock and key. Imogen peered closely at the letter to see if there were any clues as to its origins. There were
not. She set off to walk to the lake, holding the letters very tightly in case the wind blew them away. She shivered slightly, not only from the cold.

We’re both prisoners, she thought. Orlando is locked up somewhere unknown, I am locked up inside a marriage to a man my parents forced me to marry. She had resigned herself to her fate.
She went to the local dinner parties, full of hearty squires and their buxom wives, talking endlessly of hunting and the threat of higher taxes under a Liberal government. She received her
husband’s guests, drifting through the evenings as if she were in a dream, her mind far away. She knew that most of the neighbouring families thought Granville Foxe had married a mad woman,
seduced by her beauty into forgetting the vagaries of her temperament, the odd silences, the lack of attention she paid to local affairs. And, they said, she reads poetry, sometimes in foreign
languages like French. No greater proof of insanity or mental decay could have been produced in hunting country than that. But on one point Imogen had remained absolutely firm since the wedding
night. She locked her bedroom door.

When she reached the lake, the surface was choppy, a couple of ducks bobbing up and down by the water’s edge. She began composing her reply to the letter. She would make it very formal,
she decided. Mrs Imogen Foxe thanks Mr Peters for his invitation to visit Mr Orlando Blane and has great pleasure in accepting.

Powerscourt found Chief Inspector Wilson pacing up and down the late Thomas Jenkins’ room in the Banbury Road. Wilson was looking perplexed.

‘There’s not a lot of progress, my lord,’ he said, ‘apart from a couple of people who remember seeing Buckley in Oxford on the day of the murder. We have talked to
everybody who lives round about, all the streets for a hundred yards or so from here, and nobody saw anything unusual on the day the unfortunate Jenkins was killed. No strangers. Nobody out of the
ordinary at all.’

Powerscourt produced his photograph of Horace Aloysius Buckley in his cricket flannels. He told him of his conversation with Buckley’s partner and the secret passion for Evensong.

‘All the cathedrals in England, did you say?’ Chief Inspector Wilson’s reaction was the same as Powerscourt’s own. ‘How many are there altogether, for God’s
sake?’

‘I was trying to count them on my way here on the train,’ said Powerscourt. He fixed his mind on an imaginary rail map of England. ‘St Paul’s and Southwark in London
wouldn’t be much of a problem. Rochester, Canterbury, Chichester, Winchester, Salisbury, Exeter, Gloucester, Worcester, Hereford, Coventry, Peterborough, Ely, Norwich, Lincoln, York Minster
must count as a cathedral as it’s got an Archbishop, Ripon, Durham, Carlisle, Christ Church here in Oxford. That’s nearly twenty-one of them, probably some more I’ve
forgotten.’ Did Bury St Edmunds have one? Did Manchester? Did Birmingham? It seemed a bit unfair for the west of England to have three close together at Worcester, Gloucester and Hereford
when the north was scarcely supplied. Were the people more pagan north of the Wash?

Chief Inspector Wilson rubbed his hand across his forehead. ‘Evensong or no Evensong,’ he said, ‘I don’t mind telling you, my lord, that my superiors think we should
issue a warrant for Buckley’s arrest. It’s the tie, my lord. Mrs Buckley told us that the Trinity College, Cambridge tie we found on the floor in Jenkins’ room belonged to her
husband. She recognized a dark stain near the bottom.’

‘But you can’t arrest a man because of a tie, Chief Inspector. Hundreds of people must have those ties and some of them will have stains near the bottom,’ said Powerscourt.

‘I know that as well as you do, my lord,’ said Chief Inspector Wilson. Powerscourt suspected Wilson might often have trouble with his superiors. Wilson would never become a professor
in his native city but he could be obstinate, stubborn, reluctant to admit he was in the wrong.

‘They say, my superiors,’ he went on – was that a faint note of sarcasm in the way he said superiors, Powerscourt wondered? – ‘that it all has to do with motive.
This Buckley man finds out that his wife has been carrying on with the first corpse, the man Montague.’ Powerscourt shuddered slightly at the thought of carrying on with a corpse. ‘So
he kills him. Then he discovers that she’s been coming to Oxford to see this man Jenkins. Maybe she was carrying on with him as well. So Buckley kills him too. You have to admit the motive
looks pretty strong.’

‘But you don’t believe it, Chief Inspector, do you?’ said Powerscourt.

‘I do and I don’t, if you see what I mean, my lord. There is absolutely no evidence, no witnesses, nothing. The Oxford killer seems to have been an invisible man, if you follow me.
You don’t believe it, do you, my lord?’

Powerscourt paused for a moment. There were three squirrels chasing each other up and down the trees in the garden. Far off faint cheers could be heard from a college football field.

‘It’s the garrotting,’ he said finally. ‘It’s so very un-English, if you follow me. Bandits in Sardinia or Corsica or Sicily go round garrotting their enemies, and
their friends too if the newspaper reports are to be believed. But I can’t see Mr Buckley doing it.’

‘I’m not sure I can hold them off for much longer,’ said Wilson rather miserably. ‘And this Evensong business, they’re just going to laugh at that.’

Small drops of plaster were falling from the ceiling, breaking into fragments on the floor. Orlando Blane stared moodily at the latest evidence of decay in his Long Gallery,
the dust threatening to spoil his paintings. Rats, he decided, he could cope with. The rotting walls he could cope with. But this latest cascade of dust, small bomblets falling at the upper end of
the vast room, threatened his very existence. There would have to be some kind of screen, he decided, staring helplessly at the beginnings of his Sir Joshua Reynolds of Mrs Lewis B. Black, wife of
an American millionaire. He had finished his drawing for the painting two days before.

Orlando glanced briefly at another of the notes pinned round the walls of his prison. Seven people were released when the Bastille was stormed at the start of the French Revolution on the 14th
July 1789, he read. Four of them were forgers.

His Reynolds was progressing well, a volume of Reynolds’ own writing acting as midwife to the birth from beyond the grave. Orlando had placed Mrs Black on a seat in an imaginary landscape.
A delicious sunset, all soft pinks and scarlets, lay behind her, the dying light illuminating her hair and her hat. Orlando was pleased with the hat, the ostrich feathers shimmering above her
golden curls. Now he had to improve the sweep of the long cream dress that flowed down to the ground. And the gloves lying in her lap. There was something wrong with the gloves.

Then he thought of Imogen. He had heard nothing since his letter some days past. Suddenly Orlando reached for his sketchpad and filled a page not with hats or gloves or sunsets but with figures.
Orlando had tried not to think about money since he had lost so much of it at Monte Carlo. But now he tried to work out how much he had earned for his keepers. Four copies, two Titians, one
Giovanni Bellini, one Giorgione had left his prison. Orlando suspected that they were going to be sold to unsuspecting Americans who would keep them in their homes or in their private museums, away
from the inspection of the experts. They could be worth anything from five to thirty thousand. One fake Fragonard, probably about five thousand. One fake Gainsborough, say seven to ten thousand
pounds. One fake Sir Joshua Reynolds, nearing completion, probably destined for another American millionaire, five thousand pounds minimum. Whichever way you looked at it, Orlando thought, he had
easily repaid the ten thousand pounds he had lost.

He stared at the horizon beyond the rain falling on the ruined gardens. Where was he? When Imogen comes, he said to himself, it’s time to think about escaping.

Lord Francis Powerscourt was lying face down on his drawing-room carpet, peering at a large map of England. He had borrowed a red pencil from the children’s quarters and
had drawn a series of lines connecting the cathedral cities of England to each other and to London. His map now looked like a diagram of the flow of the human blood round the body, red lines
criss-crossing each other in regular patterns. Now then, he said to himself, if you were planning to attend Evensong in every single one, how would you do it? You can only take in one cathedral per
day. Horace Aloysius Buckley had been in Oxford on a Thursday, five days before. The sensible thing to do would to be to carry on to Hereford, Worcester and Gloucester. That would take you up to
Sunday. Assuming you went to Gloucester last, and Powerscourt was only too aware that his assumptions could all be wrong, you could attend Evensong in Bristol on Monday and Wells on Tuesday. Maybe
even now Horace Aloysius Buckley was staring at the extraordinary carvings on the front of Wells Cathedral, preparing himself for another helping of Evensong. Then he would, presumably, return to
London. Norwich beckoned. So did Ely and Peterborough in the Fens. Powerscourt knew that it would be hopeless to hop from one cathedral to another, trying to catch up with the wandering pilgrim. He
would have to place himself across the route, waiting for three or four days perhaps for Buckley. Lincoln, he decided, staring gloomily at Lincoln on his map, that was where he would prepare his
ambush.

‘Francis, whatever are you doing?’ Lady Lucy had entered the room without his knowledge and was standing by his side. She knew her husband was capable of eccentric behaviour from
time to time, but this seemed a little excessive, even for Francis.

‘I am planning a journey, an interception, Lucy,’ said Powerscourt, rising to his feet and smiling apologetically at his wife.

‘Can I come too?’ said Lady Lucy practically.

‘Of course you can,’ said Powerscourt, ‘but it might be rather boring. Unless you like Evensong, that is.’

‘I’m very fond of Evensong, as a matter of fact, but I have something rather important to tell you. I’ve been talking to my relations.’