Death of an Old Master (42 page)

Cornelius P. Stockman was not in London either. He was in Salisbury, taking a short tour of some of England’s finest cathedrals, though he was not attending Evensong. His hotel room looked
out over the tranquillity of the Cathedral Close. Cornelius did not swear. He did not shout. He shook with fury. He had not yet paid over any money for the
Sleeping Venus
by Giorgione and
eleven other nudes from the de Courcy and Piper Gallery. But it was the fact that he, Cornelius P. Stockman, had been cheated by these treacherous Englishmen that annoyed him so much. In spite of
his rage a small smile crossed his features as he thought of the
Sleeping Venus’s
naked beauty. But he had ordered another eleven of them from those crooks in Old Bond Street! Twelve
damned fakes to carry back across the Atlantic! The good Lord, he reflected, a thought possibly inspired by the sight of the spire of Salisbury Cathedral soaring upwards into a clear sky, the good
Lord had twelve and only one a wrong un. I’m going to get twelve wrong uns in one enormous parcel. Oh no, I’m not, he said to himself. He wished he had brought his legal counsel
Charleston F. Guthrie on this trip to the devious Europeans. Many times back in the States Charleston had ridden into battle in the courtrooms of New York and laid waste to Stockman’s
enemies. Bloody English, he said to himself, they probably have a completely different set of rules. But Stockman was not a man to take things lying down. He too set off for the railway station to
return to London. He was going to find the best lawyer in the capital, whatever it cost.

Only one of the millionaires read the headlines in London. Lewis B. Black was still a resident of the Piccadilly Hotel. He had paid over ten thousand pounds for his Sir Joshua Reynolds. Black
read the accounts of Orlando Blane’s evidence with particular care. He checked one account with another. There was only one conclusion. The man said he had been sent the pages of an American
magazine with an illustration of the Black family. His family. His wife, staring out of the portrait, so pretty in that hat with the feathers. His very own forgery. How they would laugh, back on
Fifth Avenue, about how he had been deceived.

Black abandoned his breakfast and walked as fast as he could to the de Courcy and Piper offices in Old Bond Street. All the other art dealers were open, gossip swirling round about what might
come next when the trial resumed on Monday. But on the offices of de Courcy and Piper there was a large sign. ‘Temporarily closed due to Refurbishment’ it said. Black hammered on the
door in fury. Maybe the bastards were hiding inside, destroying the evidence of their crimes, burning their records. There was no reply. De Courcy and Piper had gone to ground. Black hammered even
harder on the door. A couple of newspapermen came up to him.

‘It’s no good, mate,’ they said cheerfully. ‘Bugger’s not there. We’ve been here since first thing this morning. He’s gone.’

Late on Saturday afternoon an exhausted but triumphant William McKenzie found Powerscourt lying on the sofa in the drawing room of Markham Square, a mass of newspapers strewn
across the floor.

‘William!’ Powerscourt rose and shook McKenzie by the hand. Something in the man’s face suggested that he was the bearer of good tidings. ‘Any news? Have you found
it?’

‘I believe I have, my lord, I have come to make my report.’

Powerscourt suddenly remembered that McKenzie’s reports were always couched in rather lifeless prose. Names were rarely mentioned in case the report fell into the wrong hands. As a result
the McKenzie accounts always required a certain amount of decoding by the recipient, unlike Johnny Fitzgerald’s. These were always scrupulously accurate but read like the popular fiction of
the time.

‘I guessed that the party would not have made the relevant purchase in the immediate vicinity of their house,’ William McKenzie began. ‘They might have been seen or recognized
entering or leaving the premises. I then had to take a gamble, my lord. They could have travelled further afield by cab. But that would have been risky. The cabby might have remembered the identity
of his passenger. They have, I believe, a remarkable ability to remember people’s faces.’

McKenzie paused. Powerscourt said nothing.

‘Or,’ McKenzie went on, his features a model of concentration, ‘they could have taken the underground railway, so much more anonymous. The party’s nearest station is on
the District Line. So I have been travelling further and further from the party’s address. I drew a blank in the area around Gloucester Road. I failed in Hammersmith. I failed in Chiswick. I
failed in Kew. This morning, at the very eleventh hour as you might say, my lord, I found what we sought in Richmond, the final stop on the District Line if you are travelling in a westerly
direction.’

McKenzie paused again. Powerscourt was thinking of another life about to be ruined.

‘The party made two trips to this particular emporium, not far from Richmond station. The first visit was two days before the murder of Christopher Montague. The second was just before the
murder of Thomas Jenkins.’

‘And will the owner of the emporium come to court?’ asked Powerscourt. ‘Will they give evidence?’

‘They will, my lord. They have given me their word.’

‘Did you offer any money, William?’ said Powerscourt, a sudden vision of Sir Rufus Fitch moving in to discredit the witness.

‘I did not, my lord. I thought the legal gentlemen might have had a field day if I did.’

Powerscourt wondered suddenly how McKenzie had known that. Perhaps the man was a secret devotee of murder trials, a regular visitor to the courts of London and his native Scotland.

‘Forgive me, William.’ Powerscourt knew he should have felt triumphant, but he didn’t. ‘Are you certain this witness will turn up?’

‘Rest assured, my lord, the witness will turn up. Why, I am going to Richmond myself on Monday morning to escort the party to the court. They start very early, those trains on the District
Line.’

Early on Sunday evening Powerscourt and Pugh held a final conference in Pugh’s house in Chelsea. At the same time Schomberg McDonnell was sitting in a quiet corner of
the library of his club in Pall Mall. He began composing a letter to his master, the Prime Minister.

‘Dear Prime Minister,’ he began. ‘You asked me to find the best intelligence officer in Britain.’ McDonnell paused, his eye wandering over a couple of shelves filled with
the complete works of Cicero. Should he tell the Prime Minister the names of the people he had consulted, the generals, the brigadiers, the majors, the staff officers? Probably not, he decided. The
old man wouldn’t want to waste his time with the detail. He just wanted a name.

‘I believe,’ he continued, ‘that I have found the man you are looking for.’

London’s finest sign writers went to work very early on the Monday morning. By a quarter to nine, a busy time in the streets of the capital, the board that previously
said de Courcy and Piper had been removed from the front of the gallery of that name. The staff in the artistic world round about gazed in astonishment as a new sign was erected. The Salisbury
Gallery, it announced to Old Bond Street, Art Dealers and Suppliers of Fine Pictures, London and New York.

Piper and de Courcy had spent much of the weekend in hiding at a grubby hotel near Wolverhampton. Nobody, Piper had announced gloomily, would come looking for them in Wolverhampton. Nobody did.
On Sunday evening under cover of darkness they returned to London and crept down into the basement where their stock was stored. De Courcy had devised an original code to tell his partner about the
pictures. Alpha meant that it was genuine. Beta meant that it was a copy of an original in the gallery’s possession. Gamma meant that it was a copy of an original not in the gallery’s
possession. Omega meant that it was a total forgery, not based on any original, but born out of the artistic knowledge and creative energies of Orlando Blane in the Long Gallery in northern
Norfolk. After that Edmund de Courcy left the gallery that had borne his name.

Piper had decided that this was the only way in which they might rescue the business. Even then, he was not sure it would work. De Courcy was to take the blame for everything. He was the
sacrificial lamb, slaughtered to keep Piper afloat. ‘Think of it like this, Edmund,’ Piper had said to him as they stared in horror at the dinner menu in their Wolverhampton retreat on
Saturday evening, ‘greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his partnership for his friend. I can keep you on as a sleeping partner. I’ll pay whatever it takes to bring your
mother and your sisters back from Corsica. You will still get a share of the profits if we survive. If we give in now the entire value of our stock will simply disappear. Nobody will ever buy any
of it. They’ll think they’re all bloody fakes. It’s our only chance.’

At a quarter past nine William Alaric Piper made his way slowly along Old Bond Street to his newly named gallery. He was wearing a new suit in dark grey. There was an orchid in his buttonhole.
He nodded genially to his acquaintances. He was going to bluff it out. Already at the back of his mind he could feel a strategy emerging for handling his clients. He sat down at his desk and waited
for the American invasion.

By the same hour a long queue had formed around the entrance to the public gallery of the Central Criminal Court. There were law students come to watch the last day of what
was bound to be a famous trial in the annals of London’s jurisprudence. Maybe they would read about the case in faded red leather volumes in years to come when they were senior members of
their profession, Queen’s Counsel at least, if not High Court Judges. Today they could see it for themselves and tell their future juniors that they had watched all the proceedings in person.
There were drifters, people who always turned up to watch a great procession or a military parade because they had nothing better to do. There were phalanxes of society ladies whose loud greetings
echoed up and down the streets.

‘Darling, haven’t seen you since Freddy’s party!’

‘They say that Mr Pugh is frightfully good-looking!’

‘Somebody told me at the Devonshires’ that the police know de Courcy did it. They’re just about to arrest him.’

‘Nonsense, darling. Everybody knows that poor man Buckley was the murderer. Pugh’s just trying to confuse the jury.’

At twenty past nine a dishevelled-looking Johnny Fitzgerald burst into Charles Augustus Pugh’s chambers. Pugh was deep in conversation with Powerscourt, fastening his gold watch chain into
place, making final adjustments to his wig. Fitzgerald thrust two sheets of paper into Pugh’s hand.

‘That’s the Italian connection,’ he said, looking around desperately for coffee. ‘Got some of it from Italian newspapermen here in London. Got the rest from a man
who’d worked as a footman at the house in Rome. Man drinks like a fish, maybe a bloody whale. Had to keep refilling his glass, if you follow me.’

Pugh read it quickly and placed it carefully at the top of his papers. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Thank you so much.’

The judge, Mr Justice Browne, had had his hair trimmed over the weekend. He always tried to have a haircut before he gave his summing up and pronounced sentence on his victims. Powerscourt had
heard somebody refer to him over the weekend as Hanging Browne. The jury looked refreshed after their two days away from court. The foreman was wearing a smart suit, as if his wife had told him he
must look his best with all those press men watching. Horace Aloysius Buckley looked as though he had hardly slept at all. His face was gaunt, his eyes staring from their sockets. But he held
himself well on this, the last day of his trial. The area reserved for the gentlemen of the press was meant to accommodate six scribes at most. There were eleven of them there this morning, crammed
tightly together like galley slaves at their oars, fresh notebooks at the ready. The judge glared at them balefully as if he was thinking of reducing their number. The journalists avoided his gaze
and began scribbling on their pads. The public gallery was crammed to the rafters, a long line waiting outside in case some of those present decided to leave.

Charles Augustus Pugh, veteran of many a courtroom drama, was feeling rather nervous that morning. He looked at his tall glass and decided to wait.

‘Recall Mrs Horace Buckley!’

The society ladies peered forward to see what she was wearing. The rustle of their skirts sounded like a small breeze blowing through Mr Justice Browne’s courtroom.

‘Mrs Buckley, forgive me if I just take you through some of the details of your friendship with Christopher Montague.’

Rosalind Buckley was wearing a long dress of very deep grey, with a small black hat. The colours suited her. She looked like a widow in mourning.

‘You had known Mr Montague for some fifteen months before he died, is that correct?’

‘It is,’ said Rosalind Buckley in a firm voice.

‘And could you remind us what plans the two of you had made for your future?’ Pugh was at his silkiest, talking as if he had just met Mrs Buckley sitting next to him at a fashionable
dinner party.

‘We were going to live together in Italy,’ she said. ‘Christopher, Mr Montague I mean, was going to write there.’

‘You were going to live there out of wedlock? Or out of wedlock as long as your husband was alive?’

The newspapermen looked at each other in amazement. Yet another possibility crossed their minds, far faster than it struck anybody else in the public gallery.

‘We were,’ said Rosalind Buckley, staring at the floor beneath the witness box.

‘Were you planning to have children with Mr Montague, Mrs Buckley? Bastard children born on a foreign shore?’

‘Objection, my lord, objection.’ Sir Rufus Fitch had been reflecting over the weekend that he had let Pugh get away with far too much. Today would be different. ‘The question
is purely hypothetical. It has no bearing on the case.’

‘Mr Pugh?’ The judge turned to the defence.

‘It is our contention, my lord, that such questions may have featured more and more heavily in Mr Montague’s mind in the period before his death.’