Pandora (77 page)

‘Rotter,’ agreed Lily, crunching a glacier mint.

Zac examined his fingernails, a muscle leaping in his cheek.

Was Emerald denying, queried Naomi, that Zac had given her huge emotional and financial support in finding her affluent family?

Emerald said she could not.

‘Didn’t he buy you a beautiful dress for the silver wedding party?’

‘Yes.’

‘And other beautiful clothes?’

‘Yes,’ whispered Emerald.

‘Wasn’t he in fact putting a silver spoon in your mouth? In your new life, didn’t Sir Raymond and Lady Belvedon smother you with gifts, a studio of your own, your own bedroom, an Augustus John, a flash car, clothes from Lindka Cierach, the Belvedon emeralds on the night of your birthday? There was even fear in the family of Sir Raymond making over the Raphael to you. I suggest you found yourself in clover and enjoyed it very much indeed.’

‘I didn’t enjoy it at all, because I knew Zac didn’t love me and, like Pandora, I’d opened up a can of worms, and brought misfortune on my new family who loved their Raphael so much.’

Suddenly the realization that she wasn’t going to see Jonathan after all, overwhelmed Emerald and she burst into tears, which echoed heart-rendingly over the microphone and round the room.

Poor little duck. There was not a man in court who, like Willoughby Evans, didn’t want to draw David’s sword, leap over the bench and challenge Zac the bounder to a duel.

‘I had no idea she was so keen on that promiscuous shit,’ boomed Lily, handing Anthea her hip flask.

‘Nor had I,’ snapped Anthea thrusting it back in horror. I’m the one who deserves sympathy, she thought fretfully. Zac wronged me far more than he did Emerald.

Willoughby Evans called a short adjournment. The press rushed out to telephone. Sienna raced down from the gallery to get into the Ladies before a queue built up. She was just having a pee when she heard a sharp distinctive carrying voice. That cow Naomi Cohen must have walked in.

‘So presumptuous of Emerald Belvedon to think Zac would have ever married her,’ continued the sharp, carrying voice. ‘Zac would never marry out. As my father’s always grumbling, we lost more Jews to marrying out than in the entire Holocaust.’

Why should that information make me want to slit my wrists? wondered Sienna.

After the adjournment, it was Anthea’s turn to go into the witness box.

She looks even prettier today, thought Willoughby Evans, as Anthea, in David Shilling’s little straw Breton trimmed with daisies, played the disappointed prospective mother-in-law for all it was worth.

‘My long-lost daughter was in a fragile state adjusting to her new family. She was so in love with Zachary. We all gave him such a welcome as our son. But her hopes were built on sand. Why did he have to break my Emerald’s heart?’

A murmur of disapproval drifted round the court. A faint waft of Shalimar floated towards Willoughby Evans as Anthea drew out a little lace handkerchief and carefully mopped her eyes.

What a poppet, thought Willoughby Evans.

A
Daily Mail
reporter forced through lack of space to sit in the gallery was enchanted to find himself rammed next to the ravishing Sienna. He was also amused that she was drawing a sobbing crocodile, but was having difficulty balancing a daisy-trimmed straw Breton on its head. Catching his eye, Sienna giggled and drew a line through the sketch.

‘The whole country and the press are firmly on your side,’ he told her. ‘Ladbroke’s are offering three to one on a Belvedon victory. I myself had a hundred-pound bet this morning. Whatever Zac’s right to the Raphael, he’s coming across as a crook and a bastard. We’re all looking forward to your dad going into the box tomorrow. That should nail it for your side.’

Having shaken off the press, Zac drove the hired Vauxhall through the pouring rain into the Larkshire countryside. On the car radio, tolling hauntingly, was Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, the last piece the Vienna Philharmonic had played before the Anschluss. Simon Rattle had conducted the same symphony at a concert last week in memory of the dead at Mauthausen, the terrible death camp from which Great-uncle Jacob had somehow escaped.

Zac knew he had let down Jacob, his mother and the entire ghost army. He knew he’d behaved appallingly to Emerald and Anthea and that Naomi was feeling rejected because he hadn’t made a move on her. He was clearly going to lose the Raphael, and never see Sienna again. Even Si had deserted him, buggering off to Munich on some deal.

Zac pulled up on the edge of a dripping green wood to watch a watery sunset. Both billowing clouds and the sheep in the field ahead appeared to be ringed with fire. He hadn’t even heard the fucking cuckoo this year. But as the Mahler drew to its quiet, unbearably poignant close, deep in the wood a cuckoo, clearly inspired, began singing, like a flute practising a perfect third: ‘cuckoo, cuckoo,’ floating on and on, echoing through the drenched greenness, as if to apologize for his earlier absence.

Moved to tears, Zac flung back his aching head. He must pull himself together for the sake of the ghost army. Maybe Raymond would screw up tomorrow. He was roused by a bleep on his mobile. Checking the screen, he gave a whoop of delight.

Stop fretting, Boychic
, Si had texted,
I’ve found Trebich in Munich, who’s agreed to testify. Don’t tell anyone until I get there tomorrow
.

Day three brought back the fine weather and twice as many people to welcome Raymond as he arrived at the court, with Viridian’s copy of Tennyson in his breast pocket to ward off any metaphorical arrows. After another sleepless night he looked frailer than ever. You could get two fingers inside the collar of his pale blue striped shirt and his right hand was painfully swollen from still trying to keep the increasing flood of fan mail at bay. Anthea had been very snappy, poor child, because he kept calling Sienna ‘Galena’.

All the morning press had insisted that the case was going the Belvedons’ way, but Jupiter, Sampson and Sienna were edgy as they conferred in the corridor outside the courtroom, a dingy place of peeling radiators, dejected plants, and a sap-green carpet, speckled with coffee spilt by trembling witnesses.

‘You don’t think Dad’s too gaga to testify?’ asked Jupiter, who was pulling on a rare cigarette.

‘I hope not,’ sighed Sienna. ‘Naomi Cohen just whisked past looking as smug as hell.’

‘That may be because I caught Zac coming out of her bedroom at two o’clock this morning,’ said Sampson.

Sienna turned to look out of the window. In the block of offices opposite, she could see people typing, chatting, xeroxing, having meetings, and envied their peaceful lives, free from the dreadful pain she was enduring. Zac and Naomi. With his track record, it was to be expected. Why did it hurt so much? ‘I love, I hate, I know not why, but it is excruciating’, she quoted despairingly to herself. Out loud she said: ‘Ah, a Merc has just drawn up disgorging Si Greenbridge and several guards.’

Shit, thought Jupiter. I hope he isn’t after my sleeper.

‘I’ve just got to nip down the road to an auction,’ he told Sampson.

‘Raymond won’t notice you’ve gone,’ said Sampson reassuringly, ‘he’ll be in the box most of the morning.’

Willoughby Evans wished he hadn’t drunk so much port last night, and also that he hadn’t overheard one of the High Sheriff’s remarks. He’d been commenting idly on Raymond’s great charm.

‘Used to great effect on customs officers in the old days,’ David had interjected jealously. ‘Before political correctness kicked in, Raymond was the most effective smuggler of pictures in Europe.’

‘I didn’t hear that,’ Willoughby Evans had snapped, ‘and you didn’t say it.’

He didn’t like David, he decided, and any man who wore lifts on his buckled shoes was distinctly suspect.

David was equally unamused to see his wife in court for the first time, sitting on the Belvedon side to cheer on Raymond, an unwarranted amount of blusher on her pale cheeks, giggling and taking nips from Lily’s hip flask, and wearing much too snazzy a peacock-blue suit. He was the one who bought clothes, Rosemary only spent money on plants.

Rosemary was very happy. Si had been abroad for a few days, but had promised to be in Larkshire today. David’s Range Rover had become almost a fixture outside the Grasshopper and Sixpence. In the post, Si had very indiscreetly sent her a bracelet made up of ten gold squares, on each of which was engraved one of the Ten Commandments. Except on the seventh: ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery’, he’d had printed on the underside: ‘with anyone but Si Greenbridge.’ Rosemary couldn’t believe such happiness.

It was ten o’clock. ‘All rise,’ shouted the usher.

‘“Cannon to right of them, Cannon to left of them . . . Into the jaws of Death . . .”,’ murmured Raymond. But as he entered the court, he veered away from the witness box. Everyone held their breath as he wandered over to the Raphael. The policemen guarding it edged closer, but Raymond ignored them, gazing at his picture.

Had his father finally lost it? wondered Jupiter in horror.

‘Sir Raymond,’ hissed Anthea, ‘his Lordship is waitin’.’

‘So sorry.’ Raymond returned meekly to the witness box to be sworn in. ‘I just got used to looking at it every day.’

‘Sir Raymond,’ said Sampson warmly, ‘tell the court how you acquired the Raphael.’

The Belvedons and Sampson held their breath, but Raymond put on a command performance, rich Irish charm and telly megastar to the fore. By the time he’d raced down wartorn France, cleared the Falaise Gap of poor dead men and horses, ‘the stench was unbearable, my dear,’ stumbled on a Nazi in a burning château, ‘whose life-blood was ebbing away,’ given him a glass of water, and lifted down the Raphael for him to have a last look, there wasn’t a dry eye in court.

‘In the midst of this dreadful war, two enemies were united as brothers.’ Raymond’s beautiful silvery voice vibrated like an oboe. ‘He spoke a little English. With his last words, he thanked me, gave me his blessing and the Raphael.’

‘I wish he’d kept the chit,’ Jupiter muttered to Aunt Lily. His father was always too busy gossiping to taxi drivers to get receipts.

Giving a sigh of relief, feeling it was OK to slip out between overs, Jupiter disappeared off to the auction rooms in Lower Fresh Street.

Naomi began her cross-examination and Raymond was soon happily relating how he’d cut the Raphael out of its frame and rolled it up in a shell case.

‘I recognized it as a Raphael because my father took me to a loan exhibition in aid of the Red Cross in 1941. Lady Hampshire had lent Raphael’s working drawing for Pandora.’

‘I thought Dad bought it in a flea market,’ muttered Sienna to Archie from the
Mail
, as she drew her father as a cormorant. ‘He is sweet, isn’t he?’

‘In your witness statement, Sir Raymond, you have said you didn’t know the Raphael was looted,’ confirmed Naomi.

‘I had absolutely no idea.’

Hearing a rumble of interest, Rosemary glanced round and her heart leapt for Si Greenbridge, huge, tanned and looking uncharacteristically straight and un-Mafiaesque in a blue button-down shirt, brick-red trousers, a blazer with big gold buttons and a dark blue pashmina scarf she had given him, had walked in and was grinning in her direction.

‘There’s Si,’ bristled Anthea, ‘with the gall to smile at us.’

Si was followed by one of his sharp legal boys, who sidled into the row behind Naomi, tugged her gown as she was about to launch into her next question, and handed her some papers.

Glancing down at them impatiently, she started dramatically.

‘M’lord!’

Willoughby stopped scrabbling away at his laptop and peered over his bifocals.

‘Yes, Miss Cohen.’

‘I am very sorry,’ lied a triumphant Naomi, ‘to interrupt my cross-examination of this witness, but I have just had a message that a potentially vital new witness, with evidence that goes to the heart of this case, has made himself known.

‘I have been handed this statement by my solicitor,’ she shouted over the rumble of excitement as she passed copies first to Willoughby Evans, then to a stunned, stony-faced Sampson. ‘May I please ask for an adjournment?’

Having devoured the document with bloodhound-furrowed brow, Willoughby Evans turned to Raymond.