The Rainaldi Quartet (28 page)

He passed me the letter. It was stiff and wrinkled like a piece of hide. I studied the faded text for a time.

‘Well?' Guastafeste said. ‘What does it say?'

‘Nothing,' I replied with a heavy sigh. ‘Absolutely nothing. It's a thank you letter for that painting.'

‘What painting?'

‘The one on the wall at Highfield Hall. The Garofalo. The man with the violin.'

‘It was a gift from Anselmi?' Guastafeste said.

‘So it would appear.'

I read out the relevant section of the letter, translating it into Italian.
‘“The painting is truly magnificent, the brushwork on the violin of exceptional quality. I confess that I would have much preferred His Excellency's instrument – and indeed I have not yet given up hope of it being recovered – but your painting goes some way towards consoling me for my loss. I am indebted to you for your kind consideration and unfailing generosity. The riddle to which you allude escapes me for the moment, but I have grown accustomed to your love of japes and I will endeavour over time to attempt to solve the puzzle. Without your assistance, however, I fear I may not be successful…”'

Guastafeste frowned. ‘What's he saying. What riddle? I'm confused. Is the violin in the painting the one that went missing?'

‘It's not clear from the text. Maybe.'

‘But at Highfield Hall you said it was a Guarneri “del Gesù.”'

‘It was.'

‘So it wasn't a Stradivari that Cozio sent Colquhoun?'

‘I don't know,' I said. ‘I'm confused too. I don't know what to make of it either.' I looked at the date at the top of the letter – June, 1806. ‘It was written two years after the last of the letters we found at Highfield Hall. It would appear that the missing violin – whatever it was – had still not been found by then.'

‘It never was found,' Guastafeste said despondently. ‘It disappeared for ever. That's the truth of the matter, isn't it?'

I put the letter on the pile with the other two we'd saved. I felt deflated. The poison of defeat was seeping into both of us.

‘I'm right, aren't I?' Guastafeste said. ‘It's gone for good.'

‘Yes,' I said. ‘I fear it has.'

15

We left Casale that evening. There didn't seem much point in remaining any longer. We drove to Cremona in a heavy thunderstorm, sheet lightning breaking over the horizon, the road swimming with rainwater. Guastafeste dropped me off at my house. I opened the car door to get out, but Guastafeste put his hand on my arm.

‘I've been thinking,' he said. ‘A couple of things bother me. Well, more than a couple, but these two in particular have been nagging away at me. First, how did Tomaso track down Mrs Colquhoun? What made him go all the way to England, to that isolated house in the hills, in search of old documents? Something must have put him on to the scent. I'm going to talk to Clara about that. Second, that painting at Highfield Hall. I want to know more about it. The riddle Thomas Colquhoun mentioned in his letter to Anselmi. What was he talking about? Would you ring Mrs Colquhoun, Gianni? I'd do it myself but you know how bad my English is. Ask her if she can recall anything more about the history of the painting, ask her to look at it for us, check the back for marks, see if there's anything striking, anything peculiar about it. I'll call you later.'

I went into my house. The rain had stopped, but the air felt damp and clammy. I opened a few windows and made myself some pasta for supper, then phoned Mrs Colquhoun. An hour later, as I was preparing to go to bed, Guastafeste rang.

‘You get through to her?' he asked.

‘Yes. She wasn't much help. She didn't know any more about the painting than she'd already told us.'

‘Did you ask her to look at it?'

‘I gave her fifteen minutes, then called her back. The picture was too heavy for her to lift down, but she swung it out from the wall and had a look on the back of it. Nothing. She didn't know anything about a riddle either. How about Clara?'

‘She didn't know how Tomaso got on to the Colquhoun-Anselmi connection. But she did say that Tomaso had been spending a lot of time in the Cremona public library recently.'

‘Looking at what?'

‘I don't know, but I intend to find out. You interested? I might need a bit of help.'

I sighed. It had been a long, tiring day. I was growing weary of libraries and old documents, but I knew we had to follow up every lead, track down every missing piece in the jigsaw.

‘When do you want to meet?'

‘First thing tomorrow,' Guastafeste said. ‘Outside the Palazzo Affaitati.'

*   *   *

The Palazzo Affaitati is quite a handsome sixteenth-century building, though you wouldn't know it from the exterior which has been virtually obscured by scaffolding for many months and will no doubt remain so for years to come – almost as if the architect in charge of restoration has incorporated the planks and rusty poles into his ‘concept'.

You enter through an arched gateway and porticoed foyer which opens on to a courtyard dominated by three large magnolia trees, then go up a broad marble staircase to the first floor. On one side of the landing is the city art gallery and Museo Stradivariano, on the other the Cremona public library and historic archives. Guastafeste and I went through into the archives.

The librarian in charge was, fortunately, rather more cooperative than the one in Casale.

‘Yes, I remember Signor Rainaldi,' she said. ‘He came here a lot. Sat at that table over there. We were sorry to hear about his death. And in such horrific circumstances.'

‘Do you have any record of what he looked at when he was here?' Guastafeste asked.

‘Of course. Every reader has to fill in a request form, then the material is brought up from the archives.'

‘You still have the forms?'

‘They are kept for twelve months.'

Thank God for Italian bureaucracy, I thought, that pathological need to hoard old bits of paper.

The librarian disappeared into her office and returned a few minutes later with a thick wad of request forms. Guastafeste and I spread them out on one of the tables and studied them.

‘He must have spent weeks here,' I said.

‘He did,' Guastafeste replied. ‘Look at the dates: April, May, June. That was serious research.'

Tomaso had visited the archives, and requested material, some twenty times over that three-month period. Each time he'd asked for the same collection of documents, or rather parts of the same collection – the
Carteggio
of Cozio di Salabue, the extensive, painstakingly detailed record that the count kept of his violin collection.

‘Let's take a look at some of these,' Guastafeste said and I gave him a sceptical glance.

‘You know how many pages there are? Cozio was an obsessive. He measured every tiny bit of his violins – the height of the archings, the width of the purfling, the dimensions of the scrolls. It took him years of meticulous work. The
Carteggio
runs to thousands of pages. Cozio kept everything. Not just his own notes, but copies of letters he wrote to musicians, to violin-makers, to other collectors. He was constantly dealing, trying to enlarge his collection, selling off instruments he didn't want, buying others.'

‘You think Tomaso found some mention of Thomas Colquhoun in the
Carteggio
?' Guastafeste said.

‘It's quite possible. But to find it will take us as long as it took Tomaso – weeks, months. Are you sure there was nothing in Tomaso's workshop? No notes of his research?'

‘Not a single sheet. I've checked. There were bills, invoices, all that sort of thing, but no notes, nothing at all from the public archives, at least none that…' Guastafeste broke off. ‘Wait a minute. Wait a minute.' He put his thumb to his mouth, chewing pensively on the nail. ‘Stay here, I'll be right back.'

I sat down at the table and waited. A good half hour elapsed before Guastafeste returned. He was holding a clear plastic bag stamped with the words ‘Cremona Police Department'. There was a white label on the bag bearing a serial number and a description of the contents. Guastafeste placed the bag on the table. Through the transparent plastic I could see a rectangular piece of paper about ten centimetres by eight. It was bright orange with the printed heading ‘Comune di Cremona Sistema Museale', and beneath that the words ‘Biglietto Cumulativo' and four black ink drawings of a boy with a dog, a plough, a violin-maker and a violin.

‘You know what this is?' Guastafeste said.

‘A ticket for the Museo Stradivariano,' I said.

‘It was in the waste bin in Tomaso's workshop. No one has got round to checking it out yet. You have friends over there, don't you?'

I followed Guastafeste out of the library and across the landing to the Stradivari Museum. The museum used to be around the corner on the Via Palestro – a scruffy little place with a few violins hanging up and a collection of grubby glass cases containing the Master's tools and forms. But in the last couple of years the city council – under pressure from various citizens, myself included – had refurbished the Sala Manfredini in the Palazzo Affaitati to provide a setting worthy of Stradivari's place in the history of the city.

‘What is it you want to do here?' I asked Guastafeste.

He pointed at the bottom left-hand corner of the ticket in the plastic bag. ‘There's a serial number here – 4578. I want to know on what date it was issued.'

I gave the young girl on the ticket counter my name and asked her to call the director of the museum. A few minutes later, Vittorio Sicardo came out through a door behind the counter and shook hands.

‘Gianni, how nice to see you.'

‘I want to ask a favour,' I said.

We went back a long way, Vittorio and I. I'd sold him one of my violins – at a big discount – thirty years ago when he was still a fine-arts student at the University of Milan and we'd maintained our friendship ever since, through his early days in museum posts in Brescia, Turin and Parma until his return to Cremona as assistant director and then director of the civic museums. He was an art and sculpture man by training – specialist subject, Italian painters of the fifteenth century – but he was a keen amateur violinist and champion of Cremonese cultural history. I'd been a member of the committee that had pressed for this new, improved museum in honour of Stradivari, but we would never have succeeded without Vittorio's tenacity, commitment and political cunning.

‘That shouldn't be a problem,' Vittorio said when I'd explained who Guastafeste was and what he wanted. ‘Just let me check through the counterfoils.'

Vittorio unlocked a drawer in the desk behind the ticket counter and examined a thick black ledger.

‘It was issued on June the sixteenth,' he said, looking up. ‘A couple of weeks ago.'

I glanced at Guastafeste. He was keeping his expression resolutely neutral.

‘Thank you,' he said politely. ‘I'm grateful for your help.'

‘Is that all?' Vittorio said.

‘Would you mind if we looked around the museum?'

‘Not at all. Feel free.'

I thanked Vittorio and exchanged a few words of small talk with him, though I could sense Guastafeste was impatient to move on. Then we shook hands again and Vittorio returned to his office.

‘June the sixteenth,' Guastafeste said to me, knowing I was only too aware of the significance of that date. ‘The day he was killed, Tomaso came here. Why?'

We walked through into the museum complex, passing first through the city art gallery and its hundreds of worthy but dull examples of the Fleshy Women and Naked Cherubs school of painting. Then we reached the Museo Stradivariano.

The first room we entered was half taken up by a display showing the various stages of making a violin, and half by a group of chairs lined up in rows before a television screen where you could watch a video about violin-making. I looked around blankly.

‘Why would Tomaso have come here?' I said. ‘A museum. He was hardly likely to find an undiscovered violin.'

‘He must have had a reason,' Guastafeste said. ‘Just keep your eyes open. See if anything strikes you.'

In the next room were violins in glass cases by various nineteenth-century luthiers whose names are unknown outside violin-making circles – and some within it too. But what was interesting was the painting hanging on the wall, the original portrait of Count Cozio di Salabue by Bernardo Morera from which the photographic reproduction we'd seen at the Castello di Salabue had been taken.

I paused in front of the painting and studied it for a time. It wasn't a great work of art, but it was competently executed like most portraits of obscure noblemen of the time. It had more life than the copy at Salabue. You could see the texture of the oils, the colours were more intense, the expression in Cozio's eyes more striking.

‘What do you think?' Guastafeste said, coming up to my shoulder.

‘I don't know.'

‘That blank piece of paper in his hand still looks peculiar to me. I'm not convinced by Giovanni Davico's theory about it.'

‘The French Revolution, you mean?'

‘Look at the date. It was painted in 1831. That was almost half a century after the Revolution. Why would anyone worry about being identified as an aristocrat?'

I mused on that as we moved on through the other rooms of the museum, ending at the most impressive of them all, the Sala Manfredini which contains the collection of Stradivari's tools, moulds and forms which Paolo Stradivari sold to Cozio di Salabue in 1776. The room has a high ceiling with a crystal chandelier in the centre and walls painted with fake pillars and classical scenes of ancient ruined buildings. There is a background hum of air-conditioning and humidifying equipment and the softer, more attractive sound of violin music being piped in through speakers.