The Raphael Affair (17 page)

How
did
he know, though? Argyll was certain he had told only one person, and that had been his ever-so-civil and discreet supervisor. It had been an awkward meeting, because his idleness had finally caught up with him. His university had become somewhat impatient and had threatened to wipe his name off the books. His supervisor, old Tramerton, had been asked for a recommendation one way or another, and he had asked Argyll for evidence that any sort of mental activity was still flickering.

He’d had to produce something convincing quickly. So in the space of four days he had gathered the only material to hand, accumulated an impressive-looking bibliography and posted off to Italy his tentative conclusion that underneath the Mantini rested a genuine, lost Raphael.

It seemed now, of course, that it was the wrong conclusion, but he refused to take responsibility for that. If the university authorities had not been so unreasonably demanding, the little paper would not have been written and Byrnes would not have got to the
picture before him. Quite a pleasant chain of events, if you thought about it. Anyway, Tramerton had been convinced – of his efforts if not his scholarly merits – and had done the decent thing. The threat of execution was withdrawn and Argyll had thought no more about it.

Until now. Evidently either Tramerton had given the paper to someone or had told someone about it. Find who it was and the route to Byrnes would open up like magic. But who? His supervisor had been out of circulation in Italy; staying at a colleague’s house west of Montepulciano, so a letter had said. How had Byrnes got at him there? He’d write and ask. Maybe that would produce something useful.

It would all have to wait for the time being; the aromatic confines of the library awaited him. He stopped his colleague just as he was getting into conversational second gear, astounded him with the announcement that he was desperately keen to get back to his desk, and dragged himself up the stairs again. A brief conversation, and not at all a satisfying one.

Working proved less easy than he’d anticipated. The excitement of the previous couple of days wrought havoc on his concentration. As did the pressure he was working under. As Flavia had pointed out to him, find that Raphael and all was well. The penalty for failure was not, however, merely a raised eyebrow from his supervisor this time. This is not, he told himself as he flipped through the books he’d ordered, what academic work is meant to be like. The marines would be less dangerous at the moment. It was all very well to say
‘find a Raphael’. But if it was that easy, it would have been found years ago.

Of course, he’d made progress, but only of a negative sort. He knew better where the painting
wasn’t
. That, however, was not going to bring him many congratulations. From the initial two hundred and something or other possibilities, it was now down to a few dozen. What was he meant to do? Visit every one with a sharp knife and give it a little scrape? Apart from the fact that the owners might protest, presumably someone else was also on the same course. If Byrnes had destroyed that picture so it wouldn’t be revealed as a fake, he was smart enough to know he’d have to get rid of the real thing as well, which was the last possible proof of his initial fraud.

The idea made him think; he paid less attention to his books and stared up at the wire netting strung across the ceiling to stop falling bits of roof from the decaying building hitting the students below. The books didn’t seem quite so important now. He could accumulate information for months, and still never find anything convincing. If he was going to get anywhere, he’d have to work with what information he already had. He had to find the picture to catch a culprit. But what if he did it the other way round? Lateral thinking, it was called, and once he started thinking along these lines, everything began to seem quite simple. And after a few hours, he even began to get a smell of where the picture might be.

Later that evening he met Flavia on schedule and in the right place, and the two of them walked into a cutesy
little winebar in a street running parallel to Wardour Street. It was called the Cockroach and Cucumber, or somesuch, which prompted Argyll to make a few disparaging comments. ‘It’ll probably be full of the elder brothers of the students who work in the V & A,’ he sniffed at Flavia, who missed the reference and smiled politely. She’d had a tiresome day, talking to the other restorers. Not that it had done her much good. They’d all taken refuge in technicalities and refused to come out of their shells. This was her last chance to make the trip worthwhile. It made her determined, and sliced the edge off her sense of humour.

The clientele around the bar generated a rubicund air of confident and artificial jollity that settled around Argyll like a suffocating smog. He felt unhappy already. ‘Hardly the place for a quiet and confidential chat,’ he bellowed into Flavia’s left ear.

‘What?’ she yelled back, then sighted the Tate restorer. ‘Doesn’t matter. Tell me later.’ She weaved her way over to the bar. Anderson, her target, was standing there, waving a five-pound note in a hopeful fashion. Flavia rapped him on the shoulder firmly, just at the moment his long vigil was rewarded, and the barmaid was headed in his direction. He turned to greet the Italian, lost eye-contact with the other side of the bar, and the woman drifted off to serve someone else.

‘Goddamn,’ he exclaimed. ‘Missed her again. No matter. We can go next door where it’s quieter. They have table service through there.’

As they walked through, Flavia introduced Argyll. Anderson looked disappointed. ‘Oh. I thought you were
coming alone.’ Argyll was instantly offended and found himself disliking the man intensely. They sat down at one of the few remaining tables and ordered a bottle of white wine of uncertain origin. ‘You see? It’s a lot quieter in here. Nice place, eh?’

Argyll smiled and nodded. ‘Remarkable. Nice is not the word.’ He’d wanted to say that for years. Flavia smiled at him and trod heavily on his toe with her heel. They were not called stilettos for nothing. Tears came into his eyes from the pain.

She then went on to try and rescue the conversation, parroting out a largely erroneous explanation of her presence in England.

‘And you want my help. Willingly. If, of course, you tell me why.’

‘Just routine enquiries, as I believe they say in this country.’

‘Nonsense. Nothing I could possibly say would be of the slightest use to you unless there was more to it than that. I knew nothing about the painting except that I was called in by Sir Edward Byrnes to clean and restore it. Apart from the occasional incursion by television cameras, I worked alone with the other restorers. Why send someone all the way from Rome just to ask about that?

‘And of course, you turn up here bringing Mr Argyll – ’ for some reason Argyll disliked that Mister bit, ‘ – who Sir Edward once told me was miffed about the whole business. Why search for motives when you take the number one suspect along with you? Unless, of course, there is something else going on. Cheers.’ He raised his
glass to salute his cleverness, and screwed his face up in an exaggerated demonstration of disgust.

‘I never realised that I had achieved such fame,’ commented Argyll, uncertain whether Anderson’s facial antics referred to the wine or him.

‘Don’t worry. You haven’t. But Byrnes mentioned you once and I have a very good memory for minor details.’

Argyll decided to retire from the conversation as much as possible. Minor details, indeed. He leant back in his chair, nursed his glass of wine, and tried to look nonchalant. If it hadn’t been for his afternoon’s labours he would be in a bad mood. However, what he had to tell Flavia made him feel smug. It would be agreeable to be in control of events for once.

‘Will you give me your word that this conversation will be confidential?’ Flavia asked.

‘I can give you my word and you can decide how much it’s worth,’ Anderson replied. Flavia thought some more. She not only wanted information, it would be nice to rattle this little bugger’s confidence a little. Suggesting he might have been one of the prime victims of a hoax might sober him up a bit. Also, she didn’t like that crack about Argyll: maybe he had been a little objectionable, but basically she agreed with him. This worried her. Becoming protective was always a bad sign.

‘It was a fake,’ she announced bluntly.

The statement did the trick nicely. Anderson didn’t exactly turn pale, but clearly felt like it. ‘Oh shit,’ he said, very slowly and distinctly. ‘Are you sure?’

Flavia shrugged and smiled prettily at him, but didn’t reply.

‘And can you tell me why you think that?’

She shook her head. ‘No. I’m afraid not. Just take it that we’re right.’ It was a gross and unreasonable exaggeration, but Bottando had always instructed her that the one golden rule about police work was never ever seem uncertain of your facts. Besides, she reckoned that the more upset Anderson was, the more he’d talk. She switched into concerned and attentive mode.

‘I think I ought to buy you something to eat here. I’m pretty hungry.’

So was Argyll. And he appreciated that the little gesture was, perhaps, a good way of establishing a better rapport with Anderson. He was the sort of tactless person who not only can’t resist a free meal, but who is also made hungry by bad news. For the next hour he munched his way steadily through a large plate of jumbo prawns, a sizeable slice of fish pie, two plates of vegetables, a dessert that was meant to be pecan pie but wasn’t quite right somehow, two cups of coffee and an unfair share of a second bottle of wine. Flavia also matched him pretty much forkful for forkful. As on the first occasion when he had watched her prowess in this field, Argyll wondered how on earth someone of such a delightfully trim shape could possibly stuff that much food inside her.

To help Anderson in the right direction, Flavia began telling him about the scientific study of the picture. The scientist waved her aside. ‘I know all this. I was in charge.’

‘I thought Manzoni was?’

‘Him?’ Anderson said contemptuously. ‘He never
came near it. Just read the report afterwards, said he was sure we’d done it all correctly, and signed the thing. Scarcely lifted a finger.’

Flavia was quite unjustifiably irritated at the aspersions cast on her fellow-countryman by this large and cocky Englishman. His comments smacked too much of anti-Italian prejudice for her taste. Moreover, it meant one of her pet theories was weakened. If Manzoni hadn’t directed the tests, he couldn’t have fixed them either. Her focus came back to Anderson, who was pronouncing at great length, not noticing she hadn’t been paying any attention.

‘…That’s why I’d like to hear your evidence. I can’t see any way that picture could be a fake. It looked right and tested right. The evidence would have to be absolutely overwhelming to make me change my mind,’ he concluded.

She evaded again. ‘Just tell me, how would someone fake a thing like that?’

‘In principle it’s easy. It’s just doing it that’s the trouble. From what I remember of the report, the forger would have had to get hold of a sixteenth- or late fifteenth-century canvas to start off with. One the right size as the final picture so there wouldn’t be any new strain marks from the new shape of the stretcher. You clean off some, but not all, of the original paint. Then you start painting your own picture, using the same techniques and the same paint recipes as the original artist.’

Flavia nodded. So far what he was saying fitted in exactly with the jottings in the Swiss sketchbooks.

‘Once you’ve painted it, then it has to be artificially dried and aged. An oil painting takes years to dry completely, sometimes half a century. There’s no bigger giveaway than a Renaissance picture which is sticky. That, incidentally, is how Wacker, the Van Gogh forger, got caught in the 1930s.

‘Drying can be done in several ways,’ he continued. ‘The traditional method is to bake it – preferred temperatures vary from forger to forger – then roll it up in several directions to crack the surface, then dip it in a solution of ink to darken the cracks and make them look dirty. That, at least, was the Van Meegeren method, and he was one of the greatest. Couldn’t paint for tuppence, but a great forger.

‘Of course, there are ways of checking all that. The Elisabetta was analysed for the way it had dried, the direction and type of the cracking were examined, bits of paint were scraped off and tested in a dozen different ways, the dirt boiled up and analysed chemically. All perfect, as I say.’

‘So you’ve told us how to get caught. How about not getting caught?’ Argyll suggested.

‘There are some ways, I suppose,’ Anderson replied reluctantly. ‘As far as drying goes, you might try a low-voltage microwave oven, perhaps. That would produce a different method of drying out. Not foolproof, by any means, but it wouldn’t produce the tell-tale signs one looks for to indicate normal baking. Cracking is also relatively simple if you are careful to preserve the original pattern on the host painting. Doing it is incredibly hard, but it is possible.

‘In the case of the Raphael, you could dissolve the dirt from the original painting in some solution of alcohol and spread that over the surface. When it was tested it would be seen as being of a mixture of different substances, which is what it should be. The alcohol would also show up, but in this case might be confused with the substances we used to clean the thing.

‘But it’s paint itself which proves it. It’s difficult to see how to get round that, and we tested it endlessly. Spectroscope, electron microscope, dozens of different routines. There can be no doubt. It was sixteenth-century, Italian, painted with Raphael’s techniques. Genuinely old paint. Not just new paint mixed with old recipes. Old paint. Everything worked out perfectly. Which is why I don’t really believe it was a fake.’

‘I know how it was done,’ said Argyll quietly. They both looked at him. ‘It’s just occurred to me. Flavia, you told me the tests on the paint were done from a thin, long strip from the left-hand side of the picture?’ She nodded.

‘So why couldn’t the painter have left that bit from the original sixteenth-century picture? Paint over the central portion and match the background and portrait up. Then you could test to your heart’s content, and the tests would have been positive every time.’