He had gone through four whole months of The American before he struck gold. There, in the drawing room of a very grand house, he found an illustration of Mr and Mrs William P. McCracken of Concord, Massachusetts, and their two daughters, aged about eight and ten, a small dog standing alertly beside them. De Courcy tiptoed carefully over to the door to make sure no one was coming. Then he took a small pair of scissors from his pocket and cut the page out of the magazine. He put it inside a large red notebook he had brought with him. The book had slightly larger pages than the magazine. De Courcy didn’t want to have to fold it.
Two hours later he was on the verge of giving up. Various Americans had come down to the basement to look up old financial results in the New York Times or the football scores in the Boston Globe. They had greeted him cheerfully, wishing him a good day as he ploughed through the pile in front of him. But when he found it he was overjoyed. A large photograph showed Mr and Mrs Lewis B. Black, with their twin daughters, outside their new town house on Fifth Avenue. The girls looked about six years old. Mrs Black was wearing a hat composed largely of exotic feathers. Feathers, thought Edmund de Courcy. Hats made of fancy feathers in English portrait paintings. How many of the English Masters had painted such hats in their time? Lawrence, Hoppner, Romney. Gainsborough, Reynolds. What a treat! Out came the scissors. Mr Lewis B. Black and family joined Mr William P. McCracken and family in Edmund de Courcy’s special album.
Powerscourt was scribbling furiously at his writing desk. Jackson, the family footman who had served with his master in India, was waiting discreetly behind the chair. Powerscourt had decided not to call upon Jason Lockhart of Clarke’s the art dealers in person. He felt Lockhart might feel constrained in his working surroundings and, for some reason he couldn’t pin down, Powerscourt didn’t want to show himself yet in the rarefied air of Old Bond Street.
‘I am investigating the death of the late Christopher Montague,’ he wrote, ‘and I feel that you may be able to assist me.’ He said nothing of new magazines, of fakes and forgers, of mistresses in the heart of Chelsea. ‘If you could fix a time with my man here I should be delighted to see you in 25 Markham Square at your earliest convenience.’
Jackson promised to wait for the reply. Powerscourt found Lady Lucy inspecting the dining room with a worried air. ‘Francis,’ she said, ‘these dining chairs. We’ve had them for ever so long. But they’re beginning to look a bit shabby, don’t you think?’ Lady Lucy pushed hard at one of the seats. There was a slight wobble, implying that a very heavy person might find themselves sitting unexpectedly on the floor.
Powerscourt was used to these continuous campaigns of domestic improvement. Sometimes he would return home and find that all the furniture in the drawing room had been rearranged. Or that a pair of curtains, previously deemed perfectly satisfactory, had been transferred from his study to a spare bedroom. Once he found that his entire wardrobe had been removed from the bedroom and placed in a closet some yards away down the corridor.
‘I just didn’t like that wardrobe, Francis,’ Lady Lucy had said on that occasion, ‘it was so ugly.’ Privately Powerscourt wondered if he himself might not be the subject of one of these periodic fits of rearrangement, transferred for ever to the coal hole or the top floor of the stables, thereby guaranteeing the aesthetic perfection of the rest of the house. Sometimes he replied with flippancy, suggesting that the kitchens would work much better if they were transferred into the attics, and that the children should all sleep in the front hall. It would mean that they could get to school quicker. He was reproved for being a domestic Philistine, a non-believer in the search for domestic harmony. In vain did Powerscourt try to tell his wife that perfection was an ideal, like one of Plato’s Forms, something to aspire to, a beacon on a distant hill, a vision that could never be achieved, and that all her efforts were doomed to failure.
‘You’re being absurd, Francis,’ Lady Lucy would laugh at him. ‘All I’m trying to do is to make our home as nice as possible. You wouldn’t want the children growing up surrounded by ugliness, would you?’
Powerscourt decided that instant capitulation was the only solution to the case of the dining-room chairs. ‘That looks a bit dangerous, Lucy. I think you’d better replace them straight away.’
Lady Lucy was not accustomed to such rapid victories. Often there would be protests about furniture being able to last a few years longer, sometimes dire and apocalyptic male mutterings about money. She stared hard at her husband’s face. Perhaps, as so often, he was teasing her.
‘Are you serious?’ she said incredulously.
‘Yes, I am,’ replied her husband. Lady Lucy resolved to try to find the cause of this immediate acquiescence. If she could identify the reason, then she could time future campaigns to coincide.
‘Are you all right, Francis?’ said Lady Lucy, worried suddenly that her husband might be ill.
‘I’m perfectly all right, my love,’ said Powerscourt, giving his wife a quick kiss. ‘I’m just in rather a hurry. I’ve got to get to the Royal Academy. And I want to ask your advice.’
Lady Lucy sat down on one of her dubious dining-room chairs. Powerscourt observed that there hadn’t been a moment’s hesitation. Were they all in perfectly good condition after all, he wondered? Did just one of them need repair? This was not a battle he was prepared to enter. He banished all thoughts of domesticity from his mind.
‘We’ve got to find somebody in Chelsea, Lucy,’ he began. Lady Lucy felt a quick thrill at the use of the word ‘we’. Not I. But plural. We.
‘Who is this person, Francis?’ Lady Lucy smiled.
‘All we have,’ said Powerscourt, ‘is a Christian name. Rosalind. She was having an affair with the late Christopher Montague. Her husband was apparently not compliant. And she lives in Chelsea, this Rosalind. That’s it.’
‘I could ask Montague’s sister,’ said Lady Lucy, relieved that the vast tribe of her relations, as Francis referred to them, might come in useful at last.
‘You could,’ said Powerscourt doubtfully, ‘but I have asked the sister already in general terms. She said she didn’t know anything about his private life.’
‘I see,’ said Lady Lucy. ‘It’s quite tricky, isn’t it? You can’t very well pin up a notice on Chelsea Town Hall asking for the Rosalind who was having an affair with Christopher Montague to pop round to Markham Square for afternoon tea.’
Powerscourt laughed. ‘I wonder about the post,’ he said. ‘People in those circumstances sometimes spend a lot of time writing to each other, arranging the next meeting, saying how much they miss the other one, that sort of thing. Liable to cause trouble if you leave any of the correspondence lying around, of course.’
Lady Lucy looked suspiciously at her husband. ‘Are you an expert in these matters, Francis?’
‘Certainly not. I promise you.’ Powerscourt laughed. ‘But I have been involved in a number of cases where this sort of thing goes on. One chap I heard of even had his messages delivered by carrier pigeon. Of ingenuity in affairs of the heart there is no end.’
‘Thomas is a great friend of our postman here,’ said Lady Lucy. ‘He takes Thomas on his rounds of the square sometimes on Saturday mornings. I’ve watched Thomas post the mail through the letterboxes. He thinks it’s tremendous.’
‘Well, the postman might be able to help. But we need Montague’s hand on a letter. Those murderers took every scrap of paper out of his flat. We don’t know what his handwriting looked like.’
Powerscourt looked at his watch. ‘Heavens, Lucy, I’m going to be late. Will you have those new chairs in position when I come back, do you think?’
Lady Lucy laughed. ‘Be off with you, furniture Philistine!’ she said. But she kissed him warmly as he left.