‘Right,’ said Fitzgerald cheerfully. ‘Let’s begin with the most obvious candidate, Horace Aloysius Buckley, solicitor of Buckley, Brigstock and Brightwell, cuckolded husband of Rosalind. Consumed by jealousy, he decides to kill Christopher, the younger man. He must have felt ever so proud, Horace Aloysius, when he led his beautiful bride to the altar, an older man making off with one of the most attractive women in London. Then she betrays him. Think of the shame. Think of the gossip. Think of the sniggers behind his back. Think of his embarrassment when people begin to whisper about how she has deceived him. So he pinches the key from his wife’s dressing table, maybe he made her tell him where it was, he goes round to Brompton Square, out with the garrotte, end of Montague. How about that?’
Lady Lucy frowned. Even after years of living with her husband and Johnny Fitzgerald and their murders and their murderers she found the way they talked about the victims rather too flippant for her taste.
‘But why would he remove some of the books, Johnny?’ she said. ‘What was the point?’
‘Easy,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald, ‘all the books were about art. Art was what brought them together. Art made them fall in love. Art destroyed the husband’s married bliss, if bliss it was. Horace Aloysius decides to destroy some of the art, and the article, as he has destroyed Montague. Maybe the books are even now locked up in some storeroom at Buckley, Brigstock and Brightwell. Maybe he arranged for them to be dumped in the Thames, or taken away as rubbish. And, to cap it all, he hasn’t been at his offices since the day after Montague’s death.’
Lady Lucy got up to draw the curtains. Powerscourt watched her do it, admiring the grace of her movements over there by the windows. He smiled at her as she returned to the sofa. Lady Lucy could read his thoughts sometimes. She blushed slightly.
‘I’m not convinced,’ said Powerscourt. ‘It might be true. But it looks too plausible to me. What about this?’
He stared briefly at the Moghul chessmen on their table by the window, standing to attention, waiting for another battle.
‘Christopher Montague was about to become a very famous man in the world of art. Two books, the second due out very soon, on Northern Italian paintings. One article which demolishes most of the pictures in the de Courcy and Piper Gallery as copies, forgeries or fakes. So who would you turn to now to know if your Italian Old Master is genuine? Why, to Christopher Montague. He would have made a fortune charging for the correct attributions, maybe a percentage of the sale price every time a painting changes hands. Think of it! An income guaranteed for life! And if these Americans start buying up Old Masters in huge numbers, the prices will go up. Ten per cent of fifty thousand pounds could go a long way.’
Powerscourt paused and looked at Johnny Fitzgerald’s glass. It was, unusually, empty. ‘So this is the question, Lucy and Johnny. Who held that position before? Who was Christopher Montague going to depose, to displace? Who saw their livelihood, maybe not their livelihood, but their prospects for great wealth, suddenly removed from under their noses? Jealousy, professional not personal, and greed are a formidable cocktail.’
Lady Lucy looked at her husband again. ‘So, Francis,’ she said, ‘according to your theory, somewhere in London is an art expert who was going to be toppled from his throne. And he killed Christopher Montague?’
‘Correct. And that explains why the magazine article disappeared and some of the books were taken away. The murderer couldn’t leave anything behind which might allow somebody else to finish the article and ruin his own position.’
Johnny Fitzgerald helped himself to another bottle of claret from the sideboard. ‘I’m not convinced by that theory, Francis,’ he said, wrestling with the corkscrew. ‘Let’s try another one to do with the art world,’ he went on with a smile as the cork popped out of the bottle. ‘Let’s just think about that exhibition he was writing about. Suppose you were in charge of that. Suppose you hoped to sell lots and lots of lovely Venetian paintings. You hear on the grapevine that somebody is going to denounce most of them as fakes or forgeries. You are going to lose a great deal of money. Twenty Titians, was it, or something like that, they thought they had? Now down to three? Seventeen Titians would have made you pots of money. Now it’s all gone. So they trot round to Brompton Square with a piece of picture cord, ideal for garrotting, and wring Montague’s neck. And, for good measure, they destroy the article and get rid of the compromising books.’
‘That’s not bad, Johnny, not bad at all,’ said Powerscourt. Fitzgerald happily refilled his glass. ‘But there’s one more possibility we shouldn’t discount,’ Powerscourt went on. ‘The only problem is that it has to do with Montague’s will, and we don’t know what that contains. But it could work something like this. Let’s think about Christopher Montague. He has bought his villa near Florence. He has part of one fortune still intact and stands to make many more by attributing works of art for a fee. But somebody couldn’t wait for that to happen. Maybe the somebody was deep in debt and needed money in a hurry. The somebody was going to inherit all he had, including the Italian property. Christopher Montague’s heir was also his murderer.’
‘Have you two quite finished?’ said Lady Lucy. ‘I think all of your theories are perfectly plausible and I am more confused than I was when we started.’
‘I’m sure we could produce some more potential murderers, Lady Lucy,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald cheerfully. ‘Maybe four’s quite enough for now.’
Powerscourt had wandered over to the chessboard. He lifted the Moghul King from its position in the back row and placed it carefully in the centre of the board.
‘Christopher Montague was going to be a King,’ he said sadly, ‘in his own world.’ Powerscourt looked carefully at the chessboard. ‘Maybe his Italian villa was actually a castle. The bishops of the Church would have come to him to know about the authenticity of the pictures on their walls. The art dealers and the art experts would have been the knights, darting in unexpected directions around the black and white squares of his life. Maybe Rosalind Buckley was the Queen. The serried ranks of pawns are the books and the articles Christopher Montague had yet to write.’ Powerscourt picked up a knight and fingered it delicately.
‘For God’s sake,’ he was almost whispering, his mind far away.
‘. . . let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings:
How some have been deposed, some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed,
Some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping killed . . .’
Powerscourt picked up the King again and returned it gently to the back row.
‘All murdered.’
William Alaric Piper stared in amazement at the front of Truscott Park, home of the Hammond-Burkes. There were builders everywhere, repairing windows, men on the roof taking out the broken tiles, gardeners beginning the long task of restoring the grounds.
‘It does your heart good to see it,’ he said cheerfully to his companion. ‘The healing benison of the Old Masters comes to Warwickshire in the heart of the English Midlands!’
‘It does indeed,’ said Roderick Johnston, senior curator of Renaissance paintings in the National Gallery. Privately Johnston thought with even greater gratitude of the benison of his percentage in the final sale of Raphael’s Holy Family, purchased from Truscott Park for the princely sum of forty-five thousand pounds and sold on for a prince’s ransom, eighty-five thousand pounds, to Mr William P. McCracken, American railroad tycoon and senior elder of the Third Presbyterian Church at Lincoln Street, Concord, Massachusetts. Twelve and a half per cent of eighty-five thousand – he had made the calculation at least a hundred times – was ten thousand, six hundred and twenty-five. Pounds. Roderick Johnston could buy a new house. He could buy a place in the sun large enough to hide from the nagging of his wife.