‘Not a little cottage, I think, Johnny,’ he said. ‘Big modern place perhaps? Lions on guard outside?’
‘Big, yes. Modern, no. Lions, no,’ said Fitzgerald, searching eagerly in the Powerscourt drinks cabinet. ‘What have we here, Francis? St Aubin? Excellent. May I?’
A glass of white burgundy accompanied Fitzgerald back to his chair.
‘Right on the river it is, that house,’ he said. ‘Middle of the eighteenth century, I should think. Front door’s by the water for the days when the Thames was the main road. Place must be worth a fortune. You couldn’t possibly afford it on his salary. There’s another thing, Francis. Mr and Mrs Johnston only moved there from some little house in North London a couple of years ago. And there’s more.’
‘How did you come by this information, Johnny?’ said Powerscourt.
Johnny Fitzgerald looked appreciatively at his glass. ‘Drink, Francis. Beer rather than wine. The local pubs to be precise. There’s a whole lot of them down there by the river. Boating people, some City men, a few lawyers, the local shopkeepers. Mrs Roderick told the fishmonger the other day that they’ve just come into some more money, left them by a relative. This, Francis,’ Fitzgerald refilled his glass happily, ‘is what she said: “We’ll always be grateful to Mr Raphael for leaving us the money. We might buy a house in the Cotswolds, maybe in Italy.”’
‘Mr Raphael,’ said Powerscourt thoughtfully. ‘I like that. Oh yes, I like that very much. Has Mr Raphael been in London lately, Johnny?’
‘As a matter of fact, he has,’ said Fitzgerald, ‘I’ve been doing a lot of drinking in this investigation. I got friendly with some of the porters at the art dealers when I was carting my auntie’s Leonardo around. I go and see them on Fridays sometimes, they always drink a lot at the end of the week. The Holy Family, by our friend Mr Raphael, was recently sold to an American millionaire for eighty-five thousand pounds. The porters didn’t know what the commission would have been for authenticating it, but they reckoned it would have been between twelve and a half and fifteen per cent. Sometimes more.’
Powerscourt looked thoughtful, his mind busy with mental arithmetic. He hoped he could manage it more successfully than William Burke’s son.
‘Would you kill somebody to keep those commissions, Johnny? Ten and a half thousand pounds or so at the bottom end of that scale, maybe thirteen thousand seven hundred and fifty at the top?’
Johnny Fitzgerald peered into his glass. ‘Think of it like a vineyard, Francis,’ he said at last. ‘You might not kill for one year’s supply of superb white burgundy. But if you thought the murder might guarantee you a lifetime’s supply of the stuff, or the commissions if you like, year after year after year . . .’ Fitzgerald polished off his glass once more and helped himself to a refill. ‘. . . then you might just do it. Particularly if you had an ambitious wife, who likes dropping names in the fishmonger’s.’
Visibility was down to about a hundred yards. A mist had fallen over the waters that separated the port of Calvi, on the north-western side of the island of Corsica, from mainland France. Powerscourt and Lady Lucy were standing on the deck of the steamer peering into the void. Powerscourt was thinking about Corsica’s most famous son, native not of Calvi but of Ajaccio further to the south. Napoleon must have sailed down these passages on his way to Egypt, a disastrous expedition which ended with the future Emperor abandoning his armies in the shadows of the Pyramids and fleeing back to France in case he lost power. Napoleon must have seen his native island looming out of the sea on his left when he made his escape from Elba, the hundred days of glory that ended in the charnel fields of Waterloo, and another sea voyage to the yet more remote island of St Helena.
Gradually the mist began to clear and a watery sun crept out of hiding to light their passage. Very faintly, to the starboard side, he could see the outline of a long strip of land, Cap Corse, the northernmost tip of the island. Then, as the sun broke through, he saw the island clear for the first time.
‘My God, Lucy, it’s very beautiful. Look at the coastline.’ A curling succession of beaches lay peacefully on the shore, small breakers climbing lazily up the sand. Between them were rocky bays where the sea crashed against the rocks, faint lines of spray easily seen from their boat.
‘Look at the mountains, Francis, just look at them.’ Lady Lucy was shivering softly as she spoke. ‘They’re much bigger than anything in Wales or Scotland.’
Ahead of them at the end of a long semicircular bay fringed with pines lay the port of Calvi, its improbable citadel standing guard over the little town. Behind it, behind the beaches, behind the rocky promontories where the spray shot upwards in the late afternoon sun, behind everything were the mountains. Great jagged peaks lay in enfiladed rows behind the plain, bare rocky slopes rising towards the sky. They brooded over the island. We have been here long before the various humans came, they said, before the Greeks, before the Romans, before the Saracens, the Pisans, the Genoese, the French. We shall be here long after you have all gone. Dotted about on the slopes minute villages could be seen, lofty campaniles a place of lookout against invaders from the sea.
They dined on kid and roast potatoes, washed down with the fierce local wine. Powerscourt thought Johnny Fitzgerald would have found it interesting, a word he frequently used when confronted with crude and uncivilized vintages. They walked around the streets of Calvi as the wind rose and brought great breakers hammering on to the sands of Calvi’s beach. Behind the sand the mountains, almost black now, brooded over the Gulf of Calvi.
‘Do you have a plan for tomorrow, Francis?’ said Lady Lucy, walking along the little quayside dotted with fishing boats and a few cafes where the native Calvais were settling down to an evening of cards and wine.
‘I am going to see the police chief in the morning, Lucy. The Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police gave me an introduction. He has the most magnificent name. He’s called Antonio Imperiali. What do you think of that?’
‘Do you think he’s descended from the Emperor himself?’ said Lady Lucy, drawing her shawl tight around her neck as the cold wind whipped in from the sea.
‘He may be,’ said Powerscourt, watching a fishing boat cast off its moorings and set out to sea, a villainous crew working busily on deck. ‘I think the Corsicans did pretty well out of Napoleon’s Empire. They fought all over the place, all the way from Austerlitz to Moscow, I think. Seventeen of them became generals in the Grande Armee. Wouldn’t be surprising if some of the natives ended up being called Imperiali.’
The real Captain Imperiali was a swarthy pirate of a man, with a greasy moustache and a self-satisfied manner. He looked carefully at Powerscourt’s introduction.
‘How is it with my colleagues in London?’ he asked. ‘They do not yet catch the Ripper, I think.’ Powerscourt was amazed at how the fame of the Whitechapel murderer had reached the Corsicans and lived on for years after the event. Murders, he thought, had always been a staple of Corsican life if Lady Lucy’s book was to be believed. Maybe they thought there was a vendetta, a blood feud, running through the streets of the East End. Later, not very much later, he was to regret his frankness with Captain Imperiali.
‘I am looking for an English family who live in the area,’ he said. ‘I think they are called de Courcy, although they may be living under a false name. I have reason to believe that they are resident in the neighbourhood of Calvi. There is no suspicion of any crime having being committed by them. And I am looking for a forger, a man who may operate out of the same area, maybe even the same house, I do not know. If there is a forger here, there would be a lot of traffic in canvases and paintings being shipped back to England.’
Captain Imperiali smiled a conspiratorial smile. Powerscourt noticed that his teeth were terrible. There were great gaps in his mouth, like the gaps in the mountains behind his office.