‘Fourteen,’ said Piper.
‘Fourteen what?’
‘Sorry, fourteen thousand pounds. That’s a whole thousand off for you, Mr Black.’
‘Ten,’ said Black.
‘Ten what?’
‘Ten thousand pounds, sorry,’ said Lewis B. Black.
Piper rejoiced that they had finally settled into pounds. He felt the Bank of England would have been proud of him.
‘Fourteen thousand pounds.’ He stuck to his guns.
‘Eleven,’ said Black.
‘Thirteen,’ said Piper.
‘Twelve,’ said Black.
‘Split the difference,’ said Piper, who would have settled for ten if he had to. Almost all of that was clear profit after all. ‘Twelve and a half thousand pounds.’
‘Done,’ said Lewis B. Black. But what he said next was music to Piper’s ears.
‘This Lady Lanchester woman in the picture,’ he said, nodding at his wife on the easel, ‘did this Reynolds guy do any more paintings of her? Or did anybody else at the time?’
Piper felt like an early prospector who has just discovered a rich seam of gold. This was the California gold rush come to Old Bond Street.
‘I will have to check in our library,’ he assured Lewis B. Black, ‘but I think from memory that there are two other portraits of Lady Lanchester in existence, another one by Reynolds, the other, I think, by Gainsborough. Would you like me to see if I can find them for you?’
The interview room was very small. There were no windows. A bare light bulb cast a miserable light over the occupants. Horace Aloysius Buckley had lost weight in prison. His face was drawn. The drab grey of the prison uniform did not suit him. The clothes were several sizes too big for him, hanging loosely off his shoulders, the trousers sagging at the waist.
‘Horace,’ said his partner, George Brigstock, ‘your case may come up for trial sooner than we thought. Two cases scheduled for the Central Criminal Court have had to be postponed. We must instruct a barrister at once.’
Buckley shuddered slightly at the news that his trial might be sooner than expected. Sometimes at night, tossing on the worn-out mattress in his cell, he dreamed of judges with black caps chasing him down the nave of a cathedral, shouting at him to keep still so they could pass sentence.
‘Do you have any suggestions, George?’ said Buckley. The firm of Buckley, Brigstock and Brightwell, solicitors, did not deal in criminal cases, but the world of the law in London is a very small one.
‘Sir Rufus Fitch will be taking the prosecution case. Do you know Sir Rufus, Horace?’
Outside the footsteps of the warder sounded loud on the stone floor as he paced up and down in the corridor outside.
‘I have met Sir Rufus, George, I thought he was rather pompous.’
‘What do you say,’ said Brigstock, consulting a sheet of paper in front of him, ‘to Sir Idwal Grimble? They say he’s very good in cases of this kind.’
Horace Buckley looked unblinking at the face of the warder, peering in through the glass slit. Sometimes he still couldn’t believe all this was happening to him.
‘Sir Idwal?’ he said. ‘He’s another pompous fellow. He and Fitch would be like a pair of battleships that take a couple of hours to change course. Too heavy. Can’t manoeuvre.’
‘A number of people spoke very highly of Pemberton, Miles Pemberton.’ Brigstock tried another name. ‘Nobody thought he could get that fellow who was accused of murdering his mother-in-law off last year, but he did.’
‘I think he was lucky,’ said Horace Aloysius Buckley. ‘The prosecution’s man hadn’t done his homework properly. And he’s pretty pompous too.’
‘My own personal choice,’ said Brigstock, beginning to despair of ever coming up with a barrister acceptable to his partner, ‘is for a younger man, a coming man.’
‘Do you have somebody in mind?’ asked Buckley, suddenly aware that his time in the interview room was nearly over.
‘Pugh,’ said Buckley, ‘Charles Augustus Pugh. He’s young, he’s quick, his brain probably works faster than Sir Rufus Fitch’s. They say he’s very good with juries too.’
‘I have heard of this Pugh,’ said Buckley as the warder began the slow process of opening the door. ‘Instruct him, if you please. And tell him,’ the warder was repeating Time’s Up as if it were some kind of mantra as he ushered George Brigstock towards the daylight, ‘tell him, for God’s sake, to get in touch with Lord Francis Powerscourt.’
Mrs Imogen Foxe had taken her correspondence down to the lake again. Well, not the entire correspondence, just one letter, another missive from the mysterious Mr Peters in London. It began with instructions for a meeting in five days’ time at the Bristol Hotel near Waterloo station in London. She was to present herself at the reception desk between one and two o’clock and ask for Mr Peters. She had to understand that from that moment on, a number of unpleasant things were going to happen to her. Her eyes and the upper part of her face would be wrapped in bandages. She would be given a stick to help her walk. She would have to rely on Mr Peters or one of his assistants to guide her on her journey. If she disclosed any of these details to a single living soul, she would not meet Mr Orlando Blane on this occasion. She would never see him again. Her family – Imogen winced at this point – and her husband would also be informed about what she proposed to do.
Imogen read the letter three times and resolved to burn it when she returned to the house. She walked slowly round the lake, a light breeze rippling across the surface. She thought she saw a kingfisher shooting across the opposite side of the water. She couldn’t be sure. She hugged herself as she thought of Orlando. Another sonnet of Shakespeare’s came back to her, learnt by heart under the unforgiving eyes of the nuns and the battered reproduction of the Assumption of the Virgin on the convent wall,
O! Never say that I was false of heart,
Though absence seemed my flame to qualify.
As easy might I from myself depart
As from my soul, which in thy breast doth lie:
That is my home of love; if I have ranged,
Like him that travels, I return again.
Thoughts of travel sent her into Blandford, the nearest town. She presented herself at the counter of Barnard and Baines, the best, the most expensive outfitters in the place. She ordered six of their finest shirts.
‘Will those be for Mr Granville, madam?’ said the old assistant. Barnard and Baines had been clothing the Foxe family for generations. They had records of the neck sizes of all of them for the past hundred and twenty years.
‘No, it’s for my brother,’ Imogen blushed slightly, ‘a size smaller than Mr Granville, I should say.’
She also purchased two pairs of dark gentleman’s trousers and a jacket. Then she went to the local bank where she withdrew two hundred pounds in cash. The cashier looked round as if to ask for his superior, but Imogen’s most charming smile brought forth the money.
I can hide all these things in my luggage, she said to herself. Orlando may not have any decent clothes at all. And with two hundred pounds, we could go anywhere in the kingdom.
Lord Francis Powerscourt was dreading this interview. He knew he had put it off for far too long. He paused at the edge of Rotten Row in Hyde Park, the horses and their perfectly groomed riders trotting sedately along. He could still go home. He could be back in Markham Square in ten minutes or so. Then he remembered his last conversation with Lady Lucy the night before.
‘You must see him, Francis, you know that as well as I do,’ Lady Lucy had said.
‘What can I say to him?’ her husband pleaded. ‘Did you kill Christopher Montague? Did you also kill Thomas Jenkins? What did you do with the books?’
‘You’re being silly, Francis. And, what’s even more uncharacteristic, you’re trying to run away from something. Think of poor Mr Buckley, in his cell or wherever he is these days. Surely you owe it to him.’