‘Get me a dozen,’ Stockman said decisively. ‘I’ll buy the lot.’
‘I am dying,’ the letter had said. ‘I mean we are all dying all the time, but my portion of days is now very short. Very soon I may have to go into hospital. Please come and see me at my home before it is too late. I have some information for you about forgers.’
Sir Frederick Lambert’s handwriting was very shaky. On some of the letters, the ‘y’s and the ‘p’s, the downstrokes hurtled unstoppably down the page. Powerscourt, hurrying towards Lambert’s house in South Kensington, hoped he wasn’t too late. There was a slight drizzle falling on the pavements, glistening off the backs of the horses as they pulled their masters through the squares of Chelsea.
A middle-aged nurse in crisp white uniform showed Powerscourt into the study. This was a small room, entirely lined with books and tapestries. Powerscourt was slightly disappointed there were none of Sir Frederick’s own paintings on the walls.
Sir Frederick had looked unwell every time Powerscourt had seen him in his offices in the Royal Academy, coughing blood into an endless supply of clean white handkerchiefs, hiding them in a secret cache behind his desk. Now his body seemed to have collapsed completely. The flesh on his face had been sucked inwards, his cheeks hollow with the disease. The skin on his wrists and hands looked like dirty parchment scarcely able to cover the bones below. His eyes, which had been so full of life, were glazed. Powerscourt wondered if he was full of drugs to ease the pain.
‘Powerscourt,’ said Sir Frederick, just able to raise himself from his chair and shake Powerscourt’s hand, ‘how good of you to come.’
‘You are looking well, Sir Frederick,’ lied Powerscourt. ‘No doubt you will be up and about again soon.’
‘Nonsense, man,’ said Lambert, just able to raise a smile. His face looked even more gaunt. ‘The doctors tell me I have less than a month to go. I get frightened, you know.’ He looked down at the wrecks that had been his hands, the hands that had made all his paintings with such touch and delicacy, the hands that had brought him fame and fortune. ‘When I look at myself in the mirror, I don’t recognize myself at all. I doubt if the Good Lord would admit anybody who looks as wasted as I do. The other inmates might not like it.’
‘You never know who you might meet up there,’ said Powerscourt, ‘maybe Michelangelo is doing them another ceiling.’
‘We do not have much time, my friend,’ said Lambert. ‘That nurse is such a bully, I wonder she doesn’t go and work in a prison. I am only allowed fifteen minutes with you.’
The President of the Royal Academy produced a package from his pocket. ‘Look at all these stamps,’ he said. Powerscourt looked down at them, wondering if the old man had lost his mind as well as his body. French stamps, Italian stamps, Russian stamps, German stamps. There must have been more than fifty of them.
‘Ever since you first came to see me,’ the old man said, ‘I’ve been inquiring about forgers. I’ve now had over sixty replies from all the leading museums and authorities in Europe.’
Powerscourt remembered that the old man was still President of the Royal Academy. Even now the vultures would be circling round his job, lobbying here, promising favours there in order to take over the most prestigious post in British art.
‘I’ve narrowed it down to two,’ Lambert went on, shuffling his stamps into neat piles. ‘The first one is a Frenchman called Jean Pierre Boileau. He’s about fifty years old. They say he tried to make a career in Paris as a painter but he never sold anything at all. Then he disappeared somewhere in the Auvergne and wasn’t heard of for years. It transpired that he had an arrangement with a gallery in Florence for old paintings he could pick up on the trips he took around the south of France. The point was there weren’t any trips. There was only a trip to the barn beside his little house which he had converted into a studio. He specialized in Italian paintings.’
‘What happened to his arrangement with the gallery in Florence?’ asked Powerscourt.
‘Somebody smelt a rat, somebody from one of the big galleries in Rome. It was all hushed up. There was no publicity about the fact that the gallery had sold a heap of fakes.’ Sir Frederick was arranging his stamps into piles from their country of origin. About fifteen French ones were mustered on the left-hand side of the little table in front of him.
‘It’s a curious thing, Powerscourt,’ he went on, ‘whenever there is a forgery or a fake is discovered, everybody in the art world closes ranks. Thing gets hushed up as quickly as possible. The victims of the fraud get their money back. Very quickly, sometimes with the proviso that they keep their mouths shut.’
‘Do you think Monsieur Boileau is back in business now?’ asked Powerscourt, watching with fascination as a small regiment of German stamps took up their position before him.
‘I do not,’ said Lambert, shuffling slowly with the Russians, all adorned with the head of the Tsar, ‘I think he would be too old. I think his nerve might have gone if he’d been caught once.’
‘And the other forger? Is he French too?’
Only the Italian stamps remained. ‘The other one,’ Lambert spoke slowly, as if talking was becoming difficult, ‘is English. Quite young. Extraordinarily talented. He studied here at the Royal Academy not so long ago. Then he went to study in Rome. I think he worked for a time for the leading picture restorers in Paris – restoration, some say, is a cousin, if not a brother or a sister, to forgery. Then he disappeared. There were stories about gambling debts, about an unhappy love affair, about drinking to excess. But he has simply disappeared off the face of the earth. He may be dead, of course, but I doubt it.’
Maybe he’s hidden away somewhere in la France profonde or some remote mountainous area in the Apennines, Powerscourt said to himself. Maybe he’s in Corsica. Maybe he’s locked up on the wild coast of Norfolk, in the crumbling splendour of de Courcy Hall. Abandoned. Nobody there. Place completely empty. Nobody there at all.
The four great powers of Europe were now assembled in neat piles on Lambert’s table. Powerscourt wondered briefly about alliances, Triple Ententes between Rome, Paris and St Petersburg perhaps, as Lambert swept them all into the jumbled heap they had been a few minutes before. Powerscourt thought he must repeat this process over and over again. Rather like the diplomats of Europe.
‘Do you know his name?’ said Powerscourt, mesmerized by the new kaleidoscope of stamps.
As Sir Frederick smiled his cheeks became almost completely hollow. He might have been a ghost. ‘He is called Orlando Blane,’ he said, ‘and a very charming young man he was. I met him, you know, when he was studying at the Academy. Very quick, but not quite stable. Always liable to go off the rails.’
‘And none of your informants have any idea where he is at present?’ asked Powerscourt.
‘Nobody has any idea at all. But if you can find him, you may have solved the mystery, or part of the mystery. I think I have told you before that I was very fond of Christopher Montague. His death is such a loss to the art world. May I ask you a question, Powerscourt?’ The voice was beginning to fade. ‘Do you know who killed him?’
Powerscourt thought briefly about lying, about saying that he was on the very edge of a great discovery. But he knew Sir Frederick deserved better than that.
‘No, I do not, Sir Frederick,’ he said sadly, ‘it is a very difficult case.’
‘Can I ask you one favour, Powerscourt? Can you find the answer before I go? I’m not sure I could find out once I’m dead, if you see what I mean. And I’d hate to pass on without knowing the answer.’
Sir Frederick’s eyes were pleading with him, a last plea from a man who thought he had less than a month to live.