‘I checked in the village next to the house as well. The general opinion was that the Hammond-Burkes were virtually bankrupt.’
‘So, Edmund, so.’ Piper was planning his campaign. ‘We write to this Hammond-Burke fellow. Do we ask him to bring the painting up to London so our experts can look at it? Or do we go there?’
William Alaric Piper always wanted to bring his victims to London. He doubted if they were used to the capital. He would show them the paintings currently on display in the de Courcy and Piper Gallery. He would assure them that he could make no final decision until he had consulted his experts. He would sound rather doubtful about the provenance of the Raphael or the Rubens. He would send them back to their damp and their decay with hopes slighter than when they arrived. But he would not cast them into total despair. ‘We shall see,’ he would say, as he ushered them out of his office. ‘So many of these paintings turn out to be merely copies of the original and are worth nothing at all. Or they’re forgeries. But we shall have to wait a little while. These experts have to take their time examining the work. I have known them wait a month or so before they give their judgement. Once we know, I shall be in touch at once. A very good day to you, sir.’
‘I am sure Hammond-Burke would come to London. Absolutely sure of it,’ said de Courcy.
‘How long ago did you see him, three days ago, did you say?’
De Courcy nodded. He watched his partner calculating the problems in landing this particular fish, a fish that might be worth over fifty thousand pounds profit to the gallery.
‘Let’s leave him a little longer, Edmund. Let’s leave him for three or four days more. Then Mr Hammond-Burke or Burke-Hammond or whatever he’s called, will get a letter from us.’
De Courcy had seen many of these letters. They were masterpieces of manipulation. The gallery regretted that the owner was contemplating selling his Raphael. The gallery firmly believed that Old Masters should be left in their ancestral homes, to bear witness to their past and to be a beacon to future generations. However, it was always the policy of the gallery to be of succour to owners who might wish to dispose of their paintings. The gallery always attempted to ensure that they moved on to reputable owners who would guard and cherish the work as it had been guarded and cherished in the past. If Mr Hammond-Burke could bring his painting with him, the gallery, at its own expense, would ensure that it was examined by the foremost experts in the land. If necessary, other experts would be summoned from Paris or Berlin. The gallery believed that every care should be taken to ensure the correct attribution of the work. Then Piper would suggest a date. The date was always very close to the time of arrival of the letter. Get their hopes up, Piper would say. They can work out the cost of repairs on the train on their way here. Once they’re here, they’re caught. They’re in the net of William Alaric Piper.
Very few of them escaped.
3
Lord Francis Powerscourt was walking along Piccadilly. The traffic on one of London’s most fashionable streets was so dense that a pedestrian moved faster than the vehicles but Powerscourt’s mind was far away. He had spent most of the past four days in and around Brompton Square. He thought he knew every blade of grass in the little garden by now. He had talked to the neighbours of the late Christopher Montague. None of them had seen anything unusual. Inspector Maxwell and his team had checked with the rubbish disposal men in case a parcel of books had been left for collection. No such pile had been observed. He and the police had knocked on every door in the square, searching for information that was not there. Or that the owners chose not to reveal. The killer seemed to have been an invisible man. The day before Inspector Maxwell revealed that the police had found two people who had seen Montague on the day of his death. An Edmund de Courcy had a brief conversation with him at the corner of Old Bond Street and Grosvenor Street late in the afternoon. A certain Roderick Johnston of the National Gallery had seen him leaving the gallery just before six o’clock in the evening. But there was no news of what Montague was working on at the time of his death.
Powerscourt had inquired of all the reputable papers in the capital if Christopher Montague was writing an article for them. He was not. The papers regretted his death but had no clues to its cause. Originally Powerscourt had high hopes of the sister. Surely she, of all people, would know of any dark secrets in his private life that could have led to his death. She did not. Brothers, she had told Powerscourt sadly, did not usually confide their innermost secrets to their sisters. Powerscourt doubted this at first. Then he had thought of his own sisters and he asked himself if he would have told any of the three of them about his private life. On the very day he became engaged to Lucy, he reminded himself, he had taken great care not to tell his sisters the good news. The only intelligence the sister could provide was that Christopher’s closest friend was a history don called Thomas Jenkins at Emmanuel College, Oxford, and that he had been encouraged in his work by the President of the Royal Academy, Sir Frederick Lambert.
Powerscourt had been to an exhibition of Lambert’s work the year before. Lambert specialized in vast canvases with historical or religious or mythological subjects. People said that he travelled to the countries where the events were supposed to have taken place to steep himself in the light and the colour. Powerscourt had thought they were quite terrible but resolved to keep his views to himself in his interview with the President.
Lambert’s office was on the first floor of Burlington House. A couple of his own works modestly adorned the walls. Sir Frederick was a great bear of a man with a huge moustache and a very red face. Powerscourt remembered Lucy telling him that he took great time and trouble to curry favour with the rich and fashionable, presenting some of his own paintings to the Prince and Princess of Wales. Powerscourt doubted if either of them would have known who Agamemnon or Archimedes, regular subjects in the Lambert oeuvre, actually were. Lambert had painted Archimedes sitting in an enormous bath, designing siege engines for the battle of Syracuse while the warships surrounded the city. This incongruous vista was now hanging on the main staircase of the Waleses’ London home at Marlborough House.
‘How very kind of you to see me at such short notice, Sir Frederick,’ said Powerscourt, feeling rather giddy as he looked at some Lambert incident from the Trojan Wars on the wall above him.
‘Better have a glass of champagne, Powerscourt,’ Sir Frederick greeted him in expansive mood. ‘Lucky we’ve still got some at reasonable prices.’
Powerscourt asked how the champagne had been in peril.
Sir Frederick laughed. ‘It’s a very good story. The French Ambassador told it to me at a dinner last night at Lady Grosvenor’s. D’you know the Grosvenors, Powerscourt?’
Powerscourt felt relieved as he told the President that the Grosvenors, like so much of London society, were distant relatives of his wife’s.
‘It’s these Americans,’ Lambert went on, taking a gulp from his glass. ‘The millionaire Americans, the ones who own all the banks and all the railways and all the shipping lines. One of them, fellow by the name of Graubman, was in Paris, buying sculptures and paintings and tapestries to take home to Westchester County or wherever he lives. They say he was thinking of making the French Government an offer for the Louvre. Anyway, one of these French art dealers got him interested in fine champagne. Fellow asked where it came from. Art dealer takes out a map and shows him. “Why,” says Graubman, “that’s a very tiny area. You could put the whole lot into a small corner of New Hampshire!” The French Ambassador says that Graubman owns rather a large corner of New Hampshire. He thought he could make a new corner. In champagne. Buy up all the land and send up the price. The Ambassador says the millionaire took out a notebook full of figures. He asked the art dealer how many bottles of champagne are sold every year. He asked how much they fetched. “Look here,” he says to the art dealer, “in my country, once you control everything, you control all the prices. Once you’ve got all the steel, you can charge what you like for it. Why can’t we do the same with this champagne stuff? I’m sure we could make it for less money once we’d got control. Can’t see why they need so many bubbles for a start. I reckon” – he was apparently scribbling furiously at this point – “we could easily make a couple of million a year. Maybe more.”’