But people knowledgeable about old masters are a little difficult to get hold of in the countryside at short notice. So they decided they would have to make use of the only one readily to hand, and get him to give Forster’s papers a quick look over: if there was reference to something dodgy in there, Argyll might spot it for them.
So he was taken back to the house and allowed to wander around under the discreet and watchful eye of Constable Hanson. The house was bigger than it appeared from the outside, with a roof space that had been converted at some stage into a long, low room that had evidently functioned as Forster’s office. At one end were all the trappings of the modern art dealer—the books, the telephones, the fax machines and the filing cabinets. At the other end were those bits of his stock in trade that were not hanging on the walls of the dining room, hallway or sitting room downstairs. In a corner was the stairwell which began with the board whose wobbly state may well have precipitated Forster’s fall. Argyll trod carefully as he went up and down.
Then he went through Forster’s stock of paintings methodically, rapidly and with a combination of mounting disapproval and superior disdain. Nasty, crude stuff; all of it shoddy and most of it ugly. The prices listed were outrageous. He himself was no success as a dealer, he knew, but at least he liked the stuff he couldn’t unload on to others. This was the sort of tat only a real cynic would deal in, not someone with much of an eye. And not someone like Giotto—a person who’d stolen an example of work by almost every master of the Renaissance would hardly deal in stuff like that. On the other hand, he thought, thinking along the same lines as Flavia with Manstead, what better disguise than to have everybody associate you with the second rate, the tawdry and the ugly? Who, seeing this stuff, would ever dream…?
Then he turned his attention to the contents of the filing cabinet, although these were not at all interesting. Inventories and the rudimentary accounts that art dealers make out for themselves and the taxman are generally little more than one small column of fanciful numbers which end in an equally fanciful total at the bottom. Even Argyll, who had little talent in mathematics, could manage, although he generally sought the help of Flavia.
“What do you mean?” she’d said the first time she’d helped him out, “where are your expenses?”
“Didn’t really have any,” he replied.
“We went on holiday, didn’t we? You went to a museum during the holiday?”
“Yes. So?”
“ ‘Item: one research trip.’ How much do you reckon? Three million lire? Now, the car. You delivered a picture in it once. So, maintenance, petrol and depreciation. Let’s say another million.”
“But…”
“Oh, use your imagination, Jonathan,” she had said crossly, and proceeded to go through the entire form, adding a nought here, subtracting one there until, by the end, his little business as an art dealer had unaccountably swung from a small profit into a sudden and alarming loss. For the next six months, he’d been convinced that any day a taxman would come knocking on the door. Just needing a little clarification, Dottore Argyll.
The point was that Geoffrey Forster’s accounts made his own modest efforts look like something produced in a primary school. Figures all over the place, and Argyll was damned if he could make any sense of it at all. After about three hours of work, the only conclusion he’d come to was that the police had picked on the wrong man if they wanted help from him. He was as bad an accountant as he was a plumber.
He’d developed a thudding headache by the time he came to the end. Nor was it particularly enlightening: Forster’s income was variable but often quite high, so much so that he had bought not only his own house but two cottages in the village a few years back, although efforts to raise the money to tart them up and sell them to Londoners for weekend houses had not progressed too far. One of the cottages, he remembered, was inhabited by George Barton. His turnover of paintings—officially, at least—had dwindled to virtually nothing in the past couple of years, no doubt being hit by the recession like everyone else.
Several years back, his income had received a boost from being given a salary—not a huge one, he noted — by Miss Beaumont for what were ambiguously called services, but this stopped abruptly in January—presumably when Veronica died and Mary Verney gave him his marching orders. What, exactly, he had done for his money was far from clear. Nor did he seem to have bought all that much recently; like many dealers, he kept the catalogues of auction sales where he’d bought things, but there were no more than a couple of dozen of these, going back over five years. Not nearly enough to generate much of an income.
All in all, he appeared to be a man with some financial problems. Unless, of course, there were sources of money which he had kindly decided he needn’t waste the taxman’s time with. Certainly, it wasn’t obviously the financial profile of supposedly the finest art thief of his generation. But you would expect the finest art thief also to be a bit of a whiz in financial skulduggery as welclass="underline" it was hardly likely that his tax forms would be full of entries like ‘item: one stolen Uccello’…
That, however, was an unproductive line of enquiry. As was the fact that when Forster severed his ties with Weller House, he had apparently not bothered to return some of the papers concerned with it: at least, Argyll assumed that was why there was a probate inventory of the Weller House paintings in one of the files. Dated some fifteen years back, so Argyll assumed that it had been drawn up on the death of Uncle Godfrey. Not hugely illuminating, as the seventy-two paintings and twenty-seven drawings mentioned were treated in a somewhat cursory fashion. But as it might be the only listing there was, and as it clearly wasn’t Forster’s property anyway, he slipped it into his pocket for return to the rightful owner. He noted that the drawing of the hand was described as anonymous French eighteenth-century, which didn’t satisfy him, although it was better than Mrs. Verney’s assessment. It had also been given a value of thirty pounds, which did seem about right.
Argyll yawned from sheer boredom and decided to rest on his laurels. He marked his place, shoved the whole lot in a drawer of the desk, locked it to comply with police wishes on security, and told the ever-patient Hanson that he was finished. There was still three-quarters of the filing cabinet to go through, but that could wait until tomorrow. The police could have a quick job, or a thorough one. On their behalf, Argyll decided they would have the latter: he needed a drink, and the now off-duty Hanson readily accepted the invitation to come along as well.
He arrived back at Weller House at half past seven on the dot, as the last F1-11 of the day rocketed through the chimney pots, bearing a bottle of not very good wine which he’d bought at the pub after turning down old George’s offer of a pint.
“There you are,” she said. “What have you been up to?”
“I’ve been helping the police with their enquiries, in a manner of speaking.”
“Rumbled you at last, eh?”
“Certainly not. I’ve been reading Forster’s accounts and papers.”
“Profitably?”
“Nope. The finer points of accountancy have never been my great strength. He could be as pure as a Trappist or as bent as Al Capone, and I wouldn’t notice.”
“Neither sounds right to me.”
“Hmm. I did find this, though.” He handed over the inventory. She looked at it without much interest.