“Giacomo, please. As a friend, listen to me. Take my advice.”
“What?”
“Go straight. Give it up. Get a job.”
“Everybody tells me that. Even that judge.”
“You should listen. Now, one last thing. Those statues. What happened to them? Where are they?”
Sandano looked bashful.
“Come on. You might as well get it over and done with. I won’t tell.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
“They’re under my grandmother’s bed. You must know that if she… Oh. I’ve done it again.”
Bottando nodded and beamed at him. “That’s what I say, give up.”
“Lovely man,” he said under his breath as he left.
He rang Flavia as soon as he’d finished having a thoughtful drink in the nearby bar to consider matters, and told her about Fra Angelico.
She was not happy to hear his interpretation, especially as it was obviously right: as Bottando said, it’s what comes of underestimating the stupidity of the criminal classes.
“Little moron,” she said when he finished. “When I get my hands on him next time…”
“You can torment him at your leisure. But you see what this means, don’t you?”
“If Forster stole that painting, what the hell was he playing at by going back to talk to Sandano?”
“That’s the problem. It would still be possible to make out a very good case for this all being a figment of my imagination. Especially if you now tell me that his death might not have had anything to do with his business at all. Is that what you’re telling me?”
“It’s a theory, and not a bad one.”
“That’s the trouble. Everything’s circumstantial. Can you get me something? One way or the other. Preferably proving that the time and money you’ve spent hasn’t been a gross waste of department resources such as would be approved only by a senile old lunatic?”
“Ah. Argan. I was going to ask about him.”
“Yes,” said Bottando. “Him. He seems to have laid off for the moment. Perhaps he’s decided we were right to investigate. Certainly he seems to have stopped trying to use it as evidence against me. There’s not been a memo for days now. But I’m convinced there will be: I can hardly wait. I’m sure it will come to nothing. Can you really see people supporting that little twerp rather than me?”
Flavia shook her head silently as she put the phone down. Poor old Bottando, she thought. He was really beginning to clutch at straws. Besides, a nasty thought had just occurred to her.
14
It was one of the great tragedies in the life of the senior partner in the local medical practice that his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Robert Johnson, of Ipswich, had christened him Samuel. It was similarly a tragedy of only slightly less proportions that the lad had, from an early age, desired to become a physician. All his life, it seemed, people had smirked when introduced to him. There could be no jest on the theme of Boswell that he had not heard many times over. The great lexicographer’s comments on physicians he knew as well as if he’d written them himself, so often had they returned to haunt him.
Dr. Samuel Johnson, MD, was, as a result, a man of resigned temperament. And, by some strange fluke of psychology, he had found himself growing, over the years, to look more and more like the eighteenth-century know-all who was the bane of his existence. He was short, round and dishevelled, his jacket splotched with old food, and his reading glasses always perched at an unnatural angle at the end of his nose.
He also had a tendency to be snappish with newcomers, on the grounds that if he presented a suitably ferocious appearance, he might head off some of the more timorous before they could make some supposedly whimsical comment. He wasn’t very good at this, being naturally a lazy, amiable man, and so the result was more bizarre than frightening.
When Flavia marched into his room, stretched out her hand and pumped his up and down, then sat uninvited on his patient’s chair, such pre-emptive strikes were unnecessary, and for a simple reason: Flavia had never heard of Samuel Johnson, and was absolutely unaware that there was anything even faintly amusing in the fact that a doctor should rejoice in both or either of two fairly common English names.
Dr. Johnson found this quite a refreshing change and, as the woman was both perfectly pleasant and an agreeable physical presence, he found himself out-Johnsoning Johnson, overdoing the urbane and civilized Englishman routine in a fashion his family, friends and colleagues would have found embarrassing.
Flavia loved it. though, and thought the way he chuckled as he peered at her between thick shaggy eyebrows and the top of his reading glasses was perfectly delightful. She was a bit surprised at the only partly housetrained way he spilled his tea down his shirt and dabbed at it absent-mindedly with his tie while he talked, but this she put down to eccentricity.
In other words, they got on handsomely, and Dr. Johnson found himself being far more forthcoming in his desire to charm than he would otherwise have been. Flavia’s visit was one of desperation, searching after any smattering of detail which might give an insight into Forster and Veronica Beaumont. Argyll’s thesis was all very well as far as it went, but it didn’t go that far yet. And whatever their relationship was, it had been an odd one: they’d known each other in Italy, but had not got on. Then, over twenty years later, Forster appears, gets paid a salary which Miss Beaumont could scarcely afford to do a job which doesn’t need doing. Or so it seemed. All right, perhaps he was merely using the position to launder paintings. But was Miss Beaumont really so batty she didn’t notice?
The trouble was that sources of information were few and far between. Mrs. Verney had been only an irregular visitor before she’d inherited and was a bit vague on the details. There were few other relations and almost no friends. Apart from the vicar—an unobservant man who had been less than illuminating when the police had talked to him, and the cook who was similarly uncertain of details due to the fact that she was only in the house a few hours a day—no one had known the woman very well.
But Veronica Beaumont had been ill, and that meant doctors, and that led her to Dr. Samuel Johnson, MD. Doctors frequently knew a great deal. The trouble was, they often had this finicky conscience about retelling it.
But at least the rubicund figure with the egg stains seemed as though he wanted to be helpful. Yes, indeed, he said. Miss Beaumont had been a patient of his after his predecessor retired about five years ago, although on the whole there was little wrong with her that he could treat. Her death had been a great tragedy, although for his part he was not entirely surprised. Although no psychiatrist, you understand…
“I gather she died of an overdose. Is that correct?”
He nodded. “It’s all in the coroner’s report, and so there’s nothing secret about it. She was on sleeping tablets. One day she took far too many of them and died.”
“Deliberately?”
Dr. Johnson took off his glasses and rubbed them clean on the tail of his shirt, then put them back on, leaving the shirt tail hanging out. “Officially, I think they concluded that there was no reason to think it was anything but an accident.”
“And unofficially?”
“Pills like that have an odd effect when taken with alcohol, so it’s possible. Personally, though—and you must remember I’d known her for decades—I would very much doubt that she would take her own life deliberately. She was undoubtedly unbalanced. But not in that way. So I like to think it was an accident.”
“Unbalanced? Mrs. Verney said she was crazy.”
“No, no,” the doctor replied. “Only poor people are crazy. The Beaumont family has had a fair smattering of oddness, though. It was before my time, but Mrs. Verney’s mother was more than a little wayward, I understand. In the next generation it was poor Veronica.”