“What makes you think that?”
“Because she was married by then. Her husband died at their fifth wedding anniversary party. His gravestone says that was 1966. Therefore they were married in 1961. You don’t go to a finishing school to find a husband if you’ve already got one. I mean, that’s silly. You don’t have fastidious snobs like della Quercia calling you Miss Beaumont if you are Mrs. Finsey-Groat, nor saying how you married someone awfully suitable later. And judging by how people talk about cousin Veronica, you don’t have the old bat reminiscing about how nice you are either. She wasn’t sent there to find a husband. You were.”
“Hmm.”
“Then there’s the Pollaiuolo.”
“I thought that nice Inspector Manstead had established she was on the guest list.”
“He did, and she was. But she didn’t go. She couldn’t have because she was, in fact, opening the fête here. 10th July, 1976. A Saturday, and obviously the second Saturday in the month. The traditional day of the fête. Which she never missed. So I looked it up. She got a good write-up in the parish magazine. A charming and gracious speech over the tombola stands. As George said, she never missed a single one.”
“Amazing.”
“And finally there is the little matter of the theft of the Vélasquez portrait of Francesca Arunta. Taken two months after Veronica had a stroke. Frankly, the vision of her hobbling through the streets with a Vélasquez tied to her Zimmer frame is too much to countenance.”
“Is that on the list?”
“Not on the list Winterton provided. Flavia discounted it because there was no real evidence who took it, even though it was on Bottando’s list of Giotto’s greatest hits.”
“So Bottando was wrong and Flavia is right, then,” Mary suggested kindly. “She obviously can’t have stolen that, can she?”
“My point exactly.”
“So?”
“So what is it doing in your dining room?”
“Ah,” she said. “A good point. I must say, that one is a bit difficult to answer. What conclusions do you draw from all this?”
“Simple enough. Forster wasn’t Giotto. And cousin Veronica wasn’t Giotto. But you are.”
“And what do you expect me to say to that?” she said with a bright laugh.
“I expect you to look faintly amused, and ask how it was that I could come to such an entertaining but, alas, erroneous conclusion.”
“No, I won’t do that. But I will point out a problem with your basic premise. Why would I risk an investigation on my own doorstep, when doing nothing would mean that police attention would never head in my direction? What sort of sense does that make?”
“It makes perfect sense, although the implications are upsetting.”
“What do you mean?”
“Your cousin gets wind of something fishy. She doesn’t know what to do, so she asks Forster, who has assisted the family in the past. He looks hard, and eventually produces proof that your money is more than a little dodgy. Nails it down just after you’d stolen the Vélasquez.
“She confronts you with it. And dies. I don’t think she killed herself, nor do I think Forster killed her. You murder her because she has found out about you. You slip her the extra pills and leave her.
“Forster’s mistake is to try to blackmail you, rather than going straight to the police. You decide to murder him as well at the appropriate moment.
“But before you do that, you have to make sure that you can get your hands on whatever evidence he might have accumulated. So, instead of that nonsense about Fancelli telling the police against your wishes, you actually tell her to go to the police, to stir Forster up.
“It works very nicely. The moment I talk to him, he makes an appointment to see me and goes out to get his evidence. Winterton tells you the bait has been taken, you go down, kill him and take it all away.
“And George Barton’s confession? You heard it, after all.”
“George Barton didn’t say anything about killing him. The whole conversation could just as easily have been about how he’d seen you coming out of Forster’s house that evening. Because he likes you, and didn’t like Forster, he was telling you he wouldn’t say anything.”
“And hasn’t.”
“No. And probably won’t. This is an extraordinary tight-lipped place. Anyway, Forster’s dead, you’ve destroyed the evidence, and you think you’re in the clear. Until you realize that we are looking for more evidence. So you do the next best thing: you bum his papers, in the hope we’ll stick with Forster, and as a fall-back you keep on dropping hints here and there about your crazy cousin. Not knowing how she kept the place going with so little money. Going on fugues. Interested in art. Dr. Johnson said she stole things, but he also said that you told him that.
“And all along, right in front of our noses, there is the reason: the Vélasquez stolen from Milan a couple of years back; waiting, I assume, to be collected.”
Mary Verney gave a heavy sigh, and looked at him sadly. “I am sorry, Jonathan,” she said eventually after debating how to approach the issue and then deciding that there was little point in being anything but straightforward. “You must be feeling quite dreadfully abused.”
This was the trouble. Not only was she a thief and a murderer, he had just proven it. Morally, at least. But she was still charming and he still liked her. Damn the woman.
“That is putting it mildly.”
“I suppose you don’t think too highly of me.”
“Two murders, God knows how many thefts, framing Forster and your cousin, manipulating Jessica Forster, lying through your teeth to me and Flavia and the police. I’ve come across people who are better socially adapted. I mean, why? You’re really nice. You have intelligence, and presence…”
“And I could have been an honest woman. Married to someone I didn’t care for, doing a job that bored me, growing old and frightened about not having enough money to retire on, living in a poky little flat somewhere, which was all I had to look forward to after this family of mine had done their worst. Yes. I could have done that. But why the hell should I have done?”
“And instead you chose to steal other people’s property.”
She sniffed. “If you like. So I’m a thief. But I never destroyed anything or took from people who couldn’t afford it. Most of them didn’t even know the value of the paintings I took. They only made a fuss later. I have stolen thirty-one paintings. The nineteen we told you about will soon be back in the hands of their original owners. Of the remainder, one by one they will drift back into the public gaze. In essence, they are borrowed, as all paintings are, really. You cannot own a painting; you are merely its custodian for greater or shorter periods. They all still exist, after all, and many are better looked after than they were before.”
“But property, and legitimate ownership…”
“Oh, Jonathan, really. Stop puffing up like that. Even though I only met you a few days ago, I know you better.”
“Do you indeed?”
“Well enough to know that such statements don’t mean much to you. The Calleone Vélasquez. Do you know where the money came to buy that? Centuries of screwing the peasants, and massacring the natives in South America. The Dunkeld Pollaiuolo, owned by an English aristocrat who’d squeezed Ireland dry for two hundred years. What I do is wrong, I suppose. But at least I don’t pretend I’m a public benefactor.”
“If that’s all there was to it, I would be half inclined to agree with you. But there’s more than that, isn’t there? You killed two people. Don’t you feel guilty about that? Just a little.”
“I’m not happy about it,” she said slightly indignantly. “I’m not a psychopath, you know. But I’ve already told you there’s no point in feeling guilty. Do it, or don’t do it. Simple as that. In their case, I was merely defending myself. They were blackmailers and leeches, who didn’t even have the courage of their own greed. Both of them were content to profit from what I did, but had the gall to sneer, and criticize me for actually doing it. Veronica, the model of noblesse oblige. She ignored me and was vilely rude to me for years. She persuaded Uncle Godfrey not to help my mother when she was dying. She would have nothing to do with me until she heard I had money. Then she was all over me, wanting me to put it into restoring Weller to its former glory.