Giotto's hand

by Iain Pears

  “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.”

  “What sort of unbalanced?”

  “Delusions, insane fears, compulsions. That sort of thing. It sounds serious, but it was only very periodic. She could go for years perfectly normally, then have what the family called a little attack. Which was always discreetly covered up.”

  “But what exactly did they cover up?”

  Dr. Johnson waggled his finger. “There we risk trespassing on the medical secret. If you want to know that, you’ll have to ask Mrs. Verney. I couldn’t possibly tell you.”

  “Not even a hint?”

  Dr. Johnson wrestled with his medical conscience awhile. “She came from a family which was not as rich as it had been. Still more than rich enough in my opinion, but perceptions in these matters are relative. Her experience was permanently one of not being able to afford things that were taken for granted in the family’s past. Most of the time she coped quite well. When she didn’t…”

  He paused and wrestled some more.

  “I gather she became jealous. Powerfully so.”

  “Eh?”

  “Covetous.”

  “What?”

  “I’m sorry, miss. I shouldn’t even have said that. You will have to ask a member of the family for details. That is, after all, where I got them myself. Miss Beaumont hardly confided in me.”

  “No. Hold on a second. Do you mean she stole things? Is that what you’re discreetly hinting at?”

  But this was pushing him too far. In a very medical fashion, he wrung his hands and became all technical. “That is a broad and not very useful description,” he said. “Indeed, I strongly doubt whether such forms of malady exist, in any real sense. Certainly there is no single illness, with identifiable or predictable symptoms.”

  “Except for stealing things.”

  Dr. John
son coughed with embarrassment at her way of phrasing it.

  “She did steal things, is that right?”

  “So I understand,” he said reluctantly, before recovering himself. “A pair of gloves here, a tin of salmon there. Certain department stores in London were quite used to her. So Mrs. Verney told me. Apparently it fell to her, in later years, to go round and sort things out with them, if you see what I mean. No. I cannot possibly comment further. I am no psychiatrist, and in any case, she was only my patient for the last few years of her life. Such information as I have I got from members of the family, and you will have to apply to them. Naturally, they wanted to keep it as quiet as possible.”

  “I see,” said an astonished Flavia. “Now. What I really wanted to ask you about was her and Geoffrey Forster.”

  Johnson looked stormy, and Flavia thought that maybe the medical secret was about to be invoked again.

  “A most malign influence,” he said instead, however. “Miss Beaumont was a weak and impressionable woman, and he manipulated her quite shamelessly. For his own ends, I believe.”

  “To sell off the contents of Weller House?”

  “I never knew the details. I do know that as he wormed his way into her affections, she was asked to do more and more, and that nothing ever came of any of it. If it wasn’t for Mrs. Verney, trying to keep him at bay, things would have been very much worse. Of course, there was little she could do. Near the end, I understand there was a serious fight between the two about Mr. Forster’s influence. After her death, she tried to undo some of the damage he had done. With only limited success.”

  “You mean George Barton? Things like that?”

  “Yes. Forster persuaded Miss Beaumont to transfer some of her remaining cottages into a development company he owned. The idea was that he would do them up and sell them, and they would share the profits. I gather the idea was to transfer even more; Forster told her it was a way of avoiding tax or some such nonsense. Fortunately, this did not happen. Personally, I doubt she would ever have seen a penny back. Mrs. Verney spent some considerable amount of time trying to undo the damage but with little success, I gather. George Barton was being thrown out and there was little she could do about it.”

  “I see. Now, to return to the suicide possibility. Is there any reason why she should have killed herself then?”

  “None that I can think of, although in the case of depression you don’t necessarily need anything. And, I must say, she had some reason to be depressed. She had many hypochondriacal tendencies, but in her last year— more than a year, in fact—she was genuinely ill.”

  “How so?”

  “She had a mild stroke in the summer of 1992. Not immediately life-threatening or disabling, but it frightened her—and she was easily frightened. She was not the sort to take adversity well. She spent a great deal of time in bed and rarely moved far from the house. Personally, I think she was fitter than she seemed, and should have taken exercise. But she never listened to me.”

  “Was she depressed when she died? More so than usual, I mean?”

  Dr. Johnson thought this over. “Perhaps. Although the last time I saw her, I think angry would have described her mood better. Again, that was not uncommon: she frequently fulminated against things—socialists, thieves, what she was pleased to call the lower classes, taxmen. What she was specifically angry about, I don’t know. Possibly something to do with Forster. But, as I say, I doubt that was the cause of her death.”

  Flavia stood up, shaking his hand once more. “Thank you. Doctor. You’ve been most kind.”

  In contrast to Flavia’s preoccupation with the present, Argyll instead took much of the afternoon off. As there was little for him to do, and in any case the Italian interest in Forster seemed to be winding down, he passed the time among the pictures. Loosely connected with the case, of course, but his main interest was merely to look at them, and check that they were all there. There was always the hope that, by mere mischance, something had been overlooked.

  So, forgetful of thieves and murderers and with the two inventories of paintings in his hands, he padded quietly around the house, trying to identify the pictures mentioned in all these bits of paper with the ones which still hung on the walls of Weller House.

  It was surprisingly easy; both inventories were virtually the same, and judging by the ease with which he found the paintings they referred to, he strongly suspected that they had not even been taken down for a good dusting in the past fifteen years. Possibly not since they’d been bought in the eighteenth or nineteenth century. So much for Forster’s care and attention.

  In many ways it was not a rewarding experience: there were seventy-two paintings in the inventories and he rapidly managed to count seventy-two hanging on the walls of the house. Fifty-three were nondescript family portraits. Portraits, anyway, as some were so filthy and dark that it was difficult to tell who they were; in many cases it would cost more to clean them up than one could hope to get by selling them. The dining room in particular was rather depressing, a glorious oak-panelled room which should have resounded to the tinkling of crystal, the scrape of mahogany on floorboards and the soft pad of a butler’s footsteps. Instead, the windows were covered over, it was dark, unkempt and had a distinct smell of must. The huge mirror over the fireplace was cracked across its width and so decayed it reflected nothing at all. Not that there was much to reflect: the lights no longer worked and, although he tried to open the shutters, he found they’d been wedged shut.

  The paintings of illustrious ancestors, which were meant to look down on the diners and impress them with the length of the lineage, were now little more than black patches surrounded by tarnished gilt frames. By peering carefully, and cheating by checking the few inscriptions on frames, Argyll could work out that these were the set of six seventeenth-century members of the Dunstan family, the aristocratic former owners who had been saved by reluctantly marrying their daughter Margaret to the lowly, but stinking rich, London merchant called Beaumont. The smallish half length of Margaret Dunstan-Beaumont was the one allegedly by Kneller, and was probably the only one which would fetch a halfway decent price. Although it was so unutterably filthy you could only just work out that it was a portrait. That it was a portrait of a young woman was as much guesswork as anything else. Even the attribution seemed doubtful, although Argyll did concede to himself that having to study it by the light of a match was not the best way of fully appreciating its subtleties. Still, it didn’t look like Kneller to him. It seemed the valuer had been right on that one.

  Giving up for fear of eye strain, Argyll thought that it was about time another rich merchant came along to refill the family coffers. Pity Mabel didn’t do her duty. Otherwise, he concluded as he ticked the portraits off the list, her daughter is going to have to sell up pretty soon.

  That completed, he returned to the attic to check out two old pictures which were said to be up there. They were. They were also said to be in bad condition and of no value and Argyll, again, could scarcely fault the acumen of the people who had drawn up the valuation. Once he’d done that, he settled down again with the pile of boxes he’d discovered, just on the off-chance that an old account book might contain some small details of when and where the pictures were bought. Even a date can do wonders for a painting’s value.

  But he drew a blank. He opened one box, discovered it contained pictures of Veronica’s wedding and put it back with a shudder as he glimpsed the hairstyles. Then he tried another. Then another, and another, slowly, it seemed, reaching back into the past and the era when the family had enough money to buy paintings. The fifth box contained an old ledger, inscribed on the inside as concerning the marriage of Godfrey Beaumont to Margaret Dunstan. You never know, he thought, as he skimmed his eye down the accounts of the costs, and listings of presents and favours received; a social historian’s dream as a way of picking out the networks of relations which bound English society together. The Dunstans were at least well-connected: earls and knights an
d baronets all clubbed in to wish the poor girl well. Even some courtiers of high rank and in favour with the King. Even the Earl of Arundel, who, with typical stinginess had skimped on the wedding present. While the others had presented furs and tapestries and even manor farms, he had sent along, so the ledger drily noted, “an anatomy of Sgr. Leoni.” Whoopee! Bet the bridegroom celebrated all night when he opened that.

  Probably not. But then, Argyll thought with a sudden feeling of breathlessness in his lower abdomen, maybe he should have done.

  He sat back in his chair, took a deep breath, and then had a realization which was about as painful as being hit by a bolt of lightning. Two realizations, in fact, and, as it turned out, he had them in the wrong order. By the time it occurred to him that Arundel had died in 1646, and that Margaret Dunstan must have married before that, the significance of the fact was lost to him.

  The thoughts that swamped this information derived from distant memories about the history of collecting. The Earl of Arundel was the biggest collector in England; he had bought the best paintings on offer with an unerring eye. Most importantly he had dealings with a man called Pompeo Leoni.

  And Pompeo Leoni had sold him what is now almost every known drawing by Leonardo da Vinci. Seven hundred of them.

  Argyll strained to remember. They vanished in the Civil War but six hundred were found, quite by accident, at the bottom of an old chest in Windsor Castle nearly a hundred and fifty years later. They are still there; but the other hundred vanished without trace.

  He thought some more, mixing the written evidence with his knowledge and the evidence of his own eyes. And he became more and more convinced. He was as sure as he had ever been of anything that there were now only ninety-nine missing. The other one was in the bedroom with the damp patch. Anatomical indeed. And quite a wedding present. God only knew how much it would be worth. Perhaps not even him: it was decades since anything like that had been on the market. Time for a walk, he thought. This would take some digesting.