by Iain Pears
“I’m still not with you, my love, but go on anyway. I’m sure you’ll make sense soon.”
“Two pictures she couldn’t possibly have stolen were very much on the list.”
“Extraordinary.”
The Uccello, to start with. Supposedly stolen by her while she was at that finishing school. Except she wasn’t. She never went anywhere near della Quercia’s. Of course she didn’t.”
“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 fete. 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.
“She never earned a penny in her life, and didn’t care one jot where I got mine as long as she got her hands on it. I agreed, and kept her afloat. In fact, it was a wonderful way of storing away illicit money. But I did it only on condition that I got this place in return, so that eventually I’d get the money back. My mother liked the place, and so did I. She should have inherited it; I was damned sure I would. I’d already paid for it a couple of times over by the time Veronica died.
“Veronica had no choice, and agreed. But, once she’d got a large infusion of cash, she began to try and get out of it and wanted to give Weller—which would have been sold long since without me—to some cousin. Anything to make sure I didn’t get it.”
“This is when Forster came in?”
“That’s right. The old cow started trying to find some pretext to weasel out of the deal and still keep my money. So she brought in Forster. I suppose she must have realized there was something odd, as I had so much money which seemed to come from nowhere, but she couldn’t pin it down. She explored my past life, people I’d known, and came across Forster, who told her that I’d been up to something in Florence. So she told him to find out more. He did, with the Pollaiuolo. And Veronica summoned me, at the end of the last year, produced his evidence and told me that I’d seen the last of my money. And could forget about Weller, which would go into a trust where I couldn’t touch it.
“She was dying anyway, that’s why she was in a hurry. I thought about it for a bit, then hurried the natural process along a little. That was all. What else could I have done? I was damned if she was going to steal my money before she went.”
“And Forster?”
“He was a piece of scum,” she said thoughtfully, the words contrasting strangely with the soft and melodious voice. “He got Fancelli pregnant and left her. Not him, says he. The girl was a slut. Could have been anyone. The Stragas said that if della Quercia was going to continue associating with them, Fancelli would have to go. Primitive, intolerant times. I felt for her. My own origins weren’t so much more respectable.
“So she was out on her ear. I was appalled. If no one else was going to help her, I would. I’d been sent to Italy to find a husband to get me off their hands. I didn’t want to go to a finishing school to find a husband, for God’s sake. I wanted to look after myself.
“I didn’t have any money to give Fancelli, so I thought it only fair that the Stragas should provide it. They all trooped off to Mass on Sunday at ten on the dot. There was always a side door left open so lunch could be delivered. I slipped in, took the picture and left.
“It was so easy,” she said with a tone of fond nostalgia. “I don’t think they even noticed it had gone for a couple of days. The next stage was to slip it off to an old friend of my mother who sold it. Again, very easy.
“So Forster didn’t take it? That stuff Fancelli said was just lies?”
“He took her to Switzerland, and delivered the parcel for me. I had very carefully sealed it up. He, of course, simply opened it. I gave him some money to shut him up, and the rest to Fancelli. I paid for her to have her kid, just as I’m paying now for her to die. I liked her. So she was prepared to help me.”
“And Forster didn’t try to blackmail you then?”
“He couldn’t. It would have been my word against his. Getting rid of him then was very simple. The whole thing was simple, in fact. As far as I was concerned, what I got out of the Straga episode was the knowledge that stealing paintings is a cinch, if you know what you’re doing. One other lesson: I had a natural alibi. When my thefts were discovered, the police always looked for a man. ‘He must have got in through…’; ‘‘He took the picture off the wall…’ I knew it would never occur to them that a woman was responsible unless I made a bad mistake. I very much regret the feminist movement, you know. It made life more difficult.
“So I went on. The first few solved my financial woes for a while. I came back to England, married Verney and retired. Then the bastard left me with the kids to support. So I decided that full-time art theft was as good an option as any. I learned about art history until the money ran out, worked at an auction house and an insurance company or two as a secretary, slowly built up contacts and got to know Winterton, who I spotted as someone who was unscrupulous, ambitious and—this may sound odd—entirely trustworthy.
“After four years’ patient research, I was ready. I had detailed breakdowns of the whereabouts of paintings in a dozen houses, as well as plans of such security systems as existed and knew which ones had been photographed. It was then merely a question of picking them off, one by one.”
“How much did you get?”
“I was doing quite nicely by then. The art market was going up, of course. Between 1971 and 1975, I netted nearly $600,000; ’75 to ’80, over a million. From then on, I worked to commission, when a specific client had been lined up—and had paid—in advance. One intermediary, who never came into personal contact with the clients either, no assistants. Always smallish paintings, nothing I couldn’t carry easily myself. And I was always very, very careful. If I didn’t like the prospects, I’d hand the money back. And I always insisted on the painting going into hiding for a couple of years so it wouldn’t pop up until the police had stopped looking.”
“Fra Angelico?”
“My only failure and the reason we are sitting here now. I’d got into the house by working as a cleaning lady—a useful way of doing it, by the way. So, of course, I had to stay on afterwards for several months: it would have been too obvious to have disappeared. That was why I had to use that idiot Sandano to get the thing out of the country. Bad mistake. I’d not approached him directly, of course, so there was no danger, but I lost the picture.”
“The Milan Vélasquez?”
“I had to do that, because I’d already been paid for the Fra Angelico. It went wrong, so I offered them an alternative. They insisted on the Vélasquez. I wasn’t happy, because I knew a print had been made which could identify it; it was too well-known for my normal way of doing things. But I wanted the contract off my hands and I wanted to retire. I’m getting much too old for this sort of work. But I insisted it went out of circulation for a couple of years before delivery. When I got Weller, I decided it was a perfect place to put it.”
“Why? Wasn’t that asking for trouble?”
“I had to put it somewhere, and there’s no bigger giveaway than stashing these things in safe deposit boxes. I know bankers aren’t meant to peek. But I did not intend to trust my continued liberty to the promise of a banker. Besides, once I’d hidden the documentation, stuck it in an appropriate frame and dirtied it up, it looked quite convincing. Then I called in the morons from the auction house. They swept through in about half an hour—for which they charged an outrageous sum—and scarcely gave it a second glance.
“So for export purposes I now have certificates from English Heritage, the auctioneers and the Inland Revenue itself saying it is a mock-Kneller scarcely worth £500 due to its poor condition. Perfect. That’s the great virtue of experts: people believe them. But my worries were right. There was a print, and you recognized the picture from it. Even though you did take some time over it.”
“So what happened with Forster?” Argyll asked, brushing asid
e the criticism of his abilities. “What did he have on you?”
“His account of Florence, documents on the Pollaiuolo and a fair smattering of stuff he’d picked up from comparing auction house records and inventories here. I mean, he couldn’t prove anything about Veronica’s death, but there was enough to link me positively with two thefts. And once an investigation starts… So he wanted me to buy them back.”
“And you killed him instead?”
Mary looked sad that he should have such a low opinion of her. “No, I agreed,” she said reproachfully. “I don’t make a habit of killing people, you know. I agreed. And every time I agreed, he upped the price. I got a million for the picture, with another million on delivery in a month or so. Bargain basement, but what the hell. Forster wanted three million for his grubby bits of paper. He pushed me further than I could go. That was when I lost patience. I went to Fancelli and sent Winterton to Sandano. The police took the bait, you turned up, Forster got his evidence.”
“And you got Forster. Dear God.” Argyll rubbed his face in his hands, and closed his eyes as he digested all this information and realized the enormity of his mistake.
“I’m so sorry, Jonathan,” she said gently. “You must be feeling very badly used. And I can’t blame you. I’ve grown quite fond of you in the past few days; I would much rather it had ended in a different way. But what could I do? You can’t expect me to go to jail just because I like you?”
Argyll nodded silently. He didn’t really know what he thought at the moment.
Mary Verney continued to regard him with what seemed very like genuine sympathy and affection. “The thing is, what are you going to do?”
“Hmm?”
“Be the straight arrow, as our American friends say? Go to Flavia, and tell her what you know? I’m not going to leap at you with an axe or anything, if that’s what you’re worried about. There is a difference, you know. Between you and them.”