Death of an Old Master

by David Dickinson

  Piper did not hesitate for a second. His reply was as blunt as the question. ‘Forty-five thousand pounds,’ he said. Then he paused briefly. He fiddled about in his breast pocket and passed over a cheque to his host.

  Hammond-Burke looked at it. It was probably the largest cheque he had ever seen in his life. Pay James Hammond-Burke, it said, the sum of forty-five thousand pounds. De Courcy wondered if Piper had a series of cheques in his pocket, made out for smaller, maybe even larger, sums. How did he know he was pulling the right cheque out? It would be, to say the least, unfortunate if the written figures were ten thousand pounds less than the spoken word.

  ‘Thank you,’ said William Hammond-Burke, his eyes drawn magnetically to the figures on the cheque. ‘But I have a few questions for you, Mr Piper.’ He looked as if he might be going to ask for more money. ‘Is that your final offer?’ he said.

  Piper leaned forward confidentially in his sofa. ‘Mr Hammond-Burke,’ he went on, ‘believe me when I tell you this. I have loved paintings all my life. In many ways they are my life, my inspiration.’ Get on with the business, thought de Courcy to himself. ‘It has always been our policy to offer the possessors of such masterpieces the very highest prices. Only on the train on the way down here Edmund was suggesting a lower figure. A considerably lower figure, Mr Hammond-Burke.’

  Piper waited to let the thought of a lower figure take centre stage in Hammond-Burke’s mind. Then he leaned back into the sofa once more. ‘But I overruled him. That is the figure I propose. Not a penny more, but certainly, undoubtedly, not a penny less.’

  De Courcy was watching Hammond-Burke’s face very closely. Greed and anxiety, in equal portion, passed across his features.

  ‘What will you sell it for?’ he asked.

  De Courcy sat back and watched the play unfold. He had the best seats in the house. Which Piper would come forth now?

  ‘I have no idea,’ he said. De Courcy knew that was a lie. Piper had at least one American millionaire, William P. McCracken of the Boston railroads, in his sights. Maybe there were more.

  ‘It is impossible to say.’ Piper shook his head rather sadly. ‘It depends on the market, on who wishes to buy at any given time. Sad and regrettable though you and I would regard it, Mr Hammond-Burke, objects of great beauty like your exquisite Raphael are as subject to the whims, the ups and downs of the market as any other commodity like wheat or potatoes. It might sell for fifty thousand pounds. I should be surprised if it did.’

  I’ll bet you’d be bloody well surprised, you old fraud, thought Edmund de Courcy, you’re already thinking of seventy-five or eighty thousand for the contents of the brown paper and the string.

  ‘Equally it could sell for forty thousand, or thirty-five thousand, even as low as thirty thousand. Sometimes it takes years to find the right buyer. My honest advice to you, Mr Hammond-Burke, would be to take the forty-five thousand now.’

  Hammond-Burke stared at the floor. We could lose it all, thought de Courcy, the whole thing could unravel rather like the string on the parcel in the next few seconds.

  William Alaric Piper was equal to the task. ‘We have a further proposition to put you, Mr Hammond-Burke,’ he continued, ‘if you decide to sell, that is. We would like to send down one of our experts to make a proper catalogue of your paintings. Maybe there are other masterpieces hidden away. I have often known it to happen. Work by an unknown English artist may turn out to be a Gainsborough, some obscure Venetian may turn out to be a Giorgione after all. Our man would conduct a proper search of the house and examine everything. The results would be bound and presented to you with the family crest on the front. Gainsboroughs and Giorgiones might not fetch as much as a Raphael, but they certainly run into tens of thousands of pounds.’

  Piper paused to gauge the effect of a possible second bite of the cherry. Hammond-Burke looked down at the cheque in his hand.

  ‘Very good, gentlemen,’ he said. ‘You have persuaded me. I accept your offer.’

  6

  Lord Francis Powerscourt and Johnny Fitzgerald, recently returned from Spain, were playing chess at a small table by the window in Markham Square. Bright shafts of sunlight were falling across the room, casting Lady Lucy’s face into deep shadow on the sofa. Powerscourt and Fitzgerald had served together in the army in India. They had the special closeness of men who had saved each other’s life in battle.

  Nobody could have accused Johnny Fitzgerald of being a cautious chess player. He deployed his pieces with great vigour, forever seeking the advantage. ‘L’audace,’ he would mutter to himself from time to time, like some headstrong French cavalry commander, ‘toujours l’audace,’ as his forces rolled forward up the board.

  Powerscourt was more cautious, more patient. He would trap the Fitzgerald advances in thickets of pawns, where they would be clinically captured by marauding knights. He always took great care to guard his King. When he finally advanced it would often only be after a prolonged siege where the Fitzgerald battalions had hurled themselves in vain against the castle walls.

  But on this occasion it looked as if the rash were going to triumph over the cautious. The Fitzgerald squadrons, lubricated by regular canteens of Chateau de Beaucastel, were in the ascendant. Left under his command he had his Queen, two rooks, a knight and a solitary bishop to bless his endeavours. He had a couple of lonely pawns, one on each side of the board. Johnny never bothered much about his pawns, sacrificing them recklessly in his advances. Powerscourt had lost his Queen. He had two castles and one knight, and five foot soldier pawns remaining on the field of battle. He was always very careful about his pawns. Powerscourt’s King was under heavy attack on the right-hand side of the field.

  ‘How long is it since I beat you at chess, Francis?’ said Fitzgerald, preparing already for the sack of the beleaguered citadel, the feast following the victory.

  ‘I think it was about five years ago, Johnny,’ said Powerscourt, staring with great concentration at his knight. ‘But I’m not finished yet. I shall fight till the last pawn has been slain.’

  ‘Check,’ said Fitzgerald, moving his Queen three ranks down the board. The set had been made in India and the Queen was a particularly terrifying figure, resembling, Powerscourt often said, what Queen Boadicea must have looked like when she rode into battle.

  Powerscourt hid his King behind a couple of pawns. The threatened monarch was now half-way up the board on the right-hand side. Fitzgerald began moving his knight forward for the final attack. Lady Lucy came to watch the end of the battle, her hand resting lightly on her husband’s shoulder. Powerscourt moved one of his castles two squares to the left.

  ‘You could resign now, Francis,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald graciously. ‘Save you the trouble of playing on till the bloody end. Save your troops from the massacre.’

  ‘No, thank you,’ said Powerscourt with a smile. He moved his knight forward. The knight was protected by the castle.

  ‘Check,’ he said. It was completely unexpected. Was this a desperate move to gain time? Or had Powerscourt snatched victory from the jaws of defeat?

  The full impact of Powerscourt’s knight’s move hit Fitzgerald at the very centre of his strength. It was a fork. The King was in check and had to move. Or the piece checking could be removed by one of the Fitzgerald forces. But none of them were in a position to do that. And the Queen, Fitzgerald’s gaudy caparisoned Queen, was on the other end of the fork, the audacious knight protected by Powerscourt’s castle. Any piece rash enough to take the knight, after the destruction of the Queen, would itself be blown to pieces by Powerscourt’s castle.

  Johnny Fitzgerald laughed. ‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ he said, ‘just when I thought I had you in the bag, you’ve escaped! Houdini comes to the chessboard!’

  He could have fought on. But he knew that very soon Powerscourt would convert one of his pawns into a new Queen. Then it would only be a matter of time. In a single move the balance of advantage had switched.

  ‘I shall spare my men the
humiliation of captivity and exile,’ said Fitzgerald, striking a pose like Brutus in one of his nobler moments, ‘I resign.’

  The combatants shook hands. Lady Lucy patted them both in the back. ‘An excellent game,’ she said. ‘I think you should have won, Johnny. But the devious old Francis got you in the end!’

  The footman knocked on the door and delivered a letter, addressed in a flowing hand, to Lord Francis Powerscourt, 25 Markham Square, Chelsea.

  ‘From the President of the Royal Academy’, it said on the letterhead. Powerscourt read it aloud. ‘“My dear Powerscourt, I promised to let you know anything I heard about the sad death of Christopher Montague. A piece of gossip reached me earlier today. I cannot vouch for its accuracy, nor would I wish to comment upon the morality of this intelligence. But my conscience would not let me rest if I did not inform you. At the time of his death Christopher Montague was said to be having an affair with a married woman in London. The husband is said not to be compliant. I do not have the name. I trust that the work of an investigator is not normally so sordid. Yours, Frederick Lambert.”’

  Powerscourt passed the letter over to Johnny Fitzgerald who now knew all that Powerscourt did about the strange death of Christopher Montague.

  ‘This could be very important,’ said Powerscourt. ‘We are still in the dark about the dead man. We assume, from what they said in the London Library, that he was writing an article about forgery when he died. But we don’t know what sort of forgery. He could have been going to say that all the Florentine Old Masters in the National Gallery were fakes, or copies, or some other form of misattribution. He could have been intending to attack the curator of a museum somewhere. They’re like historians, these art people, nothing they like more than attacking each other.’

  ‘Killing each other?’ suggested Fitzgerald cheerfully. He was licking his wounds from the chess game with further draughts of Chateau de Beaucastel.

  ‘I don’t know,’ replied Powerscourt. ‘Garrotting somebody might be more likely to come from an angry husband than an art historian.’

  ‘I tell you what, Francis,’ said Fitzgerald, ‘I’m going to enlist my auntie in this investigation. She’s got a lot of paintings.’

  ‘Is that the auntie who keeps the back copies of the Illustrated London News?’ asked Powerscourt with a smile. He remembered a journey to Venice in search of a Lord Edward Gresham without a photo of his suspect. Fitzgerald had found him at the front of the train seconds before it left and pressed a copy of the Illustrated London News, complete with Gresham photograph, into his hand. Seven years later Powerscourt could still remember the words. ‘She collects all these magazines, my auntie. She’s got rooms full of them. She says they’ll be valuable in the years to come. She’s quite mad. She’s potty . . .’

  ‘The same auntie, Auntie Winifred,’ said Fitzgerald. He shook his head as he thought of the eccentricities of his relative. ‘She keeps all the paintings in the attic,’ he said. ‘God knows why she doesn’t keep them on the walls like any normal human being. She says they’ll be safer there, the burglars won’t be able to see them.’

  Lady Lucy smiled. ‘Is she quite old, your aunt, Johnny?’

  ‘I think she’s about a hundred and three,’ said Fitzgerald. ‘well, not quite that. But she is undoubtedly very old.’ Fitzgerald finished his glass and peered out into the light fading over Markham Square. ‘We’ve got a bit of a problem here,’ he went on. ‘We don’t know what kind of people they are, these art dealers and art experts. Sir Frederick up at the Royal Academy has offered to help, I know. But if they were army people, or society people or even City people, we’d know what kind of persons we’re dealing with. We don’t with this lot. Don’t you agree, Francis?’

  ‘I do,’ said Powerscourt. ‘But I’m not sure what good a hundred-and-three-year-old auntie is going to be. She doesn’t have telepathic powers, or anything like that, does she?’

  Fitzgerald gazed back to the chessboard, his King lying on its side, a magnificent Mughal crown and sceptre lying in the dust of the battlefield. ‘What’s real? What’s fake? What’s genuine? What’s a forgery? Are these art dealers going to say one is the other? Or the other way round, if you see what I mean? Are they genuine? Or are they fakes too? My auntie has in her collection one genuine twenty-four carat Titian. She has one Leonardo which everybody says is not a Leonardo at all. I think I’ll take the fake Leonardo round the art galleries to see what price it would fetch. That might be very interesting indeed.’

  ‘Excellent, Johnny, very good.’

  ‘And what is your next move, Francis?’ asked Lady Lucy, looking carefully at her husband.

  ‘I am going to Oxford, Lucy. That young man who came here, Thomas Jenkins, I suspect he has been telling me a lot of lies. I am going to the city of dreaming spires and lost causes to find out the truth about the late Christopher Montague.’

  William Alaric Piper was waiting for his new American friend William P. McCracken outside the de Courcy and Piper Gallery in Old Bond Street. He looked again at his watch. Ten minutes to go. But then Americans were known for arriving early sometimes. Piper reviewed his courtship of the Boston railroad king. He had secured an introduction by the simple expedient of sitting next to him at breakfast one morning at the Piccadilly Hotel. This manoeuvre was easier to accomplish once some banknotes had been disbursed to the hotel staff. From there it had been a short step to a weekend in a very grand country house near Leatherhead. The house belonged to Piper’s banker, and as the pictures from the de Courcy and Piper Gallery on Lord Anstruther’s walls had not yet been paid for, such invitations, an enormous advantage in the seduction of rich American clients, were easy to obtain.

  He had taken McCracken to the National Gallery. They had been greeted warmly by senior members of the gallery staff who had offered to close off any particular sections McCracken and Piper might want to see.

  ‘We couldn’t possibly let you do that.’ Piper had beamed happily at the recipients of his earlier largesse. ‘We couldn’t keep the ordinary citizens of London from their artistic heritage.’

  ‘Now, Mr McCracken,’ Piper had said, leading his new friend up the National Gallery steps, ‘I can tell that you are a man of considerable refinement. Your compatriots, as you know, are beginning to buy pictures from Europe in considerable numbers.’ He paused before the entrance to the Italian Old Masters. ‘They are buying the wrong things, Mr McCracken. They buy mediocre works by the Barbizon school, people like Rosa Bonheur and Constant Troyon, the French peasantry transferred to canvas. Can a group of cows sitting about in a field, literally chewing the cud, compare with the works of Leonardo and Raphael? Can a group of peasant girls, carrying strange French produce in baskets on their heads, be compared with the landscapes of a Rubens or a Gainsborough? Art is meant to uplift, to transcend, to make us raise our eyes towards the glory of man and his achievements, not to contemplate the mud on our own boots.’

  William P. McCracken nodded sadly. Only the year before he had paid a lot of money for his Troyon. It reminded him of the fields where the McCracken family farmstead had stood on the plains of Iowa before the railroads took him away. Maybe he would have to sell it. Or hide it away in one of the attics.

  Piper led him towards a dark Crucifixion by Tintoretto, a suffering Christ surrounded by the two thieves, weeping women in anguish on the ground.

  ‘Why is it so damned dark?’ said McCracken, peering at the picture. ‘If this Tintoretto guy wanted us to feel sorry for what was going on there why did he paint it so we can hardly see the damned thing? It all looks pretty upsetting, what you can see of it. Not sure Mrs McCracken would want anything so sad in her house, Mr Piper, not sure at all.’

  McCracken had admired a group of Venetian portraits hung together on a side wall.

  ‘Now these,’ he had said to Piper, ‘these are really fine. This red guy, Count whatever he’s called, looks rather like my banker back home in Concord, Massachusetts. And that one over there, Doge Lorenzo i
s he called? He looks like he was a mighty fine businessman. What do you say to half a million dollars for the four? Would you get a reduction for the bulk buying?’

  McCracken was used to obtaining heavy discounts for rails purchased in great quantities. Maybe the same principle should apply for the four pictures.

  Piper had explained that none of the paintings in the National Gallery were for sale. He led McCracken to the National Gallery Raphael, the Ansidei Madonna. A grey arch framed the picture. Behind it a flat Italian panorama lay bathed in a gentle sunlight. In the centre, seated on a wooden throne that extended right to the top of the archway, was a Madonna in a red dress with a dark blue cape. Her right hand cradled an infant Christ, her left hand, finger outstretched, pointed to a page of scripture. To her right John the Baptist, better clad, Piper thought, than usual, in a brown tunic and a red wrap, gazed up at the Madonna. On her left the studious figure of St Nicholas of Bari, crook in hand, great cloak fastened with a rich brooch, was consulting the scriptures.

  ‘Look at it,’ whispered Piper. ‘The colours, the composition, the way the arch frames the whole so perfectly.’ McCracken seemed impressed. ‘Above all,’ Piper whispered on, ‘look at the grace, the restrained beauty, the tranquil expression on the Madonna’s face.

  ‘And,’ Piper went on, ‘think of this, Mr McCracken. The Ansidei Madonna is one of the most expensive paintings in the world. The National Gallery paid seventy thousand pounds for it less than twenty years ago. Seventy thousand pounds.’

  ‘They wouldn’t take a hundred grand for it now? Cash rather than stock options?’ McCracken asked without much hope. Piper assured him that the Raphael was not for sale. Sadly he informed the American that not even cash would make the gallery part with it, so popular had it become. But inwardly Piper rejoiced. McCracken, if not completely hooked, had swallowed a fairly hefty section of bait. It only remained to bring the fish ashore.