by Peter Watson
‘This isn’t just any picture, Michael. I’ve done a bit of checking and I’ve compared it with similar drawings in the books I have here. But I can’t be certain – that’s why I need your help. However, I’ve a very good idea that this drawing sitting on my desk, this piece of faded paper, sent unregistered and unprotected through the mail, is an original – by Raphael. It must be worth millions.’
*
The diode display on Edward’s telephone answering machine stared up at him out of the gloom. The figure ‘3’, square and squat, cast a green glow over the top of his desk. He had worked late, trying to complete his lecture – but had failed. It needed another half-day’s work, he reckoned. Even so, he hadn’t reached his flat in Kensington Palace until after eight, by which time the light was going.
He loosened his tie and went to the bar, or the lacquered tray with bottles on it that he called a bar. He mixed himself a whisky and soda, and raised the glass to his lips. He surveyed the flat. The wallpaper, the curtains and quite a bit of the furniture came with the job but the pictures were his own. There was a lovely watercolour of Ely Cathedral by William Callow – brown, yellow and peach. A view of the Nile by Edward Lear – vivid blue and gold inks. Over the door to the bedroom was placed a small oil by Edward Molyneux, showing two roses in a glass. The water was depicted meticulously and the petals were a gorgeous tangerine. On his desk was a photograph of him driving a 1934 Bugatti at Silverstone. Old racers were Edward’s one extravagance.
On the floor by his desk was a pile of papers two feet high: his filing cabinet. He could never bring himself to throw anything away – certainly not paper. There was another pile, of old letters and bank statements, on the bottom row of the bookshelves by the window. A third was crammed into an old briefcase half hidden underneath the desk. If this room wasn’t untidy, it was definitely cluttered. He pressed the switch on the answering machine.
After a few clicks, and a pause, a voice said: ‘This is Father, Edward. Sorry to miss you. Barbra sends her love. Please call us when you can. Hope you are well. Bye!’ Edward was an only child. His father, a successful architect, lived at Stanford in California, where he lectured at the university and had developed a new bridge that was supposed to withstand earthquakes. Edward’s mother was dead and Barbra was his father’s second wife, an American. The three rarely met: even a telephone call was unusual, though Edward did miss his father. The pair were touring the Western Isles in Scotland and would be in London soon.
The second message was already beginning as he took another swig of scotch. ‘It’s Samantha. You did promise to take me to that big jazz concert, at the Albert Hall. Can you bear it? Arabella, my friend from school, wants to come. Don’t worry if you’ve changed your mind, or forgotten – we’ll just stick pins into your effigy at school. That’s it. Bye?’
Sammy was Edward’s godchild – a gangling blonde of sixteen, with a huge appetite for new experiences. Edward smiled, thinking of her. The trip to the Albert Hall would be hilarious. He drank more whisky and waited for the third message.
‘Hi, it’s Nancy. Where are you? Don’t answer that if it will make me jealous. I’m in Hackness – Yorkshire in case you’re not sure. Some great tombs by Matthew Noble, but you probably know all that – it’s hard trying to teach you anything. It’s hard even trying to talk to you in person. This is the third message in a row that I’ve had to leave on your goddam machine. Where are you, Woodie? Is anyone else listening to this with you? If they are, switch off now.’ After a few seconds’ silence, during which Edward sank some more of his whisky, Nancy’s voice was heard again, more of a whisper this time. ‘Woodie, I’ve just had a bath and haven’t got dressed again, not yet. All I’m wearing is the telephone. If you were here . . . I’ve thought of something I could teach you. So long.’
Slowly, Edward tapped his teeth with the rim of the whisky glass. An image of Nancy Tucker, lying on a bed, danced before him. Nancy was a Californian living in London. They had first met when Edward was giving a lecture at the Courtauld Institute of Art, where she was a graduate student studying the history of sculpture. Now in her late twenties, Nancy had grown up on the beaches near San Francisco and still had the straw-coloured hair and brick-brown complexion of her teens. At twenty, however, she had discovered art, suddenly turned serious and swapped the beach and the surf for the seminars of a college back east. She had graduated top of her class and been rewarded with a scholarship to study in London.
Nancy had proved full of surprises. Edward drained his glass and thought back to their first time together. The first surprise had come when she had asked him out. They had gone to a movie – he kept finding himself using Americanisms now – and afterwards she had surprised him again by hauling him off to the nearest McDonald’s for a ‘Big Mac’ hamburger. She insisted on paying, confessing to Edward that, despite her Fendi handbags, her intimate knowledge of the greatest sculptors of the world, despite the fact that she had a secret supply of Iranian caviar and that one day she would inherit one-thirty-fourth of the Vosné-Romanée slopes in Burgundy, she was a ‘junk food junkie’.
On their first night, Edward had watched, amazed and amused, as Nancy had carried the tray to their table. She wore good-quality, simple clothes – straight, plain dresses that half hid the details of her figure but totally revealed her shape. Her skin was so good that she only wore tights – or ‘hose’ as she called them – on the coldest of days. She had a ballerina’s neck that helped to take her height to five foot eleven.
She had set down the tray on the table, and handed him a plastic knife and fork.
‘I wonder if they know their flatware is Regency?’ he said with a grin, holding up the handle of the fork.
‘Don’t be such a snob, Woodie.’ Her brother was an Edward, too. She missed him, she said, and, since he was known as ‘Woodie’, she had given Edward the same honour. She waved some chips on her fork in his direction. ‘Fast food made America great. It tastes just as good as Yorkshire pudding, or kedgeree.’
‘I hate Yorkshire pudding, and I’ve never had kedgeree.’
Nancy hadn’t replied. She couldn’t: she had some hot fries in her mouth and was busy fanning air at her lips with her fingers.
Eventually, Edward had said, ‘I thought the movie was a bit over the top. The American imagination at its worst.’
She had flashed him a glare, to see if he was serious or joking. ‘Booshi!’ she said with her mouth full. Edward took this to mean ‘Bullshit!’, a favourite word of hers. She cooled the fries in her mouth with a swallowing of iced Coke.
Edward shuddered but grinned. ‘I mean it. Sentimental, mawkish, optimistic beyond reason.’
The film had featured a nurse in a mental hospital who had got through to an autistic patient who had witnessed a politically sensitive crime.
‘People need happy endings.’
‘Americans certainly seem to, more than most.’
‘How would you like ketchup on your collar?’
‘Is that your argument?’
‘It was an entertainment. Don’t take it so seriously. It’s already grossed two hundred million.’
‘“Gross” is the right word.’
Nancy had licked her fingers then and Edward, sitting in his flat in the gloom, now reflected that whatever she did, however American Nancy Tucker was, ‘gross’ was the last word to describe her. She had a natural grace, a wholesomeness that he found enchanting and endlessly self-renewing.
However, Nancy had not been over-impressed by his attachment to the royal household. Nancy was a republican and thought all royal families should be abolished. Not executed or deliberately humiliated or impoverished, but simply overlooked and turfed out of any official role in a modern state. Only when Edward had explained that his chief job at the Royal Collection would be to produce a catalogue of the Queen’s baroque holdings and the sculpture did she concede that his work was fit for a full-blooded male.
Outside McDonald’s, the night had smel
led damp and the clouds above were dark and heavy with rain that was yet to fall. ‘Jazz?’ he had said. It was still early, barely eleven, and he felt it was time he repaid some of Nancy’s hospitality.
That was when she had swung another surprise on him. ‘No,’ she had breathed. ‘There’s something I’m longing to say.’ She had looked him in the eye, then kissed his cheek and held her lips close to his ear. ‘All night long, I’ve wanted to say: “Take me back to the palace.”’
‘You don’t want royal families, but you’re happy in their palaces, eh?’ But he had taken her back all the same and they had made love on that very first evening. Edward still cherished the discoveries he made later that night. Nancy’s brown back and the sweep of flesh on her thighs were like the slopes of a desert, driven smooth by the wind. Her shoulders, her long, long neck, the deep groove of her spine moved in and out of the shadows like a wild animal glimpsed in the bush.
But there was one more surprise to come. After that first date, Edward didn’t see Nancy again for nearly two weeks. She had gone away – she was just beginning her survey of sculpture in British churches – and didn’t tell him, or anyone probably, where she was. After ten or eleven days she had called him, proposed a movie and, when they met, was as warm, as high-spirited, as irreverent as on their first meeting. When Edward had asked where she had been, she was vague, but the pattern was set. When they were together, Nancy was so full of affection that Edward found himself wondering whether she had been denied it as a child. She also had the strongest sexual appetite of any woman he had known. But the unpredictability was galling. The fact was, Edward missed Nancy but he was growing a little weary of her comings and goings.
The fact that they kept missing each other on the phone was typical of Nancy too. She knew Edward’s movements yet seemed, almost deliberately, to call when she knew he wouldn’t be in.
He sighed and dialled the number of the hotel where he knew she was staying. But of course she was out at dinner. He smiled. She’d be lost if there wasn’t a McDonald’s nearby.
Chapter Two – Thursday
At the very top of the National Gallery, in Trafalgar Square, there is a studio which every artist would envy. An enormous double-glazed skylight floods the room with what feels like a waterfall of light. Even on a dull day it is as if you are up among the clouds, and the daylight in the studio is never less than shimmering.
This is where the nation’s collection is cleaned, revarnished, revitalised. Even to reach the studio, where four or five enormous easels stand about like blind totems on a Pacific atoll, is something of an adventure. Access is by means of one of the largest, and certainly one of the slowest, lifts in the world. When the great Venetian masters – Bellini, Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese – carried out their commissions for the Doges and cardinals and wealthy merchants of the ‘serene republic’, they were instructed to fill the most sumptuous and the most enormous buildings. Their canvases – great banquet scenes, which decorated the refectories of the monasteries, or vast battle formations, which occupied the political buildings of state – were often over twenty feet long, and almost as high. These days, when they are transported to the studio at the top of the National, the lift has to be big enough to take them, and gentle enough so that when it starts or stops there are no jerks, no sudden movements of any kind to dislodge the precious paint.
Edward Andover now stood beneath the great skylight, trying to hear what Michael Arran was saying, above the sound of hailstones as hard as teeth clattering on to the glass. No bicycle for Edward today, no Telemann or Teagarden over the earphones. He patted his hair into place as he listened. Edward was a bit self-conscious about his receding hairline.
‘I said,’ groaned Arran, pointing to the skylight to explain the need to repeat himself, ‘I said that Martin is on his way. We won’t keep you long.’ Arran was a small, fussy man.
Edward had brought the picture to the National the previous afternoon. If it was indeed a Raphael it was much too valuable to be entrusted to a messenger.
Edward’s main field was baroque art, Arran’s was German and Dutch painting, so they had called in Martin Ramsay, Keeper of Italian Painting at the National. Yesterday afternoon, Ramsay had stared hard at the drawing, removed his spectacles, put them back on, pushed them up over his forehead, whispered, ‘Good Lord!’, and then looked at Edward. ‘May I keep this overnight? There’s a piece of research I’d like to do.’ They had arranged to meet here today after lunch. Ramsay had said, mysteriously, that the studio was the best place ‘from a security point of view’.
Edward had turned this phrase over in his mind on the way up in the lift. What on earth could Ramsay mean? Was he being melodramatic? Was the picture at risk in some way? Edward turned now to Arran, to ask his view. For a moment the clatter on the skylight had eased.
As he did so, however, the lift doors slid open and Ramsay came into the room, followed by a security guard. He looked around at the three or four restorers working in the studio, then turned to Arran. ‘With your permission, director, I think we should send everyone downstairs.’
Arran bridled. ‘Come on, Martin. What –’
‘I mean it.’
Arran could see that he did. He turned and waved his arms at the restorers, shepherding them to the lift. Slowly they complied. They were in the middle of things and didn’t want to leave brushes and pigments just lying around. But at length the last one disappeared inside the lift, the guard closed the doors and the odd-shaped box began its slow journey downwards.
‘This had better be good –’
‘It is,’ Ramsay cut in. ‘I don’t see how it helps Dr Andover’s mystery, but what I have is very good. I can guarantee that.’ He walked over to an easel and placed the drawing on it. The others followed and he turned to face them. ‘There’s no doubt it’s a Raphael,’ he said.
‘You mean it’s a known picture, in all the books?’ Arran looked surprised.
‘Not all the books, Michael. But enough, yes.’ Ramsay turned the picture over and pointed to a mark. ‘See that: “1774E”? I thought I recognized it last night, but I’ve now confirmed it. It’s an acquisition number – for the Uffizi Gallery, in Florence.’
Edward gasped. ‘It’s a Uffizi picture . . .? You mean it’s stolen?’
Ramsay’s eyes were aglow. ‘Oh, it’s stolen all right. Only this is a rather special theft.’ The hail roared afresh above them. ‘This picture wasn’t stolen last week, or last month, or last year for that matter. That’s why I didn’t want anyone else to hear this. Not for the moment anyway. It might embarrass Her Majesty.’
The others stared at him. The glass panes above them threatened to crack under the barrage of hail.
‘This is Raphael’s Madonna of the Veil. It was looted from Florence in the early 1940s. By the Nazis.’
*
‘Hi! This is your Sowerby correspondent. In other words, I’m still in Yorkshire. Looked at the Joseph Wilton statue of Archbishop Tillotson today, so the research is proceeding. By the way, Yorkshire pudding isn’t so bad – certainly beats kedgeree. Not that I wanted to talk about food, Woodie. What do I want to talk about? You’re right . . . call me. So long.’
Edward grinned to himself, stopped the machine and reset it. Nancy had the best telephone manner of anyone he knew. Very sexy. He followed his routine: poured himself a whisky, admired the framed piece of Arabic calligraphy which hung next to his bookshelves, and dialled the number Nancy had left.
‘You save my life!’ she cried when she heard Edward’s voice. ‘I was just going to have my third bar of chocolate. God, it’s so boring up here in the evenings. In California you could at least walk on the beach. If you walked on the beach in Yorkshire, even at this time of the year, your spit would freeze.’
‘You’re being gross again.’
‘I feel gross. I’ve had two enormous bars of chocolate.’
‘I thought you felt . . . in your message you said you wanted to talk about –’
‘As it happens, quite a bit.’ He told her what had happened at the National Gallery that afternoon.
‘Now that’s what I call a mystery. Why “Apollo Brigade”, do you think?’
‘Search me. Apollo was the classical Greek god of the arts – but I don’t need to tell you that. As to brigade . . . it sounds military.’
‘Maybe it has something to do with Nazis. Maybe that’s the military link.’
‘Maybe, maybe, maybe.’
‘So what are you going to do?’
‘Refer it upstairs. The Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures is part of the Lord Chamberlain’s department. He was out today but I’m seeing him tomorrow. Talking of which . . . when am I going to see you?’
‘The train takes about three hours.’
‘I could be with you for a late dinner tomorrow. We’d have the weekend.’
‘Beats bars of chocolate. But are you sure you want to come? It’s a tiny room, with a tiny bed –’
‘Change to something larger.’
‘Is that an order?’
‘We might as well be comfortable.’
‘It’s not very sophisticated here.’
‘Perfect.’
‘And it’s much colder than in London.’
‘Are you trying to put me off?’
There was a pause. Then Nancy said, softly, ‘No, Woodie, no. I’m not trying to put you off. I wish you were here already.’
Chapter Three – Friday
Edward had been surprised when, as soon as the Lord Chamberlain heard what he had to say, he invoked still higher authority. ‘This is one for Mordaunt, I think.’
In fact, Edward was more than surprised. Francis Mordaunt was the Queen’s personal equerry or private secretary. The Queen’s equerry was the power figure at Buckingham Palace. Nothing of consequence happened without his say-so and nothing at all happened without his knowledge. He saw Her Majesty virtually every day, and that was, roughly speaking, about sixty days a year more than the Duke of Edinburgh.