The Maltese Herring

by L. C. Tyler

  ‘It is indeed a point that’s been made quite often,’ I said. ‘So Fay was left without the Madonna and without her partner in crime?’

  ‘Yes. She needed help to recover the statue. I thought she might try to recruit you but, as I say, she found an easier victim.’

  ‘Sly may be her victim, but he’s no worse off than we are.’

  ‘On the contrary,’ said Polgreen. ‘We’ve had a thought. Sly’s watching the entrance to your road at the moment but he can’t stay there for ever. He has a job to go to during the day, albeit in the village. We think the Madonna must be in the garden somewhere. Joyner brought it down. There’s honestly nowhere else he could have hidden it. It’s just that none of us has looked in the right place yet. We’ll bring my metal detector round tomorrow and have a go with that.’

  ‘I don’t care whether it’s found or not,’ I said. ‘But why have you teamed up with these two? Sammartini represents the museum that spirited away your church plate. You said it belongs back at the Abbey.’

  ‘Well …’ said Polgreen.

  ‘It’s like this,’ said Sammartini. ‘We’ve reached an agreement. Provided we find the Madonna, the museum will agree to regard all of the Abbey silver as legally belonging to the Abbey trustees, on loan to the museum for a period to be decided. It would … ah … regularise the current state of affairs, should anyone choose to question them. In return for the loan, the museum will generously fund the construction and staffing of a new visitor centre in Sidlesham, together with a substantial contribution to annual running costs for as long as the loan continues.’

  ‘What if somebody else claims ownership when you announce all this?’ I asked.

  ‘We plan to announce the museum’s generous donation to the Abbey site. There may be no need to trouble people with the rest of it.’

  ‘It’s a good deal,’ said Polgreen. ‘We could hardly house thousands of pounds worth of silver in the hut we have. And if it’s not on-site, then it might as well be in Hadleyburg as in the V&A or somewhere. Everything becomes legally ours. And we shall finally have enough money to maintain the site properly.’

  ‘Precisely,’ said Sammartini.

  I looked at Henry Polgreen. He was now staring out to sea. Did the generous funding include a regular payment to the committee chair? The Madonna’s power to corrupt seemed capable of endless variations.

  ‘Good for you,’ I said.

  ‘So,’ said Cox, ‘we seem to have cleared everything up very nicely. We just need to find the Madonna.’

  ‘Do you have any objection if I tell Iris Munnings what the plan is?’ I asked.

  Cox flashed a glance at Sammartini, then smiled. ‘The Madonna was clearly the property of Sidlesham Abbey, as Iris would have to acknowledge. The Prior merely hid it for the Abbot. And nobody is asking her to repay the money that she obtained from the earlier sale. Under the circumstances we have nothing to hide from anyone,’ he said. ‘And certainly not from Iris.’

  It was a pleasant walk back from the beach, across the broad, empty sands and then along the sea wall, with the glistening green marshes on either side of me and the seabirds constantly whirling overhead. I had been back at my house for only a short time when my phone rang.

  ‘I’m coming down tomorrow,’ said Elsie. ‘I’ve got some news for you.’

  ‘Do you want to tell me now?’ I asked.

  ‘Aaron discovered it. He may as well take the credit for what he’s done.’

  ‘Really? You’d actually let him do that?’

  There was a long pause. ‘I see your point. Well, he can this time, anyway.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Ethelred

  The following day dawned bright and clear. Cox was the first to arrive, with Sammartini, Einstein and Henry Polgreen in tow. Henry set to work with his metal detector, walking systematically up and down the lawn, sweeping from side to side, then making a return run that overlapped the first. Polgreen politely declined Cox’s suggestion that he should take over. This was a job for the expert.

  Like Iris, I soon found myself the owner of a collection of small metallic items – several coins, a small coil of barbed wire, an old tablespoon. Polgreen’s attentions were switched to the vegetable patch, then to the flower beds. As before, we were left scratching our heads. I served coffee to Cox and Polgreen, a beer to Sammartini and lemonade with ice to his friend.

  ‘Hilary hid it here, I’m sure of it,’ said Cox. ‘I just don’t see why we can’t find it.’

  ‘Maybe it’s at the Priory, after all,’ said Polgreen. ‘That could be awkward – I mean, if Iris does object to being cut out of the deal with the Stephenson Museum. She might acknowledge she has no claim on it, but she doesn’t have to let us search there.’

  Sammartini simply nodded. I suspected that his position remained completely flexible on the question of ownership, but he was growing impatient.

  ‘I don’t think it’s at the Priory,’ said Cox. ‘Iris has checked the obvious places. And Hilary scarcely had time to bury it deeply.’

  ‘When we were first invited over to England,’ said Sammartini, ‘we were assured most categorically that the Madonna was available. My clients won’t wait for ever. They were more than a little suspicious of the authenticity of the goods in question. I would not stop you searching anywhere you wish, but I think, gentlemen, that the deal may very shortly be off.’

  ‘Hold on,’ said Cox. ‘We’ve all spent a lot of time on this. Let’s not be hasty.’

  Then Elsie and Aaron arrived.

  Aaron had travelled down with Elsie in her ancient Mini. Every time I saw the car, I was amazed that it had not succumbed to rust and was still on the road. Aaron clearly wanted to be there this morning, even at considerable risk to his life.

  Elsie introduced Aaron, neatly cut off an attempt on his part to praise my writing, and gave me instructions for coffee and biscuits.

  ‘So,’ she said to the assembled group, ‘I sent Aaron off to research Barclay-Wood’s churchwarden. He seemed to have been a victim of the curse of the Maltese Madonna, having died quite unnecessarily in the Blitz, but, unlike almost everyone else, he didn’t seem to have been corrupted by her.’

  ‘Not at first sight,’ said Aaron. ‘But it was worth checking that he might have been. I first went through the electoral rolls for Selsey for 1939 to establish his full name. It was Hector Alexander Cornwallis. This was fortunate in the sense that it was unlikely that I’d find two people of that name. I then tried to establish when he had died. I looked first at newspapers from September 1940 onwards. I found no reference to a firefighter called Cornwallis until December, at the very height of the bombing raids – the night that is referred to as the Second Great Fire of London. Amongst the reports was one of a missing firefighter – Alex Cornwallis. I kept checking to see if there was anything more about him, but that was that. Of course, that night the Luftwaffe was dropping three hundred bombs a minute. There would have been a lot of people who died and who were just never found. Temperatures reached up to a thousand degrees centigrade – that’s about a hundred degrees hotter than a crematorium furnace. I checked for death certificates issued in London.’

  ‘Did he have one?’

  ‘Yes, I found it online. It was issued about two years later, but giving his date of death as 29th December 1940. It seems that it took that long before they gave up hope that he might still be out there somewhere.’

  ‘So, much as expected,’ I said.

  ‘Not quite,’ said Aaron. ‘He apparently had a second death certificate. That was issued in Penzance in 1972. A second Hector Alexander Cornwallis. Same year of birth as the first one. It seems that he used the Blitz as an opportunity to vanish and start a new life elsewhere.’

  ‘Could you do that then?’ I asked. ‘If he’d been declared dead in London, wouldn’t that have caused problems for him in Penzance?’

  ‘Well, there were no computer systems then to help correlate information. People had a much lo
wer public profile. If you arrived in Penzance with a valid ID card saying who you were, and a ration book, then you had a good chance of getting away with it. Nobody was looking for him in Penzance, after all. With most of the men away at war, it wouldn’t have been difficult for him to find work in his new hometown.’

  ‘So, in 1940, he just started again from scratch?’ I asked. ‘That must have been tricky.’

  ‘In which case, he didn’t make a bad job of it. Here’s a shot of the house he lived in in Selsey in 1939.’

  Aaron showed me his iPad. There was a view on Google of a modest terraced house. ‘Here, conversely, is his house in 1972.’

  Aaron switched to a view of a large detached house, with extensive gardens.

  ‘Nice,’ said Sammartini. ‘Classy. All that wrought iron wouldn’t have been cheap.’

  ‘You can’t tell from this, but it has uninterrupted views of the sea,’ Aaron said. ‘According to Rightmove, it sold last year for just over two million pounds.’

  ‘Very nice,’ I agreed.

  ‘I checked the local Penzance papers for the early ’70s. According to his obituary he owned a chain of grocery stores in the south-west. He was quite well off.’

  ‘So much for the curse of the Madonna,’ Elsie said. ‘He would have been how old in 1940?’

  I quickly counted off the years on my fingers. ‘If he was there, as an established figure, when Barclay-Wood arrived in 1891, he’d have probably been born before 1860, so in 1940, he’d have been at least eighty and he’d have been over a hundred and twelve when he died … no, that can’t be right.’

  Aaron shook his head. ‘That confused me at first, but there were two Cornwallises, father and son, both churchwardens. Hector Alexander took over from his father around 1930. He was about forty-five when the war broke out.’

  ‘But still,’ I said, ‘to start again with nothing at forty-five and die rich thirty years later …’

  ‘Unless,’ said Elsie, ‘he had acquired some capital.’

  ‘You mean the statues?’ I said.

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘They were in the church,’ I said. ‘They were tucked away in some gloomy corner. Nobody cared for them very much or would have missed them, except possibly Barclay-Wood. Cornwallis was churchwarden and would have had access to everything.’

  ‘But, in that case, how did he know they were worth taking?’ asked Elsie. ‘Tucked away in a gloomy corner, one statue would look very much like another. You’d have scarcely known which was the boy and which was the girl, let alone their price tags.’

  ‘Because Barclay-Wood had been trying to sell one of them. Cornwallis came across the correspondence and worked out what was going on. Years later, his daughter found the same letters amongst his papers and sent them to me. So, Cornwallis knew the statues were valuable, even if he wasn’t sure exactly how much they were worth. And we know both statues vanished around then. What I still don’t get is how the Madonna makes it back to the Priory by the late ’50s. Cornwallis never came back. His daughter never saw him again and, anyway, he surely wouldn’t have risked it?’

  ‘Well,’ said Sammartini, ‘the mechanism for returning the Madonna is, I agree, not without interest. But it was undoubtedly at the Priory for Mrs Munnings’ grandfather to find, and that is all we need to know. Can we please focus on where the Madonna is now?’

  Aaron quickly scanned the garden. ‘Joyner needed to hide it, because he didn’t want to risk taking it back to Oxford,’ he said. ‘He hid it out here because he reckoned somebody might well search the house for it.’

  ‘That’s right,’ I said.

  ‘Except, it occurred to you all pretty quickly to search your garden. It wouldn’t have taken Joyner long to work that out too. So, that’s not what he did.’

  ‘So, what did he do?’ I asked.

  Aaron looked around again.

  ‘That’s a nice garden next door,’ he said. ‘Well-established flower beds. Nobody is going to dig in those until the autumn at the earliest. All you’d need to do is a bit of weeding and deadheading. A statue would be safe there for months.’

  Elsie nodded. ‘Joyner had taste,’ she said. ‘Why would he bury something in Ethelred’s garden when he could bury it there? It’s obvious when you think about it.’

  ‘I’ll get working with the metal detector,’ said Henry.

  ‘I’ll go and ask Pippa,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure she’s any keener than Iris is at having archaeologists in her garden, but she may be curious to find out what’s under her roses.’

  In the end, the archaeological work was mercifully brief. Joyner had chosen a spot close to the boundary hedge. Once the metal detector had located our prize, it took me less than a minute, with one of Pippa’s trowels, to uncover the bundle of bubblewrap that protected the statue. I lifted it carefully, brushing away the warm soil as I silently unwrapped it.

  Pippa looked at it. ‘It’s definitely not one of mine,’ she said. ‘And I don’t think Bugsy buried it there with one of his bones. You may have found what you were after.’

  We took it back to my garden and set it on the table. I looked at it, finally standing there for all to see, gleaming softly in the sunlight.

  ‘It’s not quite what I expected,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ said Elsie. ‘I thought it would be gold, with diamonds and rubies. But it’s black – sort of like Mrs Hardcastle’s description.’

  ‘But not painted black,’ I said. ‘That’s just the way silver tarnishes. There are one or two gems – I think those are small garnets in her crown.’

  ‘Well, that’s it, anyway,’ said Cox. ‘Or it’s the only one that I’ve seen.’

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ said Polgreen. ‘Far better than anything I’d hoped for.’

  The body was sinuous and draped in flowing robes. The face was calm and serene. Her head was inclined towards a small child, whom she carried in her arms. It was skilfully done, but there was nothing Byzantine about it. There was no dazzling blue cloak, no coral lips, no eyes of sapphire.

  ‘But this can’t be the one that Barclay-Wood found,’ I said. ‘If it were, he would have known what it was like. In its way it’s very fetching – much nicer than a mass of gaudy stones he lists in such detail. He’d have had fun describing her enigmatic smile. And there’s something very tender about the inclination of her head. But he chose instead to come up with this fantastic account of an invented image. This is nothing like the statue in the book.’

  ‘Maybe this statue was too English to be evil?’ asked Elsie.

  ‘Whereas what he described in his story was clearly a showy foreign import – something that by definition lacked good taste? I suppose so. But from his point of view, a Romish image was a Romish image. He didn’t like the incense burner made in Wolverhampton, either.’

  ‘So this was on display in his church?’ asked Elsie.

  I examined it more closely. ‘Both Mrs Hardcastle and Barclay-Wood talk of it being painted black. There’s no trace of any sort of paint. Not even in the crevices – and there are plenty of crevices. And Mrs Hardcastle described the statues at Selsey as ugly. Even painted black, this would still be elegant and well proportioned. And last, but not least, he told the auctioneers that the statue might well be gold and encrusted with jewels. This can’t be the same one. I’m going to phone Iris and get her to come over straight away.’

  ‘Well, that’s Iris’s statue,’ said Cox. ‘It’s the one she gave me.’

  ‘I’ll phone her now,’ I said. ‘She can be here in ten minutes.’

  Iris carefully picked up the little figure. ‘Yes,’ she said slowly. ‘That’s it all right. The Curse of the Munnings. And many others before us. Honestly, this is only the fourth or fifth time I’ve handled it. It never looked right – I mean, compared with Barclay-Wood’s description. That’s why I got Anthony Cox in. I’m no expert, but it just didn’t look Byzantine – more English mediaeval. And it’s clearly silver, not gold.’

  ‘It’s f
airly clear to me,’ said Polgreen, ‘that both of the statues that were in Barclay-Wood’s possession went to Penzance with Cornwallis and never came back. This is something else entirely.’

  ‘I agree,’ said Aaron. ‘It’s all pretty obvious when you read Barclay-Wood’s account. The Abbey claimed that the Madonna on display was an old one they’d always owned. They probably wouldn’t have done that if they hadn’t possessed one. That’s what this is. The Abbot sent this to the Priory along with the other gold and silver, hoping the King would find it and not look further. The real treasure, as he saw it – the statues that were worth more than all the rest put together – were safely buried in the nave of his own church, where Barclay-Wood later discovered them.’

  ‘So, there’s no curse on this one?’ asked Iris.

  ‘Not according to Barclay-Wood’s version,’ said Polgreen. ‘This one is as clean as a whistle. The curse applied only to the Byzantine images.’

  ‘Well, it may not be cursed,’ said Sammartini, ‘but these are not the goods as described to us. I’m very sorry, gentlemen and ladies, but the museum was promised the genuine Maltese Madonna. As I said before, my employers were a bit surprised when they saw the photographs, but they figured that if that’s what the Madonna looked like, then they’d have it anyway. I mean – with a backstory like that it was still pretty interesting. But we now know the real Madonna is clearly elsewhere. Which is good in a way. The museum wanted gold and gems and I can still give them gold and gems, if I can just find the proper one. The trail is far from cold, ladies and gentlemen. I can be in Penzance in a few hours. In the meantime, I can hardly take back this cheap piece of shit, with no provenance at all worth talking about, and hope my employers will settle for the red herring in the story.’

  A text came through on my phone. It was from Fay.

  WE NEED TO TALK. I’M COMING RIGHT OVER.

  The news was greeted with no great enthusiasm. I just had time to make a quick phone call before Fay arrived. Tertius Sly followed just behind her. They stopped when they saw the now large gathering in the garden, then looked open-mouthed at the statue on the table.