Murder and the Golden Goblet

by Amy Myers

  Georgia thought this through. ‘It’s unlikely the Benizi Brothers would be so determined to track Lance down after so long.’

  ‘Don’t be too sure,’ Jago said. ‘I told you the rumours about the golden goblet had begun again. There are several blogs devoted to it.’

  ‘Suppose the painting Sandro mentioned was the Rossetti of Gawain and Arthur,’ Peter suggested. ‘What made Lance so sure about the provenance?’

  ‘Because it had been held by the same family who had bought it from Rossetti in the 1850s. What Lance could not be sure of was whether the goblet was genuine or whether it was Rossetti’s imagination at work. But he was on the brink of tracking down the scripts and other evidence to confirm its existence and reveal its whereabouts. That was the exciting news I was eager to hear when news came of his death.’

  ‘By Gad, the jewels of Prester John,’ breathed Sam, open-eyed.

  ‘You jest, young lady,’ Jago said amiably.

  She giggled. ‘I’m with you all the way, Grandpops.’

  ‘Maybe this painting with the goblet was the reason for Sandro’s death,’ Cindy put in quietly. ‘It all goes back to this Lance Venyon.’

  ‘Nah,’ snorted Sam. ‘Have a go at the Cook’s Tart for the reason. He told the old witch she was a joke.’

  Could Sam or even Cindy have been Sandro’s Canterbury girlfriend? Georgia wondered. Not Cindy, she thought. She looked too businesslike to take up with such a young toy boy. ‘What about her husband?’ she asked.

  ‘You mean this lad was having it off with him too?’ Jago asked innocently.

  Sam turned on him. ‘No joke, Prester. Sandro was all right, till the tart started poking her butt in.’

  ‘Would Roy Cook have had any reason to kill him?’ Peter persisted. ‘Apart from Sandro being his wife’s bit on the side?’

  ‘It’s possible,’ Cindy said. ‘Sandro painted for the tourist trade and we weren’t his only outlet.’

  ‘Could he have been mixed up with any illegal art trade?’ Georgia asked.

  Cindy looked at her in amused scorn. ‘He’d hardly tell us, would he? Ask Mark. Art scams are his department.’

  Of course. Georgia remembered that Mark worked on art claims for an insurance company.

  ‘He’s what one might call a modern equivalent of Lance, only more static and rather more formal,’ Jago explained. ‘It was more gripping in the old days.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Sam laughed. ‘Men with hats pulled over their eyes. Me Big Spy, you evil monster threatening civilization as we want it. Anyway, Sandro wasn’t like that. His real love was painting nudes.’

  Jago fixed her with an eagle eye. ‘Sam? Not you, I trust.’

  ‘What of it? He stuck a new face on me each time.’

  *

  ‘Another blank wall?’ Georgia asked Peter as they drove away. ‘Or do we have a gate this time? If Lance was on the verge of some exciting discovery, whether over the goblet or the Rossettis, or both, the possibility remains that Sandro’s grandfather was involved too.’

  ‘Let’s say some rubble has been cleared from our path,’ Peter replied. ‘What do you make of Jago now?’

  ‘A nice guy, good at fielding balls and throwing them back. Nothing leads us on.’

  ‘I disagree. I have a feeling the next signpost points towards Paris.’

  Chapter Five

  In the late spring Paris always flaunted herself at her most beautiful, Georgia thought. Here on the outskirts, it was so green that it seemed impossible that the grey of the city was only a metro ride away. Madame la Contessa d’Orvona lived in a Vincennes mansion overlooking the huge public park and chateau, and with any luck was Lance Venyon’s former lover Madeleine. If only Luke had been able to come too. He loved Paris, whereas Peter never travelled to France. From his perspective, it was the country that chose to harbour his treacherous wife Elena – albeit she was in the Dordogne several hundred miles from here. Luke could not spare the time from work, however. Even Eurostar’s speedy travel wasn’t inducement enough for him to tear himself away, and so she had decided on a quick day trip, even though that had involved getting up at the crack of dawn to join the train at Ashford.

  The chance of meeting the Countess Madeleine had been too good to turn down, especially coming so hard on the heels of Peter’s prognostication that Paris might be their next stop in the hunt. There was no word yet from Venetia Wain, and Madeleine’s had been the only hopeful reply to their advertisement on their website. She had known Lance Venyon, her message stated baldly, and Marsh & Daughter were welcome to visit her.

  ‘Go,’ Peter had said promptly. ‘I’ve plenty to do here.’ That was true. Elaine had studied the list of named guests at the funeral, but it had rung no other bells for her than the distant relations she had mentioned. Nevertheless these all had to be followed up with the help of the old address book Elaine produced for them. Georgia also suspected he intended to have a session tracking down blogs on King Arthur.

  The small formal garden between this mansion and the broad tree-lined avenue outside spoke of money in itself, Georgia thought, judging from the architecturally arranged trees and shrubs growing through a pebble base. It was impressive, yet not off-putting, perhaps because the statuary around was equally well chosen. Soft weathered-stone classical statues seemed part of the garden rather than objects deposited there for themselves alone. It occurred to her that this was probably because they were genuine antiques rather than garden-centre offerings. Nevertheless the latter seemed to have their place too. Dotted around she could see friendly stone frogs, a heron by a small water cascade, and a stone cat regarding them thoughtfully from the shade of a bush.

  What, she wondered, would she find once she was inside the house itself?

  For starters, it was a maid – if a cheerful bustling middle-aged lady could answer to that description.

  ‘Bonjour, madame. Entrez, s’il vous plaît.’

  Georgia was then escorted through an entrance hall which was a cross between the Louvre and an antiques fair. Pictures, furniture, china jostled together for the eye’s attention. She didn’t have time to take them all in before she was shown into the room where Madame la Contessa awaited her.

  Once again she was taken aback. This was no ageing floozie sighing for the bohemian 1950s. The countess was tall, well-built and except for exquisite tailoring of her suit could have attended morning service in an English country church without attracting any notice for non-conformity. Even so, it was she rather than the Aladdin’s cave she was standing in who attracted the attention. Despite her obvious years – mid to late seventies? – her eyes and movements were lively as she came forward to greet Georgia.

  ‘It is good of you to come all this way, madame.’ Her voice was deep, almost husky, and that too had life in it.

  Despite the French formality of the greeting, Georgia was now in no doubt of Madeleine’s origins. She had falsely assumed the countess was French since Lance had met her in Paris, but she wasn’t. Her walk alone proved that.

  ‘You’re British, madame?’ she asked.

  ‘I am. I haven’t lived there for many a long year, but I still think kindly of it, and visit when I can. Do sit down, please.’

  ‘I don’t think London could rival this.’ As she sat in the elegant armchair, Georgia glanced at the glories surrounding her, and did a double take. Surely that was an original Degas painting? And the long-case clock must date back to the eighteenth century. She had to tear herself away from further gaping at the wonders around her, but Madeleine looked amused.

  ‘One of the advantages, or some might say disadvantages, of being married to an antiques expert.’

  So that explained it. ‘Is that how you met Lance Venyon?’ Georgia asked.

  Madeleine didn’t answer directly. ‘Tell me what your interest is in Lance, Miss Marsh. Your website reveals a great range of subjects, but your books are apparently all about murders. I notice you’ve just published one stemming from the Second World War.�
��

  ‘That’s correct.’

  ‘Is Lance concerned in your current case? You realize he died in 1961?’

  ‘Yes. There’s a possibility that he was murdered, and we’re looking into it to see whether there’s any evidence to support it.’ She had Madeleine’s full attention now. ‘Could you believe that?’ she continued.

  ‘Easily,’ Madeleine replied calmly.

  ‘Even though he is thought to have died in a boating accident with no suggestion that we can yet find to the contrary?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Georgia quickly debated where to take it from here. She didn’t want to leap in baldly by asking who Madeleine thought the murderer might be, and laying one’s cards on the table could often be an advantage. ‘Most of our cases are about murders that have gone unsolved or where injustice has occurred,’ she told the countess. ‘Lance doesn’t come into that category yet. What does seem irrefutable is that he led a risky working life in a shady world, and there might well be fertile ground for the allegations to turn into evidence if we could get closer to that.’

  ‘A shady world,’ Madeleine repeated thoughtfully. ‘Could you explain that?’

  This conversation wasn’t going well, Georgia realized. Madeleine was quietly taking control of it. Nevertheless it was early yet and although she’d made a bad choice of words herself, the situation might be redeemed. ‘His job, we’re told, was to chase up stolen and faked art works in Europe.’

  ‘Stolen? You mean by the occupying forces during the Second World War? I don’t know how long the Allied Commission to track down such works was active, but it’s true that Lance was still involved in that kind of work by the mid-50s when I met him.’

  ‘Art thefts were really coming into fashion by then,’ Georgia agreed.

  ‘And that’s all you think Lance was doing?’

  Odd phrasing, since ‘doing’ was ambiguous. Georgia decided not to press the point. ‘Yes. Did you know Jago Priest, Lance’s friend?’

  ‘I did.’ The shortness of the reply and her body language suggested she was not a fan.

  ‘He thinks Lance’s line of work might have included art forgeries as well as theft.’

  ‘Thinks? Jago’s still alive?’ Madeleine asked sharply. She looked surprised, then said, ‘By forgeries you mean paintings intended to deceive by confusion with the original, rather than fakes of a style to gull the unwary.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Georgia confessed, aware that she was being forced on to the defensive.

  ‘It’s quite possible,’ Madeleine continued, her composure regained. ‘As no doubt you know, the Allied Commission’s work produced interesting byways.’

  Georgia seized her chance to take the battle into the opponent’s camp, which seemed well defended. ‘There was apparently one gang in particular whose trail Lance was hotly following about the time he died. The Benizi Brothers were his target.’

  ‘Or he theirs, from the way your thesis is running,’ Madeleine commented lightly.

  ‘It follows,’ Georgia agreed. ‘Did Lance talk about his job when you knew him?’

  ‘Sometimes he would make reference to a particular case. If I ever asked specifically whom he worked for, he didn’t tell me. With Lance one laughed and joked, one made merry. He was there or he was not. In those days we did not sit down for serious career talks. Let’s say he usually – not always – had plenty of money, and it was hardly polite to ask whence it came.

  ‘I met him about 1954 in Paris,’ Madeleine continued. ‘My parents were both British, but my mother had been in the SOE during the war, and my father was a Francophile. When post-war Britain became too gloomy they moved to France, and I moved with them. I was twenty-three by then, so I lived in an apartment of my own. That’s rather a splendid word for the nest of servants’ rooms usually found at the very top of the grand houses in central Paris. Mine was in the boulevard de Courcelles. I looked out of my attic window on to the rooftops of Paris – what a sight. All the mountains and valleys of the world could not compete. Such life, such colour, such sadness. Paris was mine. I was a secretary in the Louvre, and every day I drank up what Paris had to offer. I met Lance in the museum one day, and it went on from there. Where to, you might ask.’

  She cast an amused glance at Georgia, who was indeed thinking just that. ‘But I would not reply,’ she continued, ‘since it is not relevant. For some time I had a spare room in my apartment and Lance became in effect a lodger. He travelled all over Europe, sometimes he talked of it, sometimes he did not. It was understood. And of course when he married in 1957 he would return to his Kentish home for weeks at a time.’

  ‘Was he still doing this in 1961?’ Georgia asked hopefully.

  ‘No. I had met my husband and had been married two years by then. I last saw Lance a few months before his death.’

  At last Georgia felt that she was being offered a key, if not an open door, to Lance Venyon. It was her job to turn it. ‘Even if he didn’t talk much about his job, you must have formed an impression of your own. Was he a private investigator, for instance, specializing in art crime?’

  ‘Art crime?’ A male voice, and dear heaven, one she knew. Her whole stomach seemed to turn over as dizziness hit her and she had to struggle for control. The door to the room, which had been ajar, was now fully open – and in walked trouble. ‘What are you up to, Georgia?’

  It was Zac.

  Zac, her ex-husband, looking just the same as when she’d last seen him in prison twelve years ago to tell him that she was filing for divorce. Zac, the most incompetent con man one could imagine, Zac, who specialized in art and antiques – if specialized was the right word where he was concerned. Zac, with his infuriating lopsided grin, the floppy mop of dark hair and beguiling look of innocence.

  ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ she asked wearily. So many scenarios were whizzing through her head that she felt physically faint. This came of turning keys into unknown territory, but the last thing she had expected was Zac to be lurking behind the door. The last and most scariest thing is one’s own past rearing up.

  ‘I did tell you to keep away, Zac.’ Madeleine sounded furious.

  ‘Sorry, Maddy. I couldn’t resist seeing Georgia again.’ He was grinning at her, damn him.

  What on earth was this set-up? Did this woman know she was harbouring a con man, Georgia wondered wildly. Was Madeleine a con artist too? Was Zac her toy boy? Surely to goodness he couldn’t be her husband? She’d said he was an antiques expert. Zac obviously was too young to have been her first husband, but maybe he was the second? Madeleine looked far too sensible, but she wouldn’t put it past Zac. Forty years’ age difference would mean nothing if Zac took the fancy into his mind. If only Luke were here – no, thank goodness he wasn’t. He’d pick up her confusion right away, and guess the reason. Old memories were stirring all too vividly within her.

  ‘I must apologize, Georgia,’ Madeleine said briskly, abandoning formality. ‘Zac is a colleague of my husband’s, and friend of my son’s. It is a complete coincidence and an unfortunate one that he is here at the moment.’

  So at least the toy-boy theory was out of the way. But did this absent husband know what he was letting loose in his house of priceless treasures?

  ‘In case you are wondering . . .’ Zac had his little-boy look on and unfortunately Georgia knew it could be a genuine one. The trouble with Zac was to decide (since he could never decide himself) where make-believe began and sincerity abruptly ended. ‘Maddy does know about my nefarious past.’

  ‘Fortunately,’ Madeleine said gravely, ‘my husband doesn’t need Zac’s advice on wine.’

  Georgia laughed. Zac’s downfall had been over a particularly inept scam in this department.

  Regardless of his lack of welcome, Zac threw himself down in the armchair next to Georgia, and it was all she could do to stop herself from edging away. Zac was good at body language. It went with his trade. Space invader, mind invader, was Zac. And now he was settling in
, she realized to her horror.

  ‘I’m sure you’ll understand, madame,’ she said to Madeleine firmly, ‘that I can’t speak freely in front of Zac and as I don’t have long before I have to leave for my return train—’

  ‘But I can help you,’ Zac interrupted. He wore his hurt look now. (She remembered that one well: ‘What do you mean, stole?’)

  The worst of all situations, and she had to turn the tables. ‘What about?’ she asked stonily.

  ‘Madeleine said you were coming to talk about Lance Venyon.’

  And she had thought his offer to help was the worst. It wasn’t, this was. Left to herself, she’d get up and walk away, but she wasn’t alone in this. There was Peter to consider, and she was a professional. They’d agreed to take on this case. She plunged on, conscious that Madeleine was deliberately leaving the stage to her.

  ‘You weren’t born till the late 1960s,’ she told Zac flatly. ‘You can’t have met him.’

  ‘Of course not.’ Indignation at being misjudged oozed from him. She knew all his expressions. ‘But I’ve moved in his world long enough, and he’s not forgotten. And I have contacts.’

  Sure he had, all of them either doing stir or temporarily out planning the next disaster. Despite herself, however, she had wanted to hear more.

  Zac obviously hadn’t missed her sudden interest. ‘There’s a lot of talk in the cafes I hang out in in Paris, just as there was in the 1950s, only now it’s done in cyberspace too. Lance was mixed up with some golden cup mysteriously supposed to be buried in Kent, like that one they found a year or two back. This one wasn’t Bronze Age. It was—’