by Amy Myers
Chapter Eleven
‘How was the day?’ Luke was burrowing down in the cupboard for a saucepan lid, and Georgia couldn’t see his face. Was it her imagination or guilty conscience that made her think Luke had been unusually silent since her return? He had been hard at work until gone seven and had then returned from the oast house with only a brief greeting before disappearing into the den – the name for their joint nest of books and computers. She told herself that the words guilty conscience hardly applied, and that therefore some preoccupation of his own or end-of-the-day weariness was all that was amiss.
‘Very good.’
‘Solved Daks’s murder, have you?’
‘I meant the Dover Castle visit. Peter was in his element.’
‘But not you?’ Luke stood up, his face flushed.
‘Yes, in a way.’ She pushed the memory of the battlements out of her mind.
‘Something new on Lance Venyon?’
‘Only firming up on Jago’s theory.’
‘So why go?’
There was something wrong.
‘You sound very clipped.’ Georgia took the bull by the horns. ‘Peter wanted to put the theory into perspective by seeing the terrain for himself.’
‘And did he?’
‘Yes.’ He had explained it to her, once they were alone. ‘He said that if one imagined the boats lying offshore in the present harbour, the old fortress on the hill, with its chapel and Pharos beacon, would have been the obvious place to take the dying Gawain. And, he added, why should it be so incredible that forces should come by sea, whether from France or the west of England, to see off Saxon invaders? Or that their leader be remembered for this great deed on Badon Hill, otherwise known as Barham Down?’
Usually Luke would have entered into this discussion animatedly but tonight all he grunted was, ‘Cui bono?’
‘To whom the benefit?’ Georgia picked up, and then, as Luke didn’t seem eager to expand, continued, ‘You mean where does that get us? It gives a solid base for the discussion about the provenance of the paintings and the goblet.’
‘Possibly,’ was all he replied.
She held back the inevitable, ‘Is anything wrong?’ as Luke continued with obvious effort: ‘Did you go all round the castle?’
‘The lot,’ she replied more cheerfully, and proceeded to tell him about the wartime tunnels.
‘And Roy Cook? What happened there?’ he asked, when she’d finished.
‘I’m the proud owner of a Sandro Daks original.’ She waited for him to ask more, but he didn’t. ‘Not much more. There was no reaction to Lance Venyon’s name.’ Still no comment. ‘Did you have a good day?’
‘Not bad.’
‘I didn’t see the beautiful Kelly,’ she added, anxious to provoke a response.
No answer for a moment. Then: ‘What about Zac? You didn’t mention that he was jaunting along with you.’
So that was it. The worst. How on earth had Luke found out, and why on earth hadn’t she told him earlier? So much for Luke the reasonable. From the expression on his face he had all cannons ready to fire. ‘Because I didn’t know he was coming,’ she replied.
‘Odd then that he rang here to ask what time you’d be there.’
Her heart sank. ‘Zac was trying it on. He’s a con artist.’
‘So talented that he can appear out of the blue after umpteen years and you show no surprise?’
‘No, yes, I mean . . .’ Georgia tried again, but her own temper began to rise. ‘I met him again in France, he knew Roy Cook, he suggested we went to see him together, Mike vetoed it, I was glad. Zac still turned up. OK by you?’
‘No. Because you omitted to mention it to me.’ It sounded gentle enough, but she could see him stalking back from the barricades into a fortress marked ‘Keep out’.
*
Work was the best antidote to relationship problems. For the first time Georgia blessed the fact that she had kept her former home in Haden Shaw as an office. It seemed a paradise today, and gave her a chance to readjust to normality before facing Peter’s all too observant presence. On the way here she had convinced herself, Micawber-like, that all problems would solve themselves if she didn’t panic, even Luke. He must realize, as did she, that the rock of their partnership was solid.
When she finally went into Peter’s office next door, he took one look at her face.
‘Margaret,’ he said apologetically. ‘That’s how Zac knew.’
‘She’s no gossip about our movements.’
‘No, only if a con man rings up, announces he’s visiting Dover with Peter and Georgia and has forgotten which day they were going.’
Despite her annoyance, Georgia laughed. ‘Your fault for keeping an open diary on your desk. Anyway, it’s over. No problems.’ Except with Luke, but she kept that thought to herself.
‘Not entirely. There’s Zac and—’
‘Budapest,’ she finished for him. ‘Plus the fact that Cook only showed some interest in Lance Venyon when I mentioned Daks’s grandfather.’
‘Who died in Budapest. A city which boasts a branch of Benizi Brothers Antiques run by a chum of Zac’s. I wouldn’t mind betting he’s a runner between Antonio and son.’
‘Would a sensible man like Antonio choose Zac?’
‘Who better to tread a fine line between the respectable and non-respectable. Ex-con man, we hope, now working for Scotland Yard.’
‘Antonio wouldn’t stop to work all that out, surely.’
‘You have stars in your eyes, Georgia, where Benizi is concerned.’
‘Nonsense,’ she said indignantly, but Peter laughed. Unwillingly she began to concede that he might be right. ‘What sort of go-between?’ she asked cautiously. ‘Email and phone take care of most business today.’
‘One can’t email paintings or objets d’art. I can’t help feeling it’s too much of a coincidence to have the Benizi Brothers and the Daks family in one city, both connected with the art world, both connected – however remotely – with Lance Venyon and both with a question mark, so far as Sandro is concerned, over the legality of their dealings.’
‘That’s a kangaroo jump as a theory. So what next?’ As if she couldn’t guess.
‘I’ve booked you on a package trip to Budapest for four days next week to see the Daks family and the Benizi emporium. It all seems very cosy, don’t you think?’
‘For whom?’ she asked, alarm bells ringing.
‘For the two of you, of course.’
For one crazy moment she thought he meant Zac. ‘For Luke?’ she checked. That was almost as bad at present.
‘Naturally. Who else?’ Peter smiled blandly.
*
‘Where first?’ Luke enquired.
As she stood on their hotel balcony in Budapest, this was a hard question to answer, since the city was new to both of them. Working visit or not, Georgia had been deep in guidebooks and tourist phrase books, partly as a ploy to avoid conversations with Luke. Consequently she had been less thrown than he had at the impenetrable Hungarian script when they arrived last evening. Furious at Peter’s gambit, she had been inclined to come alone but that would have been playing into his hands. (And what if Luke ever found out?) She had half expected, even hoped, in view of their present stand-off that Luke would turn down the chance, pleading pressure of work and the suddenness of the invitation. Unfortunately, he didn’t.
‘You’re not coming because you think I’ll be meeting Zac, are you?’ she had asked bluntly.
He had raised an eyebrow. ‘If, Georgia, I thought you’d be so stupid I wouldn’t come. As it is, I’ve always wanted to see Budapest. Any problem with that?’
Plenty that she could foresee, but she remained silent. Stand-off still in place. The space between them in the double bed was a no-man’s-land and neither of them entered it.
Before her was the river Danube, winding its majestic way through the city dividing Buda from Pest. On their side, Buda, the dominating Castle Hill, the Várhegy, was
the central point that drew the eye, with its churches, ancient houses and statues and the magnificent Buda Palace. On the far side of the river lay Pest, the more modern half of the city, with its museums, shops and the university. It was in Pest that she would find both the Benizi antique shop and the Daks residence.
She was tempted to answer Luke’s question of ‘Where first?’ with the obvious tourist choice, the Buda Palace, especially since the heat made the effort of work harder. Nevertheless Lance Venyon had to take precedence. There was a possibility that somewhere out there could lie the answer to the riddles that he, fairly or unfairly, had come to represent. Hungary symbolized the meeting point of East and West, and perhaps that might be a clue to the enigma of Lance. Nevertheless, as Peter admitted, they could be on a wild-goose chase, and the true story lie much closer to home.
That possibility didn’t make this visit any less useful, even though both she and Peter were aware that it was bringing them perilously close to Mike’s police investigation.
‘I’ll take the Daks family first,’ she answered Luke.
‘You will?’ That eyebrow raised once more.
She silently cursed. She had put her foot in it again. ‘We will.’
‘I can play by myself.’ Luke let her off the hook. ‘The Liszt museum is over in Pest.’
‘Come with me today, and we’ll play together later. We have two whole days here, after all.’
It was the right suggestion, and the atmosphere thawed as they took the bus across the river. ‘Whatever you say, don’t pronounce bus as we do in England,’ she warned him. ‘Here it means a four-letter word, not three.’
This produced a welcome laugh. The bus dropped them in Pest, and as she walked up the Rákóczi út and into the street where the Daks home was situated, she was even more glad that Luke was coming. For all their emotional estrangement he could be a great support in the meeting with Leonardo Daks, who was an unknown quantity. Mike had said that Leonardo was a retired academic. ‘He’s OK,’ he had explained, ‘but don’t expect there to be anything behind the brick wall if that’s what he seems to present.’
The fact that there was only one bell on the front door of this four-storey house suggested prosperity; most of the houses had three or four. The door was opened by a dark-haired girl, heavily pregnant, who announced herself cautiously as Magda. Leonardo had been equally reserved on the telephone when Peter called, and this girl, however she fitted into this household, was following suit.
They were led up several flights of stairs, since there seemed to be only a small anteroom on the ground floor, and on the first floor she glimpsed only a kitchen and dining room. They were shown into an austere but expensively furnished living room overlooking the street beneath, where Leonardo Daks – she presumed – rose to greet them. The girl stayed, so she couldn’t be a maid. A sister? There were several pictures on the wall, but they looked like expensive prints rather than originals, which surprised her. She would have expected some sign of Sandro’s work.
‘Please come in.’ Leonardo looked Jewish and in his mid-sixties, with greying hair; he also looked very weary, she thought, which was natural enough. It was less than two months since Sandro’s death.
‘You bring me news of Sandro?’ he asked immediately.
‘We’re not the police,’ she explained, ‘but we know Chief Inspector Gilroy, whom you met. There are no arrests yet.’ In fact Mike was making little progress. There was precious little forensic evidence and their one ace, a trainer footprint, had produced no leads so far. Nor had there been any success in finding the gun.
His face seemed to sag. ‘He was your only son?’ Luke asked sympathetically.
‘Yes. Magda was his fiancée.’
‘I’m very sorry about Sandro,’ Georgia said. ‘He was a very gifted artist. I bought one of his drawings at a gallery in Dover, where he worked for a man called Roy Cook. Did you meet him?’
No hint of recognition. ‘I meet only the police and the people in the village.’
‘I understand you also came over to Wymdown in 1990.’ She thought at first he was not going to answer, but she was wrong.
‘To Kent, yes. A short holiday. I taught art in Estonia and also here in Budapest. That was our first chance to travel freely to the West.’
‘We are interested in a man who died accidentally in 1961. His job was tracking down antiques and his name was Lance Venyon. When your son first came to Kent, he asked where he could find Venyon, who was a friend of his grandfather. I wondered if you could tell us more about him.’
A frown, but she had caught his interest. ‘My father is no longer living. I think, yes, he might have been a friend once. This man Venyon had property of my father’s. My father say ask him for it if I go to England. I do not know what it was. No one know about Lance Venyon any more, say that he is dead, so I ask Sandro to make an enquiry too. He tell me he is doing so, but then no more. You bring news?’
‘I’m afraid not. If Sandro discovered the property it would have been among his effects, and I think you have those. Could it have been a painting?’
From the flicker of reaction she realized she had scored a bullseye. But how and where? ‘Was your father a painter?’ she continued as innocently as she could. ‘Sandro was excellent in copying as well as drawing, so his tutor said.’
A definite coolness now. ‘Domenico Daks do not copy. Michelangelo, my brother, was artist; he create though, like Sandro, and has been dead for many years. Now Sandro gone too.’
Michelangelo? She was immediately back in Camelot with Professor Hoskin. Was this the source of his reference? No, this Michelangelo would have been much younger than Hoskin, although it could tie in with the reference to Raphael if Hoskin had been trying to convey something about a Pre-Raphaelite painting. Another thought. A young man called Michael . . . Michelangelo? Was that too big a jump from Venetia’s titbit of information? Could Lance Venyon have known him? Michelangelo Daks? He would have been living in Estonia, so it seemed unlikely.
‘You all have such wonderful painters’ names,’ she said as casually as she could. ‘Leonardo, Michelangelo, Domenico – is that after Ghirlandaio, perhaps?’
He shrugged dismissively. ‘My father love art, that why we have such names. Sandro too –’ he swallowed – ‘for Botticelli.’
She felt her stomach knotting in excitement; she was teetering on the brink of a breakthrough. ‘And there was Domenico Kranowski, the great art faker of the 1950s, whom Lance Venyon knew in Paris. Did your father work there too?’
‘My father work in Estonia, and not as art faker,’ he said sharply. ‘My father no longer here to speak for himself. Nor, Madame Marsh, is my son.’
Point taken, and she thought they were going to be thrown out, but fortunately Luke came galloping to the rescue. ‘Your son had a brilliant career in front of him. His death was a tragedy.’
Leonardo grasped the lifeline. ‘He had good teachers here in Budapest.’
‘Did Sandro ever talk to you about the work he did in England?’
The mask fell again. ‘No. Did drawings, he said. For a lady.’
‘Kelly Cook, perhaps?’ Georgia asked. ‘Or Cindy Priest? He seems to have sold his drawings to two galleries.’
He shrugged. ‘I not know.’ The interview was clearly over, since he was rising to his feet, and after a few pleasantries to restore harmony, they were back in the street.
What, she wondered, had Leonardo hoped to learn from the interview? He had wanted any news of the investigation – and, she felt a rising excitement, of this property his father had sought so keenly. Domenico, Michelangelo, Domenico Kranowski, Domenico Daks – too much of a coincidence? If linked with Lance Venyon, no. Scenarios began to rush through her head.
‘Luke, thank you,’ Georgia said gratefully.
‘Only protecting my investment.’
Back on firm ground. ‘You haven’t given us a contract yet, let alone invested.’
‘It wasn’t the book I was r
eferring to.’
‘Oh.’ Georgia digested this. Did he really think she was walking in Zac’s trail? ‘In that case, protection isn’t necessary. I’m armour-plated where Zac’s concerned.’
‘And inside the heavy metal?’
‘Nothing, Luke. Like the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz, there’s an empty space where my heart once was.’
He looked at her questioningly.
‘Mine’s on permanent loan to you,’ she finished.
His arm went round her.
‘Sure?’
‘Positive.’
‘Then let’s follow this Yellow Brick Road.’ He proceeded to jig along the Rákócszi út to the pleasure of a gypsy violinist in full Magyar costume who took this as a personal tribute to his playing and had to be duly rewarded.
The Yellow Brick Road continued down a side street, where Luke had wanted to see a garden with a Holocaust memorial at its centre in the form of a weeping willow. ‘We’re in the Jewish quarter here,’ Luke explained. ‘This is the Wallenberg Memorial Garden. He was the Swedish diplomat who rescued many Jews from being transported to Auschwitz from Budapest. They went through bad times in Budapest, first from the Germans, then the Russians.’
Sitting on a bench a girl glanced at them, and Georgia recognized Magda, who rose to greet them.
‘You knew Sandro?’ she asked wistfully.
‘Yes,’ Georgia replied firmly.
‘I am fiancée. I have his baby.’
‘That must be a comfort for you,’ Georgia said sympathetically.
‘I come to England to visit Sandro and go home with baby inside. Now I live in his home with family till the baby is born. Perhaps after that too.’
‘Is that usual in Hungary?’
‘To live with Daks family, great honour. Father Leonardo have sister, and she has daughter, but Sandro was only son. My baby another.’ She patted her stomach proudly.
‘Are the whole family artists?’ Georgia asked as casually as she could.