The Immaculate Deception

by Iain Pears

  A fine, indeed an elegant, piece of reasoning of which he was inordinately proud. On top of it, of course (although he played this down in his mind so as to heighten the satisfaction produced by the contemplation of his deductive powers), was the fact that a Signora Maria Verney was listed in the phone book.

  So he arrived in the village, parked, asked directions and, as the path was steep and not really suitable for cars, walked the rest of the way. From three hundred metres he could see Mary Verney, sitting on the little terrace in a sun hat. From two hundred metres he could see that she had a visitor. Damnation.

  He slowed down, stopped, and then thought carefully about what he should do; for reasons he didn’t fully understand, he suddenly felt reluctant to intrude, although what exactly he would be intruding upon escaped him. For a while he stood there, shifting uneasily from leg to leg, then he turned on his heel and walked back the way he had come.

  Argyll had had the experience once before, and had always hoped to taste it again. It was with a painting he’d bought, a landscape with a few figures dancing in the foreground. Old, dirty, inexpensive; he’d had it cleaned and restored as inexpensively as he could manage and when it came back from the workshop he stacked it in a corner of the apartment, in a place where Flavia would not put her foot through it in a moment of absent-mindedness, and all but forgot about it. Then, one morning, he spent some time staring at it, and got a prickle of excitement running down his back. He recognized the pose of one of the figures dancing merrily in the shaft of sunlight the painter had put across the canvas.

  As far as he was concerned, no more was necessary, he was as sure of the authorship as if he’d seen the man paint it himself. It was, most certainly, a Salvator Rosa; not great, not brilliant, no masterpiece to set the world alight and, indeed, even when he’d finally pinned it down, the picture scarcely made him any money once all the costs had been taken into account. In the eyes of the auctioneers and the collectors who insist on bits of paper, there was always that element of doubt, enough to refuse the little work a solid name and title. No matter; it was the pleasure of certainty that Argyll had enjoyed, the fact that instinct told him where to look, and eventually led him to a sketch for the dancing woman, hand held high, head slightly angled to one side, her blue dress billowing as she danced to the music of the lyre.

  He had hoped to experience the same sensation with the little picture now on Bottando’s wall, but nothing except a mild prickle of interest had come when he’d first seen it, and he hadn’t been able to have another look. To experience it unexpectedly now, seeing a sixty-year-old woman two hundred metres away on her terrace, turning her head to greet her visitor, was so unexpected he found it shocking. Perhaps it was again the turn of the head, the way her arm momentarily echoed the roll of the hillside beyond – the sort of trick Rosa himself might have pulled off. Maybe again it was the dappled effect of the light that gave a timeless, almost impressionistic glimpse of other people’s contentment that almost took his breath away.

  About a mile away, halfway up a hill, he saw a little chapel, standing at the edge of what seemed like a reasonable track, one of those places built long ago for reasons which no one can now remember. He started walking up to it. The air and the exercise might, he thought vaguely, make him think more clearly. It would at least gain him some time. So, hands in pockets, head down, off he walked, taking his time.

  As he walked, his imagination went into overdrive; he scarcely noticed the path, and when he came back down again he had no idea whether he’d been walking for twenty minutes or two hours. Much of what he imagined had no facts to support it. It didn’t matter, nor was it important if the details had happened differently. His imagination painted the scene, filled in the details, elaborated on what he knew, suspected and guessed. What Stonehouse had said, Bulovius, the police report. What he knew of Mary Verney and of Bottando, what was reasonable and what was possible. He could see it all in a black and white that was slightly grainy; Argyll’s imagination had been formed by too many Italian neo-realist films to imagine Tuscany, 1962, in any other way.

  The painting had vanished from the Villa Buonaterra and, after some little delay during which all present had looked for it, the police had been summoned. The meeting was an inauspicious one, even when it existed largely in his mind. The little police car, some sort of Fiat, he decided, old, grey and battered, with smoke pouring out of its rear end, chugs noisily and with little dignity up to the grand entranceway, lurching to a halt and shuddering into quiet with an alarming death rattle that shakes the bones of the two occupants. One of these, the older, dressed in civilian clothes which show considerable wear, leads the way to the door. The other, much younger and in a tight-fitting uniform that makes him look even less comfortable than he feels, follows obediently. They do not talk; position has to be maintained. Instead, the senior figure stands aside and nods at the bell. His subordinate steps forward to ring it, an impassive face showing neither resentment nor the contempt he feels so keenly. It is already desperately hot; the police report didn’t mention it, but it is July and Tuscany. Of course it is hot.

  The servant opens the door and, though the two are expected, goes through the formality of asking them their business, showing them into a small room which exists solely for accommodating new arrivals whose precise status is uncertain, and goes off to announce their presence to the owner, who has in fact seen the car arrive perfectly clearly from the window of his study.

  Commissario Tarento fidgets, or at least Argyll imagined he fidgets, in the way a small-town policeman would under such circumstances. He is more used to bicycle thieves than art thieves. Both crime and victim are far beyond him. So he tries to seem brusque and impatient. The natural, uncontrollable deference that flows through his veins like life-blood, which took him into the police in the first place, wells up in him; a combination of pride, envy and respect for those richer and more comfortable than himself is part of his nature, even part of his generation. Foreign grandees of unimaginable wealth bring it out in full force; he can only imagine – and does so, frequently – the life of elegance and leisure they lead.

  Oddly, his subordinate seems more at ease now there is more than the Commissario to take his attention. Why this is so Tarento cannot imagine. For he knows Bottando’s background well; a poor family from a village north of Naples; respectable but with an uncle who is a communist. Bottando had gone into the army, then into the police, to escape a life that had held nothing for his parents and would hold nothing for him. It was a choice: the military or the factories of Turin and Milan that were crying out for southern labour. Even as an adolescent, Bottando had thought there was more to life, possibly, than a fat wage packet and an apartment where the concrete was still damp from the hasty construction.

  Tarento does not like the young man, although he cannot say why; his behaviour is impeccable, his efforts unsparing and his aptitude considerable. That, perhaps, is the problem, for Tarento has reached the peak of his career, and knows it. Even in a force riddled with corruption and incompetence, he has reached his level. Not so Bottando, who has already attracted the attention of the prosecuting magistrate; if he can bear it, the young man will rise further and faster than Tarento has. The realization of this, and the fact that already Bottando has more self-confidence and assurance than he, has made the older man harsh and rude, going out of his way to impose his seniority while he still possesses it.

  At least he manages to suppress a little bow and an obsequious smile when Stonehouse comes in to welcome them with all the grace and elegance of nobility, for Tarento is unaware of the great subtleties of English class distinctions. Instead, he takes his seat with a flourish, as though sitting in a seicento chair covered in fine Brussels tapestry is quite normal for him. He even makes a comment on its beauty, but notices that, somehow, his effort comes across less well than Bottando’s indifferent silence as he also sits down. Stonehouse acknowledges the compliment but a brief, unsettling look of vague puzzl
ement passes across his face at the words. It is enough to make Tarento lose the little assurance he possesses.

  So, he tries to become professional, the representative of the Italian state, with all the might of the law behind him, almost barking questions that are answered, in flawless Italian, with courtesy and concision.

  There has been, Stonehouse says, a theft of a small painting. It was noticed that morning and he contacted the police directly.

  ‘And the item removed?’

  Stonehouse picks up a sheaf of paper from the desk; Argyll imagined it being part of the carefully handwritten inventory still in the Buonaterra muniments room. ‘I looked this out for you,’ he says. ‘I have a description of all my collection. It is a painting on wood of a Madonna. Florentine, fifteenth century, but of no great importance. Not compared to some of the other pictures in the house.’

  ‘And the artist?’

  ‘Unknown, although my friend Mr Berenson gave it one of his own attributions. I do not think his efforts are very helpful, however. More important is that it is quite small – easily carried by one person – and was taken out of its frame in a responsible manner. The thief took his time, and was concerned not to damage it.’

  ‘It is my job to ascertain what is important,’ Tarento says stiffly, and is pleased to see Stonehouse acknowledge his error. ‘What elements of security do you possess?’

  ‘None.’

  Tarento affects to look surprised, although there is no cause; this was not yet the time when anyone, rich or poor, felt much need to defend themselves from the outside world.

  ‘In fact,’ Stonehouse continues, ‘all the windows were wide open. The maid judged that there would be no rain last night – rightly, as it turned out – and opened everything up to try and blow some of this hideous heat out of the place.’

  He is right there, Tarento thinks; the heat in the past fortnight has been oppressive to a degree he can hardly remember, a dull, weakening heat that dampens the spirits and slows brain and body together.

  ‘The maid opens the window, and allows the burglars in,’ Tarento says knowingly. ‘I shall have to talk to this woman.’ Maids are something Tarento knows about, his wife having been in service with a grand Florentine family until she married him.

  ‘No doubt,’ Stonehouse says. ‘But you should know in advance that she is sixty-five, has been with my family here for twenty years and is of impeccable character. I do not and will not entertain any suspicions of her.’

  ‘None the less, she must be interviewed,’ Tarento replies firmly.

  ‘Whatever you wish,’ Stonehouse says. ‘Would you like a glass of wine? Water?’

  The prospect of a drink, of becoming acquainted on more friendly terms is irresistible; Tarento imagines himself sipping away, gradually winning the respect, even the regard of this man, becoming almost familiar. But not with Bottando there to watch; he chooses a glass of wine.

  ‘And while we talk, perhaps my subordinate could tour the grounds. Footprints, you know. That is the sort of thing he is very good at.’

  He speaks confidingly, as if Bottando isn’t there, as if he is a pet spaniel. And Bottando obediently gets up and salutes and does as he is told, leaving the two men alone.

  In Argyll’s imagination, Bottando goes through the motions, for although the orders deserve nothing but contempt – the earth is baked hard as concrete and you could have driven a tank over it without leaving any mark – he is not yet sure enough to treat them as such. And so he stares briefly at the gravel, the browned piece of grass, the wilting hedges, then gazes at the house to try and figure out which room had contained the stolen painting.

  ‘That one,’ says a cheerful voice behind him. He turns to see who has spoken. ‘Top floor, second from the left,’ the voice continues, and the young woman who owns it, holding a straw hat on her head with one hand, points with the other. Then smiles engagingly at him. An entrancing smile, impish and seductive all at once.

  ‘Thank you,’ Bottando says gravely.

  ‘Why on earth are you standing out here? You’ll boil away to nothing.’

  ‘Inspecting the scene of the crime,’ he says, conveying in his tone of voice that he, too, knows it is a waste of time.

  ‘I see. You stare at the house from a hundred metres, see that a chimney pot is slightly askew, and conclude that the thief parachuted on to the roof. From a glider, it must have been, as everyone was awake all night because of the heat. Someone would have heard a plane.’

  ‘Remarkable,’ Bottando says. ‘You must have read my mind.’

  She laughs. ‘It was easy. Nobody could expect to see anything else standing here.’

  ‘That’s true.’

  ‘Have you seen the very scene itself? The patch on the wall where the great masterpiece used to hang? Come on, then,’ she says when he shakes his head. ‘I’ll show you. Then you can sit quietly and have a cold drink. It’ll be as useful as wandering around getting heatstroke.’

  ‘Are you staying in the house?’ Bottando asks as they walk across the gravel path. ‘A member of the family?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ she says. ‘I’m a student. Friend of a friend. I’m just visiting. I have a little house twenty kilometres from here. And, as you are obviously a suspicious sort of man, that’s where I was when the picture disappeared.’

  ‘You speak Italian very well.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  They climb the staircase slowly, lest the effort make them feel even hotter. Bottando walks behind, incapable, despite his wishes, of ignoring the girl’s presence, the way she moves in her light cotton dress, so easy and relaxed.

  ‘There,’ she says, flinging open a heavy door. ‘Now, who did it?’

  She leads him into a small, brightly painted bedroom which contains little more than an old wooden bed and a heavy wardrobe. On the walls, papered with inappropriate, fusty Victorian paper, are some old prints, a portrait – exactly as the inventory said, and in fact still pretty close to how it had looked when Argyll sneaked in during his visit to the villa – and a small rectangle that is slightly lighter than its surrounds. Bottando walks across the floor – it creaked badly, Argyll had noted – and examines it closely, even though he knows it will not help at all. Then he looks around. An open window, the shutters hanging motionless on the outside, bright sunlight streaming in.

  ‘Mr Stonehouse told the maid not to shut the shutters as she normally does. Fingerprints, he thought.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ Bottando says. ‘Quite.’ Their eyes meet and hold for a tiny fragment of a portion of a second. Just enough. Each smiles at the other at the same moment before the door swings open again and a very annoyed Commissario Tarento enters. ‘I told you to look around outside, Bottando,’ he says curtly. ‘Not wander about like a tourist.’

  ‘I insisted he come here,’ the girl says. ‘To reassure me we are in no danger. I do not like the idea of murderers and robbers wandering about the place. He has been most kind.’ Another mocking smile which Bottando understands and his superior is incapable of even noticing.

  Tarento is mollified and gives her a silly-little-girl look. ‘And you are …’

  ‘Verney,’ she says. ‘My name is Mary Verney.’ From that point on, Argyll’s imagination concluded, everything was straightforward. No need even to go through it all. The loss of the little Virgin. Its recovery. Its reappearance on Bottando’s sitting-room wall. His retirement. The angle of Mary Verney’s arm as she poured a glass of wine in the crisp spring sunshine. The ransoming of the Claude. Flavia’s frustration at being constantly left out of things. It wasn’t exactly supported by evidence, far from it; Argyll’s over-wrought imagination had supplied most of it. And very puzzling it all was.

  15

  For Flavia, not being able to get hold of Argyll was merely an irritating start to what turned into another appalling day. Around the time he was leaving for Florence, she was returning to Rome, having stayed on in Siena to tidy up a few trivial matters with the police there.
She went straight to the office where she found a note summoning her to a meeting at the ministry. Urgent, it said, and the fact that the meeting had been supposed to start five minutes previously did nothing to improve her already irritable mood. She had spent a terrible night dealing with what Elena Fortini had pointed out to her. It was so blindingly and obviously true that she felt foolish for not having thought of it herself.

  Her world had changed for ever. Just like that. It was going to take some time to get used to it. She couldn’t even begin to imagine how she was going to reconcile the sort of hours that her job required with the sort of hours that she knew from observation small children seemed to demand as their right. All she did note was that she was thinking of how to fit the job in. Not the other way around. She was still too much in a state of shock even to consider whether she was pleased or not.

  She was also not really at her most attentive when she arrived, finally, at the meeting that she thought was going to be another, interminable discussion of staff training, or budgets or quibbles about results. It was something about bureaucracies she had noted: the more trivial the subject, the more pompous and urgent the summons. In general, anyway. She didn’t even pay enough attention to note that the two civil servants in the room – both completely unknown to her – spent a remarkable amount of time shuffling papers and looking uncomfortable.

  ‘I’m afraid that we have to deal with more important matters now,’ the more senior said once the small-talk had been disposed of. ‘That is the future of the department now that General Bottando has left. We feel – the minister feels – that a clear leadership line is required to ensure the maintenance of the high-profile and successful performance that has been such a marked feature of the art theft department in recent years.’

  ‘I quite agree,’ said Flavia, still unaware of the large manhole opening up in front of her. ‘Staff morale, I feel, is highly important for producing the productivity gains that the ministry seems to want so much.’ She was very proud of that remark; it showed she was learning the language of management that seemed to be so terribly fashionable in administrative circles these days. She knew that it was all nonsense, but accepted that when in Rome it was necessary to speak a little Latin.