Death of an Elgin Marble (18 page)

Lord Rosebery’s butler, Leith, had replied to Powerscourt’s query about the possibility of sending a Caryatid to America in a transatlantic liner. There were, his note said, dozens of ways in which the statue could have been sent by ship to New York, especially if she was travelling first class.

Inspector Kingsley had called on his way to the British Museum to reveal that they were no further forward with their inquiries into the death of Kostas, the Greek porter at the British Museum who had been run over by a train. The witness who had originally claimed that she thought he was pushed changed her mind later on and said she could not be certain about anything that had happened on the platform any more. She was confused. She did not wish to speak about it again or she would become even more confused. And Inspector Kingsley’s bright young Constable Smithson, working his way through the freight records in an obscure outpost of the Great Western Railway at Paddington station, was pessimistic. There were records of the freight containers, hundreds if not thousands of them. But they were never specific about the content. The only entry in that respect was ‘Household Goods’, nothing more. And that, as the Constable pointed out, could cover a multitude of sins. He told his Inspector that you could have sent the body of the risen Christ through Paddington station in a railway container and nobody would have been any the wiser.

There was a cough at the door. Coughs at the door in Markham Square usually meant only one thing. Rhys, the Powerscourt butler who had served with his master in India, had something to say.

‘Gentleman to see you, my lord. He claims to have met you before. The gentleman is waiting in the hall below, my lord. Name of Hudson, John Hudson, representing the
New York Times
.’

Powerscourt looked across at Lady Lucy. ‘Hudson?’ he asked. ‘New
York Times
? Ring any bells?’ Lady Lucy shook her head.

‘Never mind,’ said Powerscourt, ‘better show him up.’

A well-dressed young man in his early thirties strode into the room and shook hands.

‘I can see you don’t remember me, Lord Powerscourt. Well, it was some time ago. You came to ask my advice about some paintings of Irish aristocrats that had been stolen from their houses. The ancestors of the Anglo-Irish patricians, to be precise. The pictures seemed to have walked off the walls. I was working for a little gallery off Bond Street at the time.’

‘Of course I remember you now,’ said Powerscourt, wondering if he himself had changed as little over the years as John Hudson. He rather doubted it. ‘How nice to see you again. Have you abandoned the galleries altogether? What made you change jobs to the
New York Times
?’

‘Well,’ said Hudson, ‘I don’t think the change is all that great. I’ve always wanted to write a book about the Renaissance, you see. The gallery took up too much of my time. I thought I would make more progress if I left.’

‘And did you?’ asked Lady Lucy. ‘Are we to see the book in Hatchards quite soon?’

The young man laughed. ‘I’m afraid not, Lady Powerscourt. The book is as far from being finished as ever.’

‘And what is your role on the
New York Times
, Mr Hudson?’ Powerscourt asked. ‘Are you one of their London correspondents?’

‘Well, I suppose I am.’ John Hudson grinned. ‘I have this wonderful job title which always impresses people. I’m called European Arts correspondent.’

‘That sounds frightfully grand, Mr Hudson,’ said Lady Lucy. ‘What do you have to do for that?’

‘Well, most of the time I stay in London. When there’s a major exhibition in Paris or Berlin or Rome I travel there to see them and send back one or two reports. That depends on how I rate the show. It’s much cheaper than sending somebody over from New York one exhibition at a time. Mostly I write about what’s happening here in London. Rich Americans who read the
New York Times
are always keen to know what’s going on in London’s art market, who’s up, who’s down, that sort of thing. One or two of them come to visit me when they’re here and ask who or what they should buy.’

‘And what do you tell them?’ said Powerscourt.

‘I make a point of never giving any advice at all. Suppose I told them all to buy French Impressionists and then the market collapsed. I’d have a lot of angry Americans on my doorstep. No thanks.’ John Hudson laughed. ‘I’m sure you know why I’m here this afternoon, Lord Powerscourt. I’ve come about the Caryatid, the one missing from the British Museum. I believe you’re trying to find her.’

‘Ah yes, the Caryatid. I am trying to find her, as you put it.’ Powerscourt nodded. ‘How very proper, how can I help?’

‘Let me put it like this, Lord Powerscourt. I have read some extraordinary things about this damned statue in recent days. They can’t all be true. She’s been stolen by the same gang of thieves who took the
Mona Lisa
in Paris. The
Rokeby Venus
, possibly the only other work of art the crime correspondents have heard of, probably because she has no clothes on, may be next. The thieves are actually working for a museum in Germany. They’ve got lots of ancient artefacts over there in Munich and Berlin but can’t stand the fact that the British seem to have more and better examples. Envy and jealousy about colonies in Africa transferred in the German mind to that enormous museum in Great Russell Street. Some psychic with Greek connections has brought her back to life and she walked out of the door in the middle of the night of her own accord. Honestly, Lord Powerscourt, I can’t send any of that nonsense to the
New York Times
. I’d be fired within the hour.’

‘I can see that your readers would not be receptive to those theories, Mr Hudson. Perhaps they would go down better in the Midwest?’

‘Kansas more credulous than Connecticut, Lord Powerscourt? It’s perfectly possible. Let me put my position in another way, if I may. We’re not meant to have opinions on the
New York Times
, unless we write the leading, articles, and even then it’s frowned upon. But I want to see the Caryatid back home in the museum. I want her back as much as you do. Is there anything I can put in my paper that would really help your investigation? I can’t print a pack of lies, obviously, but is there something I can do?’

Powerscourt smiled at the young man. His enthusiasm was infectious. Powerscourt had liked him a lot the first time they had met. He had been helpful and discreet in the Irish investigation.

‘Let me propose a bargain, if I may, Mr Hudson. Not a bargain like that of Mephistopheles and Faust, but a bargain nonetheless. I will tell you now how the investigation is progressing, on condition that you give me your word that you will never tell a soul, not even your editors in New York, where the information came from. In return, I would ask that you carry out, or ask your colleagues to carry out, a little investigation for me, probably in New York, but certainly on the Eastern seaboard. And that, once again, you would not reveal where the request for the information came from.’

John Hudson didn’t hesitate for a second. He rose and offered Powerscourt his hand. ‘I’ll shake hands on that, Lord Powerscourt. Maybe I’m out of my mind to agree to such a deal before I know what it is, but I’m sure you’ll play fair.’

‘Let me offer you first of all an account of how the investigation is going, Mr Hudson. The short answer is that the inquiry, as of this moment, is going absolutely nowhere. We have no idea who took the statue or why. I am working very closely with the police, of course. There are a number of theories, as you would expect, more plausible certainly than the ones you mentioned earlier, but theories nonetheless. Was it a disgruntled member of staff? Or a former member of staff? Did the thieves have a buyer before they carried out the robbery? Was it theft by mail order, as it were? If so, who did the ordering? Were they English or American or French? We have no idea. There is one titbit I can offer you to establish your credentials on this story if you like. Please don’t say where the information came from. Are you happy with that?’

‘I am, Lord Powerscourt, perfectly happy. I can always say I heard it from a police source. All newspaper editors believe you can buy information from the police for money; not all that much money, usually.’

‘What a wicked world it is!’ said Powerscourt with a smile. ‘Now then. There is, or was, a porter at the British Museum, whose duties and responsibilities will have included the care and observation of the Caryatid. He has disappeared. He was run over by a tube train. It could, of course, have been an accident.’

Powerscourt decided not to mention the large amount of money in the savings account, or the brother who also seemed to have vanished, possibly head first into the Adriatic. Those facts could be brought into play later on.

‘Really, I say, that is most interesting,’ said John Hudson, whipping out an expensive-looking leather-bound notebook and taking notes very fast. ‘I don’t believe anybody else has that part of the story. Could I ask you a question, Lord Powerscourt?’

‘Of course.’

‘Those lines of inquiry you mentioned earlier, disgruntled former members of staff and so forth. I would propose mentioning them without attribution. In other words I could put them down to informed opinion, or sources close to the museum, or close to the authorities – that could be anybody right up to Prime Minister Asquith, for heaven’s sake – if that’s alright with you?’

‘Absolutely fine. Nobody’s going to complain about that.’

‘Thank you, Lord Powerscourt. Now what can I do to keep my side of the bargain?’

Powerscourt was looking at his most innocent at this moment. He’s dangerous just now, Lady Lucy said to herself, extremely dangerous. Watch your step, Mr Hudson. Mind how you go.

‘My proposal is this, Mr Hudson. I mentioned before the possibility that the theft was carried out to order, that there was a customer waiting for the Caryatid long before she was stolen.’

‘You did.’

‘Could that customer be American? By that I mean, a great collector, one of those who buys European paintings or First Folio Shakespeares, or ancient sculptures, you know the sort of man I mean.’

John Hudson whistled softly.

‘I see,’ he said. ‘You think one of these millionaires, never too scrupulous in the business dealings that brought them their millions in the first place, broke one or two more rules to get their hands on the Caryatid? Money no object, obviously, as the European art dealers have been fleecing those people for years.’

John Hudson stared into the fire for a long time. He began writing names in his pocket book, a list of suspects, perhaps. ‘Is it possible?’ he asked finally. ‘Of course it’s possible. I’ve been sure long before the
Mona Lisa
walked off the wall in the Louvre that something like this might be going on. I tell you what I’ll do when I get back to the office, Lord Powerscourt. It’s only eleven o’clock in the morning on the East Coast. I’ll send a cable to my colleague who covers the arts for the paper in New York. I’ll say there’s a rumour that a rich American collector has recently spent a fortune buying some top piece of European art. I won’t mention a specific painting or sculpture, no Caryatid or anything like that. I doubt if even my friend Franklin will make the connection. If that doesn’t work, I can try something else.’

Mephistopheles Powerscourt smiled at the young man. ‘That sounds an excellent plan,’ he said. ‘Welcome aboard, Mr Hudson. I can’t tell you our destination but I can certainly promise you an interesting ride!’

Johnny Fitzgerald was tired of drinking. Well, that wasn’t absolutely true, but he was certainly tired of drinking with the porters and the doormen and the clerks of the London art world. He felt that they had nothing more to tell him about the death of Kostas the porter from the British Museum. All he had gathered in his nights in the taverns and the private taverna off Moscow Road was that Kostas had been unusually generous in recent weeks. Before he had always stood his round, but he had been careful. Just before his disappearance he had been more than generous, on one occasion buying everyone an entire bottle rather than just a glass. Beyond that, there was, in Johnny’s view, nothing more to learn.

He had been thinking about his visit to Sokratis, the dying Greek with no liver left, and some of the last words he had spoken, ‘shades of the prison-house’. He had looked up Wordsworth’s poem in a battered book of verse left over from his schooldays. Johnny remembered his English teacher saying that the poem was a lament for the loss of innocence, that children have a heightened and more acute sense of the world, a special vision which passes as they grow older.

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God, who is our home:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

Shades of the prison-house begin to close

Upon the growing Boy,

Johnny did not think that the late Sokratis would have been a believer in Wordsworth’s theory about the death of innocence. Sokratis knew far too many other causes for the loss of innocence in a grown-up world. Johnny felt sure that the phrase ringing in that twirling kaleidoscope of Sokratis’s brain was shades of the prison-house. Which prison-house? Who was inside the prison-house? Where was the prison-house? Had Sokratis himself been locked away at some stage of his career?

He packed the book of poetry into his bag. Johnny was going out of London for a few days. Warwickshire, he thought, there should be some fine birds to watch up there, even at this time of year. He dropped a note to Powerscourt saying he was going to the country for a few days. He did not think there was much more to be gained from his drinking activities. He was, however, working on another line of inquiry. He would, of course, tell Powerscourt and Lady Lucy all about it on his return.

Inspector Kingsley had given Powerscourt a list of five unsolved robberies involving major works of art, going back over the past two years. He had now visited two of the victims, Mrs Wilson by the Thames and the Life Guards with their disappearing silver in the Knightsbridge Barracks. He had an appointment the following day in Chiswick, with the Secretary of the Chiswick Literary Society who had organized the visit to the Turner in Norfolk House. Now he was on the last lap of another visit to another house that had been robbed. This time the lost items were pieces of sculpture. Powerscourt wondered if this theft had been a rehearsal for the removal of the Caryatid in the British Museum.