Death of an Elgin Marble (19 page)

The drive from the main road to Harcourt House, the cabbie informed him, was just over five miles long and one of the grandest in the British Isles. The road twisted and turned through beech and lime trees. As it rose and fell he caught glimpses of strange buildings, outriders perhaps to the main house. Over to his left he could see the round top of what the driver told him was a mausoleum, and behind it the top of an obelisk and what might have been the upper part of a pyramid. On his right a Greek temple sat on top of a lake and a round tower perched on the crest of a little hill. The buildings came in and out of sight, as if in a dream, and then, almost straight ahead through a break in the trees, Harcourt House itself, a giant in English Baroque with a central block flanked by two projecting wings and an enormous dome on top. Xanadu, Powerscourt thought, the stately pleasure dome had come to rest in the county of Oxfordshire in twice five miles of fertile ground.

Simon Cook, eighth Earl of Harcourt, was waiting for him in the red drawing room. Busts of two very different Roman emperors kept watch above the fireplace, the virtuous Marcus Aurelius on the left, the bloodthirsty tyrant Caracalla on the right. The Earl was in his sixties with a few wisps of white hair on his head and a drooping moustache. Everything about the man drooped a little, Powerscourt thought, for he sat slumped in his chair and leant forward at an angle when he walked as if he might fall over at any point.

‘Good of you to come, Powerscourt,’ he said, rising very slowly to shake his visitor by the hand, ‘you’re here about the statues, I gather. Just the latest in the long line of things and people that have gone.’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Have there been more robberies, a whole series of break-ins here?’

‘No, no, it’s not like that really.’ The Earl sank further back in his chair. Powerscourt had been warned that the man was eccentric but he had no idea what to expect.

‘Wife’s gone. Two years ago next Thursday, that was.’

‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Oh, she’s not dead. Not by any means. My bankers keep reassuring me that she’s alive and drawing money out of my accounts. She just cleared off and left me. Said she couldn’t stand being stuck out here in the middle of nowhere so she pushed off to Antibes. Plenty of people there, I expect. Probably speaking French, mind you.’

‘I see.’

‘Then there was Magnus.’

‘Magnus?’ Powerscourt didn’t think there had been any Roman emperors called Magnus but he wasn’t sure.

‘He did die, actually. Last Thursday, that was. He was only sixteen.’

‘How very upsetting for you, Lord Harcourt. Life has obviously been difficult. Let us hope things improve from now on.’

‘I really loved Magnus, you know. Finest hunter I ever had. I used to have long talks with him in the afternoon.’

Was Magnus a horse? Better wait and see. The Earl looked up and peered out through his great windows to his parkland beyond. There were a couple of deer in the distance, standing beside a Greek temple.

‘Goodness me, Powerscourt.’ The Earl seemed to move into a different gear. ‘Here am I rambling on about a horse and all you want to know about are the missing statues. Come this way, we’ll go through the Great Hall, everybody likes looking at that.’

This was an enormous space, rising seventy feet into the air with a lantern and a gallery at the top with light flooding in through the windows. Mighty columns, heavily decorated, rose up from the four corners and the whole space was painted with scenes of ancient mythology. It was one of the most dramatic rooms Powerscourt had ever seen, a triumph of swagger and style over the more sober conventions of English architecture. The Earl took no notice of his astonishing room. He passed no comment at all as he led the way to a long corridor lined with ancient busts.

‘My brother used to call this the Rogues Gallery. God knows why my ancestors wanted to cart all this lot back from Rome or wherever they bought it. They’re quite friendly, really, these ancients. Sometimes I spend the morning talking to them. They’re good company.’

Powerscourt wondered if the old man lived here entirely alone, except for the trophies of his ancestors and the livestock in his stables. The only people to talk to were the marble gods and dead statesmen lining this corridor and his four-legged friends behind the great house.

‘What about the ones that were stolen?’ said Powerscourt softly, feeling rather oppressed by the grandeur of the house and the madness of its owner.

‘Ah yes,’ said the Earl, tottering slowly down the passage. ‘They were side by side, just here. Bacchus, the god of wine, and his helper Silenus who had vine leaves in his hair. My steward said they left because the cellars are almost empty now. We’ve drunk almost all the wine there was left. Maybe that’s why they went.’

‘Could one man have carried them both? Both busts, I mean?’

‘If he was very strong, he could. But the police thought there must have been at least two of them. Let me show you the other statue that’s gone. It was rather bigger than these two.’

The Earl led the way outside to the South Front where a fountain in the lake was sending great shoots of water high into the air. A copy of the sculpture depicting Laocoön and his sons wrestling for their lives sat in the middle of the lake, Laocoön the Trojan priest who warned against accepting the gift of the wooden horse, being strangled by sea serpents that had turned green in the Oxfordshire air.

‘There’s a sort of sculpture gallery at the very end of this building,’ the Earl said, moving very slowly now. ‘The thieves came in through a window just ahead of us.’

The gallery stretched along the side of the house, past seven tall windows. Inside were full-length Roman and Greek gods and goddesses, Apollo and Juno, Ceres and Aphrodite. It was Artemis who had gone.

‘Seven feet tall she was, Carrara marble, bow in one hand, arrows in a sling over her back, rather beautiful if you like your women as warriors. The thieves must have brought some lifting equipment with them to get her out.’

So, Powerscourt said to himself, could this have been a rehearsal for the British Museum? Were the two busts a blind, a diversionary tactic designed to draw attention from the larger statue, one close to the Caryatid in size? The Earl appeared to be having a long conversation with the Emperor Tiberius.

‘Sorry to interrupt, Lord Harcourt, but did the thieves and their equipment and the statue leave through the window?’

‘That’s what the police thought, Lord Powerscourt. That’s about all the thought they did manage, mind you. They have no idea who the thieves might have been. They have no idea where the missing busts and statue are. A couple of properly trained Roman centurions could have done better.’

The Earl gestured to Powerscourt to join him on a small settee at the end of the gallery. ‘Tell me this, Powerscourt, why are you here? I know you said you were interested in the thefts, but I don’t believe that’s the only reason you’ve come.’

‘What makes you think that, Lord Harcourt?’

‘Well, if there had been any developments, the police would have come to tell me about them. But they haven’t. You have. A fancy investigator come all the way from London? For a minor burglary that happened just over a year ago?’

‘So what do you think has brought me here today?’

The old man stroked the thigh of the goddess Hera, one of the losers in the Judgement of Paris. Powerscourt thought his host dipped in and out of normality like an old watch that stops and starts for no apparent reason.

‘It’s that Caryatid, isn’t it,’ he said, ‘the one that was taken from the British Museum. You’ve come to see if the robbery here was the same sort of thing.’

‘You’re absolutely right, Lord Harcourt. I’m most impressed by your insight. Tell me this, did any unusual people come to visit the house in the months before the robbery?’

‘Unusual people come to visit this house all the time, Lord Powerscourt. I sometimes think this place acts as a magnet for the unusual from all over the world. Architecture students, they call themselves, some of them. Then there are the self-styled lovers of classical antiquity, they’re often quite mad.’

Coming from the Earl, Powerscourt thought they must have been quite remarkable people, these lovers of classical antiquity.

‘Then there are the ones who like visiting other people’s houses. They tell you that your lake isn’t as good as the lake at Blenheim or the North Front isn’t a patch on Chatsworth. They probably come from humble semi-detached houses, four small rooms and an outside privy by the railway lines, these people, but they live out fantasy lives in what’s left of our stately homes.’

‘Would you say any of them might have been thieves, or acting for thieves? That they had come to take a good look at the place and make their plans?’

‘God knows, Lord Powerscourt. I had a great lecture from the local Chief Inspector about security here. He seemed to think the place should be like the Tower of London, Beefeaters certainly, ravens maybe, locks, bolts, bells all over the place. People always assume you’ve got plenty of money if you live in a home like this. It’d probably be cheaper to stay in a permanent suite at the Savoy than here, roofs leaking, plaster falling off the walls, taxes going up all the time, death duties waiting for you round the last corner.’

‘There wasn’t anybody who seemed to take a particular interest in the statues that have been stolen, was there? Somebody who lingered over Artemis, maybe?’

‘I’d be damned careful about lingering over that Artemis myself. The short answer is I simply don’t know. You don’t imagine that I loiter about the corridors, waiting to engage the visitors in conversation, do you? I retire to my private apartments when the invasion starts and I don’t come out until the housekeeper rings the bell to tell me the coast is clear. Imagine having to talk to those people! It would be too dreadful.’

‘And your housekeeper didn’t mention anything?’

‘Certainly not.’

Powerscourt felt he had outlived his welcome. Maybe the Earl would disappear any moment and retire to his private apartments.

‘This has been most useful, Lord Harcourt. I’m most grateful to you and I have enjoyed seeing your beautiful house. I shall, of course, let you know if anything comes up.’

‘You won’t find the bloody Caryatid here I tell you. I wish you God speed in your quest, Lord Powerscourt.’

As he made his way along the South Front back to the main entrance, the Earl appeared to be engaged in another conversation, this time with Aphrodite. Powerscourt felt she might be more interesting than the Emperor Tiberius. And, like her fellow goddess and contestant in the Judgement of Paris, Hera, the Oxfordshire Aphrodite was showing a great deal of thigh.

The schoolteacher in the little village on the edge of the Brecon Beacons knew that things were not going his way. Ever since he had helped concoct the cover story for the statue that was taken away to Bristol his luck had run out. The money had been useful, of course, but that had long gone. He had been forced to sell the tickets for the rugby internationals to the highest bidder in the Green Dragon late one Saturday night. He had wept on his way home. Wales had only lost 8–0 to England the year before and there were high hopes for greater success this season.

Part of the problem was that he was the root cause of his own misfortunes. The schoolmaster knew that he was fortunate in his position. Thirty or forty miles to the south the only jobs to be had were down the mines, one of the worst paid and most dangerous jobs in the country. Carwyn did not come home with his clothes and features stained black with dust. His lungs were not being damaged by years of working underground. His trouble was that he could not keep hold of money. It slipped through his fingers. It poured out of his hands. He was generous to his wife, he was generous to his children, he was generous to his parents. Sometimes he felt that his debts would simply overwhelm him and he would be swept away on a sea of bankruptcy. Every New Year he made resolutions, of keeping weekly accounts of everything spent, of setting strict limits on his expenditure, but it was no good. By the middle of January he was back where he started.

English papers did not reach the valleys on a regular basis. Sometimes the local library in the nearest town would have old copies of
The Times
but the supplies were not regular. One day Carwyn saw a story about the disappearance of the Caryatid from the British Museum. This particular report gave details of the reward for information to be given by the newly formed Caryatid Committee and an account of the speech given by Tristram Stanhope. As he walked up the hill to his little cottage he suddenly remembered the statue that had been sent off to Bristol. He recalled the secrecy that had attended its departure, with the undertaker telling him firmly to keep his mouth shut at the wake in the Green Dragon. He wondered if the authorities knew what had been going on here in the Brecon Beacons, the strange hammering noises that had come from the cave and the huge barns, the rumour that there were foreigners living in the caves where they could not be seen until they too disappeared. He wondered what they would say if he told them. It was in the morning break at school the next day that the idea came to him. There might not be any money to be made from telling the authorities what he knew. That would be his civic duty. But would there be money to be made from threatening to tell the authorities? Blackmail was not a word that appealed to the schoolteacher. He preferred to think of it as tribute, monies due to him for services rendered, services that might as well consist of staying silent as any other form of duty.

The undertaker, he had been the principal figure in the affair of the statue for the New World. The undertaker, had, after all, invited him to join the conspiracy and paid over the money and the other bribes. Carwyn’s letter was quite short. He did not say that he was short of funds. The undertaker would probably know that already, as he would certainly know that the schoolteacher’s wife was pregnant again. Carwyn Jones’s main point was contained in a question. Could it be that the statue in the coffin was actually the Caryatid stolen from the British Museum? And would he be right in thinking that the elaborate legend he had helped to concoct was totally false, a cover for the export of a national treasure? Would the undertaker and his colleagues make it worth his while to remain silent on this point? If not, he would have to take his concerns to the police. Sergeant Prosser in Ebbw Vale, after all, was his first cousin, twice removed.