Death of an Elgin Marble (26 page)

A very pretty maid in a very correct uniform brought in a tray with a couple of glasses of champagne. ‘Thank you, my dear. Your health, Lord Powerscourt. I often take a glass of something at this time of day. It brightens up the rest of the afternoon.’

The clock on the mantelpiece said a quarter to four. Powerscourt wondered if the old man was a kindred spirit of Johnny Fitzgerald who had expended quite a lot of treasure on the beer to lubricate the memory of Red Fred.

‘Blakeway, Nicholas George Blakeway, late of Linfords the auctioneers, believed to be involved with an antique business in Burford. I remember him as an auctioneer, Powerscourt, many years ago. He had a great talent for it, you know. He could play on his audience like one of the great violinists. His particular calling card came with paintings sent up from the provinces to be sold as part of an estate, that sort of thing. In the gap between arriving at Linfords and standing on the easel at the auction they would be transformed from a copy of a Parmigianino Madonna into an early Raphael. The price went through a similar transformation. Some wily provincial solicitor worked out what was going on and that was the end of Blakeway. I don’t think he’s working at the shop in Burford any more. It sells second-hand books as well, by the way. I’m told Blakeway retains his financial interest but employs a young man to run the shop for him. Where he is now, I’m afraid, nobody knows.’

‘That’s very helpful, very helpful indeed. I shall take a day trip to Burford and see what I can find. What of the others?’

‘I can tell you a little about Michael Moloney Kennedy, the one with his hand in the till,’ the old man said. ‘He’s gone abroad. France, I think? Italy perhaps? Some wealthy relation died while he was in prison and left him a great deal of money. By the time the cash escaped from probate and the lawyers he was out of Wormwood Scrubs and ready to spend it. I’m told it’s doubtful he will ever come back to live in this country. Not that living abroad necessarily rules him out of your business with the Caryatid. You could have planned the thing from anywhere in Europe with the right trips to the right capitals and the right contacts with the right criminals. I’m sure of that.’

‘And what of the other fellow, the one with no name who went to prison for forging old ladies’ wills? Do you have any news of him?’

Josiah Wills Baker stared myopically round the walls of his Eaton Square drawing room, lined with paintings he could no longer see.

‘I have a name for you. Easton, William Tyndale Easton. That’s almost all I know about the fellow. I know nothing of what became of him after his time as a guest of His Majesty. But this much I do know. I’m afraid it’s not what you would want to hear. Of the three who were caught – and heaven knows how many more were up to similar tricks but got away with it – William Tyndale Easton is the most formidable, the cleverest, the one with the most original mind. When I discussed him with one of my colleagues yesterday, the friend said that he was perfectly capable of organizing the theft of the Caryatid. And also perfectly capable of getting away with it.’

The members of the Caryatid Committee had originally expected a small response to their appeal for funds to pay for a reward for the recovery of the marble lady. She was only a statue, after all. Not that many people had been to see her at the British Museum. The citizens would have other things on their minds. But as Tristram Stanhope’s travelling lecture tour and the other talks organized by the schools took off, so did the appeal. Letters poured in from all over the country. The police representatives on the Caryatid Committee insisted that all correspondence had to be checked by a responsible party. At first they installed a retired detective inspector with long experience of major crimes in a small back room in the offices of Finch and Company, Bankers. Then the detective inspector became a detective inspector with two sergeants, seconded from the police station at Charing Cross, and they were transferred to an empty suite of offices on the top floor of the building. The two sergeants weeded out the weird and the fanciful. Anything that looked more serious was sent through to the inspector next door.

There was plenty of the weird and the fanciful and the downright mad in the correspondence. A letter from the West Country claimed that the theft had been organized by the Freemasons as part of their campaign for world domination. Another, from Melton Constable in Norfolk, alleged that the Caryatid had been stolen by a group of pagans who wanted her to represent the Earth Mother in their ceremonies. If the authorities wished to send a representative to the spot called the Devil’s Hallow, three miles north of Swaffham, at the time of the next full moon, they would find the Caryatid there, her neck festooned with garlands. The author enclosed a stamped addressed envelope for the reward. Three people from different parts of the country maintained that the Caryatid had been taken under cover of darkness to an embarkation point in the Thames Estuary. There, she had been placed aboard a German submarine, before being transferred to a German dreadnought. The Caryatid was now in a private room in the Kaiser’s New Palace at Sans Souci Park in Potsdam.

Another correspondent claimed that the Tsar’s chief minister was responsible for the theft. The Caryatid had been taken in a sealed train to St Petersburg and would never be discovered as it was concealed in the depths of the Winter Palace, a place full of unrecorded rooms and corridors nobody ever visited. From these secret quarters the Tsar and his wife could bring her out for private viewings in the dark watches of the night. Alexandra, wife of the Tsar, was said to believe that the Caryatid had special powers relating to fertility and haemophilia.

The police had insisted right from the start that all correspondence should be assessed within forty-eight hours of receipt. The rejects were preserved in large filing cabinets provided by the bank. The more interesting, even the doubtful, went through to the detective inspector whose workload was less arduous but more responsible than his colleagues. Illtyd Williams’s letter fell into the doubtful category.

‘What do you think of this one here,’ the first sergeant said to the second sergeant, ‘big barns in Wales and hammering heard in the night? Enormous coffins being sent away to Bristol for transit to God knows where. Man beaten to death at the end. Throw it in the bin, do you think?’

‘Let’s have a look,’ said the second sergeant who was an avid, if secret, consumer of the wilder reaches of detective fiction. ‘God knows,’ he said after a moment, ‘could be true, mind you. Anything might happen in Wales. Let’s send it through.’

Burford, Powerscourt thought, is really one very long main street running downhill to a fine old church at the bottom. There were a few people about at eleven o’clock in the morning: a vicar walking his dog, a publican bringing barrels out of his cellar, a couple of old ladies armed with wide hats and shopping baskets. Powerscourt thought the place could stand for the essence of England. Even the pubs that lined the main street and the little roads running off it had names resonant with history. There was a Royal Oak and a Highway Inn, a Bull, a Lamb and a Mermaid. In the churchyard at the bottom the dead of England had slept for centuries, Coopers and Farmers and Smiths, some of them lying here since the turmoil of the Civil War. Powerscourt wondered what the Caryatid would make of Burford with its quaint rituals, its weekly market and the fluctuating fortunes of the village cricket team on the village green. She came from a more tumultuous world, not one where the potential extremes of religion and belief had been tamed and watered down into the lowest common denominator of the Authorized Version and the Book of Common Prayer. You could have mysteries involving a descent into Hades, sacred boxes and sacred baskets, mind-altering drugs a key part of the ritual, secrets so secret that disclosure meant death, in Eleusis, but not in Burford. You could have oracles in Delos or Epirus but not in Banbury. The orgy on the island, sacred to the god Dionysus, where Ariadne reeled down the mountain drunk, disorderly and holding something revolting, could happen on Naxos. It couldn’t happen in Oxfordshire, not even in Kingston Bagpuize.

The antique shop had no doubt of its identity. Burford Antiques occupied a prime position halfway down the High Street. Old books filled one of the windows, an elegant Pembroke table the other. Powerscourt was welcomed by a young man who must have been the thinnest individual he had seen in his life. He seemed so skeletal that you wondered if he ever ate anything at all. His nose was long and thin, like its owner, and he had a mop of unruly brown hair.

‘How can I help you, sir?’

Powerscourt resisted the temptation to say that the best thing the young man could do to help would be to have a large meal at once. ‘I was looking for Mr Blakeway, actually. Is he here today?’

The thin young man shook his head. ‘No, he’s not here today, sir. He usually drops in once or twice a week, normally on Saturday afternoons.’

‘Do you have an address where I could find him, by any chance?’

The thin young man sighed, as if he was asked this question more often than he would have liked. Was Powerscourt just another debt collector or a man yet to be paid for his antiques? Did Mr Blakeway still consort with his former fellow inmates in Wormwood Scrubs?

‘I’m afraid not, sir.’

‘Surely you must be able to contact him in an emergency?’

‘I could,’ said the young man defiantly, ‘but that doesn’t mean I’m to hand the address to any Tom, Dick or Harry who comes along.’

Powerscourt thought this was the first time in his life he had been compared to any Tom, Dick or Harry who came along. It was a whole new experience. He thought he rather liked it. But he didn’t want to make a scene that might be reported back to the elusive Mr Blakeway.

‘Never mind,’ he said, ‘another time perhaps. A very good morning to you.’

The landlords at the Royal Oak next door and the Lamb across the street had no memories of Mr Blakeway. Neither had their companions in arms at the Bull or the Mermaid. Maybe Mr Blakeway was teetotal. Powerscourt caught up with the vicar, the Reverend Matthew Carey, and his dog just as he was going back in to his Old Rectory with the River Windrush meandering along the bottom of his garden. The vicar’s wife provided coffee and home-made cake.

‘Please forgive me for taking your time, Vicar, I am an investigator, I’m afraid, employed by the British Museum, to look into the disappearance of the Caryatid.’

‘Goodness gracious,’ said the vicar, ‘you don’t think she’s here, do you, here in Burford?’ He looked around him suddenly as if the statue might be hiding behind a bookcase.

‘Certainly not,’ said Powerscourt with a smile. ‘But I was rather hoping to talk to your Mr Blakeway, the man who owns the antiques shop halfway up the High Street.’

‘That Mr Blakeway,’ said the vicar with a sigh, ‘I didn’t think we’d heard the last of him, even when he went away.’

‘Were you suspicious of him in some way?’

‘Well, no, not exactly. He came to church fairly often when he first arrived, but I never felt his heart was in it. I don’t think he was a believer, if you know what I mean.’

‘So why do you think he came to your services then?’

‘I never worked that out. My wife saw him once when I was reading the prayers with his eyes wide open, staring at the stained glass. I don’t think that is normal behaviour.’

‘No, indeed,’ said Powerscourt reflecting on the innocence of a world where a man could be marked out for keeping his eyes open during prayers. ‘Do you think he came to make friends? He must have been a newcomer to Burford at that time, surely?’

‘I don’t think that was the case. We have a number of social gatherings, mainly for the old and the lonely, though we’re not meant to say that, but he was never seen at any of those.’

The vicar went over and stood by his window, watching the birds on the lawn. A swan floated by with that irritating air of complete superiority.

‘May I ask you a question, Lord Powerscourt?’

‘Of course.’

‘Is Mr Blakeway a suspect in some way for the theft of the Caryatid? It seems scarcely possible that such a crime could be conceived here in Burford.’

‘No, I wouldn’t say he was a suspect,’ said Powerscourt, but something in his tone did not convince the Reverend Carey.

‘But he is, isn’t he? You’re just being prudent, and quite rightly so. Goodness me, a master criminal here in Oxfordshire, it doesn’t bear thinking about!’

‘Not so fast, vicar, you’re running away with yourself.’

‘I’m sure you’re right, Lord Powerscourt. Martha always tells me I mustn’t rush to judgement. But thinking about crime and Mr Blakeway in the same sentence does give me another idea. I wonder if it’s correct, it might well be.’

‘What is this idea, vicar?’

‘Suppose Mr Blakeway is a man with a past, a record, as I believe people in your profession refer to it. He comes to Burford, because it is so peaceful. He goes to church because that’s what he thinks people here do. But it was all a cover; he was trying to persuade us he was one sort of man when in fact he was somebody completely different. We were cover, matins, Holy Communion, evensong, all used for a purpose totally different from what the church fathers intended. What do you think of that?’

‘I think you might well be right,’ said Powerscourt, and he did.

Inspector Jack Hegarty was enjoying his return to active service on the top floor of Finch’s Bank in Finsbury Circus between Moorgate and Liverpool Street station. During his time with the Met he had served all over London, ending up in the crime-filled quarters of Catford and Rotherhithe. His wife was, if anything, even more pleased than her husband about his return to the colours. Having grown accustomed over many decades to Jack’s irregular hours, frequent absences, sometimes not returning home until three or four in the morning, and general unpredictable behaviour, she found his regular appearances at meal times, as regular as the clock he had been given as a retirement present, rather a strain.

The Inspector had lost count of the number of letters he had read claiming the reward for the recovery of the lost Caryatid. Privately he felt certain that good police work rather than the efforts of a pack of amateurs, many of them, in his view, clinically insane, would secure the return of the statue. He was nearing the end of a four-page missive from Crewe in which its author claimed that the most likely means of transportation for the missing Athenian lady would be a railway container. His correspondent helpfully provided a number of diagrams of the things, and lists showing the various dimensions of different sorts of container. There were a lot of exclamation marks, and in a number of key places the conclusions were underlined with bright red ink. In spite of all that, the Inspector added it to a small pile he was going to discuss with his colleague Christopher Kingsley later that day. The man probably works on the bloody railways if he lives in Crewe, he said to himself. His next letter came from Wales. There were no drawings and no underlinings in red ink. One section fascinated him. He read it three times. It spoke of a man kicked to death, stamped on, cigarette burns on his arms. Bells were ringing in the Inspector’s brain. It took him a moment to remember why this account stirred his memory. One of his many protégés, a young inspector called Ferguson, was now working in Deptford. He had horrific stories of the exploits of some violent gangsters called the Twins who specialized in gangland punishments and executions, including cigarette burns. There was no mention in Illtyd Williams’s letter of any twins, but there was a reference to two people who came from London.