Death of an Elgin Marble (28 page)

‘Of course.’

‘Let me assure you of one thing before we leave your house, Mr Williams. Before I leave South Wales I’m going to arrange with the local police for a guard, a watch, to be put on certain people in this town. Knowing what I do now, I don’t think for a moment that you are in any danger. But I propose to put your name on the list. I hope that will help set your mind at rest. I don’t think it will be for very long.’

Ringer and Sons, the local undertakers, had a discreet office in the High Street opposite the Methodist Chapel. The ring on the door was answered by a spotty young man with filthy brown hair who looked as though he hadn’t washed for a week. Inspector Ferguson thought he was not the best advertisement for the firm.

‘Now then, young Gareth, is your father at home?’ Inspector Davies began. ‘This gentleman here would like to speak to him.’

Billy Ferguson smiled at the boy. ‘Just a matter of routine,’ he said.

‘Well, you can’t,’ said Gareth Ringer, ‘speak to him, I mean. He’s not here.’

‘Has he just popped out to see a client perhaps? Are you expecting him back soon?’

‘He’s not here,’ the young Ringer replied triumphantly, ‘he’s gone away. He’s gone away on business, so he said. He didn’t say when he would be back.’

‘And you have no idea where he’s gone, I suppose?’ Inspector Ferguson often wished he had a pound for all the people he wished to speak to who had been called away on business. The world was a very busy place. They didn’t always come back.

‘I have no idea at all.’

‘No,’ said Inspector Davies sadly, ‘I don’t suppose you do.’

‘Could I speak to Mrs Ringer, please? Is she still at home?’ Inspector Ferguson had little hope of succour from the temporarily abandoned wife, but the formalities had to be gone through.

‘She’s just next door. I can’t stop you speaking to her,’ said the boy in a tone that implied he wished he could.

‘And while Inspector Ferguson is next door with your mother perhaps you could show me the company records for the last three months.’ Inspector Davies headed off towards the back room where the records were kept. He didn’t mention what he was looking for but he hoped to find further details of certain transactions with a firm in Bristol some time before.

Half an hour later the two Inspectors met up again outside the undertakers.

‘I hope you had more joy than I did,’ said Inspector Ferguson. ‘That bloody woman managed to say nothing at all for well over twenty minutes. I don’t think she knows enough to be frightened, not of nasty people coming down from London anyway. Maybe she’s frightened of the undertaker she’s married to. But however he did it, he’s certainly managed to shut her up good and proper. What about you?’

‘Well,’ said Inspector Davies, ‘it’s more bad news, I’m afraid. I had a good look at those records. I never thought about it before but there’s a remarkable amount of traffic in corpses going round South Wales all the time. A lot of people don’t die in their beds as they’re supposed to. They die on a visit to their relations, or on business, or on their holidays. Our friend Lucas Ringer was forever sending bodies off to Cardiff or Bridgend and waiting for his own dead to come home from wherever they’d passed away.’

‘Giants’ coffins?’ asked Inspector Ferguson. ‘In transit to Bristol perhaps?’

‘There’s the interesting thing.’ Inspector Davies checked his notes carefully. ‘For a period of two weeks a couple of months ago the records have disappeared. They’ve been cut out of the ledger with a sharp knife, I should say. There is no record here of any traffic with Bristol or anywhere else for that time. All the written records have vanished.’

‘Francis, I think you’d better stop reading that boring newspaper and pay attention. You’re going to love this.’

‘Love what? Love whom, Lucy?’ Powerscourt put down his copy of
The Times
and looked across at his wife. It was breakfast time in Markham Square. The children had all gone off to be educated. He saw that she had an official-looking document in her hands. He was well used to mysterious packages, sent under plain cover from provincial estate agents with details of desirable properties in the West Country or in the remoter parts of Norfolk. These were always carefully filed in one of Lady Lucy’s plain folders with the boring name ‘House Improvements’ on the spine for further inspection when her husband was out.

‘You remember telling me,’ Lady Lucy began, ‘that the poor dead porter from the British Museum, the man run over by a train or something, used to work at a place near Amersham called the Hellenic College?’

‘I do,’ Powerscourt replied.

‘Well,’ Lady Lucy went on, ‘I rang them up yesterday and asked them to send me some information about the place. This—’ she waved a brochure over the remains of the toast ‘—is what they sent. It’s full of useful facts about the school. Situated, apparently, on the edge of a great park full of statues and reproductions of ancient temples like they have at Stowe. There’s a scale model of the Parthenon, apparently. And the College themselves are building a replica of that later temple on the Acropolis called the Erechtheion. That’s nearly finished, it says here. They have close links with the Greek Orthodox Church, compulsory Sunday school with the bearded Fathers, and do everything in their power to re-create the atmosphere and values of Greece in a different culture.’

‘Did you say they were building an Erechtheion, my love? That’s where the Caryatid came from, as you know. Any word of marble maidens holding up the porch, that sort of thing?’

‘Not yet, but you never know.’

‘I think I should go and see this place,’ said Powerscourt. ‘I would dearly like to know why they are embarking on this building programme.’

‘Maybe I should go, Francis. I could be a devoted mother looking for a place for her children. Greek husband is away on business much of the year and insists his wife goes with him. What sort of Greek husband would you like to be, my love? Banker? Shipping magnate with interests all over Greece and the Near East? Raisin importer?’

‘I think I’ll be an import export merchant, if that’s all right with you, Lucy. Maybe I could have a chain of shops in the Greek districts like that one near Moscow Road.’

‘Very good,’ said Lady Lucy happily, ‘but I haven’t told you the best bit.’

‘What’s that?’ said Powerscourt.

‘Well, you’ve got to look at the staff list quite carefully. After Mr Avramopoulos and Mr Livieratos and Mr Roupakitosis we have an English name. The person is described as Senior Educational Consultant in Greek and Roman studies.’

‘And who might this lucky fellow be?’

‘Why, Francis,’ Lady Lucy put her brochure on the table next to the teapot, ‘he is none other than the Head of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the British Museum, Dr Tristram Stanhope.’

‘Five feet ten inches tall. Broad chested. Built like barrels rather than humans if you see what I mean. One of them has a scar on his left cheek. Otherwise they’re identical.’

Inspector Ferguson was giving a description of the Twins to Eli Postgate, landlord of the Green Dragon where the visitors from London had met with Carwyn Jones on the last day of his life.

‘Does that ring any bells, Mr Postgate?’

‘I don’t remember the visitors very well. I seem to remember they sat in a corner. They didn’t come near the bar at all.’

Inspector Ferguson nodded. The Twins always stayed in the background. Nobody would be keen to identify them anyway. And if they were virtually invisible, so much the better.

‘I have to ask you this, Mr Postgate. Would you be prepared to swear that the Twins were the two visitors from London who came to your bar with the undertaker and the teacher all those weeks ago?’

‘No, I couldn’t do that,’ said Postgate, and Inspector Ferguson felt that the normal cloud of uncertainty and reluctance to bear witness had followed him all the way from Deptford to South Wales. ‘I didn’t know they came from London, see. I didn’t hear them speak. They could have come from Talybont as far as I knew. Or Timbuktu for that matter.’

‘Never mind, Mr Postgate, you’ve been very helpful.’ Inspector Ferguson stared at the publican’s back as he made his way to attend to his other customers in the public bar. In spite of all the problems, he felt that his trip to the valleys had been worthwhile. The Twins had indeed come to Brecon. They had, almost certainly, killed Carwyn Jones, though he had no witnesses and could never bring them to trial.

‘Gentlemen,’ he said to his two colleagues and the three local policemen, ‘let the Met buy you a drink before I ask for your further assistance.’

A couple of minutes later, with six pints on the table, Inspector Ferguson made his requests.

‘I think we need to keep a close eye on one or two of the locals, if you don’t mind,’ he began. ‘That school teacher fellow for a start. He’s scared out of his wits already by the death of his colleague, and though I tried to persuade him that he’s perfectly safe, I’m sure he’d sleep better if he felt the police were keeping an eye out for him. Then there’s the undertaker person, Lucas Ringer. Have any of you gentlemen any idea where he might have gone? Relations or family in other parts of Wales perhaps?’

‘Don’t you worry. We’ll put the word out for you,’ said Inspector Davies. ‘Nobody goes missing in Wales for very long. Mind you, we’ve had our eyes on Mr Ringer for some time.’

‘And why is that, might I ask?’

‘We suspect he’s been involved in criminal behaviour, handling stolen goods, acting as a courier or providing transport for the big boys from Cardiff and Bristol. It’s amazing what you can hide inside a coffin. Nobody’s going to be in a hurry to look inside, are they. It was no surprise to hear he’d been mixed up in these stories of bangings in the night and so on.’

‘Really,’ said Inspector Ferguson, before taking a long drink from his glass. ‘Who knows? Who knows indeed? Maybe our friend Mr Lucas Ringer has got a little out of his depth.’

Years later, in the comfort of his retirement in a pretty cottage in the Cotswolds, Theophilus Ragg would look back on this time of the Lost Caryatid as the worst period in his life.

The days passed. Policemen came to talk to him. Reporters pestered him for more quotations on the steps of his building. He felt, he knew, that hostile rumours were already flying around the corridors of the museum. Any building that housed the remains and the statues of so many tyrants and human monsters was bound to contain some hidden residue of venom, of poison leaching from the stone and marble past into the present. Rumour, he remembered Virgil’s lines from
The Aeneid
, is of all pests the swiftest. They said that the theft of the Caryatid was his fault, that he should have taken more trouble with the security. He was too old. He should be sacked. If only, the whispers went, the place was run by a man with real vision like the Head of Greek and Roman Antiquities, this would never have happened. Ragg was certain that this particular untruth originated from Tristram Stanhope himself.

Towards closing time, when the museum was nearly empty, the Deputy Director haunted the plinth where the Caryatid had stood. His curators told him that more people were now coming to look at the empty space where the statue had stood than came to see her when she was at home in her glory and her hauteur. He also haunted the foyer and the reception rooms of the Ritz Hotel in Piccadilly, searching for a sight of the man who had driven him round London in the dark. Sometimes he would start and move rapidly towards a figure disappearing out of a distant door but he never found the person he sought. At night he prayed for deliverance.

‘I’ve got some interesting news, my lord.’ John Hudson, the young man who worked for the
New York Times
, was taking off his gloves in the Powerscourt drawing room. ‘It comes from my colleague and friend Franklin in New York.’

‘It must concern the millionaire with the eye for a fake, Lincoln Mitchell, was that his name?’

‘Correct, my lord, well remembered. Now then, Franklin thought of writing to the man and asking for an interview. That is the normal practice on the
Times
. It usually works. But something told him that he might be fobbed off. So he decided to call at Mitchell’s house on the pretext that he was on his way back to the city after visiting a friend who was studying at West Point. It would be on the off chance that the great collector would be at home, nothing important.’

Hudson paused and checked a letter in his hand.

‘So what happened? Was the Caryatid hiding in the attics?’

‘We don’t know. She could have been standing to attention in the hall or taking tea with the millionaire in the drawing room or posing in the gallery attached to the house. Franklin never got past the front door. A rather flustered butler – Franklin’s own words – greeted him and reported that Mr Mitchell was suffering from an infectious disease which made it impossible for him to receive visitors. Mr Mitchell was very sorry. He would be more than happy to welcome Franklin another day.’

‘And did your friend Franklin believe the story?’

‘No, my lord. The story was plausible, the butler’s delivery was not. He sounded, my friend reported, like a man who has been told that telling lies is a sin from a very early age and is, therefore, hopeless at telling them. There is more, however.’

John Hudson turned to another page of his letter. ‘We reporters are curious people by nature, my lord. That’s probably one reason why we become reporters in the first place. Anyway, Franklin spent some time ferreting about in the village near the millionaire’s mansion. The
New York Times
, he reported, was happy to dispense generous hospitality to the clients of the Red Fox Inn. Thirsty folk, these country people apparently, but two pieces of gossip emerged which Franklin thought worth passing on across the Atlantic. The first was that an extension had recently been built to the great gallery attached to the house where Mr Mitchell deploys his finest works. And the second concerned a van driver from New York City who had asked in the Red Fox for directions to the Mitchell establishment. The porter who helped him on his way was of the opinion that this must be a fairly bulky delivery because the van was large and, unusually, had no names written on the side. It was, apparently, Franklin said, an anonymous van. Most of them have displays of the owners’ names and businesses in huge letters on the sides and at the back. Not this one.’