Death of an Old Master (13 page)

‘How right you are, Mr McCracken,’ Piper smiled. ‘Absolutely correct.’ And, he said to himself, I shall certainly drink a glass of champagne with you this evening. The
Gainsborough, after all, was something very special.

Lady Lucy intercepted her husband as he was hanging up his coat in Markham Square. ‘Francis,’ she whispered, ‘that young man from the gallery is here.
He’s waiting for you upstairs.’

‘Is he a nice young man, Lucy?’ asked Powerscourt with a smile. ‘Why are you whispering?’ Powerscourt was at the bottom of the stairs now. Lady Lucy put her hand on his
arm.

‘It’s Christopher Montague, Francis.’

‘What about him?’ said her husband, his mind already engaged with Jason Lockhart of Clarke’s Gallery, presumably sitting peacefully in the Powerscourt drawing room.

‘It’s this.’ Lady Lucy’s whisper was even quieter now. ‘Somebody left Christopher Montague a great deal of money about six months before he died.’

‘Did they indeed?’ said Powerscourt, fresh avenues of investigation opening up before him. ‘How do you know?’

‘I bumped into a cousin of mine coming out of the shops in Sloane Square. I’d been buying clothes for the children. Sarah, you know Sarah, Francis, you met her at Jonathan’s
wedding a couple of years ago, she said everybody in the family knew about it.’

Jason Lockhart of Clarke’s Gallery was sitting nervously on the sofa. He was about thirty-five years old, wearing a dark blue suit with a white shirt and a discreet tie. ‘Lord
Powerscourt,’ he said, ‘I came as soon as I could when I received your note. My apologies to your wife for arriving before you had returned. How can I help you in your
inquiries?’

‘You were going to start a magazine, I believe,’ said Powerscourt, thinking about Lockhart’s voice. He sounded very like most of the other inhabitants of Old Bond Street but
there was something wrong about the vowels. ‘With Christopher Montague. What can you tell me about it?’

‘It was going to be called
The Rembrandt
,’ said Lockhart, ‘a magazine for the art connoisseur.’

‘And what about the article by Christopher Montague, Mr Lockhart? Did you read it?’

‘I did not,’ said Jason Lockhart, ‘but I knew what it was going to say.’ Powerscourt waited. ‘The article was going to be called “Fakes and Forgeries in
Venetian Painting”. It was based on the exhibition that recently opened at the de Courcy and Piper Gallery. There are something like thirty-two paintings supposed to be by Titian. Christopher
thought only two, maybe three, were genuine. Fifteen Giorgiones, only four by the master. Twelve Giovanni Bellinis, only one by the hand of Bellini himself.’

Master, thought Powerscourt, returning to Lockhart’s voice, master spoken with a very short a. Somewhere in the north of England? Yorkshire perhaps?

‘Forgive me,’ said Powerscourt with a smile, ‘forgive me for asking such a stupid question. But how does a gallery like yours or de Courcy and Piper know whether a painting is
genuine or not?’

Jason Lockhart laughed. ‘That’s just the point, Lord Powerscourt. The gallery finds as many works of Titian or Giorgione as it can. It arranges with the owners to lend them to the
exhibition, to be returned or sold afterwards. The gallery always accepts the attribution of the lenders. If the Duke of Tewkesbury says his Titian is a Titian, then the gallery accepts that it is,
indeed, a Titian. There’s always a clause in the small print of the catalogue that all attributions are the owners’ not the gallery’s. That lets the gallery off the
hook.’

Powerscourt had decided that the original accent, now heavily overladen with the upper crust of Mayfair, was definitely Yorkshire. ‘I see,’ he said. ‘So the Christopher
Montague article would have been a bombshell. It would have offended everybody, the owners, the galleries, the dealers, the purchasers who would not have known whether they had bought the real
thing or a fake.’

‘Exactly,’ said Lockhart. ‘There was absolutely nothing else that could have offended so many people so deeply.’

‘Would de Courcy and Piper have been hardest hit,’ asked Powerscourt, ‘seeing that it was their exhibition that was being torn to pieces?’

‘Initially, yes,’ admitted Lockhart. ‘They would have been very hard hit. But it wouldn’t have taken long for it to emerge that every other gallery behaved in exactly the
same way.’

‘And what of your position in your own gallery?’ said Powerscourt, his mind racing. ‘Would your employers have been pleased that you were associated with such a
venture?’

‘They knew all about it,’ said Lockhart. ‘I suspect they thought it might be enough to force de Courcy and Piper out of business altogether. All’s fair in love and war in
Old Bond Street, Lord Powerscourt, believe me.’

Powerscourt remembered the Italian books Christopher Montague had taken out of the London Library or ordered from elsewhere. ‘What did the article say about the false Titians, Mr Lockhart?
That they were bought on the Grand Tour, and the buyers were deceived by unscrupulous dealers?’

Lockhart looked at a painting of the lower Himalayas on Powerscourt’s wall, purchased since his return from India. Powerscourt wondered if he was going to pronounce it a forgery.

‘Christopher thought that was where most of them had come from,’ he said. ‘But there was something else. Christopher intended to say that at least three, if not four, of the
paintings on display were very recent forgeries. That would have caused a sensation.’

‘And what of these Americans, the very rich ones who have been buying works of art at a fairly rapid rate lately? Have they all been taken in? Have they spent their thousands of dollars on
junk?’

‘God knows, Lord Powerscourt, God only knows.’

One thing struck Powerscourt with absolute certainty as he showed Jason Lockhart out of his house. The real beneficiary, the absolute winner out of the whole affair would have been Christopher
Montague himself. His second book was about to come out. His article destroyed the provenance of most of the Venetian masterpieces in England. Who could a poor purchaser turn to in order to be sure
that his Veronese was genuine? That his Tintoretto wasn’t a forgery? That his Giorgione wasn’t a fake? Why, the expert was at hand. Christopher Montague is your man. Powerscourt
wondered how much he would charge for verifying the attribution of the masterpieces. Ten per cent? Fifteen? Twenty-five? He might have inherited a large sum in the past six months, but he was about
to become richer yet. Much richer. Was there somebody else in the London art world who enjoyed this position of Attributer in Chief at present? Would such a somebody want Montague dead?

The rats. They would have to do something about the rats. They had become quite shameless, no longer bothering to scuttle away into the wainscoting or disappear through the
holes in the floorboards. Soon they would be sitting up in rows and demanding food, or eating away at the paintings. Orlando Blane walked up the length of the Long Gallery, hoping against hope that
the sound of his footsteps would drive them away.

As he reached the end of the room he stared sadly out of one of the five great windows. Outside it was a blustery autumn day. Chaos was continuing its relentless advance across the gardens. The
roses had run wild, threatening to strangle the other flowers that had once lain beside them in neat ordered beds. The fountain in the centre of the garden had long ceased to flow. The cheeky
statue of Eros on the top was turning a dark metallic green. Way over to his left he could still see the edge of the lake, the water dark and forbidding. In the summer evenings Orlando had been
allowed to wander round its rim, the watchful guard the regulation twenty steps behind.

Orlando Blane was a prisoner. He was still not absolutely sure where he was. Occasionally he thought he could smell the sea. The vast house, unoccupied now except for himself and his jailers,
sat alone in its thousands of acres, the long drive to the nearest road blocked by a rough barricade of trees. There were four of them, watching round the clock to make sure he did not escape. He
was forbidden alcohol, even weak or watered beer, for alcohol had played its part in his downfall. His function was to paint to order, for Orlando Blane was a very talented artist. In better times,
with a less chequered past, he might have had a prosperous career in London or Paris.

He stared down the Long Gallery at his work for the day. On his stretcher a painting was beginning to take shape, a painting that bore a remarkable similarity to a Gainsborough.

Orlando looked out at the dark clouds swirling across a stormy sky. He thought about Imogen, the great love of his life, now hundreds of miles away. No, he would not think about Imogen. His mind
went off, entirely of its own accord, to the French Riviera five months before. He saw again the mesmerizing turn of the roulette wheel, he heard the tiny click as the ball dropped into its slot.
He heard again the measured voice of the croupier,
rien ne va plus
, no more bets, the gamblers waiting, watching for the little ball to fall into its slot once more. He remembered five days
of triumph at the tables. Even now, he still shook slightly as he thought of the sixth day when everything went wrong and his world changed for ever.

The colours. Maybe it was his training that made him remember things so vividly, the dark grey, almost black, of the sea as he walked the mile and a half from the casino in Monte Carlo back to
his cheap lodgings along the coast at three or four o’clock in the morning. The first faint lines of yellow on the horizon as the sun came up to bring in a new dawn, the pale blue water that
had deepened to azure by the time he woke up, the delicate pinks of the setting sun as he set out once more for the gambling tables. The green of the roulette table. The bright red on which he
staked so much. The shiny polished black that eventually claimed his fortune.

Orlando remembered the private language of the roulette wheel, spoken in the soft but authoritative voice of the croupier.
Pair
meant betting on an even number,
impair
on an odd
one.
Passe
for a winning number between nineteen and thirty-six,
impasse
for one between nought and eighteen.
Rouge
for red,
noir
for black,
le rouge et le noir
that had dominated all his thoughts during his sojourn at the wheel. Nought for the casino, the one factor that gave the proprietors a slight mathematical edge over the gamblers who had come to
break the bank.

He had been playing on a system all his own. On his very first visit to the casino, Orlando had merely watched. A very fat Frenchman had won a great deal of money. A slim blond Englishman had
lost a great deal. A beautifully dressed Italian had made a small amount. For three nights Orlando watched one table. He placed the odd bet to pay his rent at the casino. He noted the fall of every
ball in a red notebook. He saw one of the supervisors whispering something to one of his companions – here was a man developing a system all his own. The casinos loved people with systems.
They welcomed them with open arms and vintage champagne once they were established players. Generous credit was offered to those with the right connections. For the casinos knew that all systems
were doomed to fail. Even with the one European zero as against the American two or even three, Orlando had heard, in the wilder gambling saloons of the Midwest, the odds were always stacked in
favour of the bank.

Orlando Blane had gone to Monte Carlo to seek financial salvation, to make a fortune. He had no money of his own, only debts. He was wildly, hopelessly in love with Imogen Jeffries, only
daughter of a rich London lawyer. Orlando would see her in his daytime dreams in his little cot in the back room of his
auberge
, looking out over the train tracks and the wild countryside
behind the sea. She was tall and dark, with teasing grey-blue eyes. She moved with a sinuous grace that took his breath away and she held him very close in her arms when she kissed him goodbye at
the railway station on his journey to the south of France. Imogen’s father, a man obsessed with his property, its size, its prospects, its ability to support generations of unborn Jeffries
far into the future, absolutely refused to agree to his daughter marrying a penniless man. Most girls, Orlando thought, would have tried to deter their beloved from staking their joint futures on
the spin of a small wheel in Monte Carlo. Imogen had been entranced. Danger called her like a drug.

‘Come back rich, my darling,’ she had said to him. ‘Then I can hold you in my arms all night long. Come back ever so rich.’

As he studied his red book Orlando came to an interesting conclusion. The table he had watched showed a very slight tendency to produce reds rather than blacks. Many people, he remembered,
played a variety of a system called Martingale, made famous by Sir Francis Clavering in Thackeray’s
Pendennis
, who lost enormous sums through his blind belief in its efficiency. The
system depended on waiting for a run of five successive blacks. Then, on the sixth spin, a bet was placed on red. If the winning number was black again, the bet was doubled. And so on through a
vast variety of permutations. But Orlando knew there was a fault at the heart of the Martingale system. Its adherents believed that after five blacks in a row the odds must be in favour of a red
next time. They were not. They were exactly the same each time. The wheel has no memory of where the ball landed last time round. Each time there was a fifty-fifty chance of red or black turning
up. He resolved to bet in moderate amounts on red. Red after all was Imogen’s favourite colour. Nothing else. No almighty chance on a single number with odds of thirty-six to one against. No
combinations of numbers, no
pair
, no
impair
, no
passe.
Just red.
Mesdames et messieurs, je vous en prie. Faites vos jeux.

Orlando remembered being very nervous the first night he gambled seriously. The minimum stake was one thousand francs, just under ten pounds in English money. Orlando had one thousand pounds
working capital, handed over to him out of Imogen’s bank accounts. He gambled the minimum stake which paid out the same amount if you won. One thousand francs would bring you another
thousand. He brought a sketchbook with him. Sometimes while he watched he would dash off lightning drawings, character sketches of the croupiers or his fellow gamblers. He backed red eighteen times
in all. If the law of averages had been perfect he would have won nine and lost nine. The law of averages was not perfect that first night. He won twelve times and lost six. The croupiers smiled at
him as he left to collect his winnings. Gambling with such small stakes was never going to be a problem for the Société des Jeux de Monte Carlo. On his trial run Orlando had made
sixty pounds.