The Raphael Affair (16 page)

They parted at the next corner, Bottando walking northwards, slowly, absent-mindedly and morosely; she with the brisk step of a person who cannot remain bothered and overburdened for too long.

∗  ∗  ∗

Argyll was at home this time, let her in, and burbled happily about his day for the first few minutes, not letting Flavia get a word in edgeways. She sat quietly and waited for him to stop.

‘There’s nothing like the prospect of spending the rest of your life in jail to make you get a move on,’ he said. ‘I reckon if my supervisor had threatened to send me to Wormwood Scrubs for a year or two, I could have had my thesis finished ages ago.’

He gestured over to a desk piled high with files, filecards, used coffee cups and stacks of paper. ‘See that? I’ve been working like a demon all day.’

‘All day?’ she asked quietly.

‘Yup. Non-stop. Quite possessed I was. I’ve got it down to about twenty possibles. Assuming, that is, that it exists at all. But if I didn’t assume that, I’d lose heart. With a bit of luck I’ll be off your list of potential jail fodder within a week or so.’

‘All day?’ she repeated. ‘What about when I came round at seven?’

He paused. ‘Oh. I’d forgotten all about that. That’s what comes of concentrating. You were meant to come round, weren’t you?’

She nodded. ‘And I did. At seven. And you weren’t here.’

‘Yes I was. I’d just forgotten all about it. I had my Walkman on, so I suppose I didn’t hear the bell.’

‘Was anyone else here? Can anyone give you an alibi?’

Argyll looked flustered. ‘An alibi? For heaven’s sake! Of course not. I was here all on my own. I know it
was careless of me. I’m sorry. But is it really such a big thing?’

‘Yes,’ she said. And explained why. The colour drained from his cheeks as she spoke.

‘So you think I slipped out, knifed him, came home and pretended I’d been here all the time, not hearing you because of the music?’

‘Fits the facts, doesn’t it?’

‘Rather well,’ he agreed unhappily. ‘Except, of course, that it’s not at all what I was doing. I was here.’

He rummaged around in Beckett’s drinks cupboard, pulled out a bottle of grappa and poured a healthy glassful. ‘I don’t suppose he’d object in the circumstances.’ He took a heavy suck on the glass, coughed slightly, then offered her a drink herself. She declined.

‘I suppose,’ he restarted with some hesitation, ferociously scratching the top of his head in a way that indicated profound misgivings inside, ‘I suppose that what I was planning to do next will make things worse.’

He stopped, and she gazed at him enquiringly. ‘I was about to tell you,’ he went on, ‘that to finish the search for this picture I would have to go to look at some things in London. I was thinking of going tomorrow.’

He looked at her hopefully. ‘Remarkable timing,’ she said sarcastically. ‘Especially considering that Byrnes headed off for England this evening as well.’

It was not the reassurance that Argyll had been looking for. Indeed, it made him even less comfortable. The drink rested on the floor, completely forgotten.

‘So it would look better if I stayed here?’

‘It would look better. But practically speaking, I suppose, it might be better if you went. As long as I go with you and you tell me exactly where you’ll be at every moment of the day. One more slip and I’ll pull you in. And I mean that. Depending on what turns up, I might do it anyway. Agreed?’

He nodded. ‘I suppose so. I’m grateful for your trust in me.’

‘Don’t be sarcastic. And I don’t trust you. Except, of course, that I find it difficult to believe that anyone could have forged a picture like that and act as dimwittedly as you have. At the moment the only thing you’ve got going for you is stupidity. You’re very lucky not to be in a cell already.’

So, sometimes you say the wrong thing. Flavia could, at times, be a little harsh in her conversational gambits, and the characteristic tended to show itself when she was tired or frustrated. This evening she was both of these, and worried as well. The combination eroded the natural kindness which generally masked her occasional tinge of verbal brutality.

Argyll, however, disregarded these extenuating circumstances and exploded.

‘I think we ought to get one thing clear here,’ he began coldly. ‘I never said that picture was a Raphael, I simply came out to Rome to check. I went by the rulebook, not making claims I couldn’t substantiate or prove. Whatever happened thereafter was nothing to do with me. So remember that. Secondly, it was me, not you, who first suggested it might be a fake. If it wasn’t for my research, which you sneer at so much, you’d be running around
wringing your hands at the loss of a masterpiece. Thirdly, you don’t have any evidence against me at all. If you had, you’d have locked me up already. So don’t imply you’re doing me any favours.

‘And finally, at the moment, you need my help more than I need yours. If you think you can find that picture on your own, go ahead. But you can’t. I can, maybe. And I’m not going to help you if I’m going to be subjected to sneering little taunts from you all the time. Is that clear?’

On the whole, it was not a bad speech at all. Later on, lying in bed, thinking about it and making little improvements for the benefit of posterity, he was struck by his simple eloquence. Forceful, no-nonsense stuff, in fact. He was quite pleased with himself. Opportunities for righteous indignation come up only very infrequently, and he normally never thought of the appropriately devastating response until, on average, about forty-five minutes afterwards.

More satisfying still, it stopped the voluble Italian woman dead in her tracks. He was ordinarily very mild-mannered; his expressions of rage were most visibly expressed in a faint look of distress or a mumbled sentence of mild disapproval. Oratory was quite out of character and the suddenness of the speech, combined with the real feeling that apparently went into it, momentarily caught Flavia unawares. She stared at him in surprise, dismissed the temptation to fire back a full broadside, then apologised.

‘I’m sorry. It’s been a bad day. Truce? No more comments until you’re cleared?’

He stumped around the room, closed the curtains, shut a cupboard door or two while he worked off his indignation, then nodded. ‘Or arrested, I suppose,’ he added. ‘OK. A deal. When do we leave?’

‘There’s a plane at seven-thirty. I shall pick you up here at six-thirty.’

‘That early? How horrible.’

‘Get used to it,’ she said as she got ready to leave. ‘In Italian prisons they wake you up at five…Sorry,’ she added quickly. ‘Shouldn’t have said that.’

11

Not to be outworked by his assistant, Bottando was sitting down at his desk, the inevitable coffee before him, around the same time that Flavia and Argyll were boarding the plane for London. In the cold light of dawn, he was less than convinced that letting either of them go was a good idea.

But he’d allowed himself to be persuaded by her arguments. Which were, essentially, that as things stood they had no real evidence of anything at all; that if Argyll was guilty he had to be allowed to make some mistake, and if he was innocent he had to find that picture, or prove that it didn’t exist and the one in the museum had been genuine. Besides which, as she somewhat tactlessly pointed out, they’d made so many mistakes so far in this business, one more would hardly make any great difference.

The comment accented the still ferocious assaults in the newspapers that lay before him. They had discovered
about Manzoni, and were painting lurid pictures about what they had now dubbed the ‘museum of murder’. Tommaso had been no friendlier when he’d told him of the latest developments. He’d been clearly upset about the restorer’s demise, no doubt concluding that, if this whole thing was a plot against him, then he might be next in line for a knife in the back.

Bottando had misjudged that man, it was clear. In the immediate aftermath of the party, the director had presented a humble, subdued, almost likeable side, though this was evidently an uncharacteristic reaction brought on by shock, because it wasn’t lasting. Tommaso was now getting very nervous, tense and short-tempered; not that such a condition stopped the politician in him operating at full power. He was manoeuvring with all the grace of a synchronised swimmer, rapidly and successfully shifting all blame on to the committee, Spello, and Bottando’s department. Already stories hinting something along those lines had appeared in one of the papers.

One thing was certain. Bottando felt himself getting too old for this sort of thing. Wearily, he counted up the forces and assessed his chances. On his side, he had the ministry of defence, who could be counted on to look after him. He thought. Against him, he had the newspapers, the arts ministry, the interior ministry, and Tommaso. The treasury represented a floating vote, whose mind would be made up by the chances of getting its money back.

If they ever got that far. According to the legal department in the arts ministry, the contract stated clearly that
if the picture was a fake, the seller – that is Edward Byrnes – would have to refund. Any loss of a genuine picture would be borne by the state. If Byrnes was telling the truth, if he hadn’t owned the picture and didn’t have the money, he’d still have to refund. But, as the man had told Flavia, the picture was gone. So the only way of proving it was a fake was to find the original.

Essentially, it came down to the fact that the future of his department and of his career now depended on a foreign graduate student, who had already made one mistake and who might very well be an arsonist, forger, conspirator, murderer, and half-cracked as well. The thought did not bolster the General’s confidence. He was starting to suspect that, at long last and after many campaigns, he was outnumbered, outflanked and outgeneralled.

And Bottando’s sense that he was missing something still nagged away at him. He’d paced the streets, sat in armchairs, tossed and turned in bed. All to no avail. He
was
missing something and was no nearer to discovering what it was. The more he tried, the more the wisp of memory receded. Hence the vast piles of dossiers on his desk. The personnel files of everyone in the museum, combined with what they knew about Morneau, Byrnes, Argyll, and anyone else concerned.

He picked up Tommaso’s file. Might as well start at the top, he thought as he opened it. Cavaliere Marco Ottavio Mario di Bruno di Tommaso. Born March 3, 1938. Father, Giorgio Tommaso, died 1948, aged forty-two. Mother, Elena Maria Marco, died 1959, age fifty-seven. He jotted idly on his notepad and sighed heavily.

Pages and pages of the stuff, a monument to the excessive zeal of an overstocked bureaucracy with nothing better to do. Education, careers, opinions, recommendations. All repeated hundreds of times in each dossier on everyone. And he was going to go through the lot of them, for the one piece of information that might jog his memory.

Bottando had polished off the Renaissance department when the plane touched down, and was progressing on to Early Medieval Painting by the time the taxi drew up outside the Victoria & Albert Museum to let Argyll out.

As agreed, he gave her a detailed itinerary; a couple of hours there, followed by a brief stop at the Courtauld in Portman Square, with an option on a visit to the British Museum later on. She told him to meet her at six, and concluded with dire warnings of the potential penalties should he miss the rendezvous again. He grinned nervously at her and made his way up the steps.

He had always hated the V & A, especially the library, which was his present destination. It was not just the fact that it was cold; nearly all libraries he had worked in were underheated. Nor was it particularly the clear evidence of a chronic lack of funds: – the little donation boxes hopefully primed with five-pound notes to give visitors the right idea; the lack of proper lighting; the general air of woebegone neglect.

But in he went, walking through the museum along the echoing corridors, resisting the temptation to buy an overpriced bun in the café, up the stairs and into the
library. For the next ten minutes he rummaged around in the catalogues, occasionally scribbling call numbers on bits of paper and handing them in at the desk. Then he gave in to temptation, took his newspaper and went down for a coffee. Long experience had taught him that no books would turn up for at least forty-five minutes.

Feeling oppressed and out of place, he took his coffee and soggy doughnut and sat in a far corner of the room, away from the other students and the small number of miscellaneous tourists. He concentrated on the paper and pretended, as best as he could, that he was somewhere else. His thoughts on the subject were interrupted by a clattering of plates as someone sat down at his table. The newcomer instantly fished out a packet of Rothman’s from the pocket of his old, battered jacket – which had clearly once been the top half of a suit – and lit up.

‘Thank heavens for that. First today. I’ve almost been chewing my fingers off up there.’

‘Hello, Phil. How are you?’

The newcomer shrugged. ‘As ever,’ he replied. He puffed furiously on his cigarette. He was one of Argyll’s oldest associates. As Philip Mortimer-Jones, he was a child of privilege, public schools, and superlative contacts through his father, who was some big wheel in the National Trust. As plain Phil, he was short and stocky, abominably dressed, with dark greasy hair and a look on his face which made you suspect he was about to fall asleep, or that his eyes were caked with grime, or that he had just eaten some substance of which the police would disapprove: in all the five years he had
known him, Argyll could never decide. Possibly all of the above. But for all his dormouse-like appearance Phil was a bright lad. He was also more finely tuned into the nuances of academic gossip than anyone else Argyll knew. He confirmed this with his next statement.

‘Surprised to see you here. I thought you’d still be mourning over your great Italian disappointment.’

Argyll groaned. If Phil knew then everybody would know. ‘Who told you about that?’

‘Can’t remember. Heard it somewhere.’