Death of an Elgin Marble Read online

  Death of an

  Elgin Marble

  Titles in the series

  (listed in order of publication)

  Goodnight Sweet Prince

  Death and the Jubilee

  Death of an Old Master

  Death of a Chancellor

  Death Called to the Bar

  Death on the Nevskii Prospekt

  Death on the Holy Mountain

  Death of a Pilgrim

  Death of a Wine Merchant

  Death in a Scarlet Coat

  Death at the Jesus Hospital

  Death of an Elgin Marble

  Death of an

  Elgin Marble

  DAVID DICKINSON

  Constable & Robinson Ltd

  55–56 Russell Square

  London WC1B 4HP

  www.constablerobinson.com

  First published in the UK by C&R Crime,

  an imprint of Constable & Robinson, 2014

  Copyright © David Dickinson 2014

  The right of David Dickinson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication

  Data is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978-1-47210-513-4 (hardback)

  ISBN 978-1-47210-514-1 (ebook)

  Printed and bound in the UK

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Cover design by Peter Rozycki

  For Max, who smiles a lot

  PART ONE

  THE ISLES OF GREECE

  What I would prefer is that you should fix your eyes every day on the glory of Athens as she really is and fall in love with her. When you realize her greatness, then reflect that what made her great was men with a spirit of adventure, men who knew their duty . . . These men gave her their lives, to her and to all of us, and for their own selves they won praises that never grow old, the most splendid of sepulchres – not the sepulchre in which their bodies are laid but where their glory remains eternal in men’s minds. For famous men have the whole earth as their memorial. It is not only the inscriptions on their graves in their own country that marks them out: no, in foreign lands also, not in any visible form but in people’s hearts, their memory abides and grows.

  Thucydides, Pericles’ Funeral Speech,

  The History of Peloponnesian War

  1

  It took the British Museum five days to realize that they had lost their Caryatid. In fact, if it hadn’t been for the American, they might never have realized she was gone at all.

  The Caryatid was part of the Elgin Marbles, a glittering treasure trove of ancient statuary that had once graced the walls of the Parthenon, the most prominent building on the High City, the Acropolis, of Athens, 2,400 years ago. All of the works had been seized by the British Ambassador to Turkey, Lord Elgin, at the beginning of the nineteenth century and carried back to Britain. For just over a century the Elgin Caryatid, tall, graceful and rather severe, had stood in her place in the Elgin Rooms to delight and entrance the population of London.

  The Caryatid was a statue of a maiden or a young girl that took the place of one of six columns or pillars in the Erechtheion, a temple that had stood near the Parthenon. This Caryatid was the only one to have been taken by Lord Elgin – her sisters were not to be found in London. Seven feet six inches tall, the statue was wearing a floorlength sleeveless marble dress, carved like a tunic at the top and hanging in elaborate folds at her waist. She had a look of haughty pride on her face, as if only she and her five colleagues were fit to represent their city in its place of greater glory. Lord Elgin, hero or villain of the Marbles that bore his name, depending on your point of view, was in the habit of saying to his friends, ‘That Caryatid filly, she looks rather a handful to me.’ She had lived as a single Caryatid for over a hundred years since she came to London and was now about 2,300 years old. In the lifetime of the current generation of British Museum porters, always keen on some form of intimacy with their lifeless charges, the Caryatid had been known as Charlotte, or Charlie, Clare or Clary, Cristobel or Chrissie, Carmen or Carrie. The oldest porter on the staff had always thought that Carmen Caryatid had a good ring to it. The Head of Greek and Roman Antiquities called her Clytemnestra. The Director of the British Museum, more faithful perhaps to an English literary tradition, called her Clarissa, Clarissa the Caryatid.

  The American was Stephen Lambert Lodge, a thirty-year-old lecturer in Architecture at Yale, one of the oldest and most distinguished universities in America. He was beginning a tour of the cities of Europe that held fragments of the Parthenon, for many cultural pirates apart from Lord Elgin had helped themselves to fragments of fallen statues or ripped them from the walls. From London and the British Museum he was travelling to the Louvre in Paris and on to Munich and finally to Athens itself. Lambert Lodge had arrived at the British Museum on the morning of his great discovery in a state of high excitement. He had been thinking about this trip for two years now and planning his itinerary for nine months before he stepped off his liner in Southampton and onto the train for London. He was saving the Caryatid till near the end. As he stared at the battles between the Centaurs and the Lapiths and the procession of maidens and young men and the charioteers and the sacrifices from the Parthenon frieze, he felt a sense of exultation, that he had, in some strange way, come home at last in a city that was over three thousand miles from New Haven, Connecticut. He looked at the statue for a long time. He pulled a magnifying glass out of his pocket for a more detailed examination. Lambert Lodge spent nearly two hours with the Caryatid, walking round her, peering intently at the marble. He stroked the long robe with its delicate folds that flowed from the young lady’s waist. It was the stroking that confirmed to the attendant on duty that this latest visitor was probably insane and certainly needing intercepting before he embraced the Caryatid and conducted intimate relations with her on the museum floor.

  ‘Excuse me, sir,’ said the attendant, who was called Philip Jones and came from Highbury, ‘what exactly do you think you are doing?’

  ‘I do beg your pardon, sir,’ said Lambert Lodge, ‘I know my behaviour must seem rather odd. My apologies. My card, sir.’

  He drew a rather elaborate one from his waistcoat which carried the arms of Yale University and his name as lecturer in Architecture at the School of Fine Arts in a rather florid typeface.

  ‘Forgive me, sir,’ the young American went on, with the politeness inculcated from birth in the old families of Boston to which he belonged, ‘are you an expert in Greek sculpture, by any chance?’

  ‘I’m afraid I’m not, sir,’ Jones replied, ‘the missus says the only thing I am an expert in is the fixture list for Tottenham Hotspur and that’s a fact.’

  ‘I’m sure that’s very valuable information,’ said Lambert Lodge with a smile, ‘but I do happen to be something of an expert on ancient statues and things like that. Do you think you could be very kind and show me the way to your director’s office? I have something very important to discuss with him.’

  ‘Of course, sir, seeing you’re an academic gentleman, you’d be surprise
d how many of them we get in here, forgetting their documents and their umbrellas, most of them. I can’t take you to the Director’s office, since he’s not here, and neither is the Head of Greek and Roman Antiquities, but the Deputy Director is in, sir, I saw him not half an hour ago. Would he do?’

  ‘Splendid,’ said Lambert Lodge. ‘How very kind. Could you take me to him at once?’

  Five minutes later the American was ushered into a large office looking out over the great steps and the front of the British Museum where the pilgrims milled about, smoking cigarettes and discussing the treasures they had seen before returning to the more mundane surroundings of omnibus and underground railway. A hundred and fifty yards behind him in the Reading Room young scholars were struggling with their theses and European revolutionaries were composing incendiary tracts far from the eyes of their country’s secret police. The Deputy Director ushered Lodge to a chair on the left of the fireplace.

  ‘This is indeed a pleasure, Mr Lodge,’ he began. ‘I have read one or two of your learned articles, I believe.’

  ‘You are too kind, sir,’ cried Lodge, stretching out his long legs. Theophilus Ragg, the Deputy Director, was a stooped man of average height in his early sixties with grey hair turning to white and a small, well-trimmed moustache. He was wearing a dark suit with a white shirt and a Balliol College tie. Inspecting him, Lodge thought he looked like a small town undertaker somewhere in the vast obscurity of the Midwest, waiting for retirement and fearful of more time with his family.

  ‘What can I do for you this morning, Mr Lodge? The Director is in the Middle East and the Head of Greek and Roman Antiquities is with a party in the Alps, I fear.’

  Lodge wondered if the ancient treasures of some long extinct tribe were going to be removed from the sands of Mesopotamia and brought back to join the other totems adorning the Bloomsbury museum.

  ‘I’d like to ask you about the Caryatid in the Elgin Room, if I might, sir,’ said Lodge, trying to sound as emollient as possible.

  ‘Please do,’ said Theophilus Ragg.

  ‘I’m afraid what I’m about to say may come as something of a shock, Mr Ragg. I’m not absolutely sure, but I don’t think your Caryatid is real. I don’t think she’s the real McCoy, if you’ll forgive me. Let me explain. It may be there is a reason for this. Perhaps the real statue is away being cleaned or restored?’

  ‘No, she’s not,’ said Ragg, pulling nervously at his moustache. ‘Pray continue.’

  ‘Believe me, Mr Ragg,’ Lodge continued, ‘I have no wish to cause trouble for you or your great museum here. My reason has to do with the marble. The real Caryatid, like all the statues here from the Acropolis, is carved out of Pentelic marble, brought to Athens from Mount Penteli in Attica all those years ago. Your Caryatid is made from Parian marble, very similar, but not quite the same. There are many ancient works carved in the white marble from Paros, but the metopes and the frieze and the Caryatid from the Parthenon are not among them. The Building Research Program at Yale put on an exhibition three years ago of examples of the different sorts of marble used by the Greeks, the Romans and the great sculptors of the Renaissance. Maybe they hoped to encourage a new golden age in American sculpture, who knows. Anyway, Mr Ragg, I was able to touch and get the feel of all these different types of marble. Pentelic and Parian marble are similar, pure white and fine grained. But the Pentelic, from the Penteliko Mountain, is semi-translucent, the other one is not. Even after all this time you can just see the difference.’ He paused.

  The Deputy Director was writing very carefully in a large black notebook.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ the young American concluded.

  The Deputy Director stared into the middle distance, looking once more, Lodge thought, like the ageing Midwest undertaker, searching for a missing coffin perhaps, lost in the press of traffic between church and cemetery, the few mourners stamping their feet and peering down the yew trees that lined the drive.

  ‘Maybe it’s just a mistake,’ he whispered, ‘I expect she’ll turn up in the end.’

  ‘What can I do to help, sir? I am in London for about a week and could stay longer if that would be useful. I’m desperately sorry to have been the bearer of such bad news.’

  Theophilus Ragg sighed. ‘You have been most kind, Mr Lodge. Don’t think I am not grateful. I’m just shocked, that’s all. I shall have to conduct an inquiry to see if our experts agree with you and find out what has happened. We need to know how long ago the switch happened, if it did, and what we would have to do to make sure it could never happen again.’

  ‘Could I just ask you about the Head of Greek and Roman Antiquities, Mr Ragg? Will he be back soon? I should so like to meet him, you see. We have heard so much about him in New England.’

  ‘Dr Tristram Stanhope, you mean?’ Ragg replied, suddenly ceasing to doodle in his notebook. ‘I think he should be back soon. He is still suffering from youth, you know, suffering rather badly, I should say.’

  ‘Suffering from youth, sir? I’m not quite sure what you mean.’

  ‘Forgive me, I may not have expressed myself very well. When you have lived in seats of learning like Oxford and the British Museum, you watch the rhythm of the passing generations. There are fresh drafts of the young every autumn, of course, the hope of youth coursing through their veins. But you look at the dons as they too grow older. By the time they reach middle age the hopes of youth have been replaced with some kind of accommodation with this complicated world. Stanhope is in his middle forties now. You would expect him to have passed through the hope and the optimism of youth. But no, he still behaves as if he were twenty-one years old. Never mind. We have more important things to think about now.’

  The young American felt his time was up. ‘I am staying at Brown’s Hotel, Mr Ragg. Just leave a message if I am not there and I will come at any hour of day or night.’

  Stephen Lambert Lodge bowed slightly as he left. As he made his way out towards the front door, he heard the plaintive cry once more. ‘Maybe it’s just a mistake, I expect she’ll turn up in the end.’

  The behaviour of the Deputy Director, left on his own, would have surprised Lodge. He shuffled next door into the Director’s office and locked the door. He searched in the desk until he found a small, dark blue address book. He copied the phone numbers and the addresses given there for members of the Maecenas Club, a small but select group of the top museum directors in London: National Gallery, the Tate, Natural History Museum, the Science Museum, the Victoria and Albert. The institution was named after the great artistic impresario Maecenas who worked for the first Roman Emperor Augustus, persuading poets like Virgil to compose works that would add to the lustre of Rome and the glory of Augustus. Members met in a private room at the Athenaeum once every three months. In emergencies, special meetings or special assistance could be called at twenty-four hours’ notice. This was what Theophilus Ragg proposed to do. He had to find a man who would bring his Caryatid back. He had no faith at all in the ability of the police to do it. One of these directors, surely, somewhere in their career must have needed a specialist who could solve a crime discreetly and without fuss. Money would be no object. The Maecenas members must help solve his problem. He gave no indication of what had happened when he wrote to the museum directors. He merely asked if, in the course of their professional lives, they had occasion to have recourse to a private investigator. The British Museum, he told them, needed the finest in the country and they needed him in the next twenty-four hours.

  Few car salesmen have ever owned a house on the fashionable Old Mile at Ascot and maintained a stable of racehorses, thus keeping a foot, or hoof, in the quickest delivery of the oldest and the newest forms of human transportation at the same time. Octavius Stratton was also the sole representative of his tribe to ride to Ascot with the King in the Royal Landau. On this bright morning he was taking Lord Francis Powerscourt and his son Thomas for a drive in a new Daimler. Octavius, who really was the eighth child of his parents, was usual
ly known as Eugene. He was a second cousin twice removed of Powerscourt’s wife, the mother of Thomas Powerscourt, Lady Lucy. Stratton was confident that his family connections would help deliver what would, for him, be a profitable sale. The Daimler was the finest car in its class, he assured the Powerscourts. It might be unfashionable to say so, he virtually whispered at this point in case he was overheard at the northern end of Hampstead High Street, but German engineering would soon be recognized as the best in the world. He regaled his clients with accounts of the great speed the vehicle could attain, its record as a hill climber in the annual Shelsley Walsh Hill Climb in Worcestershire, and a barrage of statistics about brake horse power, transmission and engine size. Octavius might have been slightly alarmed had he seen Thomas Powerscourt in the back seat taking extensive notes on his shirt cuffs about the mechanical details. For the young man was one of the best mathematicians Westminster School had produced this century. He was the finest shot of his year in the public schools rifle shooting championships and fluent in both French and German. This was his last term at school, with the entrance exams for Cambridge a couple of months away. Thomas began staring very hard at the driver’s back.

  The cart was a nondescript sort of vehicle. It could have been carrying barrels of beer or crates of sausages. Nobody would have looked at it twice. The two men were wearing the most nondescript clothes they could find, dark trousers, shirts that had once been white and boots that had seen better days. They might have been a couple of shepherds taking their wares to market. But in the back of the van there were no sheep. There was a long, heavy bundle swathed in blankets and other soft materials going to a place that was a long way from the British Museum. They were in the Welsh mountains now, making for their destination, a large house near a series of caves in the Black Mountains of the Brecon Beacons. The two men had no idea what their cargo was. For them, it was just another package. They spent most of their days moving packets and parcels of one sort or another from place to place.