Death of an Elgin Marble Read online

  ‘Dear Illtyd,’ the letter began. ‘I think I may have made a terrible mistake.’ Carwyn went on to describe his role in providing the cover story for the enormous coffin sent off to Bristol months before. He mentioned the rumours, of men working through the night in the lonely barn beside the entrance to the caves, of extra food being purchased by the undertaker when he had no guests staying in his house. He mentioned his suspicions after reading the London paper that events in the Brecon Beacons might have had something to do with the Caryatid stolen from the British Museum. He mentioned his financial problems, the rugby tickets sold, the roof in need of repair, the extra mouth or mouths soon to arrive, for his wife’s family had a long history of giving birth to twins. He confessed that he had written to the undertaker asking for more money to keep his mouth shut. He even mentioned his threat to go to his cousin the policeman in Ebbw Vale and tell him the whole story. Now, in his final sentence, he told his headmaster that he was due to meet the undertaker and a couple of his friends specially come from London to talk things over with him in the Green Dragon in an hour’s time.

  There was no mention in the letter of what Carwyn expected him to do. Was he supposed to go immediately to the police and hand over the letter? The policeman who told him about Carwyn’s death had left little out of his account of the last minutes of his colleague’s life, the cigarette burns on the arms, the savage kicking, the stamping on his face. The policeman was sure the two men responsible had gone back to London. What if they came back? When he was a boy, like everybody else, he had been forced to play rugby. Being in the centre or out on the wing he didn’t mind so much. It was cold and sometimes you had to stop people getting past you. But then somebody had suggested putting him in the scrum as a second row forward. Illtyd could still remember his fear and the sheer discomfort of sticking your head into the gap between the faces of the front row, other forwards leaning into you from the side and the back, and pushing for all he was worth. Not long afterwards he gave up rugby altogether. He walked over to the window and stared out at the mountains beyond the playground. He thought of Carwyn in his happier days, tramping across the hills, climbing to the top of Cader Idris on a summer’s day and exulting in the view of Cardigan Bay stretched out beneath them like an enormous map. He thought of the broken body down in the hospital morgue, kicked to death by killers from another country. He shivered slightly. For the moment, he decided, he would do nothing. He would keep quiet about the letter. He wasn’t even going to tell his wife or their children. Maybe, he said to himself, things will be clearer after the inquest.

  Theophilus Ragg, Deputy Director of the British Museum, was late for his meeting with Inspector Kingsley and Powerscourt. It was half an hour after the appointed time when he walked slowly into his office and threw his hat and coat onto a chair.

  ‘My apologies, gentlemen. I would have left word if I could. I didn’t know I was to be summoned to see the Home Secretary at very short notice.’

  Powerscourt thought Ragg sounded tired. He looked like a beaten man. He made it sound as if being summoned to see the Home Secretary was an ordeal like being called upon to meet one’s maker, frightening at best, possibly terminal.

  ‘Might I ask what he had to say?’ Inspector Kingsley too had an appointment to keep that afternoon, with the Commissioner himself at five o’clock.

  ‘You may indeed, Inspector. You may indeed. I am more annoyed than I can say. Who, after all, is meant to run this museum? The Director and his deputy and their staff? Or the Home Secretary, a man with no experience of running artistic establishments at all? I doubt if he has ever stepped inside this building, now I come to think about it. But this former newsagent dares to tell me what I may and may not do in the course of my duties! It is disgraceful! It’s worse than disgraceful! It’s probably unconstitutional!’

  ‘Perhaps you could tell us,’ Powerscourt asked in his most emollient tones, ‘what it is that you may or may not do? Is the Home Secretary proposing to come and reorganize the seating arrangements in the Reading Room? Change some of the galleries round perhaps? Send the Hittites to Assyria and the Assyrians to the basement?’

  ‘Would that he were, Lord Powerscourt. It’s not as simple as that. The Home Secretary, speaking, he assured me, on behalf of the Cabinet, told me that it is Government policy never to give in to blackmail. Therefore all negotiations with the purported blackmailer must cease. Therefore our best chance of recovering the Caryatid is gone, swamped by the Home Secretary and his newspapers. It’s monstrous!’

  ‘It does seem a little steep to me,’ said Inspector Kingsley, ‘the Government taking such a high and mighty line on blackmail. It only takes about fifty backbenchers to leap up and down and threaten to withdraw their support for them to change their minds, or commission a policy review as they usually call it. However, I’m not a politician. Ours not to reason why.’

  ‘I can fully understand your irritation, Mr Ragg,’ said Powerscourt. ‘You have my sympathy. Did the Home Secretary give any idea what caused the change of heart? There were no objections from the Head of Scotland Yard to the meeting at the Ritz yesterday, after all.’

  ‘Nobody said anything, but I rather gathered the shift came from the very top, from the Prime Minister.’

  ‘This only goes to reinforce my feelings about what we were talking about the other day, my lord.’ Inspector Kingsley was shaking his head. ‘Why should I stay when my actions are rejected by my superiors? I am virtually certain that it was the Commissioner himself who persuaded the Prime Minister.’

  Powerscourt thought the meeting was in danger of getting out of control. ‘I don’t think there is anything we can do about this decision now. I can’t see the Prime Minister changing his mind. But I am sure we still have much to learn from the meeting yesterday evening. In our haste to vent our wrath on the Government we have rather forgotten about the Caryatid and the blackmailer. Mr Ragg, could you tell us what happened yesterday evening? Starting perhaps with your collection by the taxi?’

  Theophilus Ragg put his head in his hands. He leant forward on his desk. Powerscourt thought he might be going to cry. After a moment or two there was a rustling noise as the Deputy Director searched in his pockets for his snuff. He took a very large pinch and stared sadly at his visitors.

  ‘Forgive me, please, this is all rather difficult.’ Ragg took another, smaller, dose of snuff, and stared at his bookshelves. ‘Let me tell you something about myself, gentlemen. In my early days I made my reputation in Oxford as an administrator. I was known for my ability to control costs. This involved such life-threatening decisions as whether the cleaning staff should start work at nine or half past, and whether it would be cheaper to have four porters working overtime or to have six on normal hours. On such pillars did my reputation rest. I came here to this great institution where the same skills were required. Should we have separate departments for all the Middle Eastern holdings, or should they all be parcelled up into a single body with one head rather than seven? Should the museum be prepared to lend some of its treasures to other similar institutions? But now, I don’t have to tell you gentlemen, I am plunged into high politics. The Government changes its mind about what I believe might be the best course of action. I am confronted with blackmailers. Nothing has prepared me for this, nothing. It is as if a junior officer in the commissariat has been lifted up to field marshal’s rank and told to run the entire campaign. I am not fit for this level of responsibility. I am not the right man to have to carry out the necessary actions.’

  Powerscourt felt sorry for the Deputy Director. But he knew from his time in the military that the reluctant are often called and that fate does not always wait for the right man to come along.

  ‘When I served in the Army in India, Mr Ragg, I spent a lot of time with a man who went on to become a most distinguished general. He was a colonel then, a colonel of artillery, a gunner. By accident he found himself in charge of a large detachment of foot about to be assailed by a much larger e
nemy force. I always remember what he said to us before the battle. “We are where we are,” he said, “we are who we are, and, a gunner in charge of infantry or no, I am going to do my damnedest to win this fight.” And he did. One of his junior officers said to him afterwards, “You are who you are, sir, and you’ve just won a bloody great victory.” Just because you have sailed in calmer waters in the past doesn’t mean that you’re not fit to command in a storm.’

  ‘Think of those two at Rorke’s Drift,’ said Inspector Kingsley, ‘two young officers, Chard and Bromhead, who’d never fought in a battle. Yet they organized their defence so well with their 150 men that they were able to hold off thousands of Zulu warriors.’

  ‘Come, Mr Ragg, you are who you are and you are where you are. Tell us, if you would, what transpired yesterday evening with the blackmailer.’

  They were not out of the woods yet. Ragg put his head in his hands once more. ‘I promised the man,’ he said finally, ‘that I wouldn’t tell anybody what had happened between us. I wouldn’t say what he looked like or anything like that. I swore. I gave him my word.’

  Inspector Kingsley muttered under his breath. He looked as though he were about to fire a salvo or two of his own. Powerscourt thought he might make the point more gently.

  ‘My dear Ragg,’ he said as mildly as he could. ‘Let us consider the facts. We are all engaged on the recovery of the Caryatid. That is the only priority. There was a meeting with the blackmailer. The Prime Minister, we believe, has forbidden any further negotiations with this person. So you are not going to meet him again. It is our duty, your duty, to do everything in your power to further the cause of recovering the statue. That includes knowing all we can about the man who may or may not be a thief or part of a gang of thieves. I suggest you tell us all you know. We wouldn’t want another directive from Number Ten Downing Street so soon after the last one.’

  Ragg stared at Powerscourt for quite a long time. ‘May God forgive me,’ he began.

  ‘I’m sure he will,’ put in the Inspector.

  ‘There’s not very much to say,’ Ragg continued. ‘He never told me his name. I never saw what he looked like. We didn’t go anywhere, you see, not to a house or anything like that. We drove round in that cab until he dropped me back at my house.’

  ‘What did you talk about?’ asked Powerscourt.

  ‘He tried to persuade me that he really did have the Caryatid. He said he wasn’t going to give me any details of handing over the money until I agreed to do so. He said the statue would be returned the day after the ransom had been collected.’

  ‘But no details of when or where the transfer was to take place?’ Inspector Kingsley, practical policeman to the last, planning ambushes and surprise attacks.

  ‘None. You see, I think he was suspicious. He kept his hat on all the time. He kept looking round a lot and checking in the mirror.’

  ‘What was his voice like?’ Powerscourt felt the details were sketchy. He wondered if Ragg was telling them the whole truth.

  ‘Well spoken. He sounded like one of us, really.’ Clever criminals always did, Powerscourt thought bitterly.

  ‘And that’s it, Mr Ragg, is it? You drove round in a cab, you promised not to tell anybody anything and the man said he would let you know about dropping off the ransom? Nothing more?’

  ‘No,’ said Ragg. ‘I would you tell you more if there was any, I promise.’

  ‘Two last queries,’ said Powerscourt. ‘The policeman on duty by your house thought he got a glimpse of the blackmailer as you got out of the cab. He thought the man was completely bald. He raised his hat as you got out, apparently. Good manners and all that. Did you see that?’

  ‘No,’ said Ragg rather sadly. ‘I didn’t. Sorry to be such an inadequate witness. And the other thing?’

  ‘The other thing, Mr Ragg, is this. Did you think the blackmailer was genuine? By which I mean, did you think he had the Caryatid? That he wasn’t bluffing?’

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ Ragg replied, ‘I did think he had the Caryatid or that he knew how to get his hands on her. I was quite sure about that.’

  16

  Johnny Fitzgerald had arranged to meet the art world veteran porter known as Red Fred in the Admiral Collingwood close to Fred’s old stamping grounds of New Bond Street. Johnny was on the trail of one of Sokratis’s riddles. He remembered the emaciated face, the body writhing in torment in his last illness, raising himself up till he was semi-upright in his bed, screaming, ‘Shades of the prison-house, shades of the prison-house.’ Who, Johnny wanted to find out, might have been the other residents of the prison-house?

  They settled in a small booth at the back of the Saloon with frosted glass walls and a wooden door rather like a closed pew in an Anglican church. Johnny had first met the old man years before when he was looking into a case that involved forgery and corruption in the art world. Fred had always been a reliable, if thirsty, witness.

  ‘How have you been, Fred?’ Johnny was looking well after his stay in Warwickshire, which had turned out to be rather more abstemious than he would have liked. He proposed to make amends.

  ‘Good, all things considered. Can’t complain. Wife’s not too good though. Arthritis they call it. Dolores can hardly move.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ said Johnny. ‘Please send her my best wishes for a speedy recovery.’

  ‘I’ll do that, so I will.’ Red Fred took an enormous draught of his beer. ‘You said you wanted to pick what’s left of my brains, Mr Fitzgerald.’

  Johnny had never told his companion that he was a member of the Irish peerage, and not, strictly speaking, a Mr at all.

  ‘I did and I do,’ said Johnny. ‘As you know, my friends and I are looking into the disappearance of the Caryatid from the British Museum.’

  ‘Not surprised she went,’ said Red Fred, downing another huge mouthful, ‘none of us who worked on the street were surprised. They had no idea of security in that damned museum, no idea at all. Too busy writing learned papers nobody will ever read to think about the safety of their treasures. Some of them would be bloody hard to move, mind you, if you think about it. God knows how they ever got some of those huge statues here in the first place. Big bastards they are, some of them.’

  Johnny remembered that Red Fred’s favourite technique when being plied with drink in exchange for information was to produce a small shoal of diversions at every available opportunity. That way the conversation was longer, the drinks more plentiful.

  ‘I’ve got a very particular request for you, Fred, and I’m not quite sure how to put it.’

  Fred coughed and pointed at his empty glass. Johnny departed in search of refills.

  ‘It’s vague, Fred, very vague. I’m ashamed it’s so vague, so I am. I’m looking for a man from the art world who was sent to jail some time in the last ten or fifteen years. He’s out now, mind you.’

  ‘Armed robbery? Attempted murder? Grievous bodily harm?’

  ‘Sorry, Fred. I don’t think it was any of those things, though I could be wrong. Fraud, I would have said, much more likely. Robbery, maybe, forgery, whatever the charge for forgery is. One of those.’

  ‘Art world’s full of people who should have gone down for all of those, Mr Fitzgerald. Let me have a think.’

  Red Fred stared closely at the loops and curving lines etched into the glass on the side of their little cubicle.

  ‘Chap from Contarini’s, the fine art dealers, he went down, I remember. I’m not sure I can remember when he was a guest of His Majesty, he might even have been a guest of Her Majesty, begging the late Queen’s pardon, I’m sure. He used to hang out a lot at the Travellers Club. I only know that because I had a cousin who worked in the kitchens. Our man had these big dinners there every now and again. They said he used to drive a four-in-hand round his country place at the weekend. One of the best drivers in the south of England apparently.’

  ‘Name, Fred? Any chance of a name? And the nature of his criminal activities?�
��

  Fred looked blank. His glass was nearly empty. Then it was empty.

  ‘Would you like something stronger, Fred? Port? Whisky perhaps? They say they have a fine selection of malts here.’

  ‘I’ll stick with the beer, if that’s all right with you, Mr Fitzgerald. Port gives me terrible wind and that’s a fact. Dolores always complains about it.’

  ‘Very good,’ said Johnny, heading back to the bar.

  ‘I’ve got it,’ Fred announced as his fresh glass came into view, ‘at least I’ve got part of it.’

  ‘Which part?’ asked Johnny as Fred introduced himself properly to his new drink.

  ‘What he was done for, Mr Fitzgerald. Forging old ladies’ wills, that’s what sent him down. Eighteen months? Two years?’

  ‘Rich old ladies?’

  ‘Well, nobody would bother locking you up if you fixed some wills of the poor, two or three mouldy dresses and a couple of pairs of sheets, would they? Only thing is I can’t remember the man’s name. It’s as if the thought of those horses has driven it right out of my mind.’

  ‘Did he go back to the art world after he was released? Can you recall how old he was when he went down?’

  ‘Ah,’ said Fred, ‘you’re wondering if he might still be around now, aren’t you? I don’t remember any fresh sightings of him after his time in the Scrubs. Maybe he turned over a new leaf. Age? How old was the bugger? I would say he wasn’t more than thirty-five when he departed.’

  ‘Did he have a full head of hair, Fred?’

  ‘Great God, Mr Fitzgerald, what will you think of next. I have no idea about his hair. I heard a lot about this man, so I did, but I only saw him once in the flesh and then I was on the top deck of a bus for God’s sake.’