Death of an Elgin Marble Read online

  ‘Sorry, Fred,’ said Johnny and pushed over an open pack of cigarettes. ‘Any more suspects?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Fred, drawing deeply on his cigarette, ‘there’s two more I can think of now my brain is moving into something approaching full working order.’ He downed another large gulp of his beer.

  ‘There was a man from Linfords, the auctioneers. Must have been about five years or so ago. I think he was done for fraud of some sort, don’t ask me what. They said he made the police really cross, that he treated them as if they were idiots and beneath contempt. The Inspector in charge of the case took his revenge, mind you. Blakeway, that was the name of the fellow, he used to conduct a lot of the auctions himself. There he was one fine morning, selling away for all he’s worth. Six policemen come in and make their way to the front. The second Blakeway has finished with the last lot, they move in. He was arrested in front of his own customers. Going, going, gone, you might say.’

  ‘Is he out now, Fred? Any reports on that?’

  ‘I heard he’d moved out of London, Mr Fitzgerald. Opened an antique place in the Cotswolds. Burford? Steeple Aston? Stow on the Wold? Somewhere like that. Hold on a minute. I remember now. Burford, that’s where it is, Burford.’

  It was time for another refill. There was not long to go now till closing time. Fred, Johnny thought, looked as though he could keep the bar staff fully occupied for another couple of hours.

  ‘Last man,’ said Fred. ‘Only three or four years ago now. Isn’t it strange how you remember the least about the one that’s the most recent.’

  Johnny waited as Fred lit another cigarette. ‘Hand in the till, that’s what he was up to.’ Fred took an enormous swig of his latest pint of beer.

  ‘Whose hand, Fred? Which till?’

  ‘Hand belonged to a chap called Kennedy, Mr Fitzgerald, Michael Moloney Kennedy. The till belonged to Brotherhood’s, the other big auctioneers. Kennedy’s hand was supposed to have been busy in the till for years. Only caught when the firm changed their accountants. The judge took exception to the thing. Warbled on about the prisoner betraying a position of trust in one of our most trusted and trustworthy businesses. Two years in Wormwood Scrubs if you please. Auctioneers? Trusted? Trustworthy? I ask you. New Bond Street laughed about it all for a fortnight. And no, I can’t remember if he has come back to the art world or not. Probably not directly, I would think. They were calling him Trustworthy Kennedy the day he was sent down. I don’t think people would have forgotten.’

  Johnny Fitzgerald walked home, muttering to himself. Shades of the prison-house indeed, shades of the prison-house.

  ‘What news from New York?’ said Powerscourt. John Hudson, the young Englishman employed by the New York Times as European art correspondent, was back in the Powerscourt drawing room in Markham Square.

  ‘Well, my lord, on one level the news is rather disappointing. But another door has opened, only slightly, and the room within may be empty. Or it may not.’

  ‘You sound as though you have been taking lessons from the Delphic oracle, Mr Hudson. Could you be a little clearer? The New York Times is famous for the clarity of its writing after all.’

  John Hudson smiled. ‘My apologies, my lord. My friend and colleague Franklin tells me that he is sure the Caryatid is not in New York City. He would not, however, swear to that in a court of law. His reasons may surprise you. He says that if one of the millionaires had got their hands on the Caryatid, it would have been the ultimate symbol of one-upmanship in the most competitive city on earth. The holder of the Caryatid would have outsmarted all his rivals. Franklin says he cannot imagine one of this selective club not boasting about it. It would not be enough to have the thing, you see. Everybody else would have to know you had it too.’

  ‘That sounds probable. Your friend Franklin will go far. And he is sure of his theory?’

  ‘There has not been a whisper about Greek statues, Parthenon marbles or anything like that. Apparently the millionaires are all wondering if they will be summoned to a reception by one of their rivals and arrive to find the Mona Lisa on the wall.’

  ‘That would cause a sensation, even in New York,’ said Powerscourt. ‘You mentioned a possible source of good news elsewhere, Mr Hudson.’

  ‘I did. It all comes back to Franklin’s knowledge of the American art business, my lord. He says that the most knowledgeable man in America about classical sculpture does not live in New York at all. He has some enormous mansion there with a vast ballroom of course, the usual thing, but he lives in upstate New York.’

  ‘In what way is he the most knowledgeable man in America?’

  ‘They say he can spot a fake at five hundred yards distance. The man has a gallery attached to his house, apparently, populated entirely by ancient statuary. Years ago he went to Greece and Rome and came back with stuff that was all genuine. For some reason even he couldn’t describe, he could tell the fake from the real thing without fail. He bought a couple of pieces from the top people in Rome that were the only originals they had in the entire place.’

  ‘Great God!’ said Powerscourt. ‘Does he rent himself out? The big galleries would pay fortunes for such knowledge, surely.’

  ‘I’m not sure about that, my lord, I’m not sure at all. Think about it. If the big galleries and the great auction houses were only to offer genuine works of art their business would collapse. The number of objects coming through would drop like a stone. So would their income.’

  Powerscourt laughed. ‘Does our American friend have a name? And where does he live if he’s not in New York?’

  ‘The great collector is called Wilbur Lincoln Mitchell, my lord. His parents were devoted to the assassinated President and gave their only son his middle name. He lives in upstate New York in a wild and beautiful spot looking out over the Hudson River. It’s not far from the military academy at West Point.’

  ‘Isn’t that the place where they trained up General Custer for the last stand?’ asked Powerscourt.

  ‘They did, my lord. They also trained Robert E. Lee and future President Ulysses S. Grant. They trained everybody. There is no indication, mind you, that Mr Mitchell has any links with the military. But my friend Franklin has an idea.’

  ‘What’s that, Mr Hudson?’

  ‘He says it came to him when he was reading about the Caryatid in the New York Public Library. Lost Greek statues are in the news. All the East Coast papers carry reports on her disappearance and the efforts to find her. What could be a better time for an article on the man who has one of the finest collections of Greek and Roman statues in America? Some of the museums have more, of course, but Lincoln Mitchell’s are all of the finest quality, paid for by the fruits of private enterprise. Franklin proposes, with your approval of course, to write to Mr Mitchell and request an interview. The lost Caryatid would make it highly topical and of great interest to the Times’s readers.’

  ‘Of course I give him my blessing,’ said Powerscourt. ‘I only wish I was going too.’

  The population of Wales are known for many things. Love of their native land, a weakness for myth and poetry, devotion to their local culture and a certain insularity of outlook. These traits were as common in the police force as they were in the population at large. England and Wales do not have a national police force that can investigate crimes from Carlisle to Land’s End. Each county has its own. The police force covering the Black Mountains and the Brecon Beacons were as competent as their fellows in other parts of the country. But they did have a certain suspicion of foreigners and a very great suspicion of London which their preachers told them was a human cesspit waiting for the flames of God’s judgement. When the local inspector discovered that the visitors who seemed to have been responsible for Carwyn Jones’s death came from London, he became even more cautious than usual. It was the custom with crimes involving people under the jurisdiction of other forces to write and let the other police force know what had happened. So a letter was sent to the Metropolitan Police Liaison Uni
t with details of the crime. They spared their colleagues in the capital nothing – the kicks to the head, the stamping on the body, the cigarette burns on the victim’s arms. They did not, however, mention the fact that the two men were known as the Twins, because they did not know that. The undertaker had been given no names when he met the men at the station. London might never have heard the full story had it not been for the growing reach and growing success of the Caryatid Committee.

  After the meeting near the British Museum and the high levels of contribution delivered there by the public, many would have rested on their laurels. Not Tristram Stanhope. A man fond of the sound of his own voice will always welcome another opportunity to listen to it again. Tristram set out on a national tour, taking time off from the British Museum with the approval of Theophilus Ragg and the other heads of department. He purchased a couple of flamboyant waistcoats and a Regency full-length jacket in a colour his supporters’ club described as imperial purple. He delivered the speech he had made in London with a number of variations. He had three interchangeable paragraphs about each of the ancient Greek dramatists, choosing the one he thought most appropriate to the location he was in. Aeschylus, he discovered, played well in Bristol. They liked Sophocles in Norwich. Birmingham was devoted to Euripides. When he grew weary of fifth-century BC Athens and the glories of Plato and Pericles, Tristram replaced the disappointments of democracy with the glory of conquest and spoke instead of Alexander the Great. No general in history, he told his audience, not Caesar, not Charlemagne, not even Napoleon, conquered as much of the globe as the young warrior from Macedon, tutored by the philosopher Aristotle himself. Packed houses came to hear him in all the great cities. In Newcastle they gave him a standing ovation that went on, he told his admirers later, for five minutes thirty-seven seconds. In Liverpool they carried him off the stage in triumph. Tristram always closed with the London peroration about the appeal of the Caryatid. The money flowed in.

  And that was not all. Tristram Stanhope enlisted the help of the classic departments in all the leading public schools and the top grammar schools. They were urged to send their most eloquent speakers to give lectures on Caryatids and ancient Greece in their nearest towns. When Lady Lucy Powerscourt heard the news she said that the principal peacock had enlisted a whole flock of subsidiary peacocks to help in his campaign. More money flooded in. Regular announcements of the progress of the fund were placed in the newspapers. When the total reached £5,000 the cynics said that you could get more money for the return of the Caryatid than you could earn in twenty years as a skilled workman.

  The provincial newspapers reported the story of the Caryatid and the reward. Illtyd Williams, the man who knew the secrets of Carwyn Jones’s death, earned about the same as head teacher of a small primary school in Wales as an experienced craftsman would make in a great city. He decided that his information could indeed provide a lot of help to the authorities. Indeed, he began to feel, as he contemplated the £5,000, that his information would be the principal factor in the recovery and return of the statue. With the £5,000 he could buy a new house. He could have better holidays. Maybe he could buy a motor car. So he wrote, with the full details of what he knew and what he suspected, to the address supplied in the Western Daily Mail, The Caryatid Appeal, c/o Finch’s Bank, Moorgate, London EC.

  Powerscourt had written to the old artist, Josiah Wills Baker, with details of two of the three members of the art community in London believed to have served time in prison. He said that he proposed to call on Bacon the following day to seek his counsel. He gave such details as he had from Johnny Fitzgerald about the man with no name who forged the old ladies’ wills, Blakeway the fraudster now believed to be running an antique shop in Burford, and Michael Moloney Kennedy, the man with his hand in the till at one of the great auctioneers.

  Once again the old painter did not rise from his seat to greet his visitor. He waved him to a chair just a few feet away.

  ‘Powerscourt,’ he said, ‘good to see you again. Please forgive this forced intimacy with the seating, it gives me a chance to see you, or rather, to see the shape I know to be you. Now then, let’s talk of the prisoners at the bar.’

  He leant back in his chair and peered at his visitor through eyes that were now cloudy. ‘I have a young man from the National Gallery who comes in to help me from time to time, Lord Powerscourt. I asked him to look up various records of mine to see how I could be of assistance with these gentlemen. Have you ever thought, by the way, how certain occupations give rise to suspicions of criminality almost automatically; bookmakers perhaps, door-to-door salesmen, pawnbrokers, while others, bankers, solicitors, clergymen, give off an air of probity and respectability? We artists are aligned with the bankers, I feel, though it must be a near thing. The attribution of paintings, a very limited profession numerically, must be one of the most suspect occupations in the kingdom. I digress. The young man from the National Gallery is always most patient when I wander off the subject but even he starts to cough loudly and significantly after ten minutes or so.’

  A very pretty maid in a very correct uniform brought in a tray with a couple of glasses of champagne. ‘Thank you, my dear. Your health, Lord Powerscourt. I often take a glass of something at this time of day. It brightens up the rest of the afternoon.’

  The clock on the mantelpiece said a quarter to four. Powerscourt wondered if the old man was a kindred spirit of Johnny Fitzgerald who had expended quite a lot of treasure on the beer to lubricate the memory of Red Fred.

  ‘Blakeway, Nicholas George Blakeway, late of Linfords the auctioneers, believed to be involved with an antique business in Burford. I remember him as an auctioneer, Powerscourt, many years ago. He had a great talent for it, you know. He could play on his audience like one of the great violinists. His particular calling card came with paintings sent up from the provinces to be sold as part of an estate, that sort of thing. In the gap between arriving at Linfords and standing on the easel at the auction they would be transformed from a copy of a Parmigianino Madonna into an early Raphael. The price went through a similar transformation. Some wily provincial solicitor worked out what was going on and that was the end of Blakeway. I don’t think he’s working at the shop in Burford any more. It sells second-hand books as well, by the way. I’m told Blakeway retains his financial interest but employs a young man to run the shop for him. Where he is now, I’m afraid, nobody knows.’

  ‘That’s very helpful, very helpful indeed. I shall take a day trip to Burford and see what I can find. What of the others?’

  ‘I can tell you a little about Michael Moloney Kennedy, the one with his hand in the till,’ the old man said. ‘He’s gone abroad. France, I think? Italy perhaps? Some wealthy relation died while he was in prison and left him a great deal of money. By the time the cash escaped from probate and the lawyers he was out of Wormwood Scrubs and ready to spend it. I’m told it’s doubtful he will ever come back to live in this country. Not that living abroad necessarily rules him out of your business with the Caryatid. You could have planned the thing from anywhere in Europe with the right trips to the right capitals and the right contacts with the right criminals. I’m sure of that.’

  ‘And what of the other fellow, the one with no name who went to prison for forging old ladies’ wills? Do you have any news of him?’

  Josiah Wills Baker stared myopically round the walls of his Eaton Square drawing room, lined with paintings he could no longer see.

  ‘I have a name for you. Easton, William Tyndale Easton. That’s almost all I know about the fellow. I know nothing of what became of him after his time as a guest of His Majesty. But this much I do know. I’m afraid it’s not what you would want to hear. Of the three who were caught – and heaven knows how many more were up to similar tricks but got away with it – William Tyndale Easton is the most formidable, the cleverest, the one with the most original mind. When I discussed him with one of my colleagues yesterday, the friend said that he was perfectly capable of or
ganizing the theft of the Caryatid. And also perfectly capable of getting away with it.’

  17

  The members of the Caryatid Committee had originally expected a small response to their appeal for funds to pay for a reward for the recovery of the marble lady. She was only a statue, after all. Not that many people had been to see her at the British Museum. The citizens would have other things on their minds. But as Tristram Stanhope’s travelling lecture tour and the other talks organized by the schools took off, so did the appeal. Letters poured in from all over the country. The police representatives on the Caryatid Committee insisted that all correspondence had to be checked by a responsible party. At first they installed a retired detective inspector with long experience of major crimes in a small back room in the offices of Finch and Company, Bankers. Then the detective inspector became a detective inspector with two sergeants, seconded from the police station at Charing Cross, and they were transferred to an empty suite of offices on the top floor of the building. The two sergeants weeded out the weird and the fanciful. Anything that looked more serious was sent through to the inspector next door.

  There was plenty of the weird and the fanciful and the downright mad in the correspondence. A letter from the West Country claimed that the theft had been organized by the Freemasons as part of their campaign for world domination. Another, from Melton Constable in Norfolk, alleged that the Caryatid had been stolen by a group of pagans who wanted her to represent the Earth Mother in their ceremonies. If the authorities wished to send a representative to the spot called the Devil’s Hallow, three miles north of Swaffham, at the time of the next full moon, they would find the Caryatid there, her neck festooned with garlands. The author enclosed a stamped addressed envelope for the reward. Three people from different parts of the country maintained that the Caryatid had been taken under cover of darkness to an embarkation point in the Thames Estuary. There, she had been placed aboard a German submarine, before being transferred to a German dreadnought. The Caryatid was now in a private room in the Kaiser’s New Palace at Sans Souci Park in Potsdam.