Death of an Elgin Marble Page 6

  ‘What do you think it all means, Lady Lucy? Shades of the prison-house and the other stuff comes from a poem by Wordsworth as far as I know. The High City probably means Acropolis. Half the bloody cities in ancient Greece had their own acropolises, didn’t they? I can’t make any sense of either of those. But “The Isles of Greece”, I mean, like the fellow said. What was he on about?’

  ‘It could be anything, Johnny, he was a very strange man that Lord Byron who wrote it. Some long dead relation of mine was supposed to have been in love with the poet, you know,’ said Lady Lucy. ‘Your dying friend did say it was a riddle, didn’t he? Like the Sphinx and what walks on four legs in the morning, two at midday and three in the evening.’

  ‘Could be a pub, the Isles of Greece,’ said Johnny hopefully, contemplating perhaps the long reconnaissance mission needed to identify such a place.

  ‘Or a restaurant,’ Powerscourt chipped in, ‘roll up, roll up for the freshest seafood in London.’

  ‘How about a nightclub?’ asked Lady Lucy. ‘Dusky Greek maidens dancing to the music of the lyre and the pipes of Pan perhaps?’

  ‘Seven veils?’ asked Johnny. ‘Six? Eight? Ten?’

  ‘That would depend on the time of the evening, I think, Johnny,’ Lady Lucy replied. ‘The later the hour, the fewer the number of veils, I imagine.’

  ‘How late before the veils disappear down to zero?’ asked Johnny.

  ‘What about a shop?’ suggested Lady Lucy, keen to escape from the veils. ‘Posh sort of place in Knightsbridge perhaps, selling luxury produce from the Greek islands, olives from Rhodes, toy bull dancers from Crete, a better class of ouzo from Mykonos, warm jumpers for seafarers in the winter months, hand-knitted by Greek grandmas by the fire in their peasant cottages while the wind howls round the Aegean.’

  ‘It could all have been a bluff, of course,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Maybe the fellow meant that the secret of the Caryatid’s disappearance actually does have to do with the Greek Islands. It wasn’t really a riddle at all.’

  ‘There are a couple of verses at the end of “The Isles of Greece” about Samian wine,’ said Lady Lucy. ‘They might appeal to you, Johnny. I looked it up earlier. Here we are: “Fill high the bowl with Samian wine! Our virgins dance beneath the shade – Place me on Sunium’s marbled steep, Where nothing, save the waves and I, May hear our mutual murmurs sweep; There, swanlike, let me sing and die: A land of slaves shall ne’er be mine – Dash down yon cup of Samian wine!”’

  ‘Sounds good to me,’ said Johnny, ‘I bet those rogues at the Greek pub near the Orthodox cathedral have some Samian filth hidden in the cellar. Do you think I should go to Samos, Francis? Check out the wine and the veils and the maidens?’

  ‘He said “The Isles of Greece”, mind you,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Surely if he wanted to refer to Samos, he’d have said Samos, wouldn’t he?’

  ‘There must be hundreds and hundreds of Greek islands,’ said Lady Lucy, feeling that the riddle wasn’t going to yield up its secrets very easily.

  ‘How long did it take that fellow Odysseus to get home to his island from Troy?’ Johnny Fitzgerald put his glass down and didn’t help himself to a refill. Lady Lucy looked meaningfully at her husband. ‘Ten years, wasn’t it? Should have taken him a couple of months or so at the most. I reckon it could take you as long to check out all those bloody islands. I’m not usually averse to a glass or two, even of Greek if you twist my arm, and a spot of sun and sea air and a few birds. Normally I’d volunteer like a shot but I’ve got rather a lot on at the moment so you’ll have to count me out of the expedition, I’m afraid.’

  ‘It looks to me as though the riddle has won the first round,’ said Powerscourt. ‘The way things look at the moment, it’s going to win the second and third rounds as well. Greeks with riddles are just as bad as the ones bearing gifts.’

  The message from the Corfu telegram office down in the port was hand delivered by a barefooted ragamuffin who couldn’t have been more than ten years old. The stones of the harbour were still cold on his feet at half past nine in the morning. Captain Dimitri was on his second glass of ouzo since breakfast. He was not yet tired of waiting for news. The taverna was still producing its rather greasy moussaka, served by the pretty daughter, and his small crew was kept entertained by the bars and bordellos of the city centre some six hundred yards away. His ship was swaying slightly at her mooring on the harbour, the mangy lion fast asleep, the querulous monkeys staring sadly out to sea.

  The message was very brief. Thirty or thirty-first October, it said. Half past four in the afternoon. Brindisi railway station. So, the Captain said to himself, I have six days to get from the Greek to the Italian side of the Mediterranean. If I take on stores today and leave first thing tomorrow I should have plenty of time. The Captain stared up at the sky with its wheeling gulls and decided that the weather would not trouble him on his journey. There was a widow he knew in Brindisi who ran a laundry in the town. Other services could be purchased for cash. Maybe she would be pleased to see him again.

  Precisely what he was meant to pick up at the end of his journey, he did not know. All he knew was that it would be heavy and that he might have to hire a crane or a hoist of some kind to bring it aboard.

  Over the next week Powerscourt and Lady Lucy opened relations with the upper layers of the Greek Establishment in London. They took morning coffee with the Greek Ambassador, Anastasias Papadikis, a former merchant who had made his fortune buying and selling new and second-hand boats of every description. Powerscourt’s cover story was that his publishers had asked him to write a short guide book on the glories of ancient Greece. He brought with him as a gift to the Ambassador a presentation copy of his own first volume on the cathedrals of England. What advice would the Ambassador give to one about to embark on such a venture in his native land? Sipping his sugary coffee very noisily through his great black beard, the Ambassador gave Powerscourt his blessing.

  ‘I don’t need to tell a man of your education about the principal sites, Lord Powerscourt, you will know them as well as I do. And Greece will always be grateful to this country for British assistance in money and diplomacy in the long battle for the independence we enjoy today. But I could perhaps make a few small suggestions of my own? The site in Anatolia believed to be the location of the ancient city of Troy, Homer’s Troy, is well worth a visit. But even you English know little of the key role played by an Englishman who advised the ghastly German Schliemann where to dig, and was a first-rate archaeologist in his own right. Calvert, Frank Calvert, is, or rather was, the man’s name, as he died a couple of years ago. The Greek government sent a cabinet minister to represent the Greek nation at his funeral. Your fellow countrymen should know more about the man. And, of course, there is Missolonghi at the mouth of the Gulf of Patras where the poet Byron gave his life for Greek freedom. Maybe your readers would like to pay their respects?’

  Powerscourt noted that there was a famous portrait of Lord Byron in Albanian dress above the fireplace, holding an Eastern sword and with a great storm about to break out behind him. The Ambassador informed him that this was on loan from the British Government Collections as a gesture of friendship to Greece from the British people. When asked if there were any points of disagreement, any areas of conflict between the two nations, one an empire of the past, the other an empire in the present, the Ambassador simply laughed.

  ‘There are no disagreements at all, my dear Lord Powerscourt. Why do you think the post of Ambassador to the Court of St James is one of the most coveted posts in the Greek Prime Minister’s gift? We have little to do here except attend official functions and represent our country on state occasions. It is a post for a lotus-eater rather than a real diplomat, I assure you!’

  Powerscourt was anxious to meet with the Head of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the British Museum as soon as he returned from the mountains. He had remembered only the day before another account of Tristram Stanhope from his, Powerscourt’s, brother-in-law, the ba
nker William Burke, who had sat next to him at some grand dinner in Guildhall.

  ‘There we all were, Francis, white tie and tails, course after course of French cuisine, decorations will be worn, the odd Victoria Cross on show amongst the baubles, and this fellow Stanhope beside me. He didn’t look out of place at all, cufflinks and shoes all passed muster, that sort of thing. But he had this air about him. I couldn’t put my finger on it for a long time. Then it came to me. Even there, in the beating heart of the City of London, Stanhope had the air of one forever looking to recover the dramatic excitement of some long forgotten sporting event like a cricket match. “There’s a breathless hush in the Close tonight, Ten to make and the match to win.” I rather had the impression he’s been playing the game for most of his life.’

  Powerscourt longed to talk to classical academics, art dealers, sculpture experts, modern Greek historians. If you were a serious thief, he would have asked after half an hour or so, what would you do with a Caryatid if you had stolen one? Copy it? If so, how many copies? Who might want to buy it? Greeks in Greece? Greeks in America? Greeks in London? How much would it be worth? Were there any examples of other works of major importance walking out of European museums apart from the Mona Lisa? Tristram Stanhope would have to answer for them all. Powerscourt thought about the links between the worlds of art, scholarship, Greek nationalism and crime. Somewhere, he felt sure, they intersected. If he could find that point, he might be able to solve the mystery. Once again Stanhope would be his guide.

  A bumping pitch and a blinding light,

  An hour to play and the last man in.

  Theophilus Ragg, Deputy Director of the British Museum, thought he recognized the handwriting. The envelope too looked familiar. Feeling a great wave of anger sweep through him, he slid open the letter with an elaborately carved Japanese paper knife, a gift from the National Museum in Tokyo.

  ‘Dear Ragg,’ he read, ‘you have dared to disobey my instructions. I have received no suggestions about the transfer of the monies mentioned in my earlier letter. The relevant sum is therefore going to increase by ten thousand pounds a day, starting today.’

  Ragg felt that the anger coursing through him was growing stronger.

  ‘Furthermore,’ the writer continued, ‘your pathetic attempts to secure your own safety and those of your family through the intervention of the Metropolitan Police have been noted. Their plain clothes policemen stand out on the streets of London like giants in a land of pygmies.

  ‘As I said before, we know who you are. We know where you are. We have ways of making you pay and in ways you might not have thought of. Quite soon you will receive reminders that it is neither wise nor prudent to ignore our demands. It is not too late. Correspondence regarding the money transfers can still be sent to The Friends of the British Museum, Ritz Hotel, London W1.’

  Ragg knew he ought to take a walk or read a Shakespeare sonnet or two, to calm himself down. Shakespeare sonnets, he had discovered some years before, were much more successful in assuaging his rages than any pill or potion. He remembered the last conversation with his doctor who had advised him that he should consider taking early retirement because of his health. His heart was not strong, the doctor said, and any strain or great upset could have severe consequences. But the wrath was upon him. He thought that if he had been younger and more martial he would have issued a demand for a duel. He grabbed a pen and wrote a reply:

  ‘Dear Blackmailer,’ he began. ‘Yet again you have insulted me and my family and the Museum I represent. You are beneath contempt.

  ‘“Rage – Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles” – these are the opening words of Homer’s great epic of ancient warfare The Iliad, which tells the story of the battle for Troy. May it contain a lesson and a warning for you. “Would to god my rage,” Achilles tells the Trojan hero Hector just before he kills him, “and my fury would drive me now to hack your flesh away and eat you raw, such agonies you have caused me.”

  ‘He then kills Hector, ties him to his chariot, and drags him behind it for a period of twelve days. I pray to the ancient gods of Achaea and the spirits of the Aegean that a latter-day Achilles may return from the dead and tear you into a thousand pieces.’

  Ragg realized he was still shaking. He did not read his letter again. He called for a porter to take it immediately to the Ritz Hotel in Piccadilly.

  He reached inside the top left-hand drawer of his desk and pulled out a well-worn leather volume containing the sonnets of William Shakespeare.

  Inspector Kingsley felt he was progressing well with his work for eight- to ten-year-olds about the Elgin Marbles and the Caryatid. He knew now that the Caryatid was cleaned in a mixture of mild soap and water once a week, and that she didn’t seem to mind when her hair was washed. He learnt about the different time scales of the various pieces of statuary. The Parthenon frieze and the metopes that had been placed around the outer walls of the building were older than the Caryatid and had probably been created by a different generation of sculptors. The Parthenon, one of the young curators told him, was built at the height of Athens’s glory, when she had an empire that spread out all over the Aegean Sea, and when her temples and public buildings were the glory of the city. The Caryatid, the young curator said, was created a generation later when the empire was lost, public life debased, and the city about to lose its thirty-year struggle with Sparta known as the Peloponnesian War. Athens had fallen from the height of glory into ignominious defeat, and the Caryatid, in a way, had marked the passing. Like Icarus, perhaps, Athens had dared to fly too close to the sun. The Athenians could always erect another temple, the Erechtheion, on the Acropolis, but they could not bring back the past.

  The Inspector wrote down what he was told in a special blue notebook with his name on the inside, written in a large, childish hand by his son to remind him of his duty. He took a special interest in the routines of the museum, what happened after dark, what happened before the museum closed last thing at night. Above all, he was interested in the fire alarm that had occurred some time before. It was, people discovered afterwards, a trial run to test some new equipment, but the porters had hurried everybody out of the building into the forecourt in front of Great Russell Street as if their lives were in danger. One or two of the more punctilious curators were able to tell him that they had been left standing about for at least forty minutes. The Inspector decided it was time for another fire alarm. This time he and a couple of his men would be left hiding inside the museum to see how easy it would be to move things about or to replace one object with another. He would talk to Deputy Director Ragg that afternoon about arranging a date. He thought his children would probably approve of fire alarms with their promise of fire engines and ambulances rushing to the rescue with their sirens at full blast.

  ‘I’m the bringer of bad news this evening, very bad.’ Detective Inspector Kingsley had refused the customary cup of tea on his evening arrival in Markham Square and was sipping slowly at a glass of brandy. Powerscourt thought he looked very pale.

  ‘It’s Kostas,’ he went on, ‘one of the Greek porters at the museum. He’s been killed, I’m afraid.’

  ‘How?’ asked Powerscourt.

  ‘Well,’ said Christopher Kingsley, ‘the official story is, and will continue to be, that he was killed by a tube train. The usual story, too many people trying to get on in the rush hour, somebody slipped and then there was a body on the line waiting to be run over by God knows how many tons of Piccadilly Line train. There was an off-duty police sergeant several carriages down and he managed to keep all the passengers at the front of the train back until he spoke to them. The driver was weeping uncontrollably in the stationmaster’s office. He’d only been in the job for two weeks and nobody had prepared him for anything like this. He kept saying that it was all his fault. The point is, the sergeant told his superiors that one of the passengers, a middle-aged woman in a fur coat, said she thought somebody was pushing the victim towards the front of the t
rain, but she couldn’t be sure. She’s going to speak to us again in the morning when she’s calmed down. You know how confusing and chaotic these situations can be, my lord. Very hard to make a sensible narrative of what’s been happening.’

  ‘What do we know of the dead man, Inspector?’

  ‘Very little so far. Name of Kostas Manitakis, employed as a porter in the British Museum. Age, thirty-four, resident in a Greek boarding house, apparently, near their cathedral in Moscow Road in Notting Hill.’

  ‘I wonder if Johnny Fitzgerald has come across him,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Maybe he drank in the basement of that pub down there with the ouzo and the unspeakable Greek wines.’

  ‘I have made an appointment to go to his lodgings in the morning, my lord. I should be very happy if you would come with me. In the meantime, as a precaution, I have ordered his room to be sealed off and guarded and a watch kept on the house. All the other lodgers will be kept at home until they have spoken to us before they go off to work. The landlady is going to miss her normal cleaning duties in the cathedral.’

  ‘It sounds as if you expect foul play, Inspector.’

  ‘I do, and I don’t. I happen to have worked before with the sergeant who was on the train and organized the passengers for questioning. He’s a most reliable fellow. He wouldn’t have told us about the pushing if he didn’t think there was something funny going on.’

  Powerscourt looked closely at the Inspector and remembered what Christopher Kingsley had said about his dislike of murders. Now it looked as though he might have been plunged right into the middle of another one.

  Number six Moscow Road was a three-storey terraced house with steps up to the front door, guarded by a large cat with fierce black eyes and half a tail. The landlady, Mrs Olga Henderson, was of Greek extraction but married to a man from Yorkshire. She greeted them nervously at the door, as Kingsley introduced his sergeant and Powerscourt.