Death of an Elgin Marble Page 7

  ‘Come in, sir, my lord Powerscourt, Sergeant. Dear me, I never expected three of you all at once.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Mrs Henderson,’ said the Inspector, ‘nobody is suggesting anything illegal went on in this house.’ Powerscourt’s eyebrows rose a couple of inches at this point. ‘We just want to ask everybody a few questions,’ the Inspector continued, ‘that’s all. Perhaps we could begin with you and then you needn’t worry any more. Is there somewhere quiet we could talk?’

  ‘Yes, yes, come this way, please.’ The front hall was adorned with pictures of Greek saints. She now showed them into what was clearly the front room, overlooking the street, obviously not used very much and entirely dominated by a large reproduction of a Byzantine Christ, gazing sadly at his earthly kingdom of a battered sofa and a glass cabinet filled with children’s dolls.

  ‘Perhaps you could begin by telling us how many residents you have here, Mrs Henderson.’ Powerscourt was impressed by the way the Inspector avoided using the word ‘lodgers’.

  ‘Five at the moment,’ Mrs Henderson replied. ‘All my rooms are taken just now!’ She brightened slightly at this point as if a full house was a guarantee of innocence.

  ‘Perhaps we could begin with the late Mr Kostas, Mrs Henderson. How long had he been with you?’

  ‘About a year and a half, he came with his brother Stavros just after Easter last year. They shared the little room at the back of the house at the top. Very good guests they were too.’ Mrs Henderson looked as though she might be about to burst into tears at any moment.

  ‘Tell us, if you would, Mrs Henderson, what sort of people they were, these two brothers, what they liked doing in their spare time, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Well, it’s hard to say when you get to know people, isn’t it. They liked their work at the museum, I know that. They used to drink at that pub round the corner. Kostas liked playing football, there was some kind of informal Greek team that kicked a ball about in the park on Sunday afternoons.’

  ‘Is the brother here at present?’ asked Powerscourt. ‘In the house, I mean?’

  ‘No, Mr Stavros is away, he’s been away a week or more now. I don’t know where he’s gone or how to get in touch with him, I’m afraid. There was some talk of a long journey, I think, but I’m not sure.’

  There was a pause while Mrs Henderson dried her eyes on a large purple handkerchief that looked as though it belonged to her husband.

  ‘Take your time,’ said the Inspector kindly, in his best bedside manner, ‘there’s no hurry.’

  Powerscourt looked up again at the huge mournful eyes of the Saviour above the mantelpiece. Lady Lucy had always maintained that it was the foreknowledge of their own death that made these Greek Orthodox Christs so sad. ‘If you knew, Francis, that you were going to have a long and bloody death, stuck on top of a cross at the top of some hill with Roman soldiers abusing you, you’d look pretty miserable too.’

  ‘Were they regular with the rent, that sort of thing?’ asked the Inspector.

  ‘Yes, they were, they never missed a rent day all the time they were here.’

  ‘Were they religious, the brothers,’ asked Powerscourt, ‘living so close to the cathedral and so on?’

  ‘Now you mention, they were very keen on the Church. There’s another brother who’s a monk in a monastery on a Greek island somewhere in the middle of the Aegean. Kostas always tried to get home early on Fridays for Vespers in the early evening and they both went to church on Sundays, regular.’

  ‘Forgive me, Mrs Henderson, were there any women friends you were aware of?’

  ‘Not that they ever brought any home, if that’s what you mean. I always told them that if they were walking out with a nice respectable girl they were always welcome to bring her home to afternoon tea on Sundays. We have it in here, you know, with Greek cakes and a glass of wine before leaving. But nobody ever came.’

  Powerscourt thought Mrs Henderson would have welcomed the chance to inspect these respectable young girls, but he said nothing.

  ‘Were there any particular friends they went about with?’ The Inspector was turning to a fresh page in his notebook.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Mrs Henderson replied, ‘they were quite self contained and, of course, they were very friendly with my other Greek gentlemen. I have five altogether.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said the Inspector, ‘you could tell us a little about them?’

  ‘Well, two of them, Maximos and Antonis, are also brothers and they work for a Greek bank with a branch in Notting Hill. There are a lot of Greeks living round here, as you know, with the cathedral and the school and so on. Very quiet boys.’

  ‘And the last one?’

  ‘Nikos,’ said Mrs Henderson, ‘he works in that big Greek store by the tube station, the one that sells Greek food and wine and newspapers and all sorts of things. He brings me olives and Greek cakes and pastries on Saturdays when he comes back from the shop. He’s mad about football, Nikos, follows Arsenal home and away whenever he can.’

  ‘Very good,’ the Inspector said. ‘That’s all for now unless you can think of anything you want to tell us, any reason for his death perhaps? No? Then if I could talk to the other gentlemen one by one we’ll let them go off to work. Lord Powerscourt here will have a look at the brothers’ room, if you have no objections? Perhaps you could show him the way?’

  The young police constable stepped aside as Powerscourt and Mrs Henderson came to the door of Kostas’s quarters on the top floor. Mrs Henderson parked herself by the window and gave every appearance of intending to stay while her visitor searched the room.

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Henderson, thank you very much. I’ll see you on my way out.’

  Mrs Henderson clattered noisily down her stairs. ‘Well, Constable, is there anything to report up here?’

  ‘I took over here at seven o’clock this morning, sir, my lord, seeing as how the Inspector wanted this room guarded twenty-four hours a day until you gentlemen had a chance to look at it. Not very much to guard, is there? I’ve checked under the beds and there’s nothing funny about the floorboards, I can tell you that much.’

  The room was small. The two beds were side by side at the window, divided by a small dresser with four drawers. There was a wardrobe in the corner by the door which revealed that the brothers had one suit each, three pairs of trousers and eight shirts between them and four pair of shoes. Powerscourt thought that brother Stavros would have taken some clothes on his journey.

  ‘If there’s anything here,’ said Powerscourt, ‘it’s going to be in one of those drawers.’

  ‘I could empty them out on the bed one by one if you like, my lord.’

  ‘Thank you very much. Perhaps we could begin at the bottom.’

  The bottom two yielded nothing but socks, underwear and sweaters. The Constable checked that there were no secret hiding places and put them back. The third drawer was full of letters, apparently stuffed in at random with no sign of a filing system at all.

  ‘I’ll bag these up for you, if you like, my lord, and you can take them away for translation,’ the Constable said, after they had checked that every single page was written in Greek. But when they turned out the top drawer Powerscourt realized that there might have been a system after all. Everything here was in English for a start. It was as if one or both brothers had emptied their pockets into this drawer every evening. There were bus tickets, tube tickets, train tickets, some of them to and from Amersham, orders of service from the cathedral. There were rotas from the British Museum and the stubs of two pairs of theatre tickets at the Lyceum, both on Saturday afternoons. And there was a receipt from Thomas Cook for organizing the transportation of what must have been a large and obviously expensive package to be taken in a railway container from London Victoria to Italy. There was no date of travel and no precise information about what the package contained. Powerscourt showed the document to his new friend, the Constable.

  ‘What do you think, young man?’ />
  The policeman looked at it closely. ‘I don’t know, sir. Maybe Kostas and his brother didn’t know how to organize the thing, so they asked Thomas Cook to sort it out for them? They’d have heard of Thomas Cook for sure, but maybe they felt uncertain about approaching one of the big removal companies themselves.’

  ‘It’s possible, it’s certainly possible, thank you so much for your help,’ said Powerscourt and took the stairs two at a time to confer with Inspector Kingsley on the ground floor.

  Twenty minutes later Powerscourt was talking to a young man called Davies in the Holborn branch of Thomas Cook. Davies had a small, dark brown beard, well trimmed, and a pair of very thick spectacles as if the reading of multiple timetables, often in lamentably small type, had taken a toll of his eyesight.

  ‘Why, yes,’ he told Powerscourt, who told him that he was an investigator, ‘I remember the two Greek gentlemen, of course I do. And I remember that receipt you have in your hand. They were very anxious and rather confused, I think, our Greek friends. They worked at the British Museum and they came to us for advice about transporting a very large package from here to Greece. They were anxious, for some reason, that the package should be picked up from Brindisi and make the final stretch of the voyage by boat.’

  ‘And what did you tell them?’ asked Powerscourt, feeling suddenly that he might be on the verge of making significant progress at last.

  ‘I said that we didn’t do packages like that ourselves. Whenever we’re asked to provide that kind of transportation we place the matter in the hands of Rochfords, the furniture removal people. They’ve been moving stuff around Europe for decades. As a matter of fact I rang a friend of mine who works there and asked him to look after the brothers and their mysterious package. I did ask them, you see, what the package contained and they muttered something about a very large pipe needed for repair work in a big engineering project somewhere in Greece. I didn’t quite believe them, actually. Anyway, the long and the short of it is that the package was booked to travel in a railway container from Victoria to Brindisi in southern Italy.’

  The young man checked his papers. ‘It is meant to arrive six days from now. I can ask my friend Wakefield over at Rochfords to provide all the paper documentation, the manifest, the customs clearance and so on if that would help. God knows where the wretched pipe is now; it’s probably sitting in a siding somewhere like Lyon or Milan for all I know.’

  ‘That would be most kind,’ said Powerscourt, and handed over his card. ‘Those details would be very helpful. Is there anything else you can tell me that might be helpful? Anything, however trivial it seems, could be useful.’

  The young man took off his glasses and polished them vigorously on the end of his tie.

  ‘I note,’ he said, ‘that although you introduced yourself as an investigator, Lord Powerscourt, you haven’t told me exactly what you are investigating. I’m not asking you to tell me since it is obviously confidential. But there is one thing that might help you.’

  ‘And what is that?’

  ‘One of the Greek gentlemen decided on the spot that he should accompany their package. He too has a railway ticket from Victoria to Brindisi Central. But I doubt very much if he will be travelling on the same train. Stavros, that’s your man, if you’re thinking of joining him on his travels. I could probably book you a ticket on the same train if you like? I could do that right now.’

  6

  Inspector Kingsley came to Markham Square after he had finished his interviews with the Greek residents of the Moscow Road boarding house.

  ‘I think you heard the most interesting bits from the landlady, my lord,’ he said, ‘but what did you discover at Thomas Cook?’

  The Inspector whistled when Powerscourt told him the news. ‘And Stavros has gone a wandering, has he, all the way to the boot of Italy. Well, well. What do you think we should do?’

  ‘I don’t think we have any choice, Inspector. Somebody has to go to Brindisi. Somebody has to be there, if at all possible, when this wretched container is unloaded from the train. We need to discover where on earth it is going after that, presumably on a boat if our friend at Thomas Cook is to be believed. I think you should continue your work at the museum talking to everybody about the daily life of a Caryatid. People might get suspicious if you suddenly disappeared. I shall go to Brindisi.’

  ‘I think you should take Johnny with you,’ Lady Lucy cut in. She always felt safer when her husband had his friend with him on a dangerous investigation. However colourful he might appear to the outside world, Johnny always brought his friend home safe and sound.

  ‘I agree,’ said the Inspector. ‘I would not dream of going on such a mission without my sergeant. Two heads are better than one.’

  ‘Very well. I shall telephone Leith immediately.’

  Leith was Lord Rosebery’s butler, a one man encyclopaedia of train timetables, railway buffets and station hotels right across Europe. He could tell you how to get to Vladivostok or Vitoria, he could recommend the fastest trains to Rome or Riga. His little office halfway down the basement stairs in Rosebery’s town house in Belgrave Square was the finest private library in Europe of railway information across twenty countries and four different railway gauges. Powerscourt could see him now, the hair white, Leith himself as slim as a railway sleeper in his master’s memorable phrase, a well-chewed pencil hovering over the pages of his sacred texts. Then the lights in his mind would go green, the signals would clack down, the points swing over, the steam would shoot up into the air with a great whoosh and a new journey plan would be born.

  Rosebery maintained that Leith was now the best paid butler in the Western world.

  ‘I do not believe even the American tycoons pay their fellows as much as I do,’ Lord Rosebery would tell his friends. ‘Leith just has to whisper “Thomas Cook” to me and I have to give him a rise to stop him deserting me. I couldn’t travel anywhere without him now.’

  ‘Brindisi in the tip of Italy, my lord?’ Leith’s gravelly voice sounded very close on the phone. ‘To arrive by 31 October you say? I shall send you a telegram directly, my lord. Hard to remember details off these telephonic instruments I find. A very good morning to you.’

  There was a great sense of relief at the British Museum. Those at the top sensed that something was amiss from the irregular behaviour of their Deputy Director, but there was great relief when the Head of Greek and Roman Antiquities returned to post from his mountaineering tour in the Alps. He left his climbing boots and a rather battered ice axe in his outer office and set off on a tour of his kingdom. He spoke to the porters, handing out praise and encouragement like sweets at a children’s party. He conversed with his colleagues at the more scholarly end of the museum, regaling them with tales of his fifth successful attempt on the Matterhorn. ‘Only the north-east route, mind you, not the most difficult,’ he would say with his usual modesty. If he noticed anything amiss with the Caryatid, he did not say.

  Leith’s telegram reached Markham Square inside half an hour. It was couched in cryptic telegraph speak as if its paymaster, Lord Rosebery, was a poor man rather one of the richest peers in the country:

  Early train to Paris tomorrow, my lord. Seats booked on first two services. Essential to arrive before 18.30 sleeper from Paris Bercy to Bologna, Florence and Rome. Have reserved first class dinner and sleeper tickets for two on this conveyance. Informants report excellent service from new French chef on board. Arrive Bologna 19.30 in the evening, my lord. Have made reservations at Hotel Cellini in Via Garibaldi to the left of the main entrance to the station, my lord. Pasta and lamb dishes come highly recommended. Further sleeper following day, my lord. Depart Bologna 15.30. Service quite slow. Stops at Ancona, Pescara Centrale, Foggia, Bari Centrale. Provision of meals and refreshments ceases at Foggia, my lord. Brindisi station on Piazza Francesco Crispo. Few reports from this far south, my lord, but Hotel Mazzini highly recommended for cleanliness. Simple food prepared by proprietor’s mother. Have booked suitab
le accommodation. I await instructions on the return journey, my lord. Leith.’

  Powerscourt spent the journey rereading Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War. He remembered reading some of it one hot summer in Ireland, lying by the side of the great fountain at the bottom of the steps in the Powerscourt House garden, the sparkle and the gurgling of the water a relief from the austere and rather difficult prose of the ancient Greek historian. He marvelled again at the extraordinary claim Thucydides had made at the beginning of his great work, that it would not be a mere trifle to be picked up and put down lightly, but a possession for ever. He wondered if the historian had ever imagined that people would still be reading his words over two thousand years after his death, hurtling across the plains of northern Italy. Johnny worked on his bird book, staring out of the window for long stretches of time, then writing furiously in an enormous notebook.

  Three days after their departure Powerscourt and Johnny Fitzgerald were standing on the balcony of Powerscourt’s enormous suite at the Hotel Mazzini. In the centre of the square was a huge statue of King Victor Emmanuel the Second, first king of a united Italy fifty years before. Powerscourt wondered how many people down here in Puglia had even heard of Victor’s original kingdom of Piedmont far to the north at the time of independence and how many of them spoke his language. In front of them was the square, populated by a couple of mangy dogs and a bar with broken chairs on the pavement outside. Way over to their left, out of sight from their position, was the port.

  Powerscourt’s halting Italian had discovered from the hotel reception that goods that came by train were kept in a siding overnight and moved to the port or other destinations first thing in the morning. He was shown the single-line track that led from the back of the station in the direction of the harbour. Reception did not think that proceedings would begin before eleven o’clock at the earliest. People had to have time for breakfast after all. By that time Johnny Fitzgerald was sipping a large glass of Greek brandy in the café by the quays. Powerscourt watched as an old horse drew a pallet containing one battered railway container down the tracks in the general direction of the harbour. He sprinted off through the side streets, dodging a couple of cats and a flock of skeletal chickens on the way. He joined Johnny at the bar and ordered a glass of ouzo.