“Really?”
“No. But in this particular case I think we should make a start. What do you want?”
“Two things, then. Firstly, a list of everything Forster sold through you. And bought, I suppose. Secondly, I’d like to know whether your firm did the inventory on Weller House.”
“Post-mortem?”
He nodded. “Somebody did; it would have been official valuers and Forster was in charge then. It struck me he might well have chosen you. Your firm does that sort of thing, doesn’t it?”
She grunted. “Oh, yes. If the owners decide to sell it gives us a head start. That at least I can help you with. On the other hand, his trading might be a bit more difficult. All the details will be in Alex’s office and I don’t want to disturb him, if you see what I mean.”
“Of course.”
“Hold on.”
And she disappeared into the next office, carefully making sure that there was no one in it. Argyll heard the sound of file drawers being slid in and out, then a pause, then the whirring and clunking of a photocopying machine. Eventually, she returned, bearing a few sheets of paper.
“I’ve got the inventory at least. We did it at the end of January,” she said. “I only copied the paintings for you; I’d have been there all day if I’d done the furniture as well.”
“That’s fine.”
She handed the sheets over. “Pretty motley collection,” she said. “We’re not the greatest auction house in the world, but even we get to deal with higher quality stuff. Ninety-nine in all.”
“Paintings?”
“Er, hold on.” She counted quickly. “Seventy-two paintings. The rest are drawings. What’s the matter? You look disappointed.”
“There’s more than I was expecting.”
“Oh. Anyway, there’s scarcely anything worth bothering about in the whole lot. Nearly all pretty ordinary family portraits. One supposed Kneller, but that apparently is a bit dubious. There’s a note from the person who did it saying if that’s a Kneller, he’s a cucumber. The rest are even worse.”
He nodded. “Now, I’ve taken more of your time than I should. I should leave you.”
“Not before you promise to keep me fully informed of everything that you find that concerns us.”
Argyll agreed.
“And put me up for a week when I come to Rome in September.”
Argyll agreed.
“And sell pictures through us if you ever use a London auction house.”
He agreed to that.
“And take me out for dinner before you leave.”
And that. As he left he wondered whether he could give the bill to Bottando.
11
He got back to Byrnes’s gallery about half an hour after Flavia, and the two of them then slogged their way across central London to get to the station. Liverpool Street Station at five-thirty in the evening requires a strong stomach and nerves of steel even when you’re used to it; for Flavia it resembled nothing so much as a scene from Dante’s Inferno. A post-modern, recently-restored Inferno, no doubt, but even the fine restoration work on the station could not disguise the basic chaos of the transport.
“Dear God,” she said as she followed Argyll towards what was flagged as the 5:15 to Norwich, but which was still hanging around in the station, “are you serious?”
She looked at the ancient carriages with the doors hanging open, the windows filthy with years of grime and the paint peeling off, then shook her head in disbelief. Then she peered through the caked mud and saw the hundreds of commuters crammed in with barely a square millimetre of space, each one gamely reading a newspaper and pretending this was a civilized way of spending their brief sojourn on earth. “Is this the express service to Belsen, or something?” she asked.
Argyll coughed with embarrassment. It’s always awkward, being in the position of feeling patriotically obliged to defend the indefensible. “It’ll get us there,” he said lamely. “I hope.”
“But why don’t these people just get off and put a match to the thing?” she asked with the incredulity that only someone who lives in a country with an effective train service can muster.
Argyll was halfway through explaining that British Rail would just transfer the charred wrecks to the Brighton line when a loud crackle was followed by an incomprehensible booming around the station.
“What?” asked Flavia, frowning and trying to make it out.
“I don’t know.”
The grunting and mumbling seemed to be understood by the passengers on the train, however. With one huge collective sigh, they folded their newspapers, picked up their briefcases, got off and organized themselves on the platform. None seemed particularly perturbed by the fact that the train should have pulled out of the station twenty minutes ago.
“Excuse me,” Flavia asked a well-dressed, fifty-year-old man who had come to stand placidly nearby. “What did that announcement say?”
He raised an eyebrow, surprised at the disturbance. “The train has been cancelled again,” he explained. “The next one’s in an hour.”
This is ridiculous,” she said firmly after she’d digested the information and decided that patience could be overdone. “I’m not hanging around here for an hour to be squeezed into a cattle truck. If these people want to stand around like a bunch of sheep, that’s their problem. I’m getting out of here.”
Suppressing a desire to point out that sheep don’t travel in cattle trucks, Argyll trooped after her, out of the station and into a car rental place around the corner.
He reckoned they averaged about three miles an hour all the way to Norwich. He still thought they would have arrived faster if they’d waited for the train, but, in the circumstances, didn’t want to say so. It did give them plenty of time to talk about the late Geoffrey Forster, and the varying possibilities that he was either a major criminal or, alternatively, the biggest waste of time for years. Argyll summarized his findings in the afternoon.
“So?” Flavia said as they slowed to a halt somewhere. “What do you think?”
“Well. It’s interesting, isn’t it? All these little hints.”
“Which ones?”
“Forster busied himself for several years selling paintings from Weller House. Right?”
She nodded.
“Now, when Uncle Godfrey shuffled off the mortal coil fifteen years back, there were seventy-two paintings listed in the inventory taken when he died. When Cousin Veronica followed suit another inventory was taken. And guess what?”
She shook her head. “Amaze me.”
“Still seventy-two pictures in the collection.”
The queue of traffic got moving again, and Flavia paused while she tried to manoeuvre herself into a position to burst mightily through the twenty miles-an-hour barrier.
“Which means,” she resumed as she gave up the effort a few moments later, “that either he was buying new ones, which I assume you can check from comparing the two lists. or he wasn’t selling anything.”
Argyll nodded enthusiastically.
“Using Weller House as a sort of Laundromat?” she suggested. “Is that what you’re getting at?”
“That’s it. Forster steals a painting, which is bought by someone. Problem: how to disguise where it comes from, so it can satisfy the curious. For a picture not to have any provenance is a bit suspicious these days, and the last thing you want is to give the impression it might have come from Italy. So, you find an old country house collection that hasn’t been examined by anyone for years. If there is any old documentation, you burn it so no one can double check. Then you begin to sell the pictures, perhaps going through an auction house to be doubly sure, claiming they came from there.”
“And” Flavia continued, “although some people might wonder, no one can ever prove it was stolen because Forster has made sure his targets were from badly catalogued, uninsured collections. And the new owners will be cautious enough to make sure no photographs of their new possession are taken either.”