The Last Judgement

‘Was she in during the hours of the crime?’

‘Well, I wouldn’t come and tell you if she wasn’t, would I? ’Course she was. That’s why –’

‘Good, good,’ said Fabriano briskly. ‘Well done. Good work,’ he went on, thus removing from the policeman any pleasure he might have felt at his small discovery. ‘Wheel her in, then.’

There must be hundreds of thousands of women like Signora Andreotti in Italy; quite sweet old ladies, really, who were brought up in small towns or even in villages. Capable of labours on the Herculean scale – cooking for thousands, bringing up children by the dozen, dealing with husbands and fathers and, very often, having a job as well. Then their children grow up, their husbands die and they move in with one child, to do the cooking. A fair bargain, on the whole, and much better than being confined to an old folks’ home.

But in many cases, the children have gone a long way from home; many have made it big in the city, made money on a scale their parents could scarcely even imagine in their day; la dolce vita, eighties style.

The Andreotti household was one such; two parents, one child, two jobs and no one in the house from eight in the morning to eight at night. The elder Signora Andreotti, who once spent her spare time gossiping to neighbours back home, was bored silly. So much so that she felt her mind going with the tedium. And so she noticed everything. Every delivery van in the street, every child playing in the backyard. She heard every football in the corridor, knew the lives of each and every person in the apartment block. She wasn’t nosy, really, she had nothing better to do. It was the closest to human comradeship she came, some days.

So, the previous day, as she explained to Fabriano, she had seen a youngish man arriving with a brown paper packet, and seen him leaving again, still with the packet, some forty minutes later. A door-to-door salesman, she reckoned.

‘This was what time?’ Fabriano asked.

‘About ten. In the morning. Signor Muller went out about eleven, and didn’t come back until six. Then in the afternoon another man came, and rang the bell. I knew Signor Muller was at work, so I popped my head around the door to say he was out. Very surly look he had.’

‘And this was when?’

‘About half-past two. Then he went away. He may have came back again, if he was quiet. I didn’t hear anything, but I sometimes watch a nice game show on the television.’

She explained that in the evening – the crucial time, as far as Fabriano was concerned – she was too busy preparing dinner for the family to see anything. And she went to bed at ten.

‘Can you describe these men?’

She nodded sagely. ‘Of course,’ she said, and went on to give a perfect description of Argyll.

‘This was the one in the morning, right?’

‘Yes.’

‘And the afternoon visitor?’

‘About one metre eighty. Age about thirty-five. Dark brown hair, cut short. Gold signet ring on the middle finger of his left hand. Round metal-rimmed spectacles. Blue and white striped shirt, with cufflinks. Black slip-on shoes –’

‘Inside-leg measurement?’ said Fabriano in amazement. The woman was the sort of witness the police dream about, but rarely find.

‘I don’t know. I could make a guess if you like.’

‘That’s quite all right. Anything else?’

‘Let me see. Grey cotton trousers, with turn-ups, grey woollen jacket with a red stripe running through it. And a small scar above his left eyebrow.’

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‘In that case I suggest you get him to trot down to the Carabinieri and make a statement. Do it now, in fact,’ Bottando said, drumming his fingers on the desk. A definite irritant. More than many, his department had to work closely with the trade; today’s witness was frequently tomorrow’s defendant. It was a fine business, not to get too close to people who were, at least, liable to come under suspicion. And in the world of Italian crime and politics, accusations of corruption were easily made. The connection of Argyll and Flavia, when allied to a murder and the wrath of Fabriano, had considerable potential for trouble. What was more, Flavia knew that very well. It was perfectly understandable that she should want to keep her private life away from Fabriano’s baleful gaze, but she should have known better.

‘I know. I should have come clean. But you know what he’s like. Jonathan would be locked up and emerge with bruises, just to teach me a lesson. Anyway, I’ve tried to get hold of him. He’s out. But I’ll see him and take a statement myself, not that there can be any connection of importance. I’ll send it to Fabriano tomorrow.’

Bottando grunted. Not perfect, but it would do. ‘Apart from that, is there anything for you to do on this case? Anything that concerns us?’

‘Not obviously so, no. At least, not yet. Fabriano’s going to do all the legwork. Talk to the people at Muller’s office, find out his movements, and so on. Apparently he has a sister in Montreal who may come over. If anything turns up which might concern us, I have no doubt he’ll let us know.’

‘Still as obnoxious, is he?’

‘Even worse. Getting into homicide seems to have turned his head.’

‘I see. Good. In that case, until you talk to Mr Argyll, you may as well amuse yourself with daily routine. Now, how do you fancy doing something with that computer?’

Flavia’s face fell. ‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘Not the computer.’

He’d expected that. This awful machine was supposed, by the designers, to be the last word in detection techniques. The idea behind it was to be the Delphic oracle of art police around the world. Each force in each country could enter details of paintings and things into it, and even photographs of missing pieces. Other forces could then access this information, look through it, recognize objects that were on sale at dealers, go round, arrest, prosecute and return the stolen goods to their real owners. The committee behind it had fondly expected that art theft would dwindle away to almost nothing overnight when the forces of law and order were provided with such an awesomely sophisticated weapon.

But.

The trouble with the thing was that it was a bit too Delphic. Call up a picture of a lake by Monet, and you were likely to get a photograph of a Renaissance silver chalice. Other times it would produce rows of gibberish or, worst of all, the dreaded phrase in eight languages, ‘Service temporarily suspended. Please try again.’

According to a technician who had been called in to look at it, it was a marvellous product of European co-operation. A perfect symbol of the continent, he said in abstract philosophic vein as the machine had, yet again, insisted that a Futurist sculpture was a long-lost masterpiece by Masaccio. Specification by the Germans; hardware by the Italians; software by the British; telecommunication links by the French. Put it all together and naturally it didn’t work. Did anyone really expect it to? He left eventually, recommending the postal system. More reliable, he said gloomily.

‘Please, Flavia. We have to use it.’

‘But it’s useless.’

‘I know it’s useless. That’s not the point. This is an international venture which cost a fortune. If we don’t use it periodically we’ll be asked why not. Good heavens, woman, last time I went into the room the monitor was being used as a plant-stand. How would that look if anyone from the budget committee came around?’

‘No.’

Bottando sighed. Somehow or other he seemed to have trouble projecting his authority, despite holding the rank of general. Think of Napoleon, for example. If he issued an order, did his subordinates snort derisively and refuse to pay a blind bit of attention? If Caesar ordered an immediate flanking movement, did his lieutenants look up from their newspapers and say they were a bit tired at the moment, how about next Wednesday? They did not. Of course, the fact that Flavia was perfectly correct weakened his case a little. But that was not the point. It was time to exert control. Discipline.

‘Please?’ he said appealingly.

‘Oh, all right,’ she said eventually. ‘I’ll switch it on. Tell you what, I’ll leave it on all night. How about that?’

‘Splendid, my dear. I’m so grateful.’

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While the authorities in the Art Theft Department were dealing with crucial matters of international co-operation, Jonathan Argyll spent the morning coping with more basic matters of stock management. That is, he was doing a little work on his picture. He had been struck by a good idea. That is, Muller had said the picture was one of a series. Who more likely to want to buy it than the person, or museum, or institution, who owned the others? Assuming, that is, they were all together. All he had to do was find out where the rest were, and offer to complete the set. It might not work, of course, but it was worth an hour or so of his time.

Besides, this was the bit of his trade that he liked. Dealing with recalcitrant clients, and bargaining and extracting money and working out whether things could be sold at a profit were the bread and butter of his life, but he didn’t really enjoy them much. Too much reality for him to cope with comfortably. A meditative hour in a library was far more to his taste.

The question was where to start. Muller said he’d read about it, but where? He was half minded to ring the man up, but reckoned he’d have gone to work, and he didn’t know where that was. Anyway, a skilled researcher like himself could probably find out fairly quickly anyway.

All he knew about the picture was that it was by a man called Floret; and he knew that because it was signed, indistinctly but legibly, in the bottom left-hand corner. He could guess it was done in the 1780s, and it was obviously French.

So he proceeded methodically and with order, a bit like Fabriano only more quietly. Starting at the beginning with the great bible of all art historians, Thieme und Becker. All twenty-five volumes in German, unfortunately, but he could make out enough to be directed to the next stage.

Floret, Jean. Künstler, gest. 1792. That was the stuff. A list of paintings, all in museums. Six lines in all, pretty much the basic minimum. Not a painter to be taken seriously. But the reference did direct him to an article published in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts in 1937 which was his next port of call. This was by a man called Jules Hartung, little more than a biographical sketch, really, but it fleshed out the details. Born 1765, worked in France, guillotined for not being quite revolutionary enough in 1792. Served him right, as well, according to the text. Floret had worked for a patron, the Comte de Mirepoix, producing a series of subjects on legal themes. Then, come the Revolution, he had denounced his benefactor and supervised the confiscation of the man’s goods and the ruin of his family. A common enough sort of story, perhaps.