A Family Affair Page 7

  So much – Appleby thought, as he began to walk down Lower Regent Street – for the skeleton of the affair. But that it was an ‘affair’ at all – that one aspect of it really did cohere with another – depended upon one’s accepting the significance of certain common features. The most striking was the exploitation, by the villain or villains concerned, of what had to be termed the embarrassment factor. Lord Cockayne had been told, by a post-haste emissary from an exalted quarter, that there would be discomposure and distress in that same quarter if he didn’t keep mum – and being by tradition and training a proconsul of Empire he had at once toed the line. There had been clever calculation behind that. Sir Thomas Carrington had merely wished not to look awkward as having offered to the Royal Academy (or whatever the body was) a Stubbs that perhaps had never been a Stubbs at all; and this had been enough to make him pull his punches. Mr Meatyard, at first noisily indignant, had seen himself heading for a figure of fun. Lord Canadine had been in the habit (one had to suppose) of leading his male guests (no doubt on a late-evening stroll in summer) to view, in some secluded corner of his demesne, a joke not readily to be accommodated with a refined modern taste. Mr Praxiteles had been similarly circumstanced; he would not be eager to publicize his possession of a choice collection of curious pictures; this had kept him mum when his – possibly temporary – loss had been discovered, and had subsequently made him knuckle under to the resourceful Braunkopf as well.

  Most of this, Appleby told himself, he had totted up already. But there were two further points of significance. The first was the highly specialized character of the operations. Somebody had known about Lord Cockayne’s unsuspected treasure, had known that Sir Thomas Carrington possessed a Stubbs, had known not only that Lord Canadine’s garden ornament dated from classical antiquity but also that it had been treated in a disrespectful manner, had known about the sort of pictures collected by Mr Praxiteles. It was only the misfortune of Mr Meatyard that was a little out of series here, but it still fell within the general area of operations in the art market. And the second point was at least a related one. The entire sequence of frauds, although seemingly yielding big money every time, was too freakish to be thought of in terms of a professional criminal world. When that world impinged upon the art world – upon Braunkopf’s voonderble vorlt, one might say – it was usually by way of stealing masterpieces and holding them for a ransom which insurance companies or wealthy owners were often willing to pay up in an unobtrusive way. In operations of that kind there was really big money – money comparable with what might be gained by robbing mail trains and bullion merchants – and with this the gains from these bizarre operations, substantial though they must have been, simply didn’t compare. The whole lot, in fact, had something amateurish about them. But amateurish in the old-fashioned sense of the word. The element of fun or play – or of practical joke, if one cared to put it that way – distinguishably lurked in them.

  But then again – and Appleby paused on the steps of his club – the mind behind them was quite as wary as it was crazy. It was a mind capable of biding its time, and of so minimizing risks. The series of five frauds covered a period, according to his reckoning, of over fifteen years. The perpetrator, that was to say, was capable of lurking and watching for two or three years before finding conditions which sufficiently assured him of success.

  Was there anything else to be remarked of these outlandish coups collectively? Appleby suddenly saw that there was. He himself had much the same attitude to all of them, and it was an attitude which could best be described as distinctly lacking in moral zeal. He had retired from keeping a professional eye on crime; he had no more than the private citizen’s obligation to resist it; and in the matter of these odd goings-on he had been inquiring into he found that he had no serious feelings at all. If Oswyn Lyward was reliable – which was perhaps a large assumption – his father had lost nothing he had valued; and between Mr Braunkopf and Mr Praxiteles as deserving or undeserving characters there was clearly nothing to choose. And so on, indeed, through the whole lot. This surely meant that he had come up to town in a thoroughly idle spirit. He might as well have stayed at home, and filled in his time with a chess problem or a crossword puzzle.

  Appleby found this sudden glimpse of himself as a busybody discouraging. Lord Cockayne appeared really to want him to go down to Keynes Court, but this was upon the strength of expectations so unrealistic as not in fact to constitute a very sensible proposal at all. He had been able to impose himself upon Braunkopf, and extract a certain amount of hard information from him, largely because of that wary gentleman’s politic insistence that in Appleby he had the good fortune to be firmly possessed of a powerful friend and patron. When Braunkopf got round to divulging dubious practices to you – and Appleby had experienced this with him before – it was almost impossible to resist the premise that the matter belonged with what Braunkopf liked to call the confidentials. At Scotland Yard Appleby’s successor had been entirely amiable, but he had probably regarded his visitor as having turned harmlessly eccentric all the same. How would Lord Canadine regard him – or Sir Thomas Carrington or Mr Praxiteles or Mr Meatyard – if he simply presented himself with a ring at a front-door bell?

  Appleby nodded abstractedly to a porter, hung up his hat and umbrella, wandered into a smoking-room, decided it wasn’t too early to ask for a drink, and sat down with an evening paper.

  ‘You can’t maintain we’re too bad at prediction,’ the Astronomer Royal was saying. ‘It’s our speciality, in a way. I can predict you a very nice line in comets, for instance, pretty well stretching out to the crack of doom. There will be an effluxion of just so much time–’

  ‘Whatever that may be,’ the Astronomer Royal’s companion said.

  ‘Ah, yes – of course. Time. Yes, indeed. One has to make use of these rather vague terms. But so much of what we call time will go by, and there will be your comet, as punctual as a tube train drawing up at a platform. If it’s a day or two late, the world’s astronomers will be thrilled to bits.’

  ‘Yes, yes – predictability, of course.’ The Astronomer Royal’s companion, whom Appleby didn’t know, was looking at the Astronomer Royal with a great appearance of severity. ‘I ought to have said repeatability. Repeatability is the test, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘Certainly, my dear fellow, certainly. But it depends so much, you know, on one’s lab. And on the extent to which one can potter around one’s lab. Mine is fairly commodious – nothing less then the spacious firmament on high – and I can claim to be coming to wander around it fairly freely. And I don’t mean in their ridiculous hardware. Like every competent astronomer, I am steadily extending my own means of strolling through interstellar space. But strictly as a looker-on. I’m rather like Appleby here. Do you two know each other, by the way? Sir John Appleby, Professor Sansbury. For Appleby, crime is now among what may be termed the spectator sports. But whereas he has simply become a touchline character on retiring, I am essentially one while still more or less actively on the job. It isn’t even any good my giving an encouraging cheer. The stars in their courses heed me not. So I can’t get them to square up in the interest of the repeatability principle.’

  Apart from a conventional murmur at the appropriate moment, Appleby had said nothing. It struck him as odd – as conceivably, indeed, an instance of what is termed the finger of Providence – that here, fortuitously before him, was the eminent Cambridge art historian who had authenticated the Nanna and Pippa. But he was even more impressed – or depressed – by the Astronomer Royal’s having so firmly characterized him as a mere spectator ab extra in the murky firmament of crime. It was perfectly true, and just what he had been thinking himself. Like the astrophysicist, he was without power to give anything a nudge or shove as it went by. But was this quite true? As he asked himself the question, Appleby was aware of a new glimmer on the farthest fringe of his mind. If he wasn’t exactly like Keats’ watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken, h
e was at least a man in whose mind a little astronomical talk had lodged a new idea.

  ‘Repeatability?’ he now asked. ‘You’re talking about the principle of the controlled experiment?’

  ‘Something like that.’ The Astronomer Royal passed a hand over his abundant silver hair. ‘Have you ever interested yourself in psychical research – parapsychology, as they say nowadays?’

  ‘I read about it from time to time.’

  ‘At Cambridge,’ Professor Sansbury said, ‘it has been admitted within the sphere of orthodox scientific inquiry. For that matter, eminent scientists have been interested in it for a long time. But now there is a new statistical basis. Most interesting.’

  ‘My point is, you see, that these fellows are in rather the same position as myself in point of this repeatability business. We both have to bide our time. Take the affair they call ESP. Turning over a set of cards, you know, and having somebody guessing about them in the next room. The experiment isn’t, in the strict sense, repeatable – simply because this paranormal faculty comes and goes in such individuals as seem to be endowed with it, and sometimes there seems not to be anybody available at all. You can think up new techniques for investigating the phenomenon, and have no end of stuff ready waiting in your lab. Gadgets for recording and measuring electrical behaviour in the brain, and so forth. And then you just have to wait – you see? – until some sort of suitable percipient turns up. It’s rather the same with astronomers. We have everything ready and waiting – and then what used to be called the celestial objects take their time in coming along.’

  ‘But at least they come along predictably,’ Sansbury said. ‘Whereas these extrasensory people mayn’t come along at all.’

  ‘Quite true – but they can keep us waiting the devil of a long time. I sometimes do wish I could lure or summon the stars out of their courses.’

  ‘Lure them?’ Appleby said.

  ‘Have everything set up for them and waiting, you know. And then drop them a line, saying we’d prepared the ideal little theatre for them to show their paces in. A straight appeal to astral vanity, as it were.’

  ‘Most interesting.’ Appleby seemed quite impressed by these whimsical remarks. ‘There’s an astronomer in Dr Johnson’s Rasselas–’

  ‘My dear Appleby, I read about him every year on my birthday. A cautionary tale for us, indeed. “I have sometimes turned aside the axis of the earth, and sometimes varied the ecliptick of the sun.” I could quote you the whole thing. The poor old chap hadn’t been content simply to admit himself a looker-on, and as a result the stars drove him off his rocker. Sansbury, are there any professional risks of that sort in your line?’ The Astronomer Royal glanced at his watch as he spoke, and jumped to his feet. ‘Only don’t give me the answer now, or I’ll miss my damned train. Time, once more. Good day to you both.’ And he turned and strode from the room.

  ‘A fanciful mind,’ Sansbury murmured. ‘But entertaining enough for a short time. And I suppose the answer to his question to be that, in my line, we run small risk of going mad, but a considerable risk of making asses of ourselves.’ He paused, and glanced at Appleby curiously. ‘Do you often drop in here?’

  ‘Not nowadays. I live in the country, and seldom come up to town. Today I’ve been looking up a few old acquaintances – including one whom I think you know. Hildebert Braunkopf.’

  ‘Braunkopf?’ For a moment the name seemed to convey nothing to Sansbury. And then he nodded. ‘But, Lord, yes! Fellow who has a picture shop he calls the Da Vinci? I once thought I’d made an ass of myself there, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘Over a couple of tarts?’

  ‘Tarts?’ Not unnaturally, Professor Sansbury was startled. But then he laughed. ‘By Jove, yes! Nanna and Pippa. You know something about that affair?’

  ‘I may almost be said to be investigating it.’ Appleby announced this boldly. Indeed, he now knew in his heart that he was investigating it. For hadn’t an altogether surprising idea come into his head? ‘You see,’ he went on to Professor Sansbury, ‘I happen to have made contact with a rather similar case. It happened in the household of a friend of my youngest son’s. Keynes Court – Lord Cockayne’s place.’

  ‘How very interesting.’ Sansbury – who had given Appleby a sudden sharp glance – sounded suitably impressed. ‘You mean another business of a picture’s being borrowed, authenticated, copied, and returned? That was the species of foolery I was involved in through this Da Vinci concern.’

  ‘No, not quite that. Just straight theft.’

  ‘I see. But round about the same time as this Giulio Romano affair?’

  ‘Well, no. The Keynes Court incident was over fifteen years ago.’

  ‘Dear me.’ No doubt justifiably, Professor Sansbury stared at Appleby.

  ‘I assure you there are some grounds for tracing a connection between the two events.’

  ‘And with other events as well – perhaps within this fifteen years period?’

  ‘Well, yes.’ It was Appleby’s turn to stare. Sansbury appeared to be a more astute character than he had supposed. ‘But it is Braunkopf’s misfortune that I want to start off from. You don’t mind my discussing it with you for a few minutes? This chance meeting is quite a stroke of luck for me.’

  ‘My dear Sir John, I don’t object in the least. I’d be delighted to think the affair was going to be cleared up. It gave me at least a bad half-hour.’

  ‘When you heard Braunkopf was asserting that what he’d been finally landed with was a copy?’

  ‘Precisely so. Of course I was quite clear that what I had been asked to go and look at in the first instance was an old painting. Indeed, I hadn’t the slightest doubt that it was Giulio Romano’s Nanna and Pippa, of which there is a good deal of early documentation. But when I did hear Braunkopf’s news, I naturally wondered at first whether I could have been taken in by a clever forgery. Fortunately, as soon as I saw the thing–’

  ‘You did see the copy, as well as the original?’

  ‘Naturally. The police were investigating the matter, and I was asked to go along to this Da Vinci place again. Fortunately – as I was saying – there was no question of the canvas being the one I had previously seen and authenticated. It was a perfectly straight, and very recent, copy. I’m surprised it took the fellow Braunkopf in, even for a quarter of an hour. He simply can’t have examined his purchase properly before paying up. But then the whole trick was cunningly contrived to take him off his guard. And so, I suspect, was the whole cock-and-bull story that was pitched at him.’

  ‘Why do you suppose it to have been that, Professor?’

  ‘My dear sir!’ Sansbury appeared to be almost at a loss before this question. ‘It was a story about a nobleman finding this picture in a lumber-room. That’s a hoary old yarn in itself. And when it proves to be the prelude to an unscrupulous fraud, it would be absurd to accept it for a moment.’

  ‘Then what do you take to have been the true background of the affair?’

  ‘I can only say that several perfectly good guesses are possible. It is simplest to suppose that the deception upon Braunkopf was perpetrated by the present owner of the picture. He exposed it to expertise, deftly took it away again, returned a mere copy, and nevertheless collected a large sum of money. He has the money in his pocket, and the original picture available for surreptitious sale elsewhere. It’s that kind of picture, after all. But there’s another possibility – and it’s the one I’ve been accepting. The rightful owner of the thing may be totally innocent. It may have been briefly borrowed without his knowledge.’

  ‘Quite so.’ Appleby was undecided for a moment about how much to divulge. Then he decided to take this eminent figure in the world of connoisseurship at least partly into his confidence. ‘But the truth, as a matter of fact, appears to be a little different from either of these assumptions. The picture was stolen – or, rather, it was borrowed for the purpose of the fraud. The owner was aware it had gone, but he kept quiet about it. He had been g
iven some assurance that it had been taken as a mere prank, and would be returned to him. And so it was.’

  ‘Its character made him reluctant to create a fuss?’

  ‘Yes. Which reminds me, Professor, of that bad half-hour. Was it partly a matter of the character of the thing with you?’

  ‘Well, yes – I suppose that’s a fair way to put it.’ Sansbury laughed not altogether happily. ‘Of course, indecent pictures exist, and one can hardly decline to make one the subject of an expertise. But I certainly didn’t relish such a thing making the headlines. I couldn’t have looked other than slightly ridiculous. Fortunately it never attained to the dimensions of a sensation. I have a notion that Braunkopf himself began to drag his feet in the affair. Perhaps he felt the reputation of his wretched little gallery–’

  ‘Perhaps. Or perhaps he found his own way of getting square on the deal.’ Again Appleby hesitated. ‘I agree that it isn’t a particularly pleasing picture to become associated with.’

  ‘You’ve seen the copy? Braunkopf has hung on to it?’

  ‘I’ve seen the original.’

  ‘The original! You’re sure?’ This time Sansbury was really startled – perhaps almost alarmed. ‘The true owner is known to you?’

  ‘It depends on what you mean by the true owner, Professor. I have reason to suppose that the identity of the man who was the true owner is known to me. But my sight of the authentic Nanna and Pippa has been in Braunkopf’s shop. He at least regards himself as the true owner now. He says it has come to him by way of restitution.’

  ‘Restitution! What the devil does he mean?’

  ‘He was £12,000 out of pocket on account of the authentic picture, and so has felt himself entitled to get hold of it. It’s as simple as that.’