The Titian Committee - Iain Pears

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      Flavia smiled, thinking how Bottando would have sniffed at this exposition, built as it was on nothing whatsoever. One glance at Bovolo was enough to convince her that he was a member of the same school of policework.

      ‘You’ve worked out the whereabouts of all her colleagues, I imagine?’ she asked.

      Bovolo again reacted as though he didn’t know whether she was being sweet or sarcastic, but suspected the worst. ‘Of course,’ he said primly, producing yet another sheaf of papers. He put his spectacles on the end of his nose and looked at the documents carefully, just in case they’d changed in the past five minutes.

      ‘All perfectly reasonable accounts of themselves. And before you ask, we have also checked the clothes in their rooms and not found a single stain, bloody dagger or diary containing a full confession. Professor Roberts and Dr Kollmar cancel each other out, as they were at the opera together. Dr Van Heteren was at dinner with friends near the railway station. Dr Lorenzo was at home, with servants and friends to testify to it. All of those four are staying on the main island, not at the foundation. That leaves Dr Miller.’

      ‘Tell me about him, then. I take it he had no witnesses?’

      Bovolo nodded. ‘Yes. For a moment we also had high hopes there. However, he was on the island with no way of getting off it, because of the strike. He went into the kitchen just after ten to ask for some mineral water to wash down a sleeping pill, drank it down while talking to some of the staff, and went straight off to bed.’

      ‘But he is still the only one who has no one else to vouch for him at the time of the murder?’

      ‘True. But the gate keeper is prepared to swear no one left or arrived after about six o’clock. If he was on the island at ten, he was on it at nine. And in that case, he didn’t kill this woman. Besides, all of them are most distinguished people with no possible motive. It was a very harmonious and scholarly operation, not a branch of the Mafia.’

      Flavia nodded thoughtfully. ‘So, having eliminated all her colleagues, you decide on a lone marauder.’

      Bovolo nodded. ‘And we’ll stick with it, unless you have something else to suggest,’ he said with a don’t-you-dare expression on his face.

      ‘And what’s that?’ she asked, gesturing briefly at another envelope.

      ‘This? Just her mail. Delivered to her room this morning and we picked it up. We thought it might have been important, but it isn’t. Take it if you like and check it out. All art stuff.’

      She read through them briefly. Circulars, notes from her museum, a letter from a photographic agency and a couple of bills. Uninspiring. She put them all down in the pile.

      ‘Still,’ said Flavia, not really feeling comfortable, ‘it seems odd to go to all that trouble to tear a gold crucifix off her neck and then leave it behind. Was she a Catholic, by the way?’

      Bovolo shook his head. ‘Don’t think so,’ he replied. ‘You know what these Americans are like. All religious fanatics, by the sound of them.’

      Another nation to cross off your list. Not a man with a broad appreciation of the varieties of human culture.

      ‘Take copies of these if you want,’ he said, gesturing at the police files on the case with a sudden spurt of co-operative generosity. ‘Not the photographs, obviously, but anything else. As long as you give them back and don’t show them to anyone. They are confidential, you know.’

      Why did she want all that miscellaneous debris? she wondered after she’d shaken the inspector by his clammy little hand and was walking slowly back to the Danieli. Clearly Bovolo thought them useless, or he wouldn’t have allowed her to have them. She felt a slight glimmering of interest in this murder, despite Bottando’s orders that she was not to get involved in any way. It was, perhaps, the woman’s face. There was no fright on it. It was not the face of someone who’d died in the middle of a robbery. If there was any expression at all, it was determination. And indignation. That did not fit in at all with Bovolo’s notion of a mugging somehow.

       3

      Jonathan Argyll sat in a restaurant in the Piazza Manin, trying with mixed success to disguise both his upset at the message and his distaste for the messenger. It was not easy. He felt out of his depth, as usual, and was beginning to have a sneaking feeling that nature had not really designed him to be an art dealer, try as he might to earn an honest crust at the trade. He knew very well what he was meant to do. Ear to the ground to hear gossip in the trade, research in libraries to spot opportunities, careful approach to owners with an offer that, in theory, they leapt to accept. Easy. And he could do all of it pretty well, except for the last bit. Somehow the owners of pictures never seemed quite as ready to part with their possessions as the theory suggested they should be. Perhaps he just needed more practice, as his employer suggested. On good days, this is what he liked to think. On bad days, and this was one of them, he was more inclined to think it was not for him.

      ‘But Signora Pianta, why?’ he asked in an Italian flawed only by the distinct tone of weary desperation. ‘If the terms weren’t satisfactory, why on earth didn’t she say so last month?’

      The vulture-faced, mean-minded, vicious-looking old misery smiled in a tight and very unsympathetic fashion. She had a nose of quite alarming dimensions which curved round and down almost like a sabre, and he found himself increasingly fixated on the monstrous protuberance as the meal progressed and the quality of the conversation deteriorated. He had not especially noticed her singularly unappealing appearance before she demanded more money from him, but the shock had stimulated his senses. On the other hand, he had never liked dealing with her, and found the act of enforced gallantry increasingly difficult to sustain.

      Very irritating. Especially as Argyll and the old Marchesa had hit it off well. She was a feisty, cunning woman with eyes still bright in her old and lined face, a bizarre sense of humour and a very satisfactory desire to unload some pictures. All was going nicely, more or less. Then she’d fallen ill, and it evidently made her cranky. Since her side-kick – companion, she liked to call herself – had taken over, the negotiations had lurched and sputtered. Now it appeared they were going to grind to a final halt.

      ‘And I’ve already told you it is quite unnecessary. We are very experienced at this sort of thing.’

      Tiresome woman. She had spent the evening elliptically dropping bizarre hints, and eventually he had asked outright what on earth she wanted, apart from switching the deal to a percentage of the sale price rather than a lump sum. That he could deal with, although it would have been nice had she thought of it earlier.

      It was the other little detail that upset him. Smuggle the pictures out, she said. Don’t bother with export permits, official regulations and all that nonsense. Stick them in the back of the car, drive to Switzerland and sell them. Get on with it.

      It was, of course, not that unusual. Thousands of pictures leave like that from Italy every year, and some of his less respectable colleagues in Rome made a tidy living as couriers. But, as he said firmly, Byrnes Galleries did not work like that. They went by the book, and were good at hurrying officialdom along. Besides, the pictures were relatively unimportant – family pictures, second-rate landscapes, anonymous portraits and the like – and there was no likelihood of any hitches. The price he had offered was not great, admittedly, but as much as they were worth. By the time they were paid for, transported to England, cleaned, prepared and sold, he and his employer would show a respectable profit. Worked out as a rate per hour for the amount of time he’d put in, he could probably earn more selling hamburgers in a fast food chain.

      She was upset by his adamant refusal. In that case, she said, he must agree to pay all export taxes and registration fees. Whether she was serious or whether this was all a ploy to get him to agree to her request he did not know, but here he put his foot down.

      ‘I’ve been through all the figures. We couldn’t

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