Giotto's Hand

She shrugged. “Maybe. Although he wasn’t that much of a fool. And he had a good reason to find them if they were there. I suppose it would have helped him get a better price for all the stuff he sold.”

“Could I check? Just to make sure?”

She sighed at his persistence. “Oh, very well. But you won’t find anything. What there is will be in the attic. If there’s anything.”

“Wonderful.”

“Along with the water tank,” she went on.

“Oh. All right,” he conceded. “I’ll see what I can do.”

So he followed her up the next, more rickety staircase, then up what was little more than a stepladder into the attic, where the air was filled with the sound of nesting pigeons.

“Bit dusty, I’m afraid,” she observed, with a true and sure grasp of the art of understatement. “And smelly. But I think the tank is over there. And the boxes of archives and things ought to be in the other direction. Might not be, of course,” she added doubtfully.

Argyll reassured her that he would do his best on both counts. In the case of the water tank, it wasn’t a great deal. It took about five minutes to locate the leaky joint that was causing all the trouble, realize that it was far beyond his level of competence and conclude that a plumber was necessary. This task completed to his satisfaction, he then turned his attention to more interesting matters, and began poking around in the pile of boxes at the other end of the attic. Huge quantities of paper. Fired by a brief flicker of optimism, he quickly glanced through them, in the hope that all the stuff that Forster hadn’t been able to find was in there.

It didn’t take that long to realize it wasn’t. Some concerned marriage settlements, the eternal haggling over property that was the solid foundation of love in the seventeenth century; and, it seemed, well into the twentieth, as the last batch concerned cousin Veronica’s betrothal. Others were very routine documents concerning the management of the estate in the nineteenth century and more recent correspondence to and from members of the family. Not a reference to pictures in any of them, he thought, picking up one box at random and peering in. The contents were bound up in string with a little label attached. “Mabel,” it read.

No, he told himself as he opened it up, none of your business. No time to waste on this, he added as he took out a bundle of letters which he rapidly realized had been written by his hostess’s mother. Besides, he thought as he settled down for a good read, Mary Verney would not forgive such a gross violation of her privacy. And quite right too.

His conscience registered its protest and, for once, was ignored, leaving Argyll to read with growing astonishment about Mabel Beaumont who, although she had made a promising start as the dutiful eldest of five daughters, slowly transformed in the course of dozens of letters into someone who, to put it mildly, manifested a certain eccentric streak in her character. She was, it seemed, a woman at war with herself and everybody else, and the battle took her away from home and the prospect of a life spent marrying, raising children and opening fêtes, and instead made her roam across Europe until she died, according to the death certificate which was the last document in the box, in a hotel room in what Argyll knew was a particularly seedy part of Milan. Her daughter, just turned fourteen, was the only person with her and had tended the sick woman herself as there was no money to pay for doctors. There was a letter in a girlish hand, asking for help; the box contained no reply.

Argyll sneezed meditatively as he digested this cautionary tale of inter-war wildness, and absentmindedly flipped through the rest of the box, most of which concerned family negotiations to have Mary placed under their guardianship and sent to school. “She is wild, intelligent but apparently immune to discipline,” said the one and only school report. Good for her, he thought briefly before remembering that this was not what he was there for. So he tied the whole lot back up, replaced the box, and reluctantly applied himself once more to the plumbing, and after another half hour, with little bits of plastic and string and much struggling and stubbing of fingers, he eventually managed to slow the flow of water. But, as he said later when fending off her thanks, it wasn’t a very good job. Sooner or later, she’d have to call a plumber.

9

For all Bottando’s strictures about her expenses, Flavia took a taxi from the airport; she had a busy time ahead of her, and no time to waste saving money. First stop was the British police, to explain herself. Nothing ever upsets people more than foreigners wandering around the place. And she thought that she might well need their assistance; all the more reason to be as open as possible with them.