Giotto's Hand

“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 comer.

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.”

“Exactly. There’s some risk, but given the number of pictures in the world and the small number of people able to recognize them, it’s not that big.”

Flavia nodded. “This woman is going to send you a list of his sales and purchases, is she?”

“In a couple of days. She doesn’t want anyone else to know.”

“I could do with the evidence now.”

Argyll thought this over. Some people are in such a hurry all the time. They’d only heard of Forster less than a week ago, after all.

“The statements about him aren’t good enough?”

“One person, thirty years out of date and with a grudge. Sandano I’m not sure we can use: I promised him confidentiality. Delia Quercia is too batty to be relied on. All Winterton says is that Forster recognized a possibly stolen painting. It’s a pity Veronica Beaumont is dead. Evidence that Forster was selling pictures supposedly from Weller House, and proof that they didn’t come from there would be very useful. We might then be able to find out where they got to. Was there anything in his papers about his sales?”

“Not so far. But I haven’t finished them yet.”

Then it was her turn to think and to change the subject. “What do people in this village think of him? Nobody this afternoon seemed to have a high opinion. Winterton thought he had bad taste—which Bottando’s Giotto most certainly did not have, if he existed. Byrnes sneers about Forster being charming. Why would anyone sneer at someone being charming?”

“Because this is England, my dear, and that’s what we do here.”

“Why? I like people to be charming.”

“But you’re Italian,” he explained patiently, as she slipped the car into gear and lurched forward a few hundred yards. “In this country charm means you’re superficial, have a tendency to flattery, are probably a bumptious social climber and, moreover, the term carries very distinct implications that you like women.”