Giotto's Hand

“I know. I’m sorry. But I’m beginning to lose patience over this a little. You don’t know Geoffrey was murdered and you don’t know he was a thief. So why bash away at it? The village has been turned upside down by all this, you know. You can’t have everybody under suspicion, one after the other.”

“Forster’s death would have been investigated even without us. And if it’s any consolation, the police seem to be losing heart. So am I, frankly.”

“Good.”

13

Seated behind the desk in his office that evening, as the sounds of the city dwindled and the rush hour came to its appointed end, General Bottando was feeling more than a little frustrated. It is very hard, the thought that investigations can get along perfectly well without you. It makes you feel old, and redundant. And, of course, he was vulnerable in that area, what with Argan trying to elevate this line of thought to the status of official policy.

That problem was temporarily quiescent at least, although Bottando thought that this was probably only a lull before the final storm. Apart from a little note again urging greater activity over the raid on the via Giulia, his secretary reported that Argan’s word processor had fallen silent in the past day or so; no more memos were flying around documenting the iniquities of the Art Theft Department.

That said, it was probably because the air was already saturated. The quality of the man’s information was also extraordinary. He had known that Flavia had seen della Quercia, had latched on to Sandano’s withdrawing his confession, figured out the real reason why Flavia had gone to England.

Now, after subtle metamorphosis, Bottando was gullible about these silly theories, believed a convicted criminal because it fitted in with those theories and had sent his obedient little girl to England at vast expense in a last ditch attempt to hang on to his job.

Well, true enough, if you wanted to look at it like that. But where was the information coming from? Who was feeding the information? Bottando, with the heightened senses of a man fighting for his life, reckoned he knew. Paolo. A good boy, he thought a little patronizingly, but wanted to get on faster than was seemly. In too much of a rush, he was, and attaching himself to a victorious Argan would undoubtedly speed things up a bit. Had Bottando neglected him? Maybe so.

But the rights and wrongs of it were irrelevant at the moment. Argan had his office mole. The question was, what to do about it?

Nothing, at the moment. That would have to wait.

The trouble was that the more he jotted down little notes, the more he was, very reluctantly, kicking and screaming and protesting all the way, coming to the appalling conclusion that, perhaps, the abominable Argan was right after all. Maybe he was losing his touch. He could just about encompass the latter, but the former proposition went so much against the fundamental laws of nature that it still made his head swim in bewilderment.

For the umpteenth time, he got out his notes, and read them once more, to see if he could spot any hole through which he, and the rest of the department, could wriggle.

Forster implicated in theft of picture in 1963 from Florence, Giotto number one. Connected loosely with disappearance of a Pollaiuolo from Scotland, 1976, Giotto number thirteen. Connected with theft of a Fra Angelico from Padua, 1991, Giotto number twenty-six.

Three connections, all popping up from nowhere, unbidden, in less than a week. Volunteered, you might say. And that was the thing that was giving Bottando a headache, making his bones creak and giving him the feeling that there was something wrong somewhere. Far too much of a coincidence that someone who, if he were Giotto, had successfully covered his tracks for a quarter of a century, should suddenly have his sticky fingerprints appearing everywhere.

And, of course, there was the other side of things. If you looked at it carefully, there was nothing whatsoever to show that Forster had stolen anything. He didn’t have much money, and did not have an extravagant lifestyle. No one had proved he was anywhere in the vicinity when any of the pictures were stolen.

Bottando shook his head and ground his teeth. He was giving up the fight, he noticed. He was sitting here, waiting for fate to overtake him. And that wasn’t good enough. It was time to put up a bit of a struggle. He could start with Fancelli and go on to Sandano.

He smiled to himself, and felt better. That was one problem solved already. He shovelled his papers into his bag, and marched with a very much more jaunty step out of his office.

His secretary had already gone home for the evening, and Bottando started to write her a Little note.