Giotto's Hand

“Come now,” Flavia said severely. “You can do better than that. You know perfectly well why him. He’s the man who went and talked to Sandano three months ago to find out what he knew about the Fra Angelico theft. Fifties or older with thick dark hair, so Sandano says. That matches Winterton, but Forster was grey and a bit thin on top. Nice touch to give Sandano one of Forster’s cards, though.”

“Old family friend helping out?”

Flavia frowned with disapproval at her lack of invention. “Who gives a second-rater like Forster a place in his very exclusive gallery? And who risks his career by going to Italy to pay money to thieves and implicates Forster in the theft of the Pollaiuolo? He wouldn’t touch something like that unless he had to. He’s not the sort to do people favours like that. Not good enough. Perhaps you should tell me why? Save time and effort on the guessing games.”

“Maybe that’s a good idea,” Mary replied, sipping the drink, then putting it down again and composing herself for the trial of being perfectly frank. At least, Flavia thought, they weren’t going to have to batter their way through any more lies and evasions. One thing about Mary Verney, she was eminently sensible. She knew when she was beaten.

“He based his entire career on poor Veronica’s little weaknesses,” she said with a sigh. “He took a vast percentage, I gather. So much that the silly woman never really benefited much from her habit. Enough to keep things ticking over, not much more. Which was typical of her, really. I mean, if you’re going to be a crook, you might as well make money out of it, don’t you think?”

“Was it always part of the plan to kill Forster?”

“Certainly not,” she said robustly. “If I’d wanted that, then I could have killed him and had done with it. No. I simply wanted him off my back. His dying made life appallingly complicated.”

“How did he get on your back in the first place?”

“Forster knew Veronica in Italy, and when she lifted that Uccello, he offered to help her out by getting rid of it. It was just a way of worming himself into her affections, although I suspect he also made quite a lot of money out of it. Then communications ceased for years, until he was called in to organize the collection of someone in Belgium. He did it quite well, and noticed that a picture by Pollaiuolo wasn’t all that it seemed. He worked quite hard, and found out what it really was, and absconded with all the sale documents concerning it.”

“Which were?”

“Which were, firstly a deed of sale countersigned by Veronica and by Winterton as the dealer who organized the deal, and secondly an export permission saying it came from the collection at Weller House.”

“Isn’t that a risky way of selling hot pictures?”

“Evidently, as we are sitting here talking about it,” she said drily. “But who am I to judge? If you think about it, I suppose you could say that the painting’s original ownership was undocumented; it had been hidden away for some time, there was nothing to prove that it hadn’t come from Weller House and the inventories here were vague. Forster got suspicious only because he knew Veronica and at some stage after Uncle Godfrey’s death had gone through the Weller collection inventory, so knew what was in it—and what certainly wasn’t. Very bad luck on their part.

“Anyway, Forster figured out what might have happened, and decided to follow up. He wrote Veronica a letter, came to see her and put his cards on the table: ‘Hi. Remember me? I knew you in Florence. When you were stealing a Uccello. Nice to see you’re still at it. Pollaiuolo now, eh? And I have documents to prove it. What’s it worth?’

“At this stage, you see, he didn’t even know the start of it, but once he was in the house, it didn’t take him long to figure it out. He began dropping little hints; asking for favours, then money, then a house.”

“So what was the problem with your cousin? Couldn’t she be stopped?”

“Again, you’re asking the wrong person. I would have stopped her, but no one asked me. When she came back from Italy, she told my uncle everything and he panicked. He asked Winterton’s advice. Personally, I think the obvious thing would have been to go to the police and help them recover the picture. ‘Sorry, Veronica had one of her little turns; you know how it is.’ Then followed it by locking her up or getting her good psychiatric treatment.

“But, of course, my family didn’t think like that. The first thing that worried them was the shame of it all. All their instincts were to cover it up, and Winterton encouraged them to think that it would be easy to do this. I honestly don’t think that it ever occurred to them that a real crime had been committed. That’s what oiks like Gordon Brown do; Beaumonts are merely indiscreet. And, of course, they kept Veronica’s cut from the sale.