Death of an Old Master by David Dickinson Page B

back. ‘An excellent game,’ she said. ‘I think you should have won, Johnny. But the devious old Francis got you in
the end!’
    The footman knocked on the door and delivered a letter, addressed in a flowing hand, to Lord Francis Powerscourt, 25 Markham Square, Chelsea.
    ‘From the President of the Royal Academy’, it said on the letterhead. Powerscourt read it aloud. ‘“My dear Powerscourt, I promised to let you know anything I heard about
the sad death of Christopher Montague. A piece of gossip reached me earlier today. I cannot vouch for its accuracy, nor would I wish to comment upon the morality of this intelligence. But my
conscience would not let me rest if I did not inform you. At the time of his death Christopher Montague was said to be having an affair with a married woman in London. The husband is said not to be
compliant. I do not have the name. I trust that the work of an investigator is not normally so sordid. Yours, Frederick Lambert.”’
    Powerscourt passed the letter over to Johnny Fitzgerald who now knew all that Powerscourt did about the strange death of Christopher Montague.
    ‘This could be very important,’ said Powerscourt. ‘We are still in the dark about the dead man. We assume, from what they said in the London Library, that he was writing an
article about forgery when he died. But we don’t know what sort of forgery. He could have been going to say that all the Florentine Old Masters in the National Gallery were fakes, or copies,
or some other form of misattribution. He could have been intending to attack the curator of a museum somewhere. They’re like historians, these art people, nothing they like more than
attacking each other.’
    ‘Killing each other?’ suggested Fitzgerald cheerfully. He was licking his wounds from the chess game with further draughts of Chateau de Beaucastel.
    ‘I don’t know,’ replied Powerscourt. ‘Garrotting somebody might be more likely to come from an angry husband than an art historian.’
    ‘I tell you what, Francis,’ said Fitzgerald, ‘I’m going to enlist my auntie in this investigation. She’s got a lot of paintings.’
    ‘Is that the auntie who keeps the back copies of the Illustrated London News ?’ asked Powerscourt with a smile. He remembered a journey to Venice in search of a Lord Edward
Gresham without a photo of his suspect. Fitzgerald had found him at the front of the train seconds before it left and pressed a copy of the Illustrated London News, complete with Gresham
photograph, into his hand. Seven years later Powerscourt could still remember the words. ‘She collects all these magazines, my auntie. She’s got rooms full of them. She says
they’ll be valuable in the years to come. She’s quite mad. She’s potty . . .’
    ‘The same auntie, Auntie Winifred,’ said Fitzgerald. He shook his head as he thought of the eccentricities of his relative. ‘She keeps all the paintings in the attic,’ he
said. ‘God knows why she doesn’t keep them on the walls like any normal human being. She says they’ll be safer there, the burglars won’t be able to see them.’
    Lady Lucy smiled. ‘Is she quite old, your aunt, Johnny?’
    ‘I think she’s about a hundred and three,’ said Fitzgerald. ‘well, not quite that. But she is undoubtedly very old.’ Fitzgerald finished his glass and peered out
into the light fading over Markham Square. ‘We’ve got a bit of a problem here,’ he went on. ‘We don’t know what kind of people they are, these art dealers and art
experts. Sir Frederick up at the Royal Academy has offered to help, I know. But if they were army people, or society people or even City people, we’d know what kind of persons we’re
dealing with. We don’t with this lot. Don’t you agree, Francis?’
    ‘I do,’ said Powerscourt. ‘But I’m not sure what good a hundred-and-three-year-old auntie is going to be. She doesn’t have telepathic powers, or anything like that,
does