The Last Judgement

‘What are you doing?’ she asked, treating the suggestion with the contempt it deserved, as Argyll burrowed through a mound of papers and finally extracted the telephone.

‘I thought I’d give this Muller fellow a ring. Set up an appointment. Nothing like seeming efficient.’

‘It’s a bit late, isn’t it? It’s past ten.’

‘Do you want me to get rid of it or not?’ he said, as he dialled.

He presented himself at the door of Muller’s apartment just after ten the following morning, as arranged. Muller had been delighted when he’d rung, enthused about his efficiency and consideration and could scarcely contain his anticipation. Had Argyll not protested that he was completely exhausted and could barely move a muscle, he would have been summoned round immediately.

He wasn’t entirely certain what to expect. The apartment indicated a reasonable amount of money; Delorme had said that he was American, or Canadian, or something transatlantic. The marketing man for some international company. Muller ran the Italian operation. So he thought.

He did not appear to Argyll to be the epitome of the international salesman; the sort who eyes up whole portions of the world and coolly maps out master strategies for penetrating regions, grabbing market share or cutting out the opposition. For a start, he was at home at ten o’clock in the morning, and Argyll thought such people normally took off only seventeen minutes a day to do things like wash, change, eat and sleep.

Also, he was a little fellow, showing no obvious signs of hard-boiled commercialism. Across a vast middle there were all the indications of decades of eating the wrong sort of food. Arthur Muller was a model of how to die young, with the sort of weight-to-height ratio that makes dieticians wake up in the middle of the night screaming with terror. The type who should have keeled over thirty years before of clogged arteries, if his liver hadn’t got him first.

But there he was, short, fat and with every sign of living to confound the medical statisticians a while longer. On the other hand, his face let the image down a little: although he looked quite pleased to see Argyll standing at his door, parcel in hand, it didn’t exactly light up with glee. The habitual expression seemed almost mournful; the sort of face that didn’t expect much and was never surprised when disaster struck. Most odd; it was almost as if there’d been a mismatch in the assembly process, and Muller’s body had emerged with the wrong head on it.

But he was welcoming enough, at least.

‘Mr Argyll, I imagine. Do come in, do come in. I’m delighted you’re here.’

Not a bad apartment at all. Argyll noted as he walked in, although with definite signs of having been furnished by the company relocation officer. For all that the furniture was corporate good taste, Muller had, none the less, managed to impose a little of his own personality on the room. Not a great collector, alas, but somewhere along the way he had picked up a couple of nice bronzes and a few decent if unexceptional pictures. None of these indicated any great interest in neoclassical, mind you, still less in the baroque pictures cluttering up Flavia’s apartment; but perhaps, Argyll thought to himself hopefully, his tastes were expanding.

He sat down on the sofa, brown paper parcel in front of him, and smiled encouragingly.

‘I can’t tell you how pleased I am you’re here,’ Muller said. ‘I’ve been looking for this picture for some considerable time.’

‘Oh, yes?’ Argyll said, intrigued.

Muller gave him a penetrating, half-amused look, then laughed.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘What you mean to say,’ his client said, ‘was “why on earth would anybody spend time looking for this very ordinary painting? Does he know something I don’t?”’

Argyll confessed that such thoughts had scuttled across his mind. Not that he didn’t like the picture.

‘I’m quite fond of this sort of thing,’ he confessed. ‘But not many other people are. So a friend of mine says. A minority taste, she keeps on telling me.’

‘She may be right. In my case, I haven’t been looking for aesthetic reasons.’

‘No?’

‘No. This was owned by my father. I want to find out something about myself. A filial task, you see.’

‘Oh, right,’ Argyll said, kneeling reverently on the floor and trying to unpick the knot keeping the whole package together. He’d been too conscientious about packing it up again last night. Another where-are-my-roots? man, he thought to himself as he fiddled. A topic to be avoided. Otherwise Muller might offer to show him his family tree.

‘There were four, so I gather,’ Muller went on, watching Argyll’s lack of dexterity with a distant interest. ‘All legal scenes, painted in the 1780s. This is supposed to be the last one painted. I read about them.’

‘You were very lucky to get hold of it,’ Argyll said. ‘Are you after the other three as well?’

Muller shook his head. ‘I think one will suffice. As I say, I’m not really interested in it for aesthetic reasons. Do you want some coffee, by the way?’ he added as the knot finally came undone and Argyll slid the picture out of the packing.

‘Oh, yes, thank you,’ Argyll said as he stood up and heard his knees crack. ‘No, no. You stay there and admire the picture. I can get it.’

So, leaving Muller to contemplate his new acquisition, Argyll headed for the coffee-pot in the kitchen and helped himself. A bit forward, perhaps, but also rather tactful. He knew what these clients were like. It wasn’t simply the eagerness to see what they’d spent their money on; it was also necessary to spend some time alone with the work. To get to know it, person-to-person, so to speak.

He came back to find that Muller and Socrates were not hitting it off as well as he’d hoped. As he was a mere courier he could afford to be a little detached, but he was an amiable soul, and liked people to be happy even when there was no financial gain in it for himself. In his heart, he hadn’t really expected tears of joy to burst forth at the very sight. Even for the aficionado, the painting was not instantly appealing. It was, after all, very dirty and unkempt; the varnish had long since dulled, and it had none of that glossy air of well-cared-for contentment that shines forth from decent pictures in museums.

‘Let me see,’ said Muller non-committally, and he completed his examination, pressing the canvas to see how loose it was, checking the frame for woodworm, examining the back to see how well the stretcher was holding up. Quite professional, really; Argyll hadn’t expected such diligence. Nor had he expected the growing look of disappointment that had spread slowly over the man’s face.

‘You don’t like it,’ he said.

Muller looked up at him. ‘Like it? No. Frankly, I don’t. Not my sort of thing at all. I’d been expecting something a bit more …’

‘Colourful?’ Argyll suggested. ‘Well-painted? Lively? Assured? Dignified? Masterful? Adept?’

‘Interesting,’ Muller said. ‘That’s all. Nothing more. At one stage this was in an important collection. I expected something more interesting.’

‘I am sorry,’ Argyll said sympathetically. He was, as well. There is no disappointment quite so poignant as being let down by a work of art, when your hopes have built up, and are suddenly dashed by being confronted with grim, less-than-you-expected reality. He had felt like that himself on many occasions. The first time he’d seen the Mona Lisa, when he was only sixteen or so, he’d fought through the vast throng in the Louvre with mounting excitement to get to the holy of holies. And, when he arrived, there was this tiny little squit of a picture, hanging on the wall. Somehow it should have been … more interesting than it was. Muller was right. There was no other word for it.

‘You can always hang it in a corridor,’ he suggested.

Muller shook his head.

‘You make me a bit sorry I didn’t allow it to get stolen,’ he went on cheerfully. ‘Then you could have claimed on insurance and got your money back.’

‘What do you mean?’

Argyll explained. ‘As I say, if I’d known you didn’t want it, I’d have told him to take the thing away and welcome to it.’

Somehow his attempts to cheer Muller up didn’t work. The idea of such an easy solution having been missed made him even more introspective.

‘I didn’t realize such a thing might happen,’ he said. Then, jerking himself out of the mood, he went on: ‘I’m afraid I’ve put you to a great deal of trouble for nothing. So I feel awkward about asking you for something else. But would you be prepared to take it off my hands? Sell it for me? I’m afraid I couldn’t stand having this in the house.’

Argyll gave a variety of facial contortions to indicate the dire state of the market at the moment. It all depended on how much he’d bought it for. And how much he wanted to sell it for. Privately he was thinking dark thoughts to himself about people with too much money.

Muller said it had been ten thousand dollars, plus various commissions. But he’d be prepared to take less. As a penalty for buying things sight unseen. ‘Think of it as a stupidity tax,’ he said with a faint smile, an acknowledgement which made Argyll warm to him once more.

So a mild spot of negotiation ensued which ended with Argyll agreeing to put the picture in an auction for him, and seeing if he could get a better price elsewhere before the sale took place. He left with the brown paper package under his arm once more, and a decent cheque in his pocket for services rendered.

After that he spent the rest of the morning cashing the cheque, then went on to the auction house to hand over the painting for valuation and entry into the next month’s sale.

3

It was no good, Flavia thought to herself as she surveyed the debris all around her. Something will have to be done about this and soon. She had arrived late at her office in Rome’s Art Theft Department and, after an hour, had achieved nothing.

It was September, for heaven’s sake. Not August, when she expected everyone in Rome to be on holiday. Nor was one of the local football teams playing at home. She herself was rarely to be seen when Roma or Lazio were playing. What was the point? All Italian government came to an abrupt halt when an important match was on. Even the thieves stopped work for a really big one.

But today there were no excuses, and it was still impossible to get hold of anyone. She’d phoned the Interior Ministry with an important message only to be told that every secretary, under-secretary, deputy under-secretary, everyone, in fact, from minister to floor-sweeper, was busy. And what was the excuse? Some foreign delegation in town for a beano at the public expense. Top-level meetings. International accords. Mutterings of civil servants and lawyers in dark corners on legal and financial regulations and how to get round stipulations from Brussels. How to obey the letter, and disregard the meaning. All over the continent, similar meetings were taking place. That’s what unity is all about. Fiddlesticks. No wonder the country was going to the dogs.

And she’d arrived feeling enthusiastic for once, despite the lack of anything really interesting to do. Argyll had recovered from his excursion to Paris, more or less, and at last had something to occupy himself. His client had said yesterday he didn’t want the picture and, as he was getting 10 per cent of the sale price on commission, he’d decided to waste today seeing what he could find out about it. Some notion about trying to up its value a little. He’d come back fired with enthusiasm from at last having a task to undertake and had scuttled off first thing to the library.

She sympathized with his efforts to find himself something to do; she was in much the same position herself. Not only was the art market in a bit of a slump; the drop in prices had triggered a knock-on effect in the world of crime as well. Or maybe all reputable art thieves had bought package tours for Czechoslovakia, the one place in Europe now where it was even easier to steal art than Italy. Only the second-rankers were still in the country, it seemed. There were the usual break-ins, and all that; but it was petty-crime stuff for the most part. Nothing to get your teeth into.

And what did that leave? Filing, as Argyll had so maliciously suggested. In her own little room she could see several dozen miscellaneous files lying around on the floor. Her boss, General Bottando, had several dozen more in various states of disarray. And across the corridor, in the rabbit-warren of little rooms occupied by the other members of staff, probably about half the contents of what was laughingly known as their archives were being used to rest coffee-cups on, prop up desks and as improvised floor-coverings.

Organization and tidiness were not her strong points, normally, and she was quite prepared to admit that she was as bad as anyone else in the building – except for Bottando, but he was in charge so could do as he liked – at putting things away. But every now and then some faint echo of house-proud zeal would rumble in her deepest subconscious and she would develop, enthusiastically if only temporarily, a passion for method and order. Perhaps Jonathan was right, she said to herself reluctantly. Maybe I should do something about this place.

So she picked all the files off the floor and stacked them on her desk, and found underneath one of them a small pile of forms requiring Bottando’s immediate signature three weeks ago. No time like the present, she thought; so, both to get this little matter seen to and to inform her boss that all pursuit of the criminal element of society would cease until the files were put into order, she marched briskly and with an air of purposeful efficiency up the stairs to Bottando’s room.

‘Ah, Flavia,’ said Bottando as she marched in, omitting to knock as usual. That was all right; she never did manage to remember, and Bottando was used to it. Some people stand on their dignity. Many a senior Polizia man would produce a freezing look and remind himself – and his subordinates – that this was a general here who should have his door knocked on politely. But not Bottando. It wasn’t in his nature. Nor was it in Flavia’s, more to the point.

‘Morning, General,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Sign here, please.’

He did as he was told.

‘Don’t you want to know what it is you’ve signed? It could have been anything. You should be more careful.’

‘I trust you, my dear,’ he said, looking at her a little anxiously.

‘What is it?’ she asked. ‘You’ve got that look on your face.’

‘A little job,’ he said.

‘Oh, good.’

‘Yes. A murder. Peculiar thing, apparently. But we may have to stake out a minor interest in it. The Carabinieri phoned up twenty minutes ago, asking if we could send someone down.’

‘I’ll go,’ she said. She didn’t like murder at all, but beggars can’t be choosers these days. Anything to get out of the office.

‘You’ll have to. There’s no one else around. But I don’t think you’ll like it.’

She eyed him carefully. Here it comes, she thought. ‘Why not?’

‘Giulio Fabriano’s been promoted to homicide,’ Bottando said simply, an apologetic look on his face.

‘Oh, no,’ she wailed. ‘Not him again. Can’t you send someone else?’

Bottando sympathized. She and Fabriano had been very close at one stage. A bit too close for Flavia’s liking, and their friendship had degenerated into squabbles, fights and general dislike several years back. Shortly before Argyll had appeared on the scene, in fact. In ordinary circumstances, she wouldn’t have had much to do with him, but he was in the rival Carabinieri – doing surprisingly well, considering his relatively limited intelligence, but then there wasn’t a great deal of competition in the Carabinieri – and had developed the habit over the past few years of ringing her up every time he was on a case which had even the most tenuous connection with art. For example, a man has his car stolen. He once bought a picture, so Fabriano would ring to see if there was a file on him. Anything would do. He was tenacious, our Fabriano. The trouble was he also had a quite extraordinarily high opinion of himself and, as Flavia continued to keep her distance, and indeed had taken up with a ridiculous Englishman, his tone had turned decidedly hostile. Cutting remarks. Sneering comments to colleagues. Not that Flavia particularly cared or couldn’t deal with it. She just preferred not to, if possible.

‘I’m sorry, my dear,’ Bottando went on, with genuine regret, ‘But there really is no one else here. I’m sure I don’t know what they’re all doing, but still …’

In a toss-up between Fabriano and filing, Flavia was unsure which was the worse option. On the whole, she reckoned Fabriano was. The man just couldn’t stop himself from trying to demonstrate what a prize she’d let slip through her fingers when they’d broken up. But it seemed Bottando wasn’t going to give her any choice.

‘You really want me to go?’

‘I do. But I don’t imagine it will detain you overlong. Try and get back here as quickly as possible.’

‘Don’t worry,’ she said gloomily.

It took about forty minutes before it dawned on her that Fabriano’s murder victim was the very same man that Argyll had been talking about the previous evening. To give her credit, thirty minutes of that delay was spent in a traffic jam trying to make her way out of the centre. Most of the remaining ten minutes was spent looking around aghast at the apartment. There was scarcely a book left on the shelves; all had been pulled off, many ripped apart then dumped in the centre of the little sitting-room. All the papers in the filing cabinets had similarly been removed and thrown on the floor; the furniture had been ripped, and the cushions cut up. Every picture had been pulled off the wall and slashed to pieces.

‘Hold everything,’ said Fabriano with fake amusement as she walked in. ‘Signora Sherlock’s here. Tell me quickly. Who did it?’

She gave him a frosty look and ignored the remark. ‘Jesus,’ she said, looking around at the chaos. ‘Someone did a good job here.’

‘Don’t you know who?’ he said.

‘Shut up, Giulio. Let’s keep this professional, shall we?’

‘I stand corrected,’ he said, standing in the corner of the room and leaning against the wall. ‘Professionally speaking, I don’t know. Must have taken several hours, wouldn’t you say? To make a mess like this, I mean. We can rule out simple vandalism, don’t you think?’

‘Curious,’ she said, looking around.

‘What? Do we have a blinding insight coming our way?’

‘All the furniture and stuff was just shredded. Very violently, and carelessly. The pictures were sliced precisely. Taken out of their frames, the frames broken and in a pile, and the canvas cut up. It looks as though with scissors.’

Fabriano delivered himself of an ambiguous gesture which was half sneer and half self-congratulation.

‘And you think that maybe we didn’t notice? Why do you reckon I called?’

Nice to know some people don’t change. ‘What happened to the occupant?’ Keep calm, she thought. Don’t reply in kind.

‘Go and look. He’s in the bedroom,’ he said with a faint and worrying smile.

She knew from the moment he spoke that it wasn’t going to be very nice. But it was much worse.

‘Oh, my God,’ she said.

The assorted specialists who gather round on these occasions hadn’t finished yet, but even after they’d tidied up a little the scene was horrific. It was like something out of Hieronymus Bosch’s more appalling nightmares. The bedroom itself was domestic, cosy even. Chintz bedcovers, silk curtains, floral-patterned wallpaper all combining to give an air of comfort and tranquillity. It made the contrast all the greater.

The man had been tied to the bed, and had been treated appallingly before he died. His body was covered in cuts and bruises and weals. His left hand was a bloody mess. His face was almost indistinguishable as anything that had anything to do with a human being. The pain he had suffered must have been excruciating. Whoever had done this had taken a good deal of time, a lot of trouble and, in Flavia’s instant opinion, needed to be locked up fast.

‘Ah,’ said one of the forensics from the corner of the room, reaching down with a pair of tweezers and putting something in a plastic bag.

‘What?’ said Fabriano, leaning as nonchalantly as he could manage against the door. Flavia could see that even he was having a hard time maintaining the pose.

‘His ear,’ the man replied, holding up the bag containing the bloody, torn object.

At least Fabriano turned and bolted first, although Flavia was hard on his heels in her attempt to get out of the room as fast as possible. She went straight into the kitchen and poured a glass of water.

‘Did you have to do that?’ she asked angrily as Fabriano came in after her. ‘Did sending me in there make you feel any better or something?’

He shrugged. ‘What did you expect? “This is no sight for a little woman,” or something?’

She ignored him for a few seconds, trying to maintain calm in her stomach. ‘So?’ she said, looking up at him again, annoyed that she had seemed so fragile with him around. ‘What happened?’

‘Looks as though he had a visitor, doesn’t it? Who tied him up, ransacked the house, then did that to him. According to the doctor, he was shot to death eventually.’

‘Reason?’

‘Search me. That’s why we asked you people along. As you can see, whoever it was seemed to have a grudge against pictures.’

‘Organized-crime connection?’

‘Not as far as we can tell. He was the marketing director for a computer company. Canadian. Clean as a whistle.’

It was then that Flavia got this nasty feeling. ‘What’s his name?’

‘Arthur Muller,’ he said.

‘Oh,’ she said. Damnation, she thought. A complication she didn’t need. She could see it now: if she said Argyll had been there yesterday, Fabriano would go straight round and arrest him. Probably lock him up for a week, out of pure malice.

‘Have you heard of him?’ Fabriano asked.

‘Maybe,’ she said cautiously. ‘I’ll ask around, if you like. Jonathan might know.’

‘Who’s Jonathan?’

‘An art dealer. My, um, fiancé.’

Fabriano looked upset, which made the small untruth worthwhile. ‘Congratulations,’ he said. ‘Have a chat with the lucky man, will you? Maybe you should get him along here?’

‘Not necessary,’ she said shortly. ‘I’ll ring. Was anything stolen, by the way?’

‘Ah. This is the problem. As you see, it’s a bit of a mess. Working out what’s gone may take some time. The house-keeper says she can’t see anything that’s gone. None of the obvious things, anyway.’

‘So? Conclusions?’

‘None so far. In the Carabinieri we work by order and evidence. Not guesswork.’

After which friendly exchange, she went back into the living-room to phone Argyll. No answer. It was his turn to do the shopping for dinner. It didn’t matter; he’d be back in an hour or so. She rang a neighbour and left a message instead.

‘Yes?’ Fabriano said brusquely as another detective came in, a man in his mid-twenties who had already acquired the look of weary and sarcastic disdain which came from having worked for Fabriano for two hours. ‘What is it?’

‘Next-door neighbour, Guilio –’

‘Detective Fabriano.’

‘Next-door neighbour, Detective Fabriano,’ he restarted rolling his eyes in despair at the thought that this might turn out to be a long case, ‘she seems to be your friendly neighbourhood spy satellite.’

‘Was she in during the hours of the crime?’

‘Well, I wouldn’t come and tell you if she wasn’t, would I? ’Course she was. That’s why –’

‘Good, good,’ said Fabriano briskly. ‘Well done. Good work,’ he went on, thus removing from the policeman any pleasure he might have felt at his small discovery. ‘Wheel her in, then.’

There must be hundreds of thousands of women like Signora Andreotti in Italy; quite sweet old ladies, really, who were brought up in small towns or even in villages. Capable of labours on the Herculean scale – cooking for thousands, bringing up children by the dozen, dealing with husbands and fathers and, very often, having a job as well. Then their children grow up, their husbands die and they move in with one child, to do the cooking. A fair bargain, on the whole, and much better than being confined to an old folks’ home.