A Family Affair by Michael Innes

nation. Then – rather inconsequentially – he thought of finding an American buyer through the instrumentality of Braunkopf. But he was determined to remain entirely anonymous–’
    ‘It really was the most awful bosh.’
    ‘I rather agree, and we needn’t suppose that Braunkopf swallowed quite all of it. But what interests me is the supposed intermediary. The confidential person, I mean, who was supposed to be contacting Braunkopf on the noble person’s behalf. It occurs to me that you must have encountered him.’
    ‘Of course I did. He brought the picture to Braunkopf’s place, and remained brooding over it while I examined it. But it must have been after I left that he told Braunkopf the story about the owner wanting to have it back for a few days in order to have it copied.’
    ‘Just how did this expertise work? It seems that you satisfied yourself on the spot. I’d have imagined that perhaps laboratory tests might have been required.’
    ‘There might have been something in that.’ Sansbury now spoke indulgently. ‘Raking light, and so on, might have revealed characteristics of the fattura – the handling, you know – not perceptible to the naked eye and relevant to whether Giulio Romano painted the thing. But nothing of that sort was my business. I looked at it – and just that, you will understand, is my job – and wrote and signed an opinion that it was the original Nanna and Pippa. I suppose I spent about twenty minutes on the commission. Feeling a bit of a fool, as a matter of fact.’
    ‘Again because of the subject matter?’
    ‘Well, yes. An elderly man, peeking and peering at what is going on in the damned thing. You must understand that the particular handwriting of the painter in representing some quite small detail of a figure or gesture–’
    ‘I can see that you might feel the situation to be a shade absurd. But I don’t suppose Braunkopf did?’
    ‘Not in the least. He made quite a solemnity of it. Do you know? It seems to me that the perpetrator of the fraud was rather skilful in inventing a nobleman as the picture’s owner. Braunkopf seemed decidedly to “dig” the nobility, as the young people might put it.’
    ‘He had a good deal to say about nobles gentry his goot freunds?’
    ‘Just that. But I expect the fellow you’re particularly interested in is the intermediary.’
    ‘Decidedly so, and I wish I could see him at all clearly. You had no feeling, I suppose, that you’d ever seen him before?’
    ‘Absolutely not.’
    ‘And you haven’t set eyes on him since?’
    ‘I’m quite sure I haven’t.’
    ‘It would be too much to hope for, I suppose.’ Appleby paused for consideration. ‘As I’ve hinted to you, Professor Sansbury, I am interesting myself in a group or sequence, spread over a considerable period of time, of affairs roughly in the same general area as this one.’
    ‘You whet my curiosity very much, Sir John. Not that I have any business to be curious.’
    ‘I shall be delighted to tell you more about it, some time when you are at leisure.’ Appleby presented this civil evasion promptly. If anything more was to be done today, he had not a great deal of leisure himself. ‘A few of these frauds and impostures must have required something like a gang to carry them out. But it strikes me that the one we are considering could have been a one-man show. We know that this chap who brought the picture to the Da Vinci was not really acting as the agent of a nobleman – nor of any other rightful owner of the thing. So was he any sort of mere emissary or confederate at all? May he not have contrived the entire imposture on his own?’
    ‘Even to the extent of subsequently painting the copy, Sir John? He’d have to be uncommonly versatile. Burglary on the one hand – for I suppose that’s how he did his borrowing – and highly competent painting on the other. And he’d have had to know about this person Praxiteles and his collection.’
    ‘The man