The Raphael Affair by Iain Pears Page A

fork and using it to sop up some garlic sauce from his plate, while Bottando considered whether he should break the policy of silence about the Raphael which he had so convincingly explained to Flavia several weeks back. It was about the only decent anecdote of recent vintage, and he knew Janet would appreciate it. On the other hand, he doubted the man’s ability to keep it to himself.
    ‘Well, then,’ Janet began, lifting his head reluctantly from his plate and wiping a dribble of gravy from his chin. ‘As you probably noticed, Morneau was an exceedingly rich man for an art dealer. He had an extravagant lifestyle, a house in Provence, a spacious apartment in Paris, and a gallery which, although successful, certainly did not generate enough income to support his expenditure. No mortgages, no debts. All his residences, incidentally, had been completely swept of any incriminating papers by the time we got there to have a look around. A very tidy man.
    ‘So where did this money come from? Not from legitimate activities, and not from peddling stolen icons either. We know of twenty-five he probably stole. Even if there are another twenty-five we don’t know about, that gives you, say, six or seven million francs over a ten-year period. He spent much more than that. So what else was he up to?
    ‘Then he disappears. This is a man who turns up at almost every gallery opening, hasn’t missed a performance of the ballet for nearly fifteen years, and is an artistic socialite of the first order. He ducks out of sight for nearly a year, and then he turns up, in an embarrassing position and dead. So where has he been, eh? Tell me that.’
    He finished his little speech and smiled, as if expecting applause for the brilliance of his logic.
    ‘I was hoping you would. You haven’t actually told us anything at all. What was he doing?’ Bottando asked.
    Janet shrugged. ‘There I cannot help you. Deduction can take you only so far. Any further requires more information. Now tell me. What about Rome?’
    Before he could begin, Flavia, who had been staring absently out of the window, made one of her first comments of the day. She didn’t like being ignored, although she was occasionally prepared to put up with being treated as merely a decorative appendage by Bottando. He didn’t do it very often and, besides, he was old and southern and could hardly be expected to be perfect. But it was time, she decided, to make her presence felt.
    ‘Maybe we should test the Commissioner’s powers of deduction a little further,’ she said, smiling winsomelyat the Frenchman. She always did that when she suspected she might be being a little rude. But before she could proceed further along these lines, Bottando interrupted her.
    ‘Quite,’ he said. ‘But how good a painter was he? What were those fake icons he turned out like? It struck me that we might approach some of the more reputable forgers in Naples and ask a few careful questions there. Now he’s dead they would probably be more forthcoming than usual.’
    Janet considered the matter for a moment. ‘As for Morneau’s qualities as a painter, he was very good indeed, but he was born too late. He disliked modernism in all its forms. Had he been born a century earlier he would have had a great success.
    ‘His icons were very variable. The earliest ones were good, painted on old panels, covered in dirt, quite well-executed. But once the technicians knew what they were looking for, they could easily spot them – something about paint in wormholes, which you don’t get in the real thing. The later ones were sloppy. It looks as though he realised that they didn’t really have to be that good to be convincing, so stopped wasting so much effort.
    ‘Technical problems aside, however, they are remarkable, even the bad ones. They have a great spiritual quality, almost as if he were painting for his own sake. I’m not really surprised the monks were taken in. Once they had been aged and