‘Oh?’
‘From Mary Verney.’
She put down her drink and looked at him. Not today, she thought. It’s been bad enough already without her. She was retired, Flavia knew; she had said so last time they almost arrested her for theft on a grand scale. But she’d said that the time before last as well.
‘She asked me to ask you if you’d mind if she came back to Italy.’
‘What?’
Argyll said it again. ‘She has a house somewhere in Tuscany, it seems. She hasn’t felt comfortable going there for the last few years, what with you so keen to lock her up. So she simply wanted to know whether you had any outstanding business with her. If you do, she’ll stay away and sell the house, but if you don’t she wouldn’t mind coming and seeing if it still has a roof. I said I’d ask. Don’t look at me like that,’ he concluded mildly. ‘I’m the messenger. You know, the one you don’t shoot.’
Flavia huffed. ‘I really do have better things to do, you know, than reassuring ageing thieves.’
‘So it seems.’
‘What does that mean?’ she snapped.
‘You weren’t really listening to my fascinating anecdote about the coffee-machine in the staff room. My little joke about the tourist being taken to hospital when a piece of the Pantheon fell on his head didn’t make you smile at all, even though it was quite a clever play on words and would normally have produced at least a flicker of amusement. And you have twice dipped your olive into the sugar bowl and eaten it without even noticing.’
So she had. Now she thought about it, it had tasted odd. So she heaved a sigh and told him about more serious matters. By the time she finished, Argyll was dipping his olives in the sugar bowl as well. He, in contrast, found them quite tasty. He could see that it did really put the antics of the departmental coffee-machine in the shade.
Oddly, the more important matter was swiftly dealt with. Flavia didn’t want Argyll’s advice on this one, but got it anyway. It just wasn’t very good. ‘Your stomach,’ he said. ‘It’s been playing you up for days now. How about if we got Giulio downstairs to have you admitted to hospital for a week? Urgent tests? Suspected ulcer? Gastro-enteritis? You could blame my cooking. He’d be happy to oblige. Then you could sit it out in peace and security.’
Giulio was the doctor who lived on the grander first floor of their block. And Flavia was sure he would oblige. He was an obliging fellow. And her stomach – in fact, her entire internal system – was misbehaving shockingly, although it was better now, probably thanks to the wine. But this was one she could not duck out of, and Argyll knew it as well as she did.
‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. ‘If you want to be useful, you can tell me about this Claude.’
‘What’s to tell? It’s a landscape. Not one of his huge ones, which is no doubt why it’s so popular with the thieves.’
‘What about the subject, though? Cephalis and Procris.’
Argyll waved his hand dismissively. ‘Wouldn’t worry about that. They’re just figures wandering around the canvas and put in to give it respectability. Claude couldn’t do people for toffee. Arms and legs too long. Bums in the wrong place. But he had to do them to be taken seriously.’
‘Still. What’s the story?’
‘No idea.’
And Flavia clearly wanted to say no more, so he switched the topic. ‘Tell me about Bottando. You’ll miss him, won’t you?’
‘Terribly. Father figure, you know. It gives you a shock when permanent fixtures are suddenly not so permanent. Also, he’s not happy about it, either. It’s not a good way to end after all this time.’
‘We should get him a present.’
She nodded. ‘Can you think of anything?’
‘No.’
‘Nor me.’
They paused. ‘What shall I do about Mary Verney?’
She sighed. ‘Oh, I don’t know. I suppose there are so many thieves in the country, one more won’t make any difference. At least we can be certain she didn’t steal the Claude.’
Argyll was reluctant to criticize his dear wife, especially as she had been such for only a short time and it seemed premature to begin carping, but he found it hard to suppress a certain amount of irritation at the way she wouldn’t listen to reason – his reason – about this Claude. It was not that he didn’t see that it was her job to recover pictures, nor did he blame her for being worried. Normally it was her calm that amazed him. He knew quite well that he would have been incapable of doing what she did without being in a permanent state of panic. The omnipresent possibility of disaster that she seemed to live with was not the sort of thing that gave him pleasure; in his own line of work, now that being an art dealer was more of a hobby than an occupation, the worst that could happen was that he might lose his lecture notes. Getting rid of his remaining stock of pictures and covering his costs was more than enough stress to have in your life, in his opinion.
There were only about two dozen left now, ranging in quality from the moderately decent to the embarrassing; the rest he had either got rid of to a couple of clients, unloaded on to dealers, or decided to keep for himself. This last batch, in a fit of impatience, he had decided to sell at an auction and, as none were particularly valuable, he had arranged for them to go into a sale in London; they were not subject to any export restrictions and would get a better price there. They were, however, subject to a monumental amount of paperwork, which he had been sweating over for months. It was nearly all done now, most of the pictures were safely boxed and ready to go, but there still remained an alarming number of forms to fill in.
So he didn’t blame Flavia for being alarmed; the Italian state in one of its full-blown moods of cranky irrationality is an alarming thing. But she had a sort of absent-minded calm about her which was really quite unwise.
It was not that Flavia was ungrateful that made her dismiss his counsel with a touch of impatience, merely that she was preoccupied. Since being summoned to the prime minister’s office, she had been totally taken up with the Claude while also having to put on an air of not having a care in the world. A long, early morning phone call with the prime minister to try and extract more specific instructions produced nothing except a convoluted statement which gave the impression that he was unaware of anything to do with ransoms; after it was over, Flavia convinced herself that the call had been taped and would be used in evidence against her if need be. That started her day off badly, but even worse was the lack of any movement; the kidnapper did not follow up with any more details about how much money he wanted or how it was to be paid. Assuming that’s what he wanted. Time was short, after all; Flavia found the desultory approach quite surprising. Even the dimmest thief – and this character clearly was not dim – must realize that the longer he waited, the greater the risk of something going wrong, and that if the news came out then the price would go down dramatically.
At least it gave her time to do something, even though she had no great hopes of anything useful resulting.
