Inspector Kingsley had not yet heard of the Isles of Greece when he met with Deputy Director Ragg the following day to discuss the Booklet for the Young, as the policeman now referred to it.
‘Capital idea, capital!’ cried Ragg, rubbing his hands together. ‘Why didn’t we think of it ourselves? The Director will be so pleased, he’s always keen to involve the next generation. Our Head of Greek and Roman Antiquities should be back from the Alps in a couple of days, he too will be delighted. I shall issue instructions for everybody to give you their full cooperation. Perhaps you could wait twenty-four hours before you embark on your enquiries? That would be splendid.’
‘Thank you so much,’ said Inspector Kingsley. ‘I have some disappointing news, I fear, Mr Deputy Director. Not that I find it disappointing, for I had few hopes of success, but it does not take us any further forward.’
He paused and drew a couple of letters from his pocket. ‘You will recall that my superiors wished to send the blackmail letter to a couple of so-called handwriting experts?’ It sounded as though he thought his superiors should have been arrested immediately and locked up in Newgate for even harbouring such an idea.
‘You will not be surprised to hear,’ Kingsley went on, ‘that their reports are totally without value.’ He looked down at them distastefully. ‘There’s a whole lot of nonsense about pressure of downward strokes, upward inclination of the line indicating an optimistic temperament, decisive dottings of the i’s and so on. The upshot, to conflate the two reports, is that the author is a middle-aged man, possibly with violent temperament, of determined and decisive character who may stop at nothing to get what he wants. Bravo, say I. Tom Thumb himself could have told us as much as that.’
‘Never mind,’ said Deputy Director Ragg, ‘I thought it might be unprofitable. But tell me this, Inspector. Your men are patrolling my house and watching over my family day and night. I am most grateful. Today or tomorrow, by my calculations, we should hear from the blackmailer again even though the museum has followed your Commissioner’s advice not to get in touch with him at all. Do you think I shall receive another letter? That the blackguard will write again?’
‘I’m sure you’ll hear from him again, Mr Ragg. Let’s just hope a letter is all we get.’
Johnny Fitzgerald was rewarded with a large glass of Brunello di Montalcino, a new recommendation from Powerscourt’s wine merchant, when he brought the news of the Isles of Greece and the other Delphic messages from Sokratis Papadopolous to Markham Square shortly after 6.30 on the evening of his trip to the hospital. Lady Lucy had observed to her husband only the day before that Johnny seemed to be drinking much less than usual. She had heard a whisper from a distant outstation of her relatives in Warwickshire that Johnny was romantically involved with a rich and attractive widow resident in that county and in Flood Street, Chelsea, but no mention had been made of the putative love affair.
‘What do you think it all means, Lady Lucy? Shades of the prison-house and the other stuff comes from a poem by Wordsworth as far as I know. The High City probably means Acropolis. Half the bloody cities in ancient Greece had their own acropolises, didn’t they? I can’t make any sense of either of those. But “The Isles of Greece”, I mean, like the fellow said. What was he on about?’
‘It could be anything, Johnny, he was a very strange man that Lord Byron who wrote it. Some long dead relation of mine was supposed to have been in love with the poet, you know,’ said Lady Lucy. ‘Your dying friend did say it was a riddle, didn’t he? Like the Sphinx and what walks on four legs in the morning, two at midday and three in the evening.’
‘Could be a pub, the Isles of Greece,’ said Johnny hopefully, contemplating perhaps the long reconnaissance mission needed to identify such a place.
‘Or a restaurant,’ Powerscourt chipped in, ‘roll up, roll up for the freshest seafood in London.’
‘How about a nightclub?’ asked Lady Lucy. ‘Dusky Greek maidens dancing to the music of the lyre and the pipes of Pan perhaps?’
‘Seven veils?’ asked Johnny. ‘Six? Eight? Ten?’
‘That would depend on the time of the evening, I think, Johnny,’ Lady Lucy replied. ‘The later the hour, the fewer the number of veils, I imagine.’
‘How late before the veils disappear down to zero?’ asked Johnny.
‘What about a shop?’ suggested Lady Lucy, keen to escape from the veils. ‘Posh sort of place in Knightsbridge perhaps, selling luxury produce from the Greek islands, olives from Rhodes, toy bull dancers from Crete, a better class of ouzo from Mykonos, warm jumpers for seafarers in the winter months, hand-knitted by Greek grandmas by the fire in their peasant cottages while the wind howls round the Aegean.’
‘It could all have been a bluff, of course,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Maybe the fellow meant that the secret of the Caryatid’s disappearance actually does have to do with the Greek Islands. It wasn’t really a riddle at all.’
‘There are a couple of verses at the end of “The Isles of Greece” about Samian wine,’ said Lady Lucy. ‘They might appeal to you, Johnny. I looked it up earlier. Here we are: “Fill high the bowl with Samian wine! Our virgins dance beneath the shade – Place me on Sunium’s marbled steep, Where nothing, save the waves and I, May hear our mutual murmurs sweep; There, swanlike, let me sing and die: A land of slaves shall ne’er be mine – Dash down yon cup of Samian wine!”’
‘Sounds good to me,’ said Johnny, ‘I bet those rogues at the Greek pub near the Orthodox cathedral have some Samian filth hidden in the cellar. Do you think I should go to Samos, Francis? Check out the wine and the veils and the maidens?’
‘He said “The Isles of Greece”, mind you,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Surely if he wanted to refer to Samos, he’d have said Samos, wouldn’t he?’
‘There must be hundreds and hundreds of Greek islands,’ said Lady Lucy, feeling that the riddle wasn’t going to yield up its secrets very easily.
‘How long did it take that fellow Odysseus to get home to his island from Troy?’ Johnny Fitzgerald put his glass down and didn’t help himself to a refill. Lady Lucy looked meaningfully at her husband. ‘Ten years, wasn’t it? Should have taken him a couple of months or so at the most. I reckon it could take you as long to check out all those bloody islands. I’m not usually averse to a glass or two, even of Greek if you twist my arm, and a spot of sun and sea air and a few birds. Normally I’d volunteer like a shot but I’ve got rather a lot on at the moment so you’ll have to count me out of the expedition, I’m afraid.’
‘It looks to me as though the riddle has won the first round,’ said Powerscourt. ‘The way things look at the moment, it’s going to win the second and third rounds as well. Greeks with riddles are just as bad as the ones bearing gifts.’
The message from the Corfu telegram office down in the port was hand delivered by a barefooted ragamuffin who couldn’t have been more than ten years old. The stones of the harbour were still cold on his feet at half past nine in the morning. Captain Dimitri was on his second glass of ouzo since breakfast. He was not yet tired of waiting for news. The taverna was still producing its rather greasy moussaka, served by the pretty daughter, and his small crew was kept entertained by the bars and bordellos of the city centre some six hundred yards away. His ship was swaying slightly at her mooring on the harbour, the mangy lion fast asleep, the querulous monkeys staring sadly out to sea.
The message was very brief. Thirty or thirty-first October, it said. Half past four in the afternoon. Brindisi railway station. So, the Captain said to himself, I have six days to get from the Greek to the Italian side of the Mediterranean. If I take on stores today and leave first thing tomorrow I should have plenty of time. The Captain stared up at the sky with its wheeling gulls and decided that the weather would not trouble him on his journey. There was a widow he knew in Brindisi who ran a laundry in the town. Other services could be purchased for cash. Maybe she would be pleased to see him again.
Precisely what he was meant to pick up at the end of his journey, he did not know. All he knew was that it would be heavy and that he might have to hire a crane or a hoist of some kind to bring it aboard.
Over the next week Powerscourt and Lady Lucy opened relations with the upper layers of the Greek Establishment in London. They took morning coffee with the Greek Ambassador, Anastasias Papadikis, a former merchant who had made his fortune buying and selling new and second-hand boats of every description. Powerscourt’s cover story was that his publishers had asked him to write a short guide book on the glories of ancient Greece. He brought with him as a gift to the Ambassador a presentation copy of his own first volume on the cathedrals of England. What advice would the Ambassador give to one about to embark on such a venture in his native land? Sipping his sugary coffee very noisily through his great black beard, the Ambassador gave Powerscourt his blessing.
‘I don’t need to tell a man of your education about the principal sites, Lord Powerscourt, you will know them as well as I do. And Greece will always be grateful to this country for British assistance in money and diplomacy in the long battle for the independence we enjoy today. But I could perhaps make a few small suggestions of my own? The site in Anatolia believed to be the location of the ancient city of Troy, Homer’s Troy, is well worth a visit. But even you English know little of the key role played by an Englishman who advised the ghastly German Schliemann where to dig, and was a first-rate archaeologist in his own right. Calvert, Frank Calvert, is, or rather was, the man’s name, as he died a couple of years ago. The Greek government sent a cabinet minister to represent the Greek nation at his funeral. Your fellow countrymen should know more about the man. And, of course, there is Missolonghi at the mouth of the Gulf of Patras where the poet Byron gave his life for Greek freedom. Maybe your readers would like to pay their respects?’
Powerscourt noted that there was a famous portrait of Lord Byron in Albanian dress above the fireplace, holding an Eastern sword and with a great storm about to break out behind him. The Ambassador informed him that this was on loan from the British Government Collections as a gesture of friendship to Greece from the British people. When asked if there were any points of disagreement, any areas of conflict between the two nations, one an empire of the past, the other an empire in the present, the Ambassador simply laughed.
‘There are no disagreements at all, my dear Lord Powerscourt. Why do you think the post of Ambassador to the Court of St James is one of the most coveted posts in the Greek Prime Minister’s gift? We have little to do here except attend official functions and represent our country on state occasions. It is a post for a lotus-eater rather than a real diplomat, I assure you!’
Powerscourt was anxious to meet with the Head of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the British Museum as soon as he returned from the mountains. He had remembered only the day before another account of Tristram Stanhope from his, Powerscourt’s, brother-in-law, the banker William Burke, who had sat next to him at some grand dinner in Guildhall.
‘There we all were, Francis, white tie and tails, course after course of French cuisine, decorations will be worn, the odd Victoria Cross on show amongst the baubles, and this fellow Stanhope beside me. He didn’t look out of place at all, cufflinks and shoes all passed muster, that sort of thing. But he had this air about him. I couldn’t put my finger on it for a long time. Then it came to me. Even there, in the beating heart of the City of London, Stanhope had the air of one forever looking to recover the dramatic excitement of some long forgotten sporting event like a cricket match. “There’s a breathless hush in the Close tonight, Ten to make and the match to win.” I rather had the impression he’s been playing the game for most of his life.’
Powerscourt longed to talk to classical academics, art dealers, sculpture experts, modern Greek historians. If you were a serious thief, he would have asked after half an hour or so, what would you do with a Caryatid if you had stolen one? Copy it? If so, how many copies? Who might want to buy it? Greeks in Greece? Greeks in America? Greeks in London? How much would it be worth? Were there any examples of other works of major importance walking out of European museums apart from the Mona Lisa? Tristram Stanhope would have to answer for them all. Powerscourt thought about the links between the worlds of art, scholarship, Greek nationalism and crime. Somewhere, he felt sure, they intersected. If he could find that point, he might be able to solve the mystery. Once again Stanhope would be his guide.
A bumping pitch and a blinding light,
An hour to play and the last man in.
Theophilus Ragg, Deputy Director of the British Museum, thought he recognized the handwriting. The envelope too looked familiar. Feeling a great wave of anger sweep through him, he slid open the letter with an elaborately carved Japanese paper knife, a gift from the National Museum in Tokyo.
‘Dear Ragg,’ he read, ‘you have dared to disobey my instructions. I have received no suggestions about the transfer of the monies mentioned in my earlier letter. The relevant sum is therefore going to increase by ten thousand pounds a day, starting today.’
Ragg felt that the anger coursing through him was growing stronger.
‘Furthermore,’ the writer continued, ‘your pathetic attempts to secure your own safety and those of your family through the intervention of the Metropolitan Police have been noted. Their plain clothes policemen stand out on the streets of London like giants in a land of pygmies.
‘As I said before, we know who you are. We know where you are. We have ways of making you pay and in ways you might not have thought of. Quite soon you will receive reminders that it is neither wise nor prudent to ignore our demands. It is not too late. Correspondence regarding the money transfers can still be sent to The Friends of the British Museum, Ritz Hotel, London W1.’
Ragg knew he ought to take a walk or read a Shakespeare sonnet or two, to calm himself down. Shakespeare sonnets, he had discovered some years before, were much more successful in assuaging his rages than any pill or potion. He remembered the last conversation with his doctor who had advised him that he should consider taking early retirement because of his health. His heart was not strong, the doctor said, and any strain or great upset could have severe consequences. But the wrath was upon him. He thought that if he had been younger and more martial he would have issued a demand for a duel. He grabbed a pen and wrote a reply:
‘Dear Blackmailer,’ he began. ‘Yet again you have insulted me and my family and the Museum I represent. You are beneath contempt.
‘“Rage – Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles” – these are the opening words of Homer’s great epic of ancient warfare The Iliad, which tells the story of the battle for Troy. May it contain a lesson and a warning for you. “Would to god my rage,” Achilles tells the Trojan hero Hector just before he kills him, “and my fury would drive me now to hack your flesh away and eat you raw, such agonies you have caused me.”
‘He then kills Hector, ties him to his chariot, and drags him behind it for a period of twelve days. I pray to the ancient gods of Achaea and the spirits of the Aegean that a latter-day Achilles may return from the dead and tear you into a thousand pieces.’
Ragg realized he was still shaking. He did not read his letter again. He called for a porter to take it immediately to the Ritz Hotel in Piccadilly.
He reached inside the top left-hand drawer of his desk and pulled out a well-worn leather volume containing the sonnets of William Shakespeare.
Inspector Kingsley felt he was progressing well with his work for eight- to ten-year-olds about the Elgin Marbles and the Caryatid. He knew now that the Caryatid was cleaned in a mixture of mild soap and water once a week, and that she didn’t seem to mind when her hair was washed. He learnt about the different time scales of the various pieces of statuary. The Parthenon frieze and the metopes that had been placed around the outer walls of the building were older than the Caryatid and had probably been created by a different generation of sculptors. The Parthenon, one of the young curators told him, was built at the height of Athens’s glory, when she had an empire that spread out all over the Aegean Sea, and when her temples and public buildings were the glory of the city. The Caryatid, the young curator said, was created a generation later when the empire was lost, public life debased, and the city about to lose its thirty-year struggle with Sparta known as the Peloponnesian War. Athens had fallen from the height of glory into ignominious defeat, and the Caryatid, in a way, had marked the passing. Like Icarus, perhaps, Athens had dared to fly too close to the sun. The Athenians could always erect another temple, the Erechtheion, on the Acropolis, but they could not bring back the past.
The Inspector wrote down what he was told in a special blue notebook with his name on the inside, written in a large, childish hand by his son to remind him of his duty. He took a special interest in the routines of the museum, what happened after dark, what happened before the museum closed last thing at night. Above all, he was interested in the fire alarm that had occurred some time before. It was, people discovered afterwards, a trial run to test some new equipment, but the porters had hurried everybody out of the building into the forecourt in front of Great Russell Street as if their lives were in danger. One or two of the more punctilious curators were able to tell him that they had been left standing about for at least forty minutes. The Inspector decided it was time for another fire alarm. This time he and a couple of his men would be left hiding inside the museum to see how easy it would be to move things about or to replace one object with another. He would talk to Deputy Director Ragg that afternoon about arranging a date. He thought his children would probably approve of fire alarms with their promise of fire engines and ambulances rushing to the rescue with their sirens at full blast.
‘I’m the bringer of bad news this evening, very bad.’ Detective Inspector Kingsley had refused the customary cup of tea on his evening arrival in Markham Square and was sipping slowly at a glass of brandy. Powerscourt thought he looked very pale.
‘It’s Kostas,’ he went on, ‘one of the Greek porters at the museum. He’s been killed, I’m afraid.’
‘How?’ asked Powerscourt.
‘Well,’ said Christopher Kingsley, ‘the official story is, and will continue to be, that he was killed by a tube train. The usual story, too many people trying to get on in the rush hour, somebody slipped and then there was a body on the line waiting to be run over by God knows how many tons of Piccadilly Line train. There was an off-duty police sergeant several carriages down and he managed to keep all the passengers at the front of the train back until he spoke to them. The driver was weeping uncontrollably in the stationmaster’s office. He’d only been in the job for two weeks and nobody had prepared him for anything like this. He kept saying that it was all his fault. The point is, the sergeant told his superiors that one of the passengers, a middle-aged woman in a fur coat, said she thought somebody was pushing the victim towards the front of the train, but she couldn’t be sure. She’s going to speak to us again in the morning when she’s calmed down. You know how confusing and chaotic these situations can be, my lord. Very hard to make a sensible narrative of what’s been happening.’
‘What do we know of the dead man, Inspector?’
‘Very little so far. Name of Kostas Manitakis, employed as a porter in the British Museum. Age, thirty-four, resident in a Greek boarding house, apparently, near their cathedral in Moscow Road in Notting Hill.’
‘I wonder if Johnny Fitzgerald has come across him,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Maybe he drank in the basement of that pub down there with the ouzo and the unspeakable Greek wines.’
‘I have made an appointment to go to his lodgings in the morning, my lord. I should be very happy if you would come with me. In the meantime, as a precaution, I have ordered his room to be sealed off and guarded and a watch kept on the house. All the other lodgers will be kept at home until they have spoken to us before they go off to work. The landlady is going to miss her normal cleaning duties in the cathedral.’
‘It sounds as if you expect foul play, Inspector.’
‘I do, and I don’t. I happen to have worked before with the sergeant who was on the train and organized the passengers for questioning. He’s a most reliable fellow. He wouldn’t have told us about the pushing if he didn’t think there was something funny going on.’
Powerscourt looked closely at the Inspector and remembered what Christopher Kingsley had said about his dislike of murders. Now it looked as though he might have been plunged right into the middle of another one.
Number six Moscow Road was a three-storey terraced house with steps up to the front door, guarded by a large cat with fierce black eyes and half a tail. The landlady, Mrs Olga Henderson, was of Greek extraction but married to a man from Yorkshire. She greeted them nervously at the door, as Kingsley introduced his sergeant and Powerscourt.
‘Come in, sir, my lord Powerscourt, Sergeant. Dear me, I never expected three of you all at once.’
‘Don’t worry, Mrs Henderson,’ said the Inspector, ‘nobody is suggesting anything illegal went on in this house.’ Powerscourt’s eyebrows rose a couple of inches at this point. ‘We just want to ask everybody a few questions,’ the Inspector continued, ‘that’s all. Perhaps we could begin with you and then you needn’t worry any more. Is there somewhere quiet we could talk?’
‘Yes, yes, come this way, please.’ The front hall was adorned with pictures of Greek saints. She now showed them into what was clearly the front room, overlooking the street, obviously not used very much and entirely dominated by a large reproduction of a Byzantine Christ, gazing sadly at his earthly kingdom of a battered sofa and a glass cabinet filled with children’s dolls.
‘Perhaps you could begin by telling us how many residents you have here, Mrs Henderson.’ Powerscourt was impressed by the way the Inspector avoided using the word ‘lodgers’.
‘Five at the moment,’ Mrs Henderson replied. ‘All my rooms are taken just now!’ She brightened slightly at this point as if a full house was a guarantee of innocence.
‘Perhaps we could begin with the late Mr Kostas, Mrs Henderson. How long had he been with you?’
‘About a year and a half, he came with his brother Stavros just after Easter last year. They shared the little room at the back of the house at the top. Very good guests they were too.’ Mrs Henderson looked as though she might be about to burst into tears at any moment.
‘Tell us, if you would, Mrs Henderson, what sort of people they were, these two brothers, what they liked doing in their spare time, that sort of thing.’
‘Well, it’s hard to say when you get to know people, isn’t it. They liked their work at the museum, I know that. They used to drink at that pub round the corner. Kostas liked playing football, there was some kind of informal Greek team that kicked a ball about in the park on Sunday afternoons.’
‘Is the brother here at present?’ asked Powerscourt. ‘In the house, I mean?’
‘No, Mr Stavros is away, he’s been away a week or more now. I don’t know where he’s gone or how to get in touch with him, I’m afraid. There was some talk of a long journey, I think, but I’m not sure.’
There was a pause while Mrs Henderson dried her eyes on a large purple handkerchief that looked as though it belonged to her husband.
‘Take your time,’ said the Inspector kindly, in his best bedside manner, ‘there’s no hurry.’
Powerscourt looked up again at the huge mournful eyes of the Saviour above the mantelpiece. Lady Lucy had always maintained that it was the foreknowledge of their own death that made these Greek Orthodox Christs so sad. ‘If you knew, Francis, that you were going to have a long and bloody death, stuck on top of a cross at the top of some hill with Roman soldiers abusing you, you’d look pretty miserable too.’
‘Were they regular with the rent, that sort of thing?’ asked the Inspector.
‘Yes, they were, they never missed a rent day all the time they were here.’
‘Were they religious, the brothers,’ asked Powerscourt, ‘living so close to the cathedral and so on?’
‘Now you mention, they were very keen on the Church. There’s another brother who’s a monk in a monastery on a Greek island somewhere in the middle of the Aegean. Kostas always tried to get home early on Fridays for Vespers in the early evening and they both went to church on Sundays, regular.’
‘Forgive me, Mrs Henderson, were there any women friends you were aware of?’
‘Not that they ever brought any home, if that’s what you mean. I always told them that if they were walking out with a nice respectable girl they were always welcome to bring her home to afternoon tea on Sundays. We have it in here, you know, with Greek cakes and a glass of wine before leaving. But nobody ever came.’
Powerscourt thought Mrs Henderson would have welcomed the chance to inspect these respectable young girls, but he said nothing.
‘Were there any particular friends they went about with?’ The Inspector was turning to a fresh page in his notebook.
‘I don’t think so,’ Mrs Henderson replied, ‘they were quite self contained and, of course, they were very friendly with my other Greek gentlemen. I have five altogether.’
‘Perhaps,’ said the Inspector, ‘you could tell us a little about them?’
‘Well, two of them, Maximos and Antonis, are also brothers and they work for a Greek bank with a branch in Notting Hill. There are a lot of Greeks living round here, as you know, with the cathedral and the school and so on. Very quiet boys.’
‘And the last one?’
‘Nikos,’ said Mrs Henderson, ‘he works in that big Greek store by the tube station, the one that sells Greek food and wine and newspapers and all sorts of things. He brings me olives and Greek cakes and pastries on Saturdays when he comes back from the shop. He’s mad about football, Nikos, follows Arsenal home and away whenever he can.’
‘Very good,’ the Inspector said. ‘That’s all for now unless you can think of anything you want to tell us, any reason for his death perhaps? No? Then if I could talk to the other gentlemen one by one we’ll let them go off to work. Lord Powerscourt here will have a look at the brothers’ room, if you have no objections? Perhaps you could show him the way?’
The young police constable stepped aside as Powerscourt and Mrs Henderson came to the door of Kostas’s quarters on the top floor. Mrs Henderson parked herself by the window and gave every appearance of intending to stay while her visitor searched the room.
‘Thank you, Mrs Henderson, thank you very much. I’ll see you on my way out.’
Mrs Henderson clattered noisily down her stairs. ‘Well, Constable, is there anything to report up here?’
‘I took over here at seven o’clock this morning, sir, my lord, seeing as how the Inspector wanted this room guarded twenty-four hours a day until you gentlemen had a chance to look at it. Not very much to guard, is there? I’ve checked under the beds and there’s nothing funny about the floorboards, I can tell you that much.’
The room was small. The two beds were side by side at the window, divided by a small dresser with four drawers. There was a wardrobe in the corner by the door which revealed that the brothers had one suit each, three pairs of trousers and eight shirts between them and four pair of shoes. Powerscourt thought that brother Stavros would have taken some clothes on his journey.
‘If there’s anything here,’ said Powerscourt, ‘it’s going to be in one of those drawers.’
‘I could empty them out on the bed one by one if you like, my lord.’
‘Thank you very much. Perhaps we could begin at the bottom.’
The bottom two yielded nothing but socks, underwear and sweaters. The Constable checked that there were no secret hiding places and put them back. The third drawer was full of letters, apparently stuffed in at random with no sign of a filing system at all.
‘I’ll bag these up for you, if you like, my lord, and you can take them away for translation,’ the Constable said, after they had checked that every single page was written in Greek. But when they turned out the top drawer Powerscourt realized that there might have been a system after all. Everything here was in English for a start. It was as if one or both brothers had emptied their pockets into this drawer every evening. There were bus tickets, tube tickets, train tickets, some of them to and from Amersham, orders of service from the cathedral. There were rotas from the British Museum and the stubs of two pairs of theatre tickets at the Lyceum, both on Saturday afternoons. And there was a receipt from Thomas Cook for organizing the transportation of what must have been a large and obviously expensive package to be taken in a railway container from London Victoria to Italy. There was no date of travel and no precise information about what the package contained. Powerscourt showed the document to his new friend, the Constable.
‘What do you think, young man?’
The policeman looked at it closely. ‘I don’t know, sir. Maybe Kostas and his brother didn’t know how to organize the thing, so they asked Thomas Cook to sort it out for them? They’d have heard of Thomas Cook for sure, but maybe they felt uncertain about approaching one of the big removal companies themselves.’
‘It’s possible, it’s certainly possible, thank you so much for your help,’ said Powerscourt and took the stairs two at a time to confer with Inspector Kingsley on the ground floor.
Twenty minutes later Powerscourt was talking to a young man called Davies in the Holborn branch of Thomas Cook. Davies had a small, dark brown beard, well trimmed, and a pair of very thick spectacles as if the reading of multiple timetables, often in lamentably small type, had taken a toll of his eyesight.
‘Why, yes,’ he told Powerscourt, who told him that he was an investigator, ‘I remember the two Greek gentlemen, of course I do. And I remember that receipt you have in your hand. They were very anxious and rather confused, I think, our Greek friends. They worked at the British Museum and they came to us for advice about transporting a very large package from here to Greece. They were anxious, for some reason, that the package should be picked up from Brindisi and make the final stretch of the voyage by boat.’
‘And what did you tell them?’ asked Powerscourt, feeling suddenly that he might be on the verge of making significant progress at last.
‘I said that we didn’t do packages like that ourselves. Whenever we’re asked to provide that kind of transportation we place the matter in the hands of Rochfords, the furniture removal people. They’ve been moving stuff around Europe for decades. As a matter of fact I rang a friend of mine who works there and asked him to look after the brothers and their mysterious package. I did ask them, you see, what the package contained and they muttered something about a very large pipe needed for repair work in a big engineering project somewhere in Greece. I didn’t quite believe them, actually. Anyway, the long and the short of it is that the package was booked to travel in a railway container from Victoria to Brindisi in southern Italy.’
The young man checked his papers. ‘It is meant to arrive six days from now. I can ask my friend Wakefield over at Rochfords to provide all the paper documentation, the manifest, the customs clearance and so on if that would help. God knows where the wretched pipe is now; it’s probably sitting in a siding somewhere like Lyon or Milan for all I know.’
‘That would be most kind,’ said Powerscourt, and handed over his card. ‘Those details would be very helpful. Is there anything else you can tell me that might be helpful? Anything, however trivial it seems, could be useful.’
The young man took off his glasses and polished them vigorously on the end of his tie.
‘I note,’ he said, ‘that although you introduced yourself as an investigator, Lord Powerscourt, you haven’t told me exactly what you are investigating. I’m not asking you to tell me since it is obviously confidential. But there is one thing that might help you.’
‘And what is that?’
‘One of the Greek gentlemen decided on the spot that he should accompany their package. He too has a railway ticket from Victoria to Brindisi Central. But I doubt very much if he will be travelling on the same train. Stavros, that’s your man, if you’re thinking of joining him on his travels. I could probably book you a ticket on the same train if you like? I could do that right now.’