Moresby has been murdered?'
As they clearly couldn't, he told them he'd take statements properly later, and got a junior officer to usher them out. Then, taking several deep breaths to calm himself down, he ran his fingers through his hair and began to organise his investigation. Press to be talked to, names to be taken, statements to gather, bodies to be moved, someone to go round immediately and find di Souza. Hours of work stretched before him. And he couldn't really face it. So, instead he settled down and watched the video of the party, to see if that produced any real leads.
It didn't help him, nor did it greatly illuminate more professional analysts who looked it over later. The multiple interaction patterning, as the experts termed it, concluded that Thanet was having an affair with his secretary; that no less than twenty-seven per cent of the guests departed with at least one piece of museum cutlery in their pockets; that Jack Moresby drank too much, that David Barclay, the lawyer, and Hector di Souza, the art dealer, both spent extraordinary amounts of time looking at themselves in mirrors and that Jonathan Argyll was a bit lost and ill at ease most of the evening. They also noted that Mrs. Moresby arrived with David Barclay, and didn't speak to her husband once all the time he was there. Finally, they saw with disappointment that the pate sandwiches were singularly popular, although no one was seen secreting one about his person for unorthodox purposes.
They also watched Moresby talking to di Souza and leaving the party with the Spaniard at 9:07 p.m. and later on saw Barclay be summoned to the phone, talk into it, and walk out of the building at 9:58 p.m. The body was discovered moments later and Barclay came back to phone the police at 10:06 p.m. After that, everyone hung around and waited, with the exception of Langton who could be seen on the phone at 10:11 and again at 10:16. Simple enough, he explained later, he was phoning Jack Moresby and then Anne Moresby to inform them of the disaster. He was, it seemed, the only person who even thought of telling them. All the rest were too busy panicking.
Apart from that, they came up with a list of people who, at various stages of the evening, conversed with Moresby. Surprisingly enough there weren't all that many; almost everybody greeted him in one way or another, but he responded in such a frigid manner that few had sufficient courage to pursue the dialogue further. The party may have been thrown in his honour, but Arthur Moresby did not look as though he was in a party mood.
To put it another way, dozens of expert man-hours and all the techniques of advanced social-scientific investigation devoted to analysing the tape produced no useful information whatsoever. And Morelli had known they wouldn't, all along.
Jonathan Argyll tossed and turned in bed, his mind churning over recent events with a degree of manic obsessiveness. He had sold a Titian; he hadn't been paid for it; he had to go back to London; the prospective buyer had just been murdered; he wasn't going to get paid for it; he was going to lose his job; he had nearly been run over; the cheeseburger was in violent dispute with his stomach; Hector di Souza was the likely candidate for gun- toting connoisseur; the Spaniard had smuggled a bust out of Italy.
And he had no one to talk it all over with. A brief conversation with di Souza himself might have cleared his mind enough for him to get some sleep, but the infernal man was nowhere around. Not in his room, anyway; policemen there were aplenty, but Hector himself had, apparently, come back to the hotel, then left again shortly after someone phoned him. The key was with the reception. Maybe he would turn up for breakfast, unless the police got to him first, in which case he might be otherwise engaged.
Argyll rolled over in the bed for the thirtieth time, and looked at the clock with eyes that were not in the slightest bit weary, try as he might to convince them that they needed a rest.
Four in the morning. Which meant that he'd been lying in bed for three and a half hours, eyes open, brain rotating.
He switched on the light, hesitated and finally took the decision he'd been wanting to take ever since he got back to his hotel room. He had to talk to someone. He picked up the phone.
Chapter Four
While Argyll was wide awake in the middle of the night, Flavia di Stefano, sitting at her desk in the Rome headquarters of the Italian art squad, was half asleep in the middle of the day. Like him, however, she was in a disturbed frame of mind, and her colleagues were beginning to notice.
Ordinarily she was an exceptionally good-humoured person to have around. Cheerful, charming, relaxed. A perfect colleague to spend an hour chattering to over a cup of espresso when the work load flagged a bit. In the four years she'd worked for Taddeo Bottando as a researcher, she had successfully established a reputation for all- purpose amiability. She was, in short, well-liked.
But not at the moment. For the past few weeks she had been grumpy, uncooperative and a complete pain in the neck. A very junior and pimply-faced lad who had just joined had his head almost bodily ripped off for a trivial mistake that, usually, would have elicited nothing more alarming than a patient explanation of how to do it properly. A colleague asking for a swap on the work rota so he could take a long weekend was told to cancel the weekend. A plea for help from another, bogged down in a mass of documents from an art gallery raid, was told he would have to sort it out himself.
Not herself at all. General Bottando even made cautious enquiries after her health, and wondered whether she was, perhaps, overworking a little. He got short shrift as well, and was told, in effect, to mind his own business. Fortunately, he was a tolerant man, and more worried than annoyed. But he was beginning to find himself watching her more carefully. He ran a happy department, so he liked to think, and was disturbed at the effect she was beginning to have on morale.
Doggedly and persistently, though, Flavia plugged on with the work; forms in, forms annotated, forms out again. No one could fault her work, or the amount of time she spent doing it. She just wasn't much fun anymore. The bad mood seemed an almost permanent fixture, and was approaching high tide when, at 5:30, the phone rang.
'Di Stefano,' she snapped, rather as though the instrument was a personal enemy.
The voice at the other end bellowed through the receiver at a volume which suggested the owner was shouting loudly into it. He was; Argyll had still not fully accepted that the audibility of phone lines varies in inverse proportion to their length. His voice came through as clear as a bell, while a call across Rome was frequently incomprehensible.
'Wonderful, I've got you. Listen, something awful's been going on.'
'What do you want?' she said crossly when she realised who it was. Typical, she thought. Don't see him for weeks on end, then, when he wants something . . .
'Listen,' he repeated, 'Moresby's been murdered.'
'Who?'
'Moresby. The man who bought my picture.'
'So?'
'I thought you'd be interested.'
'I'm not.'
'And a Bernini's been stolen. It was smuggled out of Italy.'
This was, of course, more in Flavia's line of business, as much of her time in the past few years had been devoted to stopping smuggling, and recovering at least some of the works of art which were smuggled. Generally speaking, no matter what sort of mood she was in, she would have picked up pen and paper and begun listening. However . . .
'In that case it's too late to do anything about it, isn't it?' she said shortly. 'What are you ringing about? Don't you know I'm busy?'
There was a two dollar fifty-eight cent pause from California until the slightly aggrieved voice returned for another try. 'Of course I know you're busy. You always are these days. But I thought you'd want to know.'
'Don't see what it's got to do with me,' she said. 'It's an American affair. I haven't noticed any official requests for our assistance. Unless you've joined the local police or something.'
'Oh, come on, Flavia. You love murders and thefts and smuggling and things like that. I rang you up just to tell you. You could at least sound interested.'
In truth, she was, but was damned if she was going to let on. Argyll and she had been close friends for a couple of years. She had long given up any notion that they would be anything else. Until he came along she had tended to think of herself as the sort of person who, if not irresistible - she was not sufficiently vain to think that - was at least generally attractive. But Argyll didn't notice. He was companionable, friendly, evidently enjoyed trips
