'Why don't you ask Hector?'
'Because he's disappeared.'
'Is he in trouble?'
'Potentially. In very deep trouble if the American police ever catch up with him. There's quite a lot of people who want to ask him a question or two.'
'Dear me. That's the story of Hector's life, I'm afraid.' Borunna paused, evidently considering a series of possibilities. Had Flavia only known what they were, she might have been able to help him make up his mind. He walked over to the mantelpiece and examined a sixteenth-century cherub for a while. The effort seemed to help him reach a decision.
'Well,' he said. 'I'm afraid I'm not going to be of much help to you. As I say, I haven't seen Hector for years; I'm afraid we had a little argument. Years back. A misunderstanding.'
'About forgeries?'
He nodded reluctantly. 'Among other things.' He hesitated, and then hurried on. 'Times were changing. Getting easier. I never really approved. It was necessary, back then, but as soon as it was possible I stopped, and told him he was going to get himself into big trouble if he didn't see sense. Eventually even he and Maria fell out. But Hector - well, he was always a little reckless, and always convinced his charm would see him through. I'm afraid there was some bad blood about it, and we gradually drifted apart.
'As for your Bernini, he did own one. Very briefly, alas, and it did him no good at all. But I very much doubt that he has sold it recently.'
Aha, Flavia thought. A brief flicker of light at the end of what had turned out to be a long and dark tunnel. It was a pity that Borunna immediately snuffed the brief glow out again.
'He lost it, you see,' he went on implacably.
'Lost it?' she said incredulously. 'How on earth could you lose a Bernini?'
A stupid question, really. Recent events seemed to demonstrate that it was the easiest thing in the world. The damn things just keep vanishing.
'Well, lost is not perhaps the best word. I do hope you will keep this to yourself. It was a grave shock for him, and he did his best to forget it . . .'
Flavia informed him that discretion was her middle name. Reassured, he told the story.
'It was very simple,' the old man began. 'Hector bought a bust at a house sale; about 1950, or '51, if I remember rightly. He identified it in a job lot of miscellaneous pieces. A priest's family, I think it was. Lovely piece. And sold it to a buyer in Switzerland, who asked him to deliver it.'
'Smuggle it out, you mean.'
Borunna nodded. 'I fear so. It was a lot of money, and the risks of being caught were tiny. So he got hold of a car and went. It wasn't his lucky day. The border police were holding a day of spot checks looking for people taking out goods, currency, escaping fascists, and Hector got caught up in the net. They found the bust and discovered Hector could not prove ownership, had no export papers, nothing. For once his charm let him down. They arrested him and impounded the bust until it could be examined by an expert at the Borghese. That happened all the time in those days; so many works of art had gone missing during the war and there was an enormous effort to get everything back to the rightful owners.'
'And what happened?'
He shrugged. 'Hector never saw it again, as I say.'
'But he must have wanted to know what had happened to it.'
'Of course. He drove everybody crazy. The Borghese confirmed it was genuine, then went very tight-lipped about it. He was convinced they were going to keep it.'
'They didn't. We know that.'
Borunna dismissed the comment as though it was of no importance to him. 'Perhaps not. So what do you think happened to it?'
'We don't know.'
He nodded thoughtfully at this, then continued. 'Well, Hector didn't get it back, that I do know. It was a great blow; he was so excited to start off with. And, of course, he didn't have enough money to absorb a loss like that. He resented it for some time, because he reckoned he'd bought it fair and square. But there was nothing he could do about it.'
'Why not? I mean, if it was his . . .'
'Ah, but was it? I really don't know where he got it from. Perhaps it was at a house sale. Perhaps – well, perhaps it wasn't. But legal or not, a poor foreigner fighting something like the Borghese? He wouldn't have had a chance; if he'd persisted he might have been charged with theft, war looting, who knows what. There was a lot of that going around at the time.
'You're too young to know anything about that, but Italy after the war was chaotic. Thousands of works of art wandering around the country, and fakes being produced at an extraordinary rate, exploiting the situation. No one knew where anything came from, or where anything had gone. The authorities were doing their best to restore order, and occasionally they were a little harsh, perhaps. Anyway, that was the situation, and Hector got caught in it. I advised him to forget it, and eventually he did. Frankly, he got off very lightly in the circumstances. I'm not sure the buyer was very happy, though. I'm not entirely certain that Hector ever gave him his deposit back.'
'This was the Swiss man?'
'He lived in Switzerland.'
'You can't remember his name, can you?' Flavia asked, for form's sake.
Borunna looked a bit bemused. 'No, not really. Foreign name. Morgan? Morland?'
She looked at him, light dawning. 'Moresby?' she suggested hopefully.
'Could have been. It was a long time ago, you know.'
Borunna's wife came into the room again, and beamed at Flavia happily as she cleared away the cups. Flavia reminded her, she said, of their own daughter when she was young. Borunna agreed there was a resemblance.
'And you have no idea at all of the movements of this bust over the past few decades.'
Borunna looked fondly at his wife as she bustled about, then shook his head. 'I know it went into the Borghese. Hector was certain it never came out again. I'm afraid that's all the help I feel able to offer you.'
She finished jotting down her notes, then stood up and shook them both by the hand. Come again, they said. Stay for lunch. Perhaps Alceo will persuade you to take one of his statues off our hands next time.
With a last regretful look at the carvings all over the room, Flavia promised she'd be back, as soon as she had a free moment. Meanwhile, she had a plane to catch.
Chapter Nine
Argyll, still confined to his bed, was occupying himself by doing battle with the nurses, having nice shiny new plaster poured over his leg, and plotting how soon he could discharge himself. Not that he was one of these get- up-and-go types who twitch with frustration if they are immobilised; on the contrary, the idea of a few days in bed normally delighted him. But a few days in a non-smoking hospital was a bit much to bear. Morelli had kindly left some cigarettes behind him, but these were rapidly removed by the nurses, all of whom seemed to be equipped with smoke-detectors, and the symptoms of withdrawal were building up.
On top of that, Argyll reflected, there was a lot going on out there: di Souza was dead, Moresby was dead, someone had tried to murder him, Flavia was on the way. He had heard that she had been ringing Morelli every few hours with anxious enquiries after his health and reports of her alarm did more to make him feel better than all the somewhat brusque ministrations of the nurses, whose bedpan technique was another very good reason for getting out of hospital as soon as possible.
While Argyll spent the day hopping around evading the enema merchants, Flavia was wedged in great discomfort in seat 44H of an overstuffed 747 heading west.
She liked her job; she liked the relative smallness of the department, the collegiality which this bred. But the department's status as a sort of investigatory annexe had its problems. And the main one, as far as she was concerned at the moment, was the size of the budget. In particular the inability of expense allowances to allow personnel to travel anything other than steerage class on aircraft.
But the flight had some interesting moments. The secret service file on Moresby had come through and, contrary to all regulations, she'd photocopied it before sending it back. As she read, her contempt for the
