A Family Affair by Michael Innes Read Free Book Online

his discovery copied before parting with it. In a purely private apartment (the nobleman’s bathroom, the confidential person confided to Mr Braunkopf with the ghost of a conspiratorial smile) he judged that a modest replica would look uncommonly well. For this purpose the painting must be removed again for a brief space. But within a week it would be back in Mr Braunkopf’s keeping.
    This too had come about – or had appeared to. And when the confidential person reappeared with the painting he had a most interesting communication to make. The state of his principal’s affairs was such, he now confided to Mr Braunkopf, that very considerable expedition was to be desired in the further stages of the operation. The nobleman – not to put too fine a point on it – was damned hard up. Mr Braunkopf was distressed by this news. Being (as he explained to a senior and poker-faced Inspector at Scotland Yard) one eminently well affected to the Crown and Constitution of these islands, it harrowed him to hear of any vulgar pecuniary embarrassment befalling an ornament of the Sovereign’s Court. So distressed was he, that he had an immediate suggestion to make. He was prepared to enter the affair no longer as an agent but as a principal. He was prepared to make an immediate offer for the Giulio himself. Whereupon the confidential person, while expressing proper astonishment and gratification at this outstanding posture of magnanimity on Mr Braunkopf’s part, did confess that his client had borne some such possibility in mind – and that as a consequence he, the confidential person, was empowered to close the deal there and then, cash down. And Mr Braunkopf would understand that by cash what was meant was cash . The agreed price would do in ten-pound notes. But five-pound notes would be even better.
    Mr Braunkopf was, of course, well accustomed to transactions in which the peculiar needs of the other party – often, he believed, the greater ease which such a system afforded to the unobtrusive handing over of substantial sums to charity – entailed dispositions of this kind. After what might be called a decent ritual haggle, he repaired together with the confidential person to his bank in the next street, withdrew the required sum in notes, handed it over there and then, and returned to the Da Vinci Gallery with a comfortable sense of the day’s work well done. He was not at all sure of what he might eventually obtain for an obscene painting – untraced through nearly four hundred years – by Giulio Romano. It might not prove to be astronomical, but it would certainly very much exceed the mere £12,000 which he had just parted with. So after putting in a quiet half-hour selling another colour lithograph (eighteen guineas, plus five guineas for mount and frame), he repaired to his inner sanctum to refresh himself with the contemplation of his new acquisition, It was remarkable, he thought, how perfectly the pigments had been preserved beneath their now departed layers of varnish. It was very remarkable, indeed… Mr Braunkopf (who was a frank and unaffected man) admitted to the Inspector that his first realization of the truth had actually been occasioned by hearing himself give a howl of rage. The higher connoisseurship, after all, is a highly intuitive affair. At one moment Mr Braunkopf had been modestly pleased with himself; in the very next moment he knew; a moment after that again, he had turned the picture round, and was looking at the back of a perfectly fresh and innocent canvas on its stretcher. It wasn’t even a forgery that had passed into his possession. It was an honest-to-God copy of an original which – he instantly realized – he had seen once but might never see again.
     
    There were several more pages of the Braunkopf file. But, having read so far, Appleby knew that he had in effect read all. Criminal Investigation would prove to have shed no light on this ingenious fraud. He flicked back a page, and