The Immaculate Deception
Clever and witty art history-mystery featuring Jonathon Argyll, scholar and sleuth, from the bestselling author of ‘An Instance of the Fingerpost’.How do you resolve a scandalous kidnapping without paying the ransom or attracting any attention? It's not a question Flavia di Stefano, acting head of the Italian Art Theft Squad, would normally need to answer. Unfortunately, the Italian prime minister is asking it.As Flavia begins a desperate search for the Claude Lorrain landscape, snatched while on loan from the Louvre, her husband embarks on a rather more leisurely quest. Jonathan Argyll is keen to discover the provenance of a small Renaissance painting, titled The Immaculate Conception, as a favour to its owner. His enthusiasm wanes when the investigation brings him into unexpected danger. There's no turning back, though, and soon husband and wife are uncovering shocking secrets that will bring them into the path of some very dangerous enemies indeed…
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Iain Pears
The Immaculate Deception
To Michael and Alexander
Contents
One morning, a fine May morning in Rome, when the sun was beaming through the clouds of carbon monoxide and dust and giving a soft, fresh feel to the day, Flavia di Stefano sat immobile in a vast traffic jam which began in the Piazza del Popolo and ended somewhere near the Piazza Venezia. Many people, at least those with a different personality to her own, would have been unperturbed by this common occurrence, and would instead have contemplated their surroundings with something approaching patient smugness. Not many, after all, can call on a Mercedes, complete with chauffeur and obligatory tinted windows, to ferry them around town at the taxpayers’ expense. Fewer still at such a young age are the head (if only the acting head) of one of the more reputable departments in the Italian police force, complete with its own budget, personnel and expense accounts.
And virtually none of the small number of departmental potentates use their splendid forms of transport to go to unspecified meetings, called late the previous evening, at the Palazzo Chigi, the official residence of the Italian prime minister.
That, of course, was the problem, and the reason behind Flavia’s insensitivity to the early morning sunshine, and her disdain for all living things. For a start, her collar itched monstrously, and was a permanent, nagging reminder of her own inexperience and desire to create the right impression.
Instead of sitting quietly that morning eating toast and drinking coffee, she had run around showering, choosing clothes and, worst of all, applying copious amounts of make-up. Then having a fit of defiance and taking it all off again, then weakening with nerves and putting it all back on. Worse still, she stood peering out of the window into the little piazza below, anxiously waiting for the car to arrive, checking and re-checking the contents of her handbag. She had nightmare visions of grabbing her coat and running through the streets of Rome to get there. Breaking a heel on a cobblestone. Arriving out of breath, her hair in a mess. Creating entirely the wrong impression. Career destroyed, over in a moment, just because some damn fool driver didn’t turn up. And, what was more, she felt ill; stomach in a turmoil, the rest of her queasy. Bug. Flu, probably. Nervousness. Something like that. It was going to be one of those days. She knew it.
‘Flavia. Do stop jiggling about like that. You’re making me nervous.’ Jonathan Argyll, her husband of four weeks’ standing, and boyfriend-cum-flatmate of near ten years, sat at the kitchen table trying to read the newspaper. ‘It’s only the prime minister, you know.’
Flavia turned round to scowl at him.
‘I’m not being facetious,’ he went on calmly as he reached for the marmalade before she could tell him what she thought of his sense of whimsy. ‘You know as well as I do that bad news is always handed out by underlings. Besides, you haven’t done anything wrong recently, have you? Not misplaced a Raphael, dropped a Michelangelo, shot a senator, or anything?’
Another scowl.
‘There you are, then. Nothing to worry about,’ he continued, getting up to give her a quick pat to indicate that he sympathized. ‘Even less now that your car has arrived.’
He pointed downwards, waved cheerfully at the driver, whom he vaguely recognized, and even more cheerfully at Flavia, as she rushed for her bag and coat.
‘Calm. Remember?’ he said as she opened the door.
‘I remember.’
Calm, she repeated to herself thirty minutes later as she looked at her watch one more time. Stuck in a traffic jam, half a mile to go, five minutes late. At least it cut the unaccustomed car sickness. Calm, she thought.
It was Bottando’s fault, really, she reflected. Her erstwhile boss, now gone on to greater things, was one of those who liked formulating universal laws about life, which he delivered as aphorisms that came back to haunt you at inappropriate moments.
‘Politicians,’ he said once over a glass of brandy following a long lunch. ‘Politicians can ruin your day. Ministers, on the other hand, can ruin your week.’
‘And prime ministers?’ Flavia had asked.
‘Prime ministers? Oh, they can ruin your life.’
His little bon mot, for some reason, didn’t seem quite so urbane at the moment. She considered leaning forward to see if the driver could go any faster, but abandoned the idea. Another one of Bottando’s rules. Never let anyone see you are nervous; especially not drivers, who are notoriously the biggest gossips on the planet. So, like a condemned man who finally realizes his fate is inevitable, she gave a big sigh, leant back and gave up fretting. Immediately, the lights changed, the cars began moving and the palazzo came into sight. She was waved through the vast wooden gates into the courtyard with virtually no delay, and within minutes was being ushered into an ante-room to an ante-room to the office where Antonio Sabauda, prime minister now for a whole nine months, held his audiences. Fourteen minutes late.
