Page 75 of Marble Hall Murders

‘But Robert had absolutely no reason to kill Lady Chalfont, Mr Pünd. He didn’t inherit very much money from her, and he didn’t need it anyway. That’s the trouble. None of them did!’

Pünd and Fraser did not speak again until they reached the hotel. The taxi pulled in, Fraser paid and a moment later they were walking to the main entrance, a small crowd of porters fussing around them. At the same time, Pünd noticed a silver Peugeot parked to one side. A short, stocky man in a navy blue worsted suit got out and came towards them. It was clear that this was no guest returning to his room. The man had been waiting for Pünd to arrive and wasted no time cornering him.

‘Excuse me, sir. Am I right in thinking that I’m speaking to Atticus Pünd, the famous detective?’ He was American, with a round face, thinning hair and glasses. There was something about him that reminded Fraser of a schoolteacher or perhaps a small-town lawyer. He felt out of place in the glamour of the Côte d’Azur.

Pünd was flattered by the description. ‘I am.’

‘I hope you’ll forgive me interrupting you, sir, but Iwonder if I could speak to you confidentially and on a matter of urgency.’

‘I do not think we have met.’

‘My name’s Harlan Scott.’ The man took a business card out of his top pocket and handed it to Fraser. ‘I’ve seen you quite a few times in the last few days. You’ve been in and out of the Chateau Belmar, and this morning you were at the Werner-Waysmith Gallery in Nice.’

‘You have been watching us?’ Pünd asked. He sounded surprised rather than offended.

‘Not you, sir. No. I recognised you the moment I saw you, and I can guess why you’re here. I take it you’re investigating the death of Lady Chalfont?’

‘I am helping the police.’ Pünd was non-committal.

‘I’m hoping you can help me, too. In fact, maybe we can help each other. I’m also a detective of sorts – although my work is a world apart from yours. Even so, it may be that we’re both investigating the same thing. Can we talk?’

‘Of course, Mr Scott. It is a beautiful day. We can, if you like, have tea – or coffee, if you would prefer – on the terrace behind the hotel.’ Pünd looked around him, at the porters and a group of departing guests. ‘The tables are far apart and we are less likely to be overheard.’

‘That would be great, Mr Pünd.’

Without speaking any further, they walked into the hotel and continued through the main lounge into the gardens, where there were several guests already enjoying afternoon tea. They had no trouble finding a table set apart from the others, and after Fraser had placed an order with a waiter, Pünd sat back and waited for Scott to begin.

‘I described myself as a detective,’ Scott said. ‘But that’s not quite accurate. In fact, I began life as an art historian. I studied at Yale and ended up at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and I would be there now except that ten years ago I was asked to join the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives programme, which was being run by the army. I was one of three hundred and forty-five volunteers who came to be known as “the Monuments Men”, although there were plenty of women among us too. Our job was to help track down and return around five million artworks stolen by German forces during the war. These included paintings, sculptures, jewellery and rare books, the great majority of them seized from the Jewish families who were then wiped out.’ He paused. ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’

‘Not at all.’ Pünd was intrigued. He watched as the American took out not a cigarette but a small cigar, which he lit, sending clouds of smoke into the air.

‘The MFAA was disbanded a few years after the war,’ Scott went on. ‘But you could say I got hooked on the work and I decided to stay on in a private capacity. There are still many thousands of artworks that have never been recovered and I’m now employed by some of the survivors of the families who still hope to get their property back. I’d like to give you a bit of background to what I do, Mr Pünd, if you’ll allow me. I’m sure you’re a busy man, but I believe it will prove relevant to you and, in particular, to the death of Lady Margaret Chalfont.’

‘Please, continue.’

‘Very well.’ He drew on the cigar. ‘As early as 1938, Hitler had his eye on the art collections of Europe and hada determination to make them his own. His main reason was ideological. Take a nation’s art and you take its soul – something Napoleon had already figured out. The Louvre is full of German treasures the emperor snatched in his time, and now it was Hitler’s turn. He had plans for a gigantic art gallery he was going to build in Linz, in Austria – the Führermuseum. At the same time, he was going to destroy all the art he considered degenerate – cubism, Dadaism and pretty much anything that was too modern. He said it was the duty of the state “to prevent a nation falling under the influence of spiritual madness”. He wrote that inMein Kampf.

‘But there were other Nazi leaders who had less high-minded reasons for getting their hands on all the loot they could grab. Göring had a hunting lodge called Carinhall, north of Berlin, and he filled it with works by Matisse, Renoir, Dürer, Holbein, Cranach and so on. By the end of the war, he had over a thousand pieces of art, worth around two hundred million dollars. Goebbels had a taste for German expressionism. Von Ribbentrop snapped up works by Manet. And many other high-up Nazis were playing the same game.

‘There were no fewer than three government branches involved in the confiscation of art. One was theKunstschutz, controlled by the Wehrmacht. Then there was the German embassy in Paris, led by a guy called Otto Abetz, who cheerfully went round the country plundering anything he could get his hands on in the name of war reparations. But the most active and the most avaricious organisation was the ERR – or, to give it its full name, theEinsatzstabReichsleiter Rosenberg für die Besetzten Gebiete, which was secretly controlled by Göring. And once the Nazis had decreed that the Jews shouldn’t be allowed to own anything with cultural significance, it was open house. A hundred thousand pieces of art were stolen in France alone.’

The coffee had arrived while he was talking. He stopped for a moment and added three sugar cubes to his cup, then stirred it as he continued.

‘What I’m talking about here is a free-for-all,’ Scott said. ‘Everyone was at it. There were huge profits to be made from buying and selling art – even so-called degenerate art, which the Nazis were happy to turn into cash. Museums in Düsseldorf, Essen and other German cities seized the moment to enlarge their collections. Supposedly respectable French art buyers and dealers came rushing in like sharks. Remember, the Nazis had banned the exportation of paper money, and there was very little to buy in Europe anyway. It wasn’t as if anyone was going shopping for new cars or clothes. Suddenly art was everything. Buy it, sell it, barter with it, hoard it, enjoy it. And when the war was over … if you had it, you were made.

‘And then there was Switzerland …’

Scott’s cigar glowed red, a single devil’s eye. He exhaled and smoke wreathed itself around his head.

‘Nazi art dealers loved the Swiss. The Swiss had more money than they knew what to do with. They were neutral, which gave them complete freedom of movement. And they were, to all intents and purposes, amoral. All their biggest galleries worked hand in hand with the Nazis. The Fischer Gallery in Lucerne, the Neupert Gallery in Zurich,the Dreyfus Gallery – they turned themselves into an open market for stolen works.

‘And there was another, smaller gallery based in Geneva that had a very profitable relationship with Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, no less, and it was run by a man called Erich Werner – and that name may be familiar to you.’

‘Werner-Waysmith!’ Fraser exclaimed.

‘The very same,’ Scott said. ‘Werner went into partnership with an American dealer called Elmer Waysmith, and although he’s now retired, Elmer is still active on his behalf with galleries here and in London selling one piece after another stolen during the war and kept quietly locked up ever since.’

He stopped and drank some of his coffee. A waiter was serving tiny sandwiches cut into triangles to a family at the next table. It was hard to reconcile the sun-filled terrace and the elegant façade of the hotel with the dark story being told.

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