Death of an Elgin Marble by David Dickinson Page A

of the people in the museum. As far as they know, the Caryatid standing on her plinth is the real one. Nobody’s told them or the public who come to see her anything different. Now consider this. If you are an academic, or a scholarly gentleman like the curators at the museum, there are learned articles you can look up about the Parthenon and the Elgin Marbles. I think they produce a catalogue of their sculpture holdings every few years, with considerably more footnotes than pages of text. That’s fine if you’ve got a university degree and a pair of thick glasses but they’re no earthly use to anybody else.’
    Powerscourt smiled. He thought he could see where the Inspector was heading.
    ‘Now then, my lord, who do you think are the most important clients of the British Museum? Not the middle-aged and the old, surely. Not even the younger people who flock there at the weekends. The most valuable visitors are the youngest, the ones who will be able to go back over and over again. There are children peering at the Parthenon frieze and the lapiths and the centaurs and the Caryatid all the time, depending on their teachers to be told what is going on.’
    Inspector Kingsley paused and took another sip of his Earl Grey. Neither Powerscourt nor Lady Lucy would have dared to interrupt him now.
    ‘I’m sure you can see what I am driving at,’ he went on. ‘The museum should produce a little pamphlet, a small book with lots of illustrations, aimed at eight- to ten-year-olds, that could be on sale for a few pence or given away free to young visitors. It would be a valuable contribution to the wider understanding of ancient Greece, surely.’
    ‘Do you have an author in mind,’ asked Powerscourt in the most innocent voice he could muster.
    ‘Why, yes. I would write it.’ The Inspector blushed a deep shade of red as he said this. ‘For the real reason behind such a plan is that it would give us the perfect excuse to talk to people all over the museum. The porters would have to tell us how the Caryatid was cleaned and so on, how she was moved from place to place, the others would have to tell us how she fitted into the ancient world. But what a lot of questions we could ask! Anyway, I’ve always wanted to write something more interesting than police reports. This could be a start.’
    ‘Splendid,’ said Powerscourt, ‘splendid. I’ll speak to Ragg in the morning. If he agrees, you could start work on the project immediately.’
    Artemis Metaxas had never thought she would end up as a madame, a procurer of young girls for her clients. Certainly not at the tender age of twenty-seven. Her task, quite separate from her teaching duties at the school attached to the Greek Orthodox Cathedral of Santa Sophia in Notting Hill’s Moscow Road, came round once a month. She was to collect a group of respectable young Greek girls under the age of twenty in London, and bring them on a Saturday afternoon to a secret address in the Home Counties. Half a dozen or so would suffice, but eight would be better. They were to be returned to the capital on the Sunday afternoon under the same conditions of extreme secrecy, darkened windows in the special train, closed carriages to bring them from the station to the remote garden door of the house in the country. Quite what happened to them in their secluded stay, Artemis never knew. She was put up in a cottage on the estate some distance from the house and not allowed to leave. She only met her charges again on the return journey. She knew the girls were well paid. She knew they were sworn to silence with some ancient oath of terrible power. And, whatever went on, Artemis was sure that what took place was not too dreadful. A number of the girls volunteered to go back over and over again.
    Johnny Fitzgerald found only one regular at the Black Swan near the art dealers of Old Bond Street who remembered him from earlier times. This was a very old gentleman, universally known as Red Fred, widely