The Bernini Bust
piece of museum cutlery in their pockets; that Jack Moresby drank too much, that David Barclay, the lawyer, and Hector di Souza, the art dealer, both spent extraordinary amounts of time looking at themselves in mirrors and that Jonathan Argyll was a bit lost and ill at ease most of the evening. They also noted that Mrs. Moresby arrived with David Barclay, and didn’t speak to her husband once all the time he was there. Finally, they saw with disappointment that the pate sandwiches were singularly popular, although no one was seen secreting one about his person for unorthodox purposes.
    They also watched Moresby talking to di Souza and leaving the party with the Spaniard at 9:07 p.m. and later on saw Barclay be summoned to the phone, talk into it, and walk out of the building at 9:58 p.m. The body was discovered moments later and Barclay came back to phone the police at 10:06 p.m. After that, everyone hung around and waited, with the exception of Langton who could be seen on the phone at 10:11 and again at 10:16. Simple enough, he explained later, he was phoning Jack Moresby and then Anne Moresby to inform them of the disaster. He was, it seemed, the only person who even thought of telling them. All the rest were too busy panicking.
    Apart from that, they came up with a list of people who, at various stages of the evening, conversed with Moresby. Surprisingly enough there weren’t all that many; almost everybody greeted him in one way or another, but he responded in such a frigid manner that few had sufficient courage to pursue the dialogue further. The party may have been thrown in his honour, but Arthur Moresby did not look as though he was in a party mood.
    To put it another way, dozens of expert man-hours and all the techniques of advanced social-scientific investigation devoted to analysing the tape produced no useful information whatsoever. And Morelli had known they wouldn’t, all along.
    Jonathan Argyll tossed and turned in bed, his mind churning over recent events with a degree of manic obsessiveness. He had sold a Titian; he hadn’t been paid for it; he had to go back to London; the prospective buyer had just been murdered; he wasn’t going to get paid for it; he was going to lose his job; he had nearly been run over; the cheeseburger was in violent dispute with his stomach; Hector di Souza was the likely candidate for gun-toting connoisseur; the Spaniard had smuggled a bust out of Italy.
    And he had no one to talk it all over with. A brief conversation with di Souza himself might have cleared his mind enough for him to get some sleep, but the infernal man was nowhere around. Not in his room, anyway; policemen there were aplenty, but Hector himself had, apparently, come back to the hotel, then left again shortly after someone phoned him. The key was with the reception. Maybe he would turn up for breakfast, unless the police got to him first, in which case he might be otherwise engaged.
    Argyll rolled over in the bed for the thirtieth time, and looked at the clock with eyes that were not in the slightest bit weary, try as he might to convince them that they needed a rest.
    Four in the morning. Which meant that he’d been lying in bed for three and a half hours, eyes open, brain rotating.
    He switched on the light, hesitated and finally took the decision he’d been wanting to take ever since he got back to his hotel room. He had to talk to someone. He picked up the phone.
    Chapter Four
    While Argyll was wide awake in the middle of the night, Flavia di Stefano, sitting at her desk in the Rome headquarters of the Italian art squad, was half asleep in the middle of the day. Like him, however, she was in a disturbed frame of mind, and her colleagues were beginning to notice.
    Ordinarily she was an exceptionally good-humoured person to have around. Cheerful, charming, relaxed. A perfect colleague to spend an hour chattering to over a cup of espresso when the work load flagged a bit. In the four years she’d worked

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