‘I run this ship, and the responsibility is mine,’ said Peregrine Slade quietly.
‘I think we all know that, Perry. Before we reach any conclusions, would you be kind enough to tell us exactly how this happened?’
Slade took a deep breath. He knew he was speaking for his professional life. A scapegoat would be needed. He did not intend that it should be he. But he also knew that to be shrill or to whinge would have the worst possible effect.
‘I am sure you all know that we offer the public a free valuation service. Always have. A tradition of the House of Darcy. Some agree with this, others not. Whatever one’s view the truth still is that it is immensely time-consuming.
‘Occasionally a real treasure is indeed brought in by a member of the public, identified, authenticated and sold for a large sum, with of course a substantial fee for us. But the vast majority of the stuff brought in off the street is junk.
‘The sheer burden of work, and especially in the heavy pre-Christmas period, means that what appears to be the worst of the junk has to be seen by junior valuers, lacking the experience of thirty or more years in the business. That is what happened here.
‘The painting in question was handed in by a complete nonentity. He had no idea what it was or he would never have brought it in. It was in a simply appalling state, so dirty the painting beneath the grime was almost invisible. And it was seen by a very junior valuer. Here is his report.’
He distributed copies of the valuation at £6,000 to £8,000 that he had himself prepared, pecking away at the computer keys in the dead of night. The nine board members read it glumly.
‘As you will see Mr Benny Evans thought it might be Florentine, circa 1550, by an unknown artist and of modest value. Alas, he was wrong. It was Sienese, circa 1450 and by a Master. Under all that grime he just did not spot it. That said, his examination was clearly rather cursory, even slipshod. However, it is I who now offer my position here to the board.’
There were two who pointedly stared at the ceiling but six shook their heads.
‘Not accepted, Perry. As for the slipshod young man, perhaps we should leave him to you.’
Peregrine Slade summoned Benny Evans to his office that afternoon. He did not offer the young man a seat. His tone was contemptuous.
‘I don’t have to explain to you the nature or extent of the disaster that this affair has visited on the House of Darcy. The papers have had a field day. They have said it all.’
‘But I don’t understand,’ protested Benny Evans. ‘You must have got my report. I put it under your door. All that about my suspicion it might really be a Sassetta. About having it cleaned and restored. About consulting Professor Colenso. It was all there.’
Slade icily proffered him a single sheet of headed paper. Evans read it without comprehension.
‘But this isn’t mine. This is not what I wrote.’
Slade was white with rage.
‘Evans, your carelessness is bad enough. But I will not tolerate mendacity. No-one who attempts to offer me such pathetic lies has any place in this house. You will find Miss Bates outside. She has your cards. Clear your desk and be gone within an hour. That is all.’
Benny tried to have a word with Sebastian Mortlake. The kindly director listened for a few moments, then led the way to Deirdre’s desk.
‘Pray punch up the report and evaluation file for the twenty-third and twenty-fourth of December,’ he said. The machine obediently regurgitated a sheaf of reports, one for Item D 1601. It was what Benny Evans had just seen in Slade’s office.
‘Computers don’t lie,’ said Mortlake. ‘On your way, lad.’
Benny Evans may have had no A levels and little knowledge of computers, but he was no fool. By the time he hit the pavement he knew exactly what had been done and how. He also knew every man’s hand was against him and that he would never work again in the art world.
But he still had one friend. Suzie Day was a cockney, not a classic beauty, and with her punky hairstyle and green fingernails there were some who would not have appreciated her. But Benny did, and she him. She listened for the hour it took him to explain exactly what had been done and how.
What she knew about fine art could have filled an entire postage stamp, but she had another talent, the precise opposite of Benny. She was a child of the computer generation. If you drop a new-hatched duckling into water, it will swim. Suzie had dipped her first forefinger into cyberspace with computer games at school and found her natural environment. She was twenty-two and could do with a computer what Yehudi Menuhin used to do with a Stradivarius.
She worked for a small firm run by a former and reformed computer hacker. They designed security systems to protect computers from illegal entry. Just as the best way to get through a padlock is to ask a locksmith, the best way to break into a computer is to ask someone who designs the defences. Suzie Day designed those defences.
‘So what do you want to do, Benny?’ she asked when he was finished.
He might have come from a back street in Bootle, but his great-granddad had been one of the Bootle Lads who went to the recruiting booths in 1914. They ended up in the Lancashire Fusiliers and in Flanders they fought like tigers and died like heroes. Of the 200 who went, Benny’s great-grandpa and six came back. Old genes die hard.
‘I want that booger Slade. I want him dead in the water,’ he said.
It was that night in bed that Suzie had an idea.
‘There must be someone else out there as angry as you are.’
‘Who?’
‘The original owner.’
Benny sat up.
‘You’re right, lass. He’s been swindled out of two million quid. And he may not even know it.’
‘Who was he?’
Benny thought hard.
‘I saw the hand-in ticket briefly. Someone called T. Gore.’
‘Phone number?’
‘None listed.’
‘Address?’
‘I didn’t memorize it.’
‘Where would it be logged?’
‘In the databank. Vendor Records or Storage lists.’
‘Do you have access? A personal password?’
‘Nope.’
‘Who would?’
‘Any senior executive, I suppose.’
‘Mortlake?’
‘Of course. Seb would be able to enquire for anything he wanted.’
‘Get up, Benny luv. We’re going to work.’
It took her ten minutes to log on to the Darcy database. She posed her query. The database asked for an identification of the enquirer.
Suzie had a list beside her. How exactly did Sebastian Mortlake identify himself? Did he use just ‘S’ or ‘Seb’ or the full Sebastian? Lower case, upper case or a mix? Was there a dot or a hyphen between first and second names, or nothing at all?
Each time Suzie tried a different format and got it wrong the Darcy database rejected her. She prayed there was not a maximum limit to the erroneous formats, followed by an alarm at Darcy that would close down the contact. Fortunately the IT expert who had set up the system had presumed that some of Darcy’s art freaks were so naïve about computers that they would possibly forget their own codes. The link stayed open.
At the fifteenth try she got it. The director of Old Masters was seb-mort: all lower case, first name shortened, hyphen, surname cut in half. The Darcy database accepted that seb-mort was on the line and asked for his password.
‘Most people use something close and dear to themselves,’ she had told Benny. ‘Wife’s name, pet dog’s name, borough where they live, a famous figure they admire.’
‘Seb is a bachelor, lives alone, no pets. He just lives for the world of pictures.’
They started with the Italian Renaissance, then the Dutch/Flemish school, then the Spanish Masters. At ten past four on a sunny spring morning Suzie got it. Mortlake was seb-mort and GOYA. The database asked what she wanted. She asked for the owner of storage item D 1601.
The comput
er in Knightsbridge scoured its memory and told her. Mr T. Gore, of 32 Cheshunt Gardens, White City, W.12. She obliterated all trace of her incursion and closed down. Then they grabbed three hours’ sleep.
It was only a mile and they puttered through the waking city on Benny’s scooter. The address turned out to be a shabby block of bedsitters and Mr T. Gore lived in the basement. He came to the door in his old Spanish bathrobe.
‘Mr Gore?’
‘I am he, sir.’
‘My name’s Benny Evans. This is my friend Suzie Day. I am . . . was with the House of Darcy. Are you the gentleman who offered a small old painting in a chipped gilt frame for sale about November last?’
Trumpington Gore looked worried.
‘Indeed I did. Nothing wrong I hope? It was sold at auction in January. Not a fake, I hope?’
‘Oh no, Mr Gore, it wasn’t a fake. Just the reverse. It’s chilly out here. Could we come in? I have something to show you.’
The hospitable Trumpy offered them both a share of his morning pot of tea. Since his windfall of more than £5,000 three months earlier he no longer needed to use the tea bags twice. While the two youngsters drank he read the page-long spread in the Sunday Times that Benny had brought with him. His jaw dropped.
‘Is that it?’ He pointed at the full-colour illustration of the Sassetta.
‘That’s it, Mr Gore. Your old painting in its brown hessian wrapping. Cleaned, restored and authenticated as a genuine and very rare Sassetta. Siena, about 1425.’
‘Two million pounds,’ breathed the actor. ‘Oh, calamity. If only I had known. If only Darcy had known.’
‘They did,’ said Benny. ‘At least they suspected. I was the valuer. I warned them. You have been swindled and I have been destroyed. By a man who cut a private deal with this art gallery.’
He began at the beginning, with a last group of hand-ins and a director impatient to get away for his Christmas break. When he had finished the actor stared at the picture of the Annunciation in the paper.
‘Two million pounds,’ he said quietly. ‘I could have lived comfortably for the rest of my life on that. Surely, the law—’
‘Is an ass,’ said Suzie. ‘The record will show that Darcy made a mistake, an error of judgement, and that Fanshawe acted on a hunch and came up a winner. It happens. There is no recourse in law.’
‘Tell me something,’ said Benny. ‘On the form you filled out, it said as profession “actor”. Is that true? Are you an actor?’
‘Thirty-five years in the profession, young man. Appearances in almost a hundred films.’
He forbore to mention that most of these appearances had lasted a few seconds.
‘I mean, can you pass as someone else and get away with it?’
Trumpington Gore drew himself up in his chair with all the dignity a tatty old bathrobe would allow.
‘I, sir, can pass for anything, in any company, and get away with the impersonation. It is what I do. Actually, it is all that I do.’
‘You see,’ said Benny, ‘I have an idea.’
He spoke for twenty minutes. When he had done the impoverished actor pondered his decision.
‘Revenge,’ he murmured. ‘A dish best eaten cold. Yes, the trail has gone cold. Slade will not be expecting us. I think, young Benny, if I may, that you have just gained a partner.’
He held out his hand. Benny took it. Suzie placed her own over theirs.
‘One for all, and all for one.’
‘Aye, I like it,’ said Benny.
‘D’Artagnan,’ said Trumpy.
Benny shook his head. ‘I were never much good at the French Impressionists.’
The rest of April was very busy. They pooled their funds and completed the research. Benny needed to invade the private correspondence file of Peregrine Slade, having access to all his private e-mails.
Suzie elected to go into the Darcy system via Slade’s private secretary, Miss Priscilla Bates. Her e-identity was not long in coming. She was P-Bates as far as the database was concerned. The problem was her password.
MAY
Trumpington Gore followed Miss Bates like a shadow, in such a variety of disguises that she suspected not a thing. Having secured her private address in the borough of Cheam, it was Benny who by night raided her garbage bin and took away a binliner full of rubbish. It yielded little.
Miss Bates lived a life of blameless rectitude. She was a spinster and lived alone. Her small flat was as neat as a pin. She commuted to work on the train and underground to Knightsbridge and walked the last 500 yards. She took the Guardian newspaper – they tried ‘Guardian’ as a password, but it did not work – and she holidayed with a sister and brother-in-law at Frinton.
They discovered this from an old letter in the trash, but ‘Frinton’ did not work either. They also found six empty tins of Whiskas.
‘She has a cat,’ said Suzie. ‘What’s its name?’
Trumpy sighed. It meant another trip to Cheam. He appeared on the Saturday, knowing she would be in, and masqueraded as a salesman of pet paraphernalia. To his joy she was interested in the scratching post for bored cats, who otherwise shredded the loose covers.
He stood in the doorway, false buck teeth and heavy glasses, and a piebald tom emerged from the sitting room behind her to stare contemptuously at him. He enthused over the beauty of the animal, calling it ‘puss’.
‘Come here, Alamein, come to Mummy,’ she called.
Alamein: a battle in North Africa in 1942 where her father had died when she was a baby of one. In Ladbroke Grove Suzie logged on again and punched it up. For the Darcy database Miss Priscilla Bates, private and confidential secretary to Peregrine Slade, was P-Bates ALAMEIN. And she had right of access to all her employer’s private e-mails. Pretending to be her, Suzie downloaded a hundred personal letters.
It was a week before Benny made his selection.
‘He has a mate on the Arts pages of the Observer. There are three letters here from the same man, Charlie Dawson. Occasionally Dawson hears of things going on at Christie’s or Sotheby’s and tips Slade off. He’ll do.’
Using her cyber-skills, Suzie created a letter from Charlie Dawson to Peregrine Slade for later use. Benny was meanwhile studying the catalogue for the next major Darcy sale. Dutch and Flemish Old Masters, scheduled for 20 May. After a while he tapped the illustration of one small oil on paper, laid on canvas.
‘That one,’ he said. Suzie and Trumpy peered at it. A still life showing a bowl of raspberries: a blue and white Delft bowl and beside it several seashells. An odd composition. The bowl stood on the edge of an old and chipped table.
‘Who the hell is Coorte?’ asked Trumpington Gore. ‘I’ve never heard of him.’
‘Not many have, Trumpy. Quite minor. School of Middleburg, Holland, mid-seventeenth century. But a tiny life’s work, barely more than sixty pictures worldwide. So . . . rare. Always painted the same sort of stuff. Strawberries, raspberries, asparagus and sometimes seashells. Boring as hell, but he has his fans. Look at the estimated price.’
The catalogue suggested £120,000 to £150,000.
‘So why Coorte?’ asked Suzie.
‘Because there is a Dutch lager billionaire who is obsessed by Coorte. Been trying for years to corner the world market in his fellow countryman. He won’t be there, but his representative will. Holding a blank cheque.’
On the morning of 20 May the House of Darcy was humming with activity. Peregrine Slade was again taking the sale personally and had gone down to the auction hall when Miss Bates noted that he had incoming mail. It was nine a.m. The sale started at ten. She read the message for her employer and, suspecting from what it said that it might be important, she used the laser-jet printer to run off a copy. With this in her hand she locked the office and scurried after him.
Slade was checking the position and function of his microphone on the podium when she found him. He thanked her and scanned the letter. It was from Charlie Dawson and could be exceedingly helpful.
‘Dear Perry, I heard over dinner last night that a certain Martin Getty blew into town. He is staying with friends and hopes to remain incognito.
‘You probably know he has one of the leading thoroughbred studs in Kentucky. He also has a very private, never seen, art collection. It occurred to me he might be in town for that reason.
‘Cheers, Charlie.’
Slade stuffed the letter in his pocket and walked outside to the table of paddle girls in the lobby. Unless a bidder at one of these auctions is well known to the auctioneer, it is customary to fill out a form as an intending bidder and be issued with a ‘paddle’, a plastic card with a number on it.
This can be raised to signify a bid, but more importantly to identify a winning bidder, who will hold it up for the clerk to note the number. That gives name, address and bank.
It was still early, nine fifteen. There were only ten filled-out forms so far, and none mentioned a Martin Getty. But the name alone was enough to set Slade’s tastebuds watering. He had a quick word with the three lovely girls behind the table and went back to the hall.
It was a quarter to ten when a shortish man, not particularly smart, approached the table.
‘You would like to bid, sir?’ said one of the girls, drawing a form towards her.
‘I surely would, young lady.’
The Southern drawl was lazy as molasses.
‘Name, sir?’
‘Martin Getty.’
‘And address?’
‘Over here or back home?’
‘Full residential, if you please.’
‘The Beecham Stud, Louisville, Kentucky.’
When the details were complete the American took his paddle and wandered into the saleroom. Peregrine Slade was about to mount the podium. As he reached the bottom step there was a deferential tug at his elbow. He looked down. Her bright eyes were alight.