The Veteran (15 page)

“Lot 103,” said Slade with an imperturbability he did not feel. “Landscape by Anthonie Palamedes.”

The American, cynosure of all eyes, rose and walked out. A bright young beauty accompanied him.

“Well done, sir, you got it,” she burbled.

“Been quite a morning,” drawled the Kentuckian. “Could you tell me where I would find the men’s washroom?”

“Oh, the loo. Yes, straight down and second door on the right.”

She watched him enter, still carrying the tote bag he had had all morning, and maintained her position. When he came out she would accompany him to the accounts department for the boring details.

Inside the washroom Trumpington Gore took the calfskin attache case from the tote bag, and extracted the black Oxford shoes with the Cuban heels. In five minutes the goatee beard and grey wig were gone. Ditto the tan slacks and shabby coat. All went into the tote bag which was dropped out of the window into the courtyard below. Benny caught it and was away.

Two minutes later the very pukka London businessman emerged. He had slicked-back thin black hair and gold-rimmed glasses. He was two inches taller, in a beautifully cut, but rented, pinstripe suit, Thomas Pink shirt and Brigade of Guards tie. He turned and walked straight past the waiting girl.

“Damned good auction, what?” He just could not resist it. “See that American fella got his piece.” He nodded towards the door behind him and strode on. The girl kept staring at the lavatory door.

It took a week before the fertilizer really hit the fan but when it did it went all over the place.

Repeated enquiries revealed that though the Getty dynasty contained many family members it did not contain a Martin and none of them had a Kentucky stud. When word got around, Darcy in general and Peregrine Slade in particular became a laughing stock.

The hapless Vice-Chairman tried to persuade the underbidder, Jan de Hooft representing Old Man Van Den Bosch, to settle at a million. Not a chance.

“I would have had it for £150,000 but for your impostor,” the Dutch dealer told him down the phone. “So let’s settle for that.”

“I’ll approach the vendor,” said Slade.

The seller was the estate of a lately departed German nobleman who had once been an SS tank officer in Holland during the war. This unhappy coincidence had always cast a shadow over the issue of how he came by his Dutch collection in the first place, but the old Graf had always protested that he had acquired his Dutch Masters before the war, and had beautifully forged invoices to prove it. The art world is nothing if not flexible.

But the estate was represented by a firm of Stuttgart lawyers and it was with these that Peregrine Slade had to deal. A German lawyer in one hell of a temper is seldom a pretty sight, and at six feet and five inches senior partner Bernd Schliemann was pretty formidable when happy. The morning he learned the full details of what had happened to his client’s property in London and the offer of £150,000, he moved into a towering rage.

“Nein!” he roared down the phone to his colleague who had gone over to negotiate. “Nein. Vollig ausgeschlossen. Withdraw it.”

Peregrine Slade was by no means a complete fool. The empty lavatory, eventually penetrated by a male colleague after half an hour, started the suspicions. The girl gave a good description of the only man who had come out. But that made two descriptions, both completely different.

Charlie Dawson had been stunned when taxed with his part in the matter. He had sent no letter, never heard of any Martin Getty. His e-mail letter was shown to him. Identification showed it purported to come from his word processor, but the installer of the entire Darcy system admitted that a real wizard in the cyberworld could forge that provenance. That was when Slade knew for certain that he had been well tupped. But by whom, and why?

He had just issued instructions for the Darcy computer system to be turned into Fort Knox when he received a curt summons to the private office of the Duke of Gateshead.

His Grace may not have been as noisy as Herr Schliemann, but his anger was as intense. He stood with his back to the door as Peregrine Slade responded to the command to ‘Enter.’ The Chairman was staring out of the window at the roofs of Harrods five hundred metres away.

“One is not happy, my dear Perry,” he said. “Not happy at all. There are a number of things in life one does not like, and one of them is being laughed at.”

He turned and advanced to his desk, placing splayed fingertips on the Georgian mahogany and leaning slightly to fix his deputy with baleful blue eyes.

“A chap goes into his club and a chap is laughed at. Openly, don’t you see, dear old bean.”

The term of endearment was like a dagger in the sun.

“And you blame incompetence,” said Slade.

“Should I not?”

“This was sabotage,” said Slade and offered five sheets of paper.

The duke was slightly taken aback but he fished spectacles from a top pocket and read them quickly.

One was the phoney letter from Charlie Dawson. The second was a sworn affidavit that he had never sent it, and the third a statement from the best computer expert available to the effect that a near-genius in computer technology could have created it and inserted it into Slade’s private e-mail system.

The fourth and fifth papers were from two girls in the saleroom that day, one detailing how the supposed Kentuckian had introduced himself and the other describing how he had vanished.

“Have you any idea who this rogue could be?” asked the duke.

“Not yet, but I intend to find out.”

“Oh, you do that. Perry. Do it without delay. And when you have him, ensure he spends a long time behind bars. Failing that, ensure he is spoken to in such a manner that he will never come within a mile of us again. In the meantime, I shall try to pacify the board—again.”

Slade was about to go when His Grace added an afterthought.

“After the Sassetta affair, and now this, we need something pretty spectacular to restore our image. Keep eyes and ears open for such an opportunity. Failing that, and a resolution of this impersonation business, the board may have to consider a little ... restructuring. That is all, my dear Perry.”

When he left the room the nervous tic near Slade’s left eye, that always flared when he was under extreme stress or in the grip of powerful emotions, was flicking like a panicky Aldis lamp.

Slade was not as lost for thoughts as he had pretended.

Someone had wreaked immense damage on the House of Darcy. He looked for motive. Gain? But there had been none, except that the Coorte was now going to another auctioneer.

But would a rival do this?

If not gain, then revenge. Who would have such a rage against him, and enough knowledge to guess that an agent acting for Van Den Bosch would be present in the hall with a big enough cheque to hike the Coorte to such ludicrous levels?

His thoughts had already settled on Benny Evans, who would have had both. But the ‘Martin Getty’ he had stared at was not Benny Evans. Yet he had been briefed. He had sat silent until that single picture came under the hammer. So ... a fellow conspirator. A mere hireling, or another with a grudge?

On 2 June he sat in the chambers in Lincoln’s Inn of one of the most eminent lawyers in England. Sir Sidney Avery laid down the brief and pinched the bridge of his nose.

“Your query is: did this man commit an offence in criminal law?”

“Precisely.”

“He masqueraded as someone who does not even exist?”

“He did.”

“That, alas, is not an offence in law, unless it was done for the purpose of fraudulent gain.”

“The masquerade was supported by a clearly forged letter of introduction.”

“Actually, a tip-off, but admittedly forged.”

Privately, Sir Sidney thought the scam hilarious. It was the sort of thing that always went down hugely well at the Benchers’ dinners in hall. But his expression indicated he was contemplating mass murder.

“Did he at any time claim he was a member of the famously wealthy Getty family?”

“Not exactly.”

“You presumed he was?”

“I suppose so.”

“Did he at any time attempt to take this Dutch picture, or any other picture, with him?”

“No.”

“Have you any idea who he was?”

“No.”

“Can you think of any thoroughly disgruntled ex-employee who might have dreamed this up?”

“Only one, but it was not he in the hall.”

“You dismissed the employee?”

“Yes.”

“On what grounds?” The last thing Slade intended was to describe the Sassetta swindle.

“Incompetence.”

“Was he a genius with a computer?”

“No. He could hardly use one. But a walking encyclopedia on Old Masters.”

Sir Sidney sighed.

“I am sorry to be discouraging, but I don’t think the boys in blue are going to want to know about this. Nor the Crown Prosecution Service. Question of proof, you see. Your actor fellow can be a grey-haired Kentuckian with goatee, American accent and shabby coat one minute, and a crisply spoken ex-Guards officer in pinstripes the next. Whoever you might think you have traced, can you prove who it was? Did he leave fingerprints? A clear signature?”

“An illegible scrawl.”

“Precisely. He denies it all, and the police are nowhere. Your dismissed encyclopedia only has to say he does not know what you are talking about and ... same thing. Not a shred of proof. And somewhere in the back there seems to be a computer wizard. I’m sorry.”

He rose and held out his hand.

“If I were you, I would drop it.”

But Peregrine Slade had no intention of dropping anything.

As he emerged into the cobbled yards of one of London’s four Inns of Court, a word Sir Sidney Avery had used stuck in his mind. Where had he seen or heard the word ‘actor’ before?

Back at his office he asked for the details of the original vendor of the Sassetta. And there it was: profession, actor. He engaged a team from London’s most discreet private investigation agency. There were two in the team, both ex-detective inspectors of the Metropolitan Police, and they were on double rate for quick results. They reported back in a week but brought little news.

“We followed the suspect Evans for five days but he seems to lead an uneventful life. He is seeking work in a menial capacity.

One of our younger colleagues got talking to him in a pub. He appeared completely ignorant of the affair of the Dutch picture.

“He lives at his old address with a punk-style girlfriend, enough metal in her face to sink a cruiser, peroxide hair in spikes, hardly your computer-literate type.

“As for the actor, he seems to have vaporized.”

“This is the year 2000,” protested Slade. “People cannot vaporize any more.”

“That’s what we thought,” said the gumshoe. “We can trace any bank account, any credit card, car document, driving licence, insurance policy, social security number—you name it, we can find the address of the owner. But not this one. He is so poor, he hasn’t got any.”

“None?”

“Oh, he collects Unemployment Benefit, or he used to, but not any more. And the address the Social Security people have for him is the same you gave us. He has an actor’s union Equity card; same address. As for the rest, everyone is computerized nowadays except this Mr. Trumpington Gore. He has gone straight through some crack in the system and disappeared.”

“The address I gave you. You went to it?”

“Of course, sir. First port of call. We were men from the borough council, enquiring about arrears of council tax. He’s quit and gone. The bedsit has been taken over by a Pakistani minicab driver.”

And that, for Slade, was the end of a very expensive trail. He presumed that with £5,000 in his trousers the invisible actor had gone abroad, which would account for every detail the private investigators had, or more accurately had not, brought him.

In fact Trumpington Gore was two miles away in a cafe off Portobello Road with Benny and Suzie. All three were becoming worried. They were beginning to understand the sort of levels of pressure an angry and wealthy Establishment can generate.

“Slade must be onto us,” said Benny as they nursed three glasses of cheap house wine. “Someone struck up a conversation with me in a pub a few days ago. My age, but reeking of private fuzz. Tried to bring up the affair of what happened to Darcy at the saleroom. I played dumb as a brick. I think it worked.”

“I’ve had two following me,” said Suzie. “Alternating. I had to stay away from work for two days. I think they’ve left off.”

“How do you know you shook them?” asked Trumpy.

“I finally turned on the younger one and offered ‘im a blow job for twenty quid. He went down that street like a ferret on skates. I think that persuaded them I’m not much with a computer. Not many computer people are on the game.”

“And I fear I have had the same,” murmured Trumpington Gore. “Two private dicks” (the phrase sounded strange in the voice of Sir John Gielgud) ‘came round to my humble abode. Claiming to be from the council. By a mercy I was practising my craft. I was in role as a Pakistani minicab driver at the time. But I think I should move.”

“That apart, we are running out of money, Trumpy. My savings are gone, the rent is due, and we can’t take any more off you.”

“Dear boy, we have had our fun, we have taken a sweet revenge, perhaps we should pack it in.”

“Yes,” said Benny, “except that the shit Slade is still there, sitting on my career and a million of your money. Look, I know it’s a lot to ask, but I have an idea ...”

On 1 July the Director of British Modern and Victorian paintings at the House of Darcy received a polite letter, apparently from a schoolboy of fourteen. The youth explained that he was studying art for his GCSE exams and was particularly interested in the Pre-Raphaelite school. He asked where he could see the best works of Rossetti, Millais and Holman Hunt on public display.

Mr. Alan Leigh-Travers was a courteous man and dictated a prompt reply answering the youthful query in full. When it was typed up, he signed it personally in his own hand: Yours sincerely, Alan Leightravers.