De Hooft did not blink. His body language was almost contemptuous. He glanced at the figure on the aisle and nodded. Inside himself Slade was in a transport of delight.
‘My little Dutch Johnny,’ he thought, ‘you haven’t the faintest idea who you are taking on.’
‘One hundred and seventy thousand, sir, any . . .’
The American flicked his paddle and nodded. The bidding went up and up. De Hooft’s demeanour lost its at-ease attitude. He frowned and tensed. He knew his patron had said ‘Acquire it’ but surely there were limits. At half a million he drew a small mobile from his pocket, jabbed twelve numbers into it and spoke in low, earnest Dutch. Slade waited patiently. No need to intrude into private grief. De Hooft nodded.
By £800,000 the hall was like a church. Slade was going up in modules of £20,000. De Hooft, a pale man when he entered the hall, was now paper-white. Occasionally he muttered into his mobile and went on bidding. At £1,000,000 sanity in Amsterdam finally prevailed. The American raised his head and nodded slowly. The Dutchman shook his.
‘Sold for one point one million pounds, paddle number twenty-eight,’ said Slade. There was a collective exhalation of breath. De Hooft switched off his mobile, glared at the Kentuckian and swept from the hall.
‘Lot one hundred and three,’ 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 Ah 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 attaché 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 a hundred and fifty thousand 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. Völlig 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 500 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.