In fact Trumpington Gore was two miles away in a café 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 sa
me,’ 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 . . .’
JULY
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 Leigh-Travers.
The most prestigious institute in London for the study, identification and authentication of works of art was undoubtedly the Colbert Institute, and deep in its basement lay the scientific laboratory with its formidable array of investigative technology. The Chief Scientist was Professor Stephen Carpenter. He too received a letter. It purported to come from a graduate student preparing her thesis.
The writer explained that she had chosen as her subject the great attempted art frauds of the twentieth century, and the gallant role of science in exposing the work of the fraudsters.
Professor Carpenter was happy to reply and to suggest she read his own work on that very subject, available through the institute’s bookshop in the foyer. He too signed his letter personally.
By the 7th of the month Benny Evans had two genuine signatures and samples of handwriting.
Suzie Day knew her boss had once been one of the country’s most skilful computer hackers before he did his spell in prison, turned legitimate and started to create security systems aimed at preventing or frustrating attempts to hack into his clients’ systems.
Suzie asked him over lunch one day if he had ever, during his period as a guest of Her Majesty, come across another certain type of fraudster. He shrugged in ignorance and pretended that he had no such knowledge. But the man had a mischievous sense of humour and a long memory.
Three days later Suzie Day found a piece of paper tucked into the keys of her personal machine in the office. It simply said: Peter the Penman. There was a phone number. Nothing else was ever said.
On the 10th of the month Trumpington Gore let himself into the back door of the House of Darcy, the one approached from the rear loading yard. It was a self-closing door, operated from the outside only by a keypad, but Benny still remembered the number. He had often gone in and out that way to reach the cheap café where he occasionally took his lunch breaks outside the building.
The actor was wearing a buff dust coat with the logo of Darcy on the breast pocket, exactly like all the other porters, and he carried an oil painting. It was the lunch hour.
A dust-coated porter carrying a painting, walking through the corridors of an art auction house, is about as noticeable as a raindrop in a thunderstorm.
It took Trumpy ten minutes and several apologies before he found an empty office, went inside, locked the door behind him and went through the desk drawers. When he left, the way he had come, he was also carrying two sheets of genuine headed writing paper and two logo-bearing envelopes.
Four days later, having visited the Colbert Institute as a tourist to note the type of dust coats worn there, he reappeared as a Colbert porter and did exactly the same. No-one even turned a head.
By the end of July Peter the Penman, for a modest £100, had created two beautiful letters and a laboratory report.
Benny spent most of the month tracking down a man of whom he had heard years before, a name whispered with horror in the corridors of the art world. To his great relief he found the old man still alive and living in poverty in Golders Green. In the annals of art fraud, Colley Burnside was a bit of a legend.
Many years earlier he had been a talented young artist moving in that Bohemian post-war society of Muriel Belcher’s Colony Club and the artists’ haunts around Queensway and the studios of Bayswater.
He had known them all in their collective youth: Freud, Bacon, Spencer, even the baby Hockney. They had become famous, he had not. Then he had discovered that he had a forbidden talent. If he could not create his own original works that people would buy, he could create someone else’s.
He studied the techniques of centuries ago, the chemicals in the paints, the egg yolk in the tempera and the effect of centuries of ageing that could be recreated with tea and wine. Unfortunately, though he left the tea alone, he started to indulge in the wine.