Fakes and Lies

by Jane A. Adams

  He made tea and set Naomi’s down on the small round coaster on the windowsill. It was stuck in place with double sided tape, so she always knew the position of it.

  ‘Is Alec home at the weekend, then?’

  ‘Yes, home Friday night, back on Monday morning. Hopefully he’ll be coming back Thursday next week.’

  ‘He’s away more than he thought he would be,’ Patrick commented.

  ‘He is, yes. But at least he’s not moping any more and he feels as though he’s being useful. Money isn’t bad either, which is a help; the savings have taken a right hammering over the last year. And we still can’t sell the damned house.’

  Patrick knew she was referring to Alec’s old home, a lovely 1930s house set in a big garden. People were being put off by the fact that there had been a dead man found there.

  ‘It’s not like we’ve left the body amongst the fixtures and fittings.’ She shrugged. ‘I mustn’t grumble though, we’re doing OK. We’ve still got some of the legacy from Alec’s uncle.’

  Patrick studied her thoughtfully. It was unlike Naomi to worry about money and he knew that they were financially stable, so this was something else. ‘It’s not that, though, is it?’ he said. ‘Alec’s been dependent on you for a long time now. You’ve been so focused on him and what he needs, and now he’s getting all independent you’re bored stupid.’

  She laughed. ‘You’re probably right. Actually we’re incredibly lucky to be as secure as we are. Anyway, what brings you here tonight? It’s not one of your usual evenings. And how are Bob and Annie?’

  ‘Good,’ Patrick told her. ‘When I was there today, this girl turned up and I kind of thought you might want to talk to her. Or rather, would you talk to her?’ He paused. ‘I didn’t begin that very well, did I?’

  ‘No, not really. Want to start again?’

  Patrick nodded. ‘Yes, I think I’d better. Her name is Beatrix, Beatrix Jones, but nobody calls her that. And she is the daughter of the late Freddie Jones, art forger extraordinaire.’

  Naomi listened as Patrick filled her in on the day’s events. She’d heard about Freddie Jones, of course, but not about the murder at the gallery. When he had finished she nodded slowly and said, ‘I’m with Bob and Annie on this, too much of a coincidence, and it also sounds very dangerous. She is best kept out of it, but—’

  ‘But no way is she going to stay out of it,’ Patrick agreed. ‘I mean, would you? Would I?’

  ‘Unfair comparison,’ Naomi told him. ‘I think most people would stay out of it. Most people would just leave it to the police – and in this case very sensibly too – but I take your point. She does sound desperate, and she is all alone, and I’m not really sure what I can tell her that might help.’

  ‘Probably not a lot,’ said Patrick, ‘but at least she’ll feel as though someone’s taking notice of her and sometimes that’s really all that matters.’

  ‘True. OK, I’ll see her after the weekend. I want some time with Alec but I’ll be happy to have a chat to her on, say, Tuesday? I’d rather she didn’t come here. I could do without someone knocking on my door every five minutes and I have a feeling she might.’

  ‘I’ll ask Bob if we can meet there. I think they’d like to be in the loop anyway.’

  ‘Sounds like a good idea,’ Naomi agreed. ‘And in the meantime, I’ll see what I can find out. You never know, I might know the SIO.’

  ‘Bob and Annie say they’re trying to find stuff out too; they still have contacts here and there.’

  ‘So we can compare notes. We could really do with talking to someone in organized crime. A specialist in art and antiques. I’ll see who I can dig up.’ She sounded pleased to have been presented with a project.

  ‘Thanks,’ Patrick said. ‘I’d best be off, Dad will be getting dinner and I’ve got an assignment to finish for tomorrow.’

  He gave Naomi a hug and Napoleon another pat and then he left. Naomi imagined him running across the road to get into his car, the rain still pelting down. ‘Drive safe,’ she said. Then she turned back to her computer and began a search for Freddie Jones and his misadventures. Patrick was right, she thought, she was desperately bored. Having time to herself was rapidly losing its novelty. But having time to herself with something interesting to do, now that she could go along with.

  FOUR

  Bee had felt utterly bereft when she left Bob Taylor’s house. She wasn’t sure what she’d ever expected them to do, but she’d hoped they would do something or at least believe her. She got the feeling that Annie had but that Bob maybe thought she was making a fuss over nothing, and she also had the feeling that Patrick was more sympathetic. Patrick had taken her phone number and promised to ask his friend, the ex-detective woman, if she’d talk to her, but Bee was not optimistic. Bob Taylor had been her last hope and now she felt utterly alone.

  She came to a junction and instead of turning towards home she went right, driving back towards her father’s studio. She still had the keys and the landlord had told her that the rent had been paid for another three months. Freddie always paid six months in advance. The landlord had said that she needed to clear her father’s things out within that time, but for the moment she could come and go as she liked. She had spent an awful lot of time there. It felt like a safe space where she was still close to Freddie.

  When her mother had died, Bee had sold the house; Freddie had helped with the solicitors and stuff. For the moment she was staying in a little flat that she’d rented. It was little more than a bedsit but it was OK and she’d rather keep money in the bank until she decided what she was going to do next. Freddie told Bee to buy somewhere. ‘You can’t go wrong if you invest in property,’ he said, which was strange advice coming from someone who had never owned a damn thing in his life apart from his paints and brushes and far too many easels. She’d counted ten in his studio but had only ever seen him use about three: one for whatever he was working on, one for whatever he was preparing to work on and one for whatever reference material he might be using. He’d put a big board on that easel and stick stuff all over it. Photos, colour swatches, fragments of information that he picked up from all over the place. She supposed other people might refer to it as a ‘mood board’, but it was far more than that.

  Tears running down her cheeks, Bee was reminded by the solid ache in her chest just how much she had loved her father. She had loved her mother too, but that had been a different kind of love. Solid and steady and utterly reliable. She’d had time to get used to the idea, if not to accept it – never that! – that her mother was going to die. And at the end her mother had been so ill and in so much pain that Bee was relieved when it was over. She’d sat beside her mother’s bed in the hospice, hour after hour, and towards the very end Freddie had sat beside her. He talked about when he and her mother had been together. By that time Susie, Bee’s mother, had been barely conscious but Bee was convinced she had heard and had taken pleasure in the reminiscences. She had seen her mother smile and the slender, wasted fingers had gripped her hand.

  Neither of them had been there when Susie had finally died; it was almost as though she had waited for them to go away. It had been in the early hours of the morning and Freddie had finally persuaded his daughter to go and get some sleep. She’d been too exhausted to drive and he had taken her home, promising to go back and sit at Susie’s bedside until the morning. The call came just as Bee was getting out of the car; she got back in, Freddie turned the car around and they had driven back together.

  And now they were both gone and Bee was nineteen years old and feeling utterly and totally bereft.

  She knew there was nothing she could have done about the cancer that had taken her mother but surely there was something that could have been done for Freddie. Someone had murdered her father; she was absolutely convinced of that, and murders were preventable. Weren’t they?

  It had begun to rain by the time she reached Freddie’s studio, a cold sleety mix that almost blinded her, even though she ha
d the windscreen wipers on full speed. She made a dash to the warehouse door. Freddie had sublet space on the mezzanine floor. Freddie had told her that the landlord, Mark Brookes, used the rest of the warehouse mainly for storing and repairing machinery that he bought and sold at auctions, and the air was always redolent with the smell of grease and paint. A part of the warehouse was divided off and the landlord and his two sons worked there, getting whatever it was they bought ready for sale.

  Bee shouted greetings as she went through and climbed the stairs. Danny, the elder of the landlord’s sons, shouted back that there had been some post and she told him she’d pick it up in a minute.

  There was an old blue sofa in Freddie’s studio and Bee threw herself down on it and pulled the old plaid picnic blanket that Freddie always left on the arm around her shoulders. It smelled of oil paint and turpentine and Freddie’s cigarettes. Finally giving way to the tears, she curled up into a tight ball and wept.

  When Bee woke it was fully dark. For a moment she was disorientated; she’d not switched on the lights when she reached the studio, even though the rain outside made the whole place dim and twilight grey. As she remembered where she was, Bee sat up and rubbed her eyes. Everything was very quiet; even the rain had stopped. So quiet she could hear her own breathing.

  She had rarely been in the studio alone at night. The main light switch was across the other side of the studio, just at the top of the stairs. There were lamps set around and the closest one was next to the sofa she now occupied, but the bulb had blown before Freddie had died and had never been replaced.

  With a sigh, Bee got to her feet and started to feel her way across the studio. As her eyes grew accustomed, she realized that it was not fully dark. The big skylight windows that made the place so perfect for Freddie now filtered in a little of the light pollution from the city streets beyond the warehouse and she could make out his layout table, his easels and the plan drawers in which he kept his drawings and much of his reference material. She glanced at her watch and discovered that it was after ten p.m. Danny would be long gone. Danny wouldn’t have worried about her being in the studio alone, and nor would his brother or his father; it was her space, as it had been Freddie’s before, and they knew that Freddie often worked late. She assumed that they would just think she was like her father in that regard. They would not have been surprised that she was still there when they left.

  She reached the top of the stairs and put up a hand to switch on the lights, when a small sound caused her to pause. It was like the chink of metal on metal, the sort of sound she was used to hearing from the workshop below, but she could see no light filtering out into the warehouse area. Usually when the brothers did work late she could not only hear them clearly but could see the square of light blocked out on the floor from the opening to the workshop. The main workshop itself had no separate door. There was a second area, separated by a fire door, which they used for welding and other hot work but the purely mechanical side, where they fitted everything together, was open.

  Bee thought about calling out, alerting Danny to the fact that she was still upstairs. She worried for a moment that he might have assumed she’d already left and that if she suddenly switched on the lights or shouted for him she was likely to scare him as much as that little noise had just scared her.

  She listened again and was almost sure that she heard a door open and close. Uneasy now, Bee took a mobile phone from her pocket preparing to dial for the police and then she switched on the light.

  The light illuminated the studio and the stairs and a section of the warehouse. She saw letters on the layout table and guessed that Danny must have brought them up before he left, and seen her asleep. He would not have wanted to disturb her and so had simply left the post for her to find. She peered over the railings but from the mezzanine floor she could see nothing out of the ordinary. She went halfway down the stairs and called out to Danny, but there was no reply, and the workshop lights were out. Going all the way down the stairs she checked the main doors that Danny and his brother and father used when they departed and they were evidently padlocked, as usual, from the outside. Freddie had the keys to a small side door that could be locked separately from the outside and bolted from the inside, though he used the main door to come and go most of the time. She checked that next. It was not bolted, but that in itself didn’t mean anything. She had let herself out that way the last time she was here and more often than not no one else bothered with this extra line of security. Bee could only remember using the bolt on the odd occasions when she’d been alone in the studio and Danny had reminded her to slide it across when he had left.

  That he had not reminded her tonight reinforced her first thought that he had not wanted to wake her up. Slowly, she made her way back up the stairs and stood on the landing looking into the studio. This had been Freddie’s world, far more than his tiny little house with its yard full of plants and glorified shed-cum-studio at the far end. Far more than her mother’s house had ever been, when he briefly lived there before Bee had been born, and the fact that she was now responsible for clearing it and dealing with his possessions felt overwhelming.

  Her phone chimed to tell her that she had a text. It was from Patrick, the boy she had met that afternoon. Bee read the text. It told her that Patrick’s friend Naomi was willing to see her and suggested Tuesday of next week. Why not tomorrow? Bee wanted to ask. Why not now? Tuesday was five days away.

  She sighed, then sent a text back to say thanks and ask what time. It was something, she supposed, though what this woman Naomi could possibly do for her she was beginning to wonder.

  Bee switched off the lights and made her way slowly back down the stairs, using her phone as a torch. She let herself out and walked round the building to find her car. The industrial estate was practically deserted; there were lights on in a couple of the factories and a few random cars and vans parked here and there. The rain had stopped and the sky was clearing. She looked up at the few stars blinking between the clouds.

  ‘Oh, Freddie,’ she said. ‘What the hell am I going to do?’

  Back in the warehouse, a shadow detached itself and moved towards the stairs. He was glad that the girl had gone. He didn’t want any trouble, he just wanted what had been promised to him. He’d been to the studio three times already and still not found it and he supposed it was possible that Freddie had hidden it at his house. He hoped not: the studio was deserted for much of the time but the house was down a farm track and anyone going to it had to drive through the farm yard to get to it.

  He knew for sure it hadn’t been in the portfolio stolen from Scotts. He already had that; though of course he could have lied about the contents. Toby wouldn’t have put it past him; it would be just his style to keep demanding that Toby bring him something he already had.

  He stood at the top of the stairs and waited ten minutes, fifteen minutes before putting on the lights, not sure how long it would take the girl actually to leave the site. He’d been horrified when he spotted her asleep on the sofa and even more horrified when she started to wake up. Quite how he’d made it down the stairs and into hiding he wasn’t sure. Then she had passed within feet of him when she’d come down to investigate the tiny noise he’d made. He wasn’t sure what he’d have done if she’d seen him.

  He didn’t dare risk the main lights but he needed more than a torch to illuminate the search so he moved slowly around the room switching on one lamp at a time. The slow burning anger he had felt for Freddie Jones was in danger of bursting into new flames.

  Maybe the girl knew what he was looking for; maybe she knew where it was. Maybe Freddie had confided in his daughter. Maybe he should just have confronted her.

  Eventually he just sat down on the sofa where Bee had lain and stared around the room, much as she had done. If he didn’t get it back, then he was a dead man. Freddie had promised him and Freddie had broken his word, and now that might cost another life.

  Knowing he had no choice, he t
ook his phone from his pocket and made the call.

  ‘It’s not here. Definitely not here. I’ve searched the place so many times now.’

  He paused to listen to the response. Could feel his whole body begin to shake as the panic grew.

  ‘I’ve tried everything, everywhere. Freddie promised … Look, maybe the girl knows. She was here again tonight, she’s been in and out of the place … bound to know. That’s it, she’s bound to know.’

  Words fell over one another. He knew that whatever he said now would count for nothing. He was a dead man.

  FIVE

  ‘You didn’t have to kill her. You could just have threatened her and taken what you wanted. It’s just …’

  Sian stared at the photograph. She could say these words to it that she could never hope to say to him. Binnie was not somebody you questioned, not to his face. Binnie was somebody you didn’t talk to, didn’t say anything to that he didn’t want to hear. But it hadn’t always been like that.

  She remembered when they’d both been kids, playing together in the fields behind Binnie’s house. Sian had been faster climbing trees and he’d always been faster running down the black pad between his house and hers. They’d been such close friends for such a long time and she couldn’t really believe what he’d turned into. She still couldn’t get her head around how it had happened. Though, she supposed, it had been something that had happened over long periods of time and she’d only really noticed it when she’d gone away and then come back. She’d gone away to university, Binnie had stayed behind and by the time she’d returned he’d changed almost beyond recognition.