She left him for a few minutes and came back with a very powerful but very small torch. The crack between the boards was just about big enough for her to get her little finger through and Annie did her best to angle the light to peer inside. They moved the picture this way and that. Nothing rattled, nothing moved; Bob would have noticed already if anything had been floating around loose inside, though if he had he might have put it down to a loose sliver of timber, broken free from the backboard. They could see nothing obvious and the only way to find out more would involve damaging the labels.
Bob ran his fingers across the faded paper and said, ‘When you think about it, how long ago do you think these boards shrank? The first hundred years, the second? This label, this gallery label, purports to be nineteenth-century. You can see it’s been stuck across where the boards join and there’s a little gap beneath where the boards shrink back. And then there is this wear line, just down the middle, where you’d expect it to be with the tiny movements between those two boards, and all the dust is going to collect behind on that little sliver of paper. If Freddie did this, he really thought about it, didn’t he? But I think we’re barking up the wrong tree, love. I don’t think he’s hidden anything in the back of this.’
TWENTY-SEVEN
Binnie seemed unperturbed to be returning alone. His employer asked where Sian had got to and he just shrugged. ‘House owners came back, I scarpered, left her behind.’
‘And that doesn’t bother you at all? She knows exactly who you are and you don’t know how much she can tell them about this place.’
Binnie shrugged again. ‘Stupid bint’s too scared to say anything,’ he said. ‘And if she does, she’ll never be able to point them in this direction. And even if she does—’
‘And if she does, my friend, this will be down to you.’
Binnie nodded acknowledgement, but he still didn’t seem particularly bothered. He put the painting down on the table.
‘Go and get the other girl. I want her to see this.’
Binnie went off and a few minutes later came back with Bee. She was yelling and struggling and demanding to know what he’d done with Sian.
‘Your friend isn’t coming back,’ Binnie’s boss told her. ‘Forget about her and look at this.’
He had set up a small easel on the table and now he unwrapped the painting and placed it on the easel, then stepped back. He studied the work intently. ‘He’s taken a slightly different direction with this one, but of course it’s still in the early stages. Who knows what he could have achieved? That is the sadness of it, such a tragic loss of talent.’
That’s not my father’s work, Bee thought. It dawned on her immediately that it was probably Patrick’s; she’d not seen the copy he’d been making but that was certainly a logical assumption. Binnie had stolen the wrong piece.
But she wasn’t going to say that. If this idiot couldn’t tell the difference, she was not going to enlighten him.
Genuinely curious, she stepped closer to the painting and studied it. Bee was no artist, as she’d told Patrick – she’d rather have followed in her mother’s footsteps and gone for something scientific – but she’d been around Freddie for long enough to recognize quality when she saw it. To know that there was inherent skill here. And now that skill had probably been killed off by some moronic idiot, doing whatever he was told just for the money.
She turned away, suddenly utterly disgusted with it all, and glared at Binnie. ‘Was it you that killed my father?’
Binnie just smiled at her. ‘What do you think?’
‘How? How did you do it?’
‘That’s for me to know and you to wonder about, isn’t it?’ He leaned closer and whispered in her ear, ‘Smoking kills.’
Binnie’s employer seemed to find that funny. ‘You can take her back now,’ he said.
‘What are you going to do with me?’ Bee had promised herself she wouldn’t ask, but when it came down to it she couldn’t help herself.
‘As the man says, that’s for me to know and you to find out.’
Binnie grabbed her arm and took her back to the room.
Sian hadn’t waited for her father’s promised solicitor. She just wanted to talk and to tell the police officer (who introduced himself as DS Dattani) anything he wanted to know. At first she found it hard, she didn’t really know where to begin, and he kept having to make her go back and start again or clarify some point or other. The tape was running and a female officer who had said her name was Karen Morgan sat close by, taking notes.
Sian found it so terribly difficult, admitting the part she’d had to play.
‘I saw him kill her. He had a knife and he just stabbed her and she fell. I realized she was dead.’
‘At that point, it’s likely she was still alive,’ the woman said. ‘When the real artist arrived about ten minutes after you left, Antonia Scott still had a little spark of life left in her. It’s possible she could have been saved.’
Sian stared at her, utterly stricken. That made it even worse. ‘I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry. I was just so afraid.’
‘He threatened you?’
‘He threatened my mum and dad.’
‘You could have told someone. You could have told your mum and dad and asked for police protection. Did it never occur to you that you could have done that?’
Sian wiped away the tears that she didn’t actually feel she was entitled to shed and nodded. ‘I almost told my mum,’ she said. ‘She hated Binnie. Never trusted him. I almost told her and then at the last minute I just couldn’t. I knew she’d hate me for it.’
‘You mum and dad are here,’ Karen Morgan pointed out. ‘I don’t think they’re going to hate you.’
‘They don’t know what I’ve done, though, do they?’
‘If you were truly under duress, then the courts will be more lenient. You have to tell us absolutely everything that went on. What he said, what he did. And anything you can think of that might help us work out where this house is or who it belongs to. Remember, there’s still another girl out there and her life is most definitely at risk.’
‘You think I don’t know that?’
Sian continued to talk. She wasn’t always sure she was getting things in the right order. Thoughts tumbled over one another and sometimes a sequence of events seemed really confused and difficult to work out.
There was a soft tap at the door and DS Dattani went to open it. It seemed that the promised solicitor had arrived.
‘We’ll have a break now,’ Sian was told. ‘You can talk to your solicitor and we’ll make sure you’ve both got drinks and something to eat. Then we’ll resume the interview.’
‘When can I see my mum and dad?’
‘That will have to be later.’
They left the room and a man came in. He put his briefcase down on the table and reached out to shake her hand. Then he sat down and explained who he was and what they were going to do.
Vin closed the door on them, took Karen through to the main office and found her a chair next to his desk.
‘And what’s the betting this house belongs to Graham Harcourt?’
‘I’d say the odds are good, but we need more than that if we’re going to get a warrant. We need something that positively identifies the house; otherwise all it will be is a fishing trip.’
‘We could arrange to take the girl there?’
‘It might be possible, but she still might not recognize the place. She was scared, and the car she was in drove round the back of the house into the yard. She might not know it from the front. But if we can get some pictures to show her, just see if anything is familiar. I’m conscious of the fact that Bee Jones is still being held somewhere, probably at that house.’
‘And in the meantime, do we assume that the family is definitely at risk?’ Vin said.
‘I would say so.’ Karen paused and frowned. ‘These are serious offences, but I’m wondering if it’s still possible to release her under police bail. I do
ubt she’s a flight risk and I think the whole family would be better off in a safe house than for the girl to be on remand somewhere. My guess is that she’ll still be at risk and we don’t want the added problem of losing a vital witness.’
‘It would be an unusual step,’ Vin said. ‘But it’s not without precedent. We’ll have to see what we can do. She’s not going anywhere for the best part of the next twenty-four hours, at any rate. And from the look of her mum and dad, neither are they.’
Graham Harcourt waited until everyone had left him before resuming his examination of the painting. According to that little tick Toby Elden, Freddie had concealed the information Graham wanted in the painting – though he’d been unclear as to how or where – and now, looking at the picture lying on his table, Graham was distinctly puzzled.
He had set great store by Toby’s statement. After all, they’d had to threaten to beat him to a pulp to get that scrap of information out of him, and Graham knew that Toby had been looking for the exact same thing. He’d been picked up outside Freddie’s house and, as the police would have put it, had clearly been going in equipped. Even once he’d let Binnie loose on Toby, he’d offered nothing more or different. Toby had been convinced because that was what Freddie had led him to believe.
The picture had been painted on board, which had been gessoed with a mix of rabbit skin glue and chalk. This technique took skill and patience; the aim was to ensure it was perfectly smooth and completely free of tiny pinprick holes left by air bubbles.
The surface was scraped and polished until it was completely smooth, pure white and silken to the touch. Absorbent and also resilient, it took colour beautifully, in thin layers, built up in either delicate cross-hatched strokes or impossibly thin glazes, so the light bounced back through the colours and the pigments glowed.
Graham Harcourt knew all of this; and didn’t give a damn.
The board looked solid but it was hard to tell. To prevent warping, the surface had been gessoed on the reverse too. It had also been the intention of the artist to create a frame directly on to the picture. Layers of gesso had been applied and punched and stamped with tiny stars and open circles. It would eventually have been gilded and burnished and then aged – the most skilful part of the process in many ways. Un-aged gilding was, in Harcourt’s eyes, ridiculously garish.
The first layers of the paint had been completed, but the under-drawing was still visible, as were the tiny pinpricks delineating the halo of the Christ child and the Madonna. The work was careful and meticulous – he could see that. Maybe not up to Freddie’s usual standard … but of course, he’d never seen his work in progress before. He knew some collectors were fascinated by process, liking to feel that they were in some way expert in their understanding of an artist’s work; Harcourt himself had no such vanity. But then, he wasn’t exactly an ordinary collector. He rarely kept anything for long; what would be the point in that?
He took out his pocket knife and began to prod at the edges of the picture. What if Freddie had concealed a hollow or hiding place beneath the plaster? The board was thick enough and sturdy enough for that to be possible. He went all around the edges, stabbing and twisting, fragments of gesso flying off across the room as he became more violent and insistent.
Nothing.
In the gesso frame? He attacked this too with gusto but it was starting to dawn on him that he had been lied to. That little bastard Toby Elden, he’d held out after all.
The knife wasn’t effective enough. He took an ice pick from the drinks tray on the sideboard and resumed the attack. The sharp point made more progress against the hard and brittle surface. Again, nothing.
He stepped back and surveyed the mess. It stank, too. He could smell the rabbit skin glue in the fine dust he was creating alongside the sharp, explosive shards. Talcum-powder-fine particles rose up and clogged his nose, drying the membranes.
The eyes of the Madonna seemed to be watching him. She held her son in her lap and the older woman he assumed was St Anne had her gaze fixed on the baby. The Madonna looked out at the viewer. Inviting you to engage with her. Freddie had said it was because she knew herself to be in a state of grace, one she wanted the viewer to share. He had cared about that sort of thing. The intention of the artist, as he’d put it.
‘Fuck that!’ Harcourt said. He went to work with the ice pick, driving it straight between the eyes, ruining the delicate features, scratching away at the surface until the figures were ruined and then obscured.
Finally he took a poker from the hearth and smashed the image into fragments. The surface of the table on which it had rested scarred and cracked and eventually broke beneath the weight of his blows.
He had been lied to. Toby fucking Elden had dared to lie to him.
No one came to see what the noise was about. He hadn’t expected them to. No one dared to come in when he’d dismissed them. Not even Binnie was that stupid.
In the end he picked up the larger fragments and chucked them on to the fire, leaving what remained on the table and the floor. Then, in a fit of pure pique, he swept those remnants to the floor.
He was back to square one.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Sian’s interview continued, with regular breaks, until way after midnight. Her parents sat patiently in the reception area.
At twenty past midnight, Vin called them through into an interview room.
‘When can we see her?’ Tracey demanded.
‘Soon. I promise. Now listen, it’s been decided that she’s going to be released on police bail, because at the moment keeping her safe is more important than locking her away. You understand that. Now, everyone’s moved remarkably quickly on this and there’s a safe house lined up.’ He indicated the young female officer who had followed them through. ‘This is Bev, and what we propose is that she takes you, Tracey, back to the house to pack your bags. You’ll have another officer with you as well. Or, you give her the keys and tell her where she’ll find clothes and anything else you need. You, your husband and daughter will be taken to the safe house, as soon as Sian’s interview’s finished. And we’re going to have to ask you to surrender your mobile phones. And not to make any contact with friends or family. If you think anyone’s going to be worried about you, then we’ll inform them that you are safe.’
‘For how long?’ Richard asked. ‘I have to get back to work. We have family who will be worried about us.’
‘Hopefully only for a few days.’
‘A few days? I can’t do that.’
‘You can and you will,’ Tracey told him firmly.
‘I want you to remember,’ Vin said, ‘that there is another young girl out there, still being held. Your daughter may hold the clue to where she is. We’ve got to use every ounce of information she has.’
‘Will she go to prison?’ Tracey asked.
‘She was under duress, that counts as mitigation. But I really can’t say.’
Tracey stood up. ‘Right, I’ll go and pack, but I’ve got to admit I’m a bit nervous going back there.’
‘If you don’t want to go,’ Vin told her, ‘as I said, I can send my officers. You’ve just got to tell them where everything is. I can understand you’re scared, but we’ve got no reason to suspect that anyone will go near you tonight. I imagine the fact that we’ve got Sian will probably slow them down a bit. But we’re quite prepared to send an officer to collect your things for you.’
Tracey shook her head. ‘No, I can do this. I’ll just throw some things in bags and we’ll be off.’ She turned to her husband. ‘You just make sure that Sian is all right.’
She followed Bev, clutching at her handbag as though it was a life raft. Then at the door she stopped, suddenly overwhelmed.
Bev turned and touched her arm. ‘Just give me your keys,’ she said. ‘And a basic list. It’s OK, you stay with your family and leave the rest to me.’
Tracey nodded, not really trusting herself to speak.
Binnie had been waiting, sitting o
n the stile in the field that backed the Price house, his feet resting on a crate. He knew that they’d have to come home at some point and he was ready. When the lights came on, he picked up the crate and carried it across the field and through the gate in the garden fence.
He hadn’t been particularly upset to have left Sian behind. He was getting bored with her anyway, but he had made a threat, and he fully intended to carry it out. If people don’t carry their threats out, how is anybody supposed to take any notice of them?
A light went on in the annexe, which surprised him as that was Sian’s area, and then one in the bedroom upstairs. He guessed that must be her parents’ room. He waited. He wanted them to be settled, perhaps even getting ready for bed, and he was good at taking his time.
He gave them another ten minutes and then figured that was long enough. In the crate were a dozen bottles filled with a mixture of petrol and oil and with rags crammed into the necks to use as wicks. Binnie lit the first one and hurled it at the annexe window. The bottle smashed against the glass and broke, bursting into flames, and he heard someone shout within. A man’s voice – that surprised him too. The dad, maybe?
Whatever.
The windows at the back of the house were double glazed and he knew that he could never hope to break them with a bottle, but half bricks, packed into the base of the crate – that would do it.
The first brick bounced off. Annoying, Binnie thought, but these things happen. Sighing, he picked up his crate and went a little closer to the house, removing from his pocket an automatic centre punch. He pressed the little tool against the corner of the window and it broke instantly with a clatter and a shatter of glass. Most of it fell into the room, but some scattered around Binnie. He shook it off.
There were screams coming from inside the house now, and shouts. Binnie lit another couple of petrol bombs and threw them inside. One landed on the settee and the second, falling just inside the window, lit the curtains. Binnie did a little dance of joy as the flames roared.
Fakes and Lies Page 18
