Fakes and Lies

by Jane A. Adams

  ‘No other artists in the family?’

  ‘A great-uncle who ran off to Paris, married a Frenchwoman and eventually bought a bookshop. He was considered something of a black sheep.’

  Karen laughed. ‘And Annie?’

  ‘No. Annie doesn’t have family.’

  Karen waited but decided she wasn’t going to get any more information. ‘Must be tough,’ she said.

  ‘Not now, I don’t think. Annie has created her own family. She has close friends and is well loved.’

  Karen decided that this subject was definitely off limits.

  She parked up outside the warehouse and spoke briefly to the officer on duty, telling him that they were going up to the studio. All was quiet, he told her. Danny and his father were working inside; the other brother had just gone off to deliver a machine to a customer.

  Karen rang the bell to be let in, glad they had followed advice and locked the doors. Danny welcomed them inside.

  ‘Is it right, what we heard on the news?’ he said. ‘They found our Bee?’

  Our Bee, Karen thought. ‘She’s all right. Just very shaken up.’

  ‘Thank fuck for that. Sorry, language, but you know …’

  Karen nodded. ‘Good news,’ she agreed, and led Bob into the warehouse.

  The last time he had been here Patrick, bloody and only half alive, had lain at the bottom of the steps. The blood had soaked into the concrete leaving an iron brown stain.

  ‘You OK?’ Karen asked him.

  Bob nodded and preceded her up the stairs. ‘Just a shock,’ he said. ‘Seeing him there like that. And the blood still there.’

  He shook his head as though to clear it and then took a look around the studio. Karen watched him, wondering what he was noticing. ‘Everything as you remember?’

  ‘Hard to say. Bee and Patrick have moved things round, of course. But I think so. If I remember right, Freddie kept his files in here.’ He crouched down next to the layout table, reached underneath and pulled a small, two-drawer filing cabinet from beneath. He paused. ‘Do we need to put things in evidence bags or anything?’

  ‘No, we just need to log everything. If it becomes evidence later, then we re-log it as such.’

  ‘Right.’ He pulled the file cabinet all the way out and then opened the drawers to reveal stacks of small blue exercise books.

  ‘Look like the ones I used at school,’ Karen said.

  ‘They’re cheap.’ Bob smiled. ‘They’d get chucked around the studio, splattered with paint, carried in his pocket or the car. He bought them by the dozen.’

  ‘That’s a lot of stuff to go through,’ Karen said. ‘You’re going to need a hand, maybe?’

  ‘You offering? Annie will be working until late so I gave Naomi a call when you asked me to come over here. She and Alfie are going to help me out. You too, if you like. There’s a good Chinese takeaway near Naomi’s flat. That’s if it’s not against regulations or anything?’

  Karen pondered. It was hard to know, in a setup like Freddie’s, what would prove useful. She took one of the books from the file cabinet and flicked through. ‘I don’t even understand the words,’ she said, ‘never mind the context. OK, I’ll join you all for Chinese and fact finding.’ She laughed. ‘We’ll just have to log you as an expert witness.’

  ‘Don’t need to. I’m already on the list,’ Bob told her. ‘Mind you, so was Graham Harcourt, so I’m not sure what that tells you.’

  THIRTY-SIX

  ‘Harry, there’s someone wants a word with you,’ one of the nurses told him. ‘She’s waiting in the corridor.’

  ‘Thanks, Gena. I’ll come out.’

  Wearily, Harry hoisted himself out of his chair and smiled at his ex-wife, who was sitting across the bed from him. They’d been taking it in turns to read aloud to their son. It was probably the most time they had spent together since she had left.

  ‘I’m guessing you must be Harry Jones.’ The lady waiting in the corridor was tall, black and looked as tired as he felt.

  ‘I am. I’m sorry, I—’

  ‘Sophie O’Dowd,’ she said. ‘I’m Bee’s aunt. I don’t know if the police have told you, but she’s been found. She’s here at the hospital, and she’s all right. But she insisted I come up and talk to you.’

  Harry smiled. ‘DS Dattani let me know. I’m so very pleased.’ He leaned back against the wall, exhaustion suddenly hitting him. ‘Sorry, just very tired.’

  ‘I’m sure you are. I don’t think any of us have slept since Sunday. And how is Patrick doing?’

  She had a slight accent, Harry thought, almost but not quite American. Transatlantic, he supposed they called it. Like a Brit who’d lived abroad for quite some time. ‘Improving, just a little. The swelling in the brain has gone down and they’re talking about taking him off his ventilator tomorrow. If he breathes on his own, then we’re on the way.’

  ‘That’s good, that’s very good. I’ll let Bee know.’ She took a slip of paper from her cardigan pocket and handed it to him. ‘I wrote my number down for you, just in case you wanted to get in touch.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Harry said. He felt oddly pleased by that. Sophie had the most beautiful eyes, he thought, and a really nice smile. ‘I don’t have anything to write on.’

  ‘That’s OK. You text me when you get a minute.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Harry said again. ‘I’d best be getting back. Give my love to Bee; I know Patrick likes her a lot.’

  ‘Well then, we’ll have to make sure they get together, won’t we?’

  Harry went back to the ward with something of a spring in his step. He sat down and looked at his son, knowing that nothing had really changed and yet, somehow, everything had changed. The world was full of possibilities.

  Bob emptied the boxes on to the table and then stood back.

  ‘OK,’ Alfie said. ‘It looks like we’ve got quite a job ahead of us. How far do these go back?’

  ‘These, only about two or three years. I expect he’s got more in his home studio, but I don’t think we need those. Freddie used to archive things in a big box at home. Lord alone knows what’s in it.’

  ‘So what are we looking for?’

  ‘I think we need to look for names, dates, titles of paintings,’ Karen said. ‘But I really don’t know. Anything that might be useful, though I’m not sure I’ll know it’s useful until Bob says so. We’re looking for links, I suppose, between Freddie and Graham Harcourt and Toby Elden. Maybe even Scotts, I don’t know.’

  ‘OK,’ Naomi said. ‘Give me a couple and I’ll see if my scanner can cope with it. It’s not that good with handwriting, but who knows?’

  ‘These seem to be from last year,’ Bob said. ‘See what you can come up with. I think it’s going to be boring,’ he predicted.

  Naomi took the books and settled herself in the corner of the room where her computer and other equipment were set up. She had a reading machine that she used for books that weren’t available as audio and also a scanner, hooked up to read back on her computer.

  Freddie’s handwriting must have been reasonably clear because the reader could cope with some of it at least. She plugged in a headset and one earbud and listened to the attempts her technology made; she also half listened to what was going on at the table across the room.

  Bob was right, Freddie recorded everything. It would have made a fascinating archive had they not been in such a hurry.

  At six thirty Naomi went with Napoleon and Alfie to the Chinese restaurant down the road to pick up the order that they had phoned through, taking a bit of a detour so that they could give Napoleon a walk. So far the search had been pretty fruitless.

  When they got back they discovered that Karen, in their absence, had found the first reference that might be of use. It was about Toby Elden.

  Karen read aloud. ‘“I’m afraid I had to lie to poor Toby. I told him that I had hidden the documents he was looking for behind the backing board of the Madonna I was working on. It was all I could think
of at the time. I feel sorry for him. I know this is going to lead to more trouble for him but what can I do? I can’t risk that bastard getting hold of Bee.”’

  ‘So someone was threatening his daughter. I don’t think we have to guess who,’ Karen said.

  ‘So, what documents?’ Alfie wanted to know. ‘We’ve been looking through all the most recent stuff, and there’s nothing. The earlier books are full of lists, reference material, stuff he was working on, who he was selling it to and how much for. He even made little notes about where he’d eaten lunch, but all he seems to have in the last eighteen months or so is stuff like pigment lists. Recipes.’

  They cleared space on the table and Alfie distributed plates and then laid out the food.

  ‘Recipes, pigment lists.’ Bob was thoughtful. ‘Alfie, pass me that last book you were looking at.’

  He read silently while they all chatted and ate. ‘You got something?’ Naomi asked.

  ‘I think I have,’ Bob said. ‘I noticed that this book isn’t as thick as the rest. Look, he may have ripped out the odd page, but they’re mostly about the same thickness. This has maybe three or four pages missing from the middle. And you’d have to know what you were looking for to realize that the information that starts on this left-hand page doesn’t carry on to this right-hand page. I noticed the same thing in one of the other books. I thought it was just – well, these things happen when you’re writing stuff down, he may have ripped a page out without thinking, but now I’m thinking it’s deliberate. Freddie was hiding something. And whatever it was, Toby Elden had been told to get it back.’

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  The decision was made to release the CCTV footage of Binnie snatching Bee from the warehouse. It was the clearest image of him that the police had, apart from some photographs that Sian had taken on her camera. These stills were shown alongside the video with the warning that the man must not be approached. That he was extremely dangerous.

  And then of course the calls started coming, sightings of him everywhere.

  Karen had reported back to Vin about the blue books. They’d carried on until just after midnight and found references to Graham Harcourt and to the Scotts’ gallery but also to other dealers and collectors and, as Bob said, it was the kind of record you would find in the paperwork of just about any artist who was selling regularly and working to commission. On its own it proved nothing.

  Freddie had indeed been meticulous about recording details of paintings: the customer’s name and address, the materials used in the production, and here and there were records about provenance relating to similar paintings in the artist’s oeuvre. From this they made a guess that sometimes he was producing missing works.

  Again, Bob suggested, there could be innocent explanations a lot of the time. Freddie made a living copying quite legitimately for customers who needed to keep up appearances of wealth, or who wanted the original to be safely in a bank vault. Occasionally Freddie marked something as a ‘pastiche’ and that too was open to interpretation.

  But there were almost no clients’ names for the past eighteen months and yet Freddie’s bank balance seemed to have remained relatively healthy. No large sums deposited, nothing unusual, but it hadn’t fallen off either.

  ‘He’s earning money,’ Vin said. ‘But exactly where from?’

  Alfie felt that given time he could probably find out; it was what he did, after all.

  At midday on the Friday, Harry texted Naomi. Patrick was off the ventilator, he was breathing on his own. Later that afternoon Alec arrived home and Naomi felt oddly inclined just to settle down for the weekend. There was nothing more to be done and it had been one hell of a week.

  They found themselves watching the rolling news avidly, but there was nothing about Kevin Binns, only a rehash of the kidnap and the murders, and now there was speculation about Freddie Jones and whether he had in fact died of natural causes.

  The only additional information was that Toby Elden had died. Poor Toby, as Freddie had called him, seemed to have paid the ultimate price as a consequence of Freddie having to lie to him.

  The search of Binnie’s home had revealed a stash of stolen goods. Money, jewellery, antiques, though whether Binnie had been stealing on behalf of his employer or on his own account was moot and likely to remain so.

  Graham Harcourt had gone to ground.

  By rights, Karen thought, she should be off back home. She had her own investigation to pick up – though at least they now knew who had killed Antonia Scott. What they didn’t know was who had ordered the killing or the theft of the portfolio – but the assumption was that it was Graham Harcourt.

  She was sitting in the main office with Vin, logging in the blue books and trying to put them into some kind of order – they’d not even looked at some of them, she realized – when a call came in. It stood out from the background noise of sightings because it included footage captured on CCTV. Binnie was in a shopping centre on the outskirts of town, eating a burger as though all was right with the world and it was just an ordinary Saturday.

  Armed police were mobilized, but instructed to wait until Binnie was outside. The restaurant was crowded, so was the shopping centre, and from the way Binnie swaggered as he left the restaurant and wandered into another shop looking at T-shirts, it was almost as though he knew they were there and didn’t care.

  He was followed into the car park, challenged as he got to his car. Binnie turned slowly, looking mildly amused. He raised his hands without question but he seemed totally unperturbed to be surrounded by armed officers and told to get down on the ground. It was almost as though he’d been told to smile for the cameras.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  ‘Nothing to say,’ Binnie told them. ‘I told you I got nothing to say.’ This had been his refrain ever since he was brought in and three hours had passed and nothing had happened. Vin thought he was just amusing himself; it was as though Binnie was the one in control and they were rushing around trying to do his bidding. The only response he’d made was when he was asked if he wanted a cup of tea or told that he’d be having a food break in another half hour. He told them that he didn’t care what he had in his sandwiches as long as it wasn’t chicken.

  ‘Chicken stinks, it’s just cat food,’ he said.

  Vin was tempted to tell whoever arranged the sandwiches that they had to be chicken.

  Just before Binnie’s meal break was due, Vin was called out of the interview room. He was a little annoyed, but the look on Karen’s face told him that this was important. ‘What?’

  He followed her back through to the main control room, where officers were still working their way through the evidence bags that had been brought from Freddie’s studio. ‘He was a clever old sod,’ Karen said. ‘Talk about hiding stuff in plain sight.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The missing pages from the blue books. He must’ve had to hide them in a hurry, so do you know what he did?’

  She pointed towards a young officer who was sitting at a desk with envelopes next to him. Vin recognized the letters that had been brought along with the stuff in the portfolio. ‘Junk mail, so—’

  ‘Craig here noticed there was something wrong with the seal on one of the envelopes. It was ever so slightly misaligned. It looks like a letter from the credit card company – you know, one of those “you have been pre-selected to apply” things. Everybody gets them. Most of us just chuck them in the bin or they get put down on the side and forgotten about.’

  ‘You’ve lost me.’

  ‘So Craig opened the envelope.’

  ‘So Craig can now apply for a credit card?’ He looked more closely at the paperwork laid out on the desk. ‘Bloody hell.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Vin donned a pair of latex gloves and picked the pages up, studying them closely. On two pages were lists of paintings, customers and the provenance that had been used, created by Freddie. On another was a list of payments which had obviously never made it into Freddie
’s bank account and must have been stashed away somewhere else.

  Last of all was a confession, of sorts. In it Freddie admitted to creating about a dozen works for which he also created the provenance. He gave names and dates, buyers and sellers, and implicated Toby Elden and Graham Harcourt, amongst others. One of the others was Antonia Scott’s brother.

  ‘This is what Toby Elden must have been after. Graham Harcourt must’ve discovered that he kept a record. He must’ve threatened Freddie’s daughter if he didn’t give it up but Freddie died first, before he could do anything.’

  ‘So chances are he wasn’t murdered.’

  Karen shrugged. ‘Well, unless Binnie confesses to that one as well, we’re not going to know. Not for sure. But now we don’t need Binnie’s evidence. We have enough to pull the others in. We can piece the rest together. You tell him that, I don’t think he’s going to be best pleased. My guess is that Binnie is a typical narcissist; he wants to be the centre of attention, no matter what it’s for.’

  THIRTY-NINE

  There was a strange little coda to all of this. Danny and his father turned up at the police station on the Sunday morning, along with a Catholic priest. He had a package under his arm, brown paper tied up with string, and they asked to see either Vin or Karen.

  ‘Danny tells me you’ve been looking for this,’ Mark Brookes said. ‘I never meant to cause any trouble. It was just after that bloke had been hanging round, and it was obvious this was what he was after, so I got worried. Freddie’d made me promise I’d keep an eye on things if anything happened, look after his girl’s inheritance. I thought at the time he was just being dramatic, like he could be sometimes. Then he was dead and this bloke was claiming the picture was his. So I moved it, gave it into safe keeping, like. Danny didn’t know what I’d done. I thought the fewer people that knew the better.’

  ‘Oh, Dad,’ Danny said. ‘I had a feeling you might have done something when I noticed the painting had gone. You could have told me, you know.’