The Veteran

by Frederick Forsyth

  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.

  In his time he passed off to the greedy and the gullible over a hundred canvases and oil-on-boards from Veronese to Van Dyck. Even before they caught him it was reckoned he could run you up a pretty good Matisse before lunch.

  After lunch was a problem because of what he called his ‘little friend’. Colley’s bel amour was ruby in colour, liquid and normally grown on the slopes of Bordeaux. He tripped up because he tried to sell something he had painted after lunch.

  An outraged and humiliated art world insisted on the full rigour of the law and Colley was taken away to a large grey building with bars where the screws and the hard men treated him like a favourite uncle.

  It took the art world years to work out how many Burnsides were hanging on their walls, and he secured a considerable reduction in his sentence by telling all. When he came out of durance vile, he faded into oblivion, making a thin living dashing off sketches for tourists.

  Benny took Trumpy to meet the old man because he thought they would get on, and they did. Two rejected talents. Colley Burnside listened, gratefully savouring the Haut Médoc that Benny had brought, a welcome change from his habitual Chilean Merlot from Tesco.

  ‘Monstrous, dear boy, utterly monstrous,’ he spluttered when Benny had finished and Trumpy had confirmed his missing two millions. ‘And they called me a crook. I was never in the same league as some of these sharks. But as to the old days, I’m out of it now. Too long in the tooth, over the hill.’

  ‘There would be a fee,’ said Trumpy.

  ‘A fee?’

  ‘Five per cent,’ said Benny.

  ‘But five per cent of what?’

  Benny leaned over and whispered in his ear. Colley Burnside’s rheumy eyes lit up. He had a vision of Château Lafitte glowing like garnets by the light of the fire.

  ‘For that kind of fee, dear boy, I will produce you a masterpiece. Nay, not one but two. Colley’s last stroke. Gentlemen, to hell with them all.’

  There are some paintings which, though extremely old and painted on ancient timber boards, have been so destroyed that hardly a fragment of the original paint remains and they are then valueless. Only the old timber board retains a small value, and it was one of these that Benny acquired after scouring a hundred old shops that claimed to sell antiques but in fact stocked only ancient junk.

  From a similar emporium he acquired for £10 a Victorian oil of surpassing ugliness. It showed two dead partridge hanging from a hook, and a double-hammer shotgun propped against the wall. It was titled The Game Bag. Colley Burnside would have little trouble copying it, but would have to force himself to make it as devoid of talent as the original.

  On the last day of July a ginger-whiskered Scot with a pretty impenetrable accent walked into the branch office of the House of Darcy in Bury St Edmunds, county of Suffolk. It was not a large office but covered the three counties of East Anglia.

  ‘I have here, lassie,’ he told the girl behind the counter, ‘a work of great value. Created these hundred years ago by my own grandfather.’

  He triumphantly showed her The Game Bag. She was no expert but even she thought the partridge looked as if they had been hit by a truck.

  ‘You wish to have it valued, sir?’

  ‘Aye, that I do.’

  The Bury office had no facility for valuations, which could only be carried out by the London staff, but she could take the painting in and note the vendor’s details. This she did. Mr Hamish McFee claimed to live at Sudbury and she had no reason to believe that this was not so. In fact the address was that of a small newsagent whose proprietor had agreed to take in and keep all mail for Mr McFee until further notice, for a consideration of £10 a month in his back pocket. In the next van the Victorian daub was sent down to London.

  Before leaving the office Mr McFee noted that his grandfather’s genius had been tagged with a storage identification number: F 608.

  AUGUST

  The month of August swept over the West End of London like a pint of chloroform. The tourists took over and those who lived and worked in the city tried to get away. For the upper crust of the House of Darcy that meant a variety of choice destinations: villas in Tuscany, manors in the Dordogne, chalets in Switzerland, yachts in the Caribbean.

  Mr Alan Leigh-Travers was a passionate amateur yachtsman and kept his own ketch in the British Virgin Islands where it was boarded during the non-use periods at a boatyard behind Trellis Island. He intended to spend his three weeks away cruising as far south as the Grenadines.

  Peregrine Slade might have thought he had made the Darcy computer as safe as Fort Knox but he was wrong. The IT expert he had called in used one of the systems invented and developed by Suzie’s boss. She had helped perfect some of the system’s finer points. One who has developed a system can circumvent it. She did. Benny needed all the holiday rosters for August along with destinations and emergency contact addresses. These she had downloaded.

  Benny knew that Leigh-Travers would be cruising the Caribbean, and that he had left two contact numbers: his worldwide mobile phone number and the listening frequency to which he would tune his yacht’s radio. Suzie altered both numbers by one digit. Though unaware of it, Mr Leigh-Travers was going to have a really tranquil vacation, with no disturbances at all.
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br />   On 6 August the ginger Scotsman swept into the London office and demanded his oil painting back. There was no objection. He was helpful enough to identify it by storage number, and in ten minutes a porter had retrieved it from downstairs and handed it over.

  By nightfall Suzie noted that the computer records had logged the painting as having been brought in to the Bury St Edmunds office for valuation on 31 July, but withdrawn by owner on 6 August.

  She altered the last part. The new records showed it had been collected by arrangement by a van from the Colbert Institute. On the 10th Mr Leigh-Travers, who had never heard of The Game Bag, let alone seen it, left for Heathrow and Miami, there to take a connector flight to St Thomas and Beef Island where his ketch was waiting for him.

  The Hon. Peregrine Slade was one of those who preferred not to travel in August. The roads, airports and resorts were a congested nightmare in his view. Not that he stayed in London; he retired to his country seat in Hampshire. Lady Eleanor would depart for her friends’ villa at Porto Ercole and he could be alone with his heated pool, broad acres and small but adequate staff. His contact numbers were also on the holiday rosters log, so Benny knew where he would be.

  Slade left for Hampshire on the 8th. On the 11th he received a letter, handwritten and posted at Heathrow. He recognized the writing and signature immediately: it was from Alan Leigh-Travers.

  ‘My dear Perry, in haste from the departure lounge. In all the bother of trying to get away and leave the department shipshape for the September sale there was a matter I forgot to mention to you.

  ‘Ten days ago some unknown brought a picture into the Bury office for valuation. When it reached London I had a glance at it. Frankly, a quite ghastly late-Victorian oil showing a couple of dead partridge and a gun. Utterly talentless and normally it would have gone straight back. But something about it seemed odd. It intrigued me.

  ‘You will know the late Victorians painted both on panel and on canvas. This was on a panel that seemed extremely old, several centuries before the Victorian period.

  ‘I have seen such panels before, usually in Seb’s department. But not oak, that was what intrigued me. It looked a bit like poplar. So it occurred to me that some Victorian vandal might have painted over a much earlier work.

  ‘I know it will cost a few quid and if it is all a waste of time, a big “sorry”. But I have sent it to the Colbert to ask Steve Carpenter if he will have a look and give it an X-ray. Because I shall be away and Steve told me he is trying to get off as well, I asked him to send you his report direct to Hampshire.

  ‘See you at the end of the month, Alan.’

  Peregrine Slade lay on a lounger by the pool and read the letter twice while sipping his first pink gin of the day. He too was intrigued. Centuries-old poplar wood was never used by the British, even when they painted on panel. Northern Europe used oak. The Italians used poplar, and broadly speaking the thicker the panel the greater its age because the sawing techniques of centuries ago made thin panels almost impossible to cut.

  Using someone else’s old painting and painting over it was not uncommon, and it was quite well known in the history of art for some talentless idiot to overpaint an earlier work of genuine merit.

  Thankfully modern technology had made it possible to age and date tiny fragments of wood, canvas and paint, to identify not only the country of source but sometimes even the school from which they came, and to X-ray an overpainting to see what lay underneath.

  Leigh-Travers was right to do what he did, just in case. Slade intended to go up to London the next day for an exquisitely painful visit to Marina; he thought he would also pop into the office to check the records.

  The records confirmed everything the letter from Heathrow had said. A certain Hamish McFee had blown into the Bury office and left behind a Victorian still life entitled The Game Bag. It had been accorded a storage number of F 608.

  The storage records showed that the oil had arrived in London on 1 August and been collected by the Colbert on the 6th. Slade closed down the system, reflecting that he would await with interest the report from the legendary Stephen Carpenter, whom he did not personally know.

  Glancing at his watch he saw it was six p.m. in London or one p.m. in the Caribbean. He spent an hour trying to raise Leigh-Travers on his mobile or his marine radio, but kept finding himself speaking to someone else. Finally, he gave up and went off to his rendezvous with Marina.

  On the 18th a shortish porter in the dust coat of the Colbert Institute walked through the front door of the House of Darcy and presented himself at the front desk. He bore a small oil painting in protective bubble wrap.

  ‘Morning, luv. Delivery from the Colbert as arranged.’

  The young woman behind the desk looked blank. The delivery man fished out a docket from his pocket and read from it.

  ‘Darcy storage number F 608,’ he read. Her face cleared. She had a number for the computer on the table behind her.

  ‘One moment,’ she said, turned and consulted the fount of all wisdom. The oracle explained matters to her. She saw that this item had left the store for examination at the Colbert on the authority of the absent director of British Modern and Victorian art. And now it was being returned. She rang for a porter of her own.

  Within minutes she had signed the Colbert man’s receipt form and the wrapped painting had been taken back to store.

  ‘If I spend any more time in that building,’ thought Trumpington Gore as he emerged onto the hot pavement, ‘I ought to start paying them rent.’

  On the 20th Professor Stephen Carpenter’s report arrived by recorded delivery at Peregrine Slade’s manor in Hampshire. He took delivery of it over a late breakfast after a pleasing swim in the pool. As he read it his eggs went cold and his coffee formed a film of skin. The letter said:

  ‘Dear Mr Slade, I am sure you will know by now that before he departed on holiday Alan Leigh-Travers asked me to have a look at a small oil painting purporting to be of the late-Victorian period and executed in this country.

  ‘I have to say that the task turned out to be most challenging and finally very exhilarating.

  ‘At first sight this picture, apparently titled The Game Bag, seemed to be of impressive ugliness and lack merit. A mere daub by a talentless amateur about a hundred years ago. It was the wooden panel on which it was painted that caught Alan’s attention and therefore it was to this that I turned my principal attention.

  ‘I removed the panel from its Victorian frame and studied it closely. It is undoubtedly of poplar wood and very old. Along its edges I discovered traces of ancient mastic or glue, indicating that it was probably a fragment panel, once part of a much bigger work such as an altarpiece from which it has been broken away.

  ‘I took a tiny sliver of wood from the rear of the panel and subjected it to tests for age and place of probable origin. You will know that dendrochronology cannot be used for poplar, since this tree, unlike oak, has no rings to denote the passing years. Nevertheless, modern science has a few other tricks up its sleeve.

  ‘I have been able to establish that this piece of wood is consistent with those used in Italy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Further examination under a spectromicroscope revealed tiny nicks and cuts left by the blade of the cross-saw used by the sawyer. One minuscule irregularity in the blade created marks identical to those found on other panels of the period and the place, again consistent with fifteenth-and sixteenth-century Italian work.

  ‘The Victorian painting of two dead partridge and a shotgun has beyond any doubt been painted over a much earlier work. I removed a tiny fragment of the oil, too small to detect with the naked eye, and established that the paint beneath is not oil but tempera.

  ‘Taking an even smaller piece of the tempera for further spectro-analysis, I found it revealed the exact combination of ingredients used by several of the Masters of the period. Finally I X-rayed the painting to see what lies beneath.

  ‘There is a tempera painting benea
th, and only the crude thickness of the paint applied by the anonymous Victorian vandal prevents greater clarity.

  ‘In the background is a rural landscape of the period mentioned, including several gentle hills and a campanile. The middle ground seems to have a road or track emerging from a shallow valley.

  ‘In the foreground is a single figure, evidently of the sort to be found in the Bible, staring straight at the viewer.

  ‘I am not able to give precise identification of the artist but you may have here a hidden masterpiece that comes straight from the time and place of Cimabue, Duccio or Giotto.

  ‘Yours sincerely, Stephen Carpenter.’

  Peregrine Slade sat transfixed, the letter lying on the table in front of him. Cimabue . . . Oh God. Duccio . . . Jesus wept. Giotto . . . bloody hellfire.

  The nervous tic by his left eye began to flicker again. He reached up a forefinger to stop the trembling. He wondered what he should do.

  He thought of two recent discoveries, both made (to his considerable frustration) by Sotheby’s. In an old armoire in a manor on the Suffolk coast one of their valuers had discovered just such a panel and had spotted the hand of a Master. It had turned out to be by Cimabue, rarest of them all, and had sold for millions.

  Even more recently another Sotheby’s man had been valuing the contents of Castle Howard. In a portfolio of overlooked and low-rated drawings he had spotted one of a grieving woman, head in hands, and had asked for more expert examinations to be carried out. The drawing, unsuspected for 300 years, turned out to be by Michelangelo. Asking price? £8,000,000. And now it seemed that he too had a priceless treasure masquerading as two dead partridge.

  Clearly another swindle with Reggie Fanshawe would never work. Getting rid of the very junior Benny Evans was one thing. Alan Leigh-Travers was quite another. The board would believe Alan, even though he might have no copy of the airport letter. Anyway, Fanshawe could never be used again. The art world was not that gullible.