The Hogarth Conspiracy

by Alex Connor

  “Why come here?” he asked as she walked back into the sitting room.

  In reply she put down her mug and went to him. Gently she touched his cheek. He shook her off, but she was undeterred. She touched his face again.

  “You have to go. You can’t be here.”

  But her hand stayed against his skin, her fingers tracing the outline of his features, and he remembered her. Every nuance, every scent, every suppressed longing. But he also remembered her stubbornness, her emotional greed.

  “Ingola,” he said, his voice wavering. “I can’t do this. You have to go.”

  She nodded, then shook her head, tears in her eyes.

  “No,” she said with a catch in her throat.

  “This is wrong. I know it, and so do you. Come on—you don’t want me anymore. You just think you do.”

  Her eyes took on a familiar look of determination, almost defiance. “I do want you. I’ve always wanted you.”

  “No—”

  “Yes.”

  “You have to go.”

  “I will,” she replied, kissing him, “I will … later.”

  They made love as though they knew they would be punished. Every moment was guilty, with Christian the decent, good phantom in the bed between them. But even as he wanted her gone, Victor clung to her, and Ingola fed off the heady mixture of desire and deceit that both of them had created. Created and failed to resist. And somewhere in between, both felt the aching realization of love lost and hope sacrificed.

  When Victor woke two hours later, she was gone.

  Fifteen

  LIZA FRITH WAS SITTING WITH HER LEGS CURLED UNDER HER, WEARING no makeup, her ash-blond hair hanging around her face. She looked unusually young—and very frightened—chewing the side of her index finger as she watched Mrs. Fleet. She knew that business would be brisk—it always was in the Park Street brothel—but she could hear no sounds from below. In the four-story house, the ground floor was used for the reception of the clients; the first floor housed lounges, and there were offices at the back. On the second floor were the sumptuous bedrooms—soundproofed and discreet—with a separate back exit on the landing. The top floor was off limits to everyone, a light, airy space converted into Mrs. Fleet’s private apartment.

  The third floor was for the girls. No men allowed. There were only four bedrooms because most of the fifteen employed girls were sent out to entertain clients in hotels, on trips abroad, or on private flights. Knowing that it was in the police’s interest to turn a blind eye to her activities, Mrs. Fleet had enough sense not to provoke the undue curiosity of her neighbors and kept the in-house business to a minimum.

  “Have you heard about Kit Wilkes?” she asked Liza, her tone remote. “He’s in the Friars Hospital—”

  “In a coma!” Liza blurted out. “He was on the plane with us! First Marian and now Kit Wilkes.”

  She sounded unnerved, but Mrs. Fleet remained cool, irritated that she should have to play nursemaid to an unstable whore. Determined that Liza shouldn’t find out about Bernie Freeland’s accident, she passed the girl a coffee and sat down. Accident? Like hell it was, she thought. Bernie Freeland had been killed. Calmly, Mrs. Fleet studied Liza Frith. The girl had always proved reliable and sweet-natured, with little temperament. Popular with the clients and sexually uninhibited even for a working girl,

  Liza had chosen to go into prostitution because she liked sex, a lazy life, and even lazier money. Intelligent enough to win a place at the University of Manchester, she had left after the second term and drifted into the outer periphery of Mrs. Fleet’s radar. A known party girl who loved clubbing, Liza had been recommended by a friend who had worked for Mrs. Fleet’s competitor in Argentina. Within a week she was ensconced at the Park Street premises.

  But if her employer had an instinct for talent, she also had an instinct about weakness. Mrs. Fleet was never a woman to succumb to a hard luck story or show generosity in supplying second chances; vulnerability resonated in her head like a bee humming against a locked window. And she could sense it now in Liza Frith.

  “I think you should stay here for a while, Liza,” she said simply. “Have a rest. Perhaps you’re tired.”

  “Marian’s dead, and Kit Wilkes is in the hospital!”

  And you don’t even know about Bernie Freeland yet, Mrs. Fleet thought. She would make sure that Liza remained in ignorance or she might react badly, even become indiscreet. And in a business run on discretion, any intimation of trouble—anything that took the client’s mind off pleasure—was bad for the profit margin.

  “Liza, don’t get yourself worked up,” Mrs. Fleet continued, staring at the girl calmly. “Accidents happen.”

  “Marian was murdered!” Liza snapped. “Her head was bashed in. What do the police think?”

  “That it was a client.”

  “No!” Liza said, shaking her head.

  “Someone left thirty pieces of silver with her.”

  “Meaning what?” Liza asked, her childish voice raised. “What’s that supposed to mean? Marian didn’t betray anyone—unless she told people what she overheard on the plane.”

  “Which was?”

  “I don’t know,” Liza said vehemently. “I couldn’t hear what was going on from where I was sitting. Annette was next to me, and we were talking, coming in to land. Bernie going off like that was a shock. I turned and saw him leaning down to Sir Oliver Peters, but I couldn’t hear what he said, just caught the name Hogarth; that was all.”

  Mrs. Fleet studied the girl closely. “Nothing else?”

  “No. Anyway, where is Annette?” Liza asked suddenly, glancing at her employer and wondering why she was so calm. Wasn’t it obvious that something was wrong, that the flight had been jinxed in some way? “When we last spoke, she said she was coming here.”

  “So she’ll come,” Mrs. Fleet replied, composed. She had not seen or heard from Annette Dvorski, but she wasn’t going to show concern. Not yet, anyway.

  “She wouldn’t have still gone, would she?”

  It was Mrs. Fleet’s turn to look surprised. “Gone where?”

  “To New York to meet up with Bernie Freeland. She was planning …” Liza felt herself turning pale. Jesus, why hadn’t she kept her mouth shut? She realized from the look on her employer’s face, her hard, narrowed eyes, that Mrs. Fleet hadn’t known about the assignation. “Maybe I got it wrong.”

  “Annette arranged to see Bernie Freeland?”

  Liza was stammering, trying to cover up.

  “I could have gotten the dates wrong.” Liza now mistook the woman’s fixed expression for anger. “Annette always gets her dates wrong,” she babbled.

  “Shut up!” Mrs. Fleet said, rising to her feet and looking down into the street below. At once the mastiff rose and padded over to her, sitting at her feet.

  At any other time the fact that Annette Dvorski had deceived her would have incensed Mrs. Fleet, but not this time. If the stupid girl had arranged a secret meeting with Bernie Freeland, she was going to get more than she bargained for. If she was on her way to New York, she would soon find out that her rendezvous was with a corpse.

  “You stay here at Park Street, Liza. Do you understand?”

  The girl nodded. “I can work.”

  Mrs. Fleet considered this awhile, then said, “No, not for the moment.” Perhaps it was better to keep Liza Frith under wraps, away from people and questions. “Just stay indoors.”

  “You think I’m in danger?”

  “I think you’re worried, and you’re no good to me in that state.”

  “Do the police know about the flight on Bernie Freeland’s jet?”

  “No,” Mrs. Fleet replied, her tone warning. “And you must not say anything.”

  “But—”

  “The flight is not to be mentioned. Forget it; it has nothing to do with Marian’s death. She died in the airport hotel. On her own. I don’t want you muddying the water.”

  When Liza left the room, Mrs. Fleet stared down
at Park Street, at winter trees bleak and bad-tempered against a blustering sky; early London rain had left the roads greasy. From her vantage point, she could see over the London rooftops toward the horizon, where watercolor clouds skittled after one another. Her mind ran over the facts. One of her working girls had been murdered; another was missing, apparently on her way across the Atlantic. And a third, without knowing even half the truth of her situation, was hiding at Park Street.

  Mrs. Fleet had grown up in the toughest area of Liverpool, accustomed to violence and intimidation. By hard graft and ruthlessness she had risen to the top of her game, and she liked her status. Not respectable but pretty nearly untouchable. No bailiffs coming to her door, no pimps either, no whores running with sores and willing to blow two men for the price of a drink. It took determination to get away from Scotland Road, a place where there were pubs on every corner and a hooker in every doorway.

  But she’d done it. Mrs. Fleet—once Charlene O’Dywer—had shed her accent, her name, and her morals to get to Park Street. To become rich and safe. And now a fucking painting was endangering everything. She had enjoyed her extended interlude of luxury and safety, but … She smiled to herself wryly, almost resigned. Perhaps she had always known it was too good to last. Perhaps she had even expected that one day trouble would come to her expensive door.

  But she was buggered if she was going to give in without a fight.

  Sixteen

  WALKING UP THE NARROW STAIRWELL OF THE TOWNHOUSE, VICTOR rang the bell marked “Thomas Harcourt” and waited to hear the lock being slid to open the door. He knew from past experience that Thomas—Tully to his friends—already would have checked on his caller through the peephole, but he had the grace to smile effusively as though surprised when he opened the door.

  “Victor, come in, come in,” he said, stepping back and allowing his visitor to enter the spacious, high-ceilinged drawing room that overlooked the Thames Embankment. The windows were almost the height of the room, and French doors led onto a balcony that spied on the river and let in the sound of traffic and pigeons.

  “Coffee?” Tully asked. His lofty figure moved over to the stove in the open-plan kitchen, where a pan of milk simmered on the stove. “I remember how you like it, milky and sweet.”

  There was no mention of Victor having been in prison, no surprise at the sudden reemergence of an old friend, just a genuinely affectionate welcome tempered with an old uncomfortable memory that neither of them would ever forget.

  Years earlier, Thomas Harcourt had been in the running with Ian McKellen, Daniel Day-Lewis, and Jeremy Irons to become one of the greatest English actors of his generation, formidable in the theater and mesmerizing on the screen. His tall, rangy frame, loose-limbed and supple, had allowed him to take on many of the great Shakespearean roles, and his voice, never strident, could become intimate for the screen. His indeterminate looks and mobility of expression allowed him to convince an audience that he was whatever the character called for: handsome, virtuous, heroic, predatory….

  Tully’s decline came not through any failure of his own but from the sudden and traumatic death of his wife. Returning to work a month after her suicide, he developed stage fright or—keen to make light of an affliction that was crippling him—life fright, as he explained it to interviewers. People believed it was due to grief, but it was not that Tully missed his wife; it was more that she obsessed him, her suicide a constant reproach, a subtle undermining of his confidence that rendered this most articulate of actors a mumbling tyro.

  Victor had never known his friend’s wife but had heard that she was jealous of his success. She had wanted a career as successful as her husband’s, but the public didn’t take to her, and her bitterness turned to resentment. Her suicide, although professed in her note to be an act of release for her husband, was in fact the opposite. From the moment she killed herself she never left him. On stage, on a film set, she was there, making gibberish of his lines or wiping his memory until there were no lines and no more work.

  “Two sugars, isn’t it?”

  Victor nodded and sat down. The apartment was in perfect order, the valuable Georgian commode in precisely the same place it had always been, as was a faded Hogarth print of His Servants and the luscious Gainsborough portrait hanging beside a vertiginous spiral staircase.

  But the sofa was showing signs of wear and tear, Tully’s trousers weren’t as expensive as they had been, and his slip-on shoes were scuffed at the toe.

  “Here you go.” He handed Victor his coffee and sat down next to him. “You look well. Older but good.”

  “You look the same.”

  “I am the same,” Tully replied, “and my work’s picking up. I do voiceovers now. Can’t forget your lines if they’re printed in big, bold letters in front of you, and the pay’s pretty good, especially if you do voice for feminine products. Tampax has been very good to me.” He laughed, the sound resonant. “I expected to see you when you got back to town.”

  Victor nodded. “I’ve got a job.”

  “Which side of the law?”

  “Which side d’you think?”

  “You had it coming, you know,” Tully went on, sipping his coffee. He set down his cup on the table next to him. “Too much, too young,” he said. “You’d have gotten away with it if you’d been your brother, but people resent charisma, Victor. They can’t forgive a person for having it.” He paused, “Charisma—everyone wants it, and everyone resents it if they haven’t got it. Poor soul, you couldn’t go on being lucky, rich, and well known—someone had to stop you.”

  The assumption that he was innocent pleased Victor.

  “You still know everything that’s going on in London, Tully?”

  “Everything. It passes for real life. I’m a willing recipient of news—from all kinds. But you know that, don’t you, Victor?”

  It was no secret that after his wife’s death and the demise of his career Tully Harcourt had dabbled in gambling. Mostly the horses, sometimes the dogs. Dabbled in drugs too, but not for long. As with sex, Tully heart wasn’t in it. But he craved the thrill of the bet, and the capital’s casinos welcomed him until his losses included a family Herring portrait and a Dutch still life.

  But Tully, nobody’s fool, came to his senses and sought alternative—and safer—ways to amuse himself. Having moved among the bookies at the tracks, he had made unlikely friends and been drawn to the peripheries of the London underworld. Mentally and morally adept, he had, however, picked his role and stuck to it. He was an observer no more. A sympathetic listener. The pastor of the dispossessed.

  “So,” Tully asked, “who are you working for?”

  “Charlene Fleet.”

  Tully’s shape-shifting face altered, his curiosity making him alert.

  “Mrs. Fleet of Park Street?”

  “The same.”

  “She runs whores.”

  “I know that.”

  “For the art world mostly. She’s cornered the market there, I believe.”

  Victor nodded. “Three days ago, one of her girls died. All this is in confidence, Tully.”

  “You didn’t have to say that.”

  “Marian Miller was murdered.”

  Tully drew a protracted breath. “Not the girl with the thirty pieces of Russian silver?”

  Victor raised his eyebrows. “I’m surprised that part’s come out.”

  “Not publicly, but I heard it on the grapevine. People always gossip about that kind of thing. They don’t much care about a call girl getting killed, but they like the salacious details. What were the coins supposed to mean?”

  “That her killer was a Russian?” Victor offered, smiling wryly. “God knows. But what isn’t common knowledge is that before she died, Marian Miller had been on board Bernie Freeland’s jet. There were also three other art dealers on that plane and two other call girls, as well as the pilot, the copilot, and two male crew members. One of the dealers was Kit Wilkes—”

  “Who’s in the
Friars Hospital.”

  “Yes, for the last three days. In a convenient coma.”

  Thoughtful, Tully moved over to the windows and closed them. Sliding the brass bolts, he drew the drapes against the early winter evening and flicked on a couple of lamps. At once the Gainsborough portrait was illuminated, the walking woman suddenly an eavesdropper, her head to one side, her parasol red as a skinned fish.

  “Why was the girl killed?”

  “Because she overheard something she shouldn’t have.” Concisely, Victor outlined what he knew of the Hogarth painting.

  Tully was intrigued. “You say there were two other dealers on the plane?”

  “Lim Chang and Sir Oliver Peters,” Victor replied. “I don’t know if they heard about the painting; I haven’t talked to them yet.”

  “And the two other girls?”

  “One’s staying with Mrs. Fleet in Park Place. The other’s still working.”

  Leaning back in his chair, Tully studied his visitor. He knew why Victor had come to him—not just to find out what the gossip was but because he could talk to Thomas Harcourt about the art world. Tully’s grandfather had run one of the most successful galleries in Paris, and Tully had inherited some valuable pieces. He was also knowledgeable enough to understand the implications of the rediscovered Hogarth painting.

  But there was more to it than that. Tully Harcourt owed Victor Ballam. He owed him a debt that could never be paid fully. A debt of honor, professional and personal, an unspoken debt that bound the two men together more tightly than a rope. Without tugging on that leash Victor knew Tully would be there for him. Without question Tully understood that the bond was unimpeachable, unbreakable. And for life.