Clean Break

by Val McDermid

  The cover-up campaign was a joint decision made by several police forces and the owners of the stately homes in question. Police did not want publicity because they were following up leads and did not want the thieves to know that they had realized one gang was behind the thefts.

  And the owners were reluctant to admit the jewels of their collections had gone missing in case public attendance figures at their homes dropped off as a result.

  Some owners have even resorted to hanging replicas of the missing masterpieces in a bid to fool the public.

  The latest victim of the audacious robbers is the owner of a Cheshire manor house. Police have refused to reveal his identity, but will only say that a nineteenthcentury French painting has been stolen.

  The cheeky thieves have adopted the techniques of the pair who caused outrage at the Lillehammer Olympics when they stole Edvard Munch’s The Scream.

  They break in through the nearest door or window, go straight to the one item they have selected and make their getaway. Often they are in the house or gallery for no more than a minute.

  A police source said last night, “There’s no doubt that we are dealing with professionals who may well steal to order. There are obviously a limited number of outlets for their loot, and we are making inquiries in the art world.”

  One of the robbed aristos, who was only prepared to talk anonymously, said, “It’s not just the heritage of this country that is at stake. It’s our businesses. We employ a lot of people and if the public stop coming because our most famous exhibits have gone, it will have repercussions.

  “We do our best to maintain tight security, but you can never keep the professional out.”

  There was some more whingeing in the same vein, but nothing startling. Call me nit-picking, but I’ve never understood how the art of several European cultures has come to be a key part of our British heritage, unless it symbolizes the brigand spirit that made the Empire great. That aside, I reckoned Alexis’s story would achieve what I hoped for. With a bit of luck, the nationals would pick the story up the next morning, and the jungle drums would start beating. Soon it would be time for a chat with my friend Dennis. If he ever decides to go completely straight, he could make a living as a journalist. I’ve never known anybody absorb or disseminate so much criminal intelligence. I’m just grateful some of it comes my way when I need it.

  For the time being, I headed back to the office, stopping to pick up a couple of pizzas on the way. I knew Shelley would be waiting behind the door with a pile of paperwork that would cause more concussion than a rolling pin. At least a pizza offering might reduce the aggro to a minimum.

  I was halfway through the painful process of signing checks when Josh arrived. I pretended astonishment. “Josh!” I exclaimed. “It’s between the hours of one and three and you’re not in a restaurant! What’s happened? Has the stock market collapsed?”

  His sharp blue eyes crinkled in the smile that he’s practiced to maximize his resemblance to Robert Redford. Frankly, I’m surprised the light brown hair hasn’t been bleached to perfect it, since Josh is a man whose energies are devoted to only two things—making lots of money and women. His track record with the latter is dismal; luckily he’s a lot more successful with the former, which is how he’s ended up as the senior partner of one of the city’s most successful master brokerages. Shelley developed a theory about Josh and women after she did her A level psychology. She reckons that behind the confident façade there lurks a well of low self-esteem. So when it comes to women, his subconscious decides that any woman with half a brain and a shred of personality wouldn’t spend more than five minutes with him. The logical extension of that is that any woman who sticks around for more than six weeks must by definition be a boring bimbo, and thus he shouldn’t be seen dead with her.

  Me, I think he just likes having fun. He swears he plans to retire when he turns forty, and that’s early enough to think about settling down. I like him because he’s always treated me as an equal, never as a potential conquest. I’m glad about that; I’d hate to lose my fast track into the bowels of the financial world. Believe me, the Nikkei Index doesn’t burp without Josh knowing exactly what it had for dinner.

  Josh flicked an imaginary speck of dust off one of the clients’ chairs and sat down, crossing his elegantly suited legs. “Things are changing in the big bad world of money, you know,” he said. “The days of the three-hour lunch are over. Except when it’s you that’s buying, of course.” He tossed a file on to my desk.

  “You’ve stopped doing lunch?” I waited for the world to stop turning.

  “Today, I had a Marks and Spencer prawn sandwich in the office of one of my principal clients. Washed down with a rather piquant sparkling mineral water from the Welsh valleys. An interesting diversification from coal mining, don’t you think?”

  I picked up the file. “Kerrchem?”

  “The same. Want the gossip since I’m here?”

  I gave him my best suspicious frown. “Is this going to cost me?”

  He pouted. “Maybe an extra glass of XO?”

  “It’s worth it,” I decided. “Tell me about it.”

  “OK. Kerrchem is a family firm. Started in 1934 by Josiah Kerr, the grandfather of the present chairman, chief executive and managing director Trevor Kerr. They made soap. They were no Lever Brothers, though they’ve always provided a reasonable living for the family. Trevor’s father Hartley was a clever chap, by all accounts, had a chemistry degree, and he made certain they spent enough on R & D to keep ahead of the game. He moved them into the industrial cleaning market.” All this off the top of his head. One of the secrets of Josh’s success is a virtually photographic memory for facts and figures. Figures of the balance sheet variety, that is.

  “Hartley Kerr was an only child,” he continued. “He had three kids: Trevor, Margaret and Elizabeth. Trevor, although the youngest, owns forty-nine percent of the shares, Margaret and Elizabeth own twenty percent each. The remaining eleven percent

  “I suppose that rules out an insurance job, then. Is everybody in the family happy with Trevor’s stewardship? No young bucks snapping at his heels?”

  Josh shook his head. “That’s not the word on the exchange floor. The old lady only votes against Trevor because she thinks he’s not a patch on his old man and she wants to make a point. And the nephews have all learned the business from the bottom up, but they’re climbing the greasy pole at an impressive rate. So, no, that kite won’t fly, Kate.” He glanced at a watch so slim it looked anorexic and uncrossed his legs.

  “You’re a star, Josh. I owe you a meal.”

  “Fix up a date with Julia, would you? I don’t have my diary with me.” He stood up and I came round the desk to swap kisses on both cheeks. I watched five hundred pounds’ worth of immaculate tailoring walk out the door. Not even that amount of dosh to spend on clothes could make me spend my days talking about pension funds and unit trusts.

  On the other hand, all it took to get me salivating at the thought of an evening’s conversation about insurance was a profile from an ancient carving. Maybe I wasn’t such a smart cookie after all.

  Chapter 6

  I’d almost forgotten there are restaurants that don’t serve dim sum. For as long as I’ve known Richard, he’s maintained that if you don’t use chopsticks on it, it ain’t food. And Josh has recently taken to extracting his payment in kind in Manchester’s clutch of excellent Thai restaurants. I’m not sure if that’s down to the food or the subservient waitresses. Either way, I’d entirely lost touch with anything that didn’t come out of a wok. Which made Michael Haroun a refreshing change in more ways than one.

  He’d arrived promptly at twenty-nine minutes past seven. I’d grown so used to Richard’s flexible idea of time that I was still applying eye pencil when the doorbell rang. I nearly poked my eye out in shock, and had to answer the door with a tissue covering the damage. Eat your heart out, Cindy Crawford. Michael lounged against the door frame, looking drop-dead gorge
ous in blue jeans, navy silk blouson and an off-white collarless linen shirt that sure as hell hadn’t come from Marks and Spencer. My stomach churned, and I don’t think it was hunger. “Long John Silver, I presume,” he said.

  “Watch it, or I’ll set the parrot on you,” I replied, stepping back and waving him in.

  He shrugged away from the door and followed me down the hall. I gestured towards the living room and said, “Give me a minute.”

  Back in the bathroom, I repaired the damage and surveyed myself in the full-length mirror. Navy linen trousers, russet knitted silk T-shirt, navy silk tweed jacket. I looked like I’d taken a bit of trouble, without actually departing from the businesslike image. Michael wasn’t to know this was my newest, smartest outfit.

  I rubbed a smudge of gel over my fingers and thrust them through my hair, which I’d kept fairly short since I was shorn without consultation earlier in the year. My right eye still looked a bit red, but this was as good as it was going to get. A quick squirt of Richard’s Eternity by Calvin Klein and I was ready.

  I walked down the hall and stood in the doorway. Michael obviously hadn’t heard me. He was deep in a computer gaming magazine. Bonus points for the boy. I cleared my throat. “Ready when you are,” I said.

  He looked up and smiled appreciatively. “I don’t want to sound disablist,” he said, “but I have to admit I prefer the two-eyed look.” He closed the magazine and stood up. “Shall we go?”

  He drove a top-of-the-range Citroën. “Company car?” I asked, looking forward to the prospect of being driven for a change.

  “Yeah, but they let me choose. I’ve always had a soft spot for Citroën. I think the DS was one of the most beautiful cars ever built,” he said as he did a neat three-point turn to get out of the parking area outside my bungalow. “My father always used to drive one.”

  That told me Michael Haroun hadn’t grown up on a council estate with the arse hanging out of his trousers. “Lucky you,” I said with feeling. “My dad works for Rover, so my childhood was spent in the back of a Mini. That’s how I ended up only five foot three. The British equivalent of binding the feet.”

  Michael laughed as he hit a button on the CD player and Bonnie Raitt filled the car. Richard would have giggled helplessly at something so middle of the road. Me, I was just glad of something that didn’t feature crashing guitars or that insistent zippy beat that sounds just like a fly hitting an incinerator. We turned out of the small “single professionals” development where I live and into the council estate. To my surprise, instead of heading down Upper Brook Street towards town, he turned left. As we headed down Stockport Road, my heart sank. I prayed this wasn’t going to be one of those twenty-mile drives to some pretentious bistro in the

  “You into computer games, then?” I asked. Time to check out just how much I had in common with this breathtaking profile.

  “I have a 486 multi-media system in my spare room. Does that answer the question?”

  “It’s not what you’ve got, it’s what you do with it that counts,” I replied. As soon as I’d spoken, I wished I was on a five-second delay loop, like radio phone-ins.

  He grinned and listed his current favorites. We were still arguing the relative merits of submarine simulations when he pulled up outside a snooker supplies shop in an unpromising part of Stockport Road. A short walk down the pavement brought us to That Café, an unpretentious restaurant done out in Thirties style. I’d heard plenty of good reports about it, but I’d never quite made it across the door before. The locale had put me off for one thing. Call me fussy, but I like to be sure that my car’s still going to be waiting for me after I’ve finished dinner.

  The interior looked like flea market meets Irish country pub, but the menu had me salivating. The waitress, dressed in jeans, a Deacon Blue T-shirt, big fuck-off Doc Marten boots and a long white French waiter’s apron, showed us to a quiet corner table next to a blazing fire. OK, they only had one vodka, but at least it wasn’t some locally distilled garbage with a phony Russian name.

  As our starters arrived, I said ruefully, “I wish finding Henry Naismith’s Monet was as easy as a computer game.”

  “Yeah. At least with games, there’s always a bulletin board you can access for hints. I suppose you’re out on your own with this,” Michael said.

  “Not entirely on my own,” I corrected him. “I do have one or two contacts.”

  He swallowed his mouthful of food and looked slightly pained. “Is that why you agreed to have dinner with me?” he asked.

  “Only partly.”

  “What was the other part?” he asked, obviously fishing.

  “I enjoy a good scoff, and I like interesting conversation with it.”

  “And you thought I’d be an interesting conversationalist, did you?”

  “Bound to be,” I said sweetly. “You’re an insurance man, and right now insurance claims are one of my principal interests.”

  We ate in silence for a few moments, then he said, “I take it you were behind the story in the Chronicle?”

  I shrugged. “I like to stir the pot. That way, the scum rises to the surface.”

  “You certainly stirred things around our office,” Michael said drily.

  “The people have a right to know,” I said, self-righteously quoting Alexis.

  “Cheers,” Michael said, clinking his glass against mine. “Here’s to a profitable relationship.”

  “Oh, you mean Fortissimus are going to hire Mortensen and Brannigan?” I asked innocently.

  He grinned again. “I think I’ll pass on that one. I simply meant that with luck, you might track down Henry Naismith’s Monet.”

  “Speaking of which,” I said, “I spoke to Henry this afternoon. He says your assessor was there this afternoon.”

  “That’s right,” Michael said cagily.

  “Henry says your man put a very interesting suggestion to him. Purely in confidence. Now, would that be the kind of confidence you’re already privy to?”

  Michael carefully placed his fork and knife together on the plate and mopped his lips with the napkin. “It might be,” he said cautiously. “But if it were, I wouldn’t be inclined to discuss it with someone who has a hotline to the front page of the Chronicle.”

  “Not even if I promised it would go no further?”

  “You expect me to believe that after today’s performance?” he demanded.

  I smiled. “There’s a crucial difference. I was acting in my client’s best interests by setting the cat among the pigeons with Alexis’s story. I didn’t breach my client’s confidentiality, and I didn’t tell Alexis anything that wasn’t already in the public domain. She just

  The arrival of the waitress gave him a moment’s breathing space. She removed the debris. “So this would be strictly off the record?”

  “Information only,” I agreed.

  The waitress returned with a cheerful smile and two huge plates. I stared down at mine, where enough rabbit to account for half the population of Watership Down sat in a pool of creamy sauce. “Nouvelle cuisine obviously passed this place by,” I said faintly.

  “I suspect we Mancunians are too canny to pay half a week’s wages for a sliver of meat surrounded by three baby carrots, two mangetouts, one baby sweetcorn and an artistically carved radish,” he said wryly.

  “And is it that Mancunian canniness that underlies your assessor’s underhand suggestion?” I asked innocently.

  “Nothing regional about it,” Michael said. “You have to have a degree in bloody-minded caution before you get the job.”

  “So you think it’s OK to ask your clients to hang fakes on the wall?”

  “It’s a very effective safety precaution,” he said carefully.

  “That’s what your assessor told Henry. He said you’d be prepared not to increase his premium by the equivalent of the gross national product of a small African nation if he had copies made of his remaining masterpieces and hung them on the walls instead of the real thing,” I sai
d conversationally.

  “That’s about the size of it,” Michael admitted. At least he had the decency to look uncomfortable about it.

  “And is this a general policy these days?”

  Slicing up his vegetables gave Michael an excuse for not meeting my eyes. “Quite a few of our clients have opted for it as a solution to their security problems,” he said. “It makes sense, Kate. We agreed this morning that there isn’t a security system that can’t be breached. If having a guard physically on site twentyfour hours a day isn’t practical because of the expense or because the policyholder doesn’t want that sort of presence in

  “It’s not just about money, though,” I protested. “It’s like Henry says. He knows those paintings. He’s lived with them most of his life. You get a buzz from the real thing that a fake just doesn’t provide.”

  “Not one member of the public has noticed the substitutions,” Michael said.

  “Maybe not so far,” I conceded. “But according to my understanding, the trouble with fakes is that they don’t stand the test of time.” Thanking Shelley silently for my art tutorial that afternoon, I launched myself into my spiel. “Look at Van Meegeren’s fake Vermeers. At the time, all the experts were convinced they were the real thing. But you look at them now, and they wouldn’t even fool a philistine like me. The difference between schneid and kosher is that fakes date, but the really great paintings don’t. They’re timeless.”

  He frowned. “Even if you’re right, which I don’t concede for a moment, that’s not a bridge that our clients will have to cross for a long time yet.”