Randon knew what he would see when he turned the page. It was the face of his angel. Gina Busiri. A prostitute from London. Twenty-two years old when she died. Beside her a French girl, Odette. Dark-haired, dark-eyed. Could have been Gina’s sister. In the photograph, Odette was wearing a heart-shaped locket.
For a short while, Randon tried to convince himself that it was coincidence. He must have heard about the murders of these girls before he’d gone into his coma. His doctor had warned him that real memories could and would get mixed up with things he had seen on television or read. It happened often. Sometimes people recovering from a head injury would start to talk about past lives in incredibly convincing detail, only to discover that their former life as an Egyptian princess was actually based on a diorama they’d seen on a childhood visit to a museum. But the mementoes from the inro suggested that Randon’s memories were very real. It was practically impossible that Axel Delaflote could have gained access to Randon’s erotic collection and hidden the jewelry and hair in the little Japanese box. There really was only one good explanation.
And lately, in the past few days, the “visions” had been getting clearer. And now he knew that the house by the river was not where he should set his retreat but a place he had once hired for the weekend to host a grand party for the launch of a new clothing line. The girl had been at the party. Randon had asked Axel Delaflote to arrange for several girls to be brought out to the country from Paris. And this was the one that Randon had chosen for himself. He had fucked her in a boathouse at the bottom of the house’s sweeping lawn, taking her from behind so that he didn’t have to look at her eyes. And then he had ended her life. He’d rolled her body into the water and said nothing more about it. No one had asked. The party had been full of people who shouldn’t have been there, doing things that could have sent them to jail. Randon had learned early in his career that encouraging people to act upon their basest desires could buy their complicity. Providing a busload of prostitutes and enough drugs to kill a horse guaranteed it.
Randon shuddered as he thought of that girl. Her family. He had taken her life as easily as he had given Bellette a job. He had assumed she didn’t matter, but she must have mattered to someone. It had all been a game to him. A compulsion he’d given in to like some people give in to an extra cookie. He must have known that no one would come looking for him. They wouldn’t dare. Even if he had been a suspect, Randon held too many secrets of powerful men.
It crossed Randon’s mind that he himself might have set Axel up to take the fall. Whatever the real story was, an innocent man was in prison and Randon held the key to his escape.
But God’s instructions were not forthcoming in as clear a fashion as Randon had hoped for.
Obviously, no one was looking for him with regard to the deaths of those women. The police had long since put their suspect in jail. As far as they were concerned, the case was closed. They wouldn’t be in any hurry to reopen it. Apart from Carrie Klein, no one knew about the mementoes inside the inro. There was no reason why Carrie should start to question their origin. Gina and Odette were long dead, and so was their story.
And Randon knew what would happen if he gave himself up. With two murders, possibly three, to confess to, he would go straight into custody. That was okay. It was right and proper. His due. His penance. But Randon had so much work to do before he could let that happen. If he went to prison now, his dream of building a church fit to glorify God would be over. His property would be impounded. His bank accounts frozen. First he had to find the land he needed and hand the money over to a serious group of believers who could complete his mission.
“I am sorry, Monsieur Delaflote,” he said to the young man in the photograph. “It seems you must have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. I will get you out of your predicament, but first, God’s work is to be done.”
Randon took the file containing cuttings regarding Axel Delaflote with him back to his apartment. There he put the file inside the safety box with Gina’s glossy hair and Odette’s necklace and locked the box with the combination that only he knew. He crossed himself as he heard the bolts slide into place.
“Forgive me,” he prayed. To God. To the girls.
CHAPTER 63
In the run-up to the sale of The Virgin, the staff in the Old Masters department at Ludbrook’s were working flat-out, liaising with potential buyers and arranging last-minute private viewings for the kind of people who had shopping lists that read: Chelsea mansion, football team, priceless Renaissance painting. People flew in from all over the world to look at the most extraordinary painting to be offered for sale in a century. One Russian tried to stop the painting from going to auction at all, by offering a million over the high estimate if he could take the picture away with him right then.
The day before the sale, Carrie Klein decided she had to see The Virgin one more time. She slipped into the Ludbrook’s gallery unnoticed, wearing a pair of big dark glasses and a Ferragamo scarf over her hair. It was a rudimentary but effective disguise.
The painting was torturing her. It haunted her waking hours and her dreams. Nat Wilde was gaining so much publicity for its upcoming sale. It drove her nuts to see him quoted in all the papers. Especially since the attention could all have been on her. She wanted to reassure herself that she had made the right choice in telling its owner that she couldn’t agree with its attribution. There was something not quite right about it.
If the painting were real, however, that would be equally tragic. The estimated price for this painting would almost certainly mean that it would end up in the hands of a private collector and be lost from public view for decades. A number of museum curators had expressed their interest, but none had the means to save the painting for their nation. None at all. The annual acquisition budget of all the museums combined would not stretch to the amount of money Ludbrook’s hoped to bring in with this single sale.
Carrie positioned herself in front of the painting. It was late in the day, and she found herself alone—free to take a really good look, and she did. That little voice was with her again. Instinct.
There was something very modern about the way the woman looked. Knowing. An artist who understood the female heart had executed this painting, Carrie decided. Ricasoli was not known for his well-developed feminine side. She wondered why she hadn’t noticed it when she’d first seen the photographs of the newly rediscovered work. It seemed so obvious now. It was almost as though this were a different painting from the one she’d seen on the news a couple of weeks before.
“What’s your secret?” Carrie asked the girl in the picture. “Who are you? What are you doing here?”
“Good question,” said a voice behind her. “What are you doing here?”
Carrie turned to find Nat Wilde behind her.
“I’m looking at your painting. It’s on public view, isn’t it?”
“Not for much longer,” said Nat, echoing Carrie’s earlier thoughts. He too knew that this painting would disappear into a private collection. They were quiet for a moment, both contemplating this work of art.
“Anyway, congratulations,” said Carrie. “It’s quite an honor to be asked to sell something so amazing.”
Nat shrugged as though it were an everyday occasion at Ludbrook’s.
“I do hope you’re not too disappointed to have missed out,” he said. “The owner wanted experience, I suppose.”
Carrie looked down so that he wouldn’t see her smile. He obviously didn’t know she’d had first refusal.
“You know,” he said then, “I do believe that this is the first time you and I have found ourselves properly alone since that rather lovely evening at Claridge’s.”
Carrie pursed her lips. “Is it really?”
“I think of it often,” he told her. “I suppose I should feel honored that you chose to sleep with me one more time before you set about trying to muscle in on my patch.”
Carrie shook her head. “I don’t particularly
want to think about it,” she said.
“I have wanted to tell you ever since how amazed and delighted I was to discover that the mousy little Carrie Klein who worked for me all those years ago turned into such a beauty.”
“Save your flattery,” said Carrie.
“Why? I’m feeling particularly generous tonight.”
“That’s a first.”
“Well, I have reason. You have to admit that it’s going to be a long time before you’re able to match tomorrow’s sale. Maybe you never will. Maybe you will just have to give up and head back to NYC with your tail between your legs. Leave London to the big boys …”
Carrie snorted.
“But while we’re alone, I have to ask the obvious question. Why did you do it, Carrie? Until that night, I thought that I must have been your sworn enemy for having taken your virginity under false pretenses. Though I still maintain that had you asked if I was married, I would have told you.”
“That’s kind.”
“Why, after all those years, did you come back to give me a second bite at the cherry, as it were?”
Carrie knew what Nat wanted to hear. He wanted to hear that he had been on her mind constantly since that dreadful day back in 1990 and that she had spent many sleepless nights since then dreaming of what might have been. She tilted her head to one side and let her eyes drift lazily over his face. The gray eyes, the well-shaped lips, the square jaw. In two decades he had hardly changed at all. He would be considered attractive in any era, in any part of the world. She decided she could be forgiven for having wanted to taste that mouth just one more time. To have wanted to prove to herself that he had wanted her too.
Bored of her hesitation, even if she had filled it with a long admiring look at him, Nat raised his hand. “It’s okay. You don’t have to tell me if you’d find it embarrassing.”
“Not at all,” said Carrie. “I’m more than happy to let you know what was going through my mind. Why don’t you let me whisper it? I’d hate for your security guards to be eavesdropping on my big admission.”
With his hands in his pockets, Nat leaned forward obligingly. Such intimacy. She would say something flattering, of course.
Carrie whispered, “I think I wanted to know if my first fuck with you was my worst fuck ever because I was a virgin, or simply because you’re a selfish, clumsy lover. And I’m afraid to report that it’s the latter.”
Nat’s mouth dropped open.
“Good night.”
Carrie turned and left, leaving Nat gaping after her. She knew she’d struck a low blow and it was a small victory, but it felt like a good one.
CHAPTER 64
Nat had to recover from Carrie’s blow to his ego pretty quickly. After all, he had bigger fish to fry.
The sale of Ricasoli’s virgin had been dubbed the “sale of the century.” Nat Wilde was interviewed about the painting for several news channels. “Undoubtedly,” he told the pretty blond from Sky News, “this is one of the most important paintings to be sold through Ludbrook’s since the auction house held its very first sale in 1708.”
The painting had drawn huge crowds (though not quite as big as the crowds that had been drawn by Mathieu Randon’s museum-quality smut). Soon the other paintings in the sale started to seem like nothing more than garnishes to the main dish, though there were at least five other works that would break though the ten-million barrier if they had been priced correctly.
Adrenaline was high throughout the building as the day of reckoning drew near. Nat Wilde felt like a rock star as his colleagues buzzed around him, all of them sure that he was going to turn in the performance of his life.
Two days before the sale, Nat had handed his lucky tie to Sarah Jane and instructed her to try to do something about the gravy stains upon it.
“Should I take it to the dry cleaner?” she asked.
“Absolutely not.” Nat was horrified. “They might lose it. Just dab something on it. Make it look reasonable. You know what to do. You’re a clever girl.”
Sarah Jane said she would do her best. Then she went straight to Lizzy to ask what she thought should be done.
“I don’t know.” Lizzy shrugged, and was glad that since she was no longer Nat’s office concubine she no longer had to care.
Sarah Jane walked away from Lizzy’s desk looking so nervous, you might have thought she had been asked to sponge clean a Caravaggio (a request that was made of most new recruits to the department as a joke).
“Don’t worry about it,” Lizzy called after her. “Though your entire future at Ludbrook’s depends on it.”
Of course Sarah Jane’s attempts to clean Nat’s lucky tie ended in disaster. Having spent the best part of the afternoon online, Googling stain removal solutions, she had finally decided on a mixture of hand-wash liquid soap and cold water. In theory, it should have been fine. In practice, even though Sarah Jane applied the solution with a gentle hand and dried the tie flat between two sheets of plain white blotting paper pinched from Nat’s desk, it didn’t work at all. The stains were gone but in their place were several lightened patches that were somehow more noticeable and looked far worse than the original marks.
“It’s a disaster,” Sarah Jane was crying as she brought the tie back into the fine art office.
“It’s only a tie,” said Marcus.
“Only a tie?” echoed Lizzy, hamming things up. “That is the tie that Nat has worn for every single auction he’s conducted since 1989. Without that tie, Nat is like a warrior going into battle without his armor.”
“He’s like Luke Skywalker without his light saber,” suggested Olivia.
“He’s like Harry Potter without a wand,” Lizzy continued. “He’s … he’s … he’s nothing.”
“You’re not helping,” said Sarah Jane.
“I’m not trying to,” Lizzy assured her. It felt good. Though Lizzy felt less good when she realized that Nat was “comforting” Sarah Jane in the way he used to “discipline” her behind the closed door of his office when he thought that no one was listening. Sarah Jane emerged after fifteen minutes looking flushed and happy. “He says he’ll wear it anyway,” she said, and smiled. “He knows I did my best.”
But Nat did not wear the tie. For the first time ever he looked at the Hermès bunny rabbits and felt something approaching revulsion. At last the scales had fallen from his eyes. His beautiful tie had become nothing but a ratty piece of cloth. It was so horribly frayed and filthy, it ought to have been consigned to the dustbin a long, long time before. The tie was twenty-eight years old. There were staff in his department who had not been born when Nat first wore those bloody rabbits. Nat was keeping the damn thing for sentimental reasons only, and there was absolutely no reason why he should be so sentimental. He was a grown man. He was one of the best auctioneers in the business—in the history of the business—because he had worked hard and had a natural talent. His success did not reside in his bloody tie, and that night Nat was determined to prove it.
In the top drawer of Nat’s desk was another tie. Like his lucky tie, it was from Hermès. It had been a birthday gift from Sarah Jane. It was red with a pattern of pale blue monkeys, which really shouldn’t have worked. However, as with all Hermès ties, it did. Nat had yet to wear it, though Sarah Jane had worn it, and nothing else, in the Polaroid picture that she’d slipped into the box as a birthday card.
With the very happy image of Sarah Jane in that photo in mind, Nat tied his new tie around the collar of a blue and white striped shirt. It was the perfect combination. He slipped on his beautifully cut jacket and stepped out into the main office of the fine art department. A hush fell over his team as they regarded him. They knew at once that something was wrong, though it took a couple of seconds for them to work out exactly what. Sarah Jane was the first to realize because, of course, she recognized her gift around her beloved’s neck.
“You’re wearing—” she began.
“You’re not wearing your lucky tie!” Marcus interrupted.
He looked panicked. Almost distraught. “Where is it? What’s going on? For heaven’s sake, Nat! This is the most important night of the year!”
“Calm down,” said Nat. “It’s really no big deal. The success of this department can’t really be down to a scrap of silk, can it?”
The boys in particular looked unsure. James had been using the same pair of lucky boxer shorts every time he’d played an important amateur football match since his late teens.
“Of course it can’t,” Nat continued. “The amazing success of this department is all down to the talent and dedication of its individual team members. I promise you that just because I am not wearing the bunny rabbits, I will not forget how to do my job. I will get up on that stage and sell the hell out of our paintings. And who knows,” he added, with a wink at Sarah Jane, “this tie may turn out to be even luckier than the old one.”
Sarah Jane led the others in a round of applause. Lizzy joined in halfheartedly.
Nat calmed them down by raising his hands like a priest blessing his flock.
“Come on, then, girls and boy. Let’s sell the fuck out of that painting.”
CHAPTER 65
It was time for the show to begin. Downstairs, the lobby and the auction room were already filling up with people keen to know how far Nat Wilde could take The Virgin. This wasn’t just an auction. It was an occasion. The patrons had really made an effort and dressed up to be there. There was a full contingent from the press.
Photographers lined the road outside the Ludbrook’s building, hoping to catch a snap of someone notable heading for the sale. Soon the scene on New Bond Street was more like the run-up to a film premiere than an art auction. Limousines and gleaming classic cars disgorged famous faces by the dozen. Oligarchs with their entourages. Actors and politicians eager to prove they were in the cultural loop, even if they didn’t have a hope in hell of affording what was on sale that night.
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