“How much do you know about art theft?”
“Well, on top of what Edward mentioned this morning,” I started cheerfully, “absolutely nothing,” I finished. “Ok, that’s not entirely true. I know that the Mona Lisa was stolen back in the early 1900s and then they found it again a few years later. An Italian guy had taken it. That’s really it though.”
Violet nodded. “You know as much as the average amateur, then. The secret is that art is notoriously simple to steal.”
“Really? They make it look so hard in the movies.”
“The reality is that apart from a few major museums—and even then security can be very lacklustre—most major artworks are displayed in small galleries that do not nearly have the budget required to adequately secure a painting. And once a painting is stolen, it is actually quite rare for it to be recovered. Since we are talking about The Milkmaid, which is a Vermeer, there was a Vermeer stolen in 1990 worth around one hundred and fifty million pounds, called The Concert. It has never been recovered.”
“Wow, that’s incredible,” I said, astounded.
“Yes. The painting, along with twelve others stolen on the same night, were taken from the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum in Boston. It is the perfect example of a museum of a personal collection which was plundered. In total the thieves managed to steal four hundred million pounds worth of art by dressing as policemen and breaking into the museum at night.”
“And none of it was ever recovered?”
“No,” Violet shook her head. “Your FBI continue to investigate.”
“So it sounds like art theft is a pretty lucrative business, where’s the problem?” I asked. “The Milkmaid would surely be worth one hundred million pounds, wouldn’t it?”
Violet nodded. “Yes, it would. But the problem with art theft is that stolen goods are essentially worthless. Hot paintings are worth perhaps ten percent of their market value. In fact, the main value from a stolen painting is to essentially bribe the company that has insured it. Say you steal a painting worth and insured for fifty million pounds. You could sell it for maybe five million pounds, if you are lucky. However, you can go to the insurance company, and offer them the painting in exchange for ten million pounds. That way, they do not have to pay out the full fifty million.”
“Seriously? That actually works?” I asked, incredulous. Violet nodded.
“Yes. But that is why something here does not make sense. Even if we assume that The Milkmaid is worth one hundred million pounds—keeping in mind that estimate may be very high, as the last Vermeer to sell at auction sold for sixteen million pounds—ten percent of the value is only ten million pounds. Which is what Lin Wei offered me in exchange for its recovery. He would never have offered me the full value of the painting to him, but his plan could not have been to bribe the insurance company either, as he was planning to smuggle it out of the country. And that is what is bothering me.”
“What if he’s simply found a buyer in China or Taiwan willing to pay more than the painting’s value?” I asked, but Violet shook her head.
“No. The people in China who have the money to spend on stolen masterpieces are not the type of people who would allow themselves to be—how do you say—ripped off.”
“So basically the Triads are hiding something, and you don’t know what.”
“Exactement. However, I do not think they are responsible for the deaths. Lin Wei is right, he had no reason to have them killed. They were an asset to him, and their deaths will likely interrupt his smuggling business until he finds a new, safe way to move stolen paintings.”
“This case is so much more complicated than I expected,” I complained as the taxi pulled up to the curb in front of Violet’s house.
“I told you it would be interesting,” she replied with a smile.
Chapter 11
Violet told me she needed some time to think about the case, and I made my way back into the apartment. After playing with Biscuit for about half an hour, I pulled up my iPad and decided to see how well I could play detective myself. I was going to find out for Linda whether or not she was right about Aaron Stone not having any siblings.
I decided that the first thing to do was what Violet always did: check out his social media accounts. I opened up Facebook and typed “Aaron Stone” into the search bar. Since I’d already done the search before, I knew what profile to look for. I got a better look at Aaron Stone’s profile on my iPad than on my phone: he did look quite a bit like Channing Tatum. He had the same squinty eyes and pouty mouth, along with brown hair that was admittedly a little bit longer than Channing Tatum usually had it, but it was close enough.
I clicked on his profile, and to my dismay, almost everything was private.
“Of course this always works for Violet,” I muttered to myself while Biscuit climbed up on my lap and began to purr. Apparently he was jealous of the iPad getting more attention than he was. I stroked him gently while looking at the few posts that were public. Aaron Stone had shared a post about how men could help with feminism by calling out their friends when they made misogynist comments in public. He had signed a petition calling for tougher penalties on people breaking the fox hunting ban in England. He had updated his profile and cover photo a few times; one showed him skiing in the Alps somewhere, another was a picture taken of a lake somewhere. While it seemed like he was a decent guy, none of this gave me any actual insight into his life or, more importantly, as to whether he had any siblings.
Luckily for me, however, I did notice that one of the pictures he had set to public he had uploaded from Instagram. I clicked the link and was taken to his Instagram page, which thankfully wasn’t set to private. Maybe here I could glean a little bit more information.
Sadly, though, I wasn’t able to find much about him. It seemed Aaron Stone was the type to post one picture every few months, with a few hashtags and not much more. It did seem that Aaron Stone was a fan of food—or more specifically, desserts. Almost every picture he posted was of a different batch of cookies he had made, or cakes he’d bought, or macaroons he’d been given as a gift. He also didn’t garner a lot of likes or comments. There were one or two other men who commented on his photos regularly, but clicking on their profiles showed that they were obviously not related to Aaron. One of them, Anthony Myers, was black, and the other, Joseph Han, was born and raised in Korea, apparently. By the time I was finished scanning through his pictures I was none the wiser as to his family history, but my stomach was growling and craving something sweet.
As I looked out the window, however, I noticed that the clouds were rolling in and threatening to open up and unleash a torrent on London. Like a true San Francisco girl, I was so not used to walking in the rain like Londoners, so I decided I’d make do with whatever was in my kitchen.
Luckily, my passion for pancakes meant I had everything I needed to make chocolate chip cookies in the cupboards already, so I began making those, thinking about how good it was to feel like actually making something again.
After I had been hit by the car back in San Francisco, it turned out that my mental injuries took a lot longer to heal than the physical ones. While I still had a scar on my leg, and a slight limp most of the time, after the accident I fell into a deep depression. Moving to London was an attempt to change my environment and force myself to get over the fact that I was never going to be a surgeon, and get back into life.
It had worked with mixed results; when I had worked with Violet on her last case, I found myself with more energy, and actually going outside, which was a marked improvement on my life in San Francisco. However, when the case had ended, I quickly found myself turning back to old comforts, and occasionally being hit with the depressive stage of lying in bed, being completely unable to move.
Biscuit helped, of course. Having another mouth to feed forced me out of bed quite a few times when I otherwise would have stayed in, and having to walk him made me go outside. But one thing was certain: whenever I followed Violet
around on one of her cases, I definitely felt a lot more active, and I almost felt like my old self again.
When I wasn’t afraid for my life, anyway.
Mixing the ingredients together in the bowl was relaxing—trying to stop Biscuit from “helping” without touching his fur with my food-covered hands was less so—and forty minutes later I triumphantly looked at two dozen chocolate chip cookies. Biscuit hungrily eyed the six little chocolate-free cookies that I’d made for him as well; it wasn’t the healthiest treat ever for a cat, but then again cookies weren’t that healthy for humans either.
I sat in front of the TV and watched the end of a random current events show while I enjoyed a couple cookies, then I looked at the stacked plate and realized there was no way I was ever going to be able to eat that many cookies.
Well, maybe that wasn’t entirely true. But there was no way I should eat that many cookies in just a couple of days. I didn’t exercise enough these days to justify it, not even close. So instead, I piled most of the cookies on a plate and decided to head upstairs and offer them to Mrs. Michaels, my elderly landlady. After all, not only was it a nice thing to do, but going from the snatches of information I’d gotten from Violet, and the couple of conversations I’d had with the woman herself, Mrs. Michaels had led a very interesting life. I wasn’t going to lie, I hoped that by bribing her with cookies I might get some details into that former life.
I gave Biscuit one of the special kitty cookies I’d set aside, grabbed the plate and made my way up the steps and knocked on Mrs. Michaels’ door. A few seconds later she opened the door and greeted me with a huge smile.
“Ah! Cassie! My favorite tenant! Come inside, come inside, it’s going to rain,” she insisted as I stepped over the threshold and into her house. “Oh and you’ve brought biscuits! How lovely. Your generation does not cook enough, it is good to see a young woman like you who still knows how to use an oven.”
I laughed. “Well don’t go overboard, you haven’t tasted them yet,” I told her.
“Oh but I can smell them, and they don’t smell like rubbish,” she told me, and I laughed as I took off my shoes. “I hope you don’t mind that I have another visitor,” she told me.
“I can come back, if that’s more convenient,” I said, suddenly feeling a bit awkward.
“Oh no no, not at all. Come on in,” Mrs. Michaels insisted. Feeling slightly uncomfortable, I followed her to her living room, which was surprisingly modern for such an old woman. There wasn’t a single piece of lace or gaudy printed sofa cover in sight. Instead, a long, light grey leather couch lined one of the white walls, decorated with colorful abstract paintings. On top of a bright blue rug on the ground was a black wooden coffee table, and a couple of grey armchairs to match the couch were on the other side. The whole scene looked like it could have come out of an interior design magazine.
Sitting on one side of the grey couch was Violet, happily sipping tea from a delicate china cup. If she was surprised to see me up here, she didn’t act like it.
“Ah, Cassie,” she said. “What a nice surprise!”
“What are you doing here?” I blurted out. Violet didn’t seem to me to be the kind of person who would just drop by a neighbor’s house for afternoon tea.
“I am trying to work through our little problem with the help of Mrs. Michaels,” Violet told me.
“Our little problem? You mean the double murder?”
“I do.” Of course Violet would refer to it as a “little problem”. Mrs. Michaels bustled in with the cookies on a plate and an extra teacup, along with a pot of tea.
“Sit, sit,” she implored as I settled onto the other end of the sofa from Violet. I thanked Mrs. Michaels as I took a cup of tea, and she offered Violet a cookie.
“I have seen the way Cassie eats, I am sure I would not approve of what is in this,” Violet said, but I couldn’t help but smile slightly when she took a cookie anyway.
“If there’s one thing the Americans have truly mastered it’s the biscuit,” Mrs. Michaels said, taking a big, unladylike bite of her cookie. “Although biscuit is a much better name for them than cookie,” she said.
“Well our biscuits are something completely different,” I explained, but Mrs. Michaels nodded enthusiastically.
“Yes, yes, of course. That travesty that you call a biscuit is a complete butchering of our savory scones,” she said with such fervor that I was almost afraid to disagree. I had already had a gun pointed at me this week, I didn’t want to die at the hands of an old lady who was offended by American cooking. Luckily, Violet interrupted before I had a chance to reply.
“So Mrs. Michaels, I had just finished telling you what I’d learned,” Violet started, but she was interrupted before she could continue. I wondered how long it had taken for Violet to get through her whole story when Mrs. Michaels’ interruptions were factored in.
“Yes, yes, of course darling. That whole matter with the stolen painting. That was a good take, that one. Although personally, I was never one for paintings. It is simply too difficult to truly get good resale value. I would still recommend it to beginners attempting to get their feet wet, however.”
My mouth dropped open at Mrs. Michaels. Was she seriously giving Violet advice about painting theft? There was so much more to this woman than I could have ever imagined.
“Yes, that is my problem,” Violet said. “The resale value. The Chinese, they have offered me ten million pounds if I recover the painting. But it would not be worth more than one hundred, I imagine.”
“Well then my dear, there are two scenarios,” Mrs. Michaels said. “Either they’ve found a buyer willing to pay way more than the price for hot goods—”
Violet shook her head no. “No, I do not think that is happening.”
“Then they have multiple buyers,” Mrs. Michaels said conspiratorially.
“Of course!” Violet exclaimed, but I just looked at the two of them blankly.
“Multiple buyers?” I asked. Mrs. Michaels turned toward me.
“Yes,” Mrs. Michaels nodded. “It’s not done very often, because it requires extensive resources and, as you young ones say, balls of steel. I can think of at least one instance when a thief was caught and killed for it. Of course, the reason behind the killing was never discovered, and the perpetrator never found. But it only works on paintings of extraordinary fame, such as The Milkmaid. Essentially, the thief has copies made of the stolen art. And when I say copies, I mean there are perhaps five people in all of England who could make copies of the quality required. Then, the thief sells the painting. If he can get ten million pounds for it, he sells five of them. Just like that, he has made fifty million pounds.”
“And he advertises to all of the buyers that they’re getting the real thing, and not a fake?”
“That’s exactly it.”
“So you think that the Triads are making multiple copies of the painting and selling them off to different investors as the original,” I continued, the wheels turning in my head. “And the reason it has to be a famous painting is that it will make the news; so the thief can prove that the original painting was stolen. And also, someone who has a famous painting in their home would be less likely to brag about it than someone with a random painting from a no-name artist?” I ventured as a guess.
“Ah! She is a clever one, your new friend,” Mrs. Michaels said to Violet. “Yes, that is the reason why.”
“Well I certainly do not make a habit of making friends with idiots,” Violet replied, taking another sip of tea.
“No, you don’t, do you dear.”
“Your explanation about the multiple fakes is the most reasonable solution I can think of,” Violet said. “Of course, I am not surprised the Triads were playing a dangerous game.”
“Why don’t you report Lin Wei to the police?” I asked. “After all, you say he’s the UK leader of one of the biggest gangs of Triads in Taiwan, wouldn’t the cops here love to lock him up?”
Violet gave me a cro
oked smile. “I would love to. And Lin Wei knows it. However, we reach an impasse when it comes to proving his crimes. Lin Wei is extremely careful. He is never directly linked to any crimes whatsoever; he makes very sure of that. I have never been able to link him to a crime, and likely never will be able to. He knows it, which is why he is willing to talk to me. That, and thanks to me one of his biggest rivals is now spending the rest of his life in prison. He has been much friendlier toward me since I made that happen.”
“So he knows that if you ever find proof linking him to a crime that you’ll report him?” I asked.
“Oh yes. He is very well aware. But he knows that he can admit things to me that I will never be able to link back to him. And of course, in England, if I were to record the conversations between us, they would not be valid in court.”
“What I’m most curious about is how the Triads found out the painting was going to be moved, and how they got the details,” Mrs. Michaels chimed in. “After all, it was being kept in a Dutch museum. I may be wrong, but I imagine the Triads have very little presence in the Netherlands. Certainly not enough to get a man deep enough to know the details of the move.”
“Mrs. Michaels!” Violet exclaimed. “You are a genius of incredible proportions. I knew there was a reason I came to see you.”
“Ah, so it wasn’t simply for the tea and the excellent conversation?” Mrs. Michaels teased with a glimmer in her eye.
“There is always that,” Violet replied with a smile as she reached for another one of my cookies.
“So why does Mrs. Michaels know so much about art theft, anyway?” I asked, and both women looked at each other.
“Well dearie, when you get to be my age, you eventually gain a lot of knowledge about a lot of things,” Mrs. Michaels said to me, and it was one of the least convincing lies I’d ever heard.
“Oh come on,” I laughed. “I’ve got a grandmother too, and I guarantee you she doesn’t know anything about the details of stealing million dollar paintings.”
Bombing in Belgravia (A Cozy Mystery) (Cassie Coburn Mysteries Book 2) Page 7
