‘Several of you are new to this particular corner of our activities,’ McLarren began, ‘so I’ll begin with a wee historical perspective. Just so you understand that this is a particular obsession of mine,’ he grinned ferociously from beneath his eyebrows, ‘and that I will be very upset by any lapses on our part.’
He cleared his throat and turned to a white board, took up a blue marker and wrote Mary Martin.
‘One year ago, almost to the day, a young DC of ours, Mary Martin, was brutally murdered in a warehouse in Kilburn. You may remember the case. No one has been arrested for her murder. For those of us who knew Mary, this remains an open wound.’ He glared at Mary Martin’s name on the board. ‘She was at the end of a stake-out that had gone on, fruitlessly, for several days. Everyone had cleared the building and left the scene, but it seems she was lured back inside, to one of the upper floors, without calling for assistance. There, she was attacked with some kind of cleaver or axe, so savagely that her head was almost separated from her body.’
Kathy was aware of the deep silence in the room, and of a tightening in her throat.
McLarren turned back to the white board and wrote a second name. Picasso.
‘As the more culturally aware of you will know,’ he went on, lightening his tone disconcertingly, ‘Pablo Picasso is one of this century’s greatest artists. Now, three years ago a merchant bank in the City bought a very rare set of Picasso etchings for its board-room. They were delighted with them, not least because they portrayed a mythical beastie, half man, half bull, in various stages of ravishing a beautiful young maiden, a scenario with which merchant banks no doubt closely identify.’
He paused for jocular appreciation, then continued, ‘However, a year later the art dealer from whom they had acquired these works committed suicide, and rumours began to circulate that some of his products had not been what they seemed. So the bank invited an expert, a Picasso specialist, to check their drawings. He said they were fine Picassos, all right—he couldn’t find any fault with their execution or technical specification. The only trouble was that they couldn’t possibly exist. The number of copies made from the original plates had been very carefully controlled in order to maintain their high value, and these were not among them.
‘What made it worse was that the bank had bought two sets of these valuable etchings, and had given the second to their retiring chairman as a token of their esteem. After some discreet and embarrassed enquiries, it transpired that the second set could not be authenticated either.
‘At this point, we were brought in, and after a while our enquiries turned up a name . . .’
McLarren wrote it on the board. Raphael. ‘Like the great master. According to an informant, these amazingly good forgeries had been done by someone new, someone we hadn’t come across before. It was rumoured that he was a brilliant art student, nickname Raphael, using his talent to forge masterpieces in order to maintain an expensive habit he’d acquired, and with the bent dealer to feed the work into the art market. The proof of this lay in the signature, our snout said. Look closely at it, and we would see that there was a small feature which doesn’t correspond with the legitimate Picasso signatures. We checked and, sure enough, there it was. The point was, said our snout, that there were at least two more sets out there.
‘It took us some time to track them down, but the information proved absolutely correct—we found four sets of Picasso forgeries in all. But, despite our success in this, Raphael himself was remarkably elusive. We began to get reports from other sources. Raphael had moved on from art works, it was said, now that his dealer was dead. Now he was creating papers for undocumented asylum seekers and illegal immigrants. No sooner had the Home Office got itself involved than he had shifted to tickets for pop concerts and World Cup football matches. And the Raphael myth just grew and grew. Raphael, it was now suggested, was actually two people. Being himself unworldly, interested only in creating his perfect forgeries, the artist had a partner who negotiated the mechanics of getting them into the marketplace. This person, by contrast with Raphael, was extremely practical, violent and ruthless, nicknamed The Beast . . .’McLarren paused to write this up ‘. . . although, like his partner, he has no criminal record and exists nowhere within police files. Both of them, we might say, in their own way, are extreme talents.’
Kathy had heard of McLarren’s legendary obsession with the forger Raphael. It was one of those colourful stories that brightened up the conversation of weary detectives over a pint of beer after a long and boring day. Because of this, the story had been embellished and improved upon over time, a process that McLarren did nothing to discourage. They had checked every graduate and drop-out from art schools in the UK for the past ten years, it was said, and come up with nothing. Then it was rumoured that Raphael was a young Central European, or an Arab, and had manufactured his own entry and identity papers so that he was in effect invisible to official eyes. Kathy found it interesting to hear the authentic McLarren version.
‘Then again,’ he went on, ‘it has been suggested that Raphael may be a woman, an idea which greatly appeals to my sense of gender equity and equal opportunity among the criminal classes.’ McLarren bared his teeth in a silent laugh which was given voice by a couple of people in the room, but not, Kathy noticed, by the sole other female member of the team.
‘Meanwhile, however, as time passed and Raphael continued to elude arrest, some people came to doubt even his very existence.’ This was said with sudden bitterness and a hooded glance in Kathy’s direction, an accusation against Brock, she guessed.
‘The great thing about a master forger is that, if he’s really good, no one will know anything about him—it’s only the failed forgeries that get discovered. After months of abortive investigation, we still only had the Picasso etchings as proof of Raphael’s existence, and our lords and masters were becoming infected with this scepticism. And then Mary Martin was murdered.’
He added more writing to the board: RIP 8.7.96.
‘A new kind of printing machine had come on to the market in Japan. A kind of copier of holographic images, as on credit cards. We thought that Raphael might be interested in getting hold of it. A UK company that makes security passes and the like was the first to import one, and we made arrangements to encourage Raphael to steal it while it was in transit in London. Unfortunately, Raphael’s timing was faulty, and when he finally made his move, only Mary Martin was there to take him on. She was armed, but she stood no chance against them, Raphael and The Beast, poor lassie. Her gun was drawn—we found it later beneath her where she fell—and we may imagine her, facing Raphael alone, perhaps, the first copper to set eyes upon the mystery forger, unaware that his frightful companion, The Beast, was coming upon her from behind, the fatal blows being struck from the rear.’
McLarren’s voice was thick with regret as he described this tragedy, but Kathy thought she detected a certain relish about the way he lingered over an event that had revitalised his case. From that moment, the pursuit of Raphael had become a top priority.
‘Six months ago our informant warned us of another area of Raphael’s expertise—rare stamps. It was thought he may have been secretly active in this field for some time. We advised dealers, and heard nothing more for a while, until now.’
McLarren paused for effect, his gaze sweeping round the room like the beam of a lighthouse. ‘On Friday last, ladies and gentlemen, our forensic lab came to the fascinating conclusion that three rare postage stamps attached to a series of very strange ransom notes in a kidnapping case in Surrey, were expert forgeries.’ He smiled grimly as the room stirred with interest at this. ‘Aye, aye. Well, now, perhaps you would tell us about the stamps, Dr Waverley, if you would be so kind.’ McLarren said this with exaggerated politeness, and a little sweeping bow as the other man stepped tentatively forward.
He pushed the long lock of his hair back from his forehead, and it promptly flopped forward again as he stooped to take a folder of photographs out o
f his briefcase. ‘Would it be useful to pin these up, do you think?’ he asked McLarren, who gestured briskly to one of the others.
‘Er . . .’ Waverley gazed at the pictures as the man pinned them to a noticeboard on the wall beside the white board. Kathy recognised the stamps from the ransom notes, enlarged to fill the page. ‘Well, these three stamps were released in August 1855 in Tasmania in Australia. The design was engraved by W. Humphrys after a watercolour sketch by E. Corbould, and the stamps were recess printed in London by Perkins Bacon Limited. They have been used and cancelled, as you can see, in two cases with a pen, and, in the case of the fourpence blue, with a postmark which is recognisable as the pattern used by the Launceston post office.
‘They are fine examples—or were, before someone got to work with the scissors and glue—otherwise undamaged, clean but not unnaturally fresh, good margins . . .’
Waverley touched his hair absently again, staring at the pictures as if trying to remember something. ‘Yes. Value probably around nine hundred for the penny carmine, five for the twopence green, and one hundred for the blue. Say fifteen hundred all up. You might be lucky and get them for a thousand.
‘They were all printed on a white wove paper, with a watermark of a large, six-pointed star.’ He indicated a print of a ghostly white image on a grey background. ‘That’s quite interesting, because there was another issue of these three stamps in the following year, 1856, printed locally by H. and C. Best of Hobart, on paper without a watermark, and with current values almost the same as the 1855 issue. You see my point . . .’ He turned and looked doubtfully at his audience, who showed no indication whatsoever of seeing his point.
‘If you were going to forge these three particular stamps, why go to the trouble of forging the 1855 issue, and have to make the watermark, when you could forge the 1856 issue instead? Well, the answer is that he didn’t make the watermark paper—that’s perfectly genuine. The large star watermark was used in a number of stamps of Crown colonies of that early period, and what our man appears to have done is to take a genuine stamp of low value, completely erase the printing on it, and then reprint it with his own engraved high-value design. And that is quite beautiful, I must say. He has done it superbly well, using precisely the same recess-printing method and the same inks that Perkins Bacon would have used a hundred and forty-two years ago. It really is most impressive.’
Dr Waverley became lost in admiration for a moment before McLarren spoke sharply. ‘Not readily detectable, then, Doctor?’
‘Well, quite. To be perfectly honest, if you presented me with one of these, I would have the greatest difficulty in identifying it as a forgery. What gave the game away was your laboratory analysis. With your mass spectrometers you were able to pick up faint traces of the modern solvent that had been used to remove the earlier inks. Having found that, it was possible, using your scanning electron microscope, to find traces of the earlier dye, which appeared to be a light yellow-green. My guess is that he used the one penny green of 1856 from the colony of Victoria, which is worth only a few pounds, as his base. It was very bad luck for your forger—without that kind of laboratory equipment and analysis his work really would have been undetectable.’
‘A master forger, then, Dr Waverley!’ McLarren cried.
‘Indeed, yes. Absolutely. Quite the best I’ve seen.’
‘And where there’s one, or three . . . ?’ McLarren continued to prompt.
‘Yes, well, as you know, Superintendent, after you spoke to Cabot’s about this, they agreed to us looking at the collection of stamps which Mr Starling has deposited with them, towards payment for the Canada Cover, which was used as the kidnap ransom.’
‘And what have you found?’
‘Well, we’ve only just made a start. We selected a dozen stamps at random, all Chalon Heads. Seven of the twelve showed spectroscopic traces of the solvent.’
Kathy wondered at how fast McLarren had moved. Cabot’s must be in a panic, she imagined.
‘So, Mr Starling’s collection is possibly riddled with forgeries, is that right?’
‘Well, we don’t know yet . . .’
‘You yourself advised Mr Starling on his stamp purchases in the past, did you not?’
Dr Waverley reddened. ‘I was recommended to Mr Starling by Cabot’s to authenticate a set of rare stamps he was thinking of buying a couple of years ago. After that he occasionally had me check a particularly expensive item for him.’
‘You’ll no doubt be keen to establish whether any of those were the work of our master forger, eh, Doctor?’ McLarren grinned at the other man’s discomfort. ‘At any rate, we know that Mr Starling was one collector who was the victim of this forger. And if there’s one, there’ll be others. Not much point going to all that trouble just to make one or two copies.’
‘I’m afraid so.’ Waverley agreed. ‘One thing I hope we’ll establish is whether the forger has stuck to Chalon Heads or whether other rare stamps have been copied.’
‘Aye. These Chalon Heads were a particular speciality of Mr Starling, I believe?’
‘That’s correct.’
‘Which brings us back to the kidnapping of Mrs Starling, and the unusual kidnap notes. Anyway, Dr Waverley, that’s our problem, not yours. If you’ve nothing further to tell us just now, we’ll let you get back to the laboratory. Eric here will take you down to the street and arrange some transport for you. Many thanks.’
They shook hands, and one of the detectives led him away.
‘Well, now,’ McLarren rubbed his hands and began pacing back and forward in front of the board, ‘what do we make of this?’
‘Sir.’ Inspector Hewitt spoke.
‘Tony! Have you any thoughts to enlighten us?’
‘If Starling was a victim of Raphael, why would Raphael kidnap his wife?’
It was a rhetorical question, and McLarren nodded encouragingly. ‘Aye, aye . . .’
‘Maybe Starling had twigged to Raphael’s racket, eh? Maybe he’d figured out what was going on. He realised that Raphael had ripped him off for thousands of quid for dud stamps, and he was threatening Raphael in some way. So Raphael’s partner started to get rough with Starling, to shut him up, teach him a lesson. Leaving his wife’s head at the garden gate was a tough lesson, yes? Right in line with what we know of The Beast.’
‘Ye-es . . .’ McLarren flapped his hand like a conductor, wanting more.
‘Well, the point is, Starling must know who Raphael is.’
‘Yes!’ McLarren clapped his hands delightedly. ‘Well done, Tony. That is indeed the point. And now we must persuade him to to tell us.’ A general murmur of enthusiasm broke out around the room. McLarren beamed, then noticed Kathy. ‘DS Kolla? You look troubled?’ The room went quiet again.
‘Have you had the forensic report on Eva Starling’s head, sir?’
‘No, not yet. Who’s the pathologist?’
‘Dr Mehta. I expect they’re waiting for the toxicology reports. But apparently she had a heavy cocaine habit.’
‘I see.’ He rubbed his jaw with a bony hand as he took this in. ‘And how does that help us, would you say?’
‘I . . . I don’t know, sir.’ Kathy felt dumb, a party-pooper.
McLarren let this hang on the air for a moment. ‘Well, we’ll await Dr Mehta’s report with interest,’ he said, with a faint sarcasm that provoked a chuckle from someone, and turned to the tasks awaiting his team. A list of active, large-scale stamp collectors was being compiled from Cabot’s and other major dealers; they were to be interviewed and arrangements made for their recent acquisitions to be sampled by the laboratory.
As the meeting broke up, the other woman in the room came up to Kathy and introduced herself as DC Colleen Murchison. ‘Don’t let the old man bother you,’ she said cheerfully. ‘It used to upset me until I watched one of those nature programmes on TV, about dominance rituals among gorillas, and I suddenly realised I was watching old Jock. Now whenever he puts on one of his performances I just i
magine him eating bananas and thumping his chest.’
Kathy smiled, then Colleen glanced towards Desai. ‘What about him?’ she asked. ‘He looks tasty.’
‘Do you think so?’ Kathy said, as if she’d never considered the matter.
‘Oh, yes. I like the smouldering Eastern type. I wouldn’t mind sharing a banana with him.’
‘Well, give it a try. Why not?’
‘Can’t, unfortunately. My betrothed would play up. What about you?’
‘Hmm . . .’ Kathy looked thoughtful. ‘Is this the first time he’s worked with you lot?’
‘Yeah. This is the first time I’ve seen him around.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Absolutely. I’d have remembered him.’
On her way out, Kathy found a quiet corner to make a phone call to Queen Anne’s Gate. She got through to Dot.
‘What’s going on, Dot?’ she asked. ‘Can I talk to the boss?’
‘Oh . . .’ Dot, usually so brisk and businesslike, seemed lost for words. ‘Kathy, it’s just terrible.’ She was speaking in a whisper, as if she might be overheard, and Kathy thought she heard a catch in her voice, like tears.
‘Are you all right, Dot?’
‘I’m all right, but they’re taking the place apart.’
‘Who are?’
‘You know . . .’ she whispered. ‘The Internal Bureau.’
‘Is Brock there?’
‘He’s gone, Kathy. I don’t know where.’
‘Bren?’
‘I—I’ll have to go . . .’
The Chalon Heads Page 21
