The Debt
Page 5
She’d smiled to herself, relishing the other woman’s discomfort.
“What are you thinking?” El asked.
“I ain’t thinking anything,” said Ruby. “It’s already started. I’ve got it all lined up already, got people in place. I just need someone on the inside, someone I can trust.”
“Like me.”
“Like you.”
“To do what, exactly?”
Ruby’s smiled had broadened, smoothing out the wrinkles of her cheeks.
“What do you know about Pop Art?” she’d asked.
“At the moment, about as much as I know about molecular gastronomy,” El had said. “But I can learn. Why?”
“That painting,” Ruby had said. “I need you to help her sell it.”
———
“I want 8,” El told Lady Rose, thinking of Claire Brandon’s credit card debts, her loan repayments, the two-bed flat in Southwark she’d buy with her boyfriend just as soon as they had the deposit.
“No,” said Lady Rose, with her own first hint of a smile.
El glanced over at Karen, who was playing with her walkie-talkie and giving every impression of boredom, then back across at Lady Rose.
“I was told,” she said, with a confidence Claire Brandon didn’t feel, “that the Haring you have in your collection is a replica. A counterfeit. If that’s the case, then whoever agrees to authenticate it will be taking the same risks as you are in passing it off as an original. They’d be risking their career, their reputation. Their freedom, if the police were ever to get involved. £104,000 seems relatively small potatoes for a risk like that. Don’t you think?”
Karen laughed.
“Brilliant!” she said through the laughter. “You know, when I saw you coming up the drive, I thought you’d be some timid little mouse with a begging bowl. And just listen to you! I love it. Love it.”
Lady Rose held up a hand, silencing her. The sleeve of her blouse fell open at the wrist, revealing the flesh of her forearm. It was scarred, El saw - cut or burned, thin ropes of dark pink tissue criss-crossing the skin all the way to the elbow.
She saw El looking; pulled the sleeve down firmly, and buttoned it, concealing the scars under the fabric.
“So you’ll do it,” she said. “For 8 percent, you’ll do it.”
“Do you have a buyer?” asked El.
“I have two,” said Lady Rose. “Or rather, two potentials. Only one of them, I suspect, will come to anything.”
“Who?”
“Is it significant?”
“No. But I’m curious.”
Karen snorted, evidently tickled by Claire Brandon’s performance and the look it brought to her boss’s face.
Lady Rose ignored her. Then she smiled at El - a wide, delighted smile that reminded El for one strange second of Ruby’s.
“I’ll tell you what, Dr Brandon,” she said. “Why not meet her for yourself?”
“Alright,” said El uncertainly.
“Wonderful,” she said, still smiling.
She glanced down at the thin silver watch that decorated her other, unmarked wrist.
“But I should put on your game face quickly, if I were you,” she added. “She’ll be here with us in half an hour.”
From The Daily Bugle, April 1981
Mr S. J. L. Winchester and Miss R. K. Ackroyd
The marriage took place on Saturday, February 18, 1981 in Redbourn, Hertfordshire, between Sebastian, eldest son of Sir Henry Winchester, Bt. and Mrs Lucinda Winchester, of Silverdale House, Oakham, Rutland and Rosemary, only daughter of Mr and Mrs Arthur Ackroyd of Rotherham, South Yorkshire. The Rev Charles Foster officiated. A reception was held at the family home of the groom.
From Here! Magazine, September 1990
Exclusive: Sebastian Winchester Opens Up About His Fairytale Marriage To Wife Rose - After 15 Years Together
Businessman Sebastian Winchester has revealed the secrets of his successful marriage - and the reason for his wife’s camera-shyness.
The media boss, 35, has exclusively shared what keeps him and wife Rose close, even when his job takes him overseas and away from her and their six year old daughter for weeks at a time.
Welcoming Here! into the family home in North London, Sebastian couldn’t stop himself enthusing about Rose, and her recent ventures into fine art collecting.
“She’s always had a wonderful eye,” he said, pointing to the colourful prints that line the walls of their living room. “An absolute passion for design and layout, for the right look in the right place. It’s a real shared interest - one of the things that first brought us together.”
Sebastian and Rose, 34, met for the first time as History students at Oxford University. But it was several months before their relationship took a turn for the romantic.
“We were friends first,” he said. “Best friends. Everything else evolved from there.”
“It’s because of that, having that firm foundation of friendship, that we’ve managed to stay so happy together for so long. We already knew everything about each other before we tied the knot. So there were no surprises.”
Discussing the work trips that can often sweep him away to New York, San Francisco and Miami - and away from Rose and Sophie - at a moment’s notice, Sebastian said:
“We talk every night on the phone. That’s very important to us both - that we keep the lines of communication open. We’re both very big talkers!”
Though out at the park with Sophie during our interview, Rose was a constant presence in our conversation.
“I count myself extremely lucky to have her,” said Sebastian. “There aren’t many men whose wives would put up with the kind of schedules I keep to. But she’s a very unusual woman, quite exceptional. And terribly independent. Most women in her position would insist on bringing in at the very least a nanny and a housekeeper. But she’s always been determined to do absolutely everything herself, to change every nappy and do every school-run, and I adore that about her, that commitment.”
About Rose’s infamous aversion to the camera lens, Sebastian said, “She’s a very private person. Neither of us were expecting the business to do as well as it has, and she’s still adjusting to the attention it’s brought us. She’s still finding her feet. But obviously we’re both delighted with the way it’s all taken off, even if she doesn’t show it quite as much as I do!”
Despite their obvious happiness, though, Sebastian stayed tight-lipped on whether he and Rose would be adding a little brother or sister for Sophie to their family.
“You’ll have to ask Rose!” he laughed. “She makes the decisions in our house!”
Looks like Here! readers will just have to wait and see...
From The Examiner, June 1993
Obituary: Sir Sebastian Winchester
Sebastian Winchester, 3rd Baronet was the founder and Chief Executive of Fairlight Media, a charismatic leader whose vision and dynamic management style helped steer the organisation to dominance of the UK publishing landscape over the last decade.
Winchester, who has died suddenly of an undiagnosed heart condition aged 38, drew on his early experience as Editor of Oxford University’s Cherwell magazine to turn Fairlight’s earliest publication, women’s magazine Femme, into a near-overnight success in the late 1970s. The subsequent launch of titles like Hot Stuff, On The Box, Metal Machine and Gamer between 1980 and 1985 only consolidated his reputation, while the acquisition of Britain’s New Wireless Holdings in 1986 and the American broadcast network SNT in 1988 saw him and Fairlight move into radio and, latterly, television.
Outside of his commercial interests, Winchester was a dedicated outdoorsman and rock-climber who had scaled the summits of both California’s El Capitán and Argentina’s Aconcagua, the second with his wife Rose. So enthusiastic was he about climbing that he and Rose honeymooned in the mountain ranges of Denali, Alaska in early 1982, in the company of his best man, barrister John Richmond, and her bridesmaid, writer Susan Hayes.
He is survived by Rose, their daughter Sophie and his sisters, Barbara and Camilla.
From Dolly’s Dark Disclosures, August 1993
Fair warning, poppets: this week’s Disclosure is a Dark one, even for Dolly…
Which recently-widowed society wife might be mourning less than you’d think for her better-known dearly departed?
Official reports put her on the scene the evening of hubby’s untimely - and oh so unexpected - demise. But Dolly’s sources say she crept home late that night to find him already cold in bed - after enjoying a discreet (but apparently not that discreet) candlelight dinner with a certain square-jawed legal eagle of their mutual acquaintance.
Could this be the real reason for all those trips abroad?
From Luxe Living Magazine (US Edition), July 1995
Feature: 5 Female Collectors You Need To Know About
Number 5: Lady Rose Winchester
It’s hard to tell you much about our last collector, England’s Lady Rose Winchester. We don’t know much ourselves.
Unlike the other women on our list, Lady Rose keeps a consciously-low profile, refusing all interviews and eschewing the celebrity-and-canapes circuit you might think would be par for the course for someone with her (at last count) two hundred million pound fortune.
What we do know about Lady Rose is this: her private gallery houses the largest collection of Hockneys on either side of the Atlantic, and her wider portfolio (of Warhols, Rothkos, Blakes and Hamiltons, among others) was valued, according to rumour, at upward of $50m.
4 other things we know:
She wasn’t always a Lady. British newspaper reports have her father as a maintenance man, her mother as a housewife - and her hometown as Rotherham, a run-down former mining town in the British northeast.
She married up. Her late husband was a bona fide Baronet, as well as a publishing legend. His company, Fairlight Media, is worth an estimated $1.2b today.
She’s smart. After graduating Oxford University with a double first (the British version of magna cum laude), she was instrumental in establishing Fairlight as a key player in the media industry - first in England, then across the world. According to public listings, she still holds significant stock in the company.
She gets around. When she’s out of London, it isn’t just the East Coast auction houses she’s stalking: in the last year, she’s spent serious money in Paris, Cologne, Stockholm and Cape Town.
And one last thing, of course: we’d kill to get a look at her collection.
Chapter 5
Highgate
1996
Karen led El down the ground-floor hallway, past a sparsely-furnished sitting room and a cavernous, white-tiled kitchen-diner, so pristine and professionally kitted-out that it could have passed for one of the kitchens at The Ivy. The latter looked to El like the domain of a professional chef, a Raymond Blanc or a Marco Pierre White - an appearance entirely at odds with Lady Rose’s apparent reluctance to engage domestic help. Perhaps, El thought, she’d changed her tune since her husband’s death; perhaps these days she was more keen to have company around, to hear voices in the house instead of echoing silence. If she was, it would explain the presence of Karen. Or partially explain it.
She took a right turn, passing under a grey marble archway and down a long, winding flight of stairs that opened out into a surprisingly airy, high-ceilinged basement room spanning what felt, to El, like the entire length and breadth of the house.
There was no furniture here; nowhere to sit or relax. The floor was a stark polished hardwood, the walls whitewashed. It was a room - if, El thought, the word “room” could be used to describe a space the size of a bowling alley - dedicated to a single function: the exhibition of Lady Rose’s vast art collection.
There were photographs, all monochrome: a Man Ray-style closeup of a woman’s face, a Mapplethorpe-like boot-heel crushing the stem of a lily, an androgynous tattooed head and torso that El thought might have been a Diane Arbus. There were Cubist collages, framed comic book pages, vivid snatches of graffiti suspended in Perspex boxes. But mostly there were paintings, Pop Art and neo-expressionist: Lichtensteins and Hamiltons, Patrick Caulfield stills and Julian Schnabel plates and more obscure pieces that El didn’t recognise, their colours bright and cartoonish against the austere whitewash.
“Must be your idea of heaven down here,” said Karen, watching her take in the space.
“Hmm,” said El noncommittally.
There was CCTV too, she noticed, and a lot of it: boxy, wide-lensed cameras, pointing down towards the ground and covering, she estimated, almost every square inch of it.
In the centre of the room, mounted on an easel, was another painting, or what El took to be another painting - two feet long and three feet wide, the canvas concealed entirely by a yellow dust-sheet.
“Is this it?” she asked, pointing to the dust-sheet.
“What ‘it’?” said Karen, apparently enjoying playing dumb.
“The Haring,” said El testily.
“Oh,” said Karen. “That. Couldn’t say. You’ll have to ask Her Majesty.”
There was disdain there, El thought - but also affection. She wondered, momentarily, what kind of relationship Karen had with Lady Rose; how their paths might ever have crossed in the first place. Karen didn’t seem the type to respond to a job ad in the paper.
“How long have you worked here?” she said.
“Not long,” said Karen.
It wasn’t an answer that invited any follow-up questions or comments. But Claire Brandon, El thought, would press on with the conversation regardless; wouldn’t be comfortable with awkward silence. Besides, she was curious.
“How did you get into it?” she asked. “PA-ing?”
Karen smirked.
“Thinking about a career change, are you?” she said.
The walkie-talkie in her hand crackled. She pressed a button in the middle of the handset, and Lady Rose’s voice rang out across the room.
“Visitors,” said Lady Rose through the crackle of the speaker.
“On it,” said Karen.
She tucked the walkie-talkie into her back pocket, the muscles of her arms flexing involuntarily as she shifted her weight.
“I’m going upstairs,” she said to El. “Be back in a minute.”
“Okay,” said El.
“Try not to nick anything while I’m gone,” she added, and disappeared up the stairs, leaving El alone in the gallery.
The first thing she did, before she took a breath or moved an inch, was look up at the cameras.
They were operational, she saw - a pinprick of infrared light blinking in the centre of each.
She took a step to the right, then another. The camera closest to her moved too, swivelling on its bracket to follow her as she stepped.
The question, she thought, was whether anyone was watching - whether there was a security guard out there somewhere monitoring the camera feeds, scrutinising every screen in their bank of monitors for anything untoward or out of place.
Not that it mattered if there was, of course. Her recent forays into fine art fraud notwithstanding, Claire Brandon was an honest, upright, law-abiding citizen. She wasn’t a thief or a con-artist, and if she was curious about the painting lying under the dust-sheet, tantalisingly hidden from view, then it was a curiosity driven by professional interest, nothing more. She wanted to see what was under that dust-sheet, yes - but only to look, not to touch or take.
El walked across to the easel, and the camera followed her, whirring
slightly, straining at the hinges to keep her in view.
She gripped the dust-sheet by its corners, and lifted - first gingerly, Claire Brandon’s hesitation playing out for the benefit of any possible audience, and then more assertively, until the painting underneath was uncovered.
It was remarkable - all the more so, El thought, because it was a fake. All of the hallmarks she’d come to recognise from her crash-course in Keith Haring and the world of ‘80s street art were there, and in technicolour: the thick, bold strokes that could have come from a marker pen; the fluid, contorted figures, dancing across the frame like a string of energetic hieroglyphs; the sound waves and the love hearts. It was simple, stylistically, verging on simplistic - but there was something captivating about the innocence of the it, the sincerity, and she found it hard to look away. She could understand completely, having seen it, why Lady Rose might have wanted to believe that it was real when she bought it.
She stared at the canvas for a solid minute, mentally constructing the arguments she’d use to convince whoever she needed to of its authenticity, when she heard footsteps on the staircase above her.
She pulled the dust-sheet back over the painting, and stepped quickly away from the easel just as Karen reemerged on the bottom stairs.
“Everything alright down here?” she asked.
“Fine,” said El. “Just, you know… looking around.”