A Place of Safety Page 10

  An impending sneeze made her dive for the box of tissues at the far end of the sofa. When she emerged from the bundle of paper, she caught sight of her face reflected in the mirror over the fireplace. She looked terrible, like a sodden, red-eyed witch. If she didn’t get out of the flat soon, she would drown in a trough of self-pity.

  She looked at the clock. There was plenty of time to go back to the Gregory Bequest and have another go at Toby Fullwell before the end of the morning’s rugby.

  On her way out, she saw a bundle of post on the doormat and riffled through it. There was a postcard from Emma Gnatche, an old friend now working in the States. Beneath that were a couple of expected bills, and three charity appeals. Nothing that couldn’t wait. She dumped the pile on her desk and went out.

  Toby opened the door to the gallery himself this time. He did not look welcoming and obviously had no idea who she was.

  ‘I came here last Tuesday morning,’ Trish said, holding out the torn ticket she had bought then. ‘Do you remember? I had a work emergency and had to leave. You told me I could come back to see the rest of the pictures without buying another ticket.’

  ‘Of course.’ He produced a smile that made the skin of his face twitch and flicker like a horse getting rid of flies. ‘Come on in. What would you like to see?’

  ‘You said something about a French room, I think,’ Trish said, wondering how soon she could get on to the subject of the five million pounds and whether it was really such a good idea to broach it on a day when her mind was sluggish. ‘I’d love to see that. The original collector was French, wasn’t he? So French pictures must have been particularly special to him.’

  Helen looked down at the little package in its flowered paper, then up again at Jean-Pierre.

  ‘I don’t need a present,’ she said. ‘All I’ve ever wanted was to know you’re safe.’

  ‘But I need to give you one, ma mie,’ he answered, tracing the line of her lips with one soft-tipped finger. ‘I cannot give you a ring yet, so it had to be something else, and something small enough for you to keep safe while you are here. This seemed best. Are you not going to open it?’

  She untied the knotted ribbon that held the paper together and parted the flaps to reveal a flat gold oval about two inches by one and a half.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Turn it over, Helene.’ His voice, gentler and more seductive than ever, made her eyes blur again.

  She had never expected love to make her so weepy. In the old days she had despised girls who cried all the time, girls like her stupid sister, whose latest letter had been even more self-pitying than usual. She sniffed.

  ‘Don’t cry, ma mie,’ Jean-Pierre said, taking out his own handkerchief to wipe her eyes. ‘There is no need. All will be well. Look at it properly.’

  She turned the gold oval over and saw a frame set with clear stones that could have been diamonds, which worried her dreadfully. They surrounded a tiny portrait of a dark-haired man, who looked so like Jean-Pierre that after a moment she could think of nothing else. Both had the same dark eyes and beautiful tender mouths, but the painted man wore his hair long and had a large pearl hanging from his ear.

  ‘Is it you?’ she asked, delight at last pushing aside all her fears. ‘In fancy dress?’

  He laughed. ‘No. It was painted about three hundred years before I was born, by your English Nicholas Hilliard. But I have always thought it looked like me, which is why I chose it for you.’

  ‘Then it’s much too valuable,’ she said, holding it out, balanced on her outstretched palm like a sugar lump for a carriage horse. ‘I can’t take it, Jean-Pierre.’

  ‘But you must. I want you to have something that is very valuable to me.’ He put one hand under her outstretched wrist and laid his lips over the fluttering blue veins. Then he kissed her properly.

  ‘It was one of the first paintings I acquired,’ he said, folding her fingers over the miniature, ‘and so I wanted it to be the first one I gave to you. I thought you could wear it on this chain, under your bodice. No one else will know, but you will feel it all the time against your skin, and think of me, and know that I will always return.’

  More tears swelled in her eyes and she felt them dripping down on to her cheeks, but she smiled too, even though she couldn’t speak.

  ‘Ah, ma mie,’ he said, gathering her into his arms. ‘Don’t be so sad. We will be together properly one day. I promise you.’

  ‘You can’t,’ she said, her words muffled against his chest. ‘No one can promise anything any more.’

  The guns crashed in the distance. And nearby a man shrieked in agony.

  Trish learned nothing useful from Toby Fullwell, except that he was not prepared to talk about buying or selling paintings or exactly what he had found in Jean-Pierre’s packages.

  Each time she asked a direct question, he either pretended he hadn’t heard it, or chattered on about painters’ techniques regardless. It happened too often to be coincidence. She heard a lot more than she wanted to know about brush strokes and composition, and the way painters built up different sorts of glazes to achieve the light effects they needed. But she saw no sign of fear.

  All she took away with her in the end was confirmation that Buxford hadn’t imagined everything, even if he had exaggerated Toby’s terror. The man definitely had something to hide, but Trish still had no idea what it could be.

  Leaving the building, she wondered whether it might have had something to do with Jean-Pierre himself. At first she had accepted the story that his huge collection had been forgotten. Now that seemed incredible. Why hadn’t anyone asked what had happened to his paintings? She decided to go to her favourite library in St James’s Square in search of information about him.

  There she discovered that none of the three types of catalogue – the old bound ledgers, card index or the computer – turned up a single reference to Jean-Pierre or his paintings. Nor did any of the directories or reference books in the reading room.

  Not prepared to go away without anything, she scooped up a random selection of general accounts of the art market, and some memoirs of the First World War. Even if they didn’t help her learn more about the origins of the Gregory Bequest collection, she thought, they might come in handy for David’s project, so they wouldn’t be wasted.

  All the cabs seemed to have disappeared when she re-emerged from the library, which meant she had to walk up St James’s to Green Park tube. The books didn’t seem very heavy at first, but they began to weigh her down as she waited on the platform. When the Jubilee Line train eventually arrived, it was stuffed with people and luggage, and she had to stand all the way to her stop, in a crowd of tourists on an outing to Tate Modern. By the time she was riding the escalator up through the magnificently soaring concrete halls of Southwark Station, her arms were aching so much that she had to keep shifting the pile of books, like a baby, from arm to arm. The walk back to her flat seemed much harder than usual.

  ‘Come on, Trish,’ said George’s voice from behind her, as she reached her own street. She felt his arm around her shoulders and leaned back for the comfort. ‘Why on earth didn’t you stay in bed?’

  ‘I was too restless,’ she said, turning to smile at him. Then her voice sharpened: ‘Where’s David?’

  ‘Having a pizza with a friend and his parents. They’ll bring him back by seven.’ He was hustling her up the iron stairs. ‘Which will give us both peace and quiet and you time to rest properly.’

  Trish opened the door and silenced the alarm. ‘It’s only a cold, George. I’m not ill.’

  ‘I know. But it’s a sign that you’re run down. You’ve spent the last year dashing about looking after everyone else and working far too hard. Go and lie on the sofa and let someone else look after you for once.’

  That was pretty rich, she thought as she kicked off her shoes. George was always telling her what she ought to do for her own good. But he was right, irritatingly enough. As soon as she lay back on one of the tw
o big black sofas in front of the fireplace, blood drummed in her ears and she felt as though bullets were ricocheting around the inside of her head.

  Toby had made himself a cheese sandwich, but he couldn’t eat it. He longed for Margaret to phone so that he could be sure she and the boys had got away safely. Now that it was far, far too late, he realized how easily Ben could have picked them up as they left the house.

  He could be keeping them somewhere so that he could bring them out one by one, if Toby tried to rebel, and force him to watch them being tortured. He kept imagining he could hear their screams. He knew he’d never be able to hold out if he heard them for real, but that didn’t matter a toss when he thought about what they might have to suffer before he had convinced Ben he would do anything he was told.

  Through the open door of the kitchen, Toby could see two of the five skylights in the flat. He’d once revelled in the lightness and airiness of the place. Now it just felt exposed and dangerous. He wanted to hide for ever.

  But he couldn’t. In only four hours, he’d have to go out to do the Live Arts programme on Radio 4. In the old days, before Ben had ruined everything good Toby had ever done, he had enjoyed Live Arts, and it had produced a handy little bit of money to bulk up his pathetic income. Now he hated the idea of even that much exposure. And leaving the flat would mean deactivating the alarms and opening the front door to face whomever Ben had waiting for him.

  Toby knew they were already outside the gallery. He could feel their presence.

  If only the BBC had thought him important enough to send a car! Then he would have had some kind of protection. But they didn’t. Maybe tomorrow, if the Sunday News did run the interview he’d given their arts correspondent, he might be seen as slightly more important.

  Or maybe, he told himself looking at the cheese sandwich in disgust, I’ll be exposed as a fraud and a forger.

  Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad. He’d be sacked, of course, and he’d never get another job in the arts, but that would mean Ben would have no use for him any longer. And if the exposure had come from a third party, Ben couldn’t blame him for it, so there’d be no reason to take revenge on the boys.

  At night now whenever she could not sleep, Helen would reach under her thin pillow to touch Jean-Pierre’s miniature and try to forget that he had told her he could not give her an engagement ring. He had not said why, and her mind kept inventing more and more horrible reasons to explain it.

  During the day, just as he had promised, the sensation of the fine smooth gold against her skin was a constant reminder that he loved her, even if he did not want to marry her. At night now, it just made her sure she would never see him again.

  Chapter 10

  By mid-morning on Sunday, Trish knew she was on the mend. She looked even more witch-like than she had yesterday, but she felt a lot better.

  Lying flat in bed last night had been too uncomfortable, so she’d propped herself against her banked pillows and skimmed through several of the library books while George slept beside her. The art histories had been turgid and even a cheerful journalistic account of fakes and forgeries hadn’t held her attention. Only when she had started to read about the war had she become interested enough to forget her own discomfort.

  Life in the trenches sounded surreal. According to the memoirs of one officer, regular deliveries of post from London direct to the front line had brought him and his friends their favourite literary magazines, fine wines, Fortnum & Mason hampers and cigars, while all around them rats were fattening on half-buried decomposing corpses. They must have added an unbearable stench to the fumes of mustard gas and the stink of urine, excrement and sweaty bodies.

  There had been no drainage in the trenches, which had at times been so badly waterlogged that the men had had to be issued with waders. Lice infestations had been constant and brought dangerous infections with them. Appalling wounds had had to be treated in makeshift tented hospitals with inadequate equipment and drugs. Worse than all the rest must have been the unrelenting, mind-destroying terror of living under continuous bombardment, punctuated by even more terrifying sorties across no man’s land into a storm of bullets.

  ‘The effects of machine-gun fire on the human body have been grossly exaggerated,’ one of the home-based warmongers had written, which had made Trish shake with rage as she read it.

  More and more surprised that Helen Gregory could have met a French art collector in the middle of such a war, Trish had read on in search of clues. There had been very little about nurses in any of the officers’ memoirs, even when they wrote about their various stretches in hospital. Presumably they were so accustomed to being cared for by women that it didn’t occur to them to mention these ones. But Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth had given a vivid picture of the kind of life Helen must have lived.

  It made Trish ashamed of even noticing her poxy little cold. But it also gave her some clues to Helen’s indifference to the collection she had inherited. Maybe she hadn’t been mad to leave it untouched. Having watched the suffering of men who’d died in such conditions, even the greatest of paintings must have seemed trivial.

  Trish blew her nose and in the sudden freedom caught a hint of the scent of roasting meat, sharpened by the unmistakable smell of grated horseradish root. George must be performing his usual alchemy with the unpromising ingredients of the traditional English Sunday lunch.

  In their early days together, it had surprised her to find him such an efficient cook. She had only gradually come to understand that he used dealing with food as a way of getting rid of all the aggression that built up in him as he worked with clients he loathed but had to placate, clients as unreasonable and demanding as Jeremy Carfield.

  ‘Anything I need to read in the Sunday News?’ George asked, emerging for a moment.

  There was flour all over his blue-and-white apron. Trish admitted that she’d been falling behind and hadn’t done more than browse through a few of the sections. Promising to have something to report over lunch, she tidied and closed the financial pages she hadn’t been reading carefully enough, and dropped them on the floor beside her sofa.

  ‘Great,’ George said, turning back to his pots and pans. ‘I wouldn’t want to think you were slacking off while I’m hard at it.’

  Laughing, because he loathed interference in the kitchen when he was in charge, Trish picked the next part of the paper, which turned out to be the news, and skimmed over the front page. The biggest headline led into an account of a shooting in North London.

  A woman had been killed in a tube station newsagent’s by a 15-year-old who’d demanded change for a ticket machine. Witnesses who’d been in the station at the time had all told the police that the boy had been angry and jittery from the start. When the woman behind the counter had refused to give him change, he’d pulled a revolver out of his pocket and shot her in the head. The other people in the station had all been too shocked to prevent him running away, but the police were confident of being able to pick him up soon. For once they had a good picture from the CCTV cameras.

  Sodding drugs, Trish thought. He must have been high on crack, or coming down from a high and desperate for more.

  George had often told her she was neurotic on the subject and saw drug addicts everywhere. But, as she’d told him, that was only because they were everywhere, even at the Carfields’ dinner party.

  Oh shit! she thought. I should have written to thank them. Tough. I bought the present and he’s not my client. George can write this time.

  She turned on through the paper, in search of something less depressing than yet more accounts of drug-related crime, and was pulled up short by the sight of Toby Fullwell’s name in the list of contents of the Review section.

  There was an instantly recognizable caricature of him wearing a bow tie, beside a headline quote that read: ‘Running the Gregory Bequest is the job of a lifetime. I can’t imagine ever wanting to do anything else.’

  Remembering the tiny salary he was pa
id, Trish thought that was unlikely. Unless, of course, he really was using the collection to generate illicit cash for himself.

  She had already established to her own satisfaction, if not yet to anyone else’s, that he could have found a way to launder money through the trust. But there must be plenty of other income-generating scams he could have been running.

  It would be easy, for example, for anyone in his position to siphon off a drawing or painting each time he opened one of the packages in which they had been stored for so long. Only he knew what they contained, after all. But then that wouldn’t have explained why he had sold the Pieter de Hooch on the trust’s behalf.

  Trish’s mind began to work a little faster, as though the cold was releasing its last grip on her brain, and she saw another reason why he might have done that.

  Some time ago she had met an art expert at one of Antony Shelley’s glamorous dinners, and he had told her that London art dealers were going to the wall at an unprecedented rate because the supply of important paintings had dried up. With the Gregory Bequest offering a whole new source of forgotten old masters, Goode & Floore’s, the auctioneers Toby had used, might well have thought it worth offering him an inducement to sell some of the treasures through them.

  A seller’s premium of, say, 15 per cent of the five million pounds raised by the de Hooch would have come to seven hundred and fifty thousand pounds. A kickback of even a fraction of that could have been a serious temptation to a man on Toby’s salary.