Текст книги "The Bosch Deception"

Автор книги: Alex Connor

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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 20 страниц)

Forty-Five

Mark Spencer had to admit that Honor had pissed him off with the crack about looking down her blouse, but he wasn’t deterred. He liked her too much to give up and was eager to find a way to impress her. Which had just fallen into his lap. Having overheard her phone conversation, Mark had picked up on the name Carel Honthorst, and his unrelenting curiosity had done the rest.

So now he was standing in the doorway of Honor’s office, smiling as she turned round.

‘Hi.’

‘Hi,’ she said coolly. ‘D’you want something?’

‘No, I’m about to help you,’ he replied, sliding into the room and leaning against the window. The daylight didn’t flatter him, the sun beaming through his thinning hair and shining on his scalp. ‘I heard you mention someone called Honthorst.’

She nodded, wary. ‘What about him?’

‘He was an old client of ours.’

Now she was listening as Mark parted company with the window and perched on the side of her desk.

‘He was up for assault eight years ago. Slashed a man’s face in a pub. His father was a Dutch farmer and Honthorst was shoved into the Catholic Church to cool him down when he was a kid. He became a priest, but left soon after. Has a terribly fierce faith apparently. But he never talks about it – being godly doesn’t really tally with the kind of business he moved into.’

‘Which is?’

‘Debt collecting.’

‘Wow!’ Honor said simply. ‘What happened to the charge of assault?’

‘Victim dropped it. I reckon he thought it wasn’t worth it, that he might end up with a Stanley knife in his face if it went to court. Since then, we’ve heard nothing from Carel Honthorst.’ Mark was happy with his performance. ‘But I remember him well. Huge man. Had something wrong with his skin. Pock-marked, or burnt. He used some kind of stuff to try and cover it up, but it looked awful. Not that anyone would tell him that.’ Mark paused, thinking back. ‘Joking apart, he was fucking terrifying.’

So this was the man Nicholas had mentioned – the man who had followed her brother. The man who was apparently working for the art world and the Church.

‘Do we have an address for him?’

‘Why?’ Mark replied. ‘I’ve told you, he’s dangerous. Besides, any address we had all those years ago probably wouldn’t be relevant now … Anyway, why d’you want to know about him?’

‘Oh, it’s nothing important. His name just cropped up when I was talking to a client.’

The lie caught on Mark’s internal radar, like a fly frying on a butcher’s light.

‘Why would Carel Honthorst come up in a fraud case?’

‘You tell me,’ Honor said lightly, turning back to her work. ‘Thanks for the information, Mark – thanks a lot.’

But her thoughts weren’t on the case, instead they were on what she had said to Nicholas. It had been unforgivable, but for an instant she had doubted him. After all, they had lived different lives for years. What did she really know about her brother? Where he had been. What he had done. Who knew how badly exile had damaged him? He had unnerved her talking about the Church and people following him. And the crucifix …

That had been the real worry – Nicholas talking about a crucifix that had suddenly appeared in his bed. It wasn’t possible for someone to break in, unheard, place a cross in a bed and then disappear. And Father Michael had been asleep, so it hadn’t been him. But that wasn’t all that was worrying Honor – it was the conversation:

‘What are you talking about?’ she asked. ‘The crucifix I gave you—’

‘Was in my bed …’

But it couldn’t have been, Honor thought. Because she had never bought him a crucifix …

So did that make her brother a liar? Or a madman?

Forty-Six

Old Bond Street, London

It was snowing unexpectedly, the white flakes coming down fast. Then, just as suddenly, the rain started, drumming like a thousand tom-toms on the windows of Old Bond Street. Locking the front door of the gallery, Hiram Kaminski turned up the central heating and moved back into his office, settling down behind his desk. Judith was away, visiting her sister in Brighton, unwilling to leave him alone until Hiram insisted.

‘Get out for the day,’ he had told her. ‘Get some sea air – it will do you good.’

‘I don’t want to leave you.’

He had put his head on one side, regarding her. ‘What can happen in a day? We can’t allow ourselves to be frightened—’

‘Thomas Littlejohn sent us those damn notes—’

‘And poor Thomas is dead.’ Hiram had replied. ‘He can’t tell anyone about us. He can’t tell anyone where he sent the secret. Besides, the letter sat next door for three months, my dear. If someone had been watching us, they would have acted long before this.’ He was confident, dismissive. ‘Remember what we decided? The copies of the Bosch papers have been put in the bank. No one knows about them. And no one knows where they are.’

‘So who has the originals?’ Judith asked smartly. ‘Someone must have them.’ She had crossed her arms, defiant. ‘Don’t talk to me as though I’m a fool, Hiram. I understand our position perfectly. Thomas Littlejohn, Claude Devereux and Sabine Monette are all dead. Murdered. That’s no coincidence.’

‘We don’t know that it’s about the secret—’

‘What else could it be about? The price of plums?’ she snapped, irritated.

‘Philip Preston has the chain – he’s putting it up for auction. Why shouldn’t he have the papers too?’ Hiram asked. ‘He’s a sly man is Philip, a born negotiator. Think of the money he could raise with that exposé. Or then again, a man like that could be persuaded to keep it suppressed – for a fee. I don’t suppose the art world or the Catholic Church would like to see it splashed all over the newspapers.’

She had thought for a moment, almost convinced. ‘You think we’re all right?’

He had nodded. ‘I think we’re all right.’ He had kissed her gently. ‘Go to your sister’s and have a day out. Please, forget all this for a few hours.’

But now Hiram was feeling lonely, rather regretting his insistence. As usual the gallery had closed at five, and although he had wanted time to work on the accounts, he was soon restless. Having bought a sandwich from a nearby cafe, he made himself a coffee and perched on the high bar stool in the back kitchen. The view was depressing, the grungy back of the opposite building a morose and uniform grey. Silently he chewed his sandwich, checking the time on his watch. Judith would be back around nine.

His coffee wasn’t to his liking. Hiram preferred a finer grind, but that was his wife’s department. Good thing to have, he thought – a wife. Judith could be irritating, but he loved her. Always had done. And when she gave him a daughter, Helen, he was a happy man. In fact, Hiram thought, staring out at the blank view, he had been pretty lucky.

A light came on suddenly in a window of the opposite building and he glanced up as it was opened. He couldn’t see anyone, but jumped when the window was slammed shut again. The noise startled the pigeons on the rooftops, a shuffle of birds rising up towards the glowering sky.

Hiram finished his sandwich and moved back into his office. Tiredness came over him, a full stomach and the long hours making their presence felt. Yawning, he leaned back in his leather chair and, a moment later, slid into sleep.

Forty-Seven

It had stopped raining at last and the evening was dank and icily cold. Walking quickly, Sidney Elliott lit a cigarette and paused at the end of the street. It was a long time since he had been in London, his life revolving around his consultancy work for Cambridge University and his estranged family. A wife and two daughters lived in what used to be the family home, the house which had sucked money from him for over thirteen years. It didn’t seem to matter that his wife had been a chemist before they had married; after the ink had dried on the licence, she had given in her notice at the laboratory and got pregnant.

The first baby was born with problems. As was the second child. Not life-threatening, just learning problems and balance troubles. Problems that had required extensive and expensive treatment. As the children had gradually recovered, the marriage had gone on a respirator. No one pulled the plug, because Sidney wanted to believe that he could regain his family, that the wasted years could be retrieved. That his spectacular career – held in abeyance because of hospital visits and menial overtime jobs – could be reignited.

As for his wife, Sara wasn’t going to tell Sidney that the marriage was over and had been for many years. Her estranged husband was paying the mortgage and the medical bills. When their daughters were old enough, Sara would divorce him, But not a moment before. The day came, of course. She told him, of course. And Sidney Elliott stood looking at his wife, at this woman who had taken a machete to his career and a cleaver to his emotions, and he had wanted to kill her.

His stammering had increased from that day. His stoop intensified and he cut off all contact with Sara. Not so with his daughters, although over the following years they grew away from the round-shouldered, acerbic man who was always quizzing them about their mother.

Was she seeing anyone?

Did she go out?

Was she happy?

He made them nervous, edgy. He was demanding, imperious, then pleading. He was their father, but not a father of whom they could be proud. This man was just the pathetic remnant of their mother’s machinations.

Then finally, one day at the end of a long summer, Sidney called to see his ex-wife. She was sitting in the garden, sunbathing in a spotted bikini with the radio playing beside her. Her skin was smooth, without a wrinkle, a testament to idleness and egotism. And before he could stop himself, he kicked over the sun lounger she was lying on and sent her sprawling into a bed of roses and well-rotted manure. The next day Sara took out a court order forbidding Sidney from coming within a hundred yards of her.

She needn’t have bothered. He never went near her again, taking some small comfort from his last image of her: scratched by thorns, compost smearing the polka-dot bikini …

Sidney stared down the street as he finished off his cigarette. He wasn’t going to fail, not this time … Using his insider knowledge and contacts, he had finally discovered the identity of the other two specialists Nicholas Laverne had spoken to about the Bosch papers. The one in Holland had been unforthcoming, but the younger man in Boston, USA, had been duped by Elliott’s flattering attention. After all, his achievements looked good on paper.

It had taken a while, but Elliott had gradually eased the information out of him.

‘… Of course all of th-th-this is in confidence. Mr L-L-Laverne has asked me to act as his go-between. He’s busy at the m-m-moment.’

‘I’ll help in any way I can. We are often entrusted with valuable and private information. I’ve spoken to Mr Laverne a few times,’ the young man had replied. ‘What d’you want to know?’

‘The papers. Mr Laverne wants to ch-ch-check. H-h-how many were there in total?’

‘Twenty-eight.’

‘We thought so,’ Elliott said, swallowing hard. Twenty-eight and he’d only been allowed to see one! ‘Did you s-s-see them all? Obviously I have. B-b-but did you?’

‘Only ten of them,’ the American had replied, ‘but you could ask the expert in Holland how many he saw. Then again, if you’ve seen them yourself, you don’t need to—’

‘I just wanted to ch-ch-check with you that w-w-we had come to the same conclusion, that was all,’ Elliott had replied, taking a shot in the dark. ‘Have you s-s-seen the chain?’

‘The one coming up for sale in London?’ the young man had replied guilelessly. ‘It’s wonderful, isn’t it?’

Yes, it was wonderful. It was all so fucking wonderful, Elliott thought bitterly, inhaling from his cigarette and feeling a growing frustration. He needed to make that sale. He needed Conrad Voygel. The tycoon wanted the Bosch chain, but did he know about the secret? And if he didn’t, how much more money could Elliott get for finding it – uncover the deception, then take it to Voygel like a sly Salome presenting the head of John the Baptist?

He glanced down the street, thinking of Thomas Littlejohn. A very pleasant man, a man he had met years earlier at a conference in Cambridge. A man who had hinted about some papers from the late Middle Ages that told of a deception that would cause chaos. He hadn’t told Elliott what the deception was, and at the time Elliott had dismissed it because people in the art world burbled about such things regularly. There was always something sensational about to be revealed, usually a ploy to up the price on a sale.

But after Nicholas Laverne had been to see him Elliott remembered what Thomas Littlejohn had said … And then he remembered something else about the dealer. He hadn’t attended the conference alone, but with another man. A small, rather prim little man called Hiram Kaminski.

Elliott knew of him, of course. He was an expert in the art of the late Middle Ages, renowned in his field. The perfect man to talk to about some early and valuable writings, the ideal person to offer advice. A respectable dealer, a considerable intellect – the one person Thomas Littlejohn would have taken into his confidence.

And now Elliott was standing on Old Bond Street, in the cold, staring at the door marked KAMINSKI GALLERY.

Forty-Eight

The noise shook Hiram awake and his hands gripped the arms of the leather chair as he sat up suddenly. Trying to gather his thoughts he realised he had dozed off in his office, and then noticed the sound coming from the back rooms. Wary, he got to his feet and moved towards his office door then paused, listening. Had he locked the back exit? Yes, he was sure he had. Slowly he pushed back the door then jumped, seeing a shadow move past the window.

He was tempted to call out, but stopped himself. It could be a trader or a cleaner, he thought. Someone from one of the shops or galleries working late. But he knew it wasn’t. This person was moving silently now, no longer clumsy. The shadow ducked and paused by the back door as Hiram watched, holding his breath.

Then he saw the handle turn. He was immobilised by shock, his body rigid, his eyes fixed on the juddering handle. It turned to the right and stopped. It turned again and stopped again, further movement impeded by the lock. Then someone started to apply pressure to the door. An instant later Hiram heard a shoulder slamming against the wood, and yet he still couldn’t move, standing transfixed in the doorway of his office.

The noise stopped as quickly as it had begun. For an instant Hiram thought it was over. He remained motionless, but feeling his legs tremble, his mouth dry as asphalt.

A moment passed.

Then another.

It was over.

It wasn’t.

The next sound exploded in Hiram’s ears. A heavy foot was slammed repeatedly against the base of the door, which shuddered and creaked under the onslaught.

This time whoever was outside was determined to get in.

Book Four

‘A world of dreams (and) nightmares in which

forms seem to flicker and change before our eyes.’

Art historian Walter Gibson

‘The Temptation of St Anthony’ [detail]

After Hieronymus Bosch

’s-Hertogenbosch, Brabant, 1473

Hieronymus never discovered how his family found him, but someone betrayed him.

For once the studio door had not been locked. (Was it his gentle brother, Goossen?) Hieronymus had taken his chance to escape and made for Amsterdam, an overcrowded and filthy city where a stranger would be less likely to attract interest. Even a sickly, pale young man wearing clothes unsuited for the cold. All around him streets had lurched into other streets, the webbing of canals banked with markets. Congested alleyways were piled with pig manure and rotting offcuts of fish and meat, dogs scavenging alongside beggars. Men who had lost legs fighting in the wars of Brabant played hurdygurdies on street corners while women carried children on their shoulders as they weaved a foul pathway through the mud. It was like ’s-Hertogenbosch but on a larger scale, seen through a fish-eye lens, grand and terrifying.

Hieronymus found lodgings, using the little money he had managed to steal from his father’s study. Money he had earned, but never received. And in his place of safety he slept with a chair propped up against the door handle to stop anyone entering. Strange, he thought in the darkness. I was imprisoned and now – a free man – I imprison myself. A prisoner always.

He dreamed of his chimeras, his hands moving in sleep as though he were painting. He woke, turned on the straw mattress, felt the prickle of a flea bite and fell back to sleep.

Coughing woke him around six, because his lungs were cold and the air damp. As he had done for over three months, he coughed up phlegm and spat it into a rag, blood spotting the corners of his mouth. His forehead was tacky with sweat, his narrow chest heaving, his ribs a dull ache of pain. Then the attack subsided and he fell back into a clammy sleep.

He dreamed he was sitting by water, drawing with a stick of white chalk on an ebonised rock. He dreamed that the studio in ’s-Hertogenbosch had burned to the ground, that his family had all perished, and felt no sadness. As the night turned over, he lay on the straw with the city fleas and dreamed of a boat coming for him, taking him through the canals of Amsterdam and into the sea beyond. As he rode the water, monsters followed him and he reached out his hand to touch the chimeras, the men fish and the flying ghouls. Animals with human heads told him stories, and under the lapping sea a shoal of demons drew the boat onwards.

He was crying in his sleep so loudly that it woke the man in the room next door, who called for the landlady. When she found Hieronymus he was grey, shiny with fever, his fingers still clenching a stick of white chalk.

Forty-Nine

Uncharacteristically thoughtful, Gerrit der Keyser sat in the sauna with a towel around his middle, his bifocals steamed up. He was trying to take his mind off his diet and the effects the medication was having on him. Like the puffy feet he had had to cram into his handmade shoes that morning. Feet and ankles like dimpled tripe, his silk socks tourniquets to the flesh. He had been quite good-looking once, but that was about five hundred years ago …

He blew his nose loudly, looking around. But he was alone, steaming, sweating, his glasses beginning to slip down his nose as he thought back. Sabine Monette – Sabine Guillaine when he first knew her – had been absurdly attractive, and clever. Much too clever for the life of a bourgeoise. It had been summer in Provence … Gerrit laughed aloud. Fucking summer in Provence! Christ, he sounded like a travel brochure. But it had been summer and it had been Provence and he had met this scrumptious piece of French arse and fallen in love.

Which had been easy when he had all his hair, all his heart vessels were working, and his sex drive could have powered a nuclear war … He could remember Sabine very well now that he allowed himself to remember. Pushing aside the grasping obsession of his work and his lascivious chasing of money, Gerrit thought nostalgically of his younger self. If they had met a little later, when he had set up the gallery and his fortunes were on an upward course, they could have made a go of it.

But then Miriam had come along and her father had offered to invest in Gerrit’s new gallery, and he would have been a fool to pass up the chance. Of course in return for the money he had had to marry the girl, but Miriam had been a reasonable wife. Jealous, certainly, but blissfully stupid. If he had thought of Sabine over the years which followed Gerrit might have had a fleeting pang of regret. Now and again as he remembered the brutality of his leaving … he put it down to youthful callousness. At least that was what he told himself.

And then Sabine re-entered his life. She was in her forties, still glaringly handsome, and now wealthy. Apparently his leaving had not destroyed her. Neither had their furtive affair spoiled her chances of landing a good catch. To Gerrit’s chagrin, Mr Monette was even richer then he was. With a better looking wife … A few years later Sabine contacted Gerrit and asked about a painting he had just purchased. She spoke to him over the phone as though he were a minion. Which, in a way, he was.

Rearranging the towel over his thighs, Gerrit took off his glasses and closed his eyes. He was so hot he thought he might expire, his heart pumping like over-boiling soup. But he stayed where he was, thinking of Eloise Devereux. His daughter … Why he hadn’t made the connection immediately he couldn’t imagine. She was so like her mother. Same elegant limbs and luminous eyes, but lacking in Sabine’s sensuality and warmth. Eloise was a beautiful woman but a chilling one.

And of course it was possible. He had slept with Sabine and the timings were accurate to their affair. But he was strangely miffed by having been excluded from fatherhood. Then again, if he had been told that she was pregnant would he have married her? Gerrit opened his eyes wearily. He was getting old, developing that most dangerous human trait – a conscience. He had managed – profited – without one for many years. No broken sleep for Gerrit der Keyser; no fucking guilty regrets; no looking back and feeling queasy about the past.

Until now … Gerrit scowled into the steam, the sauna a little replica of Hell. It made him think of Hieronymus Bosch and the chain. And how Sabine had cheated him out of it. Smart move, he thought with grudging admiration. Was that her revenge? After all, she would have known it was valuable. Perhaps she had even known about the papers hidden inside it.

But he hadn’t known about the secret then. Not until later, when the chain had left his hands and the rumours began. Stories about a deception perpetrated by the Bosch family and the Brotherhood of Mary. He didn’t know the whole story, but enough to realise it was explosive.

Gerrit sighed. Sabine had always been clever and finally she had bested him. But it had cost her. Murdered in a hotel room, initials carved into her stomach. Unexpectedly, Gerrit felt tears behind his eyes and blinked, shocked by emotion he hadn’t experienced for a long time. He could remember the young Sabine so well, her rounded stomach warm under his lips. Not grey-skinned, aged, ripped up … Even in the heat, Gerrit shivered as an image of Sabine lodged in his mind – and beside it, an image of their daughter.

The beautiful, and vengeful, Eloise.