Текст книги "The Forger, The Killer, the Painter and the Whore"

Автор книги: Alex Connor

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THE KILLER London, 2014

As Luca Meriss went public with his claim to know the whereabouts of the two Caravaggio paintings, the behemoth of the art world stirred itself. From New York to London, from Paris to Berlin, the news travelled and the scavengers came out.

It was barely six thirty in the morning when Sebastian and Benjamin Weir found themselves becoming slowly paralysed. Beyond their gallery walls, London was taking her first morning breaths, while inside the twin brothers were stripped and bound together with wire fastened around their throats. Unable to defend themselves, their legs were posed in the lotus position, their attacker loading a nail gun in front of them.

Unable to move, both men had watched as the gun was loaded. Sweat trickled down their backs, their skin pressed against each other, low gurgling noises in their throats. For some reason the killer had turned up the heating and the gallery was suffocatingly hot. The killer approached them, looked down at the two brothers, and then slowly and methodically laid the nail gun against Sebastian Weir’s scrotum.

He pulled the trigger and Sebastian’s body jerked, saliva running from the side of his mouth as the man kept firing nails, eight in total. Tied to his brother, Benjamin could feel Sebastian pass out and watched, eyes bulging, as the man reloaded. He paused for several moments, watching Benjamin struggle against his paralysis, his teeth biting down on his tongue, blood oozing onto his chin.

And then he fired. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven and eight times. When he had finished, the murderer stood up and inserted a piece of metal into the wire which was wound around the brothers’ necks. He began to twist it like a garrotte and continued twisting it, cutting off their air supply. As the temperature inside the room increased and the gallery began to steam, Sebastian’s bowels relaxed and the smell of faeces was pungent as the killer stepped back from the dying men.

Curious, he watched Benjamin and Sebastian Weir turn into corpses. He saw the pink of their flesh fade to the colour of putty and their blood congeal. Then he picked up the two syringes he had emptied into them, wrapped them in a towel, and put them into the small holdall he had brought with him. Taking out a container, he unscrewed the lid and laid a paintbrush beside it. Finally he unsheathed the hunting knife he had brought with him and, grasping the front of Sebastian’s hair, cut into his scalp. It took only seconds for the killer to scalp both brothers.

He worked quickly and with precision, and when he had finished he made sure that nothing was left to give him away. When he finally left the Weir Gallery the temperature was nearing ninety degrees inside, the cold of the winter day shocking as he moved into the street.

The murders would unnerve the London, New York and Berlin art world. Seven years earlier two other gallery owners had been killed in Berlin, in the same manner, and no one – neither the investigator brought into the case nor the police – had caught the murderer. For years the killer had been silent, but now, as the news of the missing paintings became public, he had become active again.

And like the last time in Berlin, no one had any idea who the murderer was.

*

It would take one man, Gil Eckhart, to piece together the relevance of the missing paintings, a secret association between dealers in London and Berlin and the stolen Caravaggios – to uncover a labyrinthine, bloodied plot which encompassed the globe.

Now read the whole story in The Caravaggio Conspiracy.

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