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 paid, 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.
Wishing she had more to go on, Trish picked up the interview again in the hope of learning more.
The journalist had not been able to persuade him to say much about his family or upbringing, beyond the fact that one of the great advantages of being an only child was that you could create a private world in which you could always lose yourself. Trish was surprised. She was an only child too, but all her energies had gone into trying to
find
her self.
Toby had told his interviewer that he had discovered his sanctuary in the history of art. His parents had had quite a good collection of books of their own and lived near an excellent library, so he had spent much of his solitary childhood becoming acquainted with the great painters of the past, their models and their patrons. According to the journalist, this experience had stood him in very good stead when he was deciding which career to follow after his straightforward history degree, and in even better stead when he was still at university and identified some original crayon drawings by François Clouet.
‘Clearly surprised that I knew the story, and reluctant to boast,’ the journalist had written, ‘Fullwell said very little about his great coup.’
The article went on to explain that the drawings had been sold as prints by a local antique dealer, who had not been able to see past the grimy glass and poor framing to what lay beneath. That dealer must have been spitting tacks when the undergraduate’s attribution was confirmed by the auctioneers Goode & Floore’s, who sold the drawings on for a record price a few weeks later.
‘I asked Toby Fullwell whether he had made many similar discoveries,’ the journalist had written, ‘and he laughed modestly saying: “You don’t get that kind of opportunity more than once in any career. Of course, I’m always on the
lookout, but I’m not optimistic. I only wish it had been I who bought the so-called prints. Unfortunately, all I did was identify them.”’
The sound of footsteps on the iron staircase made Trish look up from the paper, and a brisk knocking at the door had her pushing herself up off the sofa. She shuffled across the polished wooden floor in her thick socks.
George reached the front door before she had even passed the fireplace. He was still wearing his huge blue-and-white butcher’s apron and now had a gravy-stained tea towel draped over his shoulder.
‘Ah, good morning,’ said a rich familiar voice. ‘My name’s Henry Buxford. I—’
‘Of course. Come on in. I’m George Henton. We met at dinner at the Shelleys’, didn’t we?’
‘So we did. That apron distracted me.’
George laughed, much too secure in his position as one of the leading solicitors in London to worry about being caught in such a domestic guise.
‘I’m sorry to disturb you, but I was in the neighbourhood, and I know Trish was trying to speak to me yesterday. Might I have a quick word with her?’
‘Sure,’ George said. ‘But it doesn’t have to be quick, does it? Stay for lunch. There’s a huge amount, and the Yorkshire puddings will start to spoil in about—’ He looked at his watch. ‘Ten minutes. Come in, Henry, and have your word with Trish while they cook.’
‘I suppose it is lunchtime,’ Buxford said. ‘But I’m afraid I can’t stay. I’ll be as quick as I can.’
Trish walked forwards to shake hands and apologize for her red nose and stockinged feet.
‘I hadn’t realized you were ill. I’m sorry to be disturbing you.’
‘It’s only a cold. I’m fine.’
‘You don’t look it. Hadn’t you better sit down or something?’
She took him round the great fireplace and offered him a drink, which he declined.
‘What have you got for me?’ he asked as she stretched herself out on one of the big black sofas. He sat down opposite her. ‘I know you’ve been trying to phone. I should have given you my mobile number.’
‘It’s only speculation so far, but there was something I wanted to ask you.’
‘Fire away.’
‘Are you afraid that Toby could be involved in money-laundering?’ she said straight out.
He didn’t flinch, or even look particularly worried. ‘No, I’m not,’ he said. ‘I’m not surprised you’ve come up with the idea, Trish. In fact, I would have been worried about your judgement if you hadn’t, but I really don’t think it’s a runner. For one thing Toby has shown no signs of paying the five million out again, and obviously he’d have to if he were laundering it.’
‘He hasn’t had much opportunity yet. The de Hooch sale only happened about three weeks ago. Couldn’t he just be waiting for the right moment? Or maybe he’s got cold feet.’
‘I doubt that.’ Buxford smiled at her, looking kind as well as honest. ‘I’ve been round all this myself, Trish, believe me. If Toby had got involved with people who wanted money laundered, he’d be working for men involved in organized crime, and that sort are remorseless. He wouldn’t be allowed to have cold feet. What else have you come up with?’
She ran through all her other ideas, watching him make notes when she reached the possibility that Toby could have been taking bribes. At the end of her account, Buxford said:
‘That’s a good start, Trish. You’ve done well.’
‘It’s kind of you to say so, but I haven’t come up with any evidence of anything. And I don’t think I’ll be able to without a proper inventory of the collection.’
‘Well, you’re not going to get that, I’m afraid. There isn’t
one. It would have made all our lives a lot easier if there had been.’
‘But there must have been one at some stage. I’ve been wondering whether Ivan Gregory could have burned it when he was in that post-stroke panic you described so vividly.’
‘Not possible.’ Buxford sounded certain. ‘Even half-mad with fear and misery, Ivan would never have destroyed an important document. He was a banker for heaven’s sake! Everything about his life and training would have forbidden it.’
Trish tried not to laugh as she thought of all the financial scandals of the last few years, and all the reports she’d ever read of shredded documents and misplaced evidence.
Before she could say anything, David and Nicky reappeared from their walk and had to be introduced to Henry. By the time they had gone to get rid of their outdoor clothes, Trish had moved on to one of her other doubts:
‘You told me that you’d had three rounds of interviews for the directorship of the gallery, Henry.’
‘Yes?’
‘I’ve been wondering what it was about Toby that made him seem so peculiarly suitable, and so trustworthy, that you felt you could give him all this power over the collection.’
‘He was easily the best of the applicants, judged by any criteria,’ Buxford said in the voice of one who would accept no contradiction. Then he pushed back the sides of his immaculate grey hair in the gesture she was coming to believe he used whenever he was feeling particularly uncomfortable, and added: ‘But he is also my godson.’
More sodding favours, Trish thought, which made her voice irritable as she said: ‘Ah, I see. Now I know why you wanted a private investigation of what he’s up to. I couldn’t understand why you didn’t call in the police straightaway.’