ELEVEN

Now I knew why Eldritch had gone to Ireland in 1940: to recruit the forger whose help he and Geoffrey Cardale had needed to pull off their lucrative art fraud. Only Cardale had been able to profit from that fraud in the end, of course. Eldritch’s return from Ireland had been delayed by the small matter of thirty-six years. Though as to precisely why, he was still not saying.

‘I’m tired,’ he complained as he polished off his second large Scotch in the Ritz bar. ‘I’m not used to leading such an eventful life. I’ll order some supper on room service. You can … enjoy the evening without me.’

Eldritch’s fatigue sounded to me like an excuse for not disclosing a single fact more than he wanted to. I didn’t bother to argue. It was all coming out, little by little. I just had to be patient. Meanwhile, I had a secret of my own to console me.

I considered contacting one or other of my old business friends who were based in London to suggest meeting later that evening. But I thought better of it. There’d have been too much explaining to do. So, I contented myself with dinner at an Italian restaurant in the Haymarket and a film afterwards at the cinema opposite.

It was gone eleven when I returned to the Ritz. It was raining by then and the hotel doorman was assisting some dowager into a taxi, umbrella protectively hoisted. From the other side of the street, where I stopped in surprise, it was possible to be deceived by the damp, jostling shadows of cars and passers-by. But I wasn’t. I didn’t have the slightest doubt that the raincoated figure climbing the steps behind the doorman and slipping quietly into the hotel was Eldritch.

It was reassuring, in one sense, to know I couldn’t rely on anything he said. It made holding out on him a whole lot easier, to the point where it almost seemed like a necessary act of self-defence. I still had to make it to the Royal Academy without him knowing where I was going, or why, of course. But, in the event, my plans for doing so were never tested. I emerged from the bath next morning to find a note had been slipped under my door. Stephen: I have to go out for a few hours. Meet me in the Red Lion, Duke of York Street, at noon. E. Somehow, without even trying to, he’d wrongfooted me.

I felt ridiculously furtive as I entered the Royal Academy a few minutes after its doors opened for the day. The galleries were largely empty, staff heavily outnumbering paying public. I headed straight for the Picasso room. The attendant I’d spoken to the day before wasn’t there. He’d been replaced by a stern-looking woman with her hair in a bun. Approachability wasn’t her forte. I gave her a nod that went unreciprocated and started a slow wander round.

I was at the first corner, contemplating Picasso’s ingenious rearrangement of the physical features of a horse and rider, such that it wasn’t possible to say which of them was actually in the saddle, when I heard a sigh from behind me that I knew instinctively hadn’t emanated from the attendant.

I turned to see a young woman in jeans, trainers and a short light mac sitting on the buttoned-leather ottoman in the centre of the room, a satchel looped loosely over her arm. She sighed again as she gazed around at the paintings, apparently oblivious to my presence. She had long, dark, almost black hair, tied back in a ponytail, and large, dark, soulful eyes. I’d have said she was about thirty. She’d have attracted my attention even if the room had been crowded. There was something fragile as well as beautiful about her. Or perhaps the fragility was her beauty. Nothing in her looks was out of the ordinary. Yet that she was out of the ordinary was immediately apparent.

I walked slowly over and sat down a foot or so away from her. She cast me a fleeting glance. I sensed dismissiveness. Perhaps she thought I was some kind of art gallery pick-up merchant. I chanced my arm. ‘I’m told you come here often.’

A second, less fleeting glance. ‘I’m not interested,’ she said, as if I’d made a sales pitch for a new brand of lipstick. Her voice was low and firm, American-accented.

‘You should be.’

‘For God’s sake.’ She grasped the strap of her satchel, stood up and made to walk away.

‘You’re related to Isaac Meridor, aren’t you?’

That stopped her. She looked round. ‘What’s it to you?’

‘Was he your grandfather?’

She coloured slightly. ‘Yes.’

‘Eldritch Swan is my uncle. Want to talk to me now?’

We had the tea-room virtually to ourselves. She’d taken off the mac by the time I got back from the counter with our coffees, revealing a collarless white shirt and a blue quilted waistcoat. Her make-up was minimal. There were no rings or bracelets. She seemed to be engaged in an attempt to look much plainer than she really was. She begged a light for a cigarette and emptied two sugar sachets into her coffee, her wide-eyed gaze fixed on me throughout.

‘I’m Rachel Banner,’ she announced. ‘My mother married a New Yorker. I’ve lived in the city most of my life. I work at the UN. I’m on unpaid leave at the moment, trying to resolve a few personal problems. Most of them come back to those paintings we were just looking at. And therefore your uncle.’ Her tone was candid yet challenging, pitched somewhere between confession and accusation. It was clear she didn’t believe in letting herself – or anyone else – off lightly. ‘What’s your story?’

‘Stephen Swan. Career in the oil business currently on hold while I help my uncle make up for his past transgressions.’

‘Oh yeah?’

‘A lawyer acting for an anonymous client has asked Eldritch to find proof that Brownlow’s Picassos were stolen from your family. I’ve been assuming that client was your mother, their rightful owner. But something in your expression tells me that may not be the case.’

‘It absolutely isn’t. My mother’s done her level best to forget the Picassos since her lawsuit against the Brownlow estate failed.’

‘I see.’

‘That’s more than I do, Stephen. Where’s your uncle been all these years? I reckoned he must be dead.’

‘He’s been in prison.’

‘Honest?’ She smiled. ‘Well, that’s something, I guess. What did he do? Murder someone?’

‘I don’t exactly know. But he’s just got out, after thirty-six years.’

‘Well, that’s almost as long as he deserved to serve, for cheating my mother out of her inheritance. But, does that mean he never got any of the proceeds?’

‘It does.’

‘Better and better.’

‘Listen, Miss Banner, I—’

‘Call me Rachel.’

‘OK. Rachel. You ought to know I had no idea about any of this until my uncle was released from prison. Like you, I thought he was dead. That’s what my father always told me.’

‘It figures. He was probably ashamed of him.’

‘Yes. He probably was.’

‘You should be too.’

‘Would it help if I said I was?’

‘No. Nothing would help. Except restitution.’

‘Well, maybe if we could—’

‘Do you know how much they’re worth? All told, I mean. Those eighteen paintings.’

‘Millions, I imagine.’

‘Yeah. That’s right. Millions, whether its dollars or pounds. And you’re telling me your uncle is trying to prove he and Cardale stole them from my family? Why doesn’t he just own up? Then we could reclaim them and he could go back where he belongs: prison.’

‘It isn’t as simple as that.’

‘No. It never is, is it?’ For the first time since we’d started talking, she looked away, drawing exasperatedly on her cigarette.

‘Eldritch was arrested long before the Picassos were copied, Rachel. Technically, he didn’t steal them. Geoffrey Cardale did that all on his own.’

‘I know Cardale stole them. Every member of my family knows that. And we tried to prove it as soon as we found out. We employed a small army of well-paid investigators to prove it. Without success.’

‘None of them knew what Eldritch knows.’

‘I can’t argue with that.’ She stubbed out her cigarette and faced me again. ‘This … anonymous party … is offering some kind of a reward if Eldritch finds proof that will stand up in court, I suppose?’

‘Yes.’

‘Of course. It had to be about money. How much? No.’ She raised a hand. ‘Don’t tell me. I really don’t want to know. I don’t think I could bear to. Do you know why I’ve come here almost every morning since I flew in? Let me tell you. So you understand. When my grandfather died, Mom and Grandma were suddenly hard up. All those paintings, those other paintings that were valuable in their own right, plus all the diamonds he was carrying, all his portable wealth, was at the bottom of the ocean. Within days, Germany invaded Belgium, cutting off access to his bank accounts. As a Jew, his savings were forfeit. There was nothing left. Except the Picassos, of course. Mom and Grandma just had to scrape by until the war ended. Then they could sell the Picassos. Well, they got them back in 1945 right enough. And they tried to sell them. Only trouble was, they turned out to be fakes. Good ones, it’s true. Good enough to deceive anyone who wasn’t an expert. But fakes nonetheless. Cardale said he was horrified. He had no idea. Grandma believed him. She burnt them in disgust. The whole lot. They were destroyed before I was born. I never saw them. I never saw the real ones either until recently. Now I like to take every opportunity to look at them, to sit in front of them, to imagine how life would have been if Cardale hadn’t defrauded us.’

‘How would it have been?’

‘Different, that’s for sure. Better, I can’t help thinking. For starters, my mother would never have married my father. He offered her security, which she badly needed after the Picasso safety net collapsed under her and Grandma. But it wasn’t worth it. He had his own business, which wasn’t anything like as stable and profitable as he’d pretended. It went bust. He hit the bottle. Then he started hitting Mom. And me. And my kid brother, Joey. Mom divorced him in the end. But the end was a long time coming. Then Joey went off to Vietnam. He came through without a scratch. Not a scratch you could see, that is. But inside … there were plenty. He lives with Grandma now.’

‘Your grandmother’s still alive?’

‘Yeah. She’ll be ninety this year. Pretty fit, if mentally fuzzy. She went back to her old home in Antwerp after Mom got married. That’s where Joey is now. He said he couldn’t settle in the States after the Army had finished with him. I don’t blame him. A lot of the time, I don’t like it there much myself.’

‘When did you realize the Picassos had been stolen from you?’

‘When the Brownlow Collection went on view for the first time, at the Met three years ago. All eighteen of them together. All acquired post-war. It was too big a coincidence. Mom knew then Cardale had shafted us. She’d always assumed her father had believed the paintings to be genuine – otherwise why would he have gone to such lengths to save them? – and that he must have been cheated by the dealer who’d sold them to him in the first place. Three years ago, she realized they really had been genuine and that Cardale was the one who’d done the cheating. But he was dead by then. His grandson denied all knowledge. And the Brownlow estate stonewalled her. She spent a lot of money on lawyers and got nothing for it. Now she says she wishes she’d never found out. I guess she’s right. It probably would have been better for us to have gone on in ignorance. It wasn’t bliss. Take my word for it. But it beat turning over and over in your mind the things you could do and the changes you could make … with all those millions.’

‘Maybe you should stop coming here, Rachel. It doesn’t sound as if it’s … good for you.’

‘That’s what my friends tell me. Forget it. Give it up. Put it behind you. Write it off. Move on. Well, I tried, but it just didn’t work. So then I decided to attack the problem head on. I fixed myself up with a year off from the UN and came to Europe to check the Brownlow estate’s version of how he’d acquired the Picassos. It’s what our lawyers were supposed to have done, but I reckoned, if I double-checked everything, I’d find what they’d missed: the crucial connection to Cardale I needed to clinch our claim.’

‘But you never found it?’

‘No. The story was the same in Paris and Geneva and the other cities I moved on to, chasing leads. The dealer Brownlow had used was dead or retired or had bought the picture from another dealer who was dead or retired – or untraceable. Memories had failed. Documentation was missing. No one knew anything – or was prepared to admit it if they did. It was a maze without a centre. Eventually, I gave up. Since then, I’ve been staying here in London with an old college friend who works at the American Embassy, putting off as long as I can the day when I have to admit defeat and go home.’

‘Well, maybe you don’t have to admit defeat now.’

‘Thanks to good old Uncle Eldritch and the anonymous moneybags who’s signed him up?’

‘Something like that.’

‘Go on, then.’ Her half-smile was wholly sceptical. ‘Tell me he’s homing in on proof positive that Cardale stole the Picassos.’

‘It’s early days.’

‘Not for me.’

‘Do you know who the forger was that Cardale used?’

‘No. Do you?’

‘Yes. Hiring him was as far as Eldritch got before he was arrested. His name’s Desmond Quilligan.’

‘Still alive?’

‘I don’t know. But I mean to find out. And it’s something, isn’t it? Something more than you’ve uncovered.’

She paused to put another cigarette in her mouth. I leant across the table to light it without waiting to be asked. For a second, we were so close I could feel her breath fanning my fingers. She went on looking at me, searching my face for some clue that she could trust me, which I sensed, for all her prickliness, she wanted to, very much. Then she leant back and took a long drag. She blew the smoke out slowly into the air above us. ‘OK. That is something. Anyhow, it might be. And I want in on it. Naturally. Can I meet Eldritch?’

‘Of course. Let me set it up with him.’

‘When?’

‘Tomorrow?’

‘OK. Do you live in London?’

‘No. We’ve come up from Devon.’

‘Where are you staying?’

‘The Ritz.’ I winced as I said it. I knew Eldritch’s choice of hotel would confirm all her prejudices about him. The arch of her eyebrows declared as much. But she said nothing. ‘I’ll need your phone number.’

She took a biro out of her satchel and wrote the number on one of the empty sugar sachets. ‘You will call, won’t you, Stephen?’

‘It’s a promise.’

‘Promises have never amounted to much in my experience.’

‘You must have been given them by the wrong people.’

‘Yeah.’ She gave a melancholy little nod. ‘I guess I must.’

We parted in the courtyard at the front of the building. Rachel looked pensive, almost apprehensive. ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.

‘Do you really not know what Eldritch served time for?’

‘He won’t say. He claims it was a condition of his release that he shouldn’t discuss it. He went to Ireland in June 1940 to hire Quilligan and never made it back to London. That’s all I can tell you.’

‘How much will he be paid if he finds what we need to reclaim the Picassos?’

‘You said you didn’t want to know.’

‘I’ve changed my mind.’

‘Fifty thousand pounds.’

Her eyes widened. ‘As much as that?’

‘Someone obviously badly wants him to succeed.’

‘Who?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Does Eldritch know?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘But you’re not sure?’

‘He’s a hard man to read.’

‘I’ll bet he is. Tell me, Stephen, are you worried by how many sides there are to this you don’t understand?’

‘Do you think I should be?’

‘Maybe.’ She looked intently at me. ‘Maybe we both should be.’ Then, quite suddenly, she turned and walked smartly away across the courtyard.

‘I’ll call you later,’ I shouted after her.

She raised a hand in acknowledgement. But she didn’t stop, or even glance back at me, as she strode through the gateway into Piccadilly.