The Rembrandt Secret Read online

  THE REMBRANDT SECRET

  ALEX CONNOR is also known as Alexandra Connor and she has written a number of historical novels. This is her first crime thriller. She is an artist, and has worked in the art world for many years. Alex is also a motivational speaker and is regularly featured on television and BBC radio. She lives in East Sussex.

  THE REMBRANDT SECRET

  Alex Connor

  For my father

  First published in Great Britain in 2011 by

  Quercus

  21 Bloomsbury Square

  London

  WC1A 2NS

  Copyright © 2011 by Alex Connor

  The moral right of Alex Connor to be

  identified as the author of this work has been

  asserted in accordance with the Copyright,

  Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication

  may be reproduced or transmitted in any form

  or by any means, electronic or mechanical,

  including photocopy, recording, or any

  information storage and retrieval system,

  without permission in writing from the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available

  from the British Library.

  ISBN 978 1 84916 346 0

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters,

  businesses, organizations, places and events are

  either the product of the author’s imagination

  or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to

  actual persons, living or dead, events or

  locales is entirely coincidental.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Typeset by Ellipsis Books Limited, Glasgow

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives Plc.

  A man who seeks revenge should first dig two graves.

  Confucius

  BOOK ONE

  Prologue

  House of Corrections,

  Gouda, 1651

  This is the story of me.

  I am writing it because one day someone will read it and know the truth. I write it believing that my history will get out of this place, because I never will. They have locked me in here, slammed the door on me. And when I panicked, water was thrown on me. It dried cold, the white cap which covered my hair stiff with starch, and spittle from one of the guards. After he had tried to feel under my skirt. After they searched me, looking in my mouth and ears, and in my private parts, forcing fingers into orifices, making an animal out of me.

  They take your life away from you when they lock the door. When they say Geertje Dircx, housekeeper to Rembrandt van Rijn, has been committed to an asylum. She is a nuisance, she abused her employer verbally, accused him of breach of promise, sold the ring he gave her: the ring which once belonged to his late wife. She is immoral, she is ungrateful, she is mad with bitterness and anger, telling lies, spreading gossip about how her master had promised he would marry her.

  But she is silent now.

  Only these pieces of paper hear my history … I lay with him when I had been at the house for some few weeks. He was grieving for his dead wife and I was eager to be promoted from kitchen to bed chamber, lying next to him and dreaming that the child I had been hired to take care of might – one day – become my stepson. Sssh … I hide these papers when I hear a noise. A footfall on the corridor outside means guards and people who peer in on me, watching me even when I relieve myself. Watching me, because I am labelled now. Locked up in the House of Corrections as a woman of licentious habits. A danger to myself, they said, when they took his part – which I should have known they would. Powerful and respected, how simple was it for him to have one mistress put aside for the newcomer. A girl younger than myself, with plump, country flesh that he will explore and probe. And then he will paint her. As he painted me.

  She will look after him and his son, and sweep the floor, with its monochrome tiles, when the sunlight comes through the stained glass of the windows and makes fireflies on the panelling. She will smell the linseed oil and rabbit glue, and know the sound of the pestle grinding the colours with the oils and turpentine which burn the back of her throat. I know she will creep upstairs and watch his pupils work, and watch him too. She will rummage amongst the heaps of costumes and props he collects for his paintings and hang back in the shadows when patrons come to the studio. She will find herself glancing at her reflection in the mirror a little longer than she used to, counting her attractions, because she wants the image to please him. She will do all this because I did. And I watched him watch me, and watched his expression turn from affection to love. I watched it – let no one say otherwise.

  Sssh … I am pausing now, hiding the paper under the skirt of my dress as someone’s eyes scrutinise me through the peevish little hatch in the door. I perform a crude gesture and the guard walks away, making a sucking sound with his lips. They think I’m promiscuous. I was once, with a few men, in the tavern where I worked, after I was widowed. I was, once. But they gave false evidence against me later. Not just my neighbours, but my own brother … What was he paid to lie? What amount was enough to have his sister committed? Does he lie awake in Amsterdam and look out of his free window at his free moon and wonder what sliver of captive sky his sister catches through the bars …?

  I could have ruined van Rijn then, but I stayed silent. Could have exposed a secret which would have hobbled him and got all Holland grinding him under the heel of their righteous Dutch boot. But I stayed silent. Only asked for what he promised, what he later denied me … It’s getting dark now, I can hardly see to write anymore. But tomorrow I’ll continue. My history will be told and I will destroy you, van Rijn. From the asylum where you put me, out of your bed and your life, from here, on scraps of hidden paper, I will chart your ruin.

  I shall write these letters to myself. I shall keep my sanity by this record. And one day, when they are read, the world will know you. They will know me, and you – and Rembrandt’s monkey.

  1

  Amsterdam

  His body was bent over, his head submerged in the confines of the basin, his knees buckled, trousers pulled down. Blood seeped from between his buttocks, intensive bruising around the top of his fleshy thighs. On the floor beside his puffy right knee lay the toilet brush, its handle bloodied. A series of small nicks covered his lower back and the skin of his scrotum was mottled with burn marks. Although his head was submerged, the back of his neck showed the imprint of fingers; his wrists bound together with the same gilt wire often used to hang paintings.

  It had taken him a long time to die. As he fought, he had struggled, his wrists jerking against the wire as it cut deep into his flesh, down to the wrist bone in places. Repeatedly his head had been dipped into the filled basin, then pulled out, then submerged again. When the water finally began to enter his lungs, his body had reacted, foam spittle gathering at the corners of his mouth. Much later it would rise from the corpse to make a white death froth. Against the push of water, his eyes had widened, the pupils turning from clear orbs to opal discs as he stared blindly at the bottom of the basin.

  The killer had made sure that the death of Stefan van der Helde would horrify not only the people who found him, but also his business associates and his cohorts. In sodomising him they had exposed Van der Helde’s hidden homosexuality, humiliating him and bringing down one of the top players in the art world. But there was more to it than that: a reason why no one would ever forget the death of Stefan van der Helde. When his body underwent post-mortem examination the pathologist found stones in his stomach. Apparently, over a period of hours, he had been forced to swallow pebbles, one after the other, each one larger than the last, u
ntil they threatened to choke him. Even when his oesophagus reacted and went into spasm, he was forced to keep swallowing, his gullet bruised and torn in places by the stones.

  They found twenty pebbles in Stefan van der Helde’s stomach. They found the water that drowned him – and the twenty stones. The pathologist didn’t know what it meant. Neither did the police. No one knew the meaning of the stones. By the time they did, the world would have plunged into recession; the auction houses losing fortunes on collapsing sales; and dealers forced into ruin as bad debts were called in and old favours demanded repayment. As the year ground into an unsteady and claustrophobic spring, the global art world was in a depression no one had foreseen or prepared for.

  And from behind elegant façades and glossy reputations crept the venal underbelly of the art world. In a matter of months the financial collapse of the market was underscored by a moral malignancy that left no one unscathed. And four people dead.

  It was, some said, a culling.

  2

  London.

  The present day.

  Tucked tight in the central kernel of the capital, in amongst the crochet of streets off the thoroughfare of Piccadilly, lies Albemarle Street. Every building is dissimilar. In shop fronts gilded with fashion logos, porters in funereal suits open doors for tourists and the wives of Russian oligarchs alike. Other shops have been there for over a hundred years; a dusty sprinkling of snobbery courts the passer-by with windows cradling bespoke shoes or hand-rolled cigars. And dotted among the By Royal Appointment signs and robin’s-egg blue Tiffany boxes nestles the Zeigler Gallery.

  It had first opened in 1845, but attracted no notice. After that, it had changed hands several times, closing during the Second World War. Left abandoned, its walls denuded of paintings, the building had sat out the fighting alone, the flat above remaining empty. The rates had been too high, the landlord too greedy. At the height of the war there had been a suspicious fire in the gallery. Some said it had been caused by a tramp, sneaking in and falling asleep with a lighted cigarette in his hand. But neither the tramp nor his cigarette – not even a stub – had ever been found. Yet soon afterwards there had been a real fatality: a soldier killed whilst on leave, his body left in the back of the gallery, hidden among the empty packing crates. The soldier – who had worn no dog tag and carried no identification – had never been named and the murder was never solved. But the death of the unknown soldier had cast a pall over the building and the gallery had acquired a ghost. Or so rumour had gone.

  Then, in 1947, the gallery had been reopened by a Polish man called Korsawaki. He had come from Warsaw – where he had had been forced to leave behind a fortune and a family – to try to make his name in London. In his home city he had been a dealer of some note, but in the austere years directly after the war he made little headway in London. Forced into selling cheap prints, he was soon grubbing around for any means to pay the rent and, by the time 1949 came around, Korsawaki had left. A couple of other dealers followed, with little success, and the gallery gained a reputation for being jinxed. Left deserted as its neighbours flourished, it had one brief spell in the sunshine as a café. But soon the clink of dishes and the pulse of conversation ended, and the doors were closed and bolted once again.

  And so they stayed, until one bitingly cold morning in 1963 when a young man had paused on Albemarle Street and seen the FOR SALE sign in the window. Curious, Owen Zeigler had leaned forward, peering in, but all he had been able to make out was a deserted interior with a staircase on one side and a skylight at the end of the room. He tried the door handle, but it was locked. Then he had stepped back – almost into the path of an oncoming car – to stare upwards at the flat above. The windows had given nothing away, but Owen had felt drawn to the place for some reason that escaped him. Intrigued, he tried the door again without success, and then noted the name and address of the estate agent.

  That afternoon he had visited Messrs Lyton and Goldthorne, asking for details on the gallery. They – spotting a potential customer for a property which had proved virtually impossible to shift – encouraged his interest. In fact, Mr Lyton had taken Owen to the gallery within the hour, pushing open the door and waving his prospective customer in. A little probing told Mr Lyton that Owen had family backing and that his father was a dealer in the East End.

  What Owen didn’t tell the agent was that Neville Zeigler dealt not in fine art, but in a variety of ‘collectables’; a Jew who had come to London before the war; a Jew who had learnt the business the hard way; a Jew clever enough to develop an eye for the marketable and, later, the valuable. And over the years Neville had instilled in his only child a terrifying ambition. He would take Owen to Bond Street and Cork Street and show him the galleries and tell his son – no, insist – that one day there would be a Zeigler Gallery within this cluster of culture and money. With a ferocity which might have daunted a lesser child, Owen learned to develop his natural appreciation into a skill. Neville’s long hours of labour in the East End afforded Owen a university place – and the son repaid the father well.

  When Owen Zeigler finally entered the bull ring of the art world, he was clever, adept and confident. He could pass as an upper class scholar, a natural inheritor of a cultural career. With his innate ability and his further education, his progress was seamless. But what people didn’t know was the other side to Owen Zeigler, the side inherited from his Jewish father, along with Neville’s shrewd, invaluable business acumen.

  Encouraged by the widowed Neville, who knew the fortunes to be made in the art world, Owen was told to keep quiet about his background and ‘get climbing’.

  ‘You’ve a foot in both camps,’ Neville told him. ‘You know about culture, and you’re street-savvy too. Use it. And remember – there’s plenty of room at the top.’

  Of course Mr Lyton didn’t know any of this, but was impressed when Owen returned a day later having uncovered the gallery’s erratic history – which he used as a bargaining tool. In short, by the time two weeks were up, Owen Zeigler had become the new gallery owner. And by the time three weeks were up, the interior had been painted, the flat above was furnished, and there was a new sign outside: after an uncomplicated delivery, the Zeigler Gallery had been born.

  In that same bitter winter, Owen held an opening to which his neighbours came to gawp and to criticise, a few to predict disaster. But the dealers from Dover Street and Bond Street realised within minutes of walking through the door that they had a serious new rival. The market at that time was swamped with French art, and the Impressionists, the gauzy country scenes, were becoming commonplace – almost boring – by their very repetition. So Owen had chosen another speciality – Dutch art. Not the thundering names of Rembrandt or Vermeer, in which he could not afford to trade, but the smaller followers, and the still-life painters.

  There had been only twenty paintings exhibited on that cold winter day in 1963, but by the end of the month eighteen had been sold. Owen Zeigler’s career had been launched. Not perhaps as a grand, ocean-gobbling liner, but as a swift, clever little lighter that could ride the waves of the art market and survive …

  And all this, Owen Zeigler’s son, Marshall, remembered, looking at his father in disbelief.

  ‘Where did all the money go?’ Marshall asked

  Owen put his head in his hands. Now in his seventies, he looked no more than sixty-five. Years of careful grooming, and long walks in London parks, had kept him lean, and his hair, although grey, was thick and well cut. In front of him was the desk he had used since the first day he had begun business at the gallery. A desk on which many a cheque had been written, and across which had passed many a handshake. Above it hung a Dutch painting by Jan Steen. Valuable, as were all the pictures in the gallery, the insurance rising regularly over the years to accommodate and protect Owen’s success. The burglar alarms, red lights flickering outside like out-of-season Christmas bunting, all connected to nearby police stations.

  Still staring at his father, M
arshall thought back to his childhood. His first ten years had been spent in the flat above the gallery, but as his father had prospered the family had been moved out of London to a country house, Thurstons. During the week, Owen had lived in the flat, spending his weekends in the Georgian stereotype of up-market success. But when Marshall’s mother had died, Owen had returned frequently to Albemarle Street, leaving his son in the care of a nanny, and later the rigid arms of public school.

  ‘Where did the money go?’ Marshall repeated.

  His father made a movement, almost a shrug, but the action dropped off, half-made. ‘I have to do something … I have to.’

  For the first time Marshall noticed that his father’s hair was thinning slightly at the crown. Even his expert barber hadn’t managed to disguise it, he thought, knowing that it would embarrass his father if he knew. Then he noticed the raised veins in his hands, the liver spots puddling the tanned skin. His father was getting old, Marshall realised, unaccountably moved. All Owen’s little vanities were becoming noticeable, obvious … Marshall glanced away, thinking of the telephone call which had brought him back to London, his father asking him to return from his work in Holland.

  ‘I need to talk to you,’ Owen had said, his voice shivering on the edge of panic. ‘If you could just come home.’

  He had done so at once, because his father had never been possessive or demanding. Marshall might have longed for more closeness as a child, might have grieved alone for the loss of his mother, but in his teens he realised that his father’s affection had never been withheld. Just neutralised. Having lost his wife so unexpectedly in a plane crash, Owen had spent the next decade in waiting, almost as though some other plane – real or ephemeral – might bring her back. As though, if he refused to accept her passing, she would one day arrive at some spiritual terminal. Where he would be waiting by the gate to bring her home.