The Hogarth Conspiracy Read online

  “How did you do it?”

  Smiling, Oliver leaned back against the bench.

  “I’ve been in this business for a long time and know a lot of people with many different skills. As you said, the painting wasn’t going to a collector, so I had a little leeway. Mass reproduction houses are so clever these days. They don’t just have paper prints of Old Masters like they did before; now they reproduce the prints onto canvas to give a realistic effect.” He pausing, relishing the skill of his deception. “So I bought the relevant print from The Harlot’s Progress and contacted a discreet and reliable restorer who’s worked for me often. An incredible man, trained at the Royal Academy and in Rome. A man I helped many years ago who finally—and willingly—repaid the favor. Before you ask, he would never divulge what was done.”

  “So how did he do it?”

  Oliver smiled. “He took the replica off the stretcher, scraped away the top surface of the print, and then painstakingly repainted it, putting in the face of Frederick, the Prince of Wales.”

  “How could he? He hadn’t seen the original.”

  “True. But there’s an old print in the British Museum which was based on the original. An engraving locked away to which only I have access. It is not, nor has it ever been, in the public domain. He copied that. Remember, Victor, the painting’s not large. The face takes up an area less than an inch. If the repainted area had been life-size, the subterfuge would have been more difficult to achieve.”

  Curious, Victor pressed him. “How did he get the colors accurate? He didn’t have time to use oil paint—it wouldn’t have dried fast enough—so he must have used acrylic.”

  “He did. In expert hands, it can be made to look the same. As you say, it dries quickly.”

  “And we had so little time.”

  “Yes,” Oliver replied. “Layer after layer of paint was applied to achieve the muted tones, then varnished to blend with the rest. He then used a craquelure glaze to mimic tiny cracks in the surface of the painting. You know well enough that it’s one of the most obvious ways of making a picture look old. Then the restorer aged it. He rolled the canvas and smoked it in front of a candle, then made the little tear in the back and faked an old watermark. And finally, he rubbed soot all over the picture.” Oliver paused, remembering. “The finished painting was—”

  “Incredible.”

  “Yes. And the beauty of the whole plan is that if someone ever exposed it as the original, an expert would immediately denounce it as a fake.”

  Victor leaned back, taking in a breath and wondering how long the Chinese would hold on to the Hogarth. Would they barter it immediately, sell it on? He hoped so. Hoped that it was used as a bargaining tool, not as a work of art. The longer the fake Hogarth remained away from the art world, the safer he would be. Under the weak sun, Victor found himself praying that the deception went unnoticed for years. That the painting would be traded across countries and continents until its history was forgotten. Until nobody remembered from where or from whom it had come.

  “You did a good job,” Victor said, standing up to leave.

  “We both did. Take care of yourself.”

  “And you.”

  “You’re a good man and a brave one. Few can say that,” Oliver said, and put out a hand. Victor shook it gladly—and gently. “I won’t see you again, Victor, but it was a privilege knowing you. A privilege and an honor.”

  Sixty-Five

  CAREFUL NOT TO WAKE LOUIS, MRS. SHELDON CAME INTO HIS bedroom and placed the breakfast tray beside his bed. Coffee and toast, as always. As Bernie Freeland had always had every morning. Opening the curtains, she glanced out at the rain and smiled, knowing how much Louis appreciated such weather. The downfall was heavy. Water ran down the glass, making a puddle on the window ledge below. In a nearby tree, a recalcitrant bird shook its wet feathers; the mailman dropped a parcel into the box at the end of the drive.

  “Louis, wake up,” Mrs. Sheldon said, turning back to him. “Your breakfast’s here.”

  She moved over to the bedside and glanced down at him, wondering at his extreme and unsettling beauty. Who could imagine that behind such a face was such a troubled mind? Who, looking at Louis Freeland, could fail to be impressed? And yet his appearance was a cruel joke, promising an intelligence and glamour that Louis had never possessed. The golden fleece that hid the poor unsteady lamb.

  “Louis,” Mrs. Sheldon said again, reaching out and shaking his shoulder gently.

  He didn’t move, but as she drew back her hand, she noticed a piece of paper crumpled under his left arm. And beside it an empty bottle of pills. Suddenly apprehensive, she felt for a pulse, turning Louis onto his back and realizing as she did so that he was dead. And had been dead for some hours.

  Locking the bedroom door, Mrs. Sheldon picked up the piece of paper and began to read:

  Sorry.

  I thought he would stay with me after I made him. I thought he would, but he didn’t. My father, that is.

  I see his ghost; he talks to me at night, all the time.

  Or rather he did; now he’s gone again. I had thought I could keep him. It was the last time he lied that made up my mind. Mrs. Sheldon, thank you for being so kind to me, I’m sorry for what I did. You were always trying to get my father to care about me. I know that, I know that.

  I followed my father to New York. You remember how I made a few trips to the city? I went to see him, but the last time he lied and said he was going away, and he wasn’t because I saw him that day in New York.

  She paused, the letter in her hand, breathing fast. She could imagine Louis seeing his father and realizing that he hadn’t wanted to visit him. That he had lied again.

  He wasn’t going away—but he wasn’t coming to see me, and I don’t know why because I loved him.

  I followed him along the street. I’m sorry.

  He wasn’t abroad; he was in New York. I followed him, and then he stopped at the curb.

  I was looking at the back of his head and wondering why he couldn’t love me. And then I got so angry. I saw the lights change, and I pushed him.

  He went under a car and then another. He went around and over and ended up on his back, under a truck. And I watched him.

  And I knew I’d stopped him leaving ever again.

  I’d won.

  When I came back here, my father visited every night. He spent time with me. Listened to me, let me tell him everything. He was interested. So eager to hear everything about me.

  My mother lies at the bottom of the lake. But when my father was dead, he came to the house. He came in and stayed, always at night. I made a home for him, didn’t even feel bad about pushing him any longer—because he was happy.

  Then last night he said he was going away. He was a ghost, and he was still going away. I couldn’t keep him.

  I couldn’t make him listen, because he didn’t want to. He wanted to be gone. And so he slipped through the blinds last night, and I think I saw his plane over the house and knew he’d gone forever.

  I was never enough.

  I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.

  Louis

  Pushing the paper into her pocket, Mrs. Sheldon tidied the bed and smoothed out Louis’s hair, laying his arms by his side, the empty pill bottle in his left hand. Then she glanced around the bedroom, checking that everything was in order and that nothing would give her charge away. Finally satisfied, she unlocked the door and returned to the bedside table.

  Dialing a familiar number, she asked to be put through to Louis’s doctor.

  “Mrs. Sheldon. What can I do for you?”

  Her voice never wavered. “It’s Louis, Doctor; he’s committed—”

  “Oh, my God.”

  “You know how depressed he’d become. Perhaps we should have suspected something like this would happen.”

  “Did he leave a note?”

  “No,” she lied. “He didn’t need to. It was obvious why he did it. Louis lived for his father, and with
Mr. Freeland dead, he just couldn’t go on.” Her hand tightened around the paper in her pocket. “He wanted to be with him so much—and now he will be.”

  She could hear the irritation in the doctor’s voice.

  “The press will have a field day with this.”

  “No,” she contradicted him. “The press doesn’t care enough about Louis Freeland. No one but me ever did. That was the problem.”

  Sixty-Six

  STIFF-BACKED, ELIZABETH STRAIGHTENED UP IN HER SEAT, GLANCING at the door as Dr. Fountain entered. Her expression was one of eager hope as the doctor moved over to Kit’s bedside. Outside the window of the Friary’s private room, the harsh and bitter cull of winter had burned itself out; before long bulbs would start pushing their dozing heads through the cold soil, vying for life in the first weak search for sunlight.

  Her eyes searched Fountain’s face as he turned to her with an expression of intense sympathy, his southern drawl almost a caricature in the hospital room.

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Are you sure you’re right?” she asked, her head turning toward her son, then back to Fountain. “Are you really sure?”

  He nodded, his action regretful, somber. “Kit has suffered irreparable brain damage.”

  As though the thought was wounding to him, Eli Fountain moved over to the window and looked out, his back to Elizabeth. His decision had been, to his surprise, easy. Despite Mrs. Fleet’s urging—or maybe because of it—he had shrunk from the outright killing of Kit Wilkes. But when the madam had left, Eli had spent a long time staring at the figure on the bed and remembering what she had said. It was true that should Kit recover and realize that his plan had failed, he would exact a terrible revenge. There would be no point trying to explain that medicine was not an exact science, that it might well have been due to Kit’s drug taking that the sedation had been so potent. And the stimulant so ineffective.

  The newspapers would be Kit Wilkes’s first port of call. He would twist the truth, expose the Hogarth painting, and tell his version of events. Eli could imagine only too easily what that might be: that his own doctor had deliberately sedated him in order to get the painting for himself. Or that he had been duped, poor gullible Kit, drugged to keep him out of the running. Either way, he would ruin Eli Fountain. As Mrs. Fleet had said, his life would be over. No more money or power. No more sordid but lucrative work treating whores, no more lascivious bonuses at Park Street. Underhanded and sleazy as his life might be, Eli Fountain had no desire to swap it for a prison cell.

  “Are you sure?” Elizabeth asked again.

  He nodded without looking at her, waiting to compose himself, check that the vast dose he had given Kit Wilkes only an hour earlier was working its grim magic. Fountain knew that his plan was foolproof, but he still had to be there to make sure there was no flutter, no Lazarus-like recovery. He had to remain there to check that Kit Wilkes’s eyes did not open, that his mouth remained closed, that his secret would be interred within him.

  In time he would leave. But not yet.

  “I’m so sorry, Elizabeth,” Fountain said, turning back to her. “He won’t ever recover.”

  It wasn’t like killing. Not murder … just suspended animation. A deep unconscious state that would lead to brain damage in a matter of hours. But in the meantime he wondered if Kit could still hear him. If in that unmoving body he could hear his own terrible fate being spelled out. That he—so clever, so vicious, so talented—would feel his brain close down, his mind crushed. And after that? Nothing. Just his lungs opening and closing for years with the help of a machine, plugged into an outlet. His whole life run by the London Electricity Board.

  It wasn’t really murder, Fountain told himself again. Not really. He could come and visit Kit Wilkes any time he liked and see that he was still alive. It wasn’t murder; it was self defense. As for the Hogarth, the wretched painting that had started the whole affair, it had gone. He sighed, fiddling with his cuff links. God only knew who had it now. He didn’t care. In truth, he was relieved. To all intents and purposes, the events that had begun in Bernie Freeland’s jet had ended in a private room at the Friary Hospital.

  Or they had for Kit Wilkes.

  “How can I afford to keep him here?” Elizabeth asked plaintively. “I mean, how long will Kit be here?”

  For the rest of his life.

  “James Holden will help you, Elizabeth,” Fountain replied smoothly, knowing that the MP would be celebrating the fate of his old tormentor. “He is his father, after all.”

  Kit wasn’t dead, but he was forever silent, and that was good enough. With the gory tabloid spotlight taken off him, James Holden would see the path to glory open up before him. Discreetly, he would provide the hospital care for Kit Wilkes, but from a distance, and with his bastard forgotten, his past would be too. In time James Holden would be able to graduate from meat quotas, take his place in line for a medal. No longer a joke, he would finally gain respect and achieve the social standing that had been denied him by the peevish machinations of Kit Wilkes.

  His private penance would be ongoing, but his public sentence was over.

  Meanwhile, Elizabeth was thinking that James Holden must never—never—discover that Kit wasn’t his son. And at the thought, she realized that she was back firmly in her sister’s grip. At any time Charlene could reveal the truth, leaving Elizabeth to face years of treatment and care for her son. Treatment she could never afford, care that no whore well past her best could hope to secure. If her sister kept silent, Elizabeth could maintain her business, her life, and her son. Silence was her only weapon. Her last card.

  She knew that her sister would relish the situation. Would love to see Elizabeth buckle down, remember her place, and wonder—endlessly wonder—if or when Mrs. Fleet would make that anonymous phone call to James Holden.

  In her sister’s hand was her future. And knowing that was a little death in itself.

  Sixty-Seven

  INGOLA WAS WAITING OUTSIDE VICTOR’S APARTMENT WHEN HE returned later that afternoon. She was smoking to calm her nerves, not because she was enjoying it. As she heard his footsteps approach, she turned and smiled, but Victor was unresponsive as he unlocked the front door and moved up the stairs to his apartment. In silence she threw the butt of her cigarette into the gutter and followed him in, standing uncomfortably by the window.

  “Whatever we had in the past is over,” Victor began, his tone firm. Not unkind but unbending.

  “I want—”

  “No; you can’t want anything from me,” Victor replied bluntly. “It’s finished. You’re Christian’s wife.”

  “It was a marriage of convenience!”

  “God, I hope you never tell him that,” Victor replied coldly. “He worships you.”

  Thwarted, she snapped back. “And I worship you.”

  “No, you don’t. You just want me. It’s a challenge for you, Ingola. You want excitement. You think I don’t know what you’re really like?” He paused, watching her expression falter. “You think I don’t know about your affair with Tully?”

  Surprised, she blustered, “That meant nothing! It was a mistake!”

  “You slept with my closest friend. I could have hated him for that, but I realized that you’d have chased him, run him to ground. And poor Tully, for all his elegant charm, is a novice around women. I imagine he was flattered. I know he was very lonely, so desperate to fill the void left by his wife that he pushed his morals to the back of his mind to feel wanted. I know how he felt, because I felt it too when we made love.”

  “It was a mistake with Tully.”

  “One you repeated.”

  Flushing, she reached out to him, but he stepped back.

  “It’s over, Ingola. We did love each other, but not now. We can’t. I always knew what you were like; it was part of your charm. It was even refreshing, knowing that you were so ruthless. No one was going to walk all over you, keep you down. I admired that in you, but not now. Now it just looks li
ke selfishness.”

  “It was one mistake, Victor. I haven’t been with Tully for years.”

  “But we slept together.”

  “You fucking hypocrite!” she snarled, furious at being rejected. “What makes you think you can judge me? Look at yourself; you’re nothing. A grubby ex-con scrabbling around to find work. Whatever you can, wherever you can, mixing with crooks and whores. The kind of people you used to detest.”

  Stung, he retaliated.

  “The only difference between the whores I’ve been mixing with and you is that they’re professionals.”

  She slapped him—hard. Victor’s head jerked back.

  “How dare you talk to me like that? I could have any man I wanted.”

  “Not anymore,” he said coldly. “You can’t even have me. And I’m no one—just an ex-con, as you just reminded me. You’re on the wane, Ingola; your glory days are over. Now you’re a suburban wife living in Worcestershire. Oh, your career’s doing okay, but the rest has soured, hasn’t it?” He was being unusually cruel, unable to stop himself. “I know what you’re lacking. Excitement. Sexual thrills. You always had a high sex drive.”

  “Listen to me!” she said desperately. “I can make this right for us. I could leave Christian. I could be with you again, like we used to be. Just us.”

  Incredulous, he stared at her.

  “It can never be like it was. I’m a convicted criminal.”

  “I don’t care!”

  “Maybe not now, but you would soon enough. When the excitement’s worn off, when you realize just how fucking tough it is without a reputation, you wouldn’t like it at all,” he said, staring at her. “People look at you with contempt. They don’t take your calls; they make little references to what you used to be and what you’ve lost. I know you, Ingola. You couldn’t take it; you always crumble when things get tough. You backed out of marrying me easily enough.”

  “You told me to marry Christian!”

  “And you took the opportunity and ran with it. And now you’re bored, and you want an adventure. Well, not with me, Ingola. Not with me.”