The Hogarth Conspiracy Read online

  “I need the money today!”

  “Why the rush? You’re not short of funds, are you?” Mrs. Fleet probed. “Not getting a liking for cocaine again, I hope. I don’t use girls who take drugs—”

  “I’m not on drugs.”

  “So what d’you want the money for?”

  “Look, Mrs. Fleet,” she replied sharply. “I work hard for you. I make good money for you, and I pass on interesting information to you, but I don’t have to tell you what I spend my fucking money on.”

  “Very well. But why’d you want the money today? Why can’t you tell me the news before I pay you?” She paused and then, sounding amused, said, “Oh, dear, you don’t trust me, do you? You think I’ll take the information and refuse to pay.”

  Irritated, Marian spoke before thinking. “I could go somewhere else.”

  “Now that would be stupid,” Mrs. Fleet replied, nettled. “I thought we had a good relationship, Marian. You don’t want to go threatening me, do you?”

  Marian caught the chill in her tone and backed down.

  “Okay, Mrs. Fleet; Bernie Freeland’s got hold of a Hogarth. The one which shows the Prince of Wales with his whore.”

  “That was destroyed a long time ago.”

  “No. He’s got it. He told Oliver Peters on the jet.”

  “Sir Oliver Peters? He was a passenger?” She sounded surprised.

  “Bernie offered him a lift. He was uncomfortable the whole journey, the stuffed shirt. Anyway, someone spiked Bernie’s drink for a laugh—”

  “You?”

  “Nah, I think it was Annette. She loves practical jokes,” Marian said, hurrying on. “Anyway, Bernie panicked, thought he was dying, and whispered something to Oliver Peters about having this painting—only it wasn’t such a whisper, if you get what I mean.”

  “So other people could have heard what he said?”

  “Yeah,” Marian agreed. “They could have. And some were acting a bit twitchy afterward. But we were coming in to land, so no one could do anything.”

  “Who else was on that flight besides you girls and Peters?”

  “Kit Wilkes.”

  “And?”

  “Lim Chang.”

  “Odd bunch,” Mrs. Fleet said thoughtfully. “So we have three of the biggest dealers in the art world. Wilkes representing Russia, Lim Chang representing Asia, and Oliver Peters representing the UK. It’s almost like the United Nations.” She paused, considering what she had just heard. “So if the other passengers overheard what Bernie said, they could already be passing the information on to their contacts?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “So why should I pay you if it might be common knowledge within hours?”

  “It might. But then again, it might not,” Marian replied briskly. “It could just be Sir Oliver Peters who heard, and me, of course. We could be the only two who know.”

  “You could, yes.”

  “And if it’s not common knowledge, it gives you a head start, doesn’t it? I reckon my tip-off’s worth a couple of thousand, don’t you?”

  There was a long silence before Mrs. Fleet spoke again.

  “As it happens, I’ve got a meeting near the airport this evening. I’ll come by around eight, Marian … with your money. Will cash do?”

  “Fine.”

  “I’ve also got a new client for you at the hotel later tonight.”

  “Name?”

  “Sergei Ivanovitch,” Mrs. Fleet replied, adding, “I don’t have to tell you to keep this Hogarth information to yourself, do I?”

  “I won’t say a word.”

  “Good girl. No point letting the world in on our little secret, is there?”

  Seven

  FOR MANY, VICTOR BALLAM PERSONIFIED LUCK. LUCKY IN HIS ABILITY and his business acumen. Fortunate in his good looks, his brain, and his quick wits, he was neither showy nor arrogant and was not verbally cruel. He knew he was fortunate and never took his luck for granted, a trait that earned him friends even in the bullpen of the London art world. So it was obvious that Victor would fall in love with a woman of beauty and intelligence. She was a svelte Norwegian law student, and with such a consort Victor’s rise continued unabated, a glossy future predicted, even confirmed.

  Always careful not to antagonize people, Victor managed to navigate the sales and auctions with skill and had opened his own gallery on Dover Street at the age of thirty. For an uncommon man, he had the common touch. And bobbing in a suffocating soup of egos, he remained naturally humble. Without resorting to dirty tricks, sleazy deals, or baited gossip, Victor Ballam—an uncrowned potentate, an impassioned counsel for the wronged—was respected and admired for his fairness and circumspection. He spoke out about the grubbier side of the art world and had become a media pet. He was blessed in his work and in his personal life.

  No one had expected him to lose it all.

  No one expected him to spend three years, four months, and five days in prison. It should have been six years, but Victor Ballam got time off for good behavior, enabling him to return to his old life more quickly. But the old life had packed up and moved on, emigrated to some moral high ground without leaving a forwarding address. Alarmed by its association with a proven fraudster, colleagues from Ballam’s previous existence had taken offense, and all but some loose change of them had disowned him.

  He came out of Long Lartin Prison on a bitter Worcestershire morning with just a brown paper package and slid into the passenger seat of a waiting Volvo, watched by the driver, his older brother, Christian. Christian had practiced his welcome speech for days, tutored by his wife, Ingola. She had been Victor’s beautiful Norwegian fiancée, but at Victor’s insistence—a year to the day after his internment—she had married his older brother. They had investigated and exhausted every alternative way to keep her in England, but in the end the solution was simple. Painful but simple. And in some strange way the marriage kept Ingola close to Victor, still a part of his life albeit not his lover.

  Victor had always known Ingola’s faults, had accepted her ambition and a certain ruthlessness as part of her nature. She might love him with intensity, but her own interests were her first priority. If she was threatened, she assumed she would be protected. And she was. So, as Victor’s star fell to earth, Ingola was persuaded to let Christian save her.

  It had been summer. The wedding was held at the registry office, and Victor sent a letter to both of them, wishing them well, and another addressed only to his brother:

  Christian

  Look after Ingola as I would have done. You’ll make a good husband, she needs that, she deserves that. She’ll make a fine lawyer some day, and do a lot better without a husband with a criminal record.

  Don’t feel bad about taking my place.

  Don’t try to excuse me.

  Don’t hurt her.

  What he thought but did not write was different:

  She can stay in England as a married woman. I’d have done that for her, and now I can’t, you can.

  Don’t make love to her…. Of course you can, of course you must…. Don’t listen to her…. About Norway, about the way she likes her eggs cooked, about how she knows all the tunes to Les Misérables.

  Don’t let her down.

  Don’t remind her, don’t let her talk about me. Don’t let her look back. I can do that for both of us.

  “You okay?” Christian asked, breaking into his brother’s thoughts. Surreptitiously, he looked him up and down as they stopped at some traffic lights, heading for the house where he and Ingola lived in the countryside.

  He saw in Victor a little weight loss, a bit of unexpected, premature crinkling around the eyes, but the hair was still dark and the eyes darker. And for all his crumpled clothes—folded too long in prison storage, leaving creases in the wrong places—Victor Ballam still retained his glamour, which, allied to an alert brain and honed ambition, made him memorably appealing. Christian might have the intellect, the professional respect, and the striking wife,
but Victor—even this Victor—had the charisma.

  “The lights have changed,” Victor said, winking at his brother, who drove on.

  “I thought we would go out for dinner—or we could stay in. Ingola said she would cook, and you know what a good cook she is.” Of course he knows, Christian thought, irritated with himself. Catching sight of his thinning hairline, he wondered why he had inherited the male pattern baldness. But then again, he had inherited Ingola too, so what right did he have to feel jealous? But he had always felt jealous of his brother. “Whatever you want to do tonight, Victor, is fine.”

  “I’m not staying.”

  Christian glanced over at him. “What!”

  “You heard me; I’m not staying here. I’m going back to London. Thanks for picking me up, Christian. I appreciate that, but if you’ll drop me at the station—”

  “London?”

  “That’s where I live. I was only put in Long Lartin because of the nature of my crime. What’s the matter—haven’t they got a color you like?” Victor gestured to the traffic lights as they changed from amber back to red. Behind them, cars started sounding their horns. “I have to get home,” he continued. “I can’t stay here.”

  “Go back in a while, when you’ve had a rest.”

  “If I don’t go back now, I’ll keep putting it off,” Victor replied. “Thanks, incidentally, for sorting everything out. I mean … you know what I mean.”

  Before being jailed Victor had taken the opportunity to sign over his London apartment and furniture to his brother for safekeeping. Everything else his talent and skill had earned him over the previous sixteen years had been taken away or repossessed. His personal belongings remained within the Ballam family, but they were to all intents and purposes no longer his. He knew that Christian would never make any reference to their arrangement, but the contrast between having total control of his life and being in tandem with his sibling was marked. And it irked Victor, made him all the more eager to leave Worcestershire and try to regain his old life.

  “Thanks for keeping an eye on the flat, too.”

  “No problem,” Christian replied. “Your neighbor was very helpful, and when I couldn’t get down to London, Ingola called in. Picked up any letters and packages and sent them on to you.”

  “It must have been a lot of trouble.”

  “No, not at all.” Christian’s tone was strained. He wanted to say something that would break the tension between them, but the words floated above his brain, just out of reach. Instead, he came across as faintly patronizing. “It was the least we could do. I would have visited more, you know, if you’d let me.”

  “You did more than enough,” Victor replied, changing the subject. “I have to get back to London. You understand, don’t you? If I put it off, I’ll never go back. Anyway, I don’t have anything up here. All my things are in the apartment.”

  “You’ll be lonely.”

  “Jesus,” Victor said, moved and trying hard not to show it. “You sound like you used to sound when we were going back to boarding school. I had to go into another house, under another housemaster, and you said, ‘You’ll be lonely,’ when you really meant you would be.” He paused, remembering the past, then asked, “How’s Mother?”

  “Fine.”

  “Does she know I’m out?”

  “She hasn’t been well….”

  “I see. So she doesn’t know.”

  “I thought I’d tell her when she’s feeling a bit better.”

  “And pray for a relapse?” Victor asked, his tone light but with an edge underneath.

  From the day he had been sentenced, the widowed Celeste Ballam had disowned her second son. Ignoring his existence was preferable to lying or trying to concoct a parallel universe where Victor was still trading as a London art dealer in Dover Street. He was always her favorite child, but the professional scandal that had turned him from a glittering scion of the Ballam clan to a thief with a criminal record had buckled her. To Victor she had entrusted the status of the family. From Victor she had expected an impressive career and an enviable marriage.

  Celeste had possessed the maternal smugness that came from having an exceptional child, and so when Victor’s fall came, it torpedoed her future and capsized her status absolutely. But that was not all. Her son the thief had done something even worse: his crime had forced Celeste into having to idolize Christian, the second choice.

  “If you go back to London now, what will you do, Victor?”

  “Work.”

  Christian didn’t really want his brother close by, was afraid that Ingola might still have feelings for him, but at the same time he was trying to be supportive. He had been the winner, after all. He could afford to be magnanimous.

  “Work? Where?”

  “Not at the gallery; I know that’s out of bounds.” Victor opened the brown paper package and rummaged through the few possessions in it. “Don’t worry about me, I’ll survive.”

  “I was thinking…. I spoke to a friend of mine. He could get you a job in Chipping Campden.”

  “As an art dealer?”

  “Well, not really. He has a restaurant.”

  “You want me to be a waiter?”

  “It’s a start.”

  “Of what? Penury?”

  Christian sighed, slowing down to the thirty-mile-an-hour speed limit. “You might find it hard to get a job now. What with your having a record …”

  “Well, I’m glad you pointed that out, because I’d never have thought of it.”

  “I’m just trying to help,” Christian responded in an injured tone.

  “By expecting me to be a fucking waiter?” Victor countered, then cooled his tone, ashamed. “I’m not running away from London, Christian. If I don’t go back, I’ll look guilty.”

  “You’re not thinking …”

  “Of what?”

  Christian took a deep breath. “Of trying to find out who framed you, are you?”

  “For over three years I’ve thought about nothing else. Every day and every night I’ve gone over everything that happened.”

  “D’you know who did it?”

  “Oh, yes,” Victor replied evenly.

  “You do?”

  “I did it to myself.”

  “What d’you mean? You weren’t guilty!”

  “I was guilty of speaking out. Guilty of going on record about the forgeries, the fixed auctions, the rigged sales. I named names and courted the press to further my own fucking bandwagon. I thought people wanted to know the truth, and I thought I could get away with telling it. I mean, I was right, wasn’t I?”

  “Victor—”

  But Victor carried on. “Being right’s not enough, though. I suppose they built up their case for years. In the end it wasn’t one person after me; it was a whole coterie of dealers, all of them more established and a bloody sight more ruthless than I was.”

  “They framed you for fraud.”

  “Yeah,” Victor agreed. “But I can’t get my own back. If it was one person, I could go after him, but a group? Never. Like they say, there’s safety in numbers. The art world doesn’t appreciate being threatened, and if it is, it closes ranks and suffocates the threat.”

  He wiped the condensation off the window next to him and looked out to the street, which was desolate under a downpour. “The only thing they won’t expect is my return.”

  Christian struggled to keep the impatience out of his voice.

  “But why bother if you can’t get revenge?”

  “Jesus, Christian, what’s the alternative? You’d have me hide?”

  “I’d have you safe,” his brother replied, driving off as the lights changed. “You know they won’t give you work.”

  “Who won’t give me work, Christian? The dealers, the brokers, the auction houses? You think I expect to get work there? You think anyone would trust me now? I’d be lucky if I could get in the back door, let alone the front, of anyone’s gallery.”

  “So who are you going
to work for?” There was a protracted pause; Christian stole a quick look at his brother. “Victor, who are you going to work for?”

  “It’s a crooked business. There’s enough work to keep me occupied.”

  Pulling over, Christian parked, turned off the engine, and looked at his brother in disbelief.

  “Please tell me you’re joking, Victor. Please, Victor, don’t get mixed up in anything dodgy. It would ruin your life.”

  “It isn’t ruined now?”

  Christian looked straight ahead, trying to form his argument without sounding like the paternal older brother.

  “Don’t give up. Don’t go down the wrong road. They put you there; you didn’t do it. You’re not a criminal.”

  “In the eyes of the world I am.”

  “But you know you’re not!” Christian went on hurriedly. “Just concentrate on keeping on the right side of the law now. I’m sure you could get it all back, Victor. I’m sure you could in time if you work hard, keep your nose clean. People will forget. In time they will.” He blundered on. “You were popular, well known. People liked you; they couldn’t help themselves. They always liked you. People will want to forgive you.”

  “You think I’m guilty, Christian?”

  “No, no! I didn’t say that.”

  “It sounded like that.”

  Christian, confused, blundered on. “No, that wasn’t what I meant. I …”

  “People will want to forgive you,” Victor repeated and, tucking the parcel under his arm, got out of the car.

  “Victor!” Christian called after him. “Don’t rush off. That wasn’t what I meant.”

  Bending down, Victor looked into his brother’s face, his scrutiny making Christian flush. “Ask me.”

  “Ask you what?”

  “You know. It’s what you’ve wanted to ask me for years. What you’ve always wanted to ask me.”

  Christian squirmed in his seat. “For God’s sake!”

  “Ask me.”

  “There’s nothing I want to—”

  “Ask me!”

  “All right! Did you do it?”

  “Go to hell,” Victor said quietly, “but don’t take Ingola with you.”