“Okay. We’ll try that.”
“Sorry I can’t come up with anything more concrete.” He made his way out, stopping to take one last look at the small odd painting. Frowning. Then left with a rueful wave.
Amanda used her cybofax to connect directly into Crescent’s memory core, and requested Tyler’s home contents file. Greg was wrong. All the insured paintings were there. Amazingly the most expensive one wasView of a Hill and Clouds. She paused in front of it, not quite believing what she was seeing was worth 20,000 New Sterling. Art, she thought, just wasn’t for people like her.
The accountant did arrive on Tuesday morning. He had brought three customized cybofaxes and a leather wallet full of memox crystals loaded with specialist financial analysis programs. His assiduous preparation, eagerness, and self-confidence did a lot to offset the fact that he looked about eighteen.
Amanda assigned Alison to assist him.
Greg turned up at the station just before lunch. “I got your message about the paintings,” he said. His manner was reticent, not like him at all.
“It was worth following up,” she assured him. “I would have got around to doing it anyway.”
“That feeling I had that something was out of kilter. I know what it is now. It’s that small oil painting, the funny one with the flying saucer or whatever. I’m sure of it.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“I don’t know, but something is.”
“I know it stands out from the others. But it turns out Tyler knew the artist: they went out partying together when McCarthy visited England a few years back. And believe it or not, it’s the most expensive piece there.”
“Ah.” Greg began to look a lot more contented. “It’s wrong, Amanda.”
“How? It’s still there, it wasn’t stolen.”
“You asked me in on this, remember?” he said gently. “I didn’t think I’d have to convince you of all people about my gland all over again.”
She stared at him for a minute while instinct, common sense, and fear of failure went thrashing about together in her head. In the end she decided he was worth the gamble; she had asked him in because she wanted that unique angle he could provide. Once, she’d heard Eleanor, his wife, call his talent a foresight equal to everyone else’s hindsight.
“How do you want to handle it?” she asked in a martyred tone.
He grinned his thanks. “Somebody who knows what they’re about needs to take a look at that painting.
We should concentrate on the artist, too…get Alison to mine some background on him.”
“Okay.” She called Mike Wilson over.
“An art expert?” he asked cynically.
“Crescent must have a ton of them,” Greg said. “Art fraud is pretty common. Insurance companies face it every day.”
“We have them, yes, but…”
“An expert has told us something is wrong with the painting, and this is my investigation,” she said, not too belligerently, but firmly enough to show him she wasn’t going to compromise on this.
He held his hands up. “All right. But you only get three lives, not nine.”
Hugh Snell wasn’t exactly the scholarly old man with fraying tweed jacket and half-moon glasses that Amanda was expecting. When he turned up at Church Vista Apartments he was wearing a leather Harley Davidson jacket, a diamond stud through his nose, and five rings in his left ear. His elbow-length Mohican plume was dyed bright violet.
He took one look at Tyler’s collection and laughed out loud. “Shit. He spent money on these? What a prat.”
“Aren’t they any good?” Amanda asked.
“My talent detector needle is simply quivering…on zero. One hates to speak ill of the dead, my dear, but if all he wanted was erotica, he should have torn the center pages out of a porno mag and framed them instead. This simply reeks of lower middle-class pretension. I know about him, I know nothing of the artists-they say nothing, they do nothing.”
Mike Wilson indicated the McCarthy. “What about this one?”
Hugh Snell made a show of pulling a gold-rimmed monocle from his pocket. He held it daintily to his eye and examined the painting. “Yeah, good forgery.”
Amanda smiled greedily. “Thanks, Greg.”
“No problem.”
“It’s insured for twenty thousand,” Wilson said.
“Alas my dear chap, you’ve been royally shafted.”
“Are you sure?”
Hugh Snell gave him a pitying look. “Please don’t flaunt your ignorance in public view, it’s frightfully impolite. This isn’t even a quality copy. Any halfway decent texture printer can churn out twenty of these per minute for you. Admittedly, it will fool the less well versed, but anyone in the trade would see it immediately.”
“Makes sense,” Amanda said. “The smallest and most valuable item, you could roll it up and carry it out in your pocket.”
“Certainly could,” Greg murmured.
“I owe you an apology, Mr. Mandel,” Mike Wilson said.
“Not a problem,” Greg assured him.
“Congratulations,” Wilson said to Amanda. “So it was a burglary which went wrong, then. Which means it was a professional who broke in. That explains why we’ve been banging our heads against the wall.”
“A pre-planned burglary, too, if he’d brought a forgery with him,” she said. “I bet Tyler would never have noticed it had gone.”
“Which means it was someone who knew Tyler had the McCarthy on his wall, and how much it was worth.”
Amanda went up to the McCarthy; and gave it a happy smile. “I’ll get forensics back to take a closer look at it,” she said.
Three-Degrees of Guilt Greg managed three hours of sleep before Christine decided it was time to begin another bright new day.
His eyes blinked open as her cries began. Nothing in focus, mouth tasted foul, limbs too heavy to move.
Classic symptoms-if only it were a hangover, that would mean he’d enjoyed some of last night.
“I’ll get her,” Eleanor grumbled.
The duvet was tugged across him as she clambered out of bed and went over to the cot. “Isn’t it my turn?” he asked as the timber of the crying changed.
“Oh, who cares?” Eleanor snapped back. “I just want her to shut up.”
He did the brave thing, and kept quiet. In his army days he’d gone without sleep for days at a time during some of the covert missions deep into enemy territory. Oh, to be back in those halcyon times. Christine could teach the Jihad Legion a thing or two about tenacity.
Eleanor started to change their daughter’s nappy.
The doorbell rang. Greg knew he’d misheard that. When he squinted, the digital clock just made it into focus: 6:23. The bell went again. He and Eleanor stared at each other.
“Who the hell…?”
Whoever they were, they started knocking.
The hall tiles were cold against his feet as he hopped over them to the front door. He managed to pull his dressing gown shut just before he flicked the lock over and pulled the door open. A young man with broad bull shoulders had his arm raised to knock again.
“What the bloody hell do you want?” Greg yelled. “Do you know what time it is?” Christine was wailing plaintively behind him.
The young man’s defiance melted away into mild confusion. “Eleanor lives here doesn’t she?”
“Yes.” Greg noticed what the man was wearing, a pair of dark dungarees with a cross stitched on the front, blue wool shirt, sturdy black leather boots. It was his turn for a recoil; he hadn’t seen a kibbutznik since the night he faced down Eleanor’s father. “Who are you?” He ordered a tiny secretion from his gland, imagining a tiny
