Charlotte’s bottom lip quivered. Adelia was astonished. Of all her seven daughters, Charlotte was not the one most prone to hysterical outbursts or, indeed, emotional outbursts of any kind. But now her eyes swam with tears and Robert shifted his position on their shared sofa so that he could pull her towards him in a protective gesture, his anger now turning immediately to care.
“We told him something,” Charlotte said in a small voice. “Information is a currency like any other. We knew something about someone that we should have kept a secret, but we did not, and telling him gives him power now over that person – and us. We betrayed a trust once. We cannot do it again by telling you. The thing that was said is irrelevant to all of this.”
Robert spoke very firmly. “All that we are asking from you – no, indeed, we are begging, begging on our very knees – is that you look into the affairs of Mr Nettles and bring him to justice. Expose him as the fraudster and criminal that he is! Topple him from his lofty position and bring peace to us at last. If he is gone – to prison, I mean – then we are free. If it can be managed discreetly. And that sort of investigation is what you do, after all, and what I believe you can do well.”
His little speech, rousingly made, sent Charlotte into a full-on fit of weeping. With a strangled apology, she leaped to her feet and fled from the room. Robert stood up and bowed. “Please do excuse me; and excuse our dear Lottie. You have no idea of the strain...” He did not finish. He seemed to think better of it. Whatever he was going to say was swallowed. He nodded, and followed his wife.
“Well,” said Adelia in astonishment now they were left alone. “What on earth do you make of that?”
“Of this, I shall make a nice picnic,” Theodore replied, reaching out to pile an unseemly amount of cakes onto a small plate. “Of that? I have no idea. But I suspect we are being lied to.”
“By our own daughter?” Adelia pressed her lips together. If she didn’t agree with him out loud, maybe she could stop it from becoming true.
Lies were not merely untruths.
Lies, as Adelia knew to her own recent shame, included omissions.
THEODORE FELT MUCH more alert once he had a sponge cake or two inside him. He pushed his finger around the plate, scooping up the last of the cream, and pretended to be unaware of Adelia’s disapproving look.
He thought things through as he ate.
Eventually, he said, “With your experience in this particular world, is it at all plausible that Mr Nettles be as thoroughly corrupt as they claim?”
“Yes,” she said, frankly. “I find it unlikely but it is not impossible. As I told Charlotte and Robert, rumours are always rife, and most are unfounded but there is no smoke without fire. There have always been causes of fakes and frauds because money is involved, and money makes men mad.”
“What sort of things might they be talking about?”
“They were far too vague. And it is not easy to pass a forged painting off as another. There is a difference, you know, between a forgery and a fake. If one artist paints a copy of another, that’s a fake, of course. But that’s not a crime.”
“What?” said Theodore in surprise. “That’s clearly a crime.”
“Not at all. How do you think artists learn their craft? They spend long hours copying the Old Masters.”
“Only to reject everything they’ve learned,” Theodore muttered darkly. He’d seen some very rough looking paintings lately.
She smiled at him patiently. “Indeed. Anyway, a copy is just that; a copy. It is a fake but it only becomes a forgery when it is passed off as an original. But that is so very hard to do, because a painting is more than the oil on the canvas. It comes with provenance. That is to say, the history of that painting’s ownership.”
“Oh, receipts and so on? But those, too, can be faked. Forged. Copied, or whatever word you wish to use.”
“Yes but everything becomes harder, especially the older a painting is. You need paper or parchment that looks passably correct. You cannot write a receipt on the new paper which is made of wood when my parents’ generation used rags for paper. Even I can tell the difference when I touch it. Art collectors and connoisseurs are clever people and they are hard to fool. Many have years of specialist experience. However, this can also be their downfall.”
“It is not possible to be too clever,” Theodore said, and he wasn’t sure why Adelia smiled at him like that.
“Yes, dear,” she said in a tone that conveyed something he didn’t understand. “The problem with the art collectors is that they talk an awful lot of guff and nonsense about instinct and knowing and gut feeling. They base this frankly unscientific and unprovable idea on their years of experience. They build up a little mystique about themselves. I suppose we all do it, don’t we? We like to feel special in our little groups and we say these things to make us feel more connected to other people who share our interests.”
“How does that work to their detriment?” he asked in confusion.
“They are so desperate to believe a newly-discovered work might be, say, a lost Rembrandt, that if their gut tells them it is real, they believe it. Then, when the forgery is revealed, they hush it all up, because heavens forbid that word should get out that their natural instinct had failed! I have known it happen on half a
