Lost Children

by Willa Bergman

  My father didn’t understand this new reality. He suffered the same affliction that has befallen many of those born into the landed gentry and like most of them too he did not have the skills to overcome his affliction. Arnaud spent his way through the funds he inherited until it was too late. When I was ten I remember the first sale of antiques from the chateau. There were many more to come in the years that followed.

  When I think back on it all, the parties they threw, the places we went, the gifts he bought, they all played their part. But it was as much what my father didn’t do as what he did. His mind was constantly elsewhere, and what he should have been doing was looking after the estate.

  His health was already starting to pay the price for his hard-living but the new reality took an even heavier toll on my father. No longer able to throw his parties of old, his friends began to find new pursuits and he became increasingly withdrawn and isolated. He became increasingly bitter and directed his anger most fiercely at my mother. He blamed her for spending all his money and accused her of making him throw all his grand parties, something which my mother always denied. I spent a long time trying to work out how true that accusation was, if my mother did have to take some responsibility for what happened. In truth I’ll never know for sure what my mother did or said, I honestly just don’t know. One thing I do know though is that Arnaud had been doing just fine at burning through his family’s money before he met my mother. And I’m certain my mother wasn’t the first girl on Arnaud’s arm. I think she was just the one who was there when the music stopped playing. The last days of Arnaud’s Rome before it all started to crumble around him.

  Unable to find a solution to the mounting problems he faced, Arnaud began to drink heavily, making his moods ever more erratic, and he began to gamble with money he didn’t have. It didn’t take long for the first of the debt collectors to come calling. He began beating my mother soon after.

  At the time my brother and I were too young to understand what he was doing. I don’t remember the exact day I realised, it just slowly crept into our lives. All I know is that by the summer of my fourteenth birthday we were all too aware. Our mother had lost almost half her bodyweight and she would wear long billowy dresses to hide the cuts and bruises on her body.

  I love my mother unconditionally. I know she isn’t perfect but she’s never had anything but kindness in her. She just didn’t know how to take responsibility for things. She didn’t think about consequences, and the Harlois estate was not hers to save. Whether she bears any responsibility for its decline or not, I can never forgive Arnaud for what he did to her.

  It breaks my heart to think about what he did, how he slowly destroyed who she was. Everything he did to her, she just took it. She never once tried to fight back, it wasn’t in her nature. He crushed her mentally and physically until there was nothing left. He may not have killed her, but she was no longer who she once was. We watched her soul slowly die in front of us and her body turn into a frail, broken shell. She didn’t deserve it. She was just an easy outlet to absorb his drunken rage and disappointment and she was too naïve to realise she needed to get out of there.

  Far too late the time came when we finally left the chateau and Arnaud. It was only when there was no other choice but to leave that we finally did, even though we had nowhere to go. We left under cover of night in an old Citroen DS with only a small bag each.

  I can still remember the drive. It was night but neither my brother or I could sleep. We just sat in silence as the French countryside, covered in pale moonlight, passed us by. We drove through the night up into the Alps, crossing the Italian border at Mont Blanc, and then onwards still across northern Italy until we reached the Dolomites. It was a full night and day of travelling before we finally arrived. Our mother had an old friend, Chiara, who lived there in a small village called Alleghe. She let us stay with her while my mother worked out what we were going to do.

  It was a tough time, we’d taken as many hits as we could. But there was one more shock for us. When we arrived at Chiara’s house my brother and I went to take our bags out from the car. There in the boot of the car was the Portrait of the Lost Child. Our mother had taken it. She knew it wasn’t hers to take but she had done it anyway. Neither Jack or I knew what to do or say, we were both exhausted and the last twenty-four hours had been strange enough already. So we did nothing. We closed the boot and pretended it wasn’t there.

  I don’t know why she took it. The obvious answer would be to say it was for the money. But my mother wasn’t interested in material things. She didn’t take it for the love of the painting either. She wasn’t into art like my father and the painting would only have served as a reminder of the pain and suffering she had left behind. Whatever the reason why she took it, I can’t condemn her for it. After everything that had happened I can’t say what was right or wrong. But the crime was now committed and we were in hiding with a stolen painting. The authorities would be after us and we had to make sure there was no way to find us.

  Through no foresight or planning on my mother’s part covering our tracks was surprisingly easy to do. My mother had never married Arnaud and there was no official record of her in the French system. She didn’t have a French driving licence, she didn’t use credit cards and she was not registered as living in Brittany. She was off grid before it was even a thing. It would almost be impressive if it wasn’t entirely unintentional. Through her own transient existence she had provided herself an exit to slip away as if she had never been there.

  It was Jack and I that were the closest thing to bringing her on the grid. We had both been enrolled in the local Ecole Primaire and so we were part of the system. But it was seemingly easier for them to just put us in as Arnaud’s children, Eloise and Jack de Harlois. After all, at the time we were in our parents’ eyes his children too, even if not by law. It was rural France and he was the local aristocrat. No one even questioned it. Our mother had taken Arnaud’s surname in France but when we needed to disappear she simply resumed who she had been before. She was once again Bella Witcham, I was Eloise Witcham and my brother was Jack Witcham and we all had the documents to prove it.

  We had left France virtually without a trace, a few grainy school photos of Jack and I were the sole footprint we left behind. And just like that, in one night we were gone, never to return. We never saw Arnaud again and he died shortly after we left him. The police looked for us but there was nothing to find.

  We didn’t stay long in the Dolomites with Chiara and we moved around a lot after that, never staying more than a couple of weeks in the same place. Our mother was paranoid that the police would find us. But they never did and after a while we stopped moving around as much. We gravitated towards London, it was where she grew up and I think she found that comforting; and bit by bit we began to build a new life for ourselves. It was hard on all of us but we had each other and that was enough. The future was unwritten and it was liberating and terrifying in equal measure. It was the start of something new but we didn’t know whether it would be good or bad.

  My mother managed to get a small council flat in Highbury and Jack and I were enrolled into a local school. We all had to help make ends meet. Jack and I both had weekend jobs and my mother found a job working in a local café. It was a million miles away from the life she’d led in France but she didn’t care. My mother was never interested in material things and with everything that had happened with Arnaud she’d now lost her love for parties and people too. Now she only wanted to live quietly. To be with my brother and I was all she wanted.

  We never found out what she did with the painting. I can remember that a few months after we’d left France and things had started to feel a bit more settled, she said she had to go somewhere for a couple of weeks. I remember she wouldn’t tell us where she was going. I was crying thinking she was leaving us and wasn’t coming back, but she promised she would, she just had something she had to do. We never discussed it but I’ve always assumed that she left
us to go somewhere and sell the painting. We were living off the kindness of strangers at that point. She’d left France with almost nothing. She’d fallen out with her parents years ago and they no longer spoke, she didn’t have a job either. The painting was the only thing she had left which was of value. When she came back we began to move around again, different places every couple of weeks. She still didn’t have a job, not for at least the first year we were hiding when she was still paranoid someone was going to find us, but she’d got some money from somewhere to pay for things.

  She only ever spoke to us once about the painting. She told us if anyone ever approached us and asked about the painting it meant that the authorities were onto us. I remember the day she told us that and I’ve never forgotten it. And today someone has done just that, they’ve come and asked about the painting. The moment Joseph Masoud walked through the door of my office everything changed and I have to accept that the authorities are probably closing in. This life we’ve tried to build for the last fifteen years, such as it is, may now be over. But it’s not over yet. And despite everything that’s wrong with our lives I don’t want to have to start again. I wouldn’t even know where to begin.

  As I sit here with Jack my mind can’t help but dance with what ifs and maybes. If the authorities really are onto us they wouldn’t have to do some cloak and dagger charade with Joseph Masoud. But maybe they suspect us. Maybe they’re watching me now to see how I react (in which case my collapse in the office will not have helped matters). But no one followed me home, no one is putting me in handcuffs. Maybe this is exactly what Masoud said it is, just another client looking for another painting.

  We have to make a decision. Is the fact that Joseph Masoud has come in and made this request enough to make us drop everything and run, or do we not give up yet and pray that we can keep these lives we’ve managed to build a little longer.

  7

  Waking up the next morning the world all seems a little brighter. In the end Jack and I spent the evening in the apartment with a bottle of Barolo I had been saving and just tried to escape the world a little bit. And waking up the next morning seeing it was all still there and that no one was banging on our door to take us away made us both breathe a little easier, for the time being at least.

  I leave Jack in my flat telling him to keep a low profile and head in to work. As I arrive at Green Park the sun is still dawning over the city skyline. I treat myself to a coffee and almond croissant from the café outside the office to pep me up for the day ahead. I need to get to work not finding the Portrait of the Lost Child.

  In the cold light of day I’m actually relatively pleased with how things played out with Masoud yesterday, all things considered. Of course I’d have infinitely preferred it if he’d never walked into my office to begin with, but coming out with the result of me leading the search for the painting when I had no time to plan or react to the fact that they’re looking for it, I’m starting to think is a great result. If Interpol are looking for the Lost Child then the closer I can be to misdirect the search the better.

  With something approaching a positive outlook for the day I leave the café and make my way to the office. Inside I’m met with a few well-meaning questions from the team asking me how I am, all of which make me feel deeply uncomfortable. I mumble a few stock pleasantries about feeling much better and try to make a beeline to my office as quickly as possible.

  As soon as I close my office door I immediately feel better. My goldfish bowl of an office might not look like it provides much privacy, but I’m still used to sitting at a desk on the floor and feeling self-conscious whenever anyone walks past while I have the BBC website on my screen. This is about the closest thing to a personal oasis at work I can get. In the zen of my office I close my eyes and begin to think about the task in front of me.

  There are over two hundred thousand works of art currently listed as lost or stolen. Time has proved greed and caprice to be constants in the human condition and over the centuries these qualities (for want of a better word) have made an indelible mark on the art world. In particular they thrive in times of conflict. The Second World War, the Iraq War, the Libyan Civil War, the Arab Spring and countless other conflicts; there is always someone ready to take advantage of the chaos they bring. Most recently ISIS were generating massive revenue streams for their cause by selling ancient antiquities that they had purged from holy sites in Syria and other territories they had captured. But it’s not just in wartime that the past is pillaged. For every warzone looting there is an Egyptian tomb raider or overzealous adventurer.

  The illegal art trade is a multi-billion dollar economy and there are many very important works that unfortunately have fallen into it, tainted by their temporary custodians. Given the scale and breadth of the black market’s reach it’s now not uncommon to get commissions like the one Joseph Masoud has brought to me, to find lost or stolen art for a private buyer. Roth of course cannot have anything to do with trading in stolen art. However one of my prouder working achievements has been my efforts in finding ways to bring some of these works of art out of the illegal black market and back into the open one.

  The way this has been possible is through a three way arrangement between Roth, a law enforcement agency and a private collector. In principle it’s all quite straightforward. First you need a collector who has a passion to find a particular object and the resources to fund the search for it. It’s then over to my team and I to actually find the object, and if we’re able to we call in the police who do the heavy work and retrieve it from the illegal owner. The final step is for us to put the retrieved item up for auction, but with the proviso that for every pound the collector spent in funding the search for it, they get two pounds off the purchase price if they should win the auction (which they usually do, given their advantage over the other bidders). This way everyone wins. The art world gets an important piece of art back, the collector gets the piece of art they want in a legitimate way at a market level price and we get our fees. We always have to get our fees. This arrangement does of course still require us to find the artwork in the first place, but we have become increasingly more adept at it and we’ve now managed to recover artworks successfully on a number of occasions.

  Apart from this particular situation I find myself in now, usually when I receive a commission to find a piece of art for a client I’m always filled with a giddy, childish enthusiasm for it. It lets me step into this different world and for a short time I get to play detective. It’s perhaps my favourite part of my job. But it’s a strange thing trying to find art. When a real detective wants to find a person they speak to the missing person’s friends and relatives, they check their bank statements, credit cards and phone bills. A person needs to eat, drink, sleep, move. A piece of art needs none of that. It can sit happily in a dusty forgotten attic corner, be buried in a remote field or locked in a secure bank vault and never once feel the need to do something to alert someone to its presence. It’s therefore often the case that it is easier to find a person connected with a piece of art than finding the piece of art itself. If you find the person, you can usually find the painting.

  But I do not want to find this painting. Every step closer I get to finding it, the closer I bring the police to finding my family. So I have to walk a very delicate line between not finding the painting and not looking like I’m trying not to find it. My work has to be as authentic as possible in every way. Any suggestion that I’m in some way avoiding looking for the painting could draw as much scrutiny on me as if I found it.

  My plan is to conduct a thorough and detailed investigation into the painting and the possible purchasers, based on a comprehensive review of the databases of lost art and the related persons of interest maintained within the industry. This exhaustive search will result in me finding nothing and the painting being forever consigned to the file of missing, presumed lost or destroyed.

  I decide to spend a couple of hours on it in the morning to begin the non-
search and then work on some of my other projects after that. If this painting isn’t going to be the end of my career I need to remember that there’s still the small matter of having to sort out the massive underperformance of the team before we all get fired.

  It takes a few hours but I manage to work through all our client databases and start the process of compiling profiles of all those persons who have sufficient funds to buy the painting (a sufficiently broad population to render the exercise pointless). The next step will be for me to cross reference those names against anyone who’s made purchases of art either by Polignac or from that period and style. I can make that take a week and I already know the information will be useless.

  A little after midday I head out to get some fresh air and pick up some lunch. The diary is pretty much empty today, just my weekly catch-up with Jo (Alice has thoughtfully cleared all my client meetings after yesterday’s events) so I’m free to take my time. I window shop some of the local boutiques for a bit and stare at the people passing along as if I’m just another Bond Street lounger.

  I grab a sandwich and smoothie from a little Italian eaterie just off Piccadilly. The sun’s out so I decide to have lunch in the park, but as I leave the little Italian and walk out onto the street, I’m met with a familiar voice from behind me.

  “I heard about your accident yesterday, it sounded horrible. I’m very surprised to see you coming back in to work so soon. I do hope you’re feeling better.”

  I don’t need to turn around to know who it is. With a heavy sigh I turn and face him and say, “Hello, Geoffrey. Fancy bumping into you here.”

  Geoffrey Webb is a competitor. Or to be more accurate we are a competitor of his. He is generally considered to be the world’s foremost expert in recovering lost and stolen works of art and he’s come to pay me an unwanted visit. He’s wearing round feature spectacles and a tailored pin-stripe suit. He’s just missing the bowler hat and apple and he could do a good impression of Magritte’s Son of Man.