The Horse's Arse

by Laura Gascoigne

  For the moment oligarchs and sheiks were keeping the wheels oiled, but their potential as collectors was limited. You couldn’t play to their intellectual snobbery. They were not art-educated or even art-educable, just simple souls who wanted something flashy on the wall. A Warhol celebrity screenprint or a Byrne petal painting on a gold ground, yes; a washed-out Boegemann canvas of barbed wire at Birkenau, no. In the present climate those big Boegemanns would only sell to museums, and to sell to museums they had to be seen in museums first. It was a Catch-22 situation. A lot was riding on the State Gallery show.

  Gone were the days when city traders bought contemporary art as an investment and put it straight into storage with the bubble-wrap still on. Those guys were risk-takers who liked risky art – clever stuff that made something out of nothing, like them. Now what collectors wanted was security, the sort of security offered by timeless art that took more and more time for auction houses to source, since most of it was already in museum collections. And time between now and June was running out.

  Vouvray-Jones ran a listless eye down the catalogue entries for the June auction, absently masticating the stiffening gum.

  A Picasso pencil sketch of Dora Maar.

  A late de Chirico Piazza d’Italia (1952), a poor imitation of early work.

  Three Sisley landscapes, one of Argenteuil, pleasant enough but hardly showstoppers.

  A Renoir still life of fruit in a bowl. Why paint apples when you could paint breasts? In the case of Renoir no nudes was not good news.

  A Kandinsky abstract from the Bauhaus years – good – measuring 10x12cm – not so good.

  A landscape by Soutine, not known for his landscapes and not known at all to many of today’s collectors.

  A Matisse charcoal sketch of a woman in a peasant blouse, a colourless drawing by the master of colour.

  A late Picasso painting of those clapped out musketeers; if it wasn’t priapic it wasn’t Picasso.

  A late Munch painting of a man in a cabbage patch; if it wasn’t masochistic it wasn’t Munch.

  A murky paint-clotted Ernst from his wartime ‘grattage’ period.

  A Giacometti painting of a Tête d’ homme – anonymous face, seen one, seen ’em all – but at least the provenance looked sound. Something to be grateful for with Giacometti. A minor museum might buy it, but it wasn’t exactly going to spark a bidding war.

  A shaky Degas pastel sketch of a ballerina from the 1910s, when the wretched artist was three-quarters blind. What wouldn’t he give for a mid-1880s nude?

  A Modigliani portrait of a woman with her clothes on: get ’em off, darling.

  A Rouault Pierrot – at least that and the Miró Femme et oiseau squiggle (late again) had a bit of colour. The Miró had three: red, yellow and blue.

  Unfortunately any fool could see that most of the colour in the catalogue was in the illustrations of related works by the same artists. They might as well have saved money on printing and published it in black and white. “Ou sont les Fauves d’antan?” Vouvray-Jones despaired as he turned listlessly to Cassandra Pemberton’s catalogue notes.

  “Dora Maar, Picasso’s legendary muse… sketched in a private moment in pencil on a scrap of paper. There is an immediacy to the choice of medium”.

  Bollocks. The woman didn’t have a clue. Instead of drawing attention to the lot’s inadequacies she was meant to disguise them. That was what she was paid to do. Buyers didn’t need telling it was only pencil on paper, they could see that unfortunately. If it was black and white, her job was to supply colour. Diversionary tactics, my dear! Use your imagination! Yes, we can see the almond eyes and the long fingernails, but what’s the subtext? The bimbo couldn’t sell soap to a laundry.

  He picked up the phone and barked: “Get Cassandra in here.”

  There was a pause while his PA tried to locate her.

  “I don’t give a monkey’s fart in a colander if it’s her lunch break, find her.”

  He spat out the nicotine gum into one of the lilies in the vase on the table, scrunched the flower around it and chucked it in the bin.

  Cassandra Pemberton was RazzellDeVere’s in-house editor. Her role was to spice up the sales catalogue notes submitted by the experts, edit RDV magazine and occasionally, when no one younger was available, pose for news stories beside a star exhibit. Since the recessionary rationalisation she also ordered the flowers, bought cigars for clients – though no longer for the director – and fixed Mrs Vouvray-Jones’s hair and Botox appointments.

  She appeared in the director’s doorway with an expression on her purebred horsey features that said: “What is it now?”

  It didn’t suit her.

  “When you applied for this job, you had some qualifications,” Vouvray-Jones began. “Remind me what they were.”

  She stared.

  “A degree in History of Art from Edinburgh University, and an-18 month internship at Marquette.”

  “Ah. And did you write anything during that time?”

  She didn’t reply, but her colour deepened and her jaw set.

  “I understand that your multiple-choice generation has never had to master the English language. That’s a minor disability these days; Mr and Mrs Oligarch’s grasp of English isn’t great either. But there is such a thing as sparkle, and this catalogue text,” his mouse scrolled furiously up and down the page, “has all the fizz of a bucket of fomenting compost.”

  He closed the document with a snap.

  “Sexed up and on my desktop tomorrow.”

  She stood in the doorway with her arms folded and looked at him. He noticed that, with indignation, her breasts went up a cup size.

  “Try to remember, if you can, that we’re ‘in trade’. Auction houses are in the business of selling. The idea is to find buyers for this stuff,” he waved a pair of Asprey’s cufflinks at the computer.

  She turned and marched out.

  Nice arse, he acknowledged, would look good in the saddle. He was wondering if she wore a thong or camiknickers when the phone beeped.

  “James Duval on the line,” came the voice of his PA.

  “Not now,” he said. James always made him feel guilty.

  “It’s about a Derain painting – ‘Coal-something Harbour’? – from a private collection, complicated story.”

  He got up from his chair. “Tell him I’ll go straight over.”

  ‘I think the picture’s in Germany.”

  From James a photo would be enough.

  “Put him through.”

  Chapter X

  Karim El Sayed’s Egyptian shack going up in smoke would make the perfect coda to Daniel’s doctoral thesis, Sheddism: A thousand years of the shed as symbol of transformation and renewal in Western Art. At present the historical balance was too heavily tilted towards stables in Bethlehem. El Sayed’s The Nile Feeds Itself would add weight to the contemporary side, along with Cordelia Markham’s exploding shed and Peter Bunting’s floating model.

  Daniel was working from home this morning, having been told off to attend a Metropolitan Police briefing on museum security at the British Museum. Sounded riveting. Crispin Finch must really have it in for him. Since his Boegemann piece got spiked he’d had nothing but dead-end stories to work on, when he wasn’t compiling exhibition listings or rewriting Bernice Stock’s copy. Her report on Orlovsky’s ICE party had been the usual fluff, trying to sound clever and only succeeding in sounding arch. When you took out the arch, the edifice collapsed.

  Daniel was learning the hard way that reputations in journalism aren’t made by writers, they’re made by subs.

  He backed up the document, shut down his computer and moved it away from the basement window – the Evening Standard had just nominated Finsbury Park as one of London’s top ten burglary hotspots. Slipping his notepad into his pocket, he lifted his bike up the basement steps and set off for Bloomsbury.

  The police briefing had been arranged by the Museums Association in response to a recent high-profile theft from a
public gallery. In March thieves had broken into the East London Gallery and got away with a Lowry, a Stanley Spencer and a small Henry Moore bronze, among a number of works on loan from the British Council Collection to a temporary exhibition meant to introduce new audiences to art. It emerged later that the alarm had been playing up for months and rather than risk too many false calls – with the police now operating a ‘three false calls and you’re out’ policy – the gallery had left the device switched off during consultation on a replacement. A month before the theft, a Lowry painting had hit the headlines when it sold at RazzelDeVere’s for a record £3m. It was thought the thieves were opportunists rather than professionals. No trace of the missing works had been found.

  As the loss was covered by the Government Indemnity Scheme, a message had come down from on high instructing the Met’s Art & Antiques unit to put a bomb under the museum community. This briefing was the result.

  Not surprisingly, the room was two-thirds empty and the few museum professionals who had turned up were sitting with smart-phones and tablets at the back hoping to carry on with business as usual. Daniel seemed to be the only member of the press who’d bothered to show. He went and sat in the middle at the front.

  DC Yasmin Desai would be chairing a panel of security experts and insurance consultants, a Museums Association representative and someone from the Art Loss Register. Daniel was expecting an intimidating Asian matron in uniform when a slip of a girl in a navy trouser suit strode onto the platform. She had short unruly black curls, almond-shaped eyes behind black-rimmed glasses and something humorous about her mouth.

  He got out his notebook with unexpected eagerness and sat with his pen poised, like a schoolboy in front of a favourite teacher. He listened attentively as she broke down the basics of museum security into three key elements: physical defences, electronic surveillance and people. It sounded surprisingly interesting. He took notes. When she handed over to the National Security Adviser of the Museums Council, his heart sank. The man droned on about accreditation standards, risk assessment models, manning levels, locking down procedures, emergency action plans and security audits. Then a private security consultant stood up and explained the principles behind ‘perimeter and trap protection’ and ‘the secure box’ theory, reviewed options for security screws and anti-bandit glass and expanded on the latest developments in object protection systems and audio-verification technology.

  Daniel tried not to fidget with impatience. Any minute now the briefing would be over and she’d be gone. What could he do? He was supposed to be a journalist; ask for an interview. About what? Never mind what, he’d think of something. Whatever.

  When she wound up the proceedings, he shot from his chair.

  “Hi,” he stopped her as she came off the platform. “Daniel Colvin from Marquette magazine. I’m doing a story on the lax state of museum security and I wondered if you had time for a chat?”

  “If you make it quick,” she said, “and you don’t mind chatting over lunch. I’m hungry.”

  “Me too,” he lied. He had no appetite.

  They bought sandwiches from a café in Coptic Street and took them out to a table on the street. She sat down with hers facing the sun.

  “Fire away.”

  He played for time by getting out his notepad, snapping off the elastic and searching for a pen. The only questions on his mind were about her. How old was she? She looked 25 but to be a constable he figured she had to be 30. And her eyes were green. Where did that come from?

  OK, security. He began with figures. What were the statistics for thefts from British museums in the past year?

  She rattled them off too fast for him to take them down.

  “I’m a bit of a Carol Vorderman with figures,” she laughed. “I should have been an accountant. That’s what you get from operating a till in your parents’ corner shop when you’re still in nappies.” When she looked up, the sun caught the hazel in her irises. He noticed with regret that her photochromic lenses were darkening. He focused on her mouth.

  So where did paintings by famous artists go when they were stolen? Presumably they were too recognisable to sell?

  “People like to fantasise about them ending up in underground vaults belonging to billionaire baddies, but the truth is usually a lot less glamorous. Billionaires don’t need to steal art, they can afford to buy it, especially at the level of the East London pictures. Above that level the best examples are in museums, so there might be a motive for some unofficial deaccessioning, though if you wanted the world’s greatest paintings for your secret gallery it would be easier to commission fakes. None of your billionaire baddie friends would know the difference – and neither, to be honest, would half the auction house ‘experts’.”

  “So why are famous paintings stolen?”

  He hadn’t touched his salt beef sandwich. She had finished her prawn and mayo and was looking unnervingly straight at him.

  “Often because they’re there, like Everest. They’re stolen to use as bargaining chips or for collateral, sometimes for status. To a criminal, art is just another form of currency. That’s how they see it portrayed in the media, where most of the time the only things you’re told about a picture are the name of the artist and how much it’s worth. A picture doesn’t have to depict a dollar sign, like Warhol’s silkscreens, for its message to be money. There are a lot of people for whom Van Gogh’s Irises mean $54m – and that includes collectors and auction houses.”

  He was surprised by how much she seemed to know about art. He hadn’t expected that from the Art & Antiques unit.

  “How about ransoms?”

  “They’re illegal in this country. Officially museums aren’t allowed to pay them… though what insurers do in private is their own affair.”

  She was finishing her drink and he’d run out of questions. He gripped his pen, sensing that if he put it down she’d reach for her bag and the interview would be over.

  “How did you get into this business, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “What’s a nice Asian girl like me doing in the police?”

  He squirmed.

  “It’s a long story, but if you really want to know I’ll give you the edited version. This is not for your article, by the way.”

  “Off the record,” he smiled and put down his pen.

  Yasmin Desai was born into a Ugandan Asian family, originally from the Punjab. In 1972, expelled from Uganda by Idi Amin, her parents had sought refuge in Leicester and opened a corner shop. She was bright at school, taking Maths ‘O’ Level two years early, and her parents dreamed of a glittering career in accountancy. But Yasmin was mad on art and, as a strong-willed only child, she got her way – and quickly regretted it. She had a horrible time at Birmingham School of Art, where she lasted a year.

  “Why?”

  “The tutors hated my work. I was painting my life in the style of Indian miniatures and they said I needed to find a style of my own. They said my work was unoriginal and not ‘contemporary’. Most of my year were making videos and installations. And then, to cap it all, I got pregnant.”

  Her parents were surprisingly good about it. They might have forced her into a marriage with the father, but fortunately her family was Hindu and he was Muslim so they didn’t. And of course they both fell in love with Sami when he was born. But she knew that living at home as a single mother brought shame on her parents, and she was desperate to move out.

  “To be able do that, I needed a job. The police were having a recruitment drive in Leicester for ethnic minority officers, and I signed up. My parents looked after Sami while I did my training, and after completing the probationary period I heard of a vacancy for a special constable in the Met’s Art & Antiques unit. I applied, and got it. The art training came in useful after all.”

  She rose through the ranks to Detective Constable and scraped together the mortgage on a small flat in Walthamstow, where she was now living with Sami, aged nine.

  “Do you still p
aint?”

  ‘When I’ve got time.” Her mouth turned down at the corners. “I’ve got a website,” she added almost as an afterthought, pulling out a brightly illuminated card and handing it to him.

  “What about you?”

  “I don’t have a website or a card. I’m an art historian. I’m working part-time for Marquette while I finish my thesis.”

  Before she could ask what the thesis was about and laugh, as people invariably did, he posed another question.

  “What’s your professional opinion of an art market in which auction houses and commercial galleries raise the prices of contemporary artists by procuring them prestigious exhibitions in public galleries?”

  “That’s a big question.”

  She thought about it.

  “Personally I think it sucks, but it’s legal. The same applies to a lot of practices in the art market. Regulation is so light-touch it’s non-existent. But our job in the police is to enforce the law.”

  * * *

  The first thing Daniel did when he got to the office was to fish out Yasmin’s card and check her website. Up came an Indian miniature of a Nativity scene with the Virgin Mary and two midwives, but no Joseph. The Virgin had Yasmin’s face and the stable was a garden shed at the bottom of a crazy-paved suburban patio.

  Bull’s eye! He had the perfect reason to see her again. Her picture would make an exotic addition to the Stable section of the Sheddism thesis. He’d wait a decent interval, then email her to ask to see the original.

  What was a decent interval? The day after tomorrow. He’d have to confess about the Sheddism, but he had a funny feeling she might not laugh.

  Chapter XI

  Another Blue Orange morning, and The Shed was humming with creative concentration as the class got stuck into a new subject. No life model today, just a yellow vase of blue fabric hydrangeas Maisie had brought in from the charity shop. She had made her entrance, to applause, like a pension-age Flora with blooms bursting from the top of her tartan shopping trolley. Pat had wanted to paint le tout ensemble just as it was – a senior citizen’s mobile cornucopia – but the Stewart tartan fought with the blue flowers, and when Maisie pulled out the yellow vase – to more applause – the colours sang.