Chapter 23 : July 2009
Lawrence Forbes looked at the caller display on his mobile and pressed the green button.
“Cedric! Where are you?”
“I’m at Heathrow, Lawrence. I’ve just landed.” Ced’s voice was very flat.
“You don’t sound on top form, old chap. How was the trip?”
“I suppose the words ‘complete disaster’ would about sum it up. They would sum up my future in this business, too.”
“Oh dear, then you probably don’t want to hear what I’ve been up to. I must admit I’m beginning to doubt my own judgement as well. My art world is falling apart.”
“Tell me about it, Lawrence. No don’t, not right now. Listen, are you free this morning? I’d like to drop by to show you what I’ve got before I head north and hand in my resignation. Is there still a Foreign Legion you can join?”
“I don’t know, old chap, but if there is, I might join up with you. Yes, I’m completely free. We can cry on each other’s shoulders, by the sound of it.”
Slumped in the back of a taxi, Ced stared through the window as the vehicle made its way along a congested M4 motorway towards London. The events of the last few days were still spinning in his head, the inexplicable results from his program an ever-worsening nightmare.
The drive back from Arezzo to Rome in Verdi’s Maserati had passed in almost total silence. Neither Ced nor Verdi was in the mood for talking, both of them too preoccupied with their own self-doubts. Arriving at Ced’s hotel shortly after seven in the evening, Ced told Verdi he would get to work processing the images he’d taken of ‘The Awakening’ and the four paintings Giorgio Bonazzi had shown them. Unless there was some good news, Ced would meet Verdi at his office the following morning.
There was no good news. The comparisons of the images from ‘The Awakening’ confirmed Ced’s thoughts from his visual examination that more than half of the work had been carried out by someone other than Piero della Francesca, the someone’s hand being indistinguishable from Perini’s, de la Place’s, Lorenzini’s and John Andrews’. Later in the evening, he would confirm Giovanni di Luca was also on the list.
The following morning, when Ced arrived at the Accademia, Verdi was already bent over a number of paintings laid out on his workbench. His black suit reflected his mood.
He looked up at Ced and shook his head. “There is nothing, Cedric, nothing at all that I can find in these paintings. It is driving me crazy. What do you have? Anything? Tell me you have something.”
Ced shook his head. “When I get back to the UK and have access to the mainframe, I’m going to analyse the whole of ‘The Awakening’ to see exactly how much my program says Piero painted and how much our unknown artist painted.”
“Yes, that is important, Cedric,” agreed, Verdi, “but please keep this information to yourself. It must go no further, as we discussed yesterday.”
“Don’t worry, Corrado, my lips are sealed. It’s our secret.”
He stared distractedly at the paintings in front of Verdi on his bench.
“Corrado, I know this is a stupid question, but I have to ask it. ‘The Awakening’ has been dated, hasn’t it? There’s no possibility we are dealing with some huge fraud here?”
Verdi gave a resigned smile. “It’s not a stupid question at all, my friend. But yes, it has. It was one of the first tests to be carried out. However, that doesn’t stop me thinking as well that we are dealing with some sort of fraud, something so clever and so new that it has never been seen before. Something that is going to turn the art world on its head.”
Ced nodded. “You know, Corrado, we’ve got to solve this thing; work out what the hell’s going on. We can keep the whole thing under wraps for now, particularly the part about ‘The Awakening’. But I’m not the only person working on a program to compare the world’s art. It’s only a matter of time, Corrado. Even if we keep this a secret for now, someone, somewhere is one day going to run the same comparisons and come up with the same conclusions. We have to find the answer.”
“‘Ere we are, sir. The National Gallery.”
Ced continued staring through the window, oblivious to his surroundings.
“Sir, is everything OK? P’raps you didn’t mean the National Gallery.”
Ced came out of his trance.
“No, that’s fine, thanks. I’ll get out here.”
Lawrence Forbes came down to meet him at the main entrance. As they climbed the stairs that led to the Gallery’s administration wing, Ced outlined his findings from his time in Italy, leaving out any mention of ‘The Awakening’.
“So let me get this straight, Cedric,” said Forbes as he closed his office door. He held up a hand and counted off on his fingers as he spoke. “So far, you’ve got Moretti, de la Place, Lorenzini, Perini and now this di Luca fellow – who I must admit I’ve never heard of – and your program can’t distinguish one from t’other.”
“Yes,” replied Ced, “but it’s not only my program. I can’t separate them on a visual examination, and what is more important, since he’s the real expert, neither can Corrado. I’ve been thinking, this whole thing is getting more and more complicated and the ramifications are potentially enormous. The fewer people who know about it for the moment, the better. You haven’t discussed it with anyone, have you?”
“Don’t worry, Cedric, I haven’t told a soul.”
“Thanks, Lawrence,” nodded Ced in appreciation. Then he slumped down into a chair as the frustration hit him again.
“On top of these several artists spanning some four centuries or so,” he continued, staring into space, “we have the inexplicable link with John Andrews. He has to be some sort of master forger, Lawrence, but I can’t see how he’s managed to get access to such a wealth of work. Did your lab come up with anything on the Perini?”
“They’re still working on it, but the preliminary results all indicate that it’s genuine.”
“God, I feel so stupid, Lawrence, so helpless.”
“Me too, Cedric, and I’m afraid it gets worse.”
“Worse?”
“Yes. I told you on the phone I’ve been following up on a few things. Obviously, with my expertise being the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, I started digging around there. Following up on de la Place, I thought about a few other portraitists and landscape artists who painted in the same style from about 1750 until the late nineteen hundreds. Trouble is there were hundreds in the minor leagues.”
“We’re not dealing with the minor leagues, Lawrence,” snapped Ced. “These guys were all bloody good. Top notch.”
“I know they were, Cedric, but none of them achieved any major fame. Don’t you think that’s odd in itself? They were all brilliant but have remained largely unknown, and in the case of di Luca, for example, pretty much forgotten.”
“I know!” replied Ced, raising his voice. “Since I came up with di Luca’s name, I’ve dug a bit and seen half a dozen works. This guy was painting in Venice at the same time as Titian and he was every bit as good. And yet are his paintings priceless works of art on display in the world’s major art museums? No! He’s a virtual unknown outside academic art circles.”
He paused. “Sorry, Lawrence, the whole thing’s really getting to me. You were about to deliver some more bad news and I cut you off. What have you found?”
Forbes got up from his desk and walked over to a large display bench.
“Ever heard of Pierre Labreche?”
“Labreche. Mmm. Rings a vague bell. Worked in Paris? Couple of hundred years ago?”
“Yes, but before that he worked in Florence for many years. His Paris phase was much shorter. He only ever undertook private commissions.”
“Possibly why he remained in obscurity. It’s becoming a familiar theme.”
“Yes, well, I checked to see what we have here in the archives – there are none on display. I unearthed six Labreches. Come and have a look.”
Ced unwound himself from his chair and walked over to where For
bes was standing, his whole bearing that of a defeated man. Forbes pointed to six canvasses.
“There they are.”
Ced picked up one of the paintings and took it over to where Forbes had set up an illuminated magnifying lens. His examination didn’t take long.
“Christ, Lawrence, here we go again. This looks very similar to the Andrews style. I’ll need to spend a little longer and confirm it using the program.” He flicked quickly through the others. “Yup, I’ll need to check the lot in detail. Any others, before I shoot myself?”
“Only one, Cedric. It’s over here,” he said, pointing further along the display table. “Does the name Giovanni Bianchi mean anything to you?”
“No, I don’t think so. Another Italian, eh? Strange; I should have heard of him.”
“Don’t think Italy or Renaissance, think London,” suggested Forbes.
“London?” He sighed heavily. “Yes, perhaps it does ring a bell, but my head’s too full and confused at the moment, Lawrence. Enlighten me.”
“Well, I had to look him up as well. He was a young Italian who arrived on the London scene around 1820 or so. Just like all our other artists, there is no record of anything he did before that or even where he was from. He was successful for a while and then disappeared.”
“You think he could be a contender for our ever-increasing Andrews group?” asked Ced.
“Possibly, yes, but I’d like your opinion.”
Ced picked up the painting and examined it carefully. It was a portrait of a young woman dressed in late Georgian fashion. Its quality and style were very similar to the Pierre Labreche portraits he had been looking at, and to the other artists on his list.
He nodded ruefully. “It’s certainly a contender, Lawrence. I’ll get out the camera and photograph it along with the Labreches.”
“So where do we go from here, Cedric?”
It was two hours later and Ced had run all Forbes’ paintings through his comparison program. The results were what he had anticipated, but being right gave him no pleasure.
“God knows!” replied Ced. “I’m going to go back home and I’m going to run everything through the program again. I’m also going to revisit all the algorithms I’ve written, check and double check all the assumptions I’ve made and examine the entire program. It’ll all take time, maybe a couple of weeks, but it’s got to be done. There has to be something, Lawrence; there has to be.”
“I agree, Cedric, it’s the only thing to do. I’ll put my own eye to the visual examination that I should normally undertake, as I imagine Corrado Verdi is doing in Rome as we speak.”
Ced checked the time. “Probably consoling himself with a siesta,” he smiled.
“And what if, Cedric, what if none of us can come up with anything? What if after running all the checks you are still in the same position? What happens then?”
“I don’t even want to go there, Lawrence, although I suppose I’m going to have to discuss it with the fraud squad. It’ll be difficult to pin anything on Andrews if there’s no evidence that he’s been forging anything – no complaints and so on, nothing in his studio – but it can’t just be left to rot. I’m sure the police will come up with some approach or other. Maybe a sting operation to try to trap him? But if he’s as good as we think he is, he must have accomplices and an organisation behind him that’s pretty sophisticated. If he gets wind of our suspicions, he’ll disappear.”
With nothing else to do in London, Ced caught a mid-afternoon train home. Sally was waiting on the platform for him. Her female antennae immediately sensed his depression and she folded her arms round him.
“Whatever’s happened, hon? You look like you have the problems of the planet on your shoulders.”
He looked down into her eyes. “I think I have, Sal. I’ve never felt so totally defeated.”
Back at the house, Sal snuggled up protectively to Ced on the sofa while he told her about his trip and the increasingly impossible situation that had arisen. True to his word to Verdi, he left any mention of ‘The Awakening’ out of his account, even though that problem played as heavily on his mind as any.
He looked across the room to where he’d put down his imaging equipment. “I know I should be setting up the files and starting on a schedule of checking and counterchecking, Sal, but my heart’s not in it. I feel empty; beaten.”
She hugged him tighter. “We’ll sort it, hon. Did I tell you Claw’s been in touch?”
“No, how is she?”
“She’s good, but she’s as frustrated as you are, in her way. She’s convinced that there’s something special about this Andrews bloke because of his DNA and she was desperate to conduct some more tests, but she’d run out of sample. Then she suddenly remembered something and she’s got some.”
“She hasn’t been back to Andrews to ask for some more, has she?” said Ced with a start, the panic obvious.
“No,” replied Sally, puzzled at the intensity of his reply, “she hasn’t been anywhere near him. Don’t worry.”
“So where did she get the sample?”
She explained about the envelope. “And guess what?”
He waited.
“Well, come on, guess. What do you think?”
“I don’t know Sal. I don’t know anything anymore.”
“She called yesterday morning. She used half the sample to run a whole load more systems – ten, in fact. And they’re all new, Ced, all of them. This bloke Andrews has given a whole new meaning to the word ‘unique’.”
Ced nodded, not over-impressed. “But what does it mean? That he’s got a whole bunch of rare alleles. So what? You say yourself they’re on the junk DNA. I’ve seen him, Sal, Claw’s seen him. He doesn’t look any different from anyone else.”
“Perhaps he doesn’t, but she’s not leaving it at that. She’s contacted her old professor in London. He’s an expert in gene analysis. She wants him to have a look at some of Andrews’ genes to see if they’re different.”
“What’s she expecting to find?”
“She doesn’t know, hon. That’s what pushing back the frontiers of science is all about: you don’t know where it will lead you. But you have to admit it would be surprising if someone with all these rare alleles – no, not rare, unique as far as we know – if someone like that didn’t also have something interesting in his gene make-up as well.”
She sat up to look at him. “Christ, hon, you really are down. You’d normally be enthusiastic over something like this. Listen, I’ve got another idea too. I’ve been thinking about it ever since these problems with the paintings arose.”
He waited.
“OK,” she said, taking his hands and putting them in her lap as she held them. “I’m right, aren’t I, that so far, all the comparisons and conclusions you’ve made about Andrews’ work have been from the painting that Claw bought?”
“Yes,” agreed Ced, “I’ve got very hi-res images of that painting, so the data’s about as good as it could be.”
“But it’s only one painting.”
“One painting’s all it takes, Sal.”
“Supposing there’s something different about that portrait, something that doesn’t normally occur in his other paintings.”
“Such as?”
“I don’t know, but say it’s a variation in his technique.”
“His technique is almost incidental, Sal. I’ve made comparisons directly between all the other paintings that his painting led me to and they all agree with each other, independently of his own work.”
“I know that, but it all leads back to him, doesn’t it? What I’m saying, hon, is don’t you think it would help to have some more examples of Andrews’ work so that you can have a better cross-section of his technique? Wouldn’t it be better to have some more originals to work from?”
“What are you suggesting we do, break into his gallery and steal some?”
“Mmm, I hadn’t thought of that, but it’s possibly a bit risky. No, I was thinking of b
uying some.”
“Buying some! They cost thousands of pounds.”
“I know, I’ve been thinking about that. I’ve got some money in my savings account from when my gran died. We could use that.”
“No, Sal, you can’t do that. You can’t go spending your nest egg on paintings; we’re not quite at that stage of our lives yet.”
“How else are we going to get the money?”
“Sal, that large landscape was marked up at seven and a half grand. That’s a huge amount of money. Just suppose the guy turns out to be a master forger. It could be worthless overnight.”
“Not necessarily. Collectors are perverse. If he gains notoriety, his work might shoot up in value.”
“Well, I’m not about to let you risk finding out, Sal.”
“It’s my money, hon. Are you saying that if I take a trip to the Lakes and buy a painting, you wouldn’t be interested in making a set of hi-res photos from it and using the data?”
“Sal, you mustn’t! It could be pouring money down the drain.”
“Listen Fisher, you’re a scientist. Think like one. You know very well that one control isn’t enough in an experiment. You need several. OK, we might have to make do with two or three, but it will be better than one.”
“Sal–”
“Now are you going to let me go on my own to make the choice, or are you going to come too and advise me?”
Rare Traits (The Rare Traits Trilogy Book I) Page 24