A Bed of Scorpions

by Judith Flanders

  I did too. ‘Do you have any idea what? You told me the police said the books were clean.’ He hadn’t told me that, Helena and Jake had, but this sounded more polite.

  ‘They are clean. The accountant Helena found for us says so, as well as Scotland Yard’s people. And they would have found something if it had been there, because they wanted to find it. Which means that there’s something that we aren’t seeing. And I don’t know what.’ He was genuinely frustrated.

  I stared at him, waiting until he looked up. ‘Forgery.’ It seemed the only possible answer to me.

  He stared back at me, completely blank. If what I was thinking had happened, he knew nothing about it. I would stake my life on that.

  ‘You’re serious.’ It started out as a statement, but by the time he’d finished the second word, it had turned into, not a question, but a plea.

  ‘I’m serious that it’s a possibility that has occurred to me, yes. That it seems likely, even. It starts with Stevenson.’ He nodded. ‘I gave a presentation this morning, on publishers and branding. I used a bunch of book jackets to show how publishers had used logos and typography over the past half-century. I also used a Stevenson, one of the ones that incorporates a book jacket. The one that has a puppy in the corner, with a picture of Kafka.’

  He shrugged and shook his head.

  I was hesitant. ‘You don’t know the one I mean?’ How could he not know what his gallery was selling?

  ‘I’ve probably seen it.’ He saw he was going to have to give me a lesson in art dealing. ‘Everything we own isn’t just sitting around the office, Sam. Some is in the building, but most is at a couple of specialist art-storage sites.’

  I’d never thought of the mechanics before.

  ‘And if I haven’t seen something we’ve sold, that’s normal too. Frank would have said the same about some of our Eastern European artists. We both have—’ He grimaced. ‘We had areas of expertise. I mostly handle European artists, and some South American ones. Frank did the States for the most part, although for some reason he was also interested in new Chinese artists. God knows why.’ He stopped, realising that he was digressing. ‘If a collector one of us normally dealt with was interested in the other partner’s area, we just passed them on. It was the only practical way to work.’

  I thought. ‘Then what you need to know is that this Stevenson is a collage of an interior, and the back wall is made out of a book jacket. The picture is from the late 1960s, and I was using it in a discussion of how publishers had branded their books, how they’d used typography and design to create an …’ – I waved my hands – ‘it sounds pretentious, but an aura. Not just for the author, but for the publisher too. After the talk, a designer came up to say I’d misdated some of the colophons. A nerd thing, he phrased it.’ I half-nodded, half-shook my head, acknowledging the truth of that. ‘Except I hadn’t made a mistake about the date. The differences are small, but once you’re aware of them, you can’t make a mistake like that. And if I didn’t make a mistake, then that Stevenson, from 1968, has a book jacket in it that was printed in the 1990s.’

  I sat back. I hadn’t said it out loud before, and now it sounded preposterous.

  Aidan believed none of it. ‘A book from the 1990s? How could that be? Someone would have noticed it.’

  ‘The book itself, the novel, doesn’t date from the 1990s. It’s an old book, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. There’s probably an even earlier edition, because it was first published in the 1950s, I think. But when books are reprinted, at least at Tetrarch, where this book jacket was from, the colophon on the spine is automatically replaced with the one the company is using at the date of the reprint, not the one that was on the previous edition, even if the cover isn’t otherwise redesigned. And I know those colophons inside out. I know which ones were used in the 1960s, and I know which ones were used in the 1990s.’

  ‘Go back a bit. A colophon is …’

  ‘It’s the little symbol on a book’s spine. It’s the company’s logo. Penguin uses a stylised drawing of a penguin, other companies use their initials or some other illustration.’

  He nodded. Now he knew what I meant.

  ‘Tetrarch uses the outline of the heads of four Roman emperors. And like all logos, it gets redrawn, updated every now and again. When I was at Tetrarch, I sorted out a new version, so I spent a lot of time looking at the old ones.’ I shrugged. ‘It’s not much of a claim to fame, but I can date most of them within a decade.’

  ‘You’re suggesting that someone is forging collages, and they’ve slipped up by using what appeared to be an old book cover? But that any publishing person could date the jacket from the logo.’

  I waved my hand in dismissal. ‘No. Even most publishing people wouldn’t be able to. As I say, it’s a nerd thing. Some would. Me. Most people, even publishers, wouldn’t notice unless a book from each decade was put in front of them, to compare. The differences become obvious once they’re laid out side by side.’

  Aidan sat turning his knife over and over, staring at it as though it had the answer etched onto the blade. ‘I have almost nothing to do with the Stevensons. Frank brought him to the gallery originally, and bought up the estate later. There was never any reason for me to be involved.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Of the collectors I deal with, only two, I think, have ever bought a Stevenson, so I’ve hardly looked at them. That is, if we’re talking about the big pieces.’

  I thought we probably were, so I nodded for him to go on.

  ‘If we take as the starting-point, that we’ve been selling forgeries …’ He looked as if he’d bitten into a rotten egg, and I couldn’t blame him. This was his life’s work, and now someone was coming along and telling him that it was most likely built on fraud. ‘If we allow for the moment that the gallery has been selling forgeries, then the question has to be how.’

  Of course it did. ‘Schmidt is the answer, isn’t he?’

  Aidan wasn’t rejecting the idea. ‘He had the technical ability. He was a good artist, just not one with anything original to say. And he would have worked on our Stevensons over the years, without doubt. Collages are fragile: newsprint and other cheap paper of the kind Stevenson used degrades quickly. They need a lot of looking after.’ He thought about that for a moment. ‘And Stevenson was prolific. That would be a good reason to choose him. No one except Frank and Myra knew the holdings well.’

  ‘Myra? She told me the other day that she was the registrar, but I didn’t – don’t – have any idea what that means, or what she does.’

  ‘What doesn’t she do? A gallery registrar is its paperwork queen, the admin centre. Myra organises the movement of all our art – shipping it out to art fairs, or to buyers, or lending it to exhibitions – as well as generating the documents that moving art around the world requires: tax, customs, loan agreements, insurance, you name it. She catalogues what comes in, what goes out, what is sold, what is bought. Whenever a piece moves in or out, she checks it and makes a condition report.’

  Too much information. I made a get-back-to-business gesture, and he smiled, admitting he’d been glad to get sidetracked. ‘So, yes, if I were going to forge, Stevenson would be a logical artist to forge. Lots of pieces. And, until Celia took over, the executor who lived in Vermont and never travelled. And wasn’t an art expert, or a lawyer.’

  ‘Celia does seem to come into this, doesn’t she?’

  ‘Are you seeing her involved?’

  ‘I can’t figure out how it could have been done, otherwise. Werner Schmidt might have the technical ability to forge dozens of artists, but if he worked with Celia, then he had the’ – I waved my hands – ‘well, the ingredients, for lack of a better word. To produce the kind of collages that Stevenson made, he’d need lots of 1960s and 1970s print materials: photos, newspapers, magazines, old photocopies. Of course you can buy old newspapers and magazines. But if you’re working with the artist’s daughter, isn’t it even better? Then you have access to the artist’s own files, the c
uttings and clippings that must have been in his studio when he vanished.’ I thought some more about how collages were made. ‘Not only that, you even have the damn glue. Jake was telling me about Schmidt. He said he filed and dated all the materials he used, the way you’d expect a restorer to. But don’t restorers use different materials than the ones the artists use? On purpose, so that experts can tell which areas are original and which the restorer has repainted?’ I waited until Aidan nodded: yes, that was true. ‘Someone restoring Stevensons would use different glue, not the glue Stevenson used, so experts could identify which areas had been restored, and which were original.’ Aidan nodded again. He could see where I was going, but he didn’t want to get there himself. ‘A forger of Stevensons, however, would need to have the kind of glue dating from Stevenson’s day. The kind that’s been illegal for twenty years. The kind that was somehow sitting in his studio, courtesy of his daughter.’

  We stared at each other. I felt like a dog that has found a bone, and was now waiting for the nice human to make a decision. Was it ‘Good dog!’ and a scratch behind my ears, or ‘Bad dog! Take that dirty bone out of the house’?

  ‘What does your policeman say?’

  If he called him ‘my’ policeman one more time, I was going to kick him too. Maybe I’d start to kick everyone I had a meal with. ‘I haven’t mentioned it.’ I was looking anywhere but at Aidan.

  So much so that he had to bend down to break into my line of sight. ‘Sam? Why not?’

  ‘Why not? Because my loyalties are all over the place. Am I just supposed to mention, as pillow talk, that I think my friend’s gallery has been selling forgeries?’ He flinched at that. Good. I stared at him accusingly. It was down to him now.

  Aidan reached for his phone, dialled, and asked for Helena.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  HELENA WAS IN a meeting that was scheduled to run all afternoon, so we assembled at her house that evening. I’d stopped and bought cold meat and salads on the way over, but I might as well have paid for Styrofoam, for all any of us ate. I repeated what I’d told Aidan, only this time I used Helena’s computer. I had the memory stick with my illustrations, so it was easy to show them the details. And once you looked for it, you had to wonder how it had been missed. Helena made notes, impassive, as though it were any other meeting with a client. Which it would have been, if it weren’t for my being involved.

  When we’d both finished she sat thinking for a moment. Then, ‘It’s out of our hands, now.’ Aidan and I had both known that, but we had somehow hoped she would make it go away. Not happening. ‘As an officer of the court, I will report what my client has told me. In the morning.’ She looked calmly at me. ‘If you want to talk to your partner, I have no control over that.’

  Wasn’t that just hotsy-totsy.

  As I made my way home, I went back and forth, trying out scenarios and then discarding them, practising conversations I knew wouldn’t go the way I was scripting them in my head. Which might be fortunate, because even the scripts that I was writing sucked.

  Happily, I didn’t have to try any of them out. Jake was still at work when I got home. I decided on early bed, and then with luck I’d be asleep by the time he got home.

  It half-worked. I was in bed, and I switched off the light as soon as I heard his key in the door. The bedroom faces the back of the house, and he couldn’t possibly see the light from the street.

  He got undressed and slid into bed without speaking. Just as I was congratulating myself on a nifty manoeuvre, however, he reached out and mussed my hair. ‘Your I-am-asleep breathing needs work. It wouldn’t fool a two-year-old. What are you avoiding?’

  I turned over to look at him. ‘You. Otherwise I wouldn’t be doing my avoiding in bed. Or not in a bed where I expected to find you.’

  There was a startled pause. ‘Have you been spending much time in beds where you don’t expect to find me?’

  That wasn’t what I’d meant, but it was a good diversion. When in doubt, try wild exaggeration. ‘Yes, of course. Dozens. Daily. Didn’t I mention it?’ I waited to see if he’d chase off down this rabbit hole.

  No such luck. ‘Well if it’s only dozens every day, then I don’t need to worry. But that’s not why you were pretending to be asleep.’

  I think I snarled. ‘I was pretending to be asleep because I need to talk to you and I don’t much want to. Can we do it in the morning? Are you working this weekend?’

  ‘Yes, we can do it in the morning, no, I’m not working.’

  ‘Good. Now I’m really going to sleep.’ I turned over again. I’m a terrible liar. There wasn’t a chance I’d sleep, and I didn’t. Instead I lay awake for hours trying to think of a way to avoid the coming conversation. The only halfway feasible solution I could come up with was emigration, and only if I could find a country that kept its visa office open after midnight.

  There was one small side benefit to my feeling of impending doom. At six I realised that if I went for a run, it would give me an extra hour before I had to face the firing squad. So I did. My running is inept at the best of times, and after a week off, it was even more so. But I was getting fresh air and I was puce with effort, and those, I told myself as I pulled up at the front door, gasping for breath, were the main things.

  Jake was waiting for me in the kitchen. He didn’t bother with any soft soap, for which I was grateful. He did smile, though, and I was grateful for that too, although I suspected he wouldn’t be smiling much longer. ‘Out with it.’

  This was the third time I was telling the story, so at least I was now telling it efficiently. I ran through the colophon evidence, and added in Aidan and Helena’s views.

  ‘Forgery.’ He sat thinking about it. ‘Compton finds out what is going on, kills himself rather than admit it to his partner. The forger …’ he frowned. ‘The forger is no longer threatened with exposure, and so he kills himself?’

  I’d already stumbled over that. ‘The forger, who used to go out with the man who has just committed suicide because of his actions, and is also an alcoholic, feels terrible, gets drunk, or drunker, and uses toxic chemicals without taking precautions.’

  He seemed to think that was possible. ‘And Celia Stein?’

  ‘She’s the source of the material, she’s the way the forgeries get back into the estate, to be sold as originals. And she got in touch with me when she shouldn’t have ever heard of me. She wants something, and hasn’t said what it is, which makes me think it’s something she’s not willing to have known.’

  ‘Why would she get in touch with you, though? Nothing could have drawn attention to her more.’

  ‘Maybe she thought approaching me through the trust would give her cover. If Lucy hadn’t mentioned the Stevenson exhibition that first evening at Toby’s, we would never have looked twice at her.’

  Jake was non-committal.

  ‘It also makes sense of her income.’

  ‘Her income? How would you know what that was?’

  ‘I don’t, but I can’t see a charitable trust salary even covering the cost of her shoes.’

  Jake stared pointedly at my T-shirt. ‘Yes, I know.’ I brushed that aside. ‘I’m not interested in shopping, but I am interested in clothes in the abstract, on other people. And I’m telling you, she wears Armani. And very expensive shoes and handbags. If she receives a share of the Stevenson estate earnings, or the estate pays her a salary for the work she does for it, then maybe, but think about her house. It’s in Highgate. Expensive area. According to Delia, it’s big enough to build an annexe in the garden. I live on an art world salary, and I can’t imagine being able to afford that. Maybe she got a good settlement from her ex-husband, but isn’t it worth looking at?’

  Jake didn’t respond directly. ‘I’m going to have to go in. We need to get the Specialist Crime unit in.’ He saw my blank response and translated. ‘The art fraud people.’

  I tried not to look as nauseous as I felt. ‘Helena told Aidan to put together a list of the Stevenson
sales over the last ten years. I agreed to look any that include book jackets. Obviously they’re going to have to get experts in, but I can at least see if any of the others have the same problem.’

  He nodded his thanks. He and Helena both had a tendency to treat me as clerical staff during an investigation. I always felt I ought to resent it, but I never did. I was quite sure they knew what they were doing, and I was quite sure I didn’t.

  ‘I won’t be long. They’ll get their own people on to it, and they won’t need me after the briefing.’

  Our weekend together had turned into a weekend with Jake working. I mentally shrugged. He’d told me from the first it would be like that, and I was happy enough most of the time. I just hadn’t expected our game of Happy Families to involve me being Mrs Dick, the Detective’s Wife. I gritted my teeth and got on with those thrilling activities that make weekends such a bower of earthly delights. I started a load of laundry, and changed the sheets and towels. I gave the kitchen and bathroom a quick clean. Any more excitement and I’d explode with happiness. Whoom. It would be like The Muppet Show when the musicians self-destruct. Maybe ‘happy’ wasn’t quite the word I was searching for to describe my mood.

  The phone rang as I began to make lunch. Jake.

  ‘Are you on your way home, or is it turning into an all-day deal?’

  ‘I’m on my way home, but I have a question. When we spoke to Celia Stein at the funeral, did you get the impression she was planning to go anywhere?’

  ‘No.’ I thought for a moment. ‘The opposite. Delia said she was always travelling, but with the Tate show she was stuck in London.’

  ‘You’re right. I’d forgotten that. Thanks.’ He was planning to hang up.

  ‘Not so fast, sunshine. Why do you want to know?’

  He wanted to tell me it was police business, but since he’d just co-opted my memory as his interview partner, based on a whole pile of information I’d dumped in his lap that morning, it was harder than usual. His voice was grudging. ‘We’re waiting to hear if she’s drawing an income from the estate once the US office opens. But otherwise you were right. Big house in the most expensive part of Highgate, bought three years ago, no mortgage. Moved from a small, mortgaged flat. Husband gone long before that, no alimony. Jobs in various arts organisations, nothing with a big salary.’