by Sam Blake
Marcus looked up at her. ‘You should definitely write your own show, sweet pea – I keep telling you.’ He grinned. ‘And don’t worry, the house is very secure but getting someone to review the alarm and camera system is top of my to-do list.’
Stephanie smiled, feeling his eyes run over her. She knew from the look on his face that he wasn’t thinking about his emails now, or alarm systems or Vittoria, and that was just how she liked it.
‘But that’s enough about my wife. What time are you due at the hairdresser’s?’
She moved around the table and kissed him lightly on the lips. ‘Eleven. What time do you have to be at the airport?’
Chapter 9
LILY COULDN’T UNDERSTAND a single word the cab driver said from the moment he picked her up. She’d smiled and made the appropriate noises and then looked busy with her phone, trying to avoid eye contact, cringing at the definite possibility that he’d think her lack of understanding was because she was wildly racist.
That was the last thing she wanted him to think.
His cab was spotless, smelling, rather incongruously in this cityscape of iconic buildings and constant traffic, of mountain pine. He was Eastern European, she guessed, had a broad, friendly smile and was, she was sure, quite lovely, but between his broken English, and the inflections and slang he’d obviously acquired living in New York, she was struggling to understand him. And there were only so many times you could ask someone to repeat themselves before they got really cross.
Was this what working in New York would be like? Panic fluttered in her chest as she looked out at the crowded pavements, the roads choked with yellow cabs. What if she couldn’t understand people? What if she couldn’t understand the people she worked with? How would she cope? Lily took a deep breath. She was being silly. There was nothing to worry about, not with the job anyway. She’d be fine with that. She had just been offered the job of her dreams – she’d be fine.
There were much bigger things to worry about right now.
She’d told Marianne Omotoso that she could start in four weeks. Why had she said that? It had made perfect sense at the time, and Marianne and her colleagues had smiled as if that worked for them – if she’d had to give in her notice in another job, it would have been four weeks before she could start, and they were expecting her to move halfway around the world.
Which meant she had four weeks to sort out Jack’s mess, find somewhere to live in New York and get some clothes that looked a bit less Hackney vintage market and a bit more Rockefeller Center. She could feel the panic rising again. Why had she said four weeks? Lily shook her head to herself. She couldn’t give up on her dreams, not after all the work it had taken to get her here. She just couldn’t.
As the cab driver drew up outside The Calvert Vaux Hotel, Lily tried to make up for her inadequacy at conversation, handing him a twenty-dollar bill and waving away the change. Soon she’d have a salary and a proper job and she’d be able to take cabs whenever she wanted. He seemed genuinely pleased, which made her feel a little better, but as she stepped out onto the pavement, pushing the door to the yellow cab closed behind her, relief quickly turned to nervous anticipation.
The sort of anticipation that knotted your stomach and made you feel deep down sick. As if she wasn’t feeling sick enough already.
Four weeks.
The interview had gone incredibly well, but now she was going to find out if Vittoria still felt the same as she had last night. Without the champagne, would their plan just sound totally mad? Was four weeks enough? It would have to be. Worst possible scenario, maybe Jack would be able to get a job in New York too and come and work out here?
But Lily knew that was highly unlikely. Whatever about her being a bag of nerves, he was a real home bird, needed his friends around him, his real friends. He’d been ready for the zombie apocalypse since he was eleven, but she couldn’t see him leaving London. He even found country holidays a challenge.
So that meant she needed to make sure he had a job and a home before she left. That was all there was to it.
The Calvert Vaux Hotel was nothing if not impressive. Lily looked up at its soaring windows as she stood on the pavement. She could see why it was so iconic. Flags fluttered over the huge French glass canopy that covered the entrance from the elements. The pavement she was standing on was a chequerboard of black and white marble tiles, a hint at the opulence inside.
Pushing the rotating door, Lily was met by gilt and glittering lights, a deep pile cream-and-gold rug covering a marble floor, classical music filling every corner. The scent of flowers was strong from a magnificent arrangement on a round antique walnut table in the centre of the hallway. This was the type of place Lily loved to come to sketch, to sit and watch and feel.
‘Lily, how did the interview go?’ She spun around to see Vittoria, stunning in a fitted red dress and black patent court shoes, and any trepidation about meeting her again evaporated. Her smile was just as warm and genuine as it had been when they’d parted at the airport. Before Lily could answer, Vittoria guided her further into the hotel. ‘I’ve booked a table in a nice private corner with a lovely view of the park. I want to hear everything.’
It didn’t take Lily long to recount the excitement of the morning.
Vittoria flicked a white linen napkin onto her knee. ‘If Marianne Omotoso is head of design, who were the men?’
Lily frowned. ‘I’m not exactly sure, but I think one of them was finance, one an international sales manager or something and one definitely looked after their bespoke customers. They kept talking about Oli, about how he’d looked at all my designs, at my blog, at everything – he’s the founder, Oli Lennon – I couldn’t believe it.’ Lily’s hand went to her hair clip. ‘They said he’d seen my clip in a photo and he wants me to do a suite of jewellery like this.’
‘It’s very pretty.’
Lily blushed. ‘It started life as a silver tea strainer and a lace doily.’ Her eyes opened wide. ‘I couldn’t tell them – they thought it was filigree.’
Vittoria’s eyes sparkled as she laughed. ‘They’ll love your innovation. Why’s it called No. 42? I’ve always wondered.’
Lily grinned. ‘It’s the answer to life, the universe and everything.’ Vittoria frowned, not understanding. Lily laughed. ‘From the book – and the film – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The founder, Oli Lennon, knew Douglas Adams. Oli Lennon’s family were South African diamond miners – actual miners not the mine owners. He said the jewellery world always saw him as an outsider – he was Arthur Dent hitchhiking through a galaxy of stars.’
Vittoria laughed. ‘Well, he’s certainly found his place now. No. 42’s as famous as Tiffany’s. I’m just so delighted that the interview went well.’ She smiled. ‘And you’ve got four weeks.’ She corrected herself, her face suddenly serious. ‘We’ve got four weeks.’ She pursed her lips. ‘And it sounds like this Edward Croxley needs to learn a lesson or two.’
One thing Lily had loved about Vittoria from the moment she had met her was that she got straight to the heart of an issue. Lily had apologised for being direct, but Vittoria was just like her – she didn’t bother with unimportant small talk, was one hundred per cent focused.
‘I need to find out more about him. I’ve only seen him once, and that was from a distance, at a reception for something. But he’s got that look, that arrogant swagger.’
Vittoria leaned forward and patted her hand reassuringly. ‘You don’t need to do anything now – keep away from him. Let me have a think about what I can do to work out the balance. I’ll do the finding out. I have someone in London who can help me and I already have some ideas.’ She paused. ‘The most important thing is that we don’t know each other, have only met on the plane and for lunch now. That happens all the time.’
‘Absolutely.’
‘Do you have the notes for me?’
Lily leaned over and handed Vittoria a map of New York, folded so her biro ring around No. 42’s fl
agship store on Fifth Avenue was clear. Lily grinned. ‘The launch of their new collection is invitation only. I’ll make sure you’re on the guest list.’
‘I’ll look forward to it. So four weeks until you start.’ Vittoria smiled warmly and bent down to open her handbag. ‘This is the information about that lovely photo gallery I mentioned in the East Village, the 4th Street Gallery. You really should check it out while you’re here – it’s tiny but quite famous.’
Lily took the brightly coloured cardboard sleeve and flipped it open. Interleaved between the information about the 4th Street Gallery’s forthcoming exhibitions was a page of Calvert Vaux Hotel notepaper with email addresses and passwords on it, plus Marcus’s flight schedule for the next month. Vittoria was very efficient.
Lily smiled back. ‘This is perfect.’
Lunch finished too quickly.
Now it was time to redress the balance.
Chapter 10
SQUATTING DOWN, his jeans tight at the knee, Edward Croxley looked at the bunch of keys in his hand impatiently and tried the third one on the ring. The lock on the roller shutter hadn’t budged with the first two tries and he was starting to get impatient. After the lengths he’d gone to get this far, being locked out just wasn’t an option.
This one had to work.
Behind him, further down the alley, he could hear the staff from the French restaurant chatting beside the bins. The scent of cigarette smoke wafted his way and he felt a deep pang for fags. He’d been off them six months but the stress of the last few weeks would have put anyone right back on them.
His hand trembling, Croxley jiggled the key in the lock and felt it move. Thank God. He glanced up and down the alley. It was only a few feet wide, snaking along the back of the shops on Great Russell Street like something out of secret London. He could just imagine Victorian cutpurses and pickpockets dipping down here, running as fast as they could to dodge the peelers, their bare feet silent on the damp cobbles.
He turned the key gently. That Power boy had said you had to do it carefully or the mechanism stuck, but if you got it right … He felt the lock on the heavy steel shutter give under his hand … and spring open. Thank fucking God. Now he just had to push it up.
How the fuck had the old man managed this every morning? Heaving up the roller shutter, he pushed it to head height, giving enough clearance to get in through the door. He flicked his fringe out of his eyes as he bent over to look at the huge bunch of keys again. The biggest key was for the front door – he’d worked that out. It was all the smaller modern keys that were confusing. All Chubb, all the same size and all silver, he had no idea how you were supposed to tell them apart. He should have got Jack Power to label them, but he’d been barely able to stand by the end of the game, had tossed the keys on the table and left.
Croxley didn’t imagine when Power woke up the next morning with the hangover from hell and found the copy of his promissory note in his pocket that it would have been a good time to ask about keys.
It had seemed such an easy way to get into the shop and to give himself enough time to look around, to find the bloody box. Croxley smirked to himself. ‘Winning’ the shop had been a stroke of genius if he did say so himself. The moment he’d realised what had happened back at the sale, he’d thought about all the ways he could get the box back. He’d even considered just asking for it, but that would have been professional – and literal – suicide. Jack would undoubtedly have had a proper look at it and would have known exactly what was hidden in it. And then they would all be fucked.
He didn’t know a whole lot about Jack Power, but Croxley knew that he’d got a first in art history, which meant he probably had a fair grasp of things old. Something seven thousand years old suddenly falling into his lap would stand out like a bitch on heat at a dog show.
This was far cleverer, and it gave him all the time in the world to search the place. But actually physically getting in was causing more of a problem than he’d expected.
Croxley chose another key at random and slipped it into the lock on the steel door. The old man must have been very security conscious. He held his breath as he twisted it. This time it opened perfectly and he felt a small jump of elation. Then he realised the door opened outwards. And the shutter wasn’t high enough to allow that to happen.
Grunting, he pushed the roller shutter up. It still wasn’t clear of the door. Jesus fucking Christ – how hard was this supposed to be? Then he saw the steel pole leaning against the wall, sandwiched between the shutter and the door. It had a flat plate soldered to one end, a hook on the other. Grabbing it, he used the flat end to push the shutter up. The other end was evidently to pull the shutter back down again. Sorted. Now he was getting somewhere.
Pulling the door open, Croxley fumbled for his phone in the pocket of his hoodie, switching on the flashlight so he could see inside. He almost jumped. The light danced back at him as if there were a circle of people lurking in the shadows, waiting for him. He took a breath, trying to still his heart – it was just the beam from his phone reflecting off panes of glass leaning against the walls.
Why was he being such a prat?
And where the fuck was the light switch?
He could hear the shop’s alarm, his anxiety rising with every pip. Quickly he slipped into the darkened back room. The alarm panel was on the wall to his right, its bright readout counting down the seconds he had to put in the code. He punched in the number. Thank God he’d thought of asking Power to write that on the bottom of the note. The last thing he needed was the alarm going off and the cops arriving. The alarm disabled, he sighed with relief.
It took him a few minutes to find the light switch on the other side of the alarm panel, a few minutes in which he dented his shin on a box and sent a stack of pictures cascading onto the floorboards. He didn’t care – he hadn’t come for pictures.
Above him, a single light bulb struggled to light the room.
Just as Croxley’s phone began to vibrate in his pocket.
Not again.
Pulling it out, he didn’t need to look at the screen to see exactly who it was. He fought the urge to reject the call, then answered. Despite the acquired public-school inflection, the caller’s accent was strong.
‘What’s happening?’
‘I’m in.’ Croxley didn’t bother with pleasantries.
‘You sure it’s there?’
‘Has to be. Your contact got it to the sale room – the only other person buying boxes of tat that day was Jack Power. He has to have it. As soon as I saw it wasn’t in my box, I went back to check, and there was no sign of it anywhere.’
‘So you keep telling me.’ The voice was full of menace.
‘It has to be here. There are loads of boxes from auctions in this place.’ He scanned the room, full of cardboard boxes neatly stacked on floor to ceiling shelving. There were more on the floor, piled haphazardly. ‘I can see their lot numbers.’
‘I don’t understand how it got moved from the box it was in.’
‘He must have swapped some of the stuff around. I don’t know, but by a process of elimination it has to be here.’
‘Find it or—’
‘I know, I’ll find it.’
Croxley’s mouth went dry. He didn’t want to think about the ‘or’. There was no ‘or’. He needed to find the box and its precious contents. The moment he’d realised what had happened he’d been in a state of shock. He had literally stood there, the auction room musty with the smell of dust and old books, sweat trickling down his back under the tweed of his jacket. He’d searched the box he’d bought over and over again. It had been there when the sale had opened – he’d checked. But it wasn’t there at the end.
It had all been going so smoothly until then. Auction after auction, the plan had been perfect. The artefacts were smuggled into the country, concealed in the random boxes that featured in every country house sale – boxes of books and miscellaneous china and oddments, all bought legitimately. Sergei
always had buyers lined up, dealers or collectors – the country house sales were the last link in a very long and bloody chain, bringing plundered, smuggled or stolen goods into the legitimate market, creating an indisputable provenance. Who was to know what had been passed down for hundreds of years through families? And country house auctioneers were notoriously inept, had no clue of the value of anything that didn’t have a foxhound on it. Artefacts from Iraq and Syria looked like old bits of glass or souvenir reproductions. It was a fool-proof system. Or had been until Jack Power had got in the way.
And of course, it had to be this fucking time that it went wrong. When the buyer was the boss and wanted something very particular – and wasn’t the type of guy who messed about. He’d made it clear that in his part of the Soviet Union the delay there had already been in delivery would be taken very seriously.
Edward felt himself chill. The items in this particular consignment might be no bigger than his little finger, but they were virtually priceless.
As soon as he’d worked out what must have happened, before he’d dreamed up the card game as a solution to his problems, Croxley had tried everything.
Calling into the shop looking for a gift for his mother, he’d wandered around with Jack, picking stuff up, examining, asking about auctions and china and nineteenth-century Minton. He’d been there for hours and hadn’t seen any of the items that had originally been in Lot 56 but had mysteriously moved. The main problem was that the box of stuff Jack had bought wasn’t big, and this shop rambled over three floors, with every corner piled high with prints and dusty books and all sorts of fucking ancient crap. Croxley shook his head. He’d thought about organising a crew to break in, but how would they know what they were looking for? And if he told them, the chances of him ever seeing it again were minimal, to say nothing of how long it would take to find anyway.
That was the real problem.
Time.
Then he’d had a total stroke of inspiration. Some of the guys he hung out with had been at school with Jack Power, and they all liked a high stakes game. Popping into the shop again, he’d been having a friendly chat when he’d casually mentioned cards and the players. Power had been flattered to be asked, had jumped at the opportunity.