Sam’s eyes were fixed in fascinated horror on the phone as if he’d never seen one before.
‘I’ll leave him to deal with you in his own way,’ James went on in the same calm, curiously threatening tone, ‘all I care about is getting him off my back. Then you really will have the chance to follow your Lifesigns precepts and discover what it’s like to accept the consequences of your own mistakes. There’s one thing you needn’t worry about. Stefano’s old-fashioned. I don’t believe he’d do anything to harm your wife or your children.’
‘You bastard,’ said Sam in a shaking voice.
‘You’re the one who’s greedily hanging on to something that doesn’t belong to you.’ Sam havered, seemingly rooted to the spot. ‘Make your decision. What’s it to be?’ James said coldly as he began to punch in numbers.
‘Stop!’ gasped Sam. ‘You can have the bloody thing back if it’s that important.’
James’s fingers stayed in the air, still poised above the phone. ‘Why don’t you go and get it and then you can rejoin the party before your wife brings an action for divorce.’
Sam cast him a look of loathing as he stumped out of the room.
‘You were brilliant,’ I whispered. ‘I never thought you could sound so sinister.’
‘I quite surprised myself,’ he admitted. ‘But I’m glad he didn’t call my bluff about calling Stefano. I forgot to recharge the battery.’
Sam clumped back in carrying a large bag which he almost threw at James. ‘Here you are.’
‘Careful, we don’t want to cause any more damage,’ said James as he looked in the bag.
‘Will you just get out of my house?’
‘Nothing would give me greater pleasure,’ James said affably, ‘but I’ll check the faun first, if you don’t mind?’ He drew out an untidily wrapped parcel and laid it on the sofa, gently removing the layers. His breath hissed in distress as the last came off. ‘Oh, Cressy, how could you do this?’
I peered over his shoulder. One leg and the arm, which held the flute, were bent sideways, a split almost severed the other arm in two at the elbow and there was a marked dent in the faun’s shoulder where it had hit the corner brick edge on. Cressida must have a strength belied by her apparent fragility to do that much damage. ‘Is it repairable?’ I asked.
James frowned as he examined it. ‘Luckily the face isn’t damaged so it shouldn’t be too much of a problem,’ he said, running his fingers over it as if it was the finest silk, ‘but no matter how clever the restorer is, it always takes a little bit away from the original. It isn’t only the maker’s work of art any longer, it’s his and someone else’s. Still,’ he straightened up and started rewrapping it, ‘I suppose we should be thankful that it wasn’t worse.’
‘Or that the fire wasn’t alight when she threw it in the fireplace.’
He shuddered. ‘Thank you for putting things into their proper perspective, Laura.’
Sam was almost visibly hopping from foot to foot in his impatience to see us go. ‘Haven’t you seen enough?’
‘Leaving now,’ said James promptly, putting the statuette back in the carrier bag and picking it up. Sam followed us as we made our way to the front door and James turned back to look at him. ‘One last question before we go to satisfy my curiosity. What were you actually planning to do with it? Have it repaired and display it somewhere?’
‘God, no. I don’t even like it. My wife wants a new conservatory. We were going to do it on the proceeds of selling the faun.’
‘She must be after quite some conservatory,’ said James mildly.
‘We’re hardly the idle rich, if that’s what you mean. We’ve earned all our money. Unlike some,’ Sam protested in an indignant voice, throwing a pointed glance at James. ‘We don’t have ancestral acres to draw upon when we need the odd ten thousand pounds or so for improvements to the house.’
James stared at him like an ant about to be squashed. ‘So you intended to pay for your improvements by what was effectively theft? And justified what you were doing by spouting mumbo-jumbo rubbish about spiritual growth. You’re not only greedy, duplicitous and amoral, my friend, you’re incredibly stupid as well.’ His arms tightened around the parcel containing the faun. ‘This isn’t worth anything like ten thousand pounds.’
‘I had it valued by my brother-in-law,’ Sam said with a superior look on his face. ‘He said ten thou, even fifteen if I was lucky. And since he runs an antiques shop I think he should know, don’t you?’
‘He doesn’t know his whatever from his elbow if he thinks that,’ murmured James as he opened the door and waved me through. ‘A Farelli bronze is practically priceless. This one, even damaged, sold legally, would start at about half a million pounds. Since it’s stolen, you might have to settle for about two hundred thousand. Now perhaps you understand why Stefano Buonotti is so keen to have it back?’ He smiled nastily at Sam’s stunned expression. ‘And it sounds to me as if your brother-in-law has the same attitude to ripping people off as you do.’
CHAPTER 19
‘Was that true?’ I asked James as he carefully stowed the package away in the boot of the car under the glowering gaze of Sam Elliot, standing guard in his porch. ‘About how much the faun is worth.’
‘Absolutely. If anything a bit on the low side.’
‘Wow!’ I said, seriously impressed. And to think Cressida had picked up something worth a cool half a million and flung it into the fireplace with the force of an England bowler trying to save the match. It didn’t bear thinking about.
James came around to my side of the car and unlocked the door. He put his arm around my shoulders, giving me a hug. There was a resounding bang as Sam’s front door slammed shut.
‘What’s that for?’ I asked in surprise.
‘Do I have to have a reason?’ I met his eyes, feeling my heartbeat suddenly accelerate, then he shifted his gaze to the top of my head and dropped a distinctly brotherly kiss on my forehead. ‘Thanks,’ he said, letting me go.
‘What for?’ I asked again, feeling bewildered and rather let down.
‘For helping me when it was nothing to do with you.’
‘Well, what are families for?’ I asked lightly, though I could feel a curious flatness come over me. ‘Besides, I didn’t have much choice, did I? You were blackmailing me.’
Only the once, and you don’t really think I’m enough of a snake to split on you to Imogen, do you?’
‘Now you tell me.’
I was hardly going to do it before, was I?’ he pointed out, reasonably enough by his standards, I presume.
I got into the car as huffily as I could, which was a difficult procedure since Barker was enthusiastically expressing his pleasure at having company again. ‘Do you think Sam will come after us and try to hi-jack the car now he knows what the thing is worth?’ I asked, glancing towards the house. ‘He didn’t look very happy.’
‘About as sick as the proverbial parrot.’ James, on the other hand, looked extremely happy. ‘He could try and see if he can catch me,’ he said with a gleam of anticipation. Then added in a regretful voice, ‘But he won’t have the chance to do anything bar gnash his teeth. He’ll be too busy refereeing fights over who gets the last chocolate biscuit, and being lambasted by his wife for leaving her in the lurch with twenty kamikaze five year olds, to do anything except think longingly of the money he let slip through his sticky fingers. That’s when he’s in between bouts of quivering with fear that big bad Stefano is going to come after him as a punishment for holding on to the thing in the first place.’
I pushed Barker off my lap. He has the misguided notion that passengers in the front of cars enjoy having a large, hairy, hot lump sitting on them. With a reproachful expression he clambered on to the back seat and breathed heavily down my neck. ‘I don’t think I’m going to be able to face Stefano in future, now I know that he’s connected to the Mafia.’
James glanced over at me with one of his haughty expressions. ‘You don’t seriou
sly think I’d have allowed you anywhere near Stefano Buonotti if he was really involved in organised crime, do you?’
I looked at him doubtfully. In the past I would have said without hesitation that he wouldn’t have thought twice about it. Now I was beginning to wonder if I hadn’t occasionally been unfair. I must have been too slow with coming out with a reassuring denial because he said in freezing tones, ‘I can promise you I’d never have put you in that sort of danger.’
He looked so offended I found myself almost stammering out apologies. ‘I thought the Mafia didn’t harm women?’ I said by way of appeasement.
‘Ideas like that belong back in the days when the good guys always wore white hats and the fallen woman repented of her sins before expiring in the arms of the hero,’ he said dismissively, but the brief flare of temper seemed to have disappeared. ‘Come on, I wouldn’t even let Cressy give me a kiss on the cheek if I thought her husband was in the Mafia. It’d be concrete boots under the nearest motorway bridge in no time at all.’
‘But if he’s basically quite honest, what’s he doing planting stuff in your house?’ I asked, confused.
‘Of course he’s not honest,’ said James scornfully as we drove off. ‘He didn’t steal the faun himself but he sure as hell hung on to it. And I’d bet anything you like that his pad in Italy has a few other pieces that he “inherited” from Papa and is none too keen for experts to examine. Does Cressy know it’s the original?’ he asked as an afterthought.
‘She suspects it is.’
‘How humiliating she didn’t think highly enough of my expertise to worry I’d recognise it for what it was. At least Stefano did, which is some consolation.’ He laughed shortly. ‘Though to be honest I might not have been suspicious at all if he hadn’t made it so obvious he didn’t want me near it. I doubt he makes mistakes like that often.’
‘I think he thought you were going to be some sort of dilettante and found it quite a shock when you turned out to be quite so knowledgeable,’ I said, remembering Stefano’s absorbed expression as he and James had briefly found common ground in antiques.
‘Perhaps,’ he said, accepting the implied compliment as no more than his due. ‘According to Pa, who likes to keep his ear very close to the ground, Stefano’s “consultancy” services run along the lines of passing large amounts of money under the table between two sides - but just because he’s Italian and bribes people to get contracts doesn’t mean he’s in the Mafia. Even so,’ he added thoughtfully, ‘he’s not someone I’d advise getting on the wrong side of.’
‘What a shame you don’t take your own advice.’
His face took on a depressingly familiar shuttered look. ‘That’s not entirely my fault.’
‘If you hadn’t given Stefano the impression you’d be only too happy to take his wife off his hands, he might not feel quite so violent towards you,’ I said sourly.
‘I don’t behave any differently with her than I do with the rest of my ex-girlfriends,’ he said mildly. But did his other ex-girlfriends behave differently with him? ‘I can’t help it if she’s got a manically jealous husband.’
You could stop looking at her as if she’s the last chocolate in the box, I thought crossly, aware that whatever I said was going to make me sound like a shrew, and a jealous one to boot. I stared out of the window instead, my good mood over the successful completion of our mission completely evaporated. As soon as we gave the faun back to Stefano I could stop running around at James’s beck and call and it would be another three years before we saw each other. This conclusion wasn’t as consoling as I’d hoped. Why should it matter whether he still thought wistfully of Cressida? He was far too fond of his own skin to risk it by actually fooling around with her, or I hoped he was, and besides I was nursing wistful thoughts of my own, wasn’t I? I should be anyway. Actually I had been too busy to spend time thinking about Daniel. I’d better have a quick wallow now, I decided, summoning up some sad thoughts. After all I had just broken up with my boyfriend of a year and was entitled to them. I sighed soulfully.
‘Are you feeling all right?’ asked James. ‘You look a bit funny.’
Barker sat up and licked my ear.
Owing to the general insensitivity of the male occupants of the car I gave up on wistful thoughts. Besides gentle yearning didn’t at all suit the fizzy edginess that was inexplicably churning up my insides. I sat in restless silence for some miles until it occurred to me I was being unfair to James. It was hardly his fault he was still hung up on a pretty flibbertigibbet who’d given him the elbow two years ago. So I was still angry with him about it, but at least I knew I was being unfair. Another few miles and I’d unbent enough to say, ‘You were brilliant with Sam. I’d never have believed you could be so menacing.’
James flicked me a sideways glance as if to check whether I was about to start having a go at him again, then smiled. ‘I haven’t had so much fun in ages,’ he declared with relish. ‘It beats outbidding Geoffrey Simpson for a set of library chairs into a cocked hat - which was the most exciting event of the week before last. I do enjoy running the shop, I couldn’t bear to be shut up in an office like Harry, no matter how much he earns, and there’s a tremendous buzz when you’ve made a good sale or discovered something fantastic. But sometimes,’ he sighed, ‘I wish that what I was doing was less middle-aged.’
I looked at him in alarm. James used to have a marked streak of wildness, which was one of the reasons he created such havoc amongst all the local females (and aroused such distrust in their fathers), but since he had taken over the business he had seemed to become a relatively sober citizen. Well, if he had to break out occasionally I hoped he would choose to do something safe like mountaineering without ropes or lion taming and not get his kicks by baiting a notoriously jealous and vindictive Italian about his wife. Or having an affair with her.
‘If I were you I’d drive in a slightly more middle-aged fashion,’ I said after a glance at the speedometer. ‘You’re going to have a really exciting time explaining if the police stop you for speeding and discover half a million quid’s worth of stolen property in the boot.’
‘Your average traffic policeman wouldn’t know a Florentine bronze if it hit him on the head,’ said James with a laugh as he slowed down fractionally. ‘But point taken. You don’t realise how fast you’re going in this car.’
‘Try telling that to the driver of the car with the flashing blue light behind you.’
‘Blast,’ snapped James, foot moving down sharply on the brake, and looked in the mirror. ‘You cow, Laura!’ He kept to the speed limit after that even though it was another five miles before he’d speak to me again.
We agreed - well, we did eventually - that I would keep the faun at my flat with the rest of Cressida’s stuff until I could give it all back to her. James had got back on to his protect-the-weak-little-woman soap box again and was banging on about not wanting me to be involved in this any further. I had to point out I was already storing, with his agreement, three items almost certainly recorded with the police as being stolen and that adding another item that happened to be on the International Register of Stolen Art Treasures to the cache wasn’t going to make things much worse. The resulting argument did much to dispel the lingering traces of my former bad mood, especially after I won it. James isn’t a bad loser; he merely grumbled about pig-headed women who were too strong-minded for their own good, all the way from Catford to Dulwich which I reckoned was quite moderate, given the heat of our discussion.
‘Are you sure about keeping it with you?’ he asked anxiously as I picked up the carrier bag with the faun. We were standing on the pavement near his house, while we went back over a subject that I considered had been aired at least five times too often already. Barker had been dropped off at Harry’s. James had made a sterling effort to keep the car on the grounds that it would be useful to have a vehicle unknown to the local Philip Marlowes, but this ingenious attempt to hold on to a fast toy for a bit longer had been firm
ly overruled by his sapient elder brother. For once no other car pulled out behind us as James drove me to get my own rust bucket from where I’d left it that morning. We couldn’t decide if Stefano had called off the watchdogs or merely given them the night off. James looked disappointed; he’d been thinking of something clever to shake off a pursuer involving an underpass and a private road through an exclusive development of flats. It looked like he wasn’t going to get the chance.
‘There’s nothing to worry about,’ I said patiently. ‘Stefano’s hardly going to break into my flat to get back his own property, is he?’
‘Depends if he thinks you really are going to return it,’ said James stubbornly. ‘He may well be blackening you with his own brush.’
I rubbed my hands together to warm them up. If James didn’t stop dithering about I was going to be a candidate for frostbite. ‘I’ll tell you what,’ he said, brightening, ‘I’ll get Barker back off Harry. He can be your guard dog.’
‘No way. Firstly I wouldn’t dream of spoiling Barker’s trip to Harry’s friends. He likes swimming in that river. Secondly, he’d be no ruddy use at all as a guard dog unless he just happened to knock the intruder over in his haste to stand up and lick his face.’
‘But the result would still be the same.’
‘And then he’d give the intruder a nice reviving bath so he was back on his feet again in no time. But the last and most important point is that I am not giving house room to Barker and Horatio at the same time.’
James had already had the privilege of meeting Horatio and had left the encounter with a lot more respect for cats, or some of them. ‘I hadn’t thought of that. But I don’t want you to be on your own,’ he persisted, stuffing his hands into his pockets and rocking backwards on his heels. He had a very determined expression on his face, the sort that one of his Norman ancestors would have worn when he’d made up his mind to capture a castle or two and didn’t feel like listening to his wife when she said they’d got enough already. We were going to be here all night at this rate.
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