by Nina Jon
“But it was called the Beech Hill Art Gallery.”
“It may have been, but like I said, the Beech Hill Art Gallery’s owners sold up months ago. After we put in for permission to change the building’s use so I could open my shop, some man rang my dad up. He’d seen the notices about the change of use application and realising dad’d bought the gallery and was going to turn it into a shop, he asked if he could sublet the place for a couple of months while it was still technically an art gallery. He said he wanted to display his daughter’s artwork to the world. She’s a recent graduate from some art school apparently. She sounds a bit spoilt to me. Anyway my dad couldn’t see the harm in it, so he said okay. Got him a bit of money. It must have been the girl’s exhibition you went to. Anyway, they’ve gone and I am here.” The girl swept her arms around in a wide flamboyant movement.
Tell me about it, Jane thought grimly.
“Did this man tell your dad his name and address, by any chance?” Jane asked, although, even as she asked the question, she didn’t know why she’d bothered herself. She knew damn well that whatever name and address Graham Burslem had given to this girl’s father, it would obviously be as false as everything he’d told her. The only genuine information Graham Burslem had given Jane, she knew, were his bank account details.
“I think it may have been Ken something. Ken Black maybe. I don’t really know. I could find out from my dad if you want?” the girl said helpfully.
“No, that will not be necessary, dear,” Jane said wearily.
She purchased some cards and a candle as a mark of her gratitude to the girl for her troubles. She paused by the door and said, “Is your father’s name Lionel Scott, by any chance?”
“It is, yeah. Do know him?”
II
Except for the envelopes lying scattered on the gallery’s floor, nothing in the gallery appeared to have altered since the last time Jane peered through its windows. The same pictures hung on its walls, the same newspaper clipping was displayed in its window, and the same notice declared the gallery closed for the winter. Even the oil painting Graham Burslem had given her as a thank you present was mysteriously back on the wall.
From the gallery, she drove to Graham Burslem’s house. It didn’t look as though anyone was at home. There weren’t any cars parked in the drive. She knocked at the front door and waited, but no one answered it. She peered through the windows, but the house was in darkness. She called Graham Burslem’s home telephone number. She heard the telephone ringing inside the house, but her call was picked up by the answer phone. She didn’t bother leaving another message.
She walked around to the back of the house and tried the back door, but it too was locked. She walked to the end of the garden and looked up, hoping to see movement inside, but saw none. The house looked as though it was deserted. She could only suppose ‘Jenny Burslem’ an accomplice to this elaborate con, along with ‘Lionel Scott’.
An upper storey window of a neighbouring house opened and a woman appeared.
“Who are you?” the neighbour demanded. Her tone was sharp. “What are you doing in the Burslem’s back garden?”
“I’m terribly sorry. I hope I didn’t disturb you. I was trying to see if anyone was in. I’ve travelled some way to buy some art from the gallery, but it’s closed,” Jane said. “Does Graham Burslem live here? I thought he did, but there doesn’t seem to be anyone here either. I’ll slip a note through the letterbox, if this is the right address.”
The neighbour visibly mellowed. “It’s the right address alright,” she said. “I’m sorry if I was a bit abrupt, but they had a break-in a while ago. They didn’t get much – a couple of bottles of wine and some cash is all – but we’ve all been on our guard since.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. Might you know when Graham is expected home? Is it worth my while waiting?”
The neighbour hesitated before answering. “I think your note would be a better idea. Graham’s not a well man that he’s not. I don’t want to say too much, least I speak out of turn. You’d better speak to a member of the family. They’ll be home soon, right enough. I expect they’re visiting him in the hospital at the moment.”
Jane forced herself to remain composed. “My goodness. I had no idea. Has he been unwell for very long?”
“Quite long enough, I’m afraid. Like I say, I don’t want to say too much.”
“Of course you don’t. I quite understand. I think I’ll leave it for the time being. I’m sorry to have disturbed you.”
Jane was almost in a trance when she got back to her car. The man who sold her that sketches must have learnt, somehow or other, of Graham Burslem’s illness and set about taking over his identity. For that he needed a passport and so he’d broken into the Burslem’s home. He must have taken the wine and cash as a clever subterfuge. She had to admit it was ingenious. If only Mrs Burslem had looked more thoroughly when she’d discovered the break-in, she might have noticed a bill missing, as well as her husband’s passport and one of his ties. But she hadn’t, not with her husband seriously ill in hospital. Either the sketch-pad was stolen (how he’d come across the sketches and taken them without anybody noticing, was anyone’s guess) or most likely, they were a set of forgeries on a pad once handled by Jasper August.
Jane closed her eyes. The passport and bill were more than enough for the imposter to open a bank account in Graham Burslem’s name. The same bank account she’d just sent James Haley’s money to. The phone rang. To her surprise she saw Graham Burslem’s home number displayed. She answered it.
“Hello,” she said hesitantly.
To her surprise, she heard Jenny Burslem’s distinctive voice at the end of the line.
“I believe you left a message for Graham Burslem. I’m afraid Graham isn’t very well at the moment. Is there anything I can help you with? I’m his sister-in-law, Jenny.”
Did she say sister-in-law, Jane thought.
“I’ve just heard that poor Graham’s been unwell,” Jane said. “I’m an occasional customer to the gallery. I just wanted to speak to his wife to enquire after his health, and ask her to pass my best wishes on to her husband.”
“Well, Graham isn’t actually married,” Jenny Burslem said, “but I can assure you the doctors are doing everything they can for him and we’re here to look after him when he gets home. Can I tell him who’s called?”
“No it’s all right. I’ll send a card,” Jane said.
She threw her phone on to the passenger seat and pressed her forehead against the steering wheel.
‘Even my wife, Jenny, doesn’t know how bad things are,’ he’d said. Nice touch ‘Graham’ she thought.
She couldn’t worry about the why’s and the wherefore’s now. She must get hold of James Haley without delay. From her car, she telephoned the Diamond Gallery in London. Its answer phone stated the gallery closed, and asked the caller to leave their name, telephone number, and any message, if they wished their call to be returned.
“Mr Haley, this is Jane Hetherington. I’m the lady who sold you the sketches of Angela. Mr Haley, there is no easy way to tell you this, but I believe, despite the fact that other parties have authenticated them, that the sketches I sold you are stolen or forged. In fact I’m certain of it. I’m afraid we have both been duped by a very clever and cunning man. I think it would be best if we met. There isn’t time for me to come down to London today, and therefore I will come to your gallery first thing tomorrow. If you get this message before then, please do call me.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
The Oldest Trick in the Book
Although it was already passed nine o’clock on a weekday morning when Jane arrived at the Diamond Art Gallery, the gallery still hadn’t opened. She peered through the window but couldn’t see anyone around. She knocked a few times on the front door. No one answered it. She tried it, but it was locked. She went to the empty rear car park, to try her luck at the back, but was just as unsuccessful. She looked up at the roof gard
en and saw a deck chair.
“Mr Haley, James,” she called out, as loudly as she could. “It’s Jane Hetherington. I need to talk to you.
From the car park, she saw him turn to look down. She wasn’t certain whether or not he’d seen her. He didn’t acknowledge her, but she watched him stand up and leave the roof garden. She stayed where she was. A few minutes later she heard the back door unlock, then nothing. She walked over to the door and tried it. This time it opened. She let herself in and found herself in the gallery’s private quarters. This too, lay in darkness. There wasn’t any sign of James Haley. Jane climbed up the stairs towards a closed door. At the top of the stairs, she pushed the door open and stepped outside onto the roof garden.
From his deckchair, James Haley stared at a tablet computer, propped up on the table. Jane pulled up a garden chair and sat down next to him. He nervously played with a postcard, turning it over and over in his hands. He seemed to be watching a film.
“I’m so sorry, James,” Jane said. “Everything I did, I believed to be for the best. A man masquerading as a local art dealer called Graham Burslem asked me to sell the sketches on his behalf, persuading me of his very good reasons for being unable sell them himself. Although I did not know it, the actual art dealer was, and still is, seriously ill in hospital. The man who duped us both, knew this somehow and used it to perpetrate a scam.”
James listened patiently, as Jane explained her part in the deceit. “He made himself look like the real thing. He completely took over his identity. He was extremely clever. Really very convincing. He even broke into the poor man’s home and stole his passport, and other bits, including some mail, to make me believe him. He must have taken the spare keys to his gallery. I met him there. He even pretended to disable the alarm. I can only presume he’d either found out the code somehow or other, or had already disabled the alarm before I got there. I think he even went as far as impersonating a postman. He must have had at least one accomplice because I met him in the course of my investigations and he bore false witness.
“The fraudster had an answer for everything, and no doubt if I had suspected anything, or if I, or anyone else, had realised he wasn’t who he said he was, he would have immediately disappeared.” James Haley said nothing. “I heard an interview with Angela, and as soon as I did, I realised that despite what Graham Burslem, or whatever his real name is, told me, he couldn’t have met the subject of the sketches. The woman I heard speak on the radio bore no resemblance to the woman he’d described to me. I knew instantly he had never met Angela. That part of his story was one lie too many. If he hadn’t met Angela, then he could not have been one of Jasper August’s flat mates, and the sketches therefore could not be authentic.”
James Haley began to laugh ruefully. Jane didn’t know what to say. James Haley picked up a notepad from the floor by his chair. He opened it at a sketch he’d drawn there.
“Is this the man who told you his name was Graham Burslem?” he asked. “I sketched it from memory.”
She studied the picture. This wasn’t the man she met, or was it? The man in the sketch had very little hair whereas ‘her man’ as she called him, had a mass of thick curly hair. Her man had a beard and a moustache, whereas this man was clean-shaven. The eyebrows were different, the nose of her man was more bulbous, and he was older, but then again, he had been disguised as another. The more she studied the picture, the more she realised it was the same man.
“Good Lord! You know him? Is this an insurance scam?” she demanded, ready to jump to her feet and go straight to the police.
“Oh that it were,” he said. “I’m going to tell you something Jane. I’ve known this was a scam since I found this lying on my doormat,” he said of the postcard he’d been fingering since she arrived at the gallery. “Now I’m going to tell you a story, which began many moons ago, and ended with this postcard being sent to me by the man who conned us.”
She took it from him. The front of the postcard featured a painting of a Dutch couple from the nineteenth-century, walking hand-in-hand away from the artist, along a seashore on a blustery day, just as the sun was setting.
Jane turned the card over and read the message written on the back: ‘Revenge is a dish best served cold!’
“Oh? It wasn’t all about money, then?”
“It wasn’t about money at all.”
“I wouldn’t mind a glass of that whisky you kindly offered me the last time I was here,” she said.
James Haley returned with a bottle of whisky and two glasses. He poured both himself and Jane a measure. Jane sipped her drink.
“I’ll admit to an errant youth,” he began. “When I was a young man, the same age that Jasper August was when he painted Angela, I too was an artist, except that I was a counterfeiter. I’d done the artist struggling to choose between putting food in his belly or paint on his brush, just like Jasper August, only, unlike Jasper, I didn’t have a doting girlfriend to support me, nor did I ever really have many original ideas, none which were very commercial anyway. I did however have a natural talent for copying works of art, which I quickly developed. To begin with, I painted things like Van Gogh’s Sunflowers or Whistler’s mother, things that couldn’t possibly be authentic, and sold them from railway arches. No one who bought them could have possibly thought they were the real thing and the most I ever got for them was a tenner. You see, that’s commerce. But where deception is involved, commerce turns into fraud. For an artist of my ability, there was more money in fraud than commerce. It didn’t take me long to learn this, and to move from innocent reproduction into counterfeiting. I concentrated on the lesser-known artists, whose popularity was the reserve of the rarefied world of art connoisseurs. You wouldn’t believe how many people fell for it.
“One day, about thirty years ago, I walked into a gallery, with one of my fakes concealed in a box. If you want to sell a counterfeit, you don’t walk into a gallery with a dozen counterfeits, which, if they were authentic, would be worth millions. You walk into a gallery with one such piece, concealed in a box of rubbish. The type of tatty art that one old man could accumulate over a lifetime, say. Then you wait for someone to spot it, whilst desperately trying to pretend they haven’t.
“This is where the man you know as Graham Burslem comes into it. His had been the third gallery I’d walked into that day, but none of the others had taken the bait. But he did. What our mutual friend thought he’d discovered, all those years ago, hidden in a pile of worthless tat, was the painting on this postcard.” He waved the postcard in the air. “A Dutch landscape allegedly painted by an artist from the last century, called Leiff Uittenbogaard. Uittenbogaard’s work was, and still is, in great demand. Of course it wasn’t. It was a forgery of a picture catalogued as an Uittenbogaard but whose whereabouts was then unknown. I’d prepared a story. I pretended it, and the other paintings in the box, were my late uncle’s art collection. I was charged with sorting out his estate and had no idea whether any of the paintings had any value, and maybe the owner of the gallery would be able to tell me? A story not unlike the one you told me, when you walked into my art gallery a few weeks ago,” he pointed out. “The big difference being, whereas I gave you the true value of your painting had it been authentic, the man you know as Graham Burslem, was as greedy and dishonest as the man I was then. After looking through the paintings in the box, he told me that most of my uncle’s art collection was frankly rubbish, but the Dutch painting was a nice picture. He explained that there was a certain amount of interest for such works from the discerning middle classes who liked pictures of that type for their dining rooms. He asked if I knew how my late uncle came to possess it. I said I thought my uncle had bought it from an unknown art gallery in Delft, while he was still a young man. As I spoke, I could tell from the look in his eyes that he knew the real value of what I was holding in my hands, or at least he thought he did. He offered me seven hundred pounds there and then, telling me he could sell it on for about one thousand pounds to some
lady he knew was interested in that kind of thing. An original Leiff Uittenbogaard would have been worth the equivalent of seven thousand pounds to nine thousand pounds back then, you understand. He had to make me a half-way decent offer or I might have gone somewhere else, and he didn’t want to lose it. I told him I might sell it at auction. He told me that was my choice, but that I might only sell the whole box for a couple of hundred or less, if it was a quiet day. Tell you what, he said, I’ll give you a thousand for the five pictures in a box. Here and now, in cash, he said. Naturally I agreed. You drive a hard bargain, he said – the same words I used to you. He was true to his word and paid me a thousand pounds in cash, on the spot. I made a discreet exit. Not just from the shop, but from the area. I’d painted the whole lot for less than a fiver. I don’t know how long it took him to find out, but when he did, it must have wiped that smug little look of his face.”
“He went to all that trouble because you defrauded him a thousand pounds,” Jane said.
“It was nearly thirty years ago,” James said, “and a thousand pounds was a hell of a lot of money back then. I guess he’s borne a grudge all that time, but he hasn’t been able to find me before now.”
“How did he? Did he chance upon you, or had he spent the last thirty years searching for you, do you think?” Jane asked.
“Probably a bit of both,” James replied. “Almost a year ago, he walked in here, off the street. Whether he’d come across me online and come looking, or literally found me entirely by chance, I’ll never know. I recognized him immediately. Being an artist, I never forget a face. He was so blasé the whole time he was here, that I didn’t realise he’d also recognized me. But he had. He’d waited a long time to get his own back on me, and get back he did. Old August dying probably gave him the idea. He must have started hatching the plot the minute he walked out of here. I can only flatter myself that my fraud annoyed him so much that he went to so much trouble.”