Peter James
Picture You Dead
To Anthony Forbes Watson – an inspirational leader and friend.
Contents
1
2
100
GLOSSARY
CHART OF POLICE RANKS
1
Thursday, 15 October 2015
Charlie Porteous was fond of quoting Auden’s poem, about the hare that was happy in the morning because it was unable to read the hunter’s waking thoughts. But as he left home on this drizzling autumnal morning, he had no way of knowing that today, he was that hare. And that he wouldn’t be making it back to his bed tonight. Or ever.
To all who knew him, and indeed to any casual stranger who happened to glance at him, the good-humoured sixty-two-year-old, who would always stop to drop a banknote on a busker’s mat, appeared to be a man without a care in the world. With his confident gait, well-lunched face and stout frame, in his Savile Row three-piece chalk-striped suit, handmade shirt and salmon-pink-and-green-striped Garrick Club tie, he exuded the very image of old money and all the confidence that came with it.
But the much-liked – despite his mercurial temper – proprietor of the eponymously named Porteous Fine Arts Gallery was, right now, properly, badly and seriously in need of a big deal. Preferably cash. A lot of the stuff. The private bank which had once considered him an undoubted client, and for years had fawned over him, was now threatening foreclosure on a loan, on an amount which would bring his entire comfortable edifice crashing down.
But in his position he could not let his predicament show either to his staff or to any of his clientele in the rarefied circle in which he appeared the very model of respectability and trustworthiness. Not to his recently retired wife, Susan, who revelled in her role as a major charitable benefactor in their home city, and not to his son, Oliver, who had spent the past decade working in the fine arts department of Sotheby’s New York, to gain experience before joining him, and eventually taking the reins, allowing Porteous, like his own father before him, to take life easier and enjoy a very comfortable dotage.
He felt particularly upset about Oliver, who knew nothing of his problems yet, that he had let him down badly. Let all his family and staff down. For months now he’d had constant sleepless nights and had ended up taking antidepressants.
But finally it looked like Lady Luck had crapped on his head. Actually, in his right eye to be precise. It had happened as he’d looked up at the bird, a black crow, a few weeks ago. He remembered as a kid, when a magpie had dumped its load on his head, his deeply superstitious mother had told him it would bring him luck, and she had been right – that month he’d won £25 on his Premium Bonds. Result!
Grasping at straws, he wondered, was his luck about to turn now? Then, amazingly, it seemed it was.
2
Thursday, 15 October 2015
Charlie Porteous did not tolerate fools gladly and his charming smile could turn into a withering glare at the flick of a switch. He had long been known as a man not to mess with but whose word was his bond, and his eye for a painting had long been the envy of many of his rival art dealers. That eye had served him well during the eight years he’d been on the team of experts, many years back now, on the Antiques Roadshow, for the peanuts the BBC then paid its experts – £100 per episode and a second-class rail ticket. But, being on the programme, he enjoyed the publicity and kudos it gave him – as well as the enhancement of his art gallery’s reputation.
Eventually the relationship had soured, the BBC producer deciding his arrogance towards people who turned up with what Porteous considered to be rubbish was not in the spirit of the show. Two things had eventually led to his firing.
The first was when he’d reduced an elderly woman to tears when he’d harshly pointed out the supposed Turner seascape she’d brought him, which had been in her family for years, was nothing more than a painted-over print, cuttingly telling her that a child painting by numbers could have done a more convincing job. And the second when, in a rare error of judgement, he’d declared a sixteenth-century Abel Grimmer landscape as genuine and worth conservatively £200,000 – and it had subsequently turned out to be a fake. Concerned for his reputation, he’d stubbornly refused to back down and admit his error.
A fastidious man, with a love for beautiful things in both his private and work lives, Charlie Porteous was a creature of habit that you could set the proverbial watch by – in his case a £45,000 Rolex Submariner.
Every weekday he left his gated mansion, in Brighton and Hove’s Tongdean Avenue, on the dot of 6.35 a.m., and drove his Bentley to Brighton station car park, catching the fast train to London’s Victoria station. From there his trusty London driver, Meehat El Hadidy, would whisk him in his Mercedes S-Class to his gallery in Duke Street, arriving at 8.20 a.m., well before his five members of staff.
Four evenings a week Porteous would travel home on the train from London Victoria, and he would walk through his front door at 7.15 p.m. precisely. But on Thursdays, he would dine at his members’ club, either with a client or with a chum from the art world, before taking a late train back. Tonight, however, he had spent a delightful evening socializing with his god-daughter at an Italian restaurant close to his gallery.
His father had given him a piece of advice he now bitterly wished he had heeded. It was to only invest in what he knew. But just over two years ago, a wealthy Australian property developer client, Kerry Dundas, who had bought paintings from him to the value of several millions over the past decade, had offered him a deal that, in the words of The Godfather, was an offer he could not refuse.
A rare chance to partner the man in buying an entire forty-two-storey block of flats in north London, Reynolds Heights, which was up for a bargain price for a quick sale, due to the current owner being overstretched. And named after a famous artist, it had to be a good omen, Porteous had thought.
For a £10 million investment each, they could turn a profit of, conservatively, £5 million within a year. His judgement had been clouded by the fact that the lease on the building adjoining his gallery was coming up for sale. If he could buy it, he would double the size of his gallery, leaving his son the legacy of being the largest dealer in their field in the country.
The bank had been happy to lend Porteous his share of the money, secured against his rock-solid assets, on a two-year term loan. Then, three months later, when they were in the process of making a sale every bit as profitable as Kerry Dundas had forecast, he was suddenly unable to contact the man.
The next thing he knew, after finally engaging his solicitors, was that Dundas was in prison in Dubai, under arrest for fraud, embezzlement and forgery.
Porteous had to face that he’d been duped and lost every penny of his investment. The bank, while initially sympathetic to his plight was, as he ruefully confided to a friend, just like the old joke: that bankers were people who lent you an umbrella when it was sunny and wanted it back when it was raining.
But tonight, for the first time in many sleepless months, he had an optimistic spring in his step as he alighted at Brighton station shortly after midnight, and he had good reason.