Stuart Piper preferred to be addressed only by his last name. With his two Dalmatians in tow, followed by Kilgore, he strode past a Gainsborough, a Watts, a Stubbs painting of a horse and through into the Grand Salon, where he stopped and produced an ancient key from his pocket. He unhooked a Gainsborough miniature and inserted the key into what looked like a hole in the panelled wall behind, and turned it. A section of the oak-panelling, which was actually a secret door, swung open to reveal the stunning, windowless room that was Piper’s private lair. Kilgore had only been admitted a couple of times in all the years he had worked for the boss.
It was a sumptuous cocoon. Also panelled in dark oak, it was furnished with deep, tasselled sofas and some fine antique pieces. It smelled of residual cigar smoke and furniture polish. A huge chandelier hung from an ornate ceiling rose, above a handsome coffee table. Silver, floor-standing candelabras, containing white, unlit candles, were positioned either side of a large fireplace, which looked freshly stacked with logs and kindling. Kilgore knew what the boss had once told him, that despite this room being windowless, there were ample ventilation ducts.
But the true wow-factor of this room was Piper’s collection of fête galante paintings, the jewels in the crown of all his art. Twelve of them hung in their gilded frames, each with a lamp above it, along the walls. But there were three that meant the most of all to him. Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s Spring, Autumn and Winter.
Despite being small, they had one entire wall to themselves, and were well spaced out, although there was an exceptionally large space between Spring and Autumn.
‘See that gap, Bobby?’ Piper looked at him coldly. Eyes the colour of high-tensile steel. Whatever genes Piper had inherited, he was missing the ones that carried humour. His charcoal-and-white-striped suit looked, as ever, like it had been freshly pressed this morning, and almost certainly would have been, by his butler, Wilson. Piper’s father, who had been a racecourse bookmaker and died of an embolism when Piper was eighteen, had given him one piece of advice on his deathbed. Always wear a suit and tie, son. People will always take you seriously in a suit and tie.
His old man should have added that people would also take you seriously if you lived in a house with twenty-two bedrooms, Piper thought, because he did. And people did. They took the mutant — as he referred to himself — with the reconstructed face, very seriously indeed. The right people.
From as far back in childhood as he could remember, Piper had been obsessed by two things — history and the paintings of the old masters. Whether it was when his mother, who had a love of art, had first taken him to the Royal Pavilion or to the Brighton Museum, or to the National Gallery and later to the Louvre in Paris and the Uffizi in Florence, paintings had brought history alive to him. For good or bad, history had changed with the invention of photography and film. Before that, he so often thought, we only had paintings to give us an idea what the past actually looked like, and that had been a life-long fascination — and had become the source of his vast wealth.
The idea had occurred to him during those long, dark months of reconstructive surgery. He’d had plenty of thinking time. While the surgeons had been shaping his face, Piper was shaping his life. Making plans, big plans. The big realization.
Forget his father’s hard work, long hours, out in all weather, reading betting odds from his tic-tac men, making lightning-fast calculations; it might have been a decent living but it never made the old guy rich. Nor for most people did robbery, drugs, all that shit, just pin money and long years inside for anyone getting it wrong. There was a different business, he realized, one that would combine his two loves, history and art.
A rogue’s business with rich pickings. Extremely rich ones. As he went on to prove over the next forty years. Tracking down old masters that had vanished during times of upheaval. Ones that had been looted or hidden or painted over to conceal their true identity during turbulent times — such as during revolutions or countless wars. The library in his house was full of documentation detailing the existence of the original works and their provenance. And their likely whereabouts today. Documentation that Robert Kilgore accumulated for him and studied assiduously.
Kilgore was a renowned — and revered — expert in old masters. He’d worked for many years as a consultant for some of the world’s foremost auction houses, including Sotheby’s in New York and Christie’s in London. He had become a go-to expert for art dealers and for insurance companies when they were trying to establish whether a painting was genuine or not. And they were utterly oblivious to the fact that he was a complete crook.
Robert Kilgore, with his impeccable appearance, his Southern gentlemanly charm and his encyclopaedic knowledge, was someone who everyone trusted. And he fully exploited that ever since he had first formed a working partnership with Piper.
Kilgore would take any painting he’d been entrusted with to a master forger in Brighton, Daniel Hegarty, rightly reputed to be the finest art forger in the world, retain the original and return the apparent original, an undetectable fake, to whichever client had entrusted it to him. He did this secure in the knowledge that the last thing any auction house or private collector or national gallery that subsequently bought the forgery would want to get out was that their picture wasn’t the original.
During the past decade, Kilgore’s reputation had become tarnished after a number of important works he’d once verified as originals had been exposed as fakes, through increasingly advanced forensic techniques. One by one, the prestigious houses had quietly dropped him. But Piper still saw his value. And knew that in the hands of Hegarty, a fake could be not only undetectable, but sometimes even more authentic to experts than the original.
Through the services of Robert Kilgore, as well as his own extensive network, over the past forty years Piper had found or had stolen for him — he didn’t care how ruthlessly — lost paintings in Argentina, Brazil, Spain, Austria, Germany, Sweden, Holland among other countries, as well as here in the UK. Many originals he’d put into auctions, but some he’d retained, either because he loved them or to speculate on their values rising. On the ones he had retained, he’d also engaged the services of Daniel Hegarty to make exquisite copies, which he’d passed off as originals, relying on the increasing global feeding frenzy for the old masters.
See that gap, Bobby?
How many times, Kilgore wondered, had Piper talked about that gap on his wall? It was the boss’s obsession. Like a child who had to have a particular toy or else it would throw a tantrum.
They remained in front of the three Fragonard paintings, with Piper still staring at the blank space, the gap. Autumn and Winter had both been acquired for a fraction of their real worth from a bent French lawyer handling an executor sale. He had asked Kilgore to identify them after they were found hanging in a modest house in Nantes in France. Spring he’d acquired through more ruthless means.
‘Bobby, do you know the difference between five million and fifty million pounds?’ Piper quizzed.