Joyce’s dog, Alan, is licking Ibrahim’s hand, a favourite hobby of his. The others see it as a bond between the two of them, without realizing that Ibrahim always keeps a Polo mint in his pocket, after discovering Alan has a fondness for them.
Donna opens another window on the laptop, and more photos appear. ‘The fraudsters use the same photos over and over again. There’s a Canadian pilot, there’s a lawyer from New York, there’s Larissa, and plenty of others like her. The romance-fraud gangs just pass them around. The look they like is beautiful but unthreatening.’
‘That’s the look I like,’ says Joyce.
Donna shows Ibrahim the pilot and Ibrahim could see the appeal. Very steadfast.
Mervyn is still unmoved, and protests that he has been speaking to Tatiana for five or six months. Many times a day.
‘Speaking?’
‘You know, writing, same thing,’ says Mervyn.
Ibrahim can imagine the lonely man filling his hours. No one calling, no one needing him.
Joyce then points out to Mervyn that he has also sent Tatiana five thousand pounds, and he blusters that of course he has, and that if someone you love needs a new car, say, or a visa, you help out. That this is simply manners.
‘You’ll all see,’ he adds. ‘She’s coming over on January the 19th, and, when she does, there will be plenty of humble pie eaten in Coopers Chase. Apologies will be expected.’
Everyone feels it is best to leave it there for now, and they gather up their things and start the walk back to Joyce’s with a quandary to consider. Elizabeth heads home to Stephen, so Joyce takes the opportunity to ask Donna about her Christmas with Bogdan.
‘And is he tattooed everywhere?’
‘Pretty much, yes,’ confirms Donna.
‘Even …?’
‘No, not there,’ says Donna. ‘Joyce, has anyone ever called you a pervert?’
‘Don’t be such a prude,’ says Joyce.
Ibrahim wonders what they should do about Mervyn. He was a difficult man, that much was certain, and he had come into their orbit only because Joyce couldn’t resist a deep voice and a sense of mystery. But he was a lonely man, and he was being taken advantage of. And, besides, it might be nice for the Thursday Murder Club to have a new project that moved at a gentler pace than usual. Something a bit less murdery would be quite a novelty.
6
Samantha Barnes is drinking a late-night gin and tonic and adding Picasso’s signature and an edition number to some pencil drawings of a dove. Samantha has signed Picasso’s name so often over the years that once, by accident, she signed it instead of her own on a mortgage-application form.
Her mind is wandering. This is the fun part of the job. This, and the money.
Forging a Picasso is a lot easier than you’d think. Not the big paintings, sure, that takes a skill Samantha doesn’t have, but the sketches, the lithographs, the stuff people will buy online without looking too closely – that’s a breeze.
There is money in real antiques, of course there is, but there is a lot more money in fake antiques. In fake furniture, in fake coins, in fake sketches.
Let’s say Samantha buys a mid-century Arne Vodder desk for £3,200, and sells it for £7,000; her profit is £3,800, very nice thank you.
However, if Samantha pays £500 to a man called Norman, who works out of an old dairy shed in Singleton, to knock up an exact replica of an Arne Vodder desk, and then sells it for £7,000, her profit is £6,500. You, as her Garth insists on saying, do the maths.
Equally, if Samantha spends her evening forging limited-edition Picasso lithographs, as she has been doing this evening, after coming home from Bridge Club, her cost of materials might be £200 or so, but, by the time she’s sold them all online to people from London who like the idea of having Picasso’s signature on their wall, and aren’t too fussy about the provenance, her profit will be about £16,000.
All of which goes to explain why Samantha Barnes no longer has a mortgage.
She starts taking photographs of the Picassos for her online store. She’ll advertise them for £2,500, and she’ll happily take £1,800.
Samantha used to be legit, she really did. Back when it was her and William. Their little shop in Petworth, their trips around the country building their stock, their loyal customers, the haggling, all good fun, all mildly profitable. But, as they got older, the shop grew too familiar, it closed in on them. What was once cosy and safe became constraining, like a childhood home. The trips around the country became chores, the same faces selling the same porcelain cats.
So they started to play little games, Samantha and William. Sam and Billy. Purely for fun, nothing else. One must get through the day, mustn’t one? And one particular game led her to exactly where she is now. And where is she now? Pretending to be Picasso while listening to the Shipping Forecast, in the finest house in West Sussex.
She often thinks back to how it all started.
William brought home an inkwell, a duff, dull runt among a haul of goods he’d picked up on Merseyside. They were about to throw it away when William suggested a bet. William bet that he could sell the worthless inkwell for £50 before Samantha could. Not to any of their regulars of course, and not to anyone who looked like they couldn’t afford it, but just as a bit of sport between the two of them. They shook on their bet and continued unpacking the real antiques.
The next day William had put the inkwell in its own locked glass display case, and with a tag saying, Ink stand, possibly Bohemian, possibly eighteenth century, please enquire about price. Serious offers only.
Was this naughty? Yes, a bit. Should they have done it? No, they shouldn’t have, but they were bored, and in love, and they were looking to entertain each other. It’s not one of the worst crimes you could commit in the antiques business. As Samantha knows well, having now committed them all.
Regulars would come in, take a look at the case and ask what was special about the ordinary-looking inkwell. Samantha and William would give a little shrug – ‘Probably nothing, just a hunch’ – but all parties soon forgot about it. Until three weeks later when a large Canadian man, who had parked in the disabled space outside the shop, bought it for £750. ‘He haggled me down from a thousand,’ William had confided.
Samantha signs another Picasso and lights a cigarette. Two things there, smoking and wide-scale forgery, that she didn’t do before Garth. But the cigarette smoke is actually rather good for ageing the paper.
They repeated the ‘inkwell’ trick a few times. A broken clock, a vintage-style plate, a one-armed teddy bear. The ‘antiques’ went to grateful homes, and the money, most of it anyway, to charity. They would eagerly rifle through job lots of antiques to pick out the new challenge: the next occupant of the glass display case with the lock. A secret game between the two of them.
And then William died.
They were on holiday, in Crete. He went out swimming after lunch, and was carried away by the tide. Samantha returned to England with the coffin in the hold, and was dragged away by a tide of her own.
She spent her next few years too sad to live but too scared to die, reeling through a haze of grief and madness, always quick with a cup of tea and a smile for her customers, accepting their well-meaning sympathies, playing bridge, tending the shop, reciting from memory the pleasantries and the platitudes, while hoping every day might be her last.
Then one morning, three years or so after William had died, the large Canadian man who had bought the inkwell came back into her shop, with a gun.
And everything changed again.