“Ah.” Greg began to look a lot more contented. “It's wrong, Amanda.”
“How? It's still there, it wasn't stolen.”
“You asked me in on this, remember?” he said gently. “I didn't think I'd have to convince you of all people about my gland all over again.”
She stared at him for a minute while instinct, common sense, and fear of failure went thrashing about together in her head. In the end she decided he was worth the gamble; she had asked him in because she wanted that unique angle he could provide. Once, she'd heard Eleanor, his wife, call his talent a foresight equal to everyone else's hindsight.
“How do you want to handle it?” she asked in a martyred tone.
He grinned his thanks. “Somebody who knows what they're about needs to take a look at that painting. We should concentrate on the artist, too…get Alison to mine some background on him.”
“Okay.” She called Mike Wilson over.
“An art expert?” he asked cynically.
“Crescent must have a ton of them,” Greg said. “Art fraud is pretty common. Insurance companies face it every day.”
“We have them, yes, but…”
“An expert has told us something is wrong with the painting, and this is my investigation,” she said, not too belligerently, but firmly enough to show him she wasn't going to compromise on this.
He held his hands up. “All right. But you only get three lives, not nine.”
Hugh Snell wasn't exactly the scholarly old man with fraying tweed jacket and half-moon glasses that Amanda was expecting. When he turned up at Church Vista Apartments he was wearing a leather Harley Davidson jacket, a diamond stud through his nose, and five rings in his left ear. His elbow-length Mohican plume was dyed bright violet.
He took one look at Tyler's collection and laughed out loud. “Shit. He spent money on these? What a prat.”
“Aren't they any good?” Amanda asked.
“My talent detector needle is simply quivering…on zero. One hates to speak ill of the dead, my dear, but if all he wanted was erotica, he should have torn the center pages out of a porno mag and framed them instead. This simply reeks of lower middle-class pretension. I know about him, I know nothing of the artists—they say nothing, they do nothing.”
Mike Wilson indicated the McCarthy. “What about this one?”
Hugh Snell made a show of pulling a gold-rimmed monocle from his pocket. He held it daintily to his eye and examined the painting. “Yeah, good forgery.”
Amanda smiled greedily. “Thanks, Greg.”
“No problem.”
“It's insured for twenty thousand,” Wilson said.
“Alas my dear chap, you've been royally shafted.”
“Are you sure?”
Hugh Snell gave him a pitying look. “Please don't flaunt your ignorance in public view, it's frightfully impolite. This isn't even a quality copy. Any halfway decent texture printer can churn out twenty of these per minute for you. Admittedly, it will fool the less well versed, but anyone in the trade would see it immediately.”
“Makes sense,” Amanda said. “The smallest and most valuable item, you could roll it up and carry it out in your pocket.”
“Certainly could,” Greg murmured.
“I owe you an apology, Mr. Mandel,” Mike Wilson said.
“Not a problem,” Greg assured him.
“Congratulations,” Wilson said to Amanda. “So it was a burglary which went wrong, then. Which means it was a professional who broke in. That explains why we've been banging our heads against the wall.”
“A pre-planned burglary, too, if he'd brought a forgery with him,” she said. “I bet Tyler would never have noticed it had gone.”
“Which means it was someone who knew Tyler had the McCarthy on his wall, and how much it was worth.”
Amanda went up to the McCarthy; and gave it a happy smile. “I'll get forensics back to take a closer look at it,” she said.
Three — Degrees of Guilt
Greg managed three hours of sleep before Christine decided it was time to begin another bright new day. His eyes blinked open as her cries began. Nothing in focus, mouth tasted foul, limbs too heavy to move. Classic symptoms—if only it were a hangover, that would mean he'd enjoyed some of last night.
“I'll get her,” Eleanor grumbled.
The duvet was tugged across him as she clambered out of bed and went over to the cot. “Isn't it my turn?” he asked as the timber of the crying changed.
“Oh, who cares?” Eleanor snapped back. “I just want her to shut up.”
He did the brave thing, and kept quiet. In his army days he'd gone without sleep for days at a time during some of the covert missions deep into enemy territory. Oh, to be back in those halcyon times. Christine could teach the Jihad Legion a thing or two about tenacity.
Eleanor started to change their daughter's nappy.
The doorbell rang. Greg knew he'd misheard that. When he squinted, the digital clock just made it into focus: 6:23. The bell went again. He and Eleanor stared at each other.
“Who the hell…?”
Whoever they were, they started knocking.
The hall tiles were cold against his feet as he hopped over them to the front door. He managed to pull his dressing gown shut just before he flicked the lock over and pulled the door open. A young man with broad bull shoulders had his arm raised to knock again.
“What the bloody hell do you want?” Greg yelled. “Do you know what time it is?” Christine was wailing plaintively behind him.
The young man's defiance melted away into mild confusion. “Eleanor lives here doesn't she?”
“Yes.” Greg noticed what the man was wearing, a pair of dark dungarees with a cross stitched on the front, blue wool shirt, sturdy black leather boots. It was his turn for a recoil; he hadn't seen a kibbutznik since the night he faced down Eleanor's father. “Who are you?” He ordered a tiny secretion from his gland, imagining a tiny mushroom squirt of white liquid scudding around his brain, neurohormones soaking into synaptic clefts. Actually, the physiological function was nothing like that; picturing it at all was a psychological quirk that most Mind-star Brigade veterans employed. There's no natural internal part of the human body which can be consciously activated; only muscles, and you can see that happen. So the mind copes by giving itself a picture of animation to explain the onrush of ethereal sensation. The result left him sensing an agitated haze of thoughts, entwined by grief. The man had forced himself to the Mandel farm against all kinds of deep-rooted doubts.
“I'm Andy,” he said it as though puzzled that Greg didn't already know…as though his name explained away everything. “Andy Broady. Eleanor's brother.”
Andy sat in a chair at the kitchen table, uncomfortable despite the cushion. He'd glanced around with a type of jealous surprise at the oak cupboards and tiled work surfaces. Greg followed his gaze with a mild embarrassment. The fittings were only a few years old, and Mrs. Owen came in to clean and help with Christine three times a week; but the room was still a mess. Baby bottles, washed and unwashed were all over the worktops, two linen baskets overflowing with clothes, packets of rusks, jars of puréed apple and other mushy, disgusting-tasting food were stacked in shop bags ready to be put away. Last night's plates and dishes were waiting on top of the dishwasher. Big, rainbow-colored fabric toys underfoot. Half the broad ash table was littered with the financial printouts which Eleanor had generated as she worked through summaries of the citrus grove crop and market sales.
Christine gurgled quietly in Andy's lap, and he looked down at his new niece with guilty surprise. His lips twitched with a tentative smile. He held her with the stiff terror of every bachelor, frightened that he'd drop her, or she'd start crying, or burp, or choke or…