False Impression (3 page)

Jamie Wentworth
spent nearly a year exiled from his native land taking what used to be known as
the Grand Tour. He visited Paris,

Amsterdam, Rome,
Florence, Venice and St Petersburg before returning to Wentworth Hall in
possession of a Raphael, Tintoretto,

Titian,
Rubens, Holbein and Van Dyck, not to mention an Italian wife.
However, it was
Charles, the fifth earl, who, for all the wrong reasons, trumped his ancestors.
Charlie was also a collector, not of paintings, but of mistresses. After an
energetic weekend spent in Paris – mainly on the racecourse at Longchamp, but
partly in a bedroom at the Crillon – his latest filly convinced him to purchase
from her doctor a painting by an unknown artist. Charlie Wentworth returned to
England having discarded his paramour but stuck with a painting that he
relegated to a guest bedroom, although many aficionados now consider
Self-portrait with Bandaged Ear to be among Van Gogh’s finest works.

Anna had already
warned Fenston to be wary when it came to purchasing a Van Gogh, because
attributions were often more dubious than Wall Street bankers – a simile Fenston
didn’t care for. She told him that there were several fakes hanging in private
collections, and even one or two in major museums, including the national
museum of Oslo. However, after Anna had studied the paperwork that accompanied
the Van Gogh Self-portrait, which included a reference to Charles Wentworth in
one of Dr Gachet’s letters, a receipt for eight hundred francs from the
original sale and a certificate of authentication from Louis van Tilborgh,
Curator of Paintings at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, she felt confident
enough to advise the chairman that the magnificent portrait was indeed by the
hand of the master.

For Van Gogh
addicts, Self-portrait with Bandaged Ear was the ultimate high. Although the
maestro painted thirty-five self taiyjn portraits during his lifetime, he
attempted only two after cutting off his left ear. What made this particular
work so desirable for any serious collector was that the other one was on
display at the Courtauld Institute in London. Anna was becoming more and more
anxious about just how far Fenston would be willing to go in order to possess
the only other example.

Anna spent a
pleasant ten days at Wentworth Hall cataloguing and valuing the family’s
collection. When she returned to New York, she advised the board – mainly made
up of Fenston’s cronies or politicians who were only too happy to accept a
handout – that should a sale ever prove necessary, the assets would more than
cover the bank’s loan of thirty million dollars.

Although Anna
had no interest in Victoria Wentworth’s reasons for needing such a large sum of
money, she often heard Victoria speak of the sadness of ‘dear Papa’s’ premature
death, the retirement of their trusted estates manager and the iniquity of 40
per cent death duties during her stay at Wentworth Hall. ‘If only Arabella had
been born a few moments earlier...’ was one of Victoria’s favourite mantras.

Once she was
back in New York, Anna could recall every painting and sculpture in Victoria’s
collection without having to refer to any paperwork. The one gift that set her
apart from her contemporaries at Penn, and her colleagues at Sotheby’s, was a
photographic memory. Once Anna had seen a painting, she would never forget the
image, its provenance or its location. Every Sunday she would idly put her
skill to the test, by visiting a new gallery, a room at the Met, or simply
studying the latest catalogue raisonne\

On returning to
her apartment, she would write down the name of every painting she had seen,
before checking it against the different catalogues. Since leaving university,
Anna had added the Louvre, the Prado and the Uffizi, as well as the National
Gallery of Washington, the Phillips Collection and the Getty Museum, to her
memory bank. Thirty-seven private collections and countless catalogues were
also stored in the database of her brain, an asset Fenston had proved willing
to pay over the odds for.

Anna’s
responsibility did not go beyond valuing the collections of potential clients
and then submitting written reports for the board’s consideration. She never
became involved in the drawing up of any contract. That was exclusively in the
hands of the bank’s in-house lawyer, Karl Leapman. However, Victoria did let
slip on one occasion that the bank was charging her 16 per cent compound
interest. Anna had quickly become aware that debt, naivety and a lack of any
financial expertise were the ingredients on which Fenston Finance thrived. This
was a bank that seemed to relish its customers’ inability to repay their debts.

Anna lengthened
her stride as she passed by the carousel. She checked her watch – off twelve
seconds. She frowned, but at least no one had overtaken her. Her thoughts
returned to the Went worth collection, and the recommendation she would be
making to Fenston that morning. Anna had decided she would have to resign if
the chairman felt unable to accept her advice, despite the fact that she had
worked for the company for less than a year and was painfully aware that she
still couldn’t hope to get a job at Sotheby’s or Christie’s.

During the past
year, she had learnt to live with Fenston’s vanity, and even tolerate the
occasional outburst when he didn’t get his own way, but she could not condone
misleading a client, especially one as naive as Victoria Wentworth. Leaving
Fenston Finance after such a short time might not look good on her resume”, but
an ongoing fraud investigation would look a lot worse.

‘
When will we
find out if she’s dead?’ asked Leapman, as he sipped his coffee.

‘I’m expecting
confirmation this morning,’ Fenston replied.

‘Good, because
I’ll need to be in touch with her lawyer to remind him -’ he paused – ‘that in
the case of a suspicious death -’ he paused a second time – ‘any settlement
reverts to the jurisdiction of the New York State Bar.’

‘Strange that
none of them ever query that clause in the contract,’ said Fenston, buttering
another muffin.

Why should
they?’ asked Leapman. ‘After all, they have no way of knowing that they’re
about to die.’

‘And is there
any reason for the police to become suspicious about our involvement?’

‘No,’ replied
Leapman. ‘You’ve never met Victoria Wentworth, you didn’t sign the original
contract, and you haven’t even seen the painting.’

‘No one has
outside the Wentworth family and Petrescu,’

Fenston reminded
him. ‘But what I still need to know is how much time before I can safely...’

‘Hard to say,
but it could be years before the police are willing to admit they don’t even
have a suspect, especially in such a high profile case.’

‘A couple of
years will be quite enough,’ said Fenston. ‘By then, the interest on the loan
will be more than enough to ensure that I can hold onto the Van Gogh and sell
off the rest of the collection without losing any of my original investment.’

Then it’s a good
thing that I read Petrescu’s report when I did,’ said Leapman, ‘because if
she’d gone along with Petrescu’s recommendation, there would have been nothing
we could do about it.’

‘Agreed,’ said
Fenston, ‘but now we have to find some way of losing Petrescu.’

A thin smile
appeared on Leapman’s lips. That’s easy enough,’ he said, ‘we play on her one
weakness.’

‘And that is?’
asked Fenston.

‘Her
honesty.’

Arabella sat
alone in the drawing room, unable to take in what was happening all around her.
A cup of Earl Grey tea on the table beside her had gone cold, but she hadn’t
noticed. The loudest noise in the room was the tick of the clock on the
mantelpiece.

Time had stopped
for Arabella.

Several police
cars and an ambulance were parked on the gravel outside. People going about
their business, dressed in uniforms, white coats, dark suits and even face
masks, came and went without bothering her.

There was a
gentle tap on the door. Arabella looked up to see an old friend standing in the
doorway. The chief superintendent removed a peaked cap covered in silver braid
as he entered the room. Arabella rose from the sofa, her face ashen, her eyes
red from crying. The tall man bent down and kissed her gently on both cheeks,
and then waited for her to sit back down before he took his place in the leather
wing chair opposite her. Stephen Renton offered his condolences, which were
genuine; he’d known Victoria for many years.

Arabella thanked
him, sat up straight and asked quietly, “
Who
could
have done such a terrible thing, especially to someone as innocent as
Victoria?’

There doesn’t
seem to be a simple or logical answer to that question,’ the chief
superintendent replied. ‘And it doesn’t help that it was several hours before
her body was discovered, allowing the assailant more than enough time to get clean
away.’ He paused.

‘Do you feel up
to answering some questions, my dear?’

Arabella gave a
nod. ‘I’ll do anything I can to help you track down the assailant.’ She
repeated the word with venom.

‘Normally, the
first question I would ask in any murder enquiry is do you know if your sister
had any enemies, but I confess that knowing her as I did that doesn’t seem
possible. However, I must ask if you were aware of any problems Victoria might
have been facing, because -’ he hesitated – ‘there have been rumours in the
village for some time that, following your father’s death, your sister was left
with considerable debts.’

‘I don’t know,
is the truth,’ Arabella admitted. ‘After I married Angus, we only came down
from Scotland for a couple of weeks in the summer, and every other Christmas.
It wasn’t until my husband died that I returned to live in Surrey’ – the chief
superintendent nodded, but didn’t interrupt – ‘and heard the same rumours.
Local gossips were even letting it be known that some of the furniture in my
shop had come from the estate, in order that Victoria could still pay the
staff.’

‘And was there
any truth in those rumours
?5
asked Stephen.

‘None at all,’
replied Arabella. “When Angus died and I sold our farm in Perthshire, there was
more than enough to allow me to return to Wentworth, open my little shop and
turn a life-long hobby into a worthwhile enterprise. But I did ask my sister on
several occasions if the rumours of Father’s financial position were true.
Victoria denied there was any problem, always claiming that everything was
under control. But then she adored Father, and in her eyes he could do no
wrong.’

‘Can you think
of anything that might give some clue as to why Arabella rose from the sofa
and, without explanation, walked across to a writing desk on the far side of
the
room.
She picked up the blood-spattered letter
that she had found on her sister’s table, walked back and handed it across to
him.

Stephen read the
unfinished missive twice before asking, ‘Do you have any idea what Victoria could
have meant by “a solution has been found”?’

‘No,’ admitted
Arabella, ‘but it’s possible that I’ll be able to answer that question once
I’ve had a word with Arnold Simpson.’

That doesn’t
fill me with confidence,’ said Stephen.

Arabella noted
his comment, but didn’t respond. She knew that the chief superintendent’s
natural instinct was to mistrust all solicitors, who appeared unable to
disguise a belief that they were superior to any police officer.

The chief
superintendent rose from his place, walked across and sat next to Arabella. He
took her hand. ‘Call me whenever you want
to,’ he said
gently, ‘and
try not to keep too many secrets from me, Arabella, because
I’ll need to know everything, and I mean everything, if we’re to find who
murdered your sister.’

Arabella didn’t
reply.

‘Damn,’ muttered
Anna to herself when an athletic, dark-haired man jogged casually past her,
just as he’d done several times during the last few weeks. He didn’t glance
back – serious runners never did. Anna knew that it would be pointless to try
and keep up with him, as she would be ‘legless’ within a hundred yards. She had
once caught a sideways glimpse of the mystery man, but he then strode away and
all she had seen was the back of his emerald green T-shirt as he continued
towards Strawberry Fields. Anna tried to put him out of her mind and focus once
again on her meeting with Fenston.

Anna had already
sent a copy of her report to the chairman’s office, recommending that the bank
sell the self-portrait as quickly as possible. She knew a collector in Tokyo
who was obsessed with Van Gogh and still had the yen to prove it. And with this
particular painting there was another weakness she would be able to play on,
which she had highlighted in her report. Van Gogh had always admired Japanese
art, and on the wall behind the self-portrait he had reproduced a print of
Geishas in a Landscape, which Anna felt would make the painting even more
irresistible to Takashi Nakamura.

Nakamura was
chairman of the largest steel company in Japan, but lately he’d been spending
more and more time building up his art collection, which he’d let it be known
was to form part of a foundation that would eventually be left to the nation.
Anna also considered it an advantage that Nakamura was an intensely secretive
individual, who guarded the details of his private collection with typical
Japanese inscrutability. Such a sale would allow Victoria Wentworth to save
face – something the Japanese fully understood. Anna had once acquired a Degas
for Nakamura, Dancing Class with Mme Minette, which the seller had wished to
dispose of privately, a service the great auction houses offer to those who
want to avoid the prying eyes of journalists who hang around the sale rooms.
She was confident that Nakamura would offer at least sixty million dollars for
the rare Dutch masterpiece.