Killing the Emperors (10 page)
The door crashed open and revealed a skinny, long-haired man in a dinner jacket. ‘Jason,’ cried Fortune and rushed over to him.
‘Oh, Bubbles!’ cried Pringle. ‘I’ve had a most ghastly time and they won’t give me anything to eat, however I plead. Is there food here?’
He looked around him and screamed. ‘Has Damien kidnapped us? Are we an installation?’
‘We don’t know.’
Pringle looked over at the baroness, who was regarding him with interest. ‘Who’s she?’
‘That bigoted woman who made that dreadful speech in the Lords calling us and Nick Serota and Charles Saatchi and lots of others terrible names.’
‘My name is Jack Troutbeck,’ said the baroness. ‘And you are?’
‘Jason Pringle. I’m an art dealer.’
‘Indeed you are, Mr. Pringle. Your fame has preceded you.’
‘Is there any food?’
‘I’m afraid not. But we should remember that hunger strikers have managed to stay alive for more than sixty days, so it’s a bit early to make a fuss.’
Fortune and Pringle shot her glances of pure hatred. ‘There is champagne, Mr. Pringle. I suggest you have a drink. I further suggest that—although you can be assured that I dislike you both just as much as I’m sure you do me—since we’re incarcerated together for God knows how long it might be an idea to try to get on if it’s at all possible.’
She rose, filled a glass, and handed it to Pringle with exaggerated courtesy. ‘Thank you,’ he muttered.
However, leaving her with just Joleen for company, Fortune and Pringle withdrew to the sofa furthest away and began what the baroness described contemptuously to herself as canoodling and caterwauling. After a few minutes, there was another assault on the door and a tall, skinny woman in jeans and a big woolly navy sweater appeared. The baroness looked at her in horror. Fortune and Pringle jumped up and rushed over and embraced her. ‘Darling,’ they cried in unison.
‘Oh, Henry and Jason, how wonderful to see you,’ said Hortense Wilde, with a sob. ‘Is there anything to eat? What’s going on here?’
‘It seems to be a remake of
Huis Clos
,’ said the baroness. ‘Would you care for a drink?’
‘I thought there couldn’t be two Ellis Pooleys,’ said the elegant man who got up from behind his desk and came forward, holding out his hand.
Pooley shook it. ‘And I thought there were unlikely to be two Adam Eichbergs.’
‘Do sit down.’ Eichberg waved at an upright leather armchair. ‘Coffee?’
‘Please.’
While Eichberg was talking to his secretary, Pooley assessed the furniture and the pictures and concluded that his old classmate was doing very well indeed. Eichberg put down the phone, sat in a matching chair, and surveyed Pooley. ‘You don’t look much different from when we were at school, Ellis. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that you ended up in the police. I seem to remember that you were mad keen on Sherlock Holmes.’
‘And I seem to recollect you preferring art to anything, Adam. I remember those Renaissance reproductions in your study.’
Eichberg laughed. ‘So in our case, the boys really were the fathers of the men.’
‘Though I’d have expected you to go the art historian route rather than the commercial.’
‘Couldn’t have done it in the present climate, Ellis. I don’t fit in with the orthodoxy of the times. As a curator it would have killed me to buy and extol dross. As an auctioneer, I don’t care.
‘Anyway, you didn’t come here to visit an old school acquaintance. What do you want from me? Is it to do with these extraordinary disappearances?’
‘It is. I’m trying to establish various links. And I’m told you were the auctioneer at these sales.’ Pooley pushed across three of the catalogues he’d taken from Briggs’ flat.
Eichberg threw them a cursory look. ‘Yes, indeed. They were most successful.’
Pooley handed him a photograph. ‘This is one of the missing people: Charlie Briggs. Do you remember him at any of them?’
‘I’m not quite sure. I saw this photo in a newspaper this morning, and thought he seemed vaguely familiar. But that’s all.’
‘He might have been with Jason Pringle.’
Eichberg snapped his fingers. ‘Oh, course. Yes, I remember. He was the one who bought that Fantona.’
‘He was indeed. And a few other things.’
There was a tap on the door and a Kate Middleton look-alike came in with a tray. ‘Thanks, Jemima. Just leave it.’ She smiled a dazzling smile and left in a waft of expensive perfume.
‘How do you get Jemimas to lower themselves to make coffee?’
‘Come on, Ellis. You must know there’s an infinite supply of well-bred young girls with degrees in fine arts who are happy to work for a pittance in places like these.’ He pushed a cup of black coffee across the desk. ‘Help yourself to milk, sugar, and biscuits.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Now what do you want to know?’
‘If you remember anything of significance about him? Anything that might give a clue as to why he might have an enemy?’
Eichberg frowned. ‘In my line of work, discretion is of the essence.’
‘As it is in mine, Adam. However, these people are in very real danger. We’re desperate for leads.’
‘That puts it in perspective. Did you know I’m Jewish? One of the good things about my religion is that it tells me it’s OK to break the Sabbath to save a life. So I guess I can break the rules of my ancient auction house for the same reason.’
‘I appreciate that, Adam. And I’d be really grateful for anything you could tell me that will help me understand this peculiar world. I’m floundering.’
‘I met Briggs with Pringle at a reception where newcomers are fattened up for the market. Briggs seemed a nice bloke but hadn’t a clue. Typical ignorant hedgie. Jason Pringle is a shark: Briggs, being ignorant and rich, is typical of his prey. What’s more, like so many of these young men who’ve got rich quick, he’s competitive and a gambler. I guess Jason realised early on that he’d do better pointing him at auctions than trying to get him to buy from the gallery.’
‘How would Pringle make money that way?’
‘By arrangement with the sellers.’
‘Can you explain that?’
‘Let’s suppose I’m an unscrupulous dealer trying to off-load an artwork worth, say, a million, on the open market. I’d like to make more, of course, so I tip off my dodgy friends among art advisers and dealers in the hope that they can deliver a mug or two who’ll buy or at least drive up the price. If they do so, they’ll get a commission. Pringle was good at providing mugs and Briggs was ideal. He’d no idea what he was bidding for, but was happy to go far above any sensible limit on Pringle’s say-so and just for the fun of it.’
‘As he did for the Fontana?’
‘Yes. He paid a bit over the odds for that. But I was more thinking of the way he bid for that sub-standard Hirst.’
‘What’s a sub-standard Hirst?’
Eichberg laughed. ‘I can see you’re not a fan. Nor am I. When I came into this game it was because I loved great art. I’ve ended up spending much of my time peddling garbage, but I tell myself everyone involved is a consenting adult—curators, dealers, collectors and, indeed, auctioneers. They all want money or prestige or status.’
‘And critics and art historians and teachers?’
‘Indeed. They’re all caught up in this vast confidence trick.’
‘So no one can afford to mention that the artist-emperor is naked?’
‘You could argue that the artists are the tailors and the rest are the emperors, Ellis. After all, smart artists have learned to exploit the parasites. And good luck to them, I say. I live in hope that one day the entire market for this trash will implode and we can get back to selling exquisite tailoring.’
‘You were saying about Briggs.’
‘We had a lot with an estimated price of nine hundred K. When we reached that, everyone dropped out except for a telephone bidder and Briggs. Briggs finally quit when the price got to just under three million, and the telephone bidder got it for three.’
‘If Briggs was that competitive, why didn’t he go to three?’
‘I saw Pringle whisper to him as I asked if he’d like to raise his bid. And he shook his head.’
‘So what do you think was going on?’
‘Briggs is rich. Not mega-rich. It would make sense to let him keep his money for the next time round. Assuming Pringle was getting a cut of that deal, which I’m sure he was, he was essentially taking his winnings and keeping Briggs’ money in reserve for another punt another time.’
‘Who was the telephone bidder?’
‘If I ever knew I don’t remember. Hang on a minute. I’ll get Jemima onto it. I need to go to her. She’ll have the catalogues.’
While he was out of the room, Pooley called the office, got an update reporting no news and no progress, and attended to some emails. After five minutes, Eichberg returned. ‘Got it,’ he said. ‘Fiona, our representative who was manning the phone, remembers the guy well. She said she had a horrible time with him because he was furious that he’d paid so much. And yet, he obviously couldn’t bear to lose.’
‘And he was?’
‘You realise how tricky this is, Ellis. We promise client confidentiality. And I know this man and he wouldn’t react well if he knew.’
‘I understand, Adam. But there are ten missing people.’
‘I know, I know.’ Eichberg sighed. ‘OK. He was called Oleg Sarkovsky.’
***
‘Yes, I’ve talked to Sarkovsky, sir,’ said Milton. ‘It took me ages to get hold of him, but I created merry hell with his people and eventually he called. He says he hasn’t seen her since they parted company at the airport weeks ago.’
‘Where is he?’
‘He claims he’s in Moscow, but he could easily be lying. I’m asking MI6 to check if he’s there. And we should search his London house now. And get that cell phone traced.’
‘Hold on, Jim. Hold on. I don’t want to ask favours of Six unless we’re sure it’s necessary. Don’t want to be beholden…’
‘But, sir...’
The assistant commissioner took off his reading glasses, folded them neatly and laid them on the desk. ‘Look here, Jim, this is an order. Relations with Six are very delicate at the moment and I don’t want any boats rocked. The only reason this bloke’s a suspect is that Troutbeck talked about him. If you ask me, she’s a more likely suspect. From all I hear she had an obsessive hatred for artists.’
By taking a deep breath, Milton succeeded in keeping his temper. ‘I can see why you might think that, sir’ he said, ‘but I’ve known Lady Troutbeck for some years, and although she’s eccentric, she’s eminently sane.’
‘It can be a small step from eccentricity to insanity,’ said the assistant commissioner, with the faux-wisdom that so grated on his juniors.
‘She is also someone who has to live on a salary which would not allow her to employ a team of skilled kidnappers.’
‘I suppose you’re right. Though they make a lot out of expenses in the Lords.’
Milton kept his voice level. ‘Which leaves us with ten people missing and only one suspect, sir. We can’t ignore that.’
‘But we don’t want to make any mistakes. According to this…’ He put his glasses back on again and looked at the brief, ‘as well as his Kensington mansion, Sarkovsky’s got homes in the Hamptons and the Antibes, a Scottish shooting lodge, a helicopter, a private plane, and a yacht.’ He took off his glasses again, put them on the desk, clasped his hands together and adopted an expression suitable to a primary school teacher explaining there was no Santa Claus. ‘If, Jim, and it’s a very big if, Sarkovsky’s the perpetrator, the victims could be absolutely anywhere. And, if he’d really had it in for them, they’d be at the bottom of the ocean wearing cement shoes.’
‘We can’t give up, sir. He’s the only lead we’ve got. There are connections between him and almost everyone on the list.’
‘There must be thousands of people in the arty world who innocently know many people on that list, Jim.’
‘We know he had rows with some of them. And a really bad one with Lady Troutbeck. We’ve got absolutely nothing else that makes any sense at all.’
‘You call this sense?’ The assistant commissioner shook his head more in sorrow than anger at Milton’s denseness. ‘You’re seriously suggesting we should bother Six and get a search warrant on the basis that he had a row with that Troutbeck lunatic, who seems to have rows with everyone? Don’t think I don’t know what she said in the Lords about the Met being full of wimps and appeasers. Anyway, if Sarkovsky hated Troutbeck that much, he could have had her knocked off and dropped down a mine while he was out of the country.’
‘But there are the other missing people, sir. And his reputation is terrible.’
‘He’s got a dodgy reputation and has the occasional business dispute? For fuck’s sake, Jim, you know as well as I do that London’s full of people with a dodgy reputation. Especially Russians. But they’re not mad enough to start mass kidnappings. The odd poisoning, maybe, but not snatching people off the street in broad daylight.’
The assistant commissioner picked up his glasses once more, put them on and bent his head again over the briefing papers. ‘The first thing the judge is going to ask is why we think Sarkovsky might have had it in for any of the others.’
‘There’s speculation that he’s lost a lot of money on art and he thought Pringle and Thorogood had pulled a fast one. But my hunch is that we’re not involved with someone rational. My sources suggest he’s in bad financial trouble and it’s probably irrecoverable. He seems to have been in close working relationships with a few unsavoury Arab dictators now dead or deposed. If he’s losing everything, he could be looking for a dramatic exit. He acquired the money violently. Why not go down gloriously?’
‘That sounds like Ellis Pooley is kite-flying again.’
‘Ellis’ theory is the only one we’ve got. People do go mad, and this guy—from all we hear—is a paranoid megalomaniac.’
The assistant commissioner bent over the file again. ‘I’ll think about it.’
‘We’ve got to do something, sir. Can’t we at least put a team on to investigating what other properties he might own?’
‘Surely you realise these people have brilliant accountants and lawyers to keep their business affairs under wraps, Jim. We haven’t the manpower for this.’
‘We can’t do nothing, sir. The press are baying for our blood.’
The assistant commissioner adopted his sagacious tone. ‘I’m surprised at you, Jim. We can’t be jumping to the tune of the reptiles. At least not when we’re deciding if we should take on someone of unlimited wealth. I said I’d think about it. And that’s what I’ll be doing tonight. See you first thing tomorrow.’
***
Milton could have done with knowing about Martin Conroy, who was sitting at his home computer triumphantly adding another company name to the list he kept in his Oleg Sarkovsky file. As ever, Conroy had worked steadily through the day in his office clearing the urgent files. It was mostly humdrum work, but he never complained. His sequence of bosses in his twenty years in Inland Revenue appreciated him for his competence, reliability, and punctuality. It was a relief to have someone who needed minimal supervision and just got on with things. He was promoted from time to time, but being avowedly uninterested in management, he would never fly as high as his other capabilities could have brought him.
There were two other reasons why he hadn’t sought promotion. One was because high office would not have been compatible with his career as an army reservist, the first major outlet for his sense of adventure. Conroy had never wanted to join the army full-time, mainly because, as with the police, there was far too much sitting around being bored. And Jane had made it very clear early on that while she didn’t mind him being away for evenings, weekends, and even the odd couple of weeks, she would never agree to being an army wife. She’d become annoyed, though, when he joined the Special Forces Reserve, which required longer and more intensive training.
By the time she stunned him by announcing she had fallen in love with his sister and they had walked off into the sunset, Conroy was set in his ways. He served a few months in Iraq as a member of the clerical support staff and found it both dull and exciting, but he hadn’t enjoyed the pain and inconvenience when he took a bullet in his shoulder, and being at the end of his contract, he decided to quit. He kept a few army friendships and attended the odd reunion, but henceforward, he concentrated in his spare time on his second interest, pursuing tax evaders of his choice even when they were none of his business.