Priceless (37 page)

A
part from the security guards, Carrie was, as usual, the very last person in the Ehrenpreis offices that night. She did her customary tour of the building to ensure that everything was in its place and that the cleaners had done their job properly. More than once she’d had to let cleaners go because they couldn’t seem to work to her standards. Yet when she found a good team, it seemed inevitable that she would lose them for some other reason. Pregnancy, visa problems, a partner who just wanted them to stay home. It was hard to find the right staff, and harder still to get them to stay. Carrie had actually ended up scrubbing toilets herself on occasion. She wasn’t too grand for that.

The Mathieu Randon collection had been on display for almost a week, during which time Ehrenpreis had seen an unprecedented number of interested parties come through the door. Most of them weren’t going to be buying, of course, but no one could ever be turned away, just in case. No matter if they turned up in sneakers rather than Turnbull and Asser. Even the bloke who gave Jessica “the creeps” when she saw him standing in front of one painting with his hands in his pockets had to be treated with politeness and care.

“Most of the world’s richest people are creeps,” Carrie reminded her.

But now all the patrons were gone.

This was the moment in her daily routine that Carrie loved the best. With no one around but security, she was transported back to her childhood fantasies. In those she was locked into the American Museum of Natural History off Central Park after everyone had gone home. With no one to stop her, she could touch whatever she liked. That movie,
Night at the Museum
, could have been written just for her.

The galleries at Ehrenpreis weren’t a museum, but they were almost as good. Better in some ways, since the items on display were constantly changing. A few months before, Carrie had spent three hours amusing herself with the lots for the fine jewelry sale, trying on some of the finer pieces, admiring herself in a pair of Jackie Kennedy’s earrings. She decided that they were a little too big and square for her heart-shaped face.

That night, Carrie wanted to take a last good look at Randon’s collection. By the end of the following day, with the auction done and dusted, this amazing group of pieces would already be dispersing to the four corners of the earth. The Ehrenpreis team was preparing to take
phone bids from clients in the United States, Russia, China, and Japan.

Even as Carrie looked at Randon’s collection, it was hard to imagine the man as he had been before he’d been caught by a falling wine barrel in the San Francisco earthquake and had fallen into a coma. Was it really possible that he had held orgies at his château just outside Paris, attended by supermodels, racing drivers, and Hollywood movie stars? Was there any truth in the rumor that he had close friends in both the Italian and Russian Mafias? The one thing that Carrie knew to be true was that Randon had once employed a serial killer. The former managing director of Maison Randon was serving a life sentence in a French prison for the murder of two prostitutes. One was a British girl, found floating facedown in the Seine, wearing nothing but a shoe.

There was something very odd about Mathieu Randon. Carrie wasn’t quite convinced that he wouldn’t miss the paintings she studied now. But he wanted to be rid of them, he said time and time again, perhaps trying to convince himself too. It was the best way he could imagine to raise the funds he needed for God’s work, he told Carrie. He had already earmarked the plot of land on which he intended to build his church and his monastery. He had to make amends for a life of hedonism and sin. The way he spoke freaked Carrie out, especially when she remembered how oddly he had behaved on board
The Grand Cru
, but she wasn’t there to worry about his sincerity. Carrie was simply there to sell Randon’s shame to the highest bidder.

After donning a pair of white gloves, Carrie picked up the little Japanese inro box, made to hang from a warrior’s obi, to look more closely at the intricate carving. As she did so, she heard the sound of something sliding around
inside. It took her by surprise. The catalog hadn’t mentioned any moving parts. Her first thought was that some idiot must have manhandled the little box while cleaning or showing it, and a piece had broken off and was now making the inro rattle.

“Damn,” she muttered. She signaled to the night watchman that she was going to remove the piece and take it to her office to save him the bother of turning on all the gallery lights, which were on their red setting, like the nightlights in most great museums, to minimize the amount of light exposure the paintings had while they were in her care.

Back in her office, Carrie cleared a space on her blotter and placed the little box down upon it. The box was such a beautiful thing. The hours of patience it must have taken to carve the scene on the lid had been well rewarded by the quality of the results. Carrie had seen several inro and netsuke before, but this was by far the best example. Ordinarily, the inro box would be held shut by a string of beads that operated like the string on a blind, but this box was held shut by a complicated mechanism. So complicated that Carrie didn’t have a clue where to start.

Neither had Randon. There was a note in the file relating to this particular piece that informed Carrie that her expert on such objects had asked Randon for the combination, but he’d been unable to supply it. The catalog duly stated that the box would be sold as locked.

But no one had ever mentioned that there might be something inside it. Carrie had to find out what it was. There was no way she could let this box go to auction broken or, far worse, with something even more valuable than the box itself hidden inside. She was determined to get the damn thing open.

The white gloves made the task especially difficult. Though they were particularly fine, they still made it hard
for Carrie to know when she might have twisted the right piece into place. But after a determined hour of experimentation, she found the right combination. She pressed on the exposed breast of one of the women carved on the inro, and at last, the lid and the box slid smoothly apart. Holding her breath, Carrie tipped the contents out onto the table.

“Oh God.” She recoiled as she saw what the box held. Was that
hair?

It was hair. Three locks of dark brown hair, each one bound with a sliver of thin black ribbon. And there was more. The hair must have been what had kept the other contents of the box from rattling against the sides when she’d first held the inro. Using a pencil to separate the curious items from the hair, which made her want to heave, Carrie counted out three pieces of jewelry. A heart-shaped pendant. A thin silver bracelet. And a ring, one of those friendship rings that girls give each other in high school. Clasped hands. A Claddagh, she thought it was called.

Carrie was confused. Randon claimed he’d had this box since the 1970s—it was one of the first pieces in his collection—and that he had never been able to open it. Yet the contents of this box looked to have been added to the inro more recently than that.

It was all worthless. Carrie could tell that the moment she laid eyes on the stuff. The locket, the bracelet, and the ring would each have cost around twenty quid new. Secondhand, it was the kind of stuff you gave to little girls for their dressing-up box. Using her tweezers, Carrie picked up the ring and held it under her desk light while she looked at it through a magnifying glass. The hallmark, which was almost rubbed away, suggested that the ring was made in 1985. Likewise, the gold locket looked to be
far newer than the 1970s, though it was difficult to tell for sure because the hallmark on this piece
had
been rubbed away. Carrie imagined a young girl smoothing the surface with nervous fingers, using the locket like worry beads.

As for the hair … Carrie had no idea how old that was. She’d seen Victorian mourning jewelry plenty of times. It was horrible stuff that always gave Carrie the shivers when she had to handle it. Mourning rings and lockets from that period often contained a piece of the loved one’s hair and Carrie had been surprised to see how fresh it could look after almost two hundred years. So the hair might always have been inside the inro. And yet …

Using a pencil and her tweezers once again, Carrie separated out the three locks so that they were side by side on a piece of white paper. Under her strong desk light, Carrie could see that they weren’t all from the same head. There was quite a difference in color from one lock to the next. One was almost red in tone. Another had strands of shimmering golden blond. None seemed particularly Japanese. A forensic scientist would have been able to tell at once.

How odd. The items inside the inro box had left Carrie feeling strangely disturbed, as though she had seen something that should have been hidden forever. But it was all such crap! Cheap mass-produced jewelry of the kind that ended up in charity shops and yard sales. Regardless, she knew she had to tell Randon what she had found.

She pulled out a Ziploc bag from the box she had in a desk drawer, and dropped the hair and the jewelry inside, planning to give Randon a call first thing and ask whether he wanted the stuff back or whether she should just throw it away.

She didn’t have to wait until morning. Her mobile phone started to vibrate in her jacket pocket.

“Monsieur Randon,
ça va?”
she greeted him.

“Ça va bien,”
he confirmed. “I hope you don’t mind me calling you a little late in the day.”

“Not at all,” said Carrie, which is what she would have said whether she really minded or not.

“Good. I wanted to talk to you before the sale and give you my best wishes. I want to tell you how grateful I am for all your hard work so far.”

“Thank you. I hope we’ll get the kind of results you’re looking for.”

“I have no doubt that you will,” said Randon.

“The sale begins at ten o’clock. Will you be with us?”

“I think not,” he said. “It wouldn’t give me any pleasure to see the faces of the stupid people who want to let such filth into their lives. This is just a means to an end. I’m only interested in the good works I will be able to do with the proceeds.”

“I understand.”

“Though, I am in London. I have taken a suite at Claridge’s, and I would appreciate it if you could come and see me to talk through the results when you have a moment.”

“Of course,” said Carrie. “I hope we’ll be able to crack open the champagne.”

“Not for me,” said Randon. “Not anymore.”

“I’m sorry.” Carrie berated herself for having forgotten, yet again, that the head of one of the world’s finest champagne houses was now a teetotaler. “Monsieur Randon, I was planning to call you first thing in the morning. I wanted to talk to you about one of the lots.”

“Yes,” said Randon. “Go on.”

“It’s the inro. The Japanese ivory box with the carvings of the man and woman on the lid. The one you said you couldn’t open.”

“Ah yes. The box I bought in 1973.”

“That’s it. Well, I’ve got some news for you. I was making a final inspection of the lots earlier this evening, and when I picked the inro up, I heard something rattle inside. Believe it or not, I actually managed to get it open. I wanted to be sure that it didn’t contain some rare jewel, and …”

“What did it contain?” Randon asked.

“Not much of interest. At least, not to me as an auctioneer. But perhaps for you … It contained some pieces of jewelry. Inexpensive stuff. The kind you can get on any high street. I’d say it was from the 1970s or 1980s. It also contained three locks of hair, which must have cushioned the jewelry. Hence we didn’t realize there was anything inside until now. I assumed that you wouldn’t want me to sell the inro with these items still in there, so I removed them. I’ve got them right here on my desk. Would you like them, or shall I dispose of them myself?”

There was a long pause.

“They’re really very cheap,” Carrie said to fill the silence, and immediately wished she hadn’t. Sentimental value, she knew, was often immeasurably great.

“I’d like you to send the items over to me at my hotel,” said Randon at last.

“Okay. I’ll do that at once.”

Carrie wanted to ask more. She wanted to ask if Randon had any idea whatsoever why the inro was stuffed with such crap. But he offered nothing, and she got no sense of whether he recalled having put those things in the box—as he must surely have done. Who else could have gained access to the collection?

“Is there anything more?” asked Randon.

“No,” said Carrie. “Everything else is ready for the sale. We’re very excited.”

“Good,” said Randon. “Make sure you send those other things over right away.”

Carrie promised she would.

Claridge’s was not far from the Ehrenpreis offices, so Carrie delivered the contents of the inro box to Randon’s hotel by hand, passing the bag to the concierge and insisting on staying until she received confirmation that it had been handed on to Randon himself.

What a strange thing. She couldn’t help thinking about those little mementoes as she sat in the back of her taxi home. Where had Randon come across them? Old girlfriends, Carrie decided. His first, second, and third loves, perhaps. Though the dates were slightly off. How old was Randon? He must be in his midfifties. In which case he would have had his first love affair way before 1985. Surely. Perhaps tomorrow, when she met Randon to discuss the results of the sale, he would throw some light on the matter. If he could.

In the privacy of his suite, Randon opened Carrie’s envelope.

Her news had confused him. Randon’s brain still failed him from time to time, and it took a while for him to remember the inro box. Why it should have had anything inside it that wasn’t from the period when the box was made was a total mystery to him. He hoped that seeing the items would jog his memory. He tipped them out onto the blotter on his desk, eager to know more.

Such a strange little collection. That tacky jewelry. Like nothing any woman he knew would have owned. And hair? Why hair? He picked up the heart-shaped locket and opened it, hoping for a further clue inside, but it was empty. Nothing but a little sliver of clear plastic that was supposed to protect a photograph. Had there ever
been a photograph? He put the Claddagh ring on his pinkie finger and turned it this way and that. Had he seen it before? He didn’t recall it. The bracelet equally drew a blank.