Priceless (39 page)

Lizzy waved them away and happily turned off her laptop for the night. Now she could join the party. Her team was in one of the boardrooms upstairs, toasting their own success. Nat had returned from his post-sale meeting with Randon, and so the party could begin in earnest. Lizzy bounded up the grand central stairway two at a time, eager to be with them. She couldn’t bear to wait
for the passenger lift, which was notoriously erratic. Earlier that week it had been out of action for two whole days, after an episode in which a dowager duchess had been treated to a yo-yo ride, ricocheting between the ground and fifth floors seven times before someone noticed what was happening and pressed the stop button. Lizzy definitely didn’t want to be stuck in the lift that night. She wanted to be with her all-conquering hero. Her Nat.

“Where’s Nat Wilde?”

James Ludbrook, the great-great-grandson of Ludbrook’s founder, and father of its current managing director, John, was eager to pay his respects to his star auctioneer so that he could leave the party and get home to bed. James was almost eighty-seven, after all.

It suddenly struck the assembled guests that none of them had seen Nat for a while.

“Maybe he went home,” suggested Olivia.

“What?” said Harry Brown. “After tonight’s performance? No way. He never misses an opportunity to hear praises sung to him.”

“He was definitely coming to the party,” said James. “I saw him getting into the lift with Sarah Jane. They were on their way up. But that was hours ago.”

“Where’s Sarah Jane?” asked someone else.

“Oh my God,” said Marcus. “You don’t suppose …”

Almost everyone at the party had complained about having to walk up the stairs to the boardroom that night because the lift had been taking forever to reach the ground floor. Maybe that was because it was broken.

A search party set out at once to discover whether Nat and Sarah Jane had met the same fate as the poor dowager duchess. And it was soon confirmed that the lift was indeed stuck between floors.

Together with Harry Brown, Marcus, and Olivia, Lizzy went to the maintenance room to let Nat and Sarah Jane know that their predicament had been noted and help was on the way. There was some kind of speaker-phone that would allow them to send their encouragement.

Lizzy felt terrible that she had allowed herself to get swept up in the excitement of the party while poor Nat languished in the elevator. She hoped he would see the funny side.

The building’s caretaker switched the CCTV camera so that they were able to see inside the lift. And there was Nat with Sarah Jane. Though they didn’t look particularly bothered about having been stuck for at least a couple of hours.

Lizzy felt the blood drain from her face as, behind her, Marcus started humming Aerosmith’s “Love in an Elevator.”

“Good God. Don’t they know there’s a camera in there?” asked Olivia with distaste.

Inside the elevator, Nat had Sarah Jane up against a mirrored wall. Her tight white cotton shirt was undone, revealing the magnificent creamy white breasts, perfect E cups, that every man at Ludbrook’s dreamed of getting his hands on. Sarah Jane seemed to have forgotten all about the back injury that had made it impossible for her to do any of the donkeywork around the department, as she wrapped her long strong legs around Nat’s waist and threw her head back in ecstasy while Nat ground into her, his face buried in her neck, his trousers around his ankles. It was an X-rated extravaganza.

“Nice arse,” said one of the girls from fine wines.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” said Lizzy, covering her mouth.

“Too much champagne?” suggested Harry.

“God, Harry,” said Olivia as she followed Lizzy out, leaving the boys to their viewing. “Are you really so bloody oblivious?”

Though the image of the man she loved screwing another woman in a lift would be with her for quite some time, Lizzy’s tears dried surprisingly quickly. She agreed with Olivia that Nat was an absolute bastard, but she refused to condemn Sarah Jane too badly. Lizzy knew how persuasive Nat could be, and she also knew that Sarah Jane would probably have to contend with the footage from that CCTV camera turning up on YouTube. (In fact, Marcus would make sure of it.) It would be faintly embarrassing for Nat too, of course, but nothing like as bad as it would be for his companion. The imbalance in the world’s view of male-female sexuality persisted. Nat would be a stud, while Sarah Jane … There were still no good words for a woman who enjoyed sex as thoroughly as Sarah Jane seemed to.

“You could make a complaint about sexual harassment,” said Olivia, when her suspicion that Lizzy had been subject to Nat’s charms too was at last confirmed. Olivia was keen to see Ludbrook’s golden boy fall from grace. Not least because he had resisted her so thoroughly. She’d had not so much as a wink in her five years at the house.

“No,” said Lizzy. “I was a willing accomplice in my own heartbreak. Nat never promised me anything.”

“God. If I were you, I would be waiting at the bottom of the lift shaft to claw his eyes out. And hers.”

There was no love lost between Olivia and Sarah Jane.

Lizzy decided that her revenge would be much more subtle.

CHAPTER 55

T
he following morning, neither Sarah Jane nor Nat was in the office when Lizzy arrived. It was a good thing. Seeing either of them might have made it harder to do what she knew she had to. Lizzy called John Ludbrook’s office and requested a meeting. His personal assistant, Genevieve, was unusually helpful for once and suggested that Lizzy come upstairs right away.

Lizzy knew, as she climbed the staircase, that Genevieve’s eagerness to help was more out of prurience than anything else. Genevieve had doubtless heard about the incident in the lift and wanted to know more. All the
really
gory details.

But Lizzy hadn’t requested a meeting to talk about Nat and Sarah Jane. She had already decided that there was little point trying to gain sympathy from the man at the top of Ludbrook’s. The old-school-tie network was alive and kicking. Affairs were rife. She had heard that John Ludbrook himself was cheating on his wife with the woman who headed up the textiles department. But much more important to any of these men than their marriages was the reputation of the house. That was taken very seriously indeed. And Lizzy was sure that she had information that would compromise it.

“And all these paintings were consigned by the same person?”

“Yes. Julian Trebarwen. Nat Wilde was at school with his brother.”

•          •          •

John buzzed Nat’s office directly. Nat was upstairs in less than three minutes, red-faced and out of breath from having bounded up the stairs two at a time. His agitation was compounded because he’d tripped in his hurry and had banged his knee—his “bad knee,” the one that had made it “impossible” for him to shag Lizzy of late—hard on the stairs. And when he walked into the office and saw Lizzy there, Nat was pretty sure he knew what was coming. It was inevitable.

He shook his head ever so slightly. Though he couldn’t deny that in some ways he deserved it. Harry Brown had warned him a thousand times that girls today weren’t like the girls who used to come to Ludbrook’s by the dozen. This new breed were serious about their careers, and if you fucked them and dumped them and left them thinking that you might promote someone else over their heads, they would think nothing about crying harassment.

But Lizzy? Nat would never have imagined that Lizzy would go crying to the big boss. What had he really done wrong? He’d never pretended their relationship was anything more than a pleasant diversion for him. He’d assumed that she understood what he was like, and when the time came and it was over, she would move aside without causing too much fuss. She should have known that he would have done his best to help her move ahead in Ludbrook’s, not least because now he wanted her out of his department.

“Come on,” said Nat as he stood in front of Lizzy and his boss. “This is madness. I think I can safely say that it was mutual.”

“What was?” asked John Ludbrook.

“It happens all the time. You yourself …”

Nat was ready to bring up the affair the managing director was having with the head of the textiles department, when he realized, in the nick of time, that the man who held Nat’s career in his hand genuinely didn’t know what he was talking about.

“This isn’t about you and me,” Lizzy confirmed in a low voice. “You didn’t matter
that
much.”

Nat glared.

“Miss Duffy has been sharing her concerns about some possible forgeries sold through your department.”

“The suspension bridge painting.” Nat sighed. He’d already been through this. He’d already sat in this very office and apologized until he was blue in the face that the damn thing had slipped through on his watch. “I know, I know … I can’t believe I didn’t spot the discrepancy.”

“Not just the suspension bridge,” said Lizzy.

Nat bristled.

“John.” Nat appealed to his boss. “How long have we known each other? Thirty years? How long have we worked together? How many times has a fake gotten past me before? I don’t remember all of the paintings that Lizzy is talking about, and I don’t suppose she remembers them all that clearly herself. You know how seriously I take my job, John. I would not let anything I had the slightest doubts about pass. I’d send it over the road to Ehrenpreis,” he added in an attempt at levity.

But levity was not working that morning.

John Ludbrook looked through a pile of papers on his desk. Things that Lizzy had printed out to support her case.

“Miss Duffy has told me that she raised her concerns about these other paintings with you not so long ago. She said that you told her you would deal with the matter yourself. But I don’t recall having been informed, nor does it seem that the proper investigations were undertaken. I
don’t need to tell you that these allegations of forgery are very serious indeed and should have been investigated with commensurate gravity.”

“I didn’t think it was worth bothering,” Nat told him. “There was one documented incident. Just one. Lizzy’s suspicions are pure conjecture. She’s very conscientious but she doesn’t have my experience.”

“Regardless, she should have been taken more seriously.”

“I resent being told how to do my job,” said Nat.

“I never thought I would have to tell you how to do it,” said John Ludbrook.

As he walked out of the room, Nat shot Lizzy such a look you might have thought she had just condemned him to death.

CHAPTER 56

T
he sale of so many possible fakes through Ludbrook’s had the potential to bring the house down if Lizzy’s suspicions were not acted on swiftly. The very next day the police were called in, and everyone in the art department was formally questioned (despite Nat’s protests). Of course Julian Trebarwen was wanted for questioning. A police car was soon outside his little house in Fulham, but the house was empty and a neighbor said that he hadn’t seen Julian in a couple of days. His car was nowhere to be found.

A deputation was sent down to Cornwall. They arrived at Trebarwen House that night.

The gray stone house was cold and empty. No cars in the driveway. No lights on. One of the officers peered through the long narrow windows that flanked the grand door. A pile of post suggested that no one had been there for quite some time.

“He’s not here,” said the constable decisively.

“There’s a light on in the house over there,” his partner pointed out. “Isn’t that place part of the estate?”

Serena had just put Katie to bed when the officers knocked on her door.

“We’re sorry to disturb you, Mrs. Macdonald.”

She wondered for a moment how they knew her name. Then she remembered that these guys probably knew a great deal more about her than that.

“What is it?” she asked.

Please don’t let it be Tom
, she prayed silently. Though she had wished him dead a thousand times since he’d left to live with Donna, the idea that something might actually have happened to him made her legs feel unsteady. But so far they hadn’t asked her to sit down. They hadn’t even asked to come in. They always came in and told you to sit down if there had been a death in the family, didn’t they?