Priceless (47 page)

T
he success of the auction had created an air of extremely high energy at Ludbrook’s. Even those buyers who were disappointed, when they saw the paintings they had come to bid for go to other people at such high prices, were buoyed up by the knowledge that there was still money out there. The recession had not come to the art world. There would still be super-yachts in Monaco and jam for tea.

When all the members of the general public had been safely shuffled from the building, the Ludbrook’s team went upstairs to the boardroom, where, as usual, John Ludbrook had laid out champagne to celebrate their great success. He believed in congratulating his staff at every opportunity. Even the fact that the last fine art department party had ended in scandal with Sarah Jane and Nat’s elevator tryst had not changed his policy.

This time, everybody took the stairs. Harry Brown had stuck a handmade sign saying “out of order except for Nat Wilde” on the lift door. Even Lizzy had to smile.

“Congratulations,” she said to Nat when she caught up with him. “The tie must have worked.”

Nat flipped up the end and studied the monkeys. “I sincerely hope it wasn’t the tie,” he said. “Can’t bloody stand it. Red with blue monkeys. Can’t think why Sarah Jane thought I would like the damn thing.”

Lizzy knew exactly why.
Because you call her “monkey,”
she thought.
Just like you used to call me your little monkey too
.

Sarah Jane slipped her arm through Nat’s proprietarily. “Come over here. Harry has a little surprise for you.”

Lizzy let them wander off. She took just three more sips of her champagne before she placed her glass down on the boardroom table and headed for home. There was nothing more for her there.

Harry’s surprise was a bottle of the finest vintage champagne, Clos Des Larmes by Champagne Arsenault.

“Look,” he said, pointing out the vintage. “I even managed to get one from your date of birth.”

“1958?” Sarah Jane goggled, realizing for the first time that Nat really was the same age as her father. “1958? Are you sure?”

“Sarah Jane,” said Nat, “you’re only as old as the woman you feel.”

The revelation of his age didn’t unduly bother Nat. There was no sense in which anyone could accuse him of being past it. That night he was at the very top of his game. He had reaffirmed his position in the pantheon of legendary auctioneers. Right up there with the best of them. Under Nat’s gentle coercion, the emir of Qatar would have bought back his own oil at one and a half times the high estimate. Nat could sell anything to anyone.

Right then, his adrenaline and testosterone levels
were through the roof. He held court, feeling like Alexander the Great, like Napoléon and Genghis Khan all wrapped up in one body. Everyone in the room wanted to talk to him and ask how it felt to preside over such a spectacular sale. The morning’s papers would be full of it. Nat had already made sure that the PR department had sent out to all the picture desks the right photograph of him standing on his podium. It was ten years old, but it would give people a rough idea of what he looked like in action.

But much as he liked the adulation, after a couple of hours, Nat was starting to get a little bored of the questions from younger guys who hoped to emulate him. Glancing across the room while some little twerp from the wine department expounded on the price he hoped to achieve for a bottle of Château Mouton Rothschild from the late Queen Mother’s personal cellar, Nat caught Sarah Jane’s eye. She made a subtle gesture with her head. Nat understood immediately. Moments later he excused himself to follow Sarah Jane to his office.

When Nat walked into his office, he found Sarah Jane sitting on the desk. She was already half-undressed. She had unbuttoned her sober white blouse to the waist, revealing the hot pink underwear beneath. The thought of that underwear had been tantalizing Nat all day, since the pink bra had showed quite clearly through the thin white cotton.

“Is this my reward?” he asked, reaching inside her blouse and cupping both her breasts in his hands.

“You certainly deserve one,” she told him. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything so impressive as you were today. You were magnificent.”

Nat grinned. “You say all the right things,” he said, dipping his head to place a kiss on the curved flesh of her bosom, held so proudly upright by her bra. Sarah Jane
sighed and tipped her head back so that Nat could kiss her throat. As he moved lower again, she loosened her long brown hair from its restrained bun and let it tumble over her bare shoulders. Nat plunged his hands into the cascading curls and pulled her wet-lipped mouth toward his.

“God, Nat,” she breathed when he let her come up for air. “I couldn’t take my eyes off you all night. You’re making me crazy.”

It was exactly what he wanted to hear. “How crazy?”

“I just want you to take me right now. On your desk. So I think you should take this off for me.” She started to undo his tie. “Aren’t you glad you’ve got a new lucky tie?” she asked as she did so.

“I certainly am. I can think of only one thing that would make this evening better.”

“What’s that?”

“Will you model it for me? Like you did in that special birthday photograph.”

Sarah Jane gave her lover a slow, dirty smile. “With pleasure,” she whispered huskily.

Sarah Jane stripped in a second. Then she took the long sliver of red silk, patterned with those silly little monkeys, and quickly transformed it into a prop worthy of the dancers at the Crazy Horse in Paris. Wearing nothing else but her leopard-skin Louboutins (which she’d decided were her lucky shoes), she strutted around Nat’s office, stopping every now and then to grind her pelvis against a bookcase or the back of a chair. Remembering everything she had been taught in rhythmic gymnastics classes at her exclusive girls-only boarding school, she made the tie dance through the air. Then she let it loop lazily around her body. It encircled her waist, caressed her breasts. She gave a little shiver as it trailed across her rosy pink nipples. She let it slide between her legs, moaning as
she pulled the silk taut against her carefully coiffed mons pubis.

“Oh yes,” said Nat. “Now, that is what I call a lucky tie.”

CHAPTER 67

W
hile Nat was busy indulging in his reward for a very good day at the office, the party in the boardroom upstairs was interrupted by the arrival of three police officers, two uniformed and one in plain clothes. They stood at the end of the beautiful paneled room—a dining room back when Ludbrook’s offices had been a private house—like the ghosts of Christmases past, present, and future. At first, only Harry Brown noticed they were there at all. The officers refused a glass of champagne from an overly attentive waiter. Instead they asked the waiter a couple of questions, and the waiter shrugged and pointed straight at Harry.

“Nat Wilde?” the detective asked.

“Not guilty,” said Harry reflexively.

“Could you tell me where he is?”

“Who wants to know?” said Harry.

“Detective Sergeant Simpson, CID. And this is Detective Constable James and Detective French. We need to speak to Mr. Wilde as a matter of some urgency. I wonder if we might step out into the corridor.”

“Excuse me,” Harry said to his companions. “Save some of that Arsenault for me.”

•          •          •

Outside in the corridor, Harry could only give the same response. “I don’t know where he is,” Harry said, though he had noticed even in his drunken haze that Sarah Jane was missing from the party too. He immediately put two and two together and figured the worst. “He might be in his office?” Harry suggested. “Doing some paperwork?” he added feebly. “I’ll try calling his mobile.” If Sarah Jane was with him, as Harry strongly suspected she would be, Nat would almost certainly need a moment to compose himself.

“No need. Let’s just go straight to his office,” said Detective Simpson.

Harry had no choice but to lead the policemen down the stairs. He felt like a Judas, though he wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t as though he could have refused to take the policemen to Nat’s office. And, in any case, perhaps they just wanted to see Nat on a routine matter. Though what on earth could that “routine matter” be? It had to have something to do with the Trebarwen fakes.

“This is it,” said Harry, pausing outside the big wooden door with its highly polished brass nameplate. Nathaniel Wilde. Such proud letters. Without knocking, Detective Simpson pushed the door open. And froze …

“And this is what they call a double Windsor,” Sarah Jane was saying. She was standing on Nat’s desk, in nothing but her red-soled shoes and his tie. Nat was sitting in his chair, leaning back as far as he could to get the best view of Sarah Jane’s Brazilian.

“Oh my God,” said Detective French, the female detective. She immediately turned away. The two male detectives and Harry Brown were transfixed as Sarah Jane gyrated to Barry White’s “Sho’ You Right,” which was belting out of the CD player in the corner of the room.
Nat too was completely absorbed. The song had finished before he or Sarah Jane noticed that they had visitors.

“Ahem.” Detective Simpson coughed before Barry White could launch into “Can’t Get Enough of Your Love.”

The police allowed Nat and Sarah Jane a few moments of privacy to compose themselves before they got down to their official business. When Sarah Jane emerged looking as red as the soles of her Louboutins, she was sent back to the party.

“I’ll be there in a moment or two,” said Nat. “Save me some champagne.”

But Nat would not be back at the party that night. Closing the door so that he would be less likely to be overheard, Detective Simpson delivered the speech that Nat had hitherto only heard in television dramas.

“You do not have to say anything—”

“There’s been some kind of mistake,” said Nat, although deep down he knew that there hadn’t.

CHAPTER 68

B
loody Trebarwen. Nat should have known that idiot Julian would cock things up for the pair of them.

The moment Nat had seen the painting of the suspension bridge, he had known that something wasn’t quite right. But his desire to make a quick buck had overridden his professional faculties. Once he’d had Julian
over a barrel and the promise of a commission from the profits, Nat had forgotten to ask himself whether the fake would get past everybody else. Of course the subject had been wrong. He knew that now.

And then Lizzy, bloody Lizzy, had been on the case. Maybe he could have kept her quiet. Perhaps he should have brought Lizzy in on the secret and held off fucking Sarah Jane until Lizzy had found herself someone else to take her mind off him. For it was undoubtedly her going to John Ludbrook that had made this moment inevitable.

Nat hadn’t intended to go so far as murder. He had used Sarah Jane’s mobile phone to call Julian and request a meeting. They’d met at the Dove, a quiet pub on the riverbank in Hammersmith. Nat had wanted to hammer out a new deal. Julian needed to say that he had been working alone. Nat was facing the end of a thirty-year career over this.

“Come on, Ju,” he said. “Neither of us has to go down. You just finger the forger. I can collaborate with you and explain that it’s easy to see why you were fooled. I’ve got thirty years’ experience and I didn’t spot the fakes. You brought the paintings to me in good faith. But you have to say where you got them.”

“I can’t do that,” said Julian.

“What do you mean you can’t? You have to. If you hand in the forger, then neither of us has committed an offense. There’s no crime in being duped. Where did you get them, Julian? Did you actually have them painted to order?”

A micro-expression on Julian’s fat face told Nat that Julian had indeed instructed the creation of the works. In that knowledge, Nat saw a way out. A way of making it seem that he and Julian were the victims of this whole mess.

“I can’t tell you where I got the paintings,” said Julian. “I promised.”

“You promised? Fuck’s sake. You’re going to go to prison.”