False Impression (4 page)

So if Fenston
accepted her proposal – and why shouldn’t he?
everyone
would be satisfied with the outcome.

When Anna passed
the Tavern on the Green, she once again checked her watch. She would need to
pick up her pace if she still hoped to be back at Artisans’ Gate in
under
twelve minutes. As she sprinted down the hill, she
reflected on the fact that she shouldn’t allow her personal feelings for a
client to cloud her judgement, but frankly Victoria needed all the help she
could get. When Anna passed through Artisans’ Gate, she pressed the stop button
on her watch: twelve minutes and four seconds. Damn.

Anna jogged
slowly off in the direction of her apartment, unaware that she was being closely
watched by the man in the emerald-green T-shirt.

J
ack Delaney
still wasn’t sure if Anna Petrescu was a criminal.

The FBI agent
watched her as she disappeared into the crowd on her way back to Thornton
House. Once she was out of sight,

Jack resumed
jogging through Sheep Meadow towards the lake.

He thought about
the woman he’d been investigating for the past six weeks.
An
enquiry that was hampered by the fact that he didn’t need Anna to find out that
the bureau were also investigating her boss, who Jack had no doubt was a
criminal.

It was nearly a
year since Richard W. Macy, Jack’s Supervising Special Agent, had called him
into his office and allocated him a team of eight agents to cover a new
assignment. Jack was to investigate three vicious murders on three different
continents which had one thing in common: each of the victims had been killed
at a time when they also had large outstanding loans with Fenston Finance. Jack
quickly concluded that the murders had been planned and were the work of a professional
killer.

Jack cut through
Shakespeare Garden as he headed back towards his small apartment on the West
Side. He had just about completed his file on Fenston’s most recent recruit,
although he still couldn’t make up his mind if she was a willing accomplice or
a naive innocent.

Jack had begun
with Anna’s upbringing and discovered that her uncle, George Petrescu, had
emigrated from Romania in 1972, to settle in Danville, Illinois. Within weeks
of Ceau§escu appointing himself president, George had written to his brother
imploring him to come to America. When Ceau§escu declared Romania a socialist
republic and made his wife Elena his deputy, George wrote to his brother
renewing his invitation, which included his young niece,

Anna.

Although Anna’s
parents refused to leave their homeland, they did allow their
seventeen-year-old daughter to be smuggled out of Bucharest in 1987 and snipped
off to America to stay with her uncle, promising her that she could return the
moment Ceau§escu had been overthrown. Anna never returned. She wrote home
regularly, begging her parents to join them in the States, but she rarely
received a response. Two years later she learned that her father had been
killed in a border skirmish while attempting to oust the dictator. Her mother
repeated that she would never leave her native land, her excuse now being, ‘
Who
would tend to your father’s grave?’

That much, one
of Jack’s squad members had been able to discover from an essay Anna had
written for her high school magazine. One of her classmates had also written
about the gentle girl with long fair plaits and blue eyes,
who
came from somewhere called Bucharest and knew so few words of English that she
couldn’t even recite the Pledge of Allegiance at morning assembly.

By the end of
her second year, Anna was editing the magazine, from where Jack had gathered so
much of his information.

From high
school, Anna won a scholarship to Williams University in Massachusetts to study
art history. A local newspaper recorded that she also won the inter-varsity
mile against Cornell in a time of 4 minutes 48 seconds. Jack followed Anna’s
progress to the University of Pennsylvania, where she continued her studies for
a PhD, her chosen thesis subject the Fauve Movement. Jack had to look up the
word in Webster’s. It referred to a group of artists led by Matisse, Derain and
Vlaminck who wished to break away from the influence of Impressionism and move
towards the use of bright and dissonant colour. He also learned how the young
Picasso had left Spain to join the group in Paris, where he shocked the public
with paintings that Paris Match described as ‘of no lasting importance’;
‘sanity will return,’ they assured their readers.

It only made
Jack want to read more about Vuillard, Luce and Camois – artists he’d never
heard of. But that would have to wait for an off-duty moment, unless it became
evidence that would nail Fenston.

After Penn, Dr
Petrescu joined Sotheby’s as a graduate trainee.

Here Jack’s
information became somewhat sketchy as he could allow his agents only limited
contact with her former colleagues.

However, he did
learn of her photographic memory, her rigorous scholarship and the fact that
she was liked by everyone from the porters to the chairman. But no one would
discuss in detail what ‘under a cloud’ meant, although he did discover that she
would not be welcome back at Sotheby’s under the present management.

And Jack
couldn’t fathom out why, despite her dismissal, she considered joining Fenston
Finance. For that part of his enquiry he had to rely on speculation, because he
couldn’t risk approaching anyone she worked with at the bank, although it was
clear that Tina Forster, the chairman’s secretary, had become a close friend.

In the short
time Anna had worked at Fenston Finance, she had visited several new clients
who had recently taken out large loans, all of whom were in possession of major
art collections. Jack feared that it could only be a matter of time before one
of them suffered the same fate as Fenston’s three previous victims.

Jack ran onto West
86th Street. Three questions still needed answering. One, how long had Fenston
known Petrescu before she joined the bank? Two, had they, or their families,
known each other in Romania? And three, was she the hired assassin?

Fenston scrawled
his signature across the breakfast bill, rose from his place and, without
waiting for Leapman to finish his coffee, marched out of the restaurant. He
stepped into an open elevator, but waited for Leapman to press the button for
the eighty-third floor. A group of Japanese men in dark blue suits and plain
silk ties joined them, having also had breakfast at Windows on the World.

Fenston never
discussed business matters while in an elevator, well aware that several of his
rivals occupied the floors above and below him.

When the
elevator opened on the eighty-third floor, Leapman followed his master out, but
then turned the other way and headed straight for Petrescu’s office. He opened
her door without knocking to find Anna’s assistant, Rebecca, preparing the
files Anna would need for her meeting with the chairman. Leapman barked out a
set of instructions that didn’t invite questions. Rebecca immediately placed
the files on Anna’s desk and went in search of a large cardboard box.

Leapman walked back
down the corridor and joined the chairman in his office. They began to go over
tactics for their showdown with Petrescu. Although they had been through the
same procedure three times in the past eight years, Leapman warned the chairman
that it could be different this time.

What do you
mean?’ demanded Fenston.

1
don’t
think Petrescu will leave without putting up a fight,’
he said. ‘After all, she isn’t going to find it easy to get another job.’

‘She certainly
won’t if I have anything to do with it,’ said Fenston, rubbing his hands.

‘But perhaps in
the circumstances, chairman, it might be wise if I...’

A knock on the
door interrupted their exchange. Fenston looked up to see Barry Steadman, the
bank’s head of security, standing in the doorway.

‘Sorry to bother
you, chairman, but
there’s
a FedEx courier out here,
says he has a package for you and no one else can sign for it.’

Fenston waved
the courier in and, without a word, penned his signature in the little oblong
box opposite his name. Leapman looked on, but neither of them spoke until the
courier had departed and Barry had closed the door behind him.

‘Is that what I
think it is?’ asked Leapman quietly.

We’re about to
find out,’ said Fenston as he ripped open the package and emptied its contents
onto the desk.

They both stared
down at Victoria Wentworth’s left ear.

‘See that Krantz
is paid the other half million,’ said Fenston.

Leapman nodded.
‘And she’s even sent a bonus,’ said Fenston, staring down at the antique
diamond earring.

Anna finished
packing just after seven. She left her suitcase in the hall, intending to
return and pick it up on the way to the airport straight after work. Her flight
to London was scheduled for 5.40 pm that afternoon, touching down at Heathrow
just before sunrise the following day. Anna much preferred taking the overnight
flight, when she could sleep and still have enough time to prepare herself
before joining Victoria for lunch at Wentworth Hall. She only hoped that
Victoria had read her report and would agree that selling the Van Gogh
privately was a simple solution to all her problems.

Anna left her
apartment building for the second time that morning, just after 7.20 am. She
hailed a taxi – an extravagance, but one she justified by wanting to look her
best for her meeting with the chairman. She sat in the back of the cab and
checked her appearance in her compact mirror. Her recently acquired Anand Jon
suit and white silk blouse would surely make heads turn.

Although
some might be puzzled by her black sneakers.

The cab took a
right on FDR Drive and speeded up a little as Anna checked her cellphone. There
were three messages, all of which she would deal with after the meeting: one
from her secretary, Rebecca, needing to speak to her urgently, which was
surprising given they were going to see each other in a few minutes’ time;
confirmation of her flight from BA, and an invitation to dinner with Robert
Brooks, the new chairman of Bonhams.

Her cab drew up
outside the entrance to the North Tower twenty minutes later. She paid the
driver and jumped out to join a sea of workers as they filed towards the
entrance and through the bank of turnstiles. She took the shuttle express
elevator, and less than a minute later stepped out onto the dark green carpet
of the executive floor. Anna had once overheard in the elevator that each floor
was an acre in size, and some fifty thousand people worked in a building that
never closed – more than double the population of her adopted home town of
Danville, Illinois.

Anna went
straight to her office and was surprised to find that Rebecca wasn’t waiting
for her, especially as she knew how important her eight o’clock meeting was.
But she was relieved to see that all the relevant files had been piled neatly
on her desk. She double-checked that they were in the order she had requested.

Anna still had a
few minutes to spare, so she once again turned to the Wentworth file and began
reading her report. ‘The value of the Wentworth Estate falls into several
categories. My department’s only interest is in...’

Tina Forster
didn’t rise until just after seven. Her appointment with the dentist wasn’t
until eight thirty and Fenston had made it clear that she needn’t be on time
this morning. That usually meant he had an out-of-town appointment, or was
going to fire someone.

If it was the
latter, he wouldn’t want her hanging around the office, sympathizing with the
person who had just lost their job. Tina knew that it couldn’t be Leapman,
because Fenston wouldn’t be able to survive without the man, and although she
would have liked it to be Barry Steadman, she could dream on, because he never
missed an opportunity to praise the chairman, who absorbed flattery like a
beached sea sponge waiting for the next wave.

Tina lay soaking
in the bath – a luxury she usually only allowed herself at weekends – wondering
when it would be her turn to be fired. She’d been Fenston’s personal assistant
for over a year, and although she despised the man and all he stood for, she’d
still tried to make herself indispensable. Tina knew that she couldn’t consider
resigning until
..
.

The phone rang
in her bedroom, but she made no attempt to answer it. She assumed it would be
Fenston demanding to know where a particular file was, a phone number, even his
diary. ‘On the desk in front of you’ was usually the answer. She wondered for a
moment if it might be Anna, the only real friend she’d made since moving from
the West Coast. Unlikely, she concluded, as Anna would be presenting her report
to the chairman at eight o’clock, and was probably, even now, going over the
finer details for the twentieth time.

Tina smiled as
she climbed out of the bath and wrapped a towel round her body. She strolled
across the corridor and into her bedroom. Whenever a guest spent the night in
her cramped apartment they had to share her bed or sleep on the sofa. They had
little choice, as she only had one bedroom. Not many takers lately, and not
because of any shortage of offers. But after what she’d been through with
Fenston, Tina no longer trusted anyone.