They had left her at dusk with his mobile
number, the pavement clear in front of the empty apartment, Marianne Johnson gathering
her belongings to go back to her hotel. They had walked away in the thick heat, him
beaming as if he had acquired some great treasure, holding the painting as reverently as
he would hold Liv later that evening. ‘This should be your wedding present,’
he had said. ‘Seeing as I never gave you anything.’
‘I thought you didn’t want
anything interrupting the clean lines of your walls,’ she had teased.
They had stopped in the busy street, and
held it up to view it again. She remembers the taut, sunburned skin at the back of her
neck, the fine dusty sheen on her arms. The hot Barcelona streets, the afternoon sun
reflected in his eyes. ‘I think we can break the rules for something we
love.’
‘So you and David bought that
painting in good faith, yes?’ says Kristen. She pauses to swat the hand of a
teenager scrabbling among the contents of the fridge. ‘No. No chocolate mousse.
You won’t eat supper.’
‘Yes. I even managed to dig out the
receipt.’ She had it in her handbag: a piece of tattered paper, torn from the back
of a journal
. Received with thanks for portrait, poss called The Girl You Left
Behind. 300 francs – Marianne Baker (Ms).
‘So it’s yours. You bought it,
you have the receipt. Surely that’s the end of it. Tasmin? Will you tell George
it’s supper in ten minutes?’
‘You’d think. And the woman we
got it from said her mother’d had it for half a century. She wasn’t even
going to sell it to us – she was going to give it to us. David insisted on paying
her.’
‘Well, the whole thing is frankly
ridiculous.’ Kristen stops mixing the salad and throws up her hands. ‘I
mean, where does it end? If you bought a house and someone stole the land in the land
grabs of the Middle Ages, does that mean some day someone’s going to claim your
house back too? Do we have to give back my diamond ring because it might have been taken
from the wrong bit of
Africa? It was the First World War, for
goodness’ sake. Nearly a hundred years ago. The legal system is going too
far.’
Liv sits back in her chair. She had called
Sven that afternoon, trembling with shock, and he had told her to come over that
evening. He had been reassuringly calm when she had told him about the letter, had
actually shrugged as he read it. ‘It’s probably a new variation on the
ambulance-chasing thing. It all sounds very unlikely. I’ll check it out – but I
wouldn’t worry. You’ve got a receipt, you bought it legally, so I’m
guessing there’s no way this could stand up in a court of law.’
Kristen deposits the bowl of salad on the
table. ‘Who is this artist anyway? Do you like olives?’
‘His name is Édouard
Lefèvre, apparently. But it’s not signed. And yes. Thank you.’
‘I meant to tell you … after
the last time we spoke.’ Kristen looks up at her daughter, shepherds her towards
the door. ‘Go on, Tasmin. I need some mummy time.’
Liv waits as, with a disgruntled backwards
look, Tasmin slopes out of the room. ‘It’s Rog.’
‘Who?’
‘I have bad news.’ She winces,
leans forward over the table. Takes a deep, theatrical breath. ‘I wanted to tell
you last week but I couldn’t work out what to say. You see, he did think you were
terribly nice, but I’m afraid you’re not … well … he
says you’re not his type.’
‘Oh?’
‘He really wants
someone … younger. I’m so sorry. I just thought you should know the
truth. I couldn’t bear the idea of you sitting there waiting for him to
call.’
Liv is trying to straighten her face when
Sven enters the room. He is holding a page of scribbled notes. ‘I just got off the
phone with a friend of mine at Sotheby’s. So … the bad news is that TARP
is a well-respected organization. They trace works that have been stolen, but
increasingly they’re doing the tougher stuff, works that disappeared during
wartime. They’ve returned some quite high-profile pieces in the last few years,
some from national collections. It appears to be a growth area.’
‘But
The Girl
isn’t a
high-profile work of art. She’s just a little oil painting we picked up on our
honeymoon.’
‘Well … that’s true to
an extent. Liv, did you look up this Lefèvre chap after you got the
letter?’
It was the first thing she had done. A minor
member of the Impressionist school at the turn of the last century. There was one
sepia-tinted photograph of a big man with dark brown eyes and hair that reached down to
his collar. Worked briefly under Matisse.
‘I’m starting to understand why
his work – if it
is
his work – might be the subject of a restitution
request.’
‘Go on.’ Liv pops an olive into
her mouth. Kristen stands beside her, dishcloth in hand.
‘I didn’t tell him about the
claim, obviously, and he can’t value it without seeing it, but on the basis of the
last sale they held for Lefèvre, and its provenance, they reckon it could easily be
worth between two and three million pounds.’
‘What?’ she says weakly.
‘Yes. David’s little wedding
gift has turned out to be a rather good investment. Two million pounds
minimum
were his exact words. In fact, he recommended you get an
insurance
valuation done immediately. Apparently our Lefèvre has become quite the man in the
art market. The Russians have a thing for him and it’s pushed prices sky
high.’
She swallows the olive whole and begins to
choke. Kristen thumps her on the back and pours her a glass of water. She sips it,
hearing his words going round in her head. They don’t seem to make any sense.
‘So, I suppose it should actually come
as no great surprise that there are people suddenly coming out of the woodwork to try to
get a piece of the action. I asked Shirley at the office to dig out a few case studies
and email them over – these claimants, they dig around a little in the family history,
claim the painting, saying it was so precious to their grandparents, how heartbroken
they were to lose it … Then they get it back, and what do you know?’
‘What do we know?’ says
Kristen.
‘They sell it. And they’re
richer than their wildest dreams.’
The kitchen falls silent.
‘Two to three million pounds? But –
but we paid two hundred euros for her.’
‘It’s like
Antiques
Roadshow
,’ says Kristen, happily.
‘That’s David. Always did have
the Midas touch.’ Sven pours himself a glass of wine. ‘It’s a shame
they knew it was in your house. I think, without a warrant or proof of any kind, they
might not have been able to prove you had it. Do they know for sure it’s in
there?’
She thinks of Paul.
And the pit of her
stomach drops. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘They know I have it.’
‘Okay. Well, either way,’ he
sits down beside her and
puts a hand on her shoulder, ‘we need
to get you some serious legal representation. And fast.’
Liv sleepwalks through the next two days,
her mind humming, her heart racing. She visits the dentist, buys bread and milk,
delivers work to deadline, takes mugs of tea downstairs to Fran and brings them back up
when Fran complains she has forgotten the sugar. She barely registers any of it. She is
thinking of the way Paul had kissed her, that accidental first meeting, his unusually
generous offer of help. Had he planned this from the start? Given the value of the
painting, had she actually been the subject of a complicated sting? She Googles Paul
McCafferty, reads testimonials about his time in the Art Squad of the NYPD, his
‘brilliant criminal mind’, his ‘strategic thinking’. Everything
she has believed about him evaporates. Her thoughts spin and collide, veer off in new,
terrible directions. Twice she has felt so sick that she has had to leave the table and
splash her face with cold water, resting it against the cool porcelain of the
cloakroom.
Last November TARP helped return a small
Cézanne to a Russian Jewish family. The value of the painting was said to be in the
region of fifteen million pounds. TARP, its website states in the section
About
Us
, works on a commission basis.
He texts her three times:
Can we talk? I
know this is difficult, but please – can we just discuss it?
He makes himself
sound so reasonable. Like someone almost trustworthy. She sleeps sporadically, and
struggles to eat.
Mo watches all this and, for once, says
nothing.
Liv runs. Every morning, and some evenings
too. Running
has taken the place of thinking, of eating, sometimes of
sleeping. She runs until her shins burn and her lungs feel as if they will explode. She
runs new routes: around the back-streets of Southwark, across the bridge into the
gleaming outdoor corridors of the City, ducking the besuited bankers and the
coffee-bearing secretaries as she goes.
She is headed out on Friday evening at six
o’clock. It is a beautiful crisp evening, the kind where the whole of London looks
like the backdrop to some romantic movie. Her breath is visible in the still air, and
she has pulled a woollen beanie low over her head, which she will shed some time before
Waterloo Bridge. In the distance the lights of the Square Mile glint across the skyline;
the buses crawl along the Embankment; the streets hum. She plugs in her iPod earphones,
closes the door of the block, rams her keys into the pocket of her shorts, and sets off
at a pace. She lets her mind flood with the deafening thumping beat, dance music so
relentless that it leaves no room for thought.
‘Liv.’
He steps into her path and she stumbles,
thrusting out a hand and withdrawing it, as if she’s been burned, when she
realizes who it is.
‘Liv – we have to talk.’
He is wearing the brown jacket, his collar
turned up against the cold, a folder of papers under his arm. Their eyes lock, and she
whips round before she can register any kind of feeling and sets off, her heart
racing.
He is behind her. She does not look round
but she can just make out his voice above the volume of her music.
She turns it up louder, can almost feel the vibration of his footsteps on the paving
behind her.
‘
Liv
.’ His hand reaches
for her arm and, almost instinctively, she launches her right hand round and whacks him,
ferociously, in the face. The shock of impact is so great that they both stumble
backwards, his palm pressed against his nose.
She pulls out her earphones. ‘Leave me
alone!’ she yells, recovering her balance. ‘Just
piss
off
.’
‘I want to talk to you.’ Blood
trickles through his fingers. He glances down and sees it. ‘Jesus.’ He drops
his files, struggles to get his spare hand into his pocket, pulling out a large cotton
handkerchief, which he presses to his nose. The other hand he holds up in a gesture of
peace. ‘Liv, I know you’re mad at me right now but you –’
‘Mad at you? Mad at you? That
doesn’t
begin
to cover what I feel about you right now. You trick your
way into my home, give me some bullshit about finding my bag, smooth-talk your way into
my bed, and then – oh, wow, what a surprise – there is the painting you just happen to
be employed to recover for a great big fat commission.’
‘What?’ His voice is muffled
through the handkerchief. ‘What? You think I stole your bag? You think I
made
this thing happen? Are you crazy?’
‘Stay away from me.’ Her voice
is shaking, her ears ringing. She is walking backwards down the road away from him.
People have stopped to watch them.
He starts after her. ‘
No.
You
listen. For one minute. I am an ex-cop. I’m not in the business of stealing bags,
or even, frankly, returning them. I met you and I liked you and then I discovered that,
by some shitty twist of Fate,
you happen to hold the painting that
I’m employed to recover. If I could have given that particular job to anyone else,
believe me, I would have done. I’m sorry. But you have to listen.’
He pulls the handkerchief away from his
face. There is blood on his lip.
‘That painting was stolen, Liv.
I’ve been through the paperwork a million times. It’s a picture of Sophie
Lefèvre, the artist’s wife. She was taken by the Germans, and the painting
disappeared straight afterwards. It was stolen.’
‘That was
a hundred years
ago
.’
‘You think that makes it right? You
know what it’s like to have the thing you love ripped away from you?’
‘Funnily enough,’ she spits,
‘I do.’
‘Liv – I know you’re a good
person. I know this has come as a shock, but if you think about it you’ll do the
right thing. Time doesn’t make a wrong right. And your painting was stolen from
the family of that poor girl. It was the last they had of her and it belongs with them.
The right thing is for it to go back.’ His voice is soft, almost convincing.
‘When you know the truth about what happened to her I think you’re going to
look at Sophie Lefevre quite differently.’
‘Oh, save me your sanctimonious
bullshit.’
‘What?’
‘You think I don’t know what
it’s worth?’
He stares at her.
‘You think I didn’t check out
you and your company? How you operate? I know what this is about, Paul, and it’s
got nothing to do with your rights and wrongs.’ She grimaces. ‘God, you must
think I’m such a pushover. The
stupid girl in her empty house,
still grieving for her husband, sitting up there knowing nothing about what’s
under her own nose. It’s about
money
, Paul. You and whoever else is
behind this wants her because she’s worth a fortune. Well, it’s not about
money for me. I can’t be bought – and neither can she. Now leave me
alone.’
She spins round and runs on before he can
say another word, the deafening noise of her heartbeat in her ears drowning all other
sound. She only slows when she reaches the South Bank Centre and turns. He has gone,
swallowed among the thousands of people crossing the London streets on their way home.
By the time she makes it back to her door she is holding back tears. Her head is full of
Sophie Lefèvre.
It was the last they had of her. The right thing is for it to
go back.
‘Damn you,’ she repeats under her breath, as she tries to
shake off his words.
Damn you damn you damn you.