Headhunters

6 RUBENS

‘PETER PAUL RUBENS.’

For a moment it was as if all movement, all sound in the room had been frozen. The Calydonian Boar Hunt by Peter Paul Rubens. The sensible assumption would of course be that this was a reproduction, a famous, fantastically good forgery that in itself might be worth a million or two. However, there was something in his voice, something about the stress, something about this person, Clas Greve, that left me in no doubt. It was the original, the bloody hunting motif of Greek mythology, the fantasy animal pierced by Meleager’s spear, the painting that had been lost since the Germans plundered the gallery in Rubens’s home town of Antwerp in 1941 and which until the end of the war people had believed and hoped was in some Berlin bunker. I am no great art connoisseur, but for natural reasons I sometimes had occasion to go onto the Net and check the lists of missing and sought-after art. And this painting had headed the top ten for the last sixty years, eventually more as a curiosity since it was thought that it had been burned up together with half of the German capital. My tongue endeavoured to gather moisture from my palate.

‘You just found a painting by Peter Paul Rubens in a hidden room behind the kitchen in your deceased grandmother’s apartment?’

Greve nodded with a grin. ‘This sort of thing can happen, I have heard. Now, it’s not his best or his best-known painting, but it must be worth something.’

I nodded without speaking. Fifty million? A hundred? At least. Another of Rubens’s rediscovered paintings, The Massacre of the Innocents, had gone for fifty million at an auction just a few years ago. Pounds sterling. Over half a billion kroner. I needed water.

‘By the way, it wasn’t a complete bolt out of the blue that she had hidden art,’ Greve said. ‘You see, my grandmother was very beautiful when she was young, and like almost all of Oslo high society she fraternised with the top German officers during the Occupation. Especially with one of them, a colonel who was interested in art, and who she often told me about when I lived here. She said he’d given her some paintings to hide for him until the war was over. Unfortunately he was executed by members of the Resistance in the last days of the hostilities, people who, ironically enough, had drunk his champagne when times had been better for the Germans. In fact, I didn’t believe most of my grandmother’s stories. Right up until the Polish builders found this door behind the shelving in the maid’s room inside the kitchen.’

‘Fantastic,’ I whispered involuntarily.

‘Isn’t it? I haven’t checked if it is the original yet, but…’

But it is, I thought. German colonels didn’t collect reproductions.

‘Your builders didn’t see the picture?’ I asked.

‘Yes, they did. But I doubt they knew what it was.’

‘Don’t say that. Is there an alarm in the flat?’

‘I hear what you’re saying. And the answer is yes. All the flats in the block use the same security company. And none of the builders has a key since they only work between eight and four in accordance with the house rules. And when they’re there, I’m generally with them.’

‘I think you should continue to do that. Do you know which company the block uses?’

‘Trio something or other. In fact, I was thinking of asking your wife if she knows anyone who can help me to determine whether it’s an original Rubens or not. You’re the first person I’ve spoken to about this. I hope you won’t mention it to anyone.’

‘Of course not. I’ll ask her and ring you back.’

‘Thank you, I’d appreciate that. For the time being, I only know that if it is genuine, it’s not one of his best-known pictures.’

I flashed a fleeting smile. ‘Such a shame. But back to the job. I like to strike while the iron is hot. Which day could you meet Pathfinder?’

‘Any day you wish.’

‘Good.’ My mind whirled as I looked down at my diary. Builders there from eight to four. ‘It suits Pathfinder best if they can come into Oslo after working hours. Horten’s a good hour’s drive away, so if we find a day this week at about six, would that be alright?’ I said it as lightly as I could, but my off-key tone grated.

‘Fine,’ said Greve, who didn’t seem to have picked up anything. ‘As long as it’s not tomorrow, that is,’ he added, getting to his feet.

‘That would be too short notice for them, anyway,’ I said. ‘I’ll ring the number you gave me.’

I escorted him out to reception. ‘Could you order a taxi, please, Da?’ I tried to read from Oda’s or Ida’s face whether she was comfortable with the abbreviation but was interrupted by Greve.

‘Thank you. I have my own car here. Regards to your wife, and I’ll wait to hear from you.’

He proffered his hand, and I shook it with a broad smile. ‘I’ll try to ring you tonight, because you’re busy tomorrow, aren’t you?’

‘Yes.’

I don’t know why I didn’t stop there. The rhythm of the conversation, the sense that an exchange was over told me that it was here I should say the closing ‘Goodbye’. Perhaps it was a gut feeling, a premonition; perhaps a terror that had already implanted itself in me, which made me extra careful.

‘Yeah, decoration is a pretty all-engrossing activity,’ I said.

‘It’s not that,’ he said. ‘I’m catching the early-morning plane to Rotterdam tomorrow. To get the dog. He’s been stuck in quarantine. I won’t be back until late evening.’

‘Oh yes,’ I said, releasing his hand so that he wouldn’t notice how I had stiffened. ‘What breed of dog is it?’

‘Niether terrier. Tracker dog. But as aggressive as a fighting dog. Good to have in the house when you have pictures like this up on the walls, don’t you think?’

‘Indeed,’ I said. ‘Indeed it is.’

A dog. I hated dogs.

‘I see,’ I heard Ove Kjikerud say at the other end of the line. ‘Clas Greve, Oscars gate 25. I’ve got the key here. Handover at Sushi &Coffee in an hour. The alarm is deactivated at seventeen hundred hours tomorrow. I’ll have to find a pretext for working in the afternoon. Why such short notice by the way?’

‘Because after tomorrow there’ll be a dog in the flat.’

‘OK. But why not during working hours, as usual?’

The young man in the Corneliani suit and geek-chic glasses came along the pavement towards the public telephone box. I turned my back on him to avoid a greeting and pressed my mouth closer to the receiver.

‘I want to be one hundred per cent sure that there are no builders there. So you ring Gothenburg this minute and ask them to get hold of a decent Rubens Reproduction. There are lots, but say that we must have a good one. And they must have it ready for you when you come with the Munch print tonight. It’s short notice, but it’s important that I have it for tomorrow, do you understand?’

‘OK, OK.’

‘And then you tell Gothenburg that you’ll be back with the original tomorrow night. Do you remember the name of the picture?’

‘Yes, The Catalonian Boar Hunt. Rubens.’

‘Close enough. You’re absolutely sure we can rely on this fence?’

‘Jesus, Roger. For the hundredth time, yes!’

‘I’m just asking!’

‘Listen to me now. The guy knows that if he pulls a fast one at any time, he’ll be out of the game for life. No one punishes thieving harder than thieves.’

‘Great.’

‘Just one thing: I’ll have to put off the second Gothenburg trip by a day.’

That was no problem, we had done it before; the Rubens would be safe inside the ceiling, but I could feel the hairs on my neck rising anyway.

‘Why’s that?’

‘I’ve got a visitor tomorrow evening. A dame.’

‘You’ll have to postpone it.’

‘Sorry, can’t.’

‘Can’t?’

‘It’s Natasha.’

I could hardly believe my ears. ‘The Russian harlot?’

‘Don’t call her that.’

‘Isn’t that what she is?’

‘I don’t call your wife a Barbie doll, do I?’

‘Are you comparing my wife with a tart?’

‘I said I didn’t call your wife a Barbie doll.’

‘All the better for you. Diana is a hundred per cent natural.’

‘You’re lying.’

‘Not at all.’

‘OK, I’m impressed. But I won’t be going tomorrow night all the same. I’ve been on Natasha’s waiting list for three weeks, and I want to film the session. Get it on tape.’

‘Film it? You’re taking the piss.’

‘I have to have something to look at before the next time. God knows when that’ll be.’

I laughed out loud. ‘You’re crazy.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘You’re in love with a whore, Ove! No real man can love a whore.’

‘What do you know about that?’

I groaned. ‘And what are you going to say to your beloved when you pull out a bloody camera?’

‘She’ll know nothing about it.’

‘Hidden camera in the wardrobe?’

‘Wardrobe? My house has total surveillance, man.’

Nothing Ove Kjikerud told me about himself could surprise me any longer. He had told me that when he wasn’t working, he mostly watched TV in his little place high up in Tonsenhagen, on the edge of a forest. And he liked to shoot at the screen if there was something he really didn’t care for. He had boasted about his Austrian Glock pistols, or ‘dames’ as he called them, because they didn’t have a hammer that stood up before ejaculation. Ove used blank cartridges to shoot at the TV, but once he had forgotten he had loaded a round of live ammunition and had shot a brand-new Pioneer plasma screen costing thirty thousand to smithereens. When he wasn’t shooting at the TV he took potshots through the window at an owl’s nesting box he himself had rigged up on a tree trunk behind the house. And one evening, sitting in front of the TV, he had heard something crashing through the trees, so he opened the window, took aim with a Remington rifle and fired. The bullet had hit the animal in the middle of the forehead, and Ove had had to empty the freezer, which was stuffed with Grandiosa pizzas. For the next six months it had been elk steaks, elk burgers, elk stew, elk meatballs and elk chops until he could stand it no longer and had emptied the freezer again and restocked it with Grandiosa. I found all these stories totally credible. But this one…

‘Total surveillance?’

‘There are certain fringe benefits to working at Tripolis, aren’t there?’

‘And you can activate the cameras without her noticing?’

‘Yep. I fetch her, we go into the flat, and if I don’t enter the password within fifteen seconds the cameras begin to work at Tripolis.’

‘And the alarm begins to howl in your flat?’

‘Nope. Silent alarm.’

Of course I was aware of the concept. The alarm just went off at Tripolis. The idea was not to frighten off the burglars while Tripolis rang the police, who were on the spot within fifteen minutes. The aim was to catch the thieves red-handed before they disappeared with the loot or, if this didn’t work, they could identify them on the video recordings.

‘I’ve told the boys on duty not to turn up, right. They can just sit back and enjoy the sight on the monitors.’

‘Do you mean to say the boys will be watching you and the Russ- Natasha?’

‘Have to share the delights, don’t I? But I have made sure the camera doesn’t show the bed, that’s a private area. But I’ll get her to undress at the foot of the bed, in the chair beside the TV, right. She’ll follow my stage directions, that’s the beauty of it. Get her to sit there touching herself. Perfect camera angle. I’ve done a bit of work on the lights. So that I can wank off-camera, right.’

Far too much information. I coughed. ‘Then you come and get the Munch tonight. And the Rubens the night after tomorrow, OK?’

‘OK. Everything alright with you, Roger? You sound stressed.’

‘Everything’s fine,’ I said, running the back of my hand across my forehead. ‘Everything’s absolutely fine.’

I put down the phone and went on my way. The sky was clouding over, but I hardly noticed. Because everything was OK, wasn’t it? I was going to be a multi-millionaire. To buy my freedom, freedom from everything. The world and everything in it – including Diana – would be mine. The rumbles in the distance sounded like hearty laughter. Then the first raindrops fell, and the soles of my shoes clattered cheerfully over the cobblestones as I ran.

7 PREGNANT

IT WAS SIX o’clock, it had stopped raining and in the west gold streamed into the Oslo fjord. I put the Volvo in the garage, switched off the ignition and waited. After the door had closed behind me, I put on the internal light, opened the black portfolio and took out the day’s catch. The Brooch. Eva Mudocci.

I ran my eyes over her face. Munch must have been in love with her, he couldn’t have drawn her like that otherwise. Drawn her as Lotte, caught the silent pain, the quiet ferocity. I swore under my breath, inhaled hard and hissed through my teeth. Then I pulled back the ceiling upholstery above my head. It was my own invention, designed for concealing pictures that had to be transported across national borders. I had just loosened the ceiling liner – the head liner as they say in car-speak – where it was attached to the top of the windscreen. Then I had stuck two strips of Velcro on the inside, and after a bit of careful cutting around the front ceiling light I had the perfect hidey-hole. The problem with moving large pictures, especially old, dry oil paintings is that they have to lie flat and must not be rolled up, because then there is a risk that the paint will crack and the picture will be ruined. In other words, transportation requires room and the cargo is somewhat conspicuous. But with a roof surface of approximately four square metres there was room for even the big pictures, and they were hidden from prying customs officers and their dogs, who luckily did not sniff around for paint or varnish.

I slid Eva Mudocci inside, fastened the lining with the Velcro, got out of the car and went up to the house.

Diana had stuck a note on the fridge saying that she was out with her friend Cathrine and would be home at about midnight. That was almost six hours away. I opened a San Miguel, sat down on the chair by the window and started to wait for her. Fetched another bottle and thought about something I remembered from the Johan Falkberget book Diana had read to me the time I had mumps: ‘We all drink according to how thirsty we are.’

I had been lying in bed with a temperature and aching cheeks and ears and looked like a sweaty pufferfish while the doctor checked the thermometer and said ‘it wasn’t too bad’. And it hadn’t felt too bad, either. It was only after pressure from Diana that he had mentioned ugly words like meningitis and orchitis, which he had even more reluctantly translated as an inflammation of the tissues round the brain and inflammation of the testicles, but straight away he had added that they were ‘highly unlikely in this case’.

Diana read to me and laid cold compresses on my forehead. The book was The Fourth Night Watch, and since I had nothing else to occupy my inflammation-threatened brain with, I listened carefully. There were two particular things that caught my attention. First there was Sigismund the priest who excuses a drunk with those words ‘We all drink according to how thirsty we are’. Maybe because I found comfort in such a view of humanity: If that’s your nature, then it’s fine.

The second was a quotation from what are known informally as ‘Pontoppidan’s Explanations’ in which he declares that a person is capable of killing another person’s soul, infecting it, dragging it down into sin in such a way that redemption is precluded. I found less comfort in that. And the thought that I might be defiling angel wings meant that I never let Diana in on all the things I was doing to acquire extra income.

She took care of me for four days and nights, and it was a source of both pleasure and annoyance. For I knew I would not have done the same for her, at least not if she had only had lousy mumps. So when I finally asked her why she had done it, I was genuinely curious. Her response was simple and straightforward.

‘Because I love you.’

‘It’s just mumps.’

‘Perhaps I won’t get a chance to show it later. You’re so healthy.’

It sounded like an accusation.

And, sure enough, the day afterwards I got out of bed, went for a job interview with a recruitment agency called Alfa and told them they would have to be idiots not to employ me. And I know how I was able to say that to them with such unshakeable self-assurance. Because there is nothing that makes a man grow beyond his own stature than a woman telling him she loves him. And however much she might have lied to him, there will always be a part of him that is grateful to her for this, and that will harbour some love for her.

I took one of Diana’s art books, read about Rubens and the little there was about The Calydonian Boar Hunt and studied the picture with great care. Then I put down the book and tried to think through the following day’s operation in Oscars gate step by step.

An apartment in a block meant of course a risk of bumping into neighbours on the stairs. Potential witnesses who could catch a glimpse of me. Just for a few seconds, though. They wouldn’t be suspicious then, wouldn’t make a note of my face as I would be wearing overalls and would let myself into an apartment that was being redecorated. So what was I frightened of?

I knew what I was frightened of.

He had read me like an open book during the interview. But how many of the pages? Could he have suspected something? No. He had recognised a method of interrogation he had used himself in the military, that was all.

I grabbed my mobile phone and called Greve’s number to tell him that Diana was out and the name of a possible expert to check the picture’s authenticity would have to wait until he was back from Rotterdam. Greve’s answerphone voice said in English: ‘Please leave a message,’ and so I did. The bottle was empty. I considered a whisky, but dismissed the idea, didn’t want to wake up with a hangover tomorrow. A last beer, great.

The call was about to go through when I realised what I had done. I lowered my phone and hurriedly pressed the red button. I had dialled Lotte’s number, the one under the discreet L in the address book, an L which had made me tremble the few times it had appeared on the display as an incoming call. Our rule had been that I was to ring. I went into the address book, found L and pressed ‘Delete’.

‘Do you really want to delete?’ the phone replied.

I scrutinised the alternatives. The cowardly, faithless ‘no’ and the mendacious ‘yes’.

I pressed ‘yes’. Knowing that her number was printed in my brain in a way that defied deletion. What that meant I neither knew nor wanted to know. But it would fade. Fade and disappear. It had to.

Diana returned home at five minutes to midnight.

‘What have you been doing today, darling?’ she asked, making for the chair, squatting on the arm and giving me a hug.

‘Not much,’ I said. ‘I interviewed Clas Greve.’

‘How did it go?’

‘He’s perfect, except that he’s a foreigner. Pathfinder said they wanted a Norwegian as head; they’ve even said publicly they set great store by being Norwegian down to the last detail. So it will have to be a persuasion job.’

‘But you’re the world’s greatest at that.’ She kissed me on the forehead. ‘I’ve heard people talking about your record.’

‘Which record?’

‘The man who always has his candidate appointed, I suppose.’

‘Oh, that one,’ I said, acting surprised.

‘You’ll manage this time, too.’

‘How was it with Cathrine?’

Diana ran her hand through my thick hair. ‘Fantastic. As usual. Or, even more fantastic than usual.’

‘She’s going to die of happiness one day.’

Diana pressed her face into my hair and spoke into it. ‘She’s just found out she’s pregnant.’

‘So it won’t be that fantastic for a while.’

‘Nonsense,’ she mumbled. ‘Have you been drinking?’

‘A tiny bit. Shall we raise a glass to Cathrine?’

‘I’m heading for bed. I’m exhausted from all this happiness chat. Are you coming?’

Lying curled up behind her in the bed, enclosing her and feeling her spine against my chest and stomach, I suddenly realised something I knew I must have thought ever since the interview with Greve. That now I could make her pregnant. That I was finally on terra firma, on safe ground; a child could not supplant me now. With the Rubens I would at last be the lion, the master Diana talked about. The irreplaceable provider. It wasn’t that Diana had had any doubts before, but I had doubted. Doubted whether I could be the guardian of the nest that Diana deserved. And that a child of all things could cure her blessed blindness. But now she could go ahead and see, see all of me. More of me, at any rate.

The sharp, cold air from the open window was giving my skin goose Pimples on top of the duvet and I could feel an erection coming.

But her breathing was already deep and even.

I let go of her. She rolled onto her back, secure and defenceless like an infant.

I slipped out of bed.

The mizuko altar did not seem to have been touched since yesterday. It was rare for a day to pass without her making some kind of visible change: replacing the water, putting in a new candle, new flowers.

I went up to the living room, poured myself a whisky. The parquet floor by the window was cold. The whisky was a thirty-year-old Macallan, a present from a satisfied client. They were listed on the stock exchange now. I looked down at the garage, which was bathed in moonlight. Ove was probably on his way. He would let himself into the garage and get into the car with the spare keys he held. Remove the Eva Mudocci, put her in the portfolio and return to his car which was parked at a reassuringly safe distance, far enough away not to be connected with our house. He would drive to the art dealer in Gothenburg, deliver the picture and be back by the early morning. But the Eva Mudocci was no longer interesting now, an irritating filler job that just had to be dispatched. On Ove’s return from Gothenburg he would hopefully have a usable reproduction of Rubens’s Boar Hunt, which he would put under the ceiling of the Volvo before we or the neighbours were up.

In the past Ove had used my car to go to Gothenburg. I had never spoken to the dealer, and I hoped he didn’t know that anyone else apart from Ove was involved. That was how I wanted it, as few contacts as possible, as few people as possible who could point a finger at me. Criminals are caught sooner or later and so it was important to have the maximum distance between them and me. That was why I made a point of never being seen in conversation with Kjikerud publicly, and that was why I used a payphone when I called him. I didn’t want any of my phone numbers to be on Kjikerud’s calls log when he was arrested. The sharing out of money and the more strategic planning were done in an out-of-the-way cabin in the Elverum area. Ove rented the cabin from a hermit farmer and we always arrived in separate cars.

I had been on my way to this cabin when it had struck me just how risky it was to let Ove use my car to drive the pictures to Gothenburg. I had passed a speed trap, and there I had seen his almost thirty-year-old Mercedes, a stylish black 280SE, parked next to a police car. And I realised that Kjikerud was obviously one of those notorious drivers who are incapable of keeping to speed limits. I had drummed it into him that he should always remove the AutoPASS unit from the windscreen when he drove my Volvo to Gothenburg as any use was logged, and I was not interested in explaining to the police why I had driven up and down the E6 in the middle of the night several times a year. But when I passed Ove’s Mercedes in the speed trap on the way to Elverum I realised that was the greatest risk we ran: that the police would stop fast drivers and old acquaintances of theirs like Ove Kjikerud on his way to Gothenburg and wonder what on earth he could be doing with a car belonging to the Respectable, hmm, headhunter Roger Brown. And from thereon in it would be bad news all the way. Because Kjikerud versus Inbau, Reid and Buckley had only one outcome.

I thought I could make out something moving in the dark by the garage.

Tomorrow was D-Day. Dream Day. Domesday. Demob Day. If everything went to plan this would be the last coup. I wanted to be finished, free, the one who got away with it.

The town sparkled full of promise beneath us.

Lotte answered on the fifth ring. ‘Roger?’ Careful, gentle. As if she had been the one to wake me and not vice versa.

I hung up.

And drained the glass in one swig.

8 G11SUS4

I AWOKE WITH a splitting headache.

I supported myself on my elbows and saw Diana’s delicate, panty-clad backside sticking up in the air as she rummaged through her handbag and the pockets of the clothes she had been wearing the previous day.

‘Looking for something?’ I asked.

‘Good morning, darling,’ she said, but I could hear that it was not. And I agreed.

I dragged myself out of bed and into the bathroom. Saw myself in the mirror and knew the rest of the day could only get better. Had to get better. Would get better. I turned on the shower and stood under the ice-cold jets listening to Diana cursing under her breath in the bedroom.

‘And it’s gonna be…’ I howled in pure defiance: ‘PERFECT!’

‘I’m off,’ Diana called. ‘I love you.’

And I love you,’ I shouted, but didn’t know if she managed to catch it before the door slammed behind her.

At ten o’clock I was sitting in my office trying to concentrate. My head felt like a transparent, pulsating tadpole. I had registered that Ferdinand had had his mouth open for several minutes and had formed it into what I assumed were words of varying interest. And even though his mouth was still open, he had stopped moving it and instead was staring at me with what I interpreted as an expectant look.

‘Repeat the question,’ I said.

‘I said it’s great I’m doing the second interview with Greve and the client, but you have to tell me a bit about Pathfinder first. I haven’t been told anything, and I’m going to look a complete fool!’ At this point his voice rose into the obligatory hysterical falsetto.

I sighed. ‘They make tiny, almost invisible transmitters which can be attached to people and tracked via a receiver connected to the world’s most advanced GPS. Prioritised service from satellites of which they are part-owners, etc., etc. Ground-breaking technology, ergo buy-out potential. Read the annual report. Anything else?’

‘I’ve read it! Everything about the products is stamped secret. And what about Clas Greve being a foreigner? How am I going to get this obviously nationalistic client to swallow that?’

‘You won’t have to. I will. Don’t worry yourself about it, Ferdy.’

‘Ferdy?’

‘Yes, I’ve been giving it some thought. Ferdinand is too long. Is that alright?’

He stared at me in disbelief. ‘Ferdy?’

‘Not with clients present, of course.’ I beamed and could feel my headache lifting already. ‘Have we finished, Ferdy?’

We had.

Through to lunch I chewed Paralgin and stared at the clock.

At lunch I went to the jeweller’s opposite Sushi &Coffee.

‘Those ones,’ I said, pointing to the diamond earrings in the window.

I had funds to cover the card. For as long as they lasted. And the scarlet box’s chamois surface was as soft as puppy fur.

After lunch I continued to chew Paralgin and stare at the clock.

At five on the dot I parked the car in Inkognitogata. Finding a place was easy; both the people who worked and lived here were obviously on their way home. It had just rained and my shoe soles squelched on the tarmac. The portfolio felt light. The reproduction had been of average quality and of course horrendously overpriced at fifteen thousand Swedish kroner, but that was not very important at this moment.

As far as there can be said to be a fashionable street in Oslo, Oscars gate is it. The apartment buildings are a hotchpotch of architectural styles, mostly new Renaissance. Facades with neo-Gothic patterns, planted front gardens, this was where the directors and top civil servants had their estates at the end of the nineteenth century.

A man with a poodle on a lead was coming towards me. No hunting dogs here in the centre. He looked through me. City centre.

I walked up to number 25, according to the Internet search a block with ‘a Hanoverian variant of medieval-inspired architecture’. It was more interesting to read that the Spanish Embassy no longer had its premises here, hence there would hopefully be no annoying CCTV cameras. There was no one about in front of the property, which greeted me with silent black windows. The key I had been given by Ove was supposed to fit both the front and the apartment door. Anyway, it worked for the front door. I strode up the stairs. Purposeful. Not heavy, not light steps. A person who knows where he is going and has nothing to hide. I had the key ready so that I would not have to stand fumbling by the apartment door; that sort of noise travels in an old apartment building.

Second floor. No name on the door, but I knew it was here. Double door with wavy glass. I was not as calm as I had believed, for my heart was pounding inside my ribs and I missed the keyhole. Ove had once told me that the first thing that goes when you are nervous is motor coordination. He had read it in a book about one-on-one combat, how the ability to load a weapon fails you when you are faced with another gun. Nevertheless I found the keyhole at the second attempt. And the key turned, soundless, smooth and perfect. I pressed the handle and pulled the door towards me. Pushed it away from me. But it wouldn’t open. I pulled again. Bloody hell! Had Greve had an extra lock put on? Would all my dreams and plans be crushed by an extra bloody lock? I pulled at the door with all my strength, I almost panicked. It came away from the frame with a loud crack and the glass in the frame quivered as the echo resounded down the staircase. I slipped inside, carefully closed the door behind me and exhaled. And the thought that had struck me the previous evening suddenly seemed stupid. Would I miss this tension to which I had become so accustomed?

As I inhaled, my nose, mouth and lungs were filled with solvents: latex paint, varnish and glue.

I stepped over the paint pots and the rolls of wallpaper in the hall. Grey protective paper on chequered oak parquet floor, wainscoting, brick dust, old windows that were clearly going to be replaced. Rooms the size of small ballrooms in a line, one after the other.

I found the half-finished kitchen behind the middle room. Strict lines, metal and wood, expensive, no doubt about that; I guessed it was a Poggenpohl. I went into the maid’s room, and there was the door behind the shelves. I had already taken into account that it might be locked, but I knew that if necessary there would be tools in the apartment I could use to break it open.

It wasn’t necessary. The hinges creaked a warning as the door opened.

I stepped into the dark, empty, rectangular room, took the pocket flashlight from inside my overalls and shone the pale yellow light on the walls. There were four pictures hanging in there. Three of them were unknown to me. The fourth was not.

I stood in front of it and felt the same dryness in my mouth as when Greve had mentioned the title.

‘The Calydonian Boar Hunt.’

Light seemed to be forcing its way out of the underlying, 400-year-old layers of paint. Together with the shadows it gave the hunting scene an outline and form, what Diana had explained to me was called chiaroscuro. The picture had an almost physical impact, a magnetism that drew you in, it was like meeting a charismatic person you have only known from photos and hearsay. I was unprepared for all this beauty. I recognised the colours from earlier, better known hunting pictures of his in Diana’s art books – The Lion Hunt, The Hippopotamus and Crocodile Hunt, The Tiger Hunt. In the book I had read yesterday it had said that this was Rubens’s first hunting motif, the departure point for later masterpieces. The Calydonian boar had been sent by Artemis to murder and ravage in Calydon in revenge for humanity’s neglect of the goddess. But it was Calydon’s best hunter, Meleager, who killed the boar with his spear in the end. I stared at Meleager’s naked muscular torso, the hate-filled expression that reminded me of someone, at the spear entering the beast’s body. So dramatic and yet reverent. So naked and yet secretive. So simple. And so valuable.

I lifted the picture, carried it into the kitchen and placed it on the bench. The old frame had, as I assumed it would, a canvas stretcher attached to the back. I produced the only two tools I had brought with me and needed: an awl and wire cutters. I snapped off most of the tacks, pulled out those I would reuse, slackened the stretcher and used the awl to force out the pins. I fumbled more than I usually do; perhaps Ove had been right about motor coordination skills after all. But twenty minutes later the reproduction was finally in position in the frame and the original in the portfolio.

I hung up the picture, closed the door behind me, checked that I had not left any clues and left the kitchen with a sweaty hand round the portfolio handle.

Walking through the middle room, I cast a glance out of the window and caught a glimpse of a semi-stripped crown of a tree. I stopped. The glowing red leaves that remained made the tree look as if it were aflame in the oblique rays of sunlight that leaked out between the clouds. Rubens. The colours. They were his colours.

It was a magical moment. A moment of triumph. A moment of metamorphosis. In such a moment you see everything so clearly that decisions which had seemed fraught with difficulty before suddenly appear as self-evident. I was going to become a father, I had planned to tell her tonight, but I knew now that this was the right moment. Now, here, at the scene of the crime, with Rubens under my arm and this beautiful, majestic tree before me. This was the moment that should be cast in bronze, the eternal memory Diana and I should share and take out on rainy days. The decision that she, unsullied, would believe was taken in a moment of lucidity and for no other reason than love for her and our child-to-be. And only I, the lion, the paterfamilias, would know the dark secret: that the zebra’s throat had been savaged after an ambush, that the ground had been bloodied before the prize had been laid before them, my innocents. Yes, that’s how our love should be consolidated. I took out my phone, removed one glove and selected the number of her Prada phone. I tried to formulate the sentence in my head while waiting to be connected. ‘I want to give you a child, my darling.’ Or: ‘My darling, let me give you…’

John Lennon played his G11sus4 chord.

‘It’s been a hard day’s night…’ So true, so true. Elated, I smiled.

But in a flash I understood.

That I could hear it.

That something was wrong.

I lowered my phone.

And in the distance, but clear enough, I heard the Beatles beginning to play ‘A Hard Day’s Night’. Her ringtone.

My feet were cemented to the grey paper on the ground.

Then they began to move in the direction of the sound, my heart like the heavy beat of kettle drums.

The sound came from behind a half-open door to the corridor on the far side of the reception rooms.

I opened the door.

It was a bedroom.

The bed in the middle of the room was made but had obviously been slept in. At the foot lay a suitcase, and beside it was a chair with some clothes draped over the back. A suit hung on a hanger in the open wardrobe. The suit Clas Greve had worn at the interview. From somewhere in the room Lennon and McCartney were singing in unison with an energy they were never to regain on subsequent records. I looked around. And knelt. Bent down. And there it was. The Prada mobile phone. Under the bed. It must have slipped out of her pocket. Presumably as he tore her trousers off. And she had not realised the phone was gone until… until…

I visualised her tempting backside this morning, the furious search through clothes and handbag.

I stood up again. Much too quickly, I suppose, for the room began to whirl around. I stuck out a hand against the wall.

The answerphone cut in, and there was her chirrupy voice.

‘Hi, this is Diana. I haven’t got my phone to hand…’

True enough.

‘But you know what to do…’

Yes, I did. My brain had registered somewhere that I had used the ungloved hand to support myself, and that therefore I would have to remember to wipe the wall.

‘Have a brilliant day!’

That might be difficult, though.

Beep.