Picture You Dead

67

Sunday, 3 November

Stuart Piper cared.

In truth, he cared far more for the past than the present. You had to live in the now, you were trapped in that, he knew. But the present was a conveyor belt that was forever tipping you off its edge, unprepared, into an uncharted future. You could only get perspective by looking at the past and – unlike the present and the future – if you had the luxury to choose, you could decide where in the past you wanted to be.

Piper had just that luxury of choice. And this Sunday night he spent surrounded by the past in his favourite room, the Hidden Salon. It was windowless and paintings hung on all four walls. Soft light glowed from the crystal chandeliers suspended from the ceiling, and subtle light from the lamps over each picture. The log fire blazing in the hearth made it as warm as the womb. Real candles burning in two candelabras on the table in front of him completed the ambience he loved so much.

In the sixteenth century, Europe was under the spiritual leadership of the Roman Catholic Church. Religious beliefs were a matter of life and death. When Henry VIII sought an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, who had failed to give him a male heir, the Pope refused. Henry responded by splitting from the Catholic Church and founding the Church of England. After his death, his son, Edward VI, during his brief reign, helped turn England further into a Protestant nation.

Edward was succeeded by his sister, Mary, who did an immediate reversal, turning England back into a Catholic state. Anyone who refused to give up their Protestant beliefs was burned at the stake, earning the Queen the soubriquet Bloody Mary. Subsequently, her sister, Queen Elizabeth, who wanted a strong, independent England with its own religion and trade and foreign policy, re-established the Church of England. She made it high treason for a Catholic priest to even enter England, and anyone found aiding or abetting a Catholic priest faced torture and death.

Priest hunters were established to locate any such Catholic priests. Hiding places, known as priests’ holes, became commonplace. Sometimes, in smaller houses, these were little more than cubby-holes behind fireplaces, in attics and in cellars. But in grander Tudor houses, such as the one Piper owned, there was often fine accommodation behind false walls. Like this salon, concealed behind a secret door in the library.

Some collectors bought art for investment. Others to display their wealth. Both kinds of people, Piper despised. The art on his walls was there because he loved it, much of it representing a world he wished he could have lived in. At least through these paintings he could achieve some of that, albeit vicariously.

This Hidden Salon was where he loved to spend his evenings. Oftentimes thinking about who might once have been concealed here. Catholic priests. Outcasts, like himself.

Cohiba cigar in one hand, 1967 Hine single cask cognac in the balloon in the other, he loved to lounge back, in his crimson smoking jacket, on one of the three ornately embroidered – and original – Louis Quatorze sofas arranged around the Queen Anne coffee table, surrounded by the paintings on the wall that brought him the most happiness of all the art in his vast collection.

All of these in this room were by French artists of the fête galante period.

He found such tranquillity in these works in particular. They took him back to a place long before he’d had his face irreparably smashed and where his bitterness and anger had been ignited. Long before the humiliation of his parents when he’d come out, at eighteen, and they’d pretty much disowned him from that point. They could never accept his sexuality.

These paintings were from a point in history where hedonism rocked and anything went. These elegant people, in their fine clothes, in such beautiful settings. Where lovers forever stared into each other’s eyes; where musical instruments were played with abandon; where breasts were proudly and shamelessly bared; where life was eternally bacchanalian and sublime. A world where the trees were forever dappled by a sun that never set. Where time was suspended on a state of permanent elegance and joie de vivre.

Like the Keats poem of the two lovers frozen forever on a Grecian urn, all these characters on his walls lived eternal gilded lives inside their gilded frames. They gave the delicious lie, Piper thought, that the past was somehow a less dark and murderous place than the present.

And in this room, with everything old or vintage, including his cigar and Patek Philippe watch – although, at sixty years old, that pretty much counted as modern in this environment – the only real intrusion of the modern day was the presence of the three mobile phones laid out on the table in front of him.

Unless anger counted as an intrusion, too.

And Piper was feeling anger tonight. He didn’t like being screwed over, and someone was doing just that, royally. Instead of indulging his normal Sunday evening pastime of looking at one of these paintings, studying the characters, trying to imagine their lives, and visualizing himself there, he was staring at a blank piece of wall. Onyx-coloured. A blank space where there should have been a painting hanging tonight.

Spring. Autumn. Winter. Those three pictures by Jean-Honoré Fragonard were there, with the glaring gap of the missing Summer between them. A painting that right now he was being cheated out of by a clever-dick forger.

He took a deep sip of his drink and puffed hard on his cigar to bring it back to life, then blew a series of smoke rings at the ceiling. He always blew smoke rings when he was angry, to calm himself down. Watching their perfect grey-blue circles rise upwards and slowly dispersing. Then he allowed his mind to reflect on how he’d acquired these first three of the Four Seasons.

Starting with Autumn and Winter.

They’d been discovered ten years ago in the priest’s hole of a derelict French chateau west of Paris. The owners, a prominent aristocratic Roman Catholic family, had been guillotined during the Terror of the French Revolution, following the de-Christianization acts of France, in 1793. France did not have the same reverence for historic buildings as England and this ruin was in the process of being demolished when the discovery had been made.

Fortunately for Piper, the foreman was a crook with no knowledge of art, and quietly flogged the two pictures to a local antiques dealer for a few euros. Piper’s second stroke of luck was when the dealer, aware the paintings were old but having no idea of what they actually were, took them to a fine art specialist. The man was part of Piper’s international network of contacts constantly on the lookout for just such missing grand master works of art. The specialist had bought them from the dealer for the equivalent of £20,000, which the dealer was deliriously happy with. And the specialist had then flogged them to Piper for £100,000 the pair.

It had been a punt for Piper, but Robert Kilgore had been reasonably confident, both from all the history of the paintings he’d been able to glean, and from his own personal eye and judgement, that these were genuine Fragonards. Knowing his boss’s ruthlessness – and violent streak – it had been a gamble for Kilgore, too. Piper would not have been a happy bunny if the pictures had been by a pupil of, or other lesser artist than, Fragonard. But he would have been even less happy if they’d subsequently turned up in a saleroom at a major auction house and gone under the hammer for millions.

Fortunately for Kilgore, his subsequent attempts at establishing the provenance – while maintaining the total anonymity of his boss – looked increasingly promising. Two scholars, considered the world’s experts on Fragonard, had created in 1982 what had become accepted as the authorized list of his works. It included an entry for the four lost Fragonard paintings of the four seasons. Their provenance, right back to the family who had owned the now-demolished chateau, was well documented along with prints of each of the paintings that had been made in Fragonard’s studio.

His next step, to confirm his assessment, had been to hand the paintings over to the octogenarian fine arts consultant to several top auction houses, Sir George Shaw, the renowned world expert on French masters. Shaw had first taken microscopic paint samples from a certified original Fragonard to compare the pigments that had been used by the artist. They had passed this test. Shaw had one final stage – the one he had told Kilgore about many times before – and which had previously exposed as a forgery many seemingly perfect originals.

The brushstroke technique of an artist was as unique as his or her handwriting. It was sometimes, but not always, possible through microscopic examination to detect if these brushstrokes were the original flourish of the artist with gay abandon, or the slower and more painstaking attempt at mimicking them. In much the same way, Shaw had explained, that a handwriting forgery could be detected.

Shaw had declared these pictures, without doubt in his opinion, to be the work of Fragonard.

Just as he had, subsequently, made the same declaration on the painting Charlie Porteous had had in his possession.

When word had reached Piper that Charlie Porteous was surreptitiously showing around to an expert what might be another of the missing Four Seasons paintings, Piper’s interest – and excitement – had been piqued. Quite apart from how it might enrich his life, he was well aware how having three of the four would potentially enrich his coffers, should he ever need to sell. But there was a big, pretty near unsurmountable, problem. He’d done business with Porteous once, and to his chagrin was well aware that the dealer would never in a million years do business with him again.

It was his own fault, he rued. He’d stiffed the famous London art dealer a few years earlier with a brilliant Tintoretto fake, commissioned from Daniel Hegarty, and executed to perfection by the forger, right down to the stencils on the back and the auction lot numbers of previous salerooms. Every detail was correct, especially the brushstroke technique that Tintoretto himself employed and which Hegarty had perfected.

Then, out of the blue, the long-lost original of the Tintoretto had turned up in Venezuela, in a haul of art looted by the Nazis – and with unassailable provenance. Charlie Porteous had come after him for the two million quid he’d paid, and Piper had told him to go fuck himself.

Porteous had been faced with a massive hit, both financially and reputationally. Even after the Venezuelan art dealer who had made the discovery had been found shot dead in an underground car park, and the original had conveniently disappeared, there was not a lot of love lost between Porteous and Piper.

Which was why, when Piper heard that Porteous might have a long-lost Fragonard Four Seasons painting, and that the expert was excited that it might be original, he knew that the respected dealer wouldn’t have sold it to him, not in a million years. Not for any money.

But he had to have that painting.

Which left him with two options.

Pay big money through an intermediary.

Or.

He’d gone for the second option, and it had worked out fine. Since October 2015, the Fragonard Spring that Porteous had been in possession of was securely hung on the wall in front of him, to the left of the onyx gap. Because of the vagaries of proof in the art world, regardless of who had seen and opined on this painting, no one was ever going to be able to definitively link it to the death of Charlie Porteous.

Piper blew another smoke ring. A magnificent one, even if he said so himself. It circled, then spiralled towards the three Fragonards, getting broader and thinner as it rose. Just one more, to fill that gap.

Tomorrow morning, after that scumbag forger had been taught a lesson by Bobby Kilgore, that gap would be gone. Filled by the original that Hegarty would hand over.

Filling a long, aching and hard-won gap in Piper’s life.

As well as adding several zeros to his net worth.