Picture You Dead

61

Sunday, 3 November

Freya Kipling lay back on the recliner sofa, a glass of red wine in one hand and a novel, Where The Crawdads Sing, in the other. Harry sat beside her with a can of lager, watching a replay of Match of the Day, his team, Brighton and Hove Albion, beating Norwich 2–0. Tom was up in his room, gaming with friends online, and Freya glanced at the Libre app to check his glucose level. 8.9. At the high end of the range, but OK.

She and Harry had spent the morning covering three different car boot sales and returned with a small amount of booty. Harry’s purchases had been an ancient, empty tin of Players Medium Navy Cut cigarettes, a tiny bronze statuette of a golfer swinging his club, and a Brighton print, in remarkably good condition, of the old, ill-fated Daddy Long Legs railway, which ran on stilts above the English Channel, along part of Brighton seafront between Kemp Town and Rottingdean, from 1896 to 1900 before being closed down. Freya had bought a pair of matching, purple-tinted glass vases which the vendor had said were Victorian, and a silver salt and pepper cruet set.

Yet again, there had been no sign of the matching paintings that Harry hoped against hope they might find. To Freya’s relief, he was finally coming around to the view they ought to put the Fragonard – well, possible Fragonard – into a major auction house sale and see what happened. Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips were all interested and had kept in regular contact, updating them on their future fine arts sales.

As the game ended, Harry put his can down on the coffee table, then slipped an arm around her shoulder, and nuzzled her ear. She grinned, knowing exactly what he wanted. And why not? Despite being engrossed in her book, even after all these years she still did really fancy him.

She felt an erotic tingling deep inside her, put down her glass and book and turned to kiss him, knowing Tom was in his room and absorbed in the computer game with his mates.

At that moment, their landline phone rang.

As she reached for it, Harry restrained her. ‘Later, baby.’ He nuzzled her ear again, whispering, ‘Now’s not the time for phone calls. It’s probably some insurance company telling us we’ve been in an accident.’

‘It might be Dad, he gets lonely on Sundays sometimes.’

Freya’s mother had died two years ago and her father, whom Harry liked, had been a lost soul since, but determinedly and fiercely independent, refusing to leave his home in Scarborough and come down to live with them.

Harry leaned forward and picked the cordless up off the table and saw it said Number Withheld. He hesitated then answered, ‘Kipling residence, Harry Kipling speaking.’

It wasn’t his father-in-law, but another elderly-sounding man who spoke with a soft, measured American drawl.

‘Good afternoon, sir,’ the man said, consummately polite. ‘I apologize for intruding on your Sunday, but I understand you own a painting that is a good copy of one by the French artist Jean-Honoré Fragonard. Would I be correct?’

‘Who am I speaking to?’ Harry asked.

‘I’m calling on behalf of my employer, who is a major collector of works of art from this period. He would be interested in making you an offer for a private sale – such a sale would save you the very costly fees of an auction house.’

‘And what makes you think I might be interested in selling, even supposing I have such a painting?’

‘Mr Kipling, my employer saw you with this picture on Antiques Roadshow. He is willing to make you a very generous offer, given that the painting is almost certainly a fake.’

‘Really?’ Harry sounded more belligerent than he had intended. ‘Exactly how generous?’ He put the phone onto loudspeaker so Freya could hear.

‘I’m instructed to offer you the sum of fifty thousand pounds.’

Harry caught Freya’s frown. ‘You are joking?’ he replied.

‘Mr Kipling, I am deadly serious. If the picture is a fake, it would be worth, at very best, a few hundred pounds – and that much only if you were lucky. I appreciate that if it did turn out to be original, then it would be worth many multiples of that sum. But really, do you seriously believe something you bought from a car boot sale could be genuine?’

Freya was signalling to him to consider the offer, waving a hand in the air to get him to negotiate upwards.

Ignoring her, Harry said, ‘Actually I do. Three of the major London auction houses want to include it in their next sales. I’ve been given estimates of around four to five million. Your offer is a joke.’

Sounding offended, the American said, ‘Mr Kipling, my employer is a gentleman who doesn’t joke about art.’

Freya signalled. Negotiate, she was indicating.

‘So what would be your employer’s best offer?’

‘I just gave you my employer’s best offer.’

The phone went dead.

Harry, shaken, stared at the phone for some moments, then put it down. Had they been cut off? He looked at Freya.

‘Maybe we should have taken it,’ she suggested.

‘No way! You’ve seen the auction estimates from those houses.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘The estimates if the painting is original.’

‘None of them would be offering to list it if they thought it was a fake. That American was just a dickhead – a chancer.’

‘Fifty thousand pounds would be very useful money, darling,’ she said.

‘Five million would be a lot more useful. He’ll ring back, don’t you worry.’

The American did not ring back.