Gauguin Connection, The
Read Gauguin Connection, The Online
Authors: Estelle Ryan
Tags: #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, #Mystery, #International Mystery & Crime, #Thrillers & Suspense, #Crime, #Heist, #Spies & Politics, #Conspiracies, #Crime Fiction
A Genevieve Lenard Novel
By Estelle Ryan
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever, including internet usage, without written permission from the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
First published 2012
Copyright © 2012 by Estelle Ryan
Second edition
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is purely incidental.
TABLE OF CONTECTS
.
Anna J Kutor, for your unending and unconditional support. Jola, for being my personal cheerleader. Linette, for being the best sister anyone can ask for. Moeks, for your faith in me. Wilhelm and Kasia, for valuable friendship and fabulous photos. Paula and Kamila for suffering through the first ten chapters with me and your support. Beth Bruno for editing. RJ Locksley for the second edit. Ania B, Krystina, Maggie, Julie, Kasia, the B(l)ogsusters and Jane for all your interest and support.
Murdered artists. Masterful forgeries.
Art crime at its worst.
A straightforward murder investigation quickly turns into a quagmire of stolen Eurocorps weapons, a money-laundering charity, forged art and high-ranking EU officials abusing their power.
As an insurance investigator and world renowned expert in nonverbal communication, Dr Genevieve Lenard faces the daily challenge of living a successful, independent life. Particularly because she has to deal with her high functioning Autism. Nothing
—not her studies, her high IQ or her astounding analytical skills—prepared her for the changes about to take place in her life.
It started as a
favour to help her boss’ acerbic friend look into the murder of a young artist, but soon it proves to be far more complex. Forced out of her predictable routines, safe environment and limited social interaction, Genevieve is thrown into exploring the meaning of friendship, expanding her social definitions, and for the first time in her life be part of a team in a race to stop more artists from being murdered.
For more information on the paintings, music and topics covered in this book, please visit:
http://estelleryan.com/the-gauguin-co
nnection.html
“Pleased to meet you, Ms. Lenard.” The stranger held out his hand expectantly. His rumpled overcoat and the dark circles under his eyes gave the impression that he hadn’t slept in days. Even his voice sounded exhausted, despite the crisp British accent. The tightened muscles of his unshaven jaw, his stiff neck and pursed lips sent a very obvious message.
“It’s Doctor Lenard.” I kept my hand to myself. “And you’re not.”
“Not what?” The dishevelled stranger pulled his hand back. His lips moved from a simple disagreeable pucker to a full-on sneer.
“Not pleased to meet me.” I had lost count of how many times I had witnessed the corners of someone’s lips drawn toward the ears to produce a sneering dimple in the cheeks. The vast majority of those expressions had been aimed at me.
“Genevieve, play nice.” Phillip Rousseau’s voice carried enough warning to pull my focus from the angry man. Despite his French background, Phillip pronounced my name in a manner more familiar to English speakers. I had insisted on that. It might be thought as callow, but it was my small rebellion against a pretentious sophistication forced on me from birth.
Phillip had been my boss for six years and none of his non-verbal cues or voice inflections was unknown to me. At present he was annoyed by my lack of sociability. He moved from behind the conference table. For a moment I thought he was going to position himself between me and the other man. Most people couldn’t handle me and some outright avoided me, but somehow I had never managed to rattle Phillip. Or rather, never managed to rattle him too much.
Since my first day in this exclusive insurance company, he had also taken on the role of a buffer between me and the other staff. Something I was sincerely grateful for. I didn’t like working with other people.
My boss came to stand next to me, far enough that I didn’t feel crowded, but close enough for me to smell his expensive aftershave. As usual he was wearing a bespoke suit with a price tag that could feed a medium-sized African family for a year.
The stranger was studying me. My immaculate appearance, all the way down to my matching handbag, was not endearing me to him. Phillip should be glad that I possessed enough restraint to not comment on the man’s lack of grooming in this elegant conference room. At least I had made some effort this morning with my appearance in an attempt to blend in. I doubted the stranger had made an effort in decades.
Ignoring the guest, I lifted an eyebrow at Phillip. “What am I doing here?”
“Okay, everyone, let’s start over. Nicer.” Phillip gave both me and the stranger warning looks and sighed. “Genevieve, this is Colonel Manfred Millard. He is the Deputy Chief Executive for Strategy at the EDA.”
“The European Defence Agency?”
“You’ve heard of us.” A surprised lilt changed Colonel Millard’s statement into a question.
I gave him an impatient look. He was stating the obvious, so I moved on. “What is the EDA doing here, Phillip?”
“Let’s sit down and discuss this.” As the CEO of one of the most prestigious insurance companies in Europe, Phillip was a master in mediation and negotiation. Competencies I admired but had no desire to emulate. At times his unending patience frustrated me beyond my limits and I had a suspicion that today was going to be one of those days. Phillip pointed to the chairs at the far end of the conference table, where folders and piles of documents lay open. Phillip and Colonel Millard must have been here for a while.
I moved to the chair Phillip indicated to me. Both men sat down and Phillip started organising some of the documents into a folder. A photo lying on top of another pile of official looking reports caught my eye. The moment I focussed on it, I knew I had made a mistake. A monumental mistake. The photo was sucking me into its depravity. Into its sadness. Its wrongness.
It was clearly a crime scene photo with markers pointing out things I had no interest in learning more about. A young girl, dressed in loose-fitting pants, a colourful tie-dye T-shirt and a bright-green spring coat spread open under her, was lying on the ground. If it weren’t for the hole in her forehead and the pool of blood framing her head like an evil halo, she would’ve looked peacefully asleep.
My heart was pounding in my skull and my breathing had become alarmingly shallow. Focussing on the simple task of inhaling and exhaling became a near-insurmountable undertaking. The blood surrounding the unfortunate victim’s head kept drawing me back into the photo with a strength greater than the last two decades of training I had forced on myself. I could feel the warm stickiness of the girl’s blood between my fingertips. There had been days that I hadn’t wanted to train my mind, but the thought of feeling like I did at this very moment was what had motivated me to search, study, train and focus. A lot of good it was doing me now. I couldn’t snap out of this.
“What’s wrong with her?” The contemptuous stranger’s voice reached me through the thick muddiness in my head.
“Oh, dear.” I barely heard Phillip’s whisper, but a second later he was next to me, mercifully not touching me. “Genevieve, sit down. Come now. Two steps to your left. Slowly does it. The chair is right behind you. There you go.”
I focussed on my own gasping breaths and Phillip’s calm voice. If I held on for long enough, the black void threatening my peripheral vision might disappear. If I fought it, maybe it would not close in on me until the darkness swallowed me and spat me out hours later, unaware of what had occurred.
“I’m going to look in your handbag for your sheets. Stay with me, Genevieve.”
I was genuinely glad that I had confided in Phillip the day my handbag had fallen off the chair, spilling its contents. The embarrassment of that day was nothing compared to what I was facing right now. I heard a rustle in my handbag and then the magical empty music staff paper appeared in front of me. “Here’s a pencil as well. Manny and I will give you a moment.”
Like a man having travelled in the desert for days would reach for a bottle of water, I grabbed the pencil and drew an accolade, connecting four staves, preparing it for the composition for four violins. I loved the elegance of the G-clef and took care drawing it with perfection. I barely heard the half whispered conversation taking place next to me.
“What’s wrong with her, Phillip?”
“She has some form of autism. Writing Mozart’s compositions calms her.”
“Why does she need calming?”
“Manny”—Phillip sounded exasperated—“she saw the photo.”
“Oh.” There was a pause. “Do you really think she is the best person for this job?”
“Without a doubt. How long have you known me?”
“I don’t know. Thirty years?”
“Thirty-four years this December. And how many people do I trust?”
There was a long silence. “I don’t think you totally trust anyone.”
“I trust Genevieve. There is not an ounce of deceit in her. She’s the only one for this job.”
“How long have you known her?”
“She started working for me six years ago. I met her at the opening of an exhibition. She was standing at a sculpture close to me while I was discussing business with a potential client. Unsolicited she walked up to me and told me that this man was lying to me and most likely was planning to defraud my company. I hired her on the spot.”
“Why have you not told me about her?”
“For what reason? Are you interested in all my staff? The guy who services our coffee machines?”
“No need to get testy, Phillip. Just tell me more about her.”
“Her speciality is reading body language. Whenever we have a claim that seems dubious, we video the interview and she views it. Not once has she been wrong in her assessments. She doesn’t only read people and situations to the point where it feels like sorcery, she also notices patterns. When she’s not viewing footage, she goes through claims and policies, and has picked up seven cases of fraud when our specialists and our extremely expensive software programmes had failed to pick anything up. She has single-handedly saved my company more than fifteen million euros.”
I was a page and a half into the Adagio of Mozart’s String Quartet No.1 in G major. I would need another page and a half to finish this movement, but already I felt considerably more in control. My breathing had almost returned to normal and the threatening blackness had receded.
Manny’s shocked response to Phillip’s explanation nearly elicited a smile. A few more bars and I would be in control enough to join in their conversation. And savour the fact that the man who had so easily disregarded me now spoke with grudging respect.
“She looks so normal though.”
“Manny, hold your tongue. She’s not deaf. People with a high-functioning form of autism like Genevieve work among us all the time. A lot of people go undiagnosed and never receive the help and support they need. They just become marginalised as strange or eccentric.”
“Are you preaching to me?”
“Yes, he is and he should.” I squared the two sheets of handwritten music and carefully placed it next to me, aligning it to the edge of the conference table. I would finish the last page later.
“My apologies. I didn’t mean to offend you.” The EDA official lifted his hands in a pacifying gesture of surrender. His increased blink rate indicated that he was truly troubled.
“Most people are ignorant about a lot of things. I’ve come to accept it.”
His eyebrows shot up.
“Genevieve, we need your help,” interrupted Phillip.
“Actually,
I
need your help.” Manny squared his shoulders and jutted his chin. “I have a sensitive problem at work and don’t know who to trust.”
“Your work is defence. How can I possibly be of help? I work with art and insurance.”
“You work with patterns, body language and deception spotting. Those are the skills I need.”
I manipulated my body in such a way that Manny could receive all the signals possible to let him know I was not interested. I pointed my feet to the door, looked askance at him through narrowed eyes and blocked my body with my right hand on my left shoulder in a miniature body-hug.
“Manny, maybe you would allow me to explain the situation to Genevieve?” Phillip’s deep voice brought the tension in the room down a notch. Manny sighed and I unblocked my body. I would never dream of showing Phillip such disrespect.
“Please, explain to her.” Manny sat back, splaying his legs in front of him.
“Genevieve.” Phillip waited until I looked at him before he continued. “Manny and I have been friends for—”
“Thirty-four years. I heard you.”
“I know.” He gave Manny a quick reprimanding glance and continued. “Of the few people I trust—”
“You said that you trust me.”
“That is true. You are the only person I trust implicitly. There are, however, a few other people I trust and Manny is one of those. He’s one of the good guys.”
“Oh.” If Phillip declared Manny a good guy, I would accept that. I wouldn’t have to like it, but accept it I would. My extensive studies had prepared me in many ways for understanding the human psyche and behaviour, and reading all the subtle nuances of non-verbal communication. But until the day Phillip had employed me, I’d had only had academic knowledge.
It was Phillip, through tremendous patience, who had introduced me to the more real-life applications of that knowledge, including the confusing concept of good and bad guys. His earlier declaration of unconditional trust in me moved me in a way I had not yet experienced. Being brought up by parents who had been agonisingly embarrassed by me, I had never known acceptance or trust until six years ago. It still jarred me.
Phillip inhaled and exhaled very slowly before he continued. “Manny came to me for assistance and I would like to h
elp him. But to do that I need
your
help.”
“For what?”
“This case.” He pointed at the files, which had been closed so the offending photos were out of sight. “A girl was murdered four weeks ago. It’s very unfortunate that you had to see the photo, but at least now you know.”
I took a shaky breath and nodded for Phillip to continue when he lifted an enquiring eyebrow. I distanced myself from the story and listened with an objective ear, another skill I had acquired out of necessity.
“Patrolling police officers noticed a large man searching through what appeared to be a pile of rags in an alley.”
“Where did this happen?” I asked.
“Here in Strasbourg. The police officers became suspicious of the man in the alley. So they went closer and that’s when they saw that the pile of rags was in actual fact a dead girl. The man was searching through her clothing for something. The moment he saw the officers, he ran, but they caught up with him. When he realised that there was no escape, he pulled out his gun and shot himself.”
“Then the murder case is closed. What is the bigger problem?”
Manny sat up in his chair and copied Phillip’s neutral tone. “The murderer’s fingerprints identified him as a Russian tourist who had entered Europe through Spain on a supposed holiday. That was three days before the murder. It has since been discovered that he had hired a car under another name. He had all the legal documents for that identity. We followed his progress to France through the petrol stations where he filled up and the hotels he paid for with the credit card under the other name.”