Gauguin Connection, The (4 page)

Manny studied me for a long time. I didn’t flinch. “You are a very strange individual, Ms Lenard.”

“So I have been told.”

“Just one more question.” He swallowed his discomfort. “Do I need to be careful what I say or do in case you, you know, go all weird again?”

“Go all weird?” If I wasn’t still shaken by the uncharacteristic lapse of my control, I would’ve smiled. “I can guarantee you it won’t happen again. And you don’t have to tiptoe around me. I’m much less delicate that most people think.”

The corner of Manny’s mouth quirked into an almost-smile. He reached into the black leather case and took out a black laptop.

“Okay, then. This is the EDA computer. I don’t know what the IT guys did to it, but they claim it is unhackable.” He opened the laptop and waited for it to boot up. It took him ten minutes to take me through all the passwords. It took me only once to memorise both twenty-six-digit passwords. I was impressed with the layered security on the computer and told Manny so.

“Yes, my guys are some of the best. You will have access to much of our database and all the files on this case. We update these files every day as new information comes in. Please take all precautions with this computer.”

I ignored the insulting warning, but Manny obviously wasn’t going to let it go.

“Ms Lenard—”

“Enough with the miss. Call me Doctor Lenard or Genevieve.”

“Okay.” He drew out the word as if unsure which option to choose in case it was the wrong one. “Doc, it is really important that no one else has access to this computer. You can’t allow anyone else to work on it or leave it unattended at any time.”

“Colonel Millard, please don’t insult my intelligence. I fully comprehend the significance of being in possession of this computer.”

“Good. Fine. Okay.”

I waited for him to continue. He didn’t. His blinking increased, indicating discomfort or a stressful thought process. Maybe both. The third time he swallowed heavily, I lost my patience. “Oh, for goodness’ sake, just say it.”

His lips thinned. “This is sensitive information.”

“We’ve already established that.”

“Well, yes.” He took a bracing breath. “This might not be of relevance, but the murderer said something before he shot himself. Actually, he shouted it. He was speaking broken French with a strong accent, so the officers were not sure of everything they heard. The autopsy showed traces of an antipsychotic drug. It would seem that he was being treated for schizophrenia, but had gone off his meds for some time. This might just be a lunatic’s
rantings.”

“Get to the point.”

“According to the officers he shouted, ‘The red will end all twenty-seven daffodils. We will just have to sit back and watch. No one will escape the red who is all-powerful’.”

“You’re right, it sounds like the
rantings of an insane man,” I said. “Or it could be a very bad translation.”

“I’m repeating it word for word, just like the officers noted it down. He shouted it over and over before he killed himself.”

“No need to get defensive, Colonel Millard.”

He sighed. “I’m in a position I don’t like to be in, working with people I don’t know, so forgive me if I’m a bit out of sorts.”

He did not sound or look repentant at all. But he did look stressed. I relented. “I’ll think about these rantings and see if I can find some meaning in it. Maybe ‘red’ is a euphemism or a codeword for something. ‘Twenty-seven’ might also have a different meaning as might ‘daffodils’. He could’ve used the word order of his native tongue, which could change all the words around.”

“Those are a lot of maybes.”

“Applicable to three very incoherent sentences.” I leaned back in my chair. “Is there anything else?”

“Yes. Call me Manny.” He turned and walked to the door, twice looking back at the laptop lying open on my table. “We’ll be in touch.”

“Goodbye, Manny.” I watched him heave another sigh before he left and wondered what he was going to say to Phillip. There was, however, no point in speculating about his issues and complaints now. The challenge was much too alluring to waste time and energy on Manny’s ill-placed worries. Already I had a few ideas how to approach the quest for a connection between the strip of a valuable painting and the Russian murderer. I turned towards the laptop and typed a few words into the search engine.

“Genevieve!” The shock in Phillip’s voice caused me to drag my eyes away from the computer. I had just made yet another connection and was becoming increasingly excited.

I turned to Phillip, who was standing in the viewing room doorway, looking bewildered. “What?”

“My God, how long have you been here?” He moved into the viewing room, looking around with not a small amount of concern. I inhaled sharply to tell him that it was none of his business, but reality rushed towards me like a freight train.

“Since we last spoke.”

“Since Tuesday?” He shook his head as if he had received a hard blow to his skull. “You have been here for the last two days.”

The ten-year-old girl in me, being berated by her embarrassed mother, threatened to hang her head in shame. Fortunately, decades of discipline came to the fore. I straightened my shoulders and blinked slowly. “I lost track of time.”

“It seems a bit more than that.” He dragged a chair closer and sat down far enough from me to make me wonder if he was respecting my personal space or whether I smelled like I had locked myself in the same room for the last forty-eight hours. I looked at my usually immaculate workspace and could understand the frown marring Phillip’s face.

The long desk was covered in over a dozen coffee mugs, chocolate wrappers and crumpled sheets of paper. I took a bracing breath before I could look down at my outfit. My white silk shirt looked like it had been lying at the bottom of the laundry bin for a week. A few stray coffee drops had stained my light green skirt. I didn’t even want to think about the unattractive mascara rings that undoubtedly were lying under my eyes. Not once in my adult life had I allowed myself to reach this point. I pushed away the shame to make place for self-aimed anger.

“I need to clean up.” How had I failed myself twice in so many days? First the episode with the photo and now this. It was unacceptable.

“That can wait. Tell me what’s happening with you.”

“Do I have to?”

“Please.”

I really didn’t want to. The sincere concern pulling at Phillip’s face was the only reason I even considered telling him. He had been the first person in my life who cared to understand me instead of trying to change me. I closed my eyes for a long moment until I found the courage to look at him. “I used to be like this all the time until I was about ten years old. I would get interested in something and completely lose touch with reality. It is called hyperfocus. I would just focus on my new favourite topic and nothing else existed. My nannies didn’t know what to do, and since it kept me quiet they didn’t try to get me out of this zone. It was only when my mother found out that there was hell to pay.” And there hell to pay. Every time.

“But it stopped when you were ten?”

“Yes. That was when I… are you sure you want to hear this?” It was boring and irrelevant to all the interesting things I had discovered.

“Yes, please.”

“Fine. I was ten when my parents had another one of their diplomatic dinners. It was one of my better days and I was observing everyone. That was when I realised how everyone was acting falsely and lying with almost every word that left their mouths. I decided that if that was what it took to get my parents’ approval, I would learn to pretend just like everyone else. It wasn’t difficult to imitate everyone’s behaviour. It was a game for me, something that I considered a challenge and fun. Soon my parents thought that I had grown out of whatever it was that had ailed me before. What they didn’t realise was that I was no longer myself. I was them, their friends, everyone else but me.”

Phillip shook his head in anger like he had the only other time that I had told him about my childhood. “And that is why you studied psychology, body language and all of that.”

“Yes. That helped me understand why people had such a need to pretend. Why people were so good at it.”

“And now you know how to behave like everyone else.”

“Oh, I mastered that skill long before I graduated. It makes people more comfortable. It’s simpler.” And I hated it.

“So why don’t you behave like that around me?”

I thought about it. “You don’t need me to be like you.”

My answer seemed to surprise Phillip, but he quickly recovered. “I do, however, need you to go home and rest.”

I barely refrained from uttering a self-berating grunt. “I will. But first I have to show you what I’ve discovered.”

“I assume that you’ve found something very interesting.”

“Why would you assume that?”

“If you hadn’t, you wouldn’t still be here.”

I gave him a quick smile for his rationale and turned to the monitors. “They are all one man.”

“Who are?”

“The poets.” I organised my discoveries to be displayed on the screens for easy show and tell.

“What poets?” Phillip sounded bemused. “I think you should start at the beginning and tell me as if I am not as intelligent as you.”

“But you aren’t.” The moment the uncensored words left my mouth, I knew it was a faux pas. I slowly turned to Phillip, only to see him clench his teeth so hard that his cheeks were bulging.

“Just tell me from the beginning.”

“Right. The beginning.” I really had to watch my mouth. “I decided to look more deeply into that piece of Gauguin that was discovered on the murdered girl. Our information says that the painting Still Life, The White Bowl was stolen during the Second World War and had been on Interpol’s list of stolen artworks. It was discovered by a Mister Henry Vaughan in 2004. This Mister Vaughan is an art historian who helped a friend move into an old mansion the friend had purchased. In the attic they discovered this painting. It was very fortunate that Mister Vaughan was at hand to identify what it was and make sure that it went back to its rightful owners. And it did, but only after proving provenance and a vigorous authentication process. A year later it was sold at an auction to our client.”

“I know all of this. What was strange about it?” When it came to artwork that had been stolen during any war, Phillip was paranoid about its authenticity and rightful provenance.

“There is no such person as Henry Vaughan, the art historian.”

“Are you sure?”

I ignored his inane question. Of course I was sure. I had not only used my usual internet sources to check the existence of this man, I had also used an EDA database search, not that it did much good. All I got were people with this name not matching any other of the parameters. “There is also no trace of any work record for this man.”

“Interesting.”

“If you look at this article”—I pointed to one of the monitors and zoomed in on the text—“you’ll see quite an impressive resume that he gave to the journalist. It no doubt gave him more credibility for this article and also for the find.”

“I remember reading this interview. He was extremely knowledgeable about the
Cloisonnism and Primitivism eras in which Gauguin worked.”

I made a sound of disbelief. “What is interesting about his resume in this article is that there is no mention of any specific institution where he studied or worked. I spent a lot of time searching for anything else on him and found nothing. Not a published paper, not another interview, nothing. It was as if he only existed for this one occasion.”

“Why would he appear in the public eye only once and then disappear?” Phillip’s eyes widened. “Maybe he died.”

“No, I also checked that. Lacking any other avenues, I decided to see what other artefacts were discovered and returned to their owners and that was when things got interesting. Look at this.”

I used all ten monitors to display more than a dozen different newspaper clippings.

“These are artefacts that were stolen during some conflict in the last century or so. There were so many that it took me hours to sift through them to get to these particular ones. In these articles the artefacts were discovered by a man who claimed to be a museum curator, an amateur archaeologist, a gallery owner”—I pointed to all the different articles—“an art dealer and in this one, an art restorer.”

Phillip was staring intently at the monitors. “All very interesting. It is wonderful that these owners got their art back. I don’t see anything suspicious in this.”

“The museum curator’s name is Edward Taylor, the archaeologist is William Strode, the gallery owner is Isaac Watts, the art dealer is John Milton and the art restorer is Sydney Goddphin.” I finished on a triumphant note and looked expectantly at Phillip. He slowly turned to me with a blank expression. My shoulders slumped. “You don’t know who they are.”

“No, Genevieve, I don’t.”

“Every single one of them was an English poet who lived in the seventeenth century.” I could barely sit still with the excitement bubbling in me. “Can’t you see? The probability of all of these men discovering stolen pieces having names of seventeenth-century poets is incalculable. It simply would not happen.”

“And that led you to believe that this is the same person.”

“Yes!” I all but shouted and took a calming breath. “What I haven’t been able to figure out is his agenda.”

“It would seem clear to me. He reappropriates artworks that were illegally taken from the owners.”

“True. But who is he working for? I couldn’t find anyone fitting his description working for any agencies.”

Phillip narrowed his eyes at the screens. “I see only three photos in these articles.”

“Unfortunately there aren’t any more photos of this man, these men. Only the three photos here.”

“None of these photos really show his face.” A sly smile pulled at the corners of his mouth. “Clever bastard.”

“But these three photos are enough for me to believe that this is the same man.”

“I don’t know, Genevieve.” He tilted his head and narrowed his eyes. “The men in those articles look mighty different from each other.”

“Look at their noses and their mouths.” I reached for a laser pointer and aimed it at the perfectly shaped male lips in each photo. “This is the same man. We can puff out our cheeks and try to draw attention away from our eyes with glasses and contact lenses, but we can’t change the shape of our lips. Or our noses. At least not without the help of a professional makeup artist.”

We spent a full minute in silence studying the photos. I was reliving the burst of excitement that had cannoned through me when I had made this discovery. Almost as if to myself I said, “These articles date back five years. I’m sure that there are many more discoveries and poets if I looked.”

“But why would you look? What is this man’s connection to the case apart from being the one who identified the artefact?”

“Talking about the artefact, did you find out why your client didn’t report the artefact stolen?”

“I haven’t been able to get in touch with him,” grunted Phillip. “He tends to go off the grid for weeks on end and then it’s impossible to reach him.”

“Which means we don’t know if or when the painting was stolen.”

“Correct.”

“Hmm, that might be a problem.”

“It is obvious to me that it would be a problem, but why do you think it’s a problem?”

“So far I’ve found six different poets who discovered another thirteen artefacts. See these three cases?” I pointed to three different screens. “Here the poet declared the stolen artefact a forgery. In each case it caused huge controversies since all three of these pieces were authenticated.”

“By whom?”

“By different and very reputable entities. One of the artefacts alone was authenticated by a museum, a university and an independent archaeologist.”

“This is not good. Not good at all.”

“No, it’s not. It leads me to believe that the poet-man not only recovers artefacts, he also has some ability to identify fakes. After his very public declaration that they were forgeries, they were once again tested and were found to be extremely good replicas of the originals.”

“Okay,” he said very slowly. “How is all this connected?”

“I don’t know yet. But I know it is connected. I’ve found more art murders.”

Phillips blinked at my quick change of topic. “Art murders?”

“Well, murders involving artists.”

“And what does this have to do with our current case?” Phillip looked like he was having a hard time keeping up with me, so I slowed down a bit. I had after all had forty-eight hours to connect all the dots in my mind.

“The girl in the photo is most likely an artist.”

“What makes you think that?”

“While I was looking for more discoveries by poets, I was looking through a lot of newspapers online. In one of the newspapers I noticed a small report about a murder, which made me think again of the girl.” An involuntary shudder rippled through me. “Manny said that she was killed with a Eurocorps weapon, one typically used by agents. Also one on the list of the stolen weapons. So I phoned Jacques.”

“I’m afraid to ask. Who’s Jacques?”

“The detective we worked with last year on the arson case.”

“Please tell me you didn’t give him any of this information. Manny couldn’t emphasise enough how important confidentiality was.” Phillip sounded like someone was strangling him. Strong distress caused his throat muscles to constrict.