Pawn (17 page)

As usual for the rest of them seemed to have got away, again, though at least not cleanly. Serina had slipped out, somewhere in the midst of the smoke filling the store, but she was sliced from head to foot and some of those cuts looked deep from the blood soaking her clothes. She’d need medical attention. The surviving Russian, Ivanova had taken three or four shots, but he was apparently wearing body armour. Only the one in his shoulder was likely to need attention. But at least he was wounded enough that he would need some medical help. It was a place to start looking.

Arabas Ben was there of course, and he too had been sliced and diced and would need to seek medical attention. But at least the images of him were very sharp. If he did get away, and a man like him had plenty of contacts, Interpol would have something to use when they hunted him down. He might not be captured in Britain, but with a little luck he would be caught.

As for the bomber, he had got away completely unscathed. Though his face was caught perfectly on the monitor and Interpol would probably have a file on him, he hadn’t been among the survivors or the dead. He hadn’t even been touched. He’d simply lobbed his bombs over the packed shelves, and let the entire disaster become ten times worse as people fired indiscriminately. But of them all, he alone had come out on top. Not only had he not been shot or stabbed, he had got his man, or actually his woman.

The daughter, Tracey Hennassy, he’d nabbed her as she’d been staggering through the smoke and flame holding an injured leg, bashed her over the head, and simply carried her out like a sack of potatoes while flinging more bombs around to add to the confusion. They’d hunt him, but the inspector knew it would take time. And all the while he knew she would be tied up in a chair somewhere, being beaten or worse, tortured for information. And when he had it? That was the next question.

He’d probably kill her, but then she was a part of a criminal family, and her own crimes were no small matter. Her death would not be a loss to the world either, and Barns found he had little sympathy for her. But as for the painting itself? The Rembrandt, if it really was one. Would it be a matter of just picking it up from wherever the Hennassy’s had stashed it? Or would it be another shoot out with more innocent people caught in the crossfire?

And if the others knew the bomber had the girl and was on to the painting? They’d come after him. No matter how he looked at it, Barns knew that things were going to get much worse before they finally ended. And many more innocent people were going to get hurt along the way.

This wasn’t going to end. And the fact that the rest were all looking at him, told him one thing more. Officially or not this had finally become his crime scene. It was with a heavy heart that Barns turned to the others, knowing that they already knew everything he was going to say.

“Alright, by the books people. Peter, the rest of the market needs to be cleared, all the side rooms, chillers and offices checked and secured, and then the surrounding shops. Full body armour and dogs, there could still be a bad guy or two in there. The fallen need to be checked for signs of life, and if they are still breathing, have them stretchered out by the paramedics under close guard. The rest can stay. Everyone here, everyone who made it out, photographed, fingerprinted and statements taken. Full statements, verified if possible. And then forensics. Every inch of that supermarket needs to be checked.”

Quietly they all wandered off to start their work, none of them even complaining about the high handed way he had ordered them around. But then they’d known it was coming.

And in the end, they were far luckier than him. At least they could do their job. He still had no idea where the Hennassy’s were. That meant he was going to be standing there for the rest of the night, listening to the copious reports, and metaphorically twiddling his thumbs as he hoped some crumb of useful information might fall his way.

But he knew it wouldn’t.

*****************

Chapter Eighteen.

“Chief Inspector, thank you for coming.” Agent
Dikē managed a surprisingly convincing smile as she held the door open for him and his sergeant, and ushered them in the room. Cynic that he was, Barns suspected that despite her words on the phone, that could only mean that she wanted something. But as long as she was willing to trade he could live with that. He could live with a lot if it would stop these criminals rampaging through his town, killing innocent people. And if it would give him Venner, so much the better. And the fact that she had called him, that gave him hope.

“I’m sorry for having to meet under such conditions, but we don’t have an office out here in the south east and I didn’t think you’d want to be pulled too far away from your investigation just now.” Maybe she had a point and while it was unusual to meet another officer in a motel room, she wasn’t a local and London was quite some distance to travel for a meeting. But still it was a nice room. A suite in fact, and in a very nice motel, The Manfred. Interpol obviously put their people up in good places when they had to. But then they probably had money and she likely had a very useful expense account. Things simple country coppers like him could only dream of.

Still he didn’t waste his time looking around at all the things he didn’t have, like a huge flat screen telly hanging on a wall or an espresso machine. Instead he walked over to the dining table where the informant was waiting to meet them. The trouble was that he didn’t look much like a normal informant. He looked like a priest and not your common parish vicar either.

“Father?” He stretched out a hand in greeting.

“Archdeacon Fields.” The man even stood up as he shook his hand, well mannered, and despite all the terrible things people said about the church, fairly down to earth. He even offered to pour them a cup of the black coffee from the plunge pot sitting in the middle of the glass topped dining table. Barns declined, having spent the last two days doing nothing but drink coffee and going through endless reports and interviews. He couldn’t take another drop.

“Archdeacon, I’d like you to meet Detective Chief Inspector Barns and Detective Sergeant Hopkins. Detectives, this is Archdeacon Geoffrey Fields of the Archdiocese of Utrecht in the Netherlands. He has special duties for the Pontifical Commission for the Cultural Patrimony of the Church, in relation to several artists. Most notably he’s an acknowledged authority on the work of Rembrandt.” For a while there as she gave his endless titles, Barn’s mind had been turning in circles, until she added the last. It was then that everything abruptly clicked into place.

“You know about the painting?” Of course he did. What else could he know unless these people had come to him in the confessional, and then they didn’t tell the police what they learned.

“Absolutely inspector.”

“And it’s a fake?”

“Oh no.” And just like that Barns’ theory of a theft to hide a fake painting and claim some sort of undisclosed insurance, fell apart. And it was all he’d had to work with, or at least all he’d had to link Venner to this unfolding train wreck of a crime spree. Maybe some of his disappointment must have shown.

“The painting’s genuine. Unknown to the world until now. Unexpected in so many ways. But it’s a Rembrandt. I’ve examined it. A dozen others have as well. The proper scientific tests have been done. And even archaic church records have been checked. It is a Rembrandt, I have no doubt of that.” He didn’t look happy though as he took a sip of his coffee.

“There’s more though.” And Agent Dika looked surprisingly pleased as she said it, like the proverbial cat who’d got the cream. She didn’t say anything more about it though, just nodded to the archdeacon to let him continue. Good interrogation technique that. Let the witnesses speak with as little prompting as possible. If by some insane chance this finally ended up in court, no one could say they’d been coerced or had words put their mouths.

“The painting’s genuine, but Mr. Venner doesn’t own it.” That got Barns’ attention very quickly. The man had a stolen painting? Now that he could believe, and more importantly, it opened up a whole new line of enquiry.

“Archdeacon?”

“He doesn’t own it. The church does. You see he found an abandoned church. A ruin really. One we’d actually forgotten about as well, though it was still the property of the Holy Roman Church. It had been fallen into wrack and ruin centuries before when the town around it died. Mr. Venner arranged to buy it, after buying the land around it and so he claimed, planning to set up an orchard for genetic engineered fruit.”

“With the church in ruins, the town gone and the land around it already his, there seemed little point in keeping it. Especially when he offered such a good price, agreed to keep the building maintained in the condition it was at the time of the sale and said he would allow visitors.”

“It was a good deal.” And it was, save that it was far better for Mr. Venner, who doubtless had no intention of building an orchard there in the first place. He just wanted a cheap Rembrandt.

“But his story of the painting hanging from the wall, that was a lie. There were no paintings hanging from the walls. They were taken away when the church was abandoned centuries before. The records were very clear on that. And even if someone had put it back up later, it would have been spotted when one of our clerics did a presale inspection. There was nothing on the walls, those few walls that still stood. What there was however, was an underground vault. A place where important treasures could be kept under lock and key in times of strife. And a vault that for reasons unknown to us, that was never emptied.”

“So he found the vault and emptied it after making up a far fetched tale about the painting hanging on the wall.” Finally something made sense. A lot of sense. Mr. Venner was a thief, busy covering up his crime as he tried to profit from it.

“Yes inspector, but he didn’t get away with it. Not completely. When we heard of his remarkable find we started checking church records. It seemed somehow unlikely that we could have missed a masterwork hanging on a wall. And we didn’t. The painting was stored in the vault along with many other artworks of the day. Put there because the bishop when he first saw it and its title, couldn’t allow it to be publicly hung. Aphrodite is after all an ancient Greek Goddess, and for a painter recognised by the church to have painted it, would have been an embarrassment. But it was also a masterpiece, and he couldn’t take it upon himself to destroy it. So he locked it away.” Of course he had. Barns could understand that, even if he found himself wishing that the priest had destroyed it and saved the world from the trouble it had caused. It was the only thing that made sense. And Venner had found it and stolen it.

“So the painting’s worth tens of millions, and the church found out it had been robbed blind?” It wasn’t even a question. The next actions were completely predictable. The church had gone through its records, then checked the authenticity of the painting, and then taken action to get their painting back.

“Yes.” The archdeacon nodded a little glumly, and took another sip of his coffee. “And it’s worth a lot more than that.”

“Naturally you launched some sort of claim on the painting?” He nodded again.

“And so Venner couldn’t sell it?” He nodded for the third time and Barns finally knew he had his man. It was so obvious.

“And now we know where the painting is.” You’d think he’d just told them that the Earth was flat from the way that everyone stared at him.

“Venner has a painting worth tens of millions of pounds or more, and he can’t sell it. Not legally. He’d get none of the money and likely go to jail for theft. He can’t even insure it. But he can sell it privately to his black market buddies through a fence as long as no one knows. And if there’s one thing that greedy little bastard can’t do, it’s walk away from a sale.” It was all so logical, as was everything that had followed. Or most of it.

“So he fakes a robbery after carefully authenticating it, finding a local gang, the Hennassy’s and promising them a whole lot of money. They carry out the robbery while he’s away in Thailand and his servants are conveniently off duty. And it goes perfectly.”

“Gas the guards, chain them up. Start the digging. Set the charges. A days work and they’re rich beyond all their dreams. It goes like clockwork.”

“Until the Hennassy’s driving their stolen truck probably with the stolen painting in the back, run into their long lost son and brother, victim of a road crash in what has to be the most unlucky chance encounter ever imagined.”

“They recognise him of course, and that was the genesis of this whole sorry crime wave. They recognise him and have to assume he recognises them. Naturally they have to kill him, so they open fire on him and he dives off the side of the road into a ditch while they careen into his smashed car. Then they have to leave in a big hurry. Quite possibly they thought he was dead, and they knew that between the gunfire and the sound of the car crashes, people would be arriving quickly. And a white van with obvious crash damage on country roads would be noticed. They knew they had to be long gone, quickly. So they drove off after that, leaving Rufus Hennassy alive.”

“That was their second mistake. That they didn’t stay to make sure he was dead. They really needed to. But the first was what started all this. If they hadn’t opened fire, if they’d just driven by, it would all have gone smoothly. But the moment Daryl pulled that trigger, everything went wrong. There were police reports filed, investigations made, and worst of all, reporters. And then someone put Rufus Hennassy together with his family, and a major art theft, and the rest became inevitable.” It was like a series of dominos falling, creating a perfect chain of events.

“Naturally Venner told the press about the painting. He had to. It was probably his plan from even before he had it stolen. He was drumming up interest in it, increasing its value, after publicly confirming its authenticity, and starting a feeding frenzy among his potential black market buyers.”

“Likely the buyers he had lined up before the theft, still wanted the painting as well. Even more than before when he not only authenticated it, but arranged for it to be conveniently lost. A lost Rembrandt. Now that would be priceless. So they sent their people to get it, and thanks to one disastrous road accident they had a name, Hennassy. A crime family and a wayward son, names splashed all over the evening news.”

“Rufus was their way in so they thought. But at the same time the Hennessy’s badly needed their errant son dead. They didn’t know how much he knew. He might be able to furnish whoever caught him with some clues as to where they were. Where they stored their stolen goods.”

“One of the agents, probably the Russians, soon found his house, broke in, found nothing, and then quite probably staked it out and followed him to the hotel after he left. The other agents and maybe the Hennassy’s as well probably followed them. Most of these people probably know each other, and they all realise they are competitors. So they follow each other around, each making sure the other doesn’t find anything before them. And so the fire fight at The Fiddlers was almost predictable.”

“Meanwhile Venner’s still trying to sell his painting, and the chances are that most if not all of the original buyers, and the villainous scum who are his new buyers know that he faked the robbery. But they also know they have competition. Much the same competition they had before the fake robbery. And they know it’s worth even more than they’d imagined. So if they can steal the painting for themselves, they don’t have to bid against anyone, and at the same time Venner can’t say anything. It’s the perfect crime.”

“So after the shoot out at the hotel they’re at war. Everyone’s hunting the thieves. They believe the Hennassy’s are their best shot at getting the painting, and they’re still trying to find Rufus Hennassy. The Hennassy’s for their part are also hunting their son, not knowing what he could give away, like their hideouts, and trying to avoid the others. Venner’s leaking news reports left and right to drum up interest in the painting. And Rufus Hennassy is on the lamb.”

“Somehow, they found him, his family that is, and they do what they desperately needed to do, murdering him on the beach, and they think they’ve got away clean, finally. But they haven’t. Somehow, possibly through Daryl, or maybe by spotting his family checking up on him in the institution, the others managed to track the family down. Chances are a few of the people at the institution have been bribed by both the Hennassy’s and the buyers, and records will like be missing.”