Harry beamed at the expert. ‘Absolutely!’

  ‘Right, well, I’ll repeat some of my questions when we’re on air. In the meantime, Roger, our runner, will take you to the green room for a little powder on your faces, and some refreshments, if you are happy with that? It will give me a little time to do some research on this remarkable painting.’ He nodded at the young man.

  ‘Make-up?’ Freya questioned.

  ‘It’s a hot day, they’ll dab a little powder on to take off the shine, so you look your best on camera, nice and cool, eh?’ the young man said.

  The sun had been relentless and both Harry and Freya were wilting. Harry relished the chance of getting out of the heat for a while and Freya the chance to check her make-up before being filmed.

  ‘Please come with me,’ the young man said.

  Extremely self-consciously, acutely aware of the gaze of dozens of onlookers, they followed him across the lawn and into a large striped tent, where the air was almost icy cool. Harry was ushered to a chair, with an array of soft drinks and snacks in front of him, while Freya was taken to the make-up artist. After a few minutes it was his turn.

  The pretty female make-up artist chatted to him pleasantly, and it helped soothe his jangling nerves as she dabbed a soft brush over his face, then very carefully rearranged some of his hair.

  Back with Freya, who had miraculously acquired a tan during her time in the chair, he said, ‘You look like a movie star!’

  ‘Really?’ she retorted. ‘I feel like a bag of jelly. What if he humiliates us and tells us it’s a bad copy, like that other guy told the woman behind us?

  Harry put his arm out and held her hand, entwining fingers. ‘I don’t think so – did you see Desouta’s face as he was looking at it? He was impressed – proper impressed. And he said it was remarkable.’

  ‘He also said he needed to do some research on it,’ she retorted sceptically. ‘Which to me means he’s not sure about it.’

  ‘I’m taking his reaction as a positive.’

  She gave him a sideways look. ‘That’s my Harry, ever the optimist.’

  27

  Saturday, 28 September

  Half an hour passed. Then another quarter of an hour. Followed by another. Harry became anxious, his mood swinging from optimist to pessimist. Maybe Freya was right. Maybe they were about to be humiliated, their hopes shattered on camera and broadcast sometime later this year to five million viewers. All their friends laughing at them. Perhaps, he thought, as time went on, and glancing continually at his watch, Desouta would have decided not to have them on camera at all. ‘What time does it finish today?’

  ‘I think they said six o’clock.’

  He glanced at his watch yet again. It was now gone a quarter past four.

  Then, suddenly, the floppy-haired runner, Roger, was standing over them. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Sorry to keep you, Mr Desouta asked for a bit more time, and he’s ready to see you now.’

  As they stood up, Harry asked, ‘Do you know when this particular programme will be broadcast?’

  ‘At the moment, no, it might be later in the autumn schedule, but it can change.’

  They followed him back over the lawn, behind all the rows of experts and the queues until they were back in front of their painting. Harry’s frayed nerves were very slightly mollified by the broad beam on Oliver Desouta’s face.

  Another camera had appeared from seemingly nowhere, and there were now three – two on them and one on Desouta. In addition a bright light was shining on them. Harry was aware there was a crowd gathered around.

  ‘So, tell me,’ the expert asked, ‘how did you come across this wonderful piece?’

  ‘Well, actually,’ Harry replied nervously, stumbling on his words, repeating what he had told Desouta earlier, off-camera, ‘we found it in a car boot sale.’

  Desouta’s eyes widened.

  ‘But not actually the painting you are looking at now,’ Freya added, sounding a lot more assured than Harry felt. ‘What my husband bought was what I thought was a hideous picture of a real old hag.’

  ‘I really bought it for the frame,’ Harry confessed. ‘My wife hated it.’ He glanced at her with a quivering smile. ‘It was only some weeks later that we discovered there was another painting underneath.’

  The expert nodded approvingly. ‘Not uncommon at all for an original picture to be painted over,’ he said. ‘Canvases are expensive and many artists would use one with a painting on it that they perceived to be of no value. Or it could be that sometimes people wanted to mask the true painting – perhaps to conceal it during times of strife, or simply because through ignorance they didn’t realize what the original was. Now, does the expression fête galante mean anything to you?’

  Both of them shook their heads.

  ‘Well,’ he said expansively, ‘fête galante is a category of painting first used for the French painter Jean-Antoine Watteau. His paintings show figures in ball dresses or theatrical costumes at garden parties, or fêtes, in bucolic settings, often with a romantic air about them. When Watteau applied to join the French Academy in 1717, there was no category to describe his works, so the Academy created one for him. Fête galante paintings reflected the growing shift at the time from the severe Baroque style to the more decorative, naturalistic Rococo period. What we have here, if it is original, is a wonderful example.’ He beamed. ‘And you really came across this in a car boot sale?’

  ‘We did,’ Harry said.

  The couple waited expectantly.

  Playing to his audience of not just the Kiplings but the considerable crowd, growing by the second, Desouta asked, ‘Are you familiar at all with the works of Jean-Honoré Fragonard?’

  Both shook their heads.

  ‘He was born in the South of France, in Grasse, famous for its perfumes, and began painting in earnest around 1752. Artists loved the area, because of its beautiful light. So far as we know, Fragonard’s lifetime canon of work was nearly six hundred paintings, many of which have been lost – as is the story of so many of the world’s greatest artists. Looting during wars, especially by the Nazis in the Second World War. And, of course, the French Revolution, which deprived Fragonard of all of his private patrons, who were either guillotined or exiled. He left Paris in 1790 to return to his native Grasse, and did not come back to Paris until early in the nineteenth century, where he died in 1806, almost completely forgotten. Today he is ranked among the greatest painters of all time. Are you aware of what one of his paintings – a portrait – sold for at a Bonhams auction a few years ago?’

  ‘No,’ Harry said, his hopes, which had steadily been rising, now off the scale.

  ‘Over seventeen million pounds!’ Desouta said.

  Harry felt a cold sensation in his stomach.

  The art expert smiled for the cameras and paused, theatrically, for some seconds.

  ‘Now, I don’t want to raise your expectations falsely, but I will tell you that in my years of working for this programme, I’ve never been so excited by a painting. But what I don’t know, of course, because I’ve not had sufficient time to examine it carefully enough, nor to carry out any tests on it such as pigment analysis, is whether this is genuine or a very clever fake. It has long been rumoured that Fragonard did a series of Four Seasons paintings, which were documented as existing prior to the French Revolution, but have never been seen since.’

  Desouta stepped closer to the picture and pointed to the bottom right-hand corner. ‘There is a very small but just visible signature, his trademark signature, just a simple Fragonard. So, tell me, how much did you pay for this painting at this car boot sale?’

  Harry glanced at his wife before replying. ‘Oh, we hadn’t seen the signature. It was twenty pounds.’

  ‘Twenty pounds,’ Desouta echoed. He gave a tilt of his coiffed head, again addressing not just Harry and Freya but the crowd around them. ‘Well, after what I’ve just told you, if it is indeed an original, have you now any idea what it might be worth?’

  Both Harry and Freya shook their heads. ‘No,’ Harry tried to say, but no sound came out.

  Desouta nodded and looked back at the painting on the easel. ‘I would say you might have a bit of a bargain. You would need to have this picture examined a lot more carefully than we are able to on this programme. But if this were to turn out to be in the school of Fragonard, it will be a really valuable and desirable painting.’

  There was a gasp from the crowd, and Desouta paused to let it sink in. The couple were staring at him, open-mouthed.

  He went on. ‘If it can be proven to have actually been painted by Fragonard himself, then it would be almost impossible to put a value on it. I would suggest that as a standalone, Summer, it could be worth, at auction, in the region of four to five million pounds.’

  He paused again to allow the eruption of gasps, ooohs and wows from the crowd to be fully caught, as the camera lenses panned them, before continuing.

  ‘But if this is part of the full set of Fragonard’s long-lost Four Seasons, you could quadruple that, conservatively – and probably even more.’

  There was an eruption of gasps from the crowd.

  Harry felt faint. He gripped Freya’s hand, which felt clammy. He forgot completely their plan to try to not show their emotions.

  ‘Fuck me!’ he said.

  ‘I really could not put it better myself,’ Desouta said. ‘But as we are pre-watershed television, would you mind if we repeated your reaction without the profanity?’

  ‘Sure,’ Harry said, trembling. ‘Yes, yes, of course.’

  Desouta turned to the camera crews. ‘We’d better do a retake.’

  Moments later Roger jumped in front of them with a clapper board, arm raised. ‘Mr and Mrs Kipling reaction, take two,’ he said.

  Bang.

  ‘Blimey!’ Harry said.

  Someone a short distance away called out, ‘Cut!’

  ‘Perfect!’ Desouta beamed. Then he turned towards the stunned couple and said, his voice quiet now so it couldn’t be heard by the onlookers, ‘Thank you so much for bringing this to us. If you would like, Mr and Mrs Kipling, we can arrange for Security to escort you back to your car.’

  Harry nodded lamely, barely able to speak, glanced at his wife and said, ‘Thank you, yes, I think we’d appreciate that.’

  28

  Saturday, 28 September

  It was set to be a glorious Indian summer weekend, but Robert Kilgore was looking forward to proper autumn weather. Raised in the southern state of Georgia, he’d had plenty of sun, enough to last him all his life, and the truth was he actually liked this erratic British climate with all its distinctive seasons – well before global warming had come along and stuck its malevolent spanner in all of that.

  His third wife had recently binned him in favour of a younger man and, hell, he was OK with that. His life was cigarettes and bourbon and doing the boss’s bidding, in service of their great passion for – and lifelong expertise in – old master paintings, particularly the French Romantics. There were few collectors of these in his adopted country who were more astute – or ruthless – than the boss. And Kilgore had yet to be in a relationship that meant more to him than beautiful pictures. A failing, maybe, he rued, but hell, he was a happy and fulfilled man.

  He was tall, with ramrod-straight posture, gained from his time in the military. He had served in Vietnam until he was hit by shell fragments, brought home, and invalided out – some of the shards were still stuck in his chest, too close to his spine to operate on and remove. Hugely annoying how they always set off airport sensors, pinging when he went through Security.

  Bewlay Park was one of the largest stately homes in England still in private hands. It dated back to Tudor times, with its red-brick facade and elaborate chimneys allegedly copied by Henry VIII for Hampton Court, set in two thousand acres of grounds designed by Inigo Jones. There were two lakes connected by a waterfall, and anywhere you stood in the grounds, you could see one of the five Grecian-columned follies. The house, its owner and its contents were protected by a combination of high-tech security and plain, old-fashioned muscle. The two principal members of the latter, identical twins whom Piper had recruited from East London over a decade ago and paid way more than enough to ensure their unswerving loyalty, including giving each of them a cottage in the grounds, were seldom out of sight, visible at any hour of the day or night that Kilgore was here.

  Just as they were now. Silent figures, dressed in black, whom no one in their right mind would want to mess with, standing a discreet distance behind them.

  ‘Tell me something, Bobby,’ Piper said, as they walked through the Long Gallery.

  Bobby raised a flag. Piper only called him that when he was off on one – usually from all the white stuff he put up his nose. Normally and professionally the boss called him by his full name, Robert, as befitted the Southern gentleman that Kilgore gave every impression of being. As always, like the boss, he was immaculately attired. Even on this warm Saturday afternoon, he was dressed in a tailored suit and sporting one of his trademark bow ties. In his disarming Southern accent, he replied, ‘Tell you what, Piper? What y’want to know, sir?’

  Stuart Piper preferred to be addressed only by his last name. With his two Dalmatians in tow, followed by Kilgore, he strode past a Gainsborough, a Watts, a Stubbs painting of a horse and through into the Grand Salon, where he stopped and produced an ancient key from his pocket. He unhooked a Gainsborough miniature and inserted the key into what looked like a hole in the panelled wall behind, and turned it. A section of the oak-panelling, which was actually a secret door, swung open to reveal the stunning, windowless room that was Piper’s private lair. Kilgore had only been admitted a couple of times in all the years he had worked for the boss.

  It was a sumptuous cocoon. Also panelled in dark oak, it was furnished with deep, tasselled sofas and some fine antique pieces. It smelled of residual cigar smoke and furniture polish. A huge chandelier hung from an ornate ceiling rose, above a handsome coffee table. Silver, floor-standing candelabras, containing white, unlit candles, were positioned either side of a large fireplace, which looked freshly stacked with logs and kindling. Kilgore knew what the boss had once told him, that despite this room being windowless, there were ample ventilation ducts.

  But the true wow-factor of this room was Piper’s collection of fête galante paintings, the jewels in the crown of all his art. Twelve of them hung in their gilded frames, each with a lamp above it, along the walls. But there were three that meant the most of all to him. Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s Spring, Autumn and Winter.

  Despite being small, they had one entire wall to themselves, and were well spaced out, although there was an exceptionally large space between Spring and Autumn.

  ‘See that gap, Bobby?’ Piper looked at him coldly. Eyes the colour of high-tensile steel. Whatever genes Piper had inherited, he was missing the ones that carried humour. His charcoal-and-white-striped suit looked, as ever, like it had been freshly pressed this morning, and almost certainly would have been, by his butler, Wilson. Piper’s father, who had been a racecourse bookmaker and died of an embolism when Piper was eighteen, had given him one piece of advice on his deathbed. Always wear a suit and tie, son. People will always take you seriously in a suit and tie.

  His old man should have added that people would also take you seriously if you lived in a house with twenty-two bedrooms, Piper thought, because he did. And people did. They took the mutant – as he referred to himself – with the reconstructed face, very seriously indeed. The right people.

  From as far back in childhood as he could remember, Piper had been obsessed by two things – history and the paintings of the old masters. Whether it was when his mother, who had a love of art, had first taken him to the Royal Pavilion or to the Brighton Museum, or to the National Gallery and later to the Louvre in Paris and the Uffizi in Florence, paintings had brought history alive to him. For good or bad, history had changed with the invention of photography and film. Before that, he so often thought, we only had paintings to give us an idea what the past actually looked like, and that had been a life-long fascination – and had become the source of his vast wealth.

  The idea had occurred to him during those long, dark months of reconstructive surgery. He’d had plenty of thinking time. While the surgeons had been shaping his face, Piper was shaping his life. Making plans, big plans. The big realization.

  Forget his father’s hard work, long hours, out in all weather, reading betting odds from his tic-tac men, making lightning-fast calculations; it might have been a decent living but it never made the old guy rich. Nor for most people did robbery, drugs, all that shit, just pin money and long years inside for anyone getting it wrong. There was a different business, he realized, one that would combine his two loves, history and art.

  A rogue’s business with rich pickings. Extremely rich ones. As he went on to prove over the next forty years. Tracking down old masters that had vanished during times of upheaval. Ones that had been looted or hidden or painted over to conceal their true identity during turbulent times – such as during revolutions or countless wars. The library in his house was full of documentation detailing the existence of the original works and their provenance. And their likely whereabouts today. Documentation that Robert Kilgore accumulated for him and studied assiduously.

  Kilgore was a renowned – and revered – expert in old masters. He’d worked for many years as a consultant for some of the world’s foremost auction houses, including Sotheby’s in New York and Christie’s in London. He had become a go-to expert for art dealers and for insurance companies when they were trying to establish whether a painting was genuine or not. And they were utterly oblivious to the fact that he was a complete crook.

  Robert Kilgore, with his impeccable appearance, his Southern gentlemanly charm and his encyclopaedic knowledge, was someone who everyone trusted. And he fully exploited that ever since he had first formed a working partnership with Piper.