Clean Break

I rubbed a smudge of gel over my fingers and thrust them through my hair, which I’d kept fairly short since I was shorn without consultation earlier in the year. My right eye still looked a bit red, but this was as good as it was going to get. A quick squirt of Richard’s Eternity by Calvin Klein and I was ready.

I walked down the hall and stood in the doorway. Michael obviously hadn’t heard me. He was deep in a computer gaming magazine. Bonus points for the boy. I cleared my throat. ‘Ready when you are,’ I said.

He looked up and smiled appreciatively. ‘I don’t want to sound disablist,’ he said, ‘but I have to admit I prefer the two-eyed look.’ He closed the magazine and stood up. ‘Shall we go?’

He drove a top-of-the-range Citroën. ‘Company car?’ I asked, looking forward to the prospect of being driven for a change.

‘Yeah, but they let me choose. I’ve always had a soft spot for Citroën. I think the DS was one of the most beautiful cars ever built,’ he said as he did a neat three-point turn to get out of the parking area outside my bungalow. ‘My father always used to drive one.’

That told me Michael Haroun hadn’t grown up on a council estate with the arse hanging out of his trousers. ‘Lucky you,’ I said with feeling. ‘My dad works for Rover, so my childhood was spent in the back of a Mini. That’s how I ended up only five foot three. The British equivalent of binding the feet.’

Michael laughed as he hit a button on the CD player and Bonnie Raitt filled the car. Richard would have giggled helplessly at something so middle of the road. Me, I was just glad of something that didn’t feature crashing guitars or that insistent zippy beat that sounds just like a fly hitting an incinerator. We turned out of the small ‘single professionals’ development where I live and into the council estate. To my surprise, instead of heading down Upper Brook Street towards town, he turned left. As we headed down Stockport Road, my heart sank. I prayed this wasn’t going to be one of those twenty-mile drives to some pretentious bistro in the sticks with compulsory spinach pancakes and only one choice of vodka.

‘You into computer games, then?’ I asked. Time to check out just how much I had in common with this breathtaking profile.

‘I have a 486 multi-media system in my spare room. Does that answer the question?’

‘It’s not what you’ve got, it’s what you do with it that counts,’ I replied. As soon as I’d spoken, I wished I was on a five-second delay loop, like radio phone-ins.

He grinned and listed his current favourites. We were still arguing the relative merits of submarine simulations when he pulled up outside a snooker supplies shop in an unpromising part of Stockport Road. A short walk down the pavement brought us to That Café, an unpretentious restaurant done out in Thirties style. I’d heard plenty of good reports about it, but I’d never quite made it across the door before. The locale had put me off for one thing. Call me fussy, but I like to be sure that my car’s still going to be waiting for me after I’ve finished dinner.

The interior looked like flea market meets Irish country pub, but the menu had me salivating. The waitress, dressed in jeans, a Deacon Blue T-shirt, big fuck-off Doc Marten boots and a long white French waiter’s apron, showed us to a quiet corner table next to a blazing fire. OK, they only had one vodka, but at least it wasn’t some locally distilled garbage with a phoney Russian name.

As our starters arrived, I said ruefully, ‘I wish finding Henry Naismith’s Monet was as easy as a computer game.’

‘Yeah. At least with games, there’s always a bulletin board you can access for hints. I suppose you’re out on your own with this,’ Michael said.

‘Not entirely on my own,’ I corrected him. ‘I do have one or two contacts.’

He swallowed his mouthful of food and looked slightly pained. ‘Is that why you agreed to have dinner with me?’ he asked.

‘Only partly.’

‘What was the other part?’ he asked, obviously fishing.

‘I enjoy a good scoff, and I like interesting conversation with it.’ I was back in control of myself, the adolescent firmly stuffed back into the box marked ‘not wanted on voyage’.

‘And you thought I’d be an interesting conversationalist, did you?’

‘Bound to be,’ I said sweetly. ‘You’re an insurance man, and right now insurance claims are one of my principal interests.’

We ate in silence for a few moments, then he said, ‘I take it you were behind the story in the Chronicle?’

I shrugged. ‘I like to stir the pot. That way, the scum rises to the surface.’

‘You certainly stirred things around our office,’ Michael said drily.

‘The people have a right to know,’ I said, self-righteously quoting Alexis.

‘Cheers,’ Michael said, clinking his glass against mine. ‘Here’s to a profitable relationship.’

‘Oh, you mean Fortissimus are going to hire Mortensen and Brannigan?’ I asked innocently.

He grinned again. ‘I think I’ll pass on that one. I simply meant that with luck, you might track down Henry Naismith’s Monet.’

‘Speaking of which,’ I said, ‘I spoke to Henry this afternoon. He says your assessor was there this afternoon.’

‘That’s right,’ Michael said cagily.

‘Henry says your man put a very interesting suggestion to him. Purely in confidence. Now, would that be the kind of confidence you’re already privy to?’

Michael carefully placed his fork and knife together on the plate and mopped his lips with the napkin. ‘It might be,’ he said cautiously. ‘But if it were, I wouldn’t be inclined to discuss it with someone who has a hotline to the front page of the Chronicle.’

‘Not even if I promised it would go no further?’

‘You expect me to believe that after today’s performance?’ he demanded.

I smiled. ‘There’s a crucial difference. I was acting in my client’s best interests by setting the cat among the pigeons with Alexis’s story. I didn’t breach my client’s confidentiality, and I didn’t tell Alexis anything that wasn’t already in the public domain. She just put the bits together. However, if Henry acted on your colleague’s suggestion and I leaked that to the press, it would seriously damage his business. And I don’t do that to the people who pay my mortgage. Trust me, Michael. It won’t go any further.’

The arrival of the waitress gave him a moment’s breathing space. She removed the debris. ‘So this would be strictly off the record?’

‘Information only,’ I agreed.

The waitress returned with a cheerful smile and two huge plates. I stared down at mine, where enough rabbit to account for half the population of Watership Down sat in a pool of creamy sauce. ‘Nouvelle cuisine obviously passed this place by,’ I said faintly.

‘I suspect we Mancunians are too canny to pay half a week’s wages for a sliver of meat surrounded by three baby carrots, two mangetouts, one baby sweetcorn and an artistically carved radish,’ he said wryly.

‘And is it that Mancunian canniness that underlies your assessor’s underhand suggestion?’ I asked innocently.

‘Nothing regional about it,’ Michael said. ‘You have to have a degree in bloody-minded caution before you get the job.’

‘So you think it’s OK to ask your clients to hang fakes on the wall?’

‘It’s a very effective safety precaution,’ he said carefully.

‘That’s what your assessor told Henry. He said you’d be prepared not to increase his premium by the equivalent of the gross national product of a small African nation if he had copies made of his remaining masterpieces and hung them on the walls instead of the real thing,’ I said conversationally.

‘That’s about the size of it,’ Michael admitted. At least he had the decency to look uncomfortable about it.

‘And is this a general policy these days?’

Slicing up his vegetables gave Michael an excuse for not meeting my eyes. ‘Quite a few of our clients have opted for it as a solution to their security problems,’ he said. ‘It makes sense, Kate. We agreed this morning that there isn’t a security system that can’t be breached. If having a guard physically on site twenty-four hours a day isn’t practical because of the expense or because the policyholder doesn’t want that sort of presence in what is, after all, his home, then it avoids sky-high premiums.’

‘It’s not just about money, though,’ I protested. ‘It’s like Henry says. He knows those paintings. He’s lived with them most of his life. You get abuzz from the real thing that a fake just doesn’t provide.’

‘Not one member of the public has noticed the substitutions,’ Michael said.

‘Maybe not so far,’ I conceded. ‘But according to my understanding, the trouble with fakes is that they don’t stand the test of time.’ Thanking Shelley silently for my art tutorial that afternoon, I launched myself into my spiel. ‘Look at Van Meegeren’s fake Vermeers. At the time, all the experts were convinced they were the real thing. But you look at them now, and they wouldn’t even fool a philistine like me. The difference between schneid and kosher is that fakes date, but the really great paintings don’t. They’re timeless.’