“Yes, but—”
Too late. The blonde from last night parked a black car behind Rafiq’s taxi, blocking us in. Shit! I fumbled for the lock with trembling fingers, but the man pulled the door open before I could find it.
“Ms. Stafford-Lyons, this is an unexpected pleasure.” He was still smiling, and it was quite disarming. “Good drive?”
“No, it was bloody terrifying.” The words popped out before I could stop them. Did I mention my tendency to babble when I got nervous?
He motioned for me to exit the vehicle, and then Rafiq piped up.
“We are lost.”
Good grief. The man rolled his eyes, and a hysterical giggle bubbled up my throat. My accomplice and I were so bad at subterfuge it was laughable.
Just for a second, I wondered if this could all be a bad dream. If the American and the blonde and the teenage car thief were figments of my overactive imagination. I dug a pink-lacquered fingernail into my arm, and it hurt. Dammit.
I climbed out of the car slowly, hesitantly, because I didn’t have much choice in the matter. The blonde exited her car too, and was that blood on her?
What the hell had I got involved in?
CHAPTER 10 - ALARIC
LOST? ALARIC HAD met a lot of bad liars in his time, but this guy won the trophy. Who was he, anyway? Another fool Pemberton had suckered into his sly little game?
On the plus side, it wasn’t the owner of the shitty farmhouse who’d arrived home, but making up a story to get rid of Stafford-Lyons and her sidekick wasn’t an option. She knew too much, perhaps even more than him.
The curse of Emerald had struck again.
“Lost? I’d say that’s unlikely. You didn’t trust your middleman?”
Alaric motioned at Emmy to hang back. Whatever happened, he needed to resolve the situation quickly so she could get to a hospital. Broken noses could be nothing or a whole heap of trouble.
“My what?”
“Your middleman. The girl who picked up the painting.”
“Picked up? What?”
“The painting.” Alaric said the words slowly. “At the grocery store.”
Stafford-Lyons looked genuinely confused. A world-class actress, or denser than the bronze statue she’d tried to sell him last night? Back then, he hadn’t realised just how involved she was in Pemberton’s scheme, and he didn’t want to admit how close he’d come to buying the damn thing. Judd always said he was a sucker for a pretty smile.
Guilty as charged.
But Alaric wouldn’t let that impact on work. Not when Emerald and his ruined reputation were at stake.
“Nobody picked up a painting. My car got stolen out of the car park, and I realised it must’ve been the girl who walked into me in the store, and I was going to call the police, but I left my phone in the car, and then I remembered I could track the phone with an app, so I called a taxi. Well, I didn’t call the taxi, a homeless man did, and—”
Alaric turned to the guy behind the wheel. “You’re a cab driver?”
“Yes, we are lost.”
“Cut the bullshit, okay?”
This was so messed up. Could Stafford-Lyons genuinely have been that unlucky?
“You’ve got a painting with you?” Alaric asked her.
“In the boot of my car? Yes, a Heath Robert gouache on paper.”
“You’re certain of that?”
“I put it in there myself.”
“I meant, are you certain it’s a Heath Robert?”
“Well, yes. It’s a gift for a friend of Hugo’s. Hugo Pemberton,” she added. “He owns the gallery where I work.”
“I know who Hugo Pemberton is.” Could Alaric have made yet another Emerald-related fuck-up? It was entirely possible. So many times, the universe had tried to tell him that the masterpiece was lost for good, but he just couldn’t take the damn hint. “You saw the painting?”
“The colours are stunning. Robert captured the sunrise over the Serengeti perfectly, and the trees… Uh, you don’t care about that, do you?”
“When did you see the painting?”
“Last week, when Hugo had it on display in his workroom. At the time, I didn’t realise it was intended as a gift, but Hugo’s always been generous with his friends.”
“You didn’t see it today?”
“Hugo packed it ready to travel. You can’t just throw a piece like that into a frame and hope for the best.” She checked her watch. “And I need to deliver it to Richmond. I’m already late.”
Alaric revised his earlier assessment. He’d put money on the fact that Stafford-Lyons wasn’t lying, and she didn’t come across as stupid either. More naïve. No matter, letting her drive off into the sunset with a questionable package clearly wasn’t an option.
“How long have you worked for Pemberton?”
“Five months.” Correct. “But why all these questions? Who are you?”
“I’m a private investigator. A client hired me to search for a missing painting.”
After decades of practice, lies rolled off Alaric’s tongue with ease. Especially ones that weren’t too far from the truth.
“Well, I don’t have your painting. Whoever told you I did was wrong.”
How confident was he that Red After Dark was in the back of Stafford-Lyons’s car? Alessandra had her own agenda, but Alaric was ninety-five percent certain she wouldn’t have called him with a bogus tip. How would it benefit her if he went after Pemberton? The answer: it wouldn’t. She’d only been at the gallery because the drug-peddling asshole whose inner circle she’d worked her way into had wanted to buy a gift for his mother, and for the past five years, she’d worked narcotics, not property theft. Of course, she could have made a mistake. She wasn’t an art expert.
And even if Alessandra had identified the painting correctly, Pemberton could have been lying when he told her it would be picked up today. That ninety-five percent chance dropped below fifty-fifty once all the variables were taken into account. Bad odds. Worse was the fact that Alaric had been outed. There would be no more skulking around the Pemberton gallery, no more covert visits while posing as a customer. He’d have to send Judd or Ravi or possibly Naz, and they had enough of their own shit to deal with without embarking on a wild goose chase after a painting more elusive than any ghost.
Or he could take a chance. All or nothing.
Maybe it would work out and maybe it wouldn’t, but what did he have to lose?
One thing was for sure—they couldn’t hang around. As well as Emmy needing medical attention, they had a teenager trussed up like a bondage victim, and…what the fuck? A guy stumbled through the front door of the farmhouse wearing only a pair of boxers. Emmy leapt from the car and went after him before Alaric could blink, but Stafford-Lyons’s eyes bugged out of her head.
“Who on earth is that?”
“I was about to ask you the same question.”
“Have I wandered into an alternate universe? Today’s been the most disastrous day of my life, and if you’d met my family or my ex-husband, you’d know that was a big deal.”
And Alaric was about to make it worse. She was right—there was a man waiting for the painting in her trunk, and he wouldn’t wait forever. They only had a tiny window of time in which to act.