Outside, I carefully strapped the Heath Robert into the boot of my Ford Fiesta, a car I’d bought second-hand with proceeds from the sale of four Versace evening gowns and half a dozen hats I’d never worn. I still had clothes in the consignment store near my apartment, and every so often, money would trickle into Chaucer’s carrot fund.
The four-year-old Fiesta was a bit of a come-down after driving a series of brand-new Mercedes for the last decade, but I didn’t care. Better to own my car than to have Piers remind me who financed my lifestyle every five minutes. Or worse still, my parents.
I carefully closed the boot and squeezed through the narrow gap to the driver’s door. According to my father, Hugo had inherited the gallery building from his parents, and it came with a tiny yard and half a dozen parking spaces at the rear—a real luxury in Chelsea. Since I didn’t have parking at my apartment, he let me keep my car there, tucked in between his old Jaguar and Henrietta’s BMW compact. Yet another reason to hang on to my job.
When I set the satnav on my phone, the route was one solid red line from beginning to end. No problem—thanks to Henrietta, I had plenty of time, and I could listen to an audiobook on the way. And stop off for a coffee. And pick up a bag of carrots for Chaucer. And perhaps grab a microwave meal for dinner. The big supermarket near Earl’s Court had a café and free parking, so it seemed rude not to. Far better to get my caffeine fix at Tesco prices than pay through the nose in a hotel bar while I waited for AJ Lonsdale to arrive.
The painting would be okay in the car for a few minutes, wouldn’t it? I’d heard of gadgets that could detect electronics—laptops and the like—but not canvas. Besides, there was CCTV. Surely even the most brazen of thieves would hesitate before breaking into a vehicle in broad daylight in a busy car park under the watchful eyes of a camera.
Should I head to the café first? Or the produce section? After I’d exited the car, I yawned as I carefully skirted around a homeless man and headed towards the store. Why weren’t the doors opening? Oh. Because that was the exit. Duh. Wake up, Bethany. In four hours, I’d see the only male I still cared about, and then I could go home to get some sleep. Honestly, I was so over humans. Give me a horse any day.
CHAPTER 2 - ALARIC
“FUCK, CINDERS—COULD you have found a more inappropriate surveillance vehicle?”
Alaric McLain watched in the rear-view mirror as Emmy Black closed up behind him in a sleek black Aston Martin. Even with his windows shut, he heard her approach.
“I’m sorry, okay?” Emmy’s voice came through the speakers in his rented Honda SUV. “I’ve had two hours’ sleep, and I’m barely functioning. I could’ve sworn there were more cars in the garage, but all that was left was this and a motorbike.”
“Why didn’t you bring the motorbike?”
“You want me to wear leathers in this temperature? I’d sweat like a pig.” Granted, she had a point there. Early May, and the weather in London had gone haywire. The last two days had been like a cheerleader’s pool party—wet and hot. “Plus there was nowhere to put my rifle.”
Alaric didn’t even try to hide his groan. “You brought a rifle? We’re chasing an art thief, not a bunch of terrorists.”
“You told me that terrorists steal art to finance their activities. ‘It’s not like in the movies,’” she mimicked. “‘Forget Ocean’s Twelve and The Thomas Crown Affair.’”
That was true. Many people shared a romanticised image of art thieves, fostered in no small part by Hollywood. In real life, men who took masterpieces didn’t do it for the challenge or a bet—more often than not, they were hardened criminals after cold, hard cash, and paintings made easier targets than, say, a bank or an armoured truck. Narcotics dealers used them as trading cards. Thieves sold them through fences for a fraction of their true value. Or occasionally, they were stolen to order for people who ran roughshod over others to satisfy their selfish desires.
The police didn’t tend to take art theft seriously either. As long as nobody got hurt and the insurance companies paid up, cultural crimes got put on the back burner. Despite the vast sums of money involved, museum heists got handled by the same squad as a common or garden burglary, and those cops didn’t have the knowledge or the resources to recover stolen paintings.
How did Alaric know all this? Because he’d once been a member of the FBI’s Art Crime Team, a small band of investigators and undercover agents who specialised in recovering treasures that would otherwise be lost forever. It had been a surprise transfer, a promotion, and it made a change from dealing with plain ol’ RICO violations. Although the Art Crime Team worked out of Washington, DC, he’d spent much of his time overseas, skulking through the underbelly of society in search of missing cultural artifacts. Many of them made their way to the United States—it was the biggest market in the world for stolen treasures.
One day, Alaric might have masqueraded as a thief, the next, as a middleman or a buyer. Undercover work was his speciality, the ability to hide in plain sight a skill he’d been perfecting since childhood. Colleagues called him a chameleon. His father was a diplomat, and moving from country to country had meant Alaric learned to fit in quickly. He’d lived everywhere from England to Italy to Tanzania to Poland, and as a result, he’d learned more about people than an entire anthropology department. It had been only natural for him to join the CIA after college and take his hobby of being places where he shouldn’t be to a whole other level. Bureaucracy and a boss he couldn’t stand led him to quit after four years, but the FBI had welcomed him with open arms. At least, they had until they’d fired him.
Hence today’s little excursion.
With no Bureau backup anymore, Alaric had been forced to turn to Emmy—his ex-girlfriend and part-owner of Blackwood Security. His own private intelligence agency, Sirius, was still in its infancy, and all three of his business partners were men. They may have been experts in their field, but male-female surveillance teams tended to work better, other than the rare occasions when the female half turned up in a fucking supercar, obviously.
“I’d have preferred you in the leather outfit,” he told Emmy.
“Of course you would, but the bike was a bright red Ducati. Look on the bright side—no sane person would run surveillance in this beast, so Blondie won’t suspect a thing.”
Blondie was a retail assistant named Bethany Stafford-Lyons. They’d met her last night during the Pemberton gallery’s latest exhibition, where they’d snooped around and planted half a dozen bugs in addition to gushing over the paintings and pretending to drink champagne. Her hair colour came from a bottle, the contents a shade or three too light for her complexion, and either she’d been on vacation recently or her tan was applied by hand as well. Stafford-Lyons took care of herself, but she wasn’t a princess. When she’d handed Alaric a drink, she’d tried to hide the chips in her manicure, then blushed when she noticed him glance at a faint bruise on her calf still visible through her sheer pantyhose.
A preliminary background check showed Stafford-Lyons was a thirty-four-year-old divorcee who’d worked at Pemberton Fine Arts for the last five months, but apart from that, she hadn’t held a job since she graduated from Oxford with a first-class honours degree in art history. Credit records were sketchy, mainly because she didn’t appear to have paid for anything prior to her divorce. A kept woman. Her only sins had been an arrest at an animal rights protest when she was eighteen and a handful of parking tickets. One of Alaric’s business partners, Judd, ran in those sorts of circles, and his assessment of her father suggested a manipulative man who’d stop at nothing to get his own way. The ex-husband? A “blithering idiot, a sycophant.”