Just admit you were wrong. Just cut off your head would have been an easier option for Altman. He knew he had been tricked, but not how. The dealer of whom he had been so dismissive had duped him – but how had he done it?

Graver smiled at him. Altman had been so easy to set up: he loved giving his own opinion and he loved seducing women. In the time Melissa had so perfectly managed to distract him, Graver had swapped the two canvases inside the frame. The canvas that Altman marked and signed was the genuine Corot. While he was busy staring at Melissa, Graver had put the Corot into the frame first, the Rubens behind it. The historian never realised there had been two paintings. He had been right about the Corot, it was genuine. But he had signed and authenticated the Rubens.

The sheer joy of the plot was threefold: Graver duped Michael Altman and got his revenge for the Turner affair, repaid Martin Kemper for his previous trickery, and last, but very much not least, made his family proud.

*

Oh yes, he was a happy man, Graver thought, making his way back into the Lamberts’ palatial home and mingling with the throng of wedding guests. He was perfectly safe: Altman would never admit his mistake, and no one would ever know that the Rubens was merely the work of one of the Master’s students. Worth millions? Never. Fifteen thousand at best.

“Happy?” Graver asked his wife, kissing her cheek and watching as Gordon Lambert clinked his glass and called for silence.

It was good to feel that he was on a par with the Lamberts, if only for the wedding. Oh yes, Graver thought, no one would think he was a klutz now. No more patronising comments from the despicable Josephine; no more put-downs from the King of Plastic, Gordon Lambert. He had done his daughter proud.

The burly Gordon clinked his champagne glass again and everyone finally quietened down. Sentimentally, he gazed at his son and daughter-in-law. “I’m so happy to welcome you to our family, Antonia,” he began. “My sweet and beautiful daughter-in-law, my son’s lovely new bride…” Everyone beamed. “I had hoped for some time that Benny would find the right woman, and he has…” Everyone beamed a bit more. “I’m so happy, so happy…” The beaming took on stratospheric proportions. “And I want to give you kids something to start off your married life…”

Pam clenched Graver’s arm. Money, maybe. A boat. A sports car. A little pad next to the Lamberts’ home in the Bahamas…

“This is for you two,” Gordon said, throwing back his arm as a servant entered, carrying something carefully. Then, with a flourish from Gordon, the man lifted a painting above his head. “It’s a Rubens!” Gordon said as a gasp went up around the room. He was showing off, bragging in front of the assembled guests. Throwing his money and power around. “A genuine Rubens…” Gordon repeated, beaming at the newly-weds, who were astonished. “It’s to start off your own collection…” His big flushed face was smug as he continued to boast. “A Rubens. Worth millions. How many other newly-weds get a present like that?”

How many indeed, Graver thought, laughing. Everyone put it down to his drinking too much champagne, but for several minutes afterwards Graver Hirst kept laughing. Martin Kemper, Gordon Lambert and Professor Altman all hoodwinked. So many egos toppled in one fell swoop.

And all by a dealer who had lost his edge.

THE KILLER, THE PAINTER AND THE WHORE

Every story begins somewhere – with an event, a person, a situation. The Caravaggio Conspiracy is a tale of missing paintings and murder. The Killer, the Painter and the Whore is the introduction to this book.

Flak Tower

Berlin, 1945

He could hear the guns clearly, even through the five-metre-thick walls of the Flak Tower. The building consisted of a cellar and six upper floors, the tower itself as tall as a thirteen-storey building. And in every room on the second floor – crammed in, piled up, every centimetre of wall space taken – was an accumulation of priceless artefacts and paintings culled from fourteen Berlin museums, including the Kaiser Wilhelm. So precious and valuable were they that the rooms were climate-controlled to protect the masterpieces, something the officials had neglected to extend to the third-floor hospital.

He had heard the rumours, of course. Fabulously valuable works of art just beneath his feet. Paintings and sculptures collected for centuries, salivated over by the rich and gawped at by the poor. Works usually protected and alarmed in galleries, but now shipped to the Flak Tower for safekeeping. It made you think, didn’t it? Hitler might believe that he had put all Germany’s treasures away safely, but had he? The Allies were carrying out their bombing raids and the Russians were inching closer every day. It was only a matter of time before someone’s bomb or shell struck the Flak Tower and the works of art it was shielding.

Would it remain standing? Hitler might think it would, but he wasn’t so sure. Hitler had thought many things and was being proved wrong daily. The man winced as the firing began again, crouching down as the stone walls shook. He had been working in the hospital for almost a week, drafted in to help with the injured. Among them was the Luftwaffe ace Hans-Ulrich Rudel, whose leg had been amputated shortly after admission. The man wondered how Rudel felt listening to the sound of planes overhead and not being involved in the fighting. Did he long to be back in the skies or did he wonder just how close defeat was, how near the end they all were? Rudel’s fame would be snuffed out among cowering strangers, under a fall of masonry.

The man was thinking fast. There would be no heroes left when the Tower fell. When Germany was defeated – because it was certain that she would be – who would venerate Hitler or Rudel then? Berlin would be burned out, a ruin of what had been promised, buildings destroyed, a nation now under the Allies’ jackboot. Survival was all anyone was thinking about.

Except for him. Oh, he wanted to survive, he wanted to get away, but not empty-handed. His gaze moved downwards. Like many people in the Flak Tower he had visited the second-floor galleries and marvelled at the bust of Nefertiti and the rows of Old Masters. Even a Caravaggio had been stored there, the head of a beautiful woman staring seductively out of the canvas.

Paintings that were worth millions were hanging just below his feet, within reach and guarded indifferently, especially now as the soldiers were moved away from their duties and harried up into the tower and the ammunitions above.

“God!”

The sound of gunfire was increasing, the vibration making the floor shudder under his feet. The Russians were closing in. Hitler had never expected that. He had built the Tower to protect Berlin, cramming it with ammunition and supplies that were supposed to keep the garrison safe for a year. It had worked for a while, but now Germany was on the defensive.

The terrified people of Berlin had fled the city and crowded into the Flak Tower for refuge. Over thirty thousand terrified souls had run from the approaching Polish and Russians troops and huddled together there, panicked into cramped conditions, where the air was thick and damp, barely breathable, and the water was stale and running out fast.

But he wasn’t thinking about that. Berlin had fallen; Hitler was beaten. But while Germans cowered in stale passageways and tunnels, who would be watching the second floor?

THE PAINTER AND THE WHORE Rome, Italy, 1607

Rome was burning that summer, its streets mottled with heat hazes, the dry scratches of the Coliseum and the Forum home only to feral cats and criminals. Pickpockets used the Coliseum’s passages as their lair and the lowest of Rome’s prostitutes took their clients to the dank old cells where gladiators had once fought. Deals were struck too, money exchanged by dirty hands under the crumbling lintels of long-missing doors.