So now he was standing in the doorway of Honor’s office, smiling as she turned round.

‘Hi.’

‘Hi,’ she said coolly. ‘D’you want something?’

‘No, I’m about to help you,’ he replied, sliding into the room and leaning against the window. The daylight didn’t flatter him, the sun beaming through his thinning hair and shining on his scalp. ‘I heard you mention someone called Honthorst.’

She nodded, wary. ‘What about him?’

‘He was an old client of ours.’

Now she was listening as Mark parted company with the window and perched on the side of her desk.

‘He was up for assault eight years ago. Slashed a man’s face in a pub. His father was a Dutch farmer and Honthorst was shoved into the Catholic Church to cool him down when he was a kid. He became a priest, but left soon after. Has a terribly fierce faith apparently. But he never talks about it – being godly doesn’t really tally with the kind of business he moved into.’

‘Which is?’

‘Debt collecting.’

‘Wow!’ Honor said simply. ‘What happened to the charge of assault?’

‘Victim dropped it. I reckon he thought it wasn’t worth it, that he might end up with a Stanley knife in his face if it went to court. Since then, we’ve heard nothing from Carel Honthorst.’ Mark was happy with his performance. ‘But I remember him well. Huge man. Had something wrong with his skin. Pock-marked, or burnt. He used some kind of stuff to try and cover it up, but it looked awful. Not that anyone would tell him that.’ Mark paused, thinking back. ‘Joking apart, he was fucking terrifying.’

So this was the man Nicholas had mentioned – the man who had followed her brother. The man who was apparently working for the art world and the Church.

‘Do we have an address for him?’

‘Why?’ Mark replied. ‘I’ve told you, he’s dangerous. Besides, any address we had all those years ago probably wouldn’t be relevant now … Anyway, why d’you want to know about him?’

‘Oh, it’s nothing important. His name just cropped up when I was talking to a client.’

The lie caught on Mark’s internal radar, like a fly frying on a butcher’s light.

‘Why would Carel Honthorst come up in a fraud case?’

‘You tell me,’ Honor said lightly, turning back to her work. ‘Thanks for the information, Mark – thanks a lot.’

But her thoughts weren’t on the case, instead they were on what she had said to Nicholas. It had been unforgivable, but for an instant she had doubted him. After all, they had lived different lives for years. What did she really know about her brother? Where he had been. What he had done. Who knew how badly exile had damaged him? He had unnerved her talking about the Church and people following him. And the crucifix …

That had been the real worry – Nicholas talking about a crucifix that had suddenly appeared in his bed. It wasn’t possible for someone to break in, unheard, place a cross in a bed and then disappear. And Father Michael had been asleep, so it hadn’t been him. But that wasn’t all that was worrying Honor – it was the conversation:

‘What are you talking about?’ she asked. ‘The crucifix I gave you—’

‘Was in my bed …’

But it couldn’t have been, Honor thought. Because she had never bought him a crucifix …

So did that make her brother a liar? Or a madman?

Forty-Six

Old Bond Street, London

It was snowing unexpectedly, the white flakes coming down fast. Then, just as suddenly, the rain started, drumming like a thousand tom-toms on the windows of Old Bond Street. Locking the front door of the gallery, Hiram Kaminski turned up the central heating and moved back into his office, settling down behind his desk. Judith was away, visiting her sister in Brighton, unwilling to leave him alone until Hiram insisted.

‘Get out for the day,’ he had told her. ‘Get some sea air – it will do you good.’

‘I don’t want to leave you.’

He had put his head on one side, regarding her. ‘What can happen in a day? We can’t allow ourselves to be frightened—’

‘Thomas Littlejohn sent us those damn notes—’

‘And poor Thomas is dead.’ Hiram had replied. ‘He can’t tell anyone about us. He can’t tell anyone where he sent the secret. Besides, the letter sat next door for three months, my dear. If someone had been watching us, they would have acted long before this.’ He was confident, dismissive. ‘Remember what we decided? The copies of the Bosch papers have been put in the bank. No one knows about them. And no one knows where they are.’

‘So who has the originals?’ Judith asked smartly. ‘Someone must have them.’ She had crossed her arms, defiant. ‘Don’t talk to me as though I’m a fool, Hiram. I understand our position perfectly. Thomas Littlejohn, Claude Devereux and Sabine Monette are all dead. Murdered. That’s no coincidence.’

‘We don’t know that it’s about the secret—’

‘What else could it be about? The price of plums?’ she snapped, irritated.

‘Philip Preston has the chain – he’s putting it up for auction. Why shouldn’t he have the papers too?’ Hiram asked. ‘He’s a sly man is Philip, a born negotiator. Think of the money he could raise with that exposé. Or then again, a man like that could be persuaded to keep it suppressed – for a fee. I don’t suppose the art world or the Catholic Church would like to see it splashed all over the newspapers.’

She had thought for a moment, almost convinced. ‘You think we’re all right?’

He had nodded. ‘I think we’re all right.’ He had kissed her gently. ‘Go to your sister’s and have a day out. Please, forget all this for a few hours.’

But now Hiram was feeling lonely, rather regretting his insistence. As usual the gallery had closed at five, and although he had wanted time to work on the accounts, he was soon restless. Having bought a sandwich from a nearby cafe, he made himself a coffee and perched on the high bar stool in the back kitchen. The view was depressing, the grungy back of the opposite building a morose and uniform grey. Silently he chewed his sandwich, checking the time on his watch. Judith would be back around nine.

His coffee wasn’t to his liking. Hiram preferred a finer grind, but that was his wife’s department. Good thing to have, he thought – a wife. Judith could be irritating, but he loved her. Always had done. And when she gave him a daughter, Helen, he was a happy man. In fact, Hiram thought, staring out at the blank view, he had been pretty lucky.

A light came on suddenly in a window of the opposite building and he glanced up as it was opened. He couldn’t see anyone, but jumped when the window was slammed shut again. The noise startled the pigeons on the rooftops, a shuffle of birds rising up towards the glowering sky.

Hiram finished his sandwich and moved back into his office. Tiredness came over him, a full stomach and the long hours making their presence felt. Yawning, he leaned back in his leather chair and, a moment later, slid into sleep.

Forty-Seven

It had stopped raining at last and the evening was dank and icily cold. Walking quickly, Sidney Elliott lit a cigarette and paused at the end of the street. It was a long time since he had been in London, his life revolving around his consultancy work for Cambridge University and his estranged family. A wife and two daughters lived in what used to be the family home, the house which had sucked money from him for over thirteen years. It didn’t seem to matter that his wife had been a chemist before they had married; after the ink had dried on the licence, she had given in her notice at the laboratory and got pregnant.

The first baby was born with problems. As was the second child. Not life-threatening, just learning problems and balance troubles. Problems that had required extensive and expensive treatment. As the children had gradually recovered, the marriage had gone on a respirator. No one pulled the plug, because Sidney wanted to believe that he could regain his family, that the wasted years could be retrieved. That his spectacular career – held in abeyance because of hospital visits and menial overtime jobs – could be reignited.