He grunted. ‘Right, yes. Right. I got a call. They said you thought it might be your missing brother … You sure you want to view it?’

‘I don’t want to. I just have to … see if it’s him …’ She was unusually nervous.

‘Have you ever identified a body before?’

‘God, no!’ Honor replied, then dropped her voice. ‘It’s probably not him. My brother, I mean.’ Pushing her hands into her pockets she fought to keep herself calm. ‘I’m not sure. I just want to know …’

‘The body’s badly burnt,’ the pathologist went on, scratching the side of his nose with a biro. ‘Not easy to identify.’

‘His face …?’

The pathologist shook his head. ‘Not much left there, I’m afraid.’ He glanced at the file in his hand. ‘Did your brother have any identifying marks?’

‘No … no, nothing.’ She swallowed.

‘There was no jewellery found on the body.’

‘He didn’t wear jewellery.’ She looked at the pathologist. ‘What about his teeth? You can identify people from dental records, can’t you?’

‘The victim doesn’t have any teeth.’

There was a moment of shock, followed by relief.

‘Then it can’t be my brother! He had great teeth. People always noticed them.’ Her hopes rose, the unease lifting. ‘It can’t be him. My brother had all his teeth.’

‘So did the victim,’ the pathologist continued, ‘until someone knocked them out and set fire to him.’

Seven

Old Bond Street, London

Hiram Kaminski was setting his watch. Of course if he had any sense he would have bought a new timepiece, something expensive which was stylish and accurate, but he knew he could never part with the watch he had. It was the only thing he had left of his late father. Whom he had hated. Just as he hated the watch.

All through Hiram’s childhood the watch had made its ghastly appearance. If he were late home, his father would tap the glass face to indicate his displeasure. If asked the time, his father would look hard at the watch and then make his son guess. Once in a while Hiram would be allowed the privilege of winding the watch, until one day he over-wound it and his father, furious, had to pay to have it repaired. It came back a few days later, its white face peaky, its thin black hands moving a little stiffly, like someone recuperating from two broken arms.

Hiram’s father said that it never kept good time after his son had over-wound it. It was, he said, ‘just another example of how clumsy the boy is.’

So when his father died, Hiram was surprised to find the watch willed to him. For a while he had held it reverently in his hands, and then he had thrown it through the window of their first-floor apartment in Warsaw. The caretaker had found it and returned it to Hiram later, saying that it just went to prove ‘how expensive things were made to last.’

Thirty years on and the bloody watch was still going.

Walking to the door of his office, Hiram glanced out into the gallery beyond. Only two places on earth looked good with flock wallpaper – Indian restaurants and West End art galleries. He let his glance travel along the walls and then settle on a small picture of a peasant, created by A Follower of Bruegel. A follower! Hiram thought. The art world had more followers than Scientology. What he needed was an original Bruegel, or a Bosch. He smiled to himself as a stout woman came down the stairs from the offices above.

‘Hiram, a word,’ she said, following him back into his office and taking a seat. Her legs were too plump to cross, her feet swollen in patent pumps, and her hands gripped a ledger. His wife, Judith. Still going after thirty years. Just like the bloody watch.

‘We have a problem, my dear.’ After a decade in London, she hadn’t lost her accent. Their daughter spoke like a Sloane, but Judith’s accent was Yiddish. ‘Takings are down. We need a big sale, my love – an influx of money.’

‘There’s a recession on,’ Hiram said, pecking his wife on the cheek. Maybe she wasn’t so slim any more, but she was still clever with money. No one could touch her. ‘People aren’t buying the same at the moment.’

‘People aren’t buying from us, my dear.’ She managed to make ‘my dear’ sound like a criticism. ‘We need something splashy. Something BIG.’ Her plump hands made a circle in the air.

‘You want me to buy a round picture?’

She sighed. ‘I want you to buy something people can’t resist. There must be something out there—’

‘There’s a lot out there, but it’s too expensive.’

Judith dismissed the remark. ‘You have to speculate to accumulate. One fine painting is worth six mediocre ones.’ She nodded her head vigorously. ‘I heard something the other day. In the hairdresser’s. I was sitting next to Miriam der Keyser and she was telling me about Gerrit being so ill, and—’

‘And?’

‘She told me about something I think her husband might have preferred her to keep to herself.’ Judith looked round as though expecting Gerrit der Keyser to come in at any moment. ‘He’s had a heart attack, as you know. And I think it made her worry – and when Miriam worries she has a little drink at lunchtime, and then maybe another.’

Hiram tried to keep the impatience out of his voice. ‘What did she tell you that she shouldn’t have?’

‘Miriam said one of their clients had stolen something from the gallery.’

‘Really? Who?’

‘How should I know! She shouldn’t have told me so much, but she was upset, letting down her guard – you know what happens at the hairdresser’s.’

He didn’t, but let it go. ‘So what was stolen?’

Judith leaned forward in her seat, her jacket buttons gaping at the front. ‘Something about Hieronymus Bosch.’

‘A painting?’

‘Did I say a painting?’ Judith asked, shrugging her shoulders. ‘Did I mention a painting? This is the trouble with you men – you exaggerate. It wasn’t a painting, it was something else.’

Silence fell and Hiram was the first to speak. ‘Is it a secret?’

Judith gave her husband a long, slow look. ‘All I know is that one of the customers stole something valuable to do with Hieronymus Bosch. Miriam didn’t say “painting”, so I thought maybe some personal artefact that once belonged to the painter …’ She let the intimation work on her husband before continuing. ‘Something worth a lot of money.’

‘Anything that could be proved to have belonged to Hieronymus Bosch would be worth a fortune,’ Hiram mused. ‘So little’s known about the man, there’d be a scramble to get hold of anything of his. I know three collectors who’d pay big money, including Conrad Voygel.’ He thought for a moment, agitation rising. ‘I’m the specialist in painting from the late Middle Ages. I should have heard about this. How did it end up in the der Keyser gallery? Gerrit’s more interested in the sixteenth century—’

‘Gerrit’s interested in making money. However it comes.’ Judith tapped the account ledger. ‘We need to get hold of this mystery object.’

‘But we don’t know what it is.’

‘It’s something connected to Bosch,’ she said crisply. ‘What else matters?’

‘But you said it was stolen—’

Judith pulled a face. ‘Maybe, maybe not. You know how this business works, Hiram. People put out rumours all the time to drum up interest. Maybe Gerrit’s heart attack got him thinking. Maybe he’s working up to a killing so he can retire and he wants to get everyone curious. This story about a theft could be a lie – maybe this phantom object’s still hidden away in the der Keyer gallery. Or maybe he wants us to think it’s valuable enough to steal.’

He glanced at his wife. ‘Have the police been brought in?’

‘No,’ she said emphatically. ‘From what I could gather it was all hush-hush.’

‘Maybe there’s no mystery object.’

‘Oh, there’s something,’ Judith said emphatically. ‘The way Miriam was talking she was nervy, like it was something big. Even bigger than a painting by Bosch. She knew at once that she shouldn’t have said anything and changed the subject.’