The actor was wearing a buff dust coat with the logo of Darcy on the breast pocket, exactly like all the other porters, and he carried an oil painting. It was the lunch hour.
A dust-coated porter carrying a painting, walking through the corridors of an art auction house, is about as noticeable as a raindrop in a thunderstorm.
It took Trumpy ten minutes and several apologies before he found an empty office, went inside, locked the door behind him and went through the desk drawers. When he left, the way he had come, he was also carrying two sheets of genuine headed writing paper and two logo-bearing envelopes.
Four days later, having visited the Colbert Institute as a tourist to note the type of dust coats worn there, he reappeared as a Colbert porter and did exactly the same. No-one even turned a head.
By the end of July Peter the Penman, for a modest £100, had created two beautiful letters and a laboratory report.
Benny spent most of the month tracking down a man of whom he had heard years before, a name whispered with horror in the corridors of the art world. To his great relief he found the old man still alive and living in poverty in Golders Green. In the annals of art fraud, Colley Burnside was a bit of a legend.
Many years earlier he had been a talented young artist moving in that Bohemian post-war society of Muriel Belcher’s Colony Club and the artists’ haunts around Queensway and the studios of Bayswater.
He had known them all in their collective youth: Freud, Bacon, Spencer, even the baby Hockney. They had become famous, he had not. Then he had discovered that he had a forbidden talent. If he could not create his own original works that people would buy, he could create someone else’s.
He studied the techniques of centuries ago, the chemicals in the paints, the egg yolk in the tempera and the effect of centuries of ageing that could be recreated with tea and wine. Unfortunately, though he left the tea alone, he started to indulge in the wine.
In his time he passed off to the greedy and the gullible over a hundred canvases and oil-on-boards from Veronese to Van Dyck. Even before they caught him it was reckoned he could run you up a pretty good Matisse before lunch.
After lunch was a problem because of what he called his ‘little friend’. Colley’s bel amour was ruby in colour, liquid and normally grown on the slopes of Bordeaux. He tripped up because he tried to sell something he had painted after lunch.
An outraged and humiliated art world insisted on the full rigour of the law and Colley was taken away to a large grey building with bars where the screws and the hard men treated him like a favourite uncle.
It took the art world years to work out how many Burnsides were hanging on their walls, and he secured a considerable reduction in his sentence by telling all. When he came out of durance vile, he faded into oblivion, making a thin living dashing off sketches for tourists.
Benny took Trumpy to meet the old man because he thought they would get on, and they did. Two rejected talents. Colley Burnside listened, gratefully savouring the Haut Médoc that Benny had brought, a welcome change from his habitual Chilean Merlot from Tesco.
‘Monstrous, dear boy, utterly monstrous,’ he spluttered when Benny had finished and Trumpy had confirmed his missing two millions. ‘And they called me a crook. I was never in the same league as some of these sharks. But as to the old days, I’m out of it now. Too long in the tooth, over the hill.’
‘There would be a fee,’ said Trumpy.
‘A fee?’
‘Five per cent,’ said Benny.
‘But five per cent of what?’
Benny leaned over and whispered in his ear. Colley Burnside’s rheumy eyes lit up. He had a vision of Château Lafitte glowing like garnets by the light of the fire.
‘For that kind of fee, dear boy, I will produce you a masterpiece. Nay, not one but two. Colley’s last stroke. Gentlemen, to hell with them all.’
There are some paintings which, though extremely old and painted on ancient timber boards, have been so destroyed that hardly a fragment of the original paint remains and they are then valueless. Only the old timber board retains a small value, and it was one of these that Benny acquired after scouring a hundred old shops that claimed to sell antiques but in fact stocked only ancient junk.
From a similar emporium he acquired for £10 a Victorian oil of surpassing ugliness. It showed two dead partridge hanging from a hook, and a double-hammer shotgun propped against the wall. It was titled The Game Bag. Colley Burnside would have little trouble copying it, but would have to force himself to make it as devoid of talent as the original.
On the last day of July a ginger-whiskered Scot with a pretty impenetrable accent walked into the branch office of the House of Darcy in Bury St Edmunds, county of Suffolk. It was not a large office but covered the three counties of East Anglia.
‘I have here, lassie,’ he told the girl behind the counter, ‘a work of great value. Created these hundred years ago by my own grandfather.’
He triumphantly showed her The Game Bag. She was no expert but even she thought the partridge looked as if they had been hit by a truck.
‘You wish to have it valued, sir?’
‘Aye, that I do.’
The Bury office had no facility for valuations, which could only be carried out by the London staff, but she could take the painting in and note the vendor’s details. This she did. Mr Hamish McFee claimed to live at Sudbury and she had no reason to believe that this was not so. In fact the address was that of a small newsagent whose proprietor had agreed to take in and keep all mail for Mr McFee until further notice, for a consideration of £10 a month in his back pocket. In the next van the Victorian daub was sent down to London.
Before leaving the office Mr McFee noted that his grandfather’s genius had been tagged with a storage identification number: F 608.