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.
AUGUST
The month of August swept over the West End of London like a pint of chloroform. The tourists took over and those who lived and worked in the city tried to get away. For the upper crust of the House of Darcy that meant a variety of choice destinations: villas in Tuscany, manors in the Dordogne, chalets in Switzerland, yachts in the Caribbean.
Mr Alan Leigh-Travers was a passionate amateur yachtsman and kept his own ketch in the British Virgin Islands where it was boarded during the non-use periods at a boatyard behind Trellis Island. He intended to spend his three weeks away cruising as far south as the Grenadines.
Peregrine Slade might have thought he had made the Darcy computer as safe as Fort Knox but he was wrong. The IT expert he had called in used one of the systems invented and developed by Suzie’s boss. She had helped perfect some of the system’s finer points. One who has developed a system can circumvent it. She did. Benny needed all the holiday rosters for August along with destinations and emergency contact addresses. These she had downloaded.
Benny knew that Leigh-Travers would be cruising the Caribbean, and that he had left two contact numbers: his worldwide mobile phone number and the listening frequency to which he would tune his yacht’s radio. Suzie altered both numbers by one digit. Though unaware of it, Mr Leigh-Travers was going to have a really tranquil vacation, with no disturbances at all.
On 6 August the ginger Scotsman swept into the London office and demanded his oil painting back. There was no objection. He was helpful enough to identify it by storage number, and in ten minutes a porter had retrieved it from downstairs and handed it over.
By nightfall Suzie noted that the computer records had logged the painting as having been brought in to the Bury St Edmunds office for valuation on 31 July, but withdrawn by owner on 6 August.
She altered the last part. The new records showed it had been collected by arrangement by a van from the Colbert Institute. On the 10th Mr Leigh-Travers, who had never heard of The Game Bag, let alone seen it, left for Heathrow and Miami, there to take a connector flight to St Thomas and Beef Island where his ketch was waiting for him.