A Three Dog Problem
- Автор: Беннет Си Джей
- Серия: Her Majesty the Queen Investigates #2
- Год: 2021
- Язык: английский
- Год: Zaffre - Bonnier Publishing Fiction
- ISBN: 978-1-83877-485-1
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «A Three Dog Problem». Краткое содержание книги:
When a body is found in the Palace swimming pool, she finds herself once again in the middle of an investigation which has more twists and turns than she could ever have suspected. With her trusted secretary Rozie by her side, the Queen is determined to solve the case. But will she be able to do it before the murderer strikes again?
Now, with a couple of precious hours ahead of them, Lavinia worked directly into the sculpture, pausing occasionally to check the dimensions against the original flesh and bone with callipers, talking as she went. The Queen had requested that the camera crew only stay for the first hour, so the second hour was much more relaxed. They discussed the Olympics, the garden, the racing on Channel 4. The Queen said she had recently seen a fascinating programme about art forgery and fakes. (She had, but it was about five years ago.)
‘I had no idea there were so many. I hope I don’t own any!’
The artist pushed a strand of hair out of her eyes with putty-smeared hands. ‘I hate to say it, but you probably do. It’s endemic. Most galleries have the odd fake or two, whether they know it or not. Of course, they’d never admit it.’
‘But how do they manage it?’ the Queen wondered. ‘The forgers, I mean. There are all these techniques for examining paintings these days, aren’t there? X-rays, I mean. And that thing they do with colours, to test what they’re made of.’
‘Mass spectrometry? Yes, you’re absolutely right. Technology’s come on in leaps and bounds. Forgers have to be so much cleverer today.’
‘Oh? Since when?’
Lavinia didn’t answer for a moment. She was busy with the slope of the nose and needed to concentrate. When she was happy with the line she said, ‘The science gets better with every decade. But when I was an art student – and I used to love this sort of stuff – you would hear tales to make your hair curl. Back in the seventies the experts did it mostly by eye. They used to check the materials, of course. I mean, if you did a Botticelli portrait on canvas, when everyone knew he used wood panels for portraiture, then you were in trouble. Or if you were stupid enough to use titanium white, which only came in in the twentieth century. But a lot of it was around provenance and whether a painting had the right “feel”.’
‘That’s so interesting.’ The Queen looked and sounded distantly composed. In fact, her mind raced and her nose itched, but her hands remained loosely clasped in her lap. A lady did not touch her face in public; Queen Mary had taught her that, as well as giving her this tiara. And a queen did not look unduly fascinated by crime. ‘So if you wanted to forge a painting, back in those days, how would you do it?’
‘Really, ma’am?’
The Queen glanced over at Lavinia, who was smiling. Her cheeks and forehead were smudged with wet clay, her hands busy as she sculpted the face. She was working hard, but a lot of it was about looking and muscle memory. It left her free to consider the Queen’s suggestion.
‘I often wondered. It would be a nice way to make your fortune – as long as you didn’t get caught and go to jail. So many forgers did. But I secretly admired a lot of them. They were really good painters and craftsmen in their own right. The detail of getting it perfect: that’s a challenge in itself.’
‘What sort of detail? Let’s say it was a Rembrandt.’
‘Oh, OK.’ Lavinia grinned. ‘Wow, that’s a toughie. Well, let’s assume I’m a genius-level copyist, to start with. We’re talking the golden age of Baroque. First of all, I’d get hold of a painted canvas from the period. That’s pretty important. It’s got to be the right linen, the right weave, the right wood in the stretchers – even the right nails. I’d scrape off the oil paint until I got to the ground – that’s how the canvas is prepared. It’s got to be authentic, so I’d leave that in. I’d research what Rembrandt’s paints were made of and make my own with the same ingredients. I’d use his method of drawing, and practise his style until I could do it in my sleep. But the painting itself is half of it, really. The rest is the provenance side, and often that’s harder to fake. Has it been in a collection? You’d need the right inventory numbers, and they’d need to match the records. Faking a painting from your collection would be hard, ma’am, because it would be so easy to cross-check. Often the back tells you as much as the front. Is it stamped? How was the canvas attached? What kind of frame has it been in?’
‘I suppose if you had the original to work off, that would make it much easier?’
‘Infinitely,’ Lavinia agreed.
‘But if you wanted to move a painting secretly, how would you go about it? I saw a film once where a man put it in a briefcase, but that didn’t seem very realistic.’
‘Oh, The Thomas Crown Affair,’ Lavinia said with another grin. ‘I loved that film, and no, you can’t hide a Monet in a briefcase. But if you were really desperate you could always take the canvas off the stretcher, roll it up and take the stretcher apart. You’d have to put it all back together of course, with the original nails. Fiddly job.’
‘Can you really roll a canvas? A painted one?’
‘Absolutely, if you’re careful. You keep the painting facing out and do it like a carpet. It’s not ideal, but I’m guessing your forger is a desperate criminal.’
‘Hmm.’
‘We had to do it for a painting my mother bought at auction once.’ Lavinia applied some clay to an eyebrow and smoothed it, stood back and judged the effect. ‘All quite legitimate, but the only way of getting it to her was in my 2CV, and it was six foot square. Dismantling the frame was heartbreaking, but by the time we’d put it all back together and touched up the dodgy bits, you’d never have known. There! I think I need a bit of a stretch myself.’
Later, Dr Jennifer Sutherland was amazed to find herself in the Queen’s Gallery, beside the South Wing of the Palace, waiting to be joined by Her Majesty. They had met a couple of times, briefly, when the Queen had come to St James’s Palace to inspect preparations for an exhibition. She had never been alone with the Queen before. And she was still regretting her trousers.
She looked down at them now. Three days in a row she’d worn them, because they were the comfiest ones she owned. They were expensive when bought, designer stretch jersey, black and figure-hugging, but overstretched and slightly baggy now, and still bearing the traces of yesterday morning’s boiled egg, though she’d tried to wash the mark off in the loos.
Jennifer had pictured a moment like this, of course, up close with Her Majesty, but in her dream she’d been about to collect her MBE (or perhaps even her damehood), and was wearing Vivienne Westwood pinstripes and vertiginous Louboutins, her hair recently coloured and her mum in the audience. Not at three thirty on a Friday afternoon, in work clothes, and for no obvious reason. Neil Hudson had said the Queen didn’t notice what you were wearing, but Jennifer didn’t believe him. She was a woman, and women noticed. She might not care, but that was another matter.
The one thing Jennifer wasn’t at all nervous about, though, was telling the Queen anything she wanted to know about the upcoming Venice exhibition, for which she was the senior curator. She had done her PhD on Grand Tour city views, or ‘vedute’ as they were called in Italian, and Canaletto was the most famous artist to produce them. In fact, it was a treat to have this opportunity to talk about her favourite subject with its most famous collector.
And there was the owner herself, suddenly, short and sturdy, in a skirt and cardigan and sensible heels, with a page hovering in the background and a couple of low-slung dogs for company, looking cheerful and relaxed.
‘Did you know, this room used to be a conservatory?’ she asked, after Jennifer had been introduced.