A Place of Safety by Natasha Cooper Read Free Book Online Page A

prints to a bottom-feeding dealer, who wouldn’t have known a Clouet from a Corot. Peter had breezed into the shop later that day and bought them at a rapacious mark-up, which still came nowhere near their cost of production, let alone the price the real thing might raise.
    Then the fun had really started. Toby had talked to a few friends about the amazing find he thought Peter had made. Together they had taken the drawings, now out of their frames again, to Goode & Floore’s in London and asked humbly at the front counter whether they might show them to an expert.
    It had been the expert who had first pronounced the name François Clouet. Toby hadn’t made any suggestion at all; he’d merely said that he thought the drawings might be interesting, but that he didn’t know enough to make even a wild guess. The expert had got very overexcited and almost insisted that the drawings went into the next old master sale. He’d been even more pleased than Toby and Peter when they’d made a record price for the artist.
    That night the two of them had celebrated with wines finer than any Toby had dreamed of tasting, and they had solemnly
renewed their oath never – ever – to tell. Even when Peter’s father had guessed there was something wrong with the drawings and thundered and shouted about criminal records and a lifetime of shame, Peter had stood firm and made Toby stand with him.
    When the old brute had left them alone again, Peter had insisted that so long as neither of them admitted anything, ever, or paid out too much of the money at once, or tried a similar scam, no one could touch them. The story was that they’d bought the drawings in good faith and it was Goode & Floore’s expert who had claimed they were by François Clouet. So long as they stuck to it and never tried to fake anything else again, they’d be safe. After a while, even Toby the terrified had come to believe it. And they’d gone swanning off on their holiday of a lifetime that summer without a care in the world.
    Remembering it now, Toby shuddered. He should have known as soon as the trip turned into a disaster that it was an omen, warning them that they wouldn’t get away with the scam for ever. But he’d had too much else to think of, as he’d been sucked down into the hell of amoebic dysentery and the certainty that he would die.
    A lorry thundered by outside, breaking off his memories. His head wasn’t anywhere near round them all, and he still had no idea how deeply Peter was involved. So far the only one of the blackmailers he’d met face to face was the appalling Ben, but Peter had to be in it somewhere. No one else had known all the details of how the Clouet drawings had come into being, however much some, like Peter’s father, might have suspected.
    Without those details, Toby still believed he might have followed the original line of never admitting anything. He’d still be safe. He wouldn’t have been forced to pretend the blackmailers’ faked de Hooch was part of the Gregory Bequest collection, and he wouldn’t be sitting on five million pounds of
their money now, ready to buy the next forgery they wanted to establish as genuine.
    At least the de Hooch had been reasonably convincing. It was one of his many nightmares that they would force him to bid – in public – for something that wouldn’t deceive a child. When he’d first understood what Ben was going to make him do, he’d tried to recommend a restorer who could be relied on to produce a really top-class job. Ben had laughed and told him they were much further on than that and had already got their fakes ready and waiting to be fed on to the market.
    Who was he working for? The whole of the London art world had been worried for years about the supply of old masters dwindling to nothing, but Toby couldn’t think of anyone with the brazen dishonesty – or the balls – to dream up something like this.
    Everything about the operation was clever. Even he had to admit