Conman by Richard Asplin Read Free Book Online

promising we’d get his accountant guy over by the end of the week.
    Returning to the sanctum of the nursery once again, I shut the door behind me and tugged out my paperwork.
    Sotheby ’s, it turned out, were right. The valuations matched. I didn’t know if this was what I wanted to hear or not. Whether it just made things more confusing, having two experts telling me I had an unboardable lifeboat out there. Pulling the buckled bank letter from my pocket, I took another long look at it. Volume four in a long line of statements, adding up all the bank charges and missed direct debits. You don’t want to know how much it all came to.
    I tore it up and buried it at the bottom of the bin under a scented nappy sack, concentrating instead on the stiff envelope containing the day’s ill-gotten prize. Untacking the lip, I eased the faded photograph free and laid it on the computer keyboard, sliding the night-light a little nearer, shadows shifting.
    Two men. Teenagers. Felt hats and shirt-sleeves, side by side in a boxy office. Smiling the guilty, awkward smiles of the suddenly famous. On the right, the artist, a pencil behind his ear and drawing pad clamped under his arm, no doubt at the behest of some unimaginative publicity hack. On the left, his partner, writer and occasional model sports a knotted tablecloth about his neck, a typewriter under his arm and – pulled over his suit trousers, causing them to ride and ruck – a huge pair of absurd underpants.
    Best wishes – Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster.
    I eased the crumbling paper over carefully. A date on the reverse. 1933. Plus an inky stamp: image copyright Detective Comics Inc. 480 Lexington Ave NYC.
    I set the photograph aside and booted up the computer.
    Fifteen pounds I’d paid. A quick click and drag across a webful of collectors’ sites moments later told me I should be slapping it on the Heroes Inc website for twenty times that amount. Did I feel guilty? Was Jane right?
    Gor dear, fuckin’ amateur hour this place. New to the game are you, ya fuckin’ fairy?
    Screw it. He’d had it coming.
    As my old scanner whirred and stuttered, I tried to focus on the job in hand. Opening up a file, I spent a moment banging out a suitably gushy description – mint, must see, collector’s item, perfect gift, offers in the region, bing bang bong, all that. Thephoto was taking a while to download so I took a quick surf across to eBay to check out Cheng’s story.
    Sure enough, there it was. Action Comics , issue 4. September 1938. Four thousand pounds. I didn’t know the seller but it was getting a lot of attention, mostly from a collector in the US called Grayson, topping everyone’s bid.
    Me? Ha, what do you think.
    No, I just sat there in the glow of a plastic caterpillar, watching the screen fill with tablecloths, underpants and fedoras, half listening to Jane next door on the phone with her dad.
    They seemed to be discussing private schools.
    Heart hammering, I was gripped suddenly with an urge to tell her. To come clean. Get up, march into the lounge, sit down, take her hand, look her in the eyes and just tell her. Blurt it out. Own up. The trouble I’d got us in. What was about to happen.
    But –
    Well I didn’t. I couldn’t. Her dad –
    I just couldn’t.
    Instead I just sat there, not blinking, eyes on my screen. Feeling them getting sore. Worry, slithery and black, coiling about my gut. Tasting fear, coppery in my mouth. Praying, praying , silently, it would be okay.
    That everything would somehow sort itself out.
    Ha. Look at the state of me.
    What do you think?

three
    Oh by the way, before we go on – you got that, did you? Jane’s little dig about Dad? The ‘ neither would yours ’ thing?
    Yes. It’s … a little complicated.
    Let’s just say, so you know, I didn’t quite enjoy the family life that Lady Jane did.
    Not that my father and I weren’t close, you understand. We were. In our own strange way. Closer than Jane and her father are even now