Ten Word Game by Jonathan Gash Read Free Book Online Page B

isn’t it?”
    See? Gossip weather. “Aye. I’ve to nick it.”
    Vincent Van Gogh’s L’Hiver is simply a bloke shovelling snow in a rural garden. You honestly wouldn’t look at it twice. It’s one of his dour pictures – worth a king’s ransom, of course. I can see why nobody wanted it when he was alive. Poor bloke only sold one painting in his lifetime, and that was to his brother Theo. Now, the real L’Hiver is in the Norton Simon Museum of Art, Inc. because Americans are all millionaires and buy everything.
    Some clever girl took an X-ray of it, and found underneath an obscured painting of a woman spinning thread. (This was common, to paint over old canvases. Impoverished artists used one canvas over and over, and nobody was poorer than Van Gogh.) The lady in the picture has bobbed hair, is concentrating on her spinning, treadling away.
    This is where I came in, because once I’d seen that mysterious lady in the X-ray I couldn’t get her out of my mind. I like women, so I painted her in Van Gogh style. When forging, I always use the same materials and canvas as the original artist. We have a strange woman who weaves superb canvas in the old style, lives with a cobbler in Southwold.
    By the time I finished Van Gogh’s Spinning Woman I was strapped for food, rent, money. A dealer gave me a meal and some paints for it: Rose Madder, YellowOchre, Burnt and Raw Umbers, and (apologies to any honest forgers reading this) an ounce of Rowney’s Flesh Tint that real artists hate. I love portraits, and those are the basic colours. I’d just parted from a weird lass who had moved in to my thatched cottage. She was crazy about a racing-car driver, and listened all night to recordings, literally, of his Formula One engine revving up, daft loon. I didn’t get a wink of sleep, what with making smiles with Clara while listening to those bloody pistons.
    She also ran the Mighty Shrew Rescue Service, which rescued shrews from death and destruction. My cottage was full of the damned things in cages. She finally left, when a lady from the local farm complained that Clara’s shrews were nothing less than rodents and should be shot. Clara went berserk and stormed out saying my friends were fascist oppressors of Mother Nature. I slept for three days. The trouble was, Clara was very wealthy – benefactors funded her shrew hospital – and kept me in grub and passion. Shrew-less, I didn’t eat the following week, so I painted Spinning Woman in a hurry. The dealer took it.
    Later, Skeggie reported it was in the Marquis of Gotham’s mansion, listed as a genuine Van Gogh. I was proud but, famished and threadbare, I moaned about it at the Treble Tile. Drogue overheard. He insisted I steal it back. Drogue would then sell it as a genuine Van Gogh. This happens more often than you dare think. I’d eeled in (easy, after Skeggie’s research), sliced the canvas from the frame (ten seconds with every art thief’s favourite tool, the black-handled Swiss serrated -bladed chef’s knife) and dangled away. Three minutes flat. The lads in the Marquis of Granby on North Hill would have a laugh, me taking so long. Dusty Malton robbed Oxford University on millennium New Year’s Eve and took only forty-one seconds. Iknew he’d never let me forget it.
    For clarity, here’s a vital question: What percentage of “genuine antiques” are truly genuine? Answer: three – that’s 3 – per cent. It means that 97% of “genuine antiques” are forgeries, fakes, duff, dud, Sexton Blakes, sham, lookalikes, replicates, all meaning worthless. And that’s on a good day.
    Where was I? Hanging on this mansion wall in the lantern hours, hoping I wouldn’t be seen, while Belle whispered into her cell phone from the box-hedged garden maze below. I heard some oldie come creaking along a passage. I wanted to shut Belle’s tinny voice up but she kept on hissing “Lovejoy? You okay?” like a gnat in my ear. I didn’t want a chat. My gran used to say,