Where Memories Lie (18 page)

But in spite of its beauty, the Goldshtein brooch left him cold. Diamonds did not fascinate him—in his mind they carried the reek of corporate corruption and of the spilled blood of innocents—but most of all, he did not understand the desire for possession.

Cullen, apparently, was no more taken than he, having merely glanced at the piece, murmured something appreciative, then fidgeted, ready to get onto the scent.

“Thanks very much,” Kincaid had told Giles Oliver, and was amused to see that Oliver seemed disappointed by their lack of reaction.

But as they passed back through the salesroom, stopping to retrieve Amir Khan’s personal information from a grudging Mrs. March, Kincaid had seen that all the seats in the auction were still
full and that the clerks handling the phone and online bids were busy as well. There were many people, obviously, who did not share his sentiments.

As they reached the doors, Kincaid stood aside for a dapper elderly man who was leaving as well.

“Any success?” Kincaid asked.

“Oh, I only come to look,” the man answered in an accent that still bore a trace of French. Smiling, he added, “But that is enough.” He lifted his catalog to them in salute, and Kincaid felt suddenly a bit more optimistic about the motivation of his fellow man.

Amir Khan lived in a terraced house on the Clapham side of Wands-worth Common. It was, Kincaid knew, pricey enough real estate, as was anything near central London, but it was not what he had expected. This was suburban London, an area where the Victorian red-brown brick terraces had back gardens and were mostly occupied by families, while he had imagined the debonair Khan in a Thames-side loft conversion with a panoramic view.

It was late enough in the afternoon that cars lined both sides of the street, and they had to circle round several times before Cullen managed to maneuver the car into a space in the ASDA car park at the top of the hill. They walked back, listening to the sounds of televisions and children’s voices drifting from the occasional open window. But most of these families, Kincaid thought, would be like his own, with children in after-school care and both parents working.

Khan’s house was midterrace, and undistinguished except for the ornate black-and-white-tiled path that led through neatly trimmed privet hedges to the front door. There was only the one bell, which meant that Khan owned the entire house, not a flat, and that piqued Kincaid’s curiosity.

Amir Khan answered the door himself. He still wore suit trousers, but his collar was open and his shirtsleeves rolled up. His perfectly
barbered dark hair was tousled, and in one arm he held a chubby, red-faced infant. “What took you so long?” he said.

There was such a thing as being too dependable, thought Melody, when the first thing your boss said on finding you at the office after five o’clock was “Oh, I knew you’d still be there.”

She was, of course, finishing up paperwork that Gemma would normally have been doing herself, and she felt the tiniest twinge of resentment. Not that Gemma could help her mother being ill, but Melody felt unsettled and would like to have been out doing something other than tackling Gemma’s latest request, which meant ringing up newspaper morgues trying to track down copies of every paper printed on the day David Rosenthal had died in May 1952.

She sighed as she pulled out her phone list. As much as she liked working with Gemma, maybe she should put in a request for a transfer to an MIT—a Murder Investigation Team at Scotland Yard. As much as she hated to admit it, she was beginning to envy Doug Cullen his job.

For a moment, Melody let the idea take hold, then shook her head. If this job was risky, that one would be akin to running blindfolded into oncoming traffic. It was definitely out of bounds, and if she knew what was good for her, she wouldn’t kick at the traces.

“I take it you were expecting us?” Kincaid asked as Khan motioned them inside.

“I’d have been an idiot not to. And I couldn’t talk at work, although my taking the afternoon off will probably fuel the gossip mill for a month.” Khan’s Oxbridge accent had softened round the edges, and his tone lacked the animosity Kincaid had heard when they’d met in the salesroom. Khan’s expression was still tense, how
ever. “Let’s not stand about having a convention on the doorstep.” Shifting the baby on his hip, he called up the stairs, “Soph!”

There was the sound of quick footsteps, and a woman came round the landing carrying another child, this one a sleepy-eyed toddler with her thumb in her mouth. “Just now changed,” she said, and gave them a cheerful smile.

She was fair-skinned, with a pleasant face and a mass of brown hair that curled in corkscrews. “Hullo. I’m Sophie. And this,” she said, jiggling the child on her hip, who promptly hid her face against her mother’s breast, “is Isabella, and that,” she said, nodding at the baby, “is Adrianna, as Ka probably hasn’t bothered to tell you. You must be the police.”

“Ka?” Kincaid repeated, certain he had missed a page, but not quite sure which one.

“Sorry,” said Sophie Khan. “Silly university nickname. He hates it when I call him that in public, but then this isn’t exactly public, is it?”

“Can you take the baby, Soph?” Khan asked, sounding only mildly exasperated.

“Why don’t you put her in her high chair in the kitchen? Then you can go out into the garden for a bit of peace and quiet, and I’ll bring you something to drink.”

They followed Khan and his wife through a sitting room that at a casual glance had more the ambience of IKEA than antiques, and then through a kitchen, where Khan stopped to ease the baby into a chair that latched on to a sturdy tile-topped table.

French doors led out to a flagged patio overlooking a long, narrow garden with neat borders and grass still the emerald of spring. A red-and-blue plastic swing set took center stage on the lawn.

“Dreadful, isn’t it?” said Khan as he sank into a chair in the shade. “I’ve a kit for a proper one in the storage shed. I just haven’t had the time to build it. Maybe when this is all over…”

“What exactly are you talking about, Mr. Khan?” asked Kincaid, now completely at a loss.

Khan stared back at him, looking equally befuddled. “Are you saying they didn’t tell you?”

“Who didn’t tell me what?”

“Jesus bloody Christ.” Khan closed his eyes and wiped a hand across a forehead already damp from the heat. “Don’t you people ever communicate with one another? SO6. Fraud. Whatever the hell they’re calling themselves these days.”

“I talked to Fraud,” said Cullen, sounding defensive. “They said they didn’t have anything definitive on Harrowby’s.”

“Not yet, they don’t.” Khan leaned forward, hands clasped on his knees. “Look, I’m really sorry about what happened to Kristin Cahill. She was a nice girl, and I tried my best to get her out of it.

“But do not, do not”—he chopped a hand in the air for emphasis—“come stomping in with big boots and screw up what I’ve been working on for the last three years. I don’t know what you’ve stumbled into, but it has no bearing on what’s going on at Harrowby’s.”

“What do you mean, what’s going on at Harrowby’s?” asked Cullen. “And what do you mean, you tried to get Kristin Cahill out of it?”

But it had clicked for Kincaid. “You tried to get Kristin to quit, didn’t you? Giles Oliver said she saw you copying papers.”

“So she told the little weasel. Damn.” Khan looked pained. “And he thought he’d finger me before I fingered him. Tosser.”

The door opened and Sophie Khan came out with glasses on a tray. “Orangina,” she said, placing the tray on a small table. “Not elegant, but there it is. That’s the last of the ice, I’m afraid. We’ve rather gone through it today.”

She gave Khan a questioning look, but when he merely said, “Thanks, Soph,” and took his glass, she went back into the house, giving them a nice retreating view of jeans and her colorful batiked cotton top.

“You’ve known each other a long time, I take it,” Kincaid said, after a grateful sip of his own drink.

“Since university. Oxford. We were at Balliol together. I read art history, and Sophie literature, for all the good it does her now.” His fond grin transformed his lean face.

Khan was, Kincaid decided, perhaps only in his midthirties. His poise, his clothes, and the veneer of arrogance he had worn so well at the salesroom had made him seem older. He said, “I think, Mr. Khan, that you had better start at the beginning.”

“Ah, well.” Khan’s smile vanished. “I never thought it would come to this. I specialized in Eastern art and meant to teach. But there were no suitable openings after uni, and the job at Harrowby’s came up. I thought it sounded glamorous, wet behind the ears as I was.

“I came up from the floor, like Kristin and Giles Oliver, and I soon found out that it wasn’t glamorous at all. But by the time I really began to see all the cracks in the porcelain, Soph and I were married and had bought a house. So I had commitments, and couldn’t afford to jump ship, but the higher I climbed, the more rotten things got.”

“What sort of rot are we talking about?” Kincaid asked.

Khan waved a hand. “You name it. Dealing in stolen or illegally exported antiquities. Falsifying import documents. Forging provenance. Collusion in the setting of the reserve. Phantom bidding. That, by the way, is Giles Oliver’s little specialty, when he works the phones.”

“Is it, now?” Kincaid asked thoughtfully, reconsidering his opinion of Oliver. “And this dirty dealing—it goes all the way up?”

“To the top. And between international branches of the firm.”

“Why doesn’t Fraud step in?” asked Cullen, sounding incensed.

“Because they can’t prove anything. And even if they managed to bring a charge against the firm—and believe me, a collector who has paid an obscene amount of money for an antiquity that he thinks might have been illegally exported is
not
going to admit it, much less complain to the police—the relevant documents would disappear in a heartbeat.”

“The documents that Kristin saw you copying—what were they?” asked Cullen.

“Memos from one of the directors to the heads of several departments, very clearly setting out a scheme for the smuggling of listed Italian objects.”

“Did Kristin know what they were?”

“God, no. That would have been disastrous. She just saw me copying things in the director’s office when I had no reason to be there. I thought if I was hard enough on her, she’d leave.”

“It seems to me that you—”

Kincaid cut Cullen off. “You still haven’t said exactly what you were doing.” He wasn’t ready to antagonize Khan, not until they had the whole story. “Or why Fraud should have told us about it.”

“No.” Khan sat back in his chair and looked out at the garden. One of the little bucket swings moved very slightly in the breeze. “I wish now I’d never had the mind to be so bloody noble. It was before Soph got pregnant with Izzy, and I hadn’t so much to lose.

“It ate at me, to see what I’d loved so tarnished, but I didn’t know what I could do. Then one night I ran into a friend from university, an investigative journalist. We got to talking, and after a few too many bottles of wine, I told him everything. He lit up like a bloody Christmas tree. He said that if I was patient, I could collect enough evidence to mount a damning exposé. And that we could sell it. Not only to a publisher, but he had a contact at ITV that might be interested in doing a program.”

“And the police?”

“My friend met with SO6, told them what we were planning. They said they’d keep a watching brief, whatever that means. I’ve never spoken directly to anyone, for fear that it would compromise my position. But I assumed that someone would have told you, or at least asked you to tread carefully. I suppose they took our request to keep it quiet a bit too literally.”

Khan smiled, this time with no humor. “I didn’t know the mean
ing of
patient.
Or what it would be like to lead a double life. I suppose I had juvenile fantasies of being a spy.” He shook his head, and in the shadows the planes of his face looked hollow.

“Sweating. Lying. Sneaking. I’d always put on a bit of a facade, as it impressed the punters, but this went much deeper. I began to bring that other man home, and Soph was getting fed up. I was getting fed up. But we—my friend and I—had finally come up with a concrete scheme for nailing them, a trail of documents that led all the way through the chain. But my position is getting more precarious every day, and you can see why I couldn’t appear to be cooperating with the police.

“I want out.” Khan sliced his hand through the air, a figurative cut. “I’ve had a teaching offer from the University of London, but first I have to finish what I started.”

“I can see you wouldn’t want to lose out on the money, after all you’ve done,” said Cullen.

Khan gave him an unfriendly glance. “Money would be welcome, especially now that Sophie isn’t working. But so far I’ve not seen a penny, nor do I have any guarantee that I will. It’s just that I’d like all my effort to count for something.

“It’s a bloody racket,” he went on, shaking his head in disgust. “Buy something from a barrow boy at a market, mark it up twenty, fifty, a hundred times, and call it a priceless antique. It’s bollocks.”

“You’re not saying it’s all worthless?” said Cullen, sounding as if he’d been told there was no Father Christmas.

“No, of course not. But you have to know what you’re doing, and you should never trust an auction house—at least not ours. Kristin liked to sneer a bit at her mum’s little antiques shop, but from what Kristin said, her mum is an honest trader and makes an honest living at it.”

“And the Goldshtein brooch?”

“Oh, that’s real enough. The hallmark and the work are unmistakable,” Khan answered with a shrug. “Although I never thought to
see an authentic Goldshtein that had not been cataloged. But these things do happen, even if not as often as the salesrooms and the telly auction shows would like you to think. But my guess, with a piece like that, would be that someone had it tucked away. I doubt it’s been floating about unidentified on the market for years.”

“And you had no previous connection with the seller, Harry Pevensey?” Kincaid asked.