A Place of Hiding

“From there, though? Where would it have gone?”


“Who’s to know?” Duffy said. “At the end of the war, the Allies set up investigation units to get art back to their owners. But it was everywhere. G?ring alone had trainloads of it. But millions of people were dead—entire families wiped out with no one left to claim their possessions. And if you were left alive but you couldn’t prove something belonged to you, you were out of luck.” He shook his head. “That’s what happened to this, I expect. Or someone with sticky fingers from one of the Allied armies stashed it in his duffel and took it home as a souvenir. Or someone in Germany—

a single owner perhaps—bought this from a French dealer during the war and managed to keep it hidden when the Allies invaded. The point is if the family was dead, who was to know who owned what? And how old was Guy Brouard at the time? Twelve? Fourteen? At the end of the war he wouldn’t have been thinking of getting back his family’s belongings. He would have thought of that years later, but by then this would have been long gone.”

“And it would have taken years more to find it,” St. James said. “Not to mention an army of art historians, conservationists, museums, auction houses, and investigators.” Plus a small fortune, he added to himself.

“He was lucky to find it at all,” Duffy said. “Some pieces went missing during the war and never turned up again. Others are still being argued over. I can’t think how Mr. Brouard proved this was his.”

“He appears to have bought it back rather than attempted to prove anything,” St. James explained. “There’s an enormous amount of money that’s gone missing from his accounts. It’s been wired to London.”

Duffy raised an eyebrow. “That’s the case?” He sounded doubtful. “I suppose he could have picked it up through an estate auction. Or it could have turned up in an antiques shop in a country village or in a street market. Hard to believe no one would have known what it was, though.”

“But how many people are experts in art history?”

“Not so much that,” Duffy said. “But anyone can see it’s old. You’d think they’d’ve taken it to be valued somewhere along the line.”

“But if someone actually nicked it at the end of the war...? A soldi er picks it up...where? Berlin? Munich?”

“Berchtesgaden?” Duffy offered. “Nazi bigwigs all had homes there. And it was crawling with Allied soldiers at the end of the war. Everyone went for the pickings.”

“All right. Berchtesgaden,” St. James agreed. “A soldier picks this up there when the plundering’s going on. He takes it home to Hackney and hangs it up above the sofa in the semidetached and never thinks another thing of it. There it stays till he dies and it gets handed on to his kids. They’ve never thought much about anything their parents own, so they sell up. Auction. Car boot sale. Whatever. This gets bought at that point. It ends up in a stall. On Portobello Road, for example. Or Bermondsey. Or a shop in Camden Passage. Or even in the country, as you suggested. Brouard’s had people looking for it for years, and when they see it, they snatch it up.”

“I suppose it could have happened that way,” Duffy said. “No. Truth is, it has to have happened that way.”

St. James was intrigued by the decisive quality of Duffy’s statement. He said, “Why?”

“Because it’s the only way Mr. Brouard could have ever got this back. He had no way to prove it was his. That meant he had to buy it back. He couldn’t’ve have got it from a Christie’s or Sotheby’s, could he, so it would have had to be—”

“Hang on,” St. James said. “Why not a Christie’s or Sotheby’s?”

“He would have been outbid. Some place like the Getty with bottomless pockets. An Arab oil magnate. Who knows who else.”

“But Brouard had money...”

“Not money like this. Not money enough. Not with Christie’s or Sotheby’s knowing exactly what they had their hands on and the whole art world bidding to get it.”

St. James looked at the painting: eighteen inches by twenty-four inches of canvas, oil paint, and undeniable genius. He said slowly, “Exactly how much money are we talking about, Mr. Duffy? What d’you reckon this painting’s worth?”

“At least ten million pounds, I’d say,” Kevin Duffy told him. “And that’s before the bidding opens.”