Next of Kin Read online

  The first night he slept at Leyville, only a few hours after his uncle Peter had brought him there following the long drive from Dover, Montignac crawled into the enormous bed in the room he was to share with his cousin Andrew and lay awake, trying to keep his fears at bay while he decided how he would behave now that he had finally arrived.

  It had been only two months since his mother was killed when the munitions factory in which she worked was blown up; five weeks after that his father, a soldier in the British army, was killed at the battle of the Somme. His mother’s family had been caring for him ever since and had written to his uncle to inform him of his new address in case they wanted to contact him; it had not been their intention to send the boy to England but events had overtaken them.

  After the letter arrived, Peter and Ann had discussed what they should do for the best.

  ‘Well we don’t have any choice in the matter,’ reasoned Peter. ‘He’ll have to come to live here with us.’

  ‘At Leyville?’

  ‘Of course. Where else?’ he said, rereading the letter. ‘He’s still a Montignac. We can’t have him growing up with a different family, let alone a foreign one.’

  ‘But he doesn’t even know us, Peter,’ she said. ‘And he must have known the Reims family his whole life.’ She reread the letter. ‘They seem to be a big family too. His grandparents are looking after three grandsons and a granddaughter already. I’m sure they’ll take care of him.’

  ‘He’s only five years old, Ann,’ said Peter sternly. ‘We can’t do that to him. Montignacs should be here. At Leyville.’

  Ann wasn’t entirely happy with the situation but had little choice in the matter and Peter wrote to France, insisting that the boy be returned to England immediately. At first, Montignac’s maternal grandmother was reluctant to let him go, but Peter threatened legal action as well as pointing out what a better position he was in to give the child a comfortable upbringing, and she finally relented. He sent enough money for the boy’s passage, and collected him at Dover a few weeks later.

  ‘All I can say is I’m glad your father’s not here to witness this,’ said Ann, the night before his arrival. ‘He’d be rolling in his grave if he knew what was about to happen.’

  ‘What happened between Henry and Father should never have happened,’ said Peter, the beneficiary of their falling-out. ‘They both lost out. For heaven’s sake it’s not as if the marriage between my brother and his wife didn’t work out. Presumably they were happy together. The poor lad must be traumatized by losing both his parents so close together. We have a responsibility to the boy to make up for what his own father missed out on. Don’t forget, Henry was my brother. We grew up together.’

  ‘But by rights Leyville belongs to him. Don’t you think he’ll want it back someday?’

  ‘It’s not his by rights,’ pointed out Peter. ‘Father left it to me. And I shall leave it to Andrew. He’ll be looked after, though. He’ll be happy with that.’

  The young Owen had one sepia-toned photograph of his parents and he kept it beside him on his bedside locker. It had been taken on their wedding day and they both had a ghostly pallor to them that didn’t recall their faces for him at all. His mother’s long blonde hair and his father’s wavy blond hair stood out dramatically from the dark tones surrounding them.

  ‘You know your father was disinherited,’ Andrew told him a year or two later after some fight between the two. ‘He upset Grandfather and was cut off without a penny.’

  ‘No, because we always lived in France,’ said Owen, with the logic of a child who bases all he believes on his own memories. ‘We were never here before.’

  ‘You weren’t here before,’ said Andrew. ‘But your father grew up here. With my father. In fact yours was the elder brother but there was some sort of commotion when he chose to get married and that’s when he slunk off to France.’

  Montignac narrowed his eyes. He wasn’t sure what the verb slunk meant but he didn’t like the sound of it. He had worked hard at losing his own French accent over the last year or two as it had only provided the other boys in school with an excuse to tease him but on occasion it rose up again and he remembered a string of words, some of which he threw at his cousin now.

  ‘Steady on,’ said Andrew. ‘Don’t use that Frog speak here. Hasn’t Father told you about that?’

  The relationship between Andrew and Owen was always a fractious one; most of the time they got along fairly well but there was always the possibility, on an hour-by-hour basis, that they would end up rolling around on the floor, knocking the stuffing out of each other. And despite the fact that Andrew was three years older and a good deal bigger, he always came off worse in any such confrontation.

  ‘It’s ridiculous, Andrew,’ said Margaret Richmond after one particularly violent session when the two boys were lined up before her, waiting for her to wash out the cuts they had inflicted on each other and examine their bruises. ‘You’re old enough to know better, aren’t you?’

  ‘It was him,’ protested Andrew. ‘It’s always him. He always starts things and then comes over all angelic when we get into trouble for it.’

  ‘You’re three years older,’ she said. ‘You should know better. And as for you,’ she added, turning to Owen and glaring at him. ‘You should be grateful for all your uncle and aunt have done for you and not go around causing chaos every day. Look at your cousin’s face,’ she added, pointing at Andrew who had a large bruise preparing to darken beneath his eye. ‘It’s absolutely no way to behave.’

  Owen didn’t care. The only one he liked was Stella whose opinion of him seemed to change on a daily basis. At first she enjoyed the fact that there was another child in the house. He was her junior by less than a year and they could play together perfectly happily. As she grew older she decided to resent his presence and would evict him from her room whenever he came to talk to her and in fact spent the best part of a year or two ignoring the boy.

  And then, when she was about twelve, they grew close again and remained increasingly intimate for several years. Then Andrew was killed and the family broke down into its separate components, afraid to mix together in case of an explosion, Ann taking to her bed for weeks on end, Peter retiring to his study to consider the wreckage of his family, and the heartbroken Stella to her room. Only Owen managed to keep his composure during those difficult months despite the fact that he had been the one who had been present during his cousin’s final moments.

  ‘What happened exactly?’ Peter asked him in tears within hours of the tragedy. ‘How did it come about?’

  ‘It’s hard to say,’ he said. ‘He loaded his gun and waited until he saw a rabbit. I wasn’t even watching him and then when he pulled the trigger he flew back against the grass. It was horrible. The gun mustn’t have been cleaned properly or perhaps it just misfired.’ He broke down in tears too and refused to discuss it any further and the doctor advised that he should not be asked to describe it any longer for fear of traumatizing him further.

  Stella was taken dramatically from school a few months later, just before her seventeenth birthday, and sent to a finishing school in Geneva. That had been Margaret Richmond’s idea and she had used all her wiles to persuade Peter Montignac that the move was a sensible one. Neither parent was sure at first but with a little clever persuasion on her part the move was secured.

  Owen didn’t see her for almost two years after that. He wrote to her, of course, but she ignored his letters. When he saved up his money to phone her in Geneva she wouldn’t take his calls and refused to return them. When she finally returned to Leyville he was at Cambridge and their paths did not cross as much as they had in the past. When they did see each other she was distant with him, afraid to be left alone in the same room together, and he felt devastated by the way she treated him.

  That had been how things had stood between them then for several years now. Two cousins, once very close, who now barely spoke to each other for reasons neither one fully under
stood, both feeling betrayed by the other but perhaps only one feeling the great loss. When Owen thought of her he thought of someone he had once been ready to lay down his life for, the only one of his English relatives who had ever meant anything to him, but who had betrayed him badly. Who, apparently over the space of one night, had decided to have nothing more to do with him and to treat him with contempt. When he thought of the maliciousness and vindictiveness of her actions, it took his very breath away. It was as if she wanted to hurt him and go on hurting him forever.

  But Stella knew differently. She knew the truth about why she found it difficult to be alone with him now, but could never tell him. It would only hurt him more than she had any right to do. And she wasn’t sure what the consequences of revealing the truth to him would be.

  7

  HAVING BEEN OPENED FOUR nights earlier, the upstairs room in the Threadbare Gallery did not smell quite so damp nor feel so dusty on the night that Owen Montignac and Gareth Bentley used it as their thoroughfare on their return to the Clarion Gallery. It was the night before the Cézanne pictures were due to be shipped to Edinburgh and the two men had managed to construct twelve sturdy frames during that time which, should their measurements prove correct, would match the various sizes of the masterpieces.

  ‘Let’s hope that they’ve packaged the paintings today after all,’ said Montignac as they made their way up the stairs. ‘And that they’re storing them in the same room. If they’ve moved them at all, we’re done for.’

  The panel above the room gave way easily and although the narrow opening above it leading to the gallery was still difficult to negotiate, at least they knew where they were going this time and after a few minutes Montignac came through first into the restoration room of the Clarion with a minimum of fuss.

  All day long Gareth had been in a state of heightened expectation, waiting for the evening to arrive. Until now the plan had seemed like a great adventure, the kind of mischief he might have got up to back in his boarding school days at Harrow, but as the night approached the thought began to cross his mind that what he was actually about to do was to commit a crime.

  He cast his mind back to his law books and tried to remember what kind of sentence was passed on thieves such as the one he was about to become. Unfortunately he had not always been a regular attendee at his lectures—something which no doubt contributed to his lower second-class degree, a standard by which he would never have been considered for a pupillage at chambers had his father not been head thereof—so he could not render a guess at the likely punishment.

  There was no doubt that it would be a custodial sentence in the unlikely event that they were discovered, but Gareth found it hard to believe that they were really doing anything too terrible. After all, it wasn’t as if they were breaking into someone’s home and robbing their possessions, or holding up a bank and clearing out the investors’ savings accounts. These were paintings which for the most part belonged to financial institutions rather than collectors and which were no doubt insured for large sums of money. If they were stolen the heads of the various banks that had an interest in the Cézanne estate would simply collect on the insurance and not give the matter of the lost art a second thought. And the ultimate recipient of the goods was undoubtedly someone who would treasure them as the painter had intended. Thus did Gareth Bentley justify his actions that night.

  They left the set of twelve frames they had constructed back in the Threadbare, wanting to make sure that they would be able to execute their plan first before dragging them across, which would be no easy task in itself. Some were quite heavy and bulky and it would take several trips back and forth to transport them.

  Montignac switched on the light and looked around the room to where the easels had stood three nights earlier and his heart sank. There was nothing there. He looked around at the neat stores of implements on the walls, the rows of restorative paints and cleansers facing him, but the Cézannes were missing.

  ‘Over here,’ said Gareth, who had walked to the back of the room where a large tarpaulin was draped over what appeared to be an enormous box. He lifted it off and standing in a holder underneath were twelve wooden boxes.

  ‘That’s a relief,’ said Montignac, who even in the few seconds of despair had been considering whether he had enough money left to leave England indefinitely and without delay. ‘All right, let’s lift one out.’

  Gareth reached down and picked up the smallest of the twelve and released it from its moorings, carrying it to the centre of the floor and laying it down. Montignac took the staple remover from his pocket and lifted out the heavy steel clips that kept the casing in place. The wood made a sharp cracking sound as the top came away and revealed the packaging beneath. They picked it up and took the wrapping off to reveal a painting.

  ‘Perfect,’ said Montignac, breaking into a rare smile as he looked across at his accomplice. ‘All right, we better do these one at a time so the boxes are placed back in the same order. That’s a small one. Go back and get the canvas and the box.’

  Gareth nodded and jumped up, and struggled back into the ceiling gap and across to the Threadbare.

  Montignac inspected the picture closer, running his fingers lightly over the surface where Paul Cézanne’s brush had hovered a half century before and that old urge inside him to be an artist himself reappeared. If only I’d had the talent, he thought, imagining the life of an internationally successful painter that he could have lived. The glamorous friends, the love affairs with European heiresses, the hospitality offered by kings and presidents and prime ministers around the world. Instead he was reduced to this. Stealing the great works in order to pay off a portion of his gambling debts. How had it come to this, he wondered, before remembering that the answer lay in two words: Peter Montignac.

  The previous evening he had calculated that the paintings themselves could be worth up to about one hundred and fifty thousand pounds when taken together. He had no idea who the final buyer was—only the intermediary, Lord Keaton, had spoken to him so far, and they had agreed on a payment of fifteen thousand pounds for his services. One thousand of this he had promised to Gareth—who was under the impression that Keaton had only offered five in total—ten was earmarked for Nicholas Delfy, which would leave him four thousand pounds in the black as he considered how to raise the final thirty-six thousand he owed him.

  ‘Here we are,’ said Gareth, reappearing and struggling under the weight of the fresh canvas and new box of the same size that he’d brought back with him. ‘I think this is the right one.’

  Montignac took the Cézanne and laid it on top of the blank, framed canvas and smiled in relief. They were a perfect match. ‘Good job,’ he muttered, taking the packaging from the floor and wrapping it around the blank. ‘Fetch me that tape from the wall over there,’ he said, looking up. Gareth brought it over and they wrapped it round several times.

  ‘You can’t even see through that,’ said Gareth appreciatively. ‘Even if they were to open the boxes.’

  ‘They won’t open them,’ said Montignac, shaking his head. ‘You can rely on that.’

  The operation to transfer all twelve paintings took almost four hours. It became more of a complicated business than had originally been thought as several of the canvases were of similar but not exactly the same proportions and when ten had been wrapped and sealed in fresh boxes, the two that were left were clearly the wrong size.

  ‘Let’s just put them in other boxes,’ suggested Gareth, who had grown weary of the whole thing. ‘No one will know the difference.’

  ‘We’ll know,’ said Montignac, shaking his head. ‘It’s best to get it right. We’ll have to take some out again.’

  They reopened a few until the elaborate jigsaw puzzle they had laid out for themselves finally started to make sense and the twelve blank canvases had been swaddled in wrapping and placed inside new boxes and returned to their moorings in the holder beneath the tarpaulin.

  ‘What time is it?’ asked
Montignac, who was only starting to feel tired now that the operation was nearly over.

  ‘Almost ten past five,’ said Gareth.

  ‘All right. Enough time to clean this place up and get back. Watch out for splinters,’ he added as they started to collect all the broken boxes which they had taken off, and carry them back to the storeroom in the Threadbare. ‘Now the paintings,’ said Montignac.

  One by one, they collected a Cézanne and carried it carefully through the ceiling into the next-door gallery, leaning each one side by side against the wall. The light was starting to break outside as the sun came up but time was still on their side.

  Gareth went back to the Clarion and swept the floor to rid it of any small pieces of wood that remained and then between them they inspected the room, happy that they were leaving it exactly as they had found it. They climbed back into the panel and made their way back to the Threadbare.

  ‘Now,’ said Montignac. ‘You see those desks in there?’ He pointed towards four old desks that stood in the second storeroom, two standing on the floor, two resting upside down on top of each other.

  ‘Yes,’ said Gareth.

  ‘I want to put all of them in this room,’ he said. ‘To fill it up.’

  Gareth sighed in exhaustion. ‘Why?’ he asked petulantly. ‘That will take ages.’

  ‘In the unlikely event that anyone ever considers the fact that the attic space is easily accessible, I want it to look as if it has been blocked up for years,’ he said patiently. ‘Now come on. If we put our backs into it, it won’t take long.’

  Knowing that he had no choice in the matter, Gareth grudgingly followed Montignac and they pulled the desks down, loading up the corridor and filling in the final gaps with some spare chairs and various bags of rubbish and bits of wood that they found about the place. By the time they locked the door again the storeroom housing the attic panel appeared virtually inaccessible.