Twist Page 12

  It was a cruel twist of fate that his surveillance suite had chosen to malfunction at the exact moment that opportunity had once again come knocking. This time it was via Sikes, who swore he’d heard it from the horse’s mouth, the bodyguard of a Russian crime kingpin who collected art and was after a set of six original Hogarths, valued at sixty mil and thought to have been destroyed in a fire two hundred and fifty years ago, which had just resurfaced and fallen into the hands of a notoriously crooked Mayfair dealer who was at this very moment preparing them for auction.

  He shuddered to think how much he’d spent on this CCTV monitoring equipment and how ill-favourably it had performed versus the uSpy, an iPhone app which at just sixty-nine pence had, for a short, glorious two-week period, given Batesy unfettered access to over fifty per cent of Mayfair’s privately owned CCTV cameras.

  But what worried him even more than their loss of video surveillance was the lack of any real intelligence on the true identity of the wealthy Russian collector who had commissioned them. It was all very well Sikes claiming this to be a cut and dried, cash in hand contract but Fagin had never embarked upon a job without knowing exactly who he was working for.

  He sat down and stared at his reflection in the blank glass of the dead monitor and asked himself what good, apart from the six million dollar fee, could possibly come from agreeing to steal six high-profile pictures for a Russian crime lord.

  He had learnt some information about Arkady Rodchenko from his friend Grigoi but not enough and it bothered him, not least because a man willing to attempt a stunt like this was more likely to whack them as pay them when it came to delivering the goods.

  And Sikes wasn’t helping. Fagin’s questions about the Russians were met with stony silence. Ten minutes with Rodchenko and Fagin was sure he’d be able to get a read on the situation. Sniffing out money and sensing danger were his special skills and employing them now could mean the difference between walking away with a suitcase full of cash or resurfacing with the Thames tide, without teeth or fingertips.

  So Fagin couldn’t work Sikes’s attitude out at all but he did know one thing. The tough kid he’d picked up ten years ago, whose debts he’d cleared and who he’d fed, housed and schooled in all the subtle tricks of his trade, had changed. He had fallen after being chased from the roof of a jewellery store in Bow. He’d slipped and plummeted two floors to the street, turning himself in the air like a diver off the high board so that he’d landed feet first, the impact shattering his leg and forcing shards of splintered bone up and into his knee.

  It had crippled him and left him bitter and resentful. And whereas Fagin had hoped he would change for the better and coach the younger boys instead, he’d fallen back on his brute strength to intimidate and coerce them. And that, as far as Fagin was concerned, was fine for as long as he played ball. But when he started drawing down scores on his own and disappearing for days on end with his new ‘associates’, he would have to see that sooner or later he was going to take another tumble.

  So with a bogeyman for a client and a recalcitrant psychopath on his payroll, Fagin felt his only option was to advance with the reconnaissance and plan the job. He would use the announcement of the discovery of the paintings and the imminent date of their public auction to light a fire under the agent, secure the ID of the client and, if he was lucky, secure an advance that would cover the costs of his disappearance if the client turned out to be the devil himself.

  And although intelligence-gathering could become prurient and an unhealthy obsession, in this instance it was invaluable because without it you were working in the dark and as his mentor Armond Griot had consistently pointed out:

  If it feels wrong, it IS wrong.

  And it was never too late to walk away. If you didn’t trust your instinct, sooner or later you were going to walk into a police sting or surface, beaten and bloated, by the Isle of Dogs where the bodies of fools who should have looked before they leapt get washed up.

  He clicked the mouse and shuffled through the grainy images that Batesy had been able to mine via uSpy during the two-week window before the firewall had picked up unwelcome attention from a security firm in the area and they’d been forced to shut it down. From this footage alone a dynamic profile had already begun to materialise. Not perfect yet but enough to have established Losberne’s eating habits, lunch partners, sexual proclivities and the timing and variations of his daily walk to and from work.

  And with this information to hand, Fagin could begin to plan, using a strategic planning tool he’d been gifted by an old business associate, a retired British Army colonel whose ‘souvenirs’ Fagin had helped place when his tour in Iraq had ended in 2003. Drug-crazed Liberian rebels annihilated, Taliban defeated on home turf and a small island off the coast of Argentina reclaimed, the tool had impressed Fagin with its simplicity.

  ‘First you get clear on what it is you want,’ the colonel had told him, ‘then you write down three supporting effects that have to be in place to bring the job off and then you get creative and list all the things you can do to make sure all three of those effects stack up in the right place at the right time.’

  Fagin had planned jobs successfully on his own before and he had never been much of a fan of the military but the colonel was living proof that the tool he called ‘The Estimate’ worked if you fed it high-quality data and were prepared to walk away if you didn’t have the resources needed to stack up the three supporting effects.

  Fagin stepped into his planning room and looked at their objective; steal a set of six paintings. First a set of three that had been missing since the year dot, then the remaining set of three from a public auction. He scratched his beard and ran his finger down a line of Post-it notes on the wall, each of which had a title.

  1. Create a diversion.

  2. Take possession of the paintings without detection.

  3. Get paid on delivery without getting whacked.

  He drained the dregs of his coffee and rubbed his red eyes. Sleep, his fickle mistress, had deserted him a couple of weeks ago after Sikes had brought him the new gig and as he shuffled up to the wall with a fresh idea on a Post-it note, he wondered if she would ever come back. Probably, he thought, when he had his share of $60 million tucked safely away under his mattress.

  He walked back into the monitor room and clicked the mouse to the right then double-clicked on the letter H, bringing up a folder with ten icons inside it. He hit R and clicked the camera on the roof into full screen mode so that he could see how the new boy called Twist was getting on.

  According to Red he’d passed the first test with flying colours. He was fast, smart and keen to impress. Her one reservation was his attitude.

  ‘He’s a funny one,’ Red had said. ‘He’s done time in Beltham but he’s a sensitive soul. You see an old lady crossing the road, he’s going to carry her and her dog over to the other side. I’m not sure he’s stolen a two-penny sweet let alone sixty-million-dollar works of art.’

  So the boy had a moral compass. Surprising, after a spell in Beltham, which was considered by many old pros as a kind of criminal finishing school. But principles, like drinks, could be fixed and the more Red told Fagin the more he knew which buttons to push. Twist wasn’t interested in money but he was interested in going to art school and, from what Fagin could see of the boy now, watching wide-eyed as his instructress pop-vaulted the double bars on the roof, he was interested in Red too.

  ‘He looks like he’s been run over.’

  Sikes’s voice took Fagin by surprise but he knew he must not show it.

  ‘He’s done well,’ he replied, clicking the monitor off with the remote control in his hand as he heard Sikes’s footsteps drawing closer.

  ‘Can we trust him?’ Sikes asked.

  ‘There is only one way to find out,’ he said.

  There was a knock on the door.

  ‘Come in,’ Fagin shouted, starting up from the monitor to greet Twist with his lopsided grin and firm hand
shake.

  ‘Now, Twist,’ he began, his face earnest as Bill sidled out of the room, ‘I know you have your concerns about the work we do so I just wanted to set the record straight.’

  23

  Twist could see Fagin’s reflection in the dead monitor. Their conversation had begun ten hours ago, here in the monitor room, with a brief lecture of the vital work his gang did as ‘repossession men’ for large insurance companies.

  Twist had heard of specialists who ‘repossessed’ cars whose lease plan buyers had failed to keep up their payments, and Fagin had used this analogy to explain the service he provided for the insurance companies who contracted them.

  If art was listed as stolen on the Art Loss Register, insurance companies paid out vast sums to the victims, which effectively meant that were the art to be recovered, it would now belong to the insurance company and not to the previous owner.

  As a result they spent equally large sums of money trying to recover the art and recoup their losses. To do this they employed private detectives, often former Interpol or Scotland Yard art squad specialists, to track down the art.

  Due to the involvement of organised crime in many art thefts, most private detectives were unwilling to take on the risks of breaking and entering criminal strongholds to ‘repossess’ the art. Which was why the major insurance companies contacted Fagin and his outfit to do the dirty work for them.

  Dirty because, as was the case in the ‘Losberne Repossession’, missing art that may have been stolen by career criminals often resurfaces in the hands of crooked dealers who in turn sell to high net worth individuals who prefer not to probe too deeply into the provenance of the work hanging on their walls.

  And this, Fagin had concluded, brandishing his contracts from the insurance firms all underwritten by Lloyds of London, was where the confusion about his work always began.

  For far from being like the thieves who had stolen the work in the first place, they were in fact far more like bailiffs, unpopular, no doubt, but in fact performing a valuable service, not just to their employer but to the art world at large by recovering great art works that would otherwise be lost to the British public.

  And so, Fagin had finally come around to asking the question that Twist had guessed he’d been building up to all along.

  ‘So now you know what we do,’ he’d begun, slowly, looking straight at Twist, ‘do you think that this is the kind of work that you could be interested in trying out for?’

  And so Twist had agreed to a ‘trial run’ which was how he’d come to be standing here the next day, watching Fagin playing the puppeteer, each click of the mouse propelling ‘the mark’, portly Dr Crispin Losberne, dealer in fine art, on his morning walk from his town house in a private mews off Belgrave Square to his gallery on Savile Row, Mayfair.

  * * *

  Twist scanned the monitor room, crossed it and sat in an empty chair directly in front of where Fagin was standing scratching his crotch impatiently, like a derelict university professor waiting for latecomers to arrive.

  A boy who had been introduced as Cribb was fiddling with a remote control by what looked to be a digital receiver unit, while across the room Red examined her nails as Fagin’s briefing began, both Dodge and Batesy notable by their absence.

  ‘You cannot con an honest man,’ he said, framing the moral of the story then pointing a toy golf club at Cribb, who hit play on the remote, before turning to point at the monitor which now whirred into life behind him.

  ‘Six foot three inches tall and just one point seven miles in forty-five minutes,’ Fagin said.

  ‘He’s moving slowly,’ Twist commented, stating the obvious.

  ‘Or stopping off en route,’ Fagin replied. ‘Cribb, if you wouldn’t mind?’

  Twist had not had much to do with Cribb so far but Red had filled in his backstory and Twist had been surprised to hear it closely resembled his own. A car thief with over forty-two violations for joy riding against his name, Cribb had done a bunk following an apprenticeship scheme with a mechanic in Swindon who’d specialised in German cars. Making his way up to London he’d fallen back on his skills and fallen in with a breaker in Tottenham who pulled them apart and made a killing in spare parts sales.

  Which is how Dodge had first stumbled across Cribb, tripping over his beanpole legs that had been sticking out from beneath a Mercedes S Class off Bow High Street. Picking himself up, Dodge had helpfully informed the body under the car that if he didn’t want trouble he should stop what he was doing and make tracks, as CID were hard on his heels. Cool as a cucumber Cribb had crawled out from under the bonnet, walked round to the back of the car and jacked open the boot, ushering Dodge inside where he’d lain, hidden, until the Feds had disappeared leaving only a trail of expletives in their wake.

  Fagin nodded to Cribb, who clicked the remote again to reveal a photograph of a much younger, fitter Losberne sitting in a rowing boat on the River Thames.

  ‘History of Art at Ruskin, Oxford, followed by Fine Art at St Martin’s, where he slummed it in his aunt’s empty flat off the King’s Road before getting kicked out for cheating in his finals and moving to a farmhouse just outside Puglia where he lived until Black Monday bankrupted his old man in 1987.’

  ‘Black Monday?’ Twist asked, wondering why it was necessary to go into Losberne’s complete life history in such detail.

  ‘Programme trading,’ Fagin explained, ‘overvaluation, illiquidity and the madness of crowds were all cited as causes of the perfect financial storm that meant that young Crispin, perfectly useless aged thirty, had to go out and do the unthinkable … and work for a living.’

  Fagin stood up at this point and turned to face his audience, forcing Twist, Red and the boy called Cribb to back up and give him more room to perform.

  ‘So, rather than go without, Losberne set himself up as a “knocker”. His timing was immaculate. When one in eight of Wiltshire’s population was middle to upper middle class, elderly and living alone, he used his family name and working knowledge of fine art to get inside their homes and identify targets for an organiser who ran several burglars and supplied several local dealers.’

  Twist watched as Fagin clicked on the mouse and a dog-eared photograph of a man in a Navy pea coat appeared alongside Losberne in the car park of a pub called The Assizes.

  ‘Just popping in to see how you were doing, Mrs Peabody. I must say that’s a delightful Regency grandfather clock …’

  Twist could see that Fagin had left no stone unturned as he went on, cycling down the crooked path that Losberne’s life had followed.

  ‘Losberne began to dabble as a dealer in the early nineties, circumnavigating the local auctions which were now too high risk. There was no single stolen art register at that time and Losberne kept himself off the Yard’s radar … Cribb!’

  Twist watched as Fagin cuffed Cribb round the ear with a backhanded swipe, and a series of images flashed up on the screens as he raced to catch up.

  ‘But his big coup came in 1994 when a tip-off from a fence who declared himself to be “out of my depth” led him to the semi-detached, pebble-dashed council house in Slough of the thief who worked into the fence. Who led him up to the attic where he found an original Braque, believed to have been taken by Franco himself after dynamiting the Mayor of Guernica’s vault twenty minutes after the Luftwaffe flattened the Spanish town’s municipal HQ in 1937.’

  ‘Fortuitously his find coincided with a MOMA, New York exhibition entitled “Stealing Beauty” and he wasted no time in worming his way to become the go-to guy for the private seller keen to authenticate and quietly sell on any high-profile work of dubious provenance. He became the Swiss banker of the art world. Drug dealers who had taken art as collateral on a debt, unscrupulous property developers seeking cut-price kudos, oligarchs, dictators and anyone filthy and rich enough to want a masterpiece, all found his double-blind, triple-encrypted online auctions the perfect way to sell and secure priceless works by artists that even thei
r vulgar friends would recognise.’

  Twist stared at the screens open-mouthed as art and sketches by major artists flashed before his eyes. Van Goghs, Rembrandts, Picassos, Constables, Bacons and Goyas all appeared on the monitors in front of them. Fagin did not bat an eyelid.

  ‘A paper millionaire by thirty-five, Losberne bought his Mayfair gallery aged forty and his Tribeca space a year later. Based in London in the summer he spends his winters in LA in his Malibu beach shack sourcing missing work for the Gettys.’

  ‘All very interesting, Fagin.’

  Twist turned and saw a man stood in the doorway, smiling. He was in his late twenties and built like a boxer and he had a livid red scar running from his scalp to his right cheek.

  ‘Good of you to join us, Bill,’ Fagin replied, smiling as he took the remote from Cribb and switched the input to a hard drive containing CCTV camera footage.

  ‘Each morning for the past two weeks the good doctor, as he has titled himself, has been blissfully unaware of his shadow, an Evening Standard vendor in a purple fleece and a baseball cap with “D” embroidered on the front.’

  Twist focused on the middle screen as a figure matching the description Fagin had just given walked into shot keeping pace behind Losberne.

  ‘Now you see him …’ Fagin said, pointing at the man in the purple fleece who stopped in the middle of the screen, turned his head up to the camera and waved. ‘Now you don’t.’

  Twist heard Red laugh on the far side of the room as Dodge disappeared from the centre of the screen and the clock jumped back ten seconds to a fresh sequence in which Losberne crossed the same street at the same time the next day without being tailed.

  ‘Now, Twist, if you were wondering why I keep Batesy on …’ Fagin said, ‘watch this.’

  Twist stared as the monitor switched out of CCTV view and into first-person camera mode. The lens was fixed at eye height and gave a clear view of Losberne’s back as he ambled relaxed through Mayfair, stopping to buy his coffee in a Carluccio’s on the corner, smiling at the dark-haired girl behind the counter, waving away the change she offered him on a small silver tray.