Twist Read online

  But at least he was in character, which was more than could be said for the toerags who had ignored his lesson in Constantin Stanislavski’s ‘Method’, preferring instead to improvise in their own inimitable style.

  ‘Right turn here,’ he barked from the back seat, gripping the handrail as the fourteen-foot behemoth slewed to the right down a narrow side street then nudged out across Jermyn Street where he waved it in to park up outside a white-fronted Georgian building.

  ‘If anyone comes you cruise round the block. Then call me,’ Fagin said, circling his finger in front of Cribb’s nose. Cribb duly doffed his chauffeur’s cap, then closed the passenger door behind him as he swept across the pavement and up the front steps of the architect’s office with his bodyguard, a well-dressed Dodge, scanning the street behind him for hostiles.

  The building was high Regency, its geometrical precision a shadow of the classical symmetry of the buildings of classical Greece and Rome. The history was not lost on Fagin. He knew that these empires had been held up as models for the education of the ruling elite of the Georgian era as they were instructed to be the colonial administrators of the British Empire, the civilisation which they considered their birthright and which they never doubted would be a legacy that would last one thousand years.

  They walked up the marble steps beneath the triangular fresco of the porch, its workmanship undiminished in the face of two hundred and fifty years of weather. He motioned his assistant forwards and Dodge, looking every inch the part in a shiny, fashionably tight-fitting silk Hugo Boss suit, stepped forwards and pressed the button above an etched stainless steel sign which read Spender Ltd. Architects since 1838.

  ‘Keep your mitts to yourself,’ Fagin hissed as they heard the electric circuitry of the door buzz and the lock click open.

  ‘Alex Spender,’ said the man who opened the door, ‘architect since 1838 at your service.’

  Fagin extended his hand, making sure the upper middle class Englishman clocked the huge gold Rolex on his wrist as Dodge gave him the once-over for concealed firearms and Batesy nodded from the illegally parked S Class in the street behind him.

  The handshake was firm if not vigorous, Fagin reaching forwards with his left hand to secure the power grip, beloved of senior statesmen and power brokers, searching deep inside his eyes as if anticipating some kind of foul play.

  Then he smiled, nodding to himself as if his expectations had not only been correct but had, in some surprising way been surpassed. Looking suitably perplexed, Alex Spender, owner and managing partner of the firm, turned and led them across the threshold of the building where his family had worked for almost two hundred years.

  ‘We speak on telephone, about conversion you do at number ninety-two,’ Fagin said, his accent as thick as crude oil in a Siberian pipeline.

  Spender ushered them into a large office at the back, a space which was entirely his own. A single glass table reflected the light that spilled into the room from a glass ceiling some thirty feet above their heads. The sound of tiny wings beating in the air above drew their gaze upwards towards a tiny bird which was dipping its long beak into a beautiful flower which appeared to be growing in thin air.

  ‘An East African hummingbird pollinating a ghost orchid. Arachneea Sprilunias. An agrophocic plant. It draws all its moisture from the environment.’

  Spender waited until they were seated before taking his own place behind his desk in a black leather Corbusier chair.

  ‘The Losberne Gallery?’ he asked.

  ‘Da,’ Fagin nodded, ‘I buy building opposite. Want make modern. Like ninety-two. You show me plans, da?’

  Spender leaned forward, his forearms flat on the glass desktop and smiled at Fagin, who noticed that the Englishman was more focused now that he was looking a three million pound account in the eye. Fagin could also tell from Spender’s slight hesitation that it was not his usual practice to share the layout of client’s premises with anyone but that there was something about an oligarch that was forcing him to seriously consider dispensing with protocol.

  ‘Of course I can show you our plans for Dr Losberne …’ he coughed, standing up and walking to a recessed black cabinet to his right, unlocking its glass door and pulling out an aluminium tube from a shelf labelled ‘L’.

  Fagin watched him walk towards the clear glass table and unfurl a four foot by four foot set of plans, pausing only when Fagin’s mobile phone began to hum.

  Turning his back on Spender, Fagin crouched low at the table, pulling his phone from his pocket and shielding it secretively from Spender who showed no sign of trying to listen in at all.

  ‘Da?’ he began.

  ‘Eleven-o-five, on the dot. Just like you said!’ he heard Batesy shriek from the car outside.

  Dodge watched Spender look over at Fagin as he pulled the mobile phone away from his ear then calmly replaced it and shouted a thick stream of expletives in Russian into it before turning to glare at the architect, shielding the earpiece of the phone with his free hand.

  ‘Is private!’ he growled.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Spender demurred, ‘I don’t understand Russian.’

  ‘You want my business?’ Fagin asked bluntly, watching as Spender finally got the message and offered up a little bow – whatever sir wants – before slipping into the next room with the flats of his hands pressed tightly against his ears.

  The moment he was gone Fagin stood up and scuttled to the door, getting firm purchase on the handle with both hands as Dodge stepped up onto the glass table, pulling out a high definition pocket camera, the flash illuminating the room and startling the hummingbird which Fagin watched climb steeply and hit the glass ceiling with an almost inaudible bump.

  30

  The plans were on the wall but Fagin looked strained. There were dark rings around his eyes and while he was never short of ideas he was having trouble placing them in a sequence that made sense. The job itself was not easy but the client posed his own risks and the fact that it had been Sikes and not Fagin who had brought him in made Fagin doubly nervous. But it was Sikes that worried him above all else.

  Sikes, who had known him almost half of his life. Sikes, who had been both raised and schooled by him. Sikes who had always, no matter how much care and charity Fagin had given him, lived in his mind with a question hanging over him. A question only a psychologist could answer.

  And if Dodge was right, if a potential human resource problem was emerging with the new boy then it was by no means inconceivable that one of Sikes’s symptoms, his predilection for violence, might reassert itself, which would derail the entire operation and expose them to a heat that no amount of firefighting would extinguish.

  Fagin looked down at the fat gold Rolex on his wrist. It was half past six and Twist and Red had still not appeared, a full thirty minutes after the briefing had been scheduled to start. Crossing himself, he turned back to the members of the gang who were present while offering a silent prayer that Dodge’s superior instincts for trouble were, for once, wildly off the mark.

  ‘No windows. Reinforced wall here,’ he began, pointing at the rear wall of the open-plan gallery space on the ground floor and a smaller room beside it.

  ‘We’ll have a job getting in there,’ Sikes replied.

  Fagin looked across at the brute. He was sat next to Dodge on one of the fold-down chairs.

  ‘You don’t have to worry about that, Bill,’ he countered. ‘We don’t go in. They bring them out.’ Fagin said watching Dodge shuffle uneasily as they entered unknown territory.

  ‘Bring what out?’ Dodge asked.

  Fagin glanced up. Batesy was checking his iPhone.

  ‘In your own time, Master Batesy,’ Fagin hissed, watching as the young man fumbled and dropped it, leaving it on the floor, returning to the remote and clicking onto the next slide, which was a page from a Sotheby’s catalogue.

  It showed a single painting, one of three existing originals from a ‘complete set of six’ that was due to
go on sale in their next auction. There was a title for the auction at the top of the page that might have been Sotheby’s marketing team’s finest hour. It read:

  The Greatest Sale of Eighteenth-Century Art Since The Eighteenth Century.

  Fagin was not often lost for words but he found them difficult to retrieve now. He paused for thought, looked up at Dodge’s face and saw the boy watching him expectantly before looking down at the ground once again.

  ‘So, my dears,’ he began, ‘our client, for whom we are going to all this trouble, is not an unreasonable man. I have not introduced him by name until now to preserve his professional … integrity, but it is important for you to know the essential facts about him as they pertain to the success of this job. He is a Russian from a Siberian city called Krasnoyarsk, a businessman of considerable means who is also, as you may well already have seen by his selection of said Hogarths, a person of considerable taste. Such a man can be persuaded. He has just paid the visit he had promised he would make to the owner of the existing three Hogarths and has, Bill has reliably informed me, persuaded him to sell via Sotheby’s which means …’

  Fagin looked up at this point and saw Sikes’s dark eyes attempting to read him from across the room. He recalled their agreement not to mention Rodchenko’s actual name to the boys. Instead he coughed, looked back at the floor and sucked half his entire beard into his mouth, before looking up again to meet Dodge’s questioning eyes.

  ‘So … where does that leave us?’ he went on. ‘Well … it means that we’ve got about a week to retrieve the missing three from Losberne before our Russian friend, Mr Arkady Rodchenko, comes and severs our vital functions with a pair of rusty pliers.’

  There was silence in the room as he picked up the miniature golf club from the desk and pointed at the picture of Moll Hackabout, the heroine of Hogarth’s cautionary tale in the first of her appearances, just off the mail coach, standing next to a toad-like woman in a black shawl.

  ‘Enter stage left our heroine, one Moll Hackabout, seventeen years old and served up fresh from the provinces into the hands of old Mother Needham, one of the Seven Dials’ most notorious brothel keepers,’ Fagin began again, glancing nervously at Sikes who showed no reaction at all.

  ‘This is the first episode in her infamous decline, rendered by none other than William Hogarth, the pre-eminent satirist of his age, that being the reign of George I, and titled The Harlot’s Progress – a series of six original plates …’

  ‘Says Sotheby’s,’ Dodge butted in. ‘So why are we casing Losberne?’

  ‘A series of six, I said. Three are up for auction at Sotheby’s, as you can see from the catalogue, at the rear end of next week. The other three have been missing since 1755. The story is they were destroyed in a fire. But some people say that the fire was merely a diversion to cover the theft of the paintings. That all the time they have been off the radar … until now, that is …’

  Fagin looked at Sikes, wondering what the real story was behind the tip-off, guessing that Rodchenko’s thugs had most likely tapped up the insurance agent or underwriter who Losberne would have called in to protect his Hogarths before they reached auction.

  ‘So you’re saying Losberne has got the three missing paintings?’ Dodge asked.

  ‘So my man tells me,’ Sikes replied, eyes forward on the prize.

  ‘I don’t mean to be thick,’ Dodge said, ‘but to clarify, we’re stealing these to order?’

  Fagin stroked his beard, nodded, then craned his ear towards the door. The others heard it then. It was the sound of the hatch to the stairwell being unlocked. Fagin nodded at Batesy who left the projector and stepped out to greet the latecomers who filed into the room seconds later, smiling and relaxed in one another’s company.

  Fagin watched them come in. No apology from either of them and no sign of guilt on their faces, which, he reflected, could only be a good thing.

  ‘Did you get the scanner?’ Cribb asked.

  Red reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out the palm-pilot-shaped device she and Twist had taken from the warehouse.

  ‘And … I saw a Bacon, a Blake and a new artist called Twist …’ she said.

  ‘They’re all a bunch of Cuntstables,’ Batesy interjected, receiving a slap from Fagin as he filed past him back to his place at the projector.

  ‘Show some respect,’ Fagin said, watching Sikes who followed Red, eyes blank as she walked in front of him and pulled a fold-down chair from the stack to sit down on it next to him.

  ‘I’m not sure you’ve been formally introduced to our latest recruit, Bill. I give you Oliver Twist. Street artist. Traceur and soon to be …’ he paused for effect, ‘Robin Hood of the art world.’

  ‘Heard a lot about you,’ Sikes said, smiling at Twist this time.

  ‘All good, I hope,’ Twist replied.

  ‘So far,’ Sikes said, offering him a friendly wink as he stood pushing up off the back of the chair with one hand to balance on his bad leg while offering his free hand for Twist to shake, holding it there, wondering why Twist had stopped short of taking it.

  ‘Hello, boy,’ Sikes said, feeling the pressure against his good leg and hearing the growl that accompanied it.

  Twist’s hand lowered as he went to pat the bulldog on the head.

  ‘Don’t touch him!’ Sikes said.

  Twist looked up at Sikes, surprised by the urgency in his voice.

  ‘You’re going to need your hands later,’ he said.

  31

  She looked round at the others crouched in the back of the white Bedford van. Twist and Batesy were sat opposite one another on the metal arch frames of the rear wheels and Bill sat watching her as she straightened the straps of her dress.

  She looked across at Batesy who was watching the entrance to Losberne’s gallery on the screen of his iPad.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘I’ve been checking his messages. He’s got nothing on this evening. Now … go. He’s coming out now.’

  She shot him her brightest smile, looked once at Sikes then turned and waited as Twist reached for the door handle opening their secure, self-contained world to the cold and dark one outside.

  As the door slammed shut behind her she saw that Plumbing Services had been painted on its side. She crossed the street to the gallery side and walked straight up to the front door just as Losberne was turning, regular as clockwork, to lock it.

  ‘Is this a bad time?’ she asked, watching his eyes light up.

  * * *

  Ten minutes later Losberne was leaning over his fridge in his small private office next to the room Fagin claimed held the Hogarths. It was not a large office and in the corner she noticed a spiral staircase.

  ‘I have a bedroom up there with a shower,’ he said, turning to face her as he poured her a glass of champagne. ‘One never knows when one will get busy.’

  Red took the flute and smiled politely back at him as he sat down on the patent leather red two-seater sofa next to her.

  ‘You were saying, it’d be answering the phone, a bit of filing …?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing a girl like you can’t handle,’ Losberne replied, placing his hand on her knee and keeping it there as she turned hastily to rummage in her bag, pushing it sideways across her lap as she switched on the key fob scanner inside.

  ‘I did want to show you some of my art,’ she countered, pushing the iPad at him with her right hand as she probed the bunch of keys in his pocket with the scanner inside the bag with her left.

  ‘I’ve got it all on here,’ she said, turning it a full half circle, scanning the room just as Batesy had instructed her but all the time worrying, wondering, how far Bill would let Losberne go before he reacted.

  ‘This one’s based on —’

  ‘The Simoniac Pope, of course. Very interesting … you’ve really got the line …’ Losberne said sitting up now, really paying attention.

  Red scrolled across to the next page. She hoped Twist was listening too. He was terr
ibly earnest but there was something about him that she liked. If he was going to be an artist when this was over then what was stopping her becoming a dancer?

  ‘I’m afraid this isn’t my area, but I have to say these look rather intriguing …’ Losberne went on, pulling the iPad closer to his face, zooming in to examine the details.

  ‘Fuck me!’ Red said, watching Losberne register the change in her accent.

  ‘Sorry. That’s my “graffiti” voice,’ she beamed. ‘It’s the only way to get taken seriously on the street.’

  ‘I see. More champagne?’

  ‘It’s going right through me. Must pay a quick visit to the little girls’ room,’ she said, standing quickly and walking back towards the entrance to his office and the gallery toilet outside.

  It was dark in the gallery but there was an unmistakable glow coming from the glass encased server which stood locked behind Losberne’s PA’s desk.

  Red approached it and ducked down behind the desk as she heard Losberne come out of his office and stand in the doorway scanning the room for her. She took a generic remote-entry key fob from her hand and hooked it up to the wire that linked it to the scanner and its tiny built-in hard drive. There was a whirring sound as the data downloaded onto the fob. She worked quickly, detaching the USB cable and placing the fob up against the reader on the face of the server stack.

  Nothing happened. She reversed the fob hoping that the other side would transmit but it didn’t. She held her breath, listening to the sound of footsteps leaving Losberne’s office. Crossing the gallery space she texted blind into her mobile phone.

  * * *

  ‘I’ll do it,’ Twist said, watching a mixture of surprise and relief play on Dodge and Batesy’s faces.

  ‘Whatever you do, don’t drop it,’ Dodge said, passing it to him and watching as he slid the key fob into the coin pocket of his jeans as Batesy muttered something about cheap Chinese shit.