“So I ring the number and mention my contact’s name and this bloke says to me he’s in the market for serious art. He says he has a client for topflight gear, flat fee of ten grand a pop for pieces agreed in advance. I go, how do I know I can trust you, and he goes, ‘you don’t part with the gear till you see the color of my money.’ I go, how does it work, and he goes, ‘you decide on something you think you can get away with, and you ring me and ask me if I want it. I ring you back the next day with a yes or a no.’ ”

“So you embark on your new career as art robber,” I said. “Simple, really.”

“You wouldn’t be so sarcastic if you knew what a nause it is shifting stuff like that on the open market,” Dennis said with feeling.

“How did you know what to go for? And where to go for it?” I demanded. I’d never had Dennis pegged as a paid-up member of the National Trust.

“My mate Frankie came out a while back,” he said. I didn’t think he meant that Frankie had revealed he was a raging queen. “He’s been doing an eight stretch for armed robbery, and he did an Open University degree while he was inside. He did a couple of courses in history of art. He reckoned it would come in useful on the outside,” he added dryly.

“I don’t think that’s quite what the government had in mind when they set up the OU,” I said.

Dennis grinned. “Get an education, get on in life. Anyway, we spent a couple of months schlepping round these country houses, sussing out what was where, what was worth nicking and what the security was like. Pathetic, most of it.”

I had a sudden thought. “Dennis, these robberies have been going on for nine months now. You only got nicked a few weeks ago. You didn’t start doing this for insurance money, you started doing this out of sheer badness,“ I accused him.

He shrugged, looking slightly shamefaced. “So I lied. I’m sorry, Kate, I can’t change the habit of a lifetime. This was just too good to miss. And watertight. We don’t touch places with security guards so nobody gets hurt or upset. We’re in and out so fast there’s no way we’re going to get caught.”

“I caught you,” I pointed out.

“Yeah, but you’re a special case,” Dennis said. “Besides, the CCTV wasn’t there when we cased the place. They must have only just put it in.”

“So who is this guy who’s giving you peanuts for these masterpieces?”

Dennis smiled wryly. “It’s not peanuts, Kate. It’s good money and no hassle.”

“It’s a tiny fraction of what they’re worth,” I said.

“Define worth. What an insurance company pays out? What you could get at auction? Worth is what somebody’s prepared to pay. I reckon ten grand for a night’s work is not bad going.”

“A grand for every year if they catch you. You’d get a better rate of pay working in a sweatshop making schneid T-shirts. So who’s the buyer? Some private collector, or what?”

“I don’t know,” Dennis said. “I don’t even know who the fence is.”

I snorted incredulously. “And I am Marie of Romania. Come on, Dennis, you’ve done more than a dozen deals with this guy, you must know who he is.”

“I’ve never met him before this run of jobs,” Dennis said. “All I’ve got is the number for his mobile.”

“You’re kidding,” I said. “You’ve done over a hundred grand’s worth of work for some punter whose name you don’t even know?”

‘“S right,” he said easily. “My business isn’t like yours, Kate. I don’t take out credit references on the people I do business with. Look, what happens is, every few weeks I ring the guy up with one of Frankie’s suggestions. He gives me the nod, we go out and do the job and I give him a bell. We meet on the motorway services, we show him the goods, he counts the dosh in front of us and we all go home happy boys.”

“What about the fakes?”

There was a deathly silence. He ground out his cigarette viciously in the ashtray. “How did you find out about them?” Dennis asked warily. “There’s been nothing in the papers or anything about that.”

“What happens when it turns out you’ve nicked a copy?” I asked, ignoring him.

Dennis shifted in his seat, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. “You setting me up, or what?” he asked. “You saying that Monet wasn’t kosher?”

“It was kosher,” I said. “But they haven’t all been, have they?”

Dennis lit his cigarette like an actor in a Pinter play filling one of the gaps with a complicated bit of business. “Three of them were bent as a nine-bob note,” he said. “First I knew about it was about a week after we’d done the handover when the geezer bells me and tells me. I said I never knew anything about it, and he goes, ‘I’m sure you were acting in good faith, but the problem is that so was my client. He reckons you owe him ten grand. And he has very efficient debt collectors. But he’s a fair man. He’ll cancel the debt if you provide another painting for free.’ So we to-and-fro a bit, and eventually he agrees that he’ll pay us a grand for expenses for the next kosher one we bring him, and we’re all square. So we go and do another one, and bugger me if it isn’t bent as well.” He shook his head in wonderment.

“Talk about a scam,” he said. “These bastards with their country houses really know how to pull a con job on the punters. Anyway, we end up having to do a third job, this time for fuck all, just to get ourselves square. I mean, he’s obviously dealing with the kind of money that can buy a lot of very vicious muscle. You don’t mess with that.”

“But everything’s hunky-dory now, is it?”

He nodded, eating smoke. “Sweet.”

“Great,” I said. “Then you won’t mind putting the two of us together, will you, Dennis?”

11

ONCE UPON A TIME I HAD A FLING WITH A TELECOM ENGINEER. It didn’t end happily ever after, but he taught me more than I’ll ever need to know about crossed lines. Along the way, before I accepted that great sex wasn’t a long-term compensation for the conversational skills of Bonzo the chimpanzee, I met some very useful people. I met some bloody boring ones too, and unfortunately the crossover between the two groups was disturbingly large. Even more unfortunately, I was going to have to talk to one of them.

After I’d finally convinced Dennis that I wasn’t going to back off and that the price of his liberty was putting me together with his fence, it hadn’t taken me long to squeeze the phone number of the contact out of him. He’d left, grumbling that I was getting in over my head and I needn’t come running to him when the roof fell in. Naturally, we both knew that in the event of such an architectural disaster, the combined emergency services of six counties wouldn’t keep him away.

I watched his car drive away, not entirely certain I was doing the right thing. But I knew I couldn’t turn Dennis over to the cops. It wasn’t just about friendship, though that had been the key factor in my decision, no doubt about that. But I hadn’t been lying when I said I wanted the people behind the whole shooting match. Without them, the robberies wouldn’t end. They’d just find another Dennis to do the dirty work and carry the can. Besides, I wanted Henry’s Monet back, and Dennis didn’t have it anymore.

After Dennis had gone, I rediscovered my appetite and wolfed the sandwich from the fridge before settling down to the thankless task of calling Gizmo. Gizmo works for Telecom as a systems engineer, which suits him down to the ground since he’s the ultimate computer nerd. The first time I met him, he was even wearing an anorak. In a nightclub. I later discovered it was rare as hen’s teeth to catch Gizmo out on the town. Normally, the only thing that will prise him away from his computer screen is the promise of a secret password that will allow him to penetrate to the heart of some company’s as yet virgin network. He’s only ever happy when his modem’s skittering round the world’s bulletin boards. Gizmo would much rather be wandering round the Internet than the streets of Manchester. I thought Bill and I were pretty nifty movers round the intangible world of computer communications till I met Gizmo. Then I realized our joint hacking skills were the equivalent of comparing a ten-year-old’s “What I did on my holidays” essay with Jan Morris on just about anywhere.