‘What is it?’

‘A fucking chain. What did you think it was?’ Gerrit replied, slamming the door of Philip’s office closed. His glasses were sliding down his nose, his neck scrawny with the after-effects of illness. But his temper was still impressive. ‘What are you playing at, Preston?’

Philip stared at him, the chain dangling from his fingers.

‘Well, say something! Don’t just stand there with your mouth open like a fucking haddock.’

It took Philip another couple of seconds to respond. Then he rushed out of his office and returned shortly afterwards holding a wooden box. Carefully, he unfastened the box and lifted the lid.

They both looked inside. At the Bosch chain.

‘OK,’ Gerrit said unpleasantly. ‘Let me guess: they’re breeding.’

‘This is no joke!’ Philip replied, examining the chain Gerrit had brought in. ‘They’re identical. But they can’t be. There can’t be two of them.’

‘So which is the original?’ Gerrit asked. ‘The one Sabine Monette stole from me?’

‘She bought the bloody painting with the chain!’ Philip roared, losing his composure entirely. ‘It was hers by rights. Stop whining like a bloody girl,’ he raged, his face red against his white hair.

Gerrit was unmoved. ‘Has this chain – the one in your box—’

‘The real chain—’

‘But we don’t know that, do we?’ Gerrit countered. ‘You’ve always been a slippery bugger, Preston. I don’t trust you, never have. If you’re trying to pull a fast one—’

‘Why would I cut my own throat?’ Philip retorted. ‘I need this sale. I don’t need the art world to think I’m dealing in fakes. No one would ever trust me again.’

‘No one fucking trusts you now,’ Gerrit replied, staring at the chain in the box. ‘Has anyone handled it apart from you?’

‘No.’

‘Has it ever left this place?’

‘No!’

‘So it’s always been at the auction house?’

‘Ever since Nicholas Laverne gave it to me …’ Philip trailed off, glancing up at Gerrit. ‘He couldn’t have. Could he?’

‘He fucking has,’ Gerrit replied, looking back at the chain he had brought in. ‘So if he swapped the chains and gave you a replica, that makes mine the real one.’

‘Maybe he didn’t swap the chains!’ Philip replied desperately. ‘Maybe he just had a copy made.’

Gerrit’s tone was withering. ‘So he could remember what it looked like?’

‘Where did you get it?’

‘Some woman dropped it off at my gallery this morning.’

‘Who?’

‘I don’t bloody know!’ Gerrit snapped. ‘My secretary handled it. She didn’t get a name. She didn’t get any fucking fingerprints either.’

Philip looked at the chain in the box and then looked back at the one Gerrit had brought in. ‘Maybe both of them are fakes.’

‘Well, they can’t both be real, can they?’

Philip’s skin was now crimson, his blood pressure rising. At any other time Gerrit would have enjoyed the show, but he had been cheated too and wasn’t laughing.

‘One of them must be real—’

Gerrit nodded. ‘One of them.’

‘Nicholas Laverne had the chain authenticated with the papers—’ He stopped short.

Alert, Gerrit tilted his head to one side. ‘Oh, don’t go shy on me! I know about the papers. Don’t know the details, don’t care. It’s the chain I want. Let some other fucker expose the fraud, I can only benefit from the publicity. And besides, seems to me that everyone who knows about the papers ends up dead.’ He smiled slyly. ‘Is that why you’ve got the security, Philip?’

‘You’ve got Honthorst.’

‘Yeah, but he doesn’t work exclusively for me. Not like your fucking doorstops.’ Changing tack, he gestured to the chains on the desk. ‘You’ll have to get them both checked out to see which one is authentic—’

Philip shrugged. ‘It looks like the same gold, same weight. Of course I can get them dated, but …’

‘Oh crap. What?’

‘If both chains were made from the same metal at the same time, they would be identical.’

‘Hieronymus Bosch had two chains made? Why the fuck would he do that?’

‘Who said it was Bosch who had them made?’ Philip countered, slumping into his office chair. ‘Jesus, this is clever, very clever … Someone could have obtained an old antique chain. Difficult, but not impossible if you went to a specialist dealer or bought one from a sale abroad. Then it could have been refashioned into two identical chains. Same links, same markings, the same in every way. The gold is antique, but the chains could have been made yesterday.’

‘That makes no bleeding sense!’ Gerrit snorted. ‘Why make two?’

‘To cause havoc,’ Philip replied. ‘Which it has done. To makes us all run around trying to work it out. To confuse, to deceive, to slow us up. To make fools of us. Hieronymus Bosch is world famous – everybody’s interested in his story.’ He remembered the scandal which had resulted in Nicholas’s disgrace. ‘Like I say, Bosch is important, not like the boy who was abused and hanged himself.’

Gerrit threw up his hands in despair. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about—’

‘Laverne!’ Philip snapped. ‘Nicholas Laverne – who’s had years to hone his plan. He knew that he had to come up with something to catch the world’s attention, and Bosch will do that.’

‘You mean there was no deception?’

‘I don’t know,’ Philip said bleakly. ‘Perhaps Laverne heard a rumour, some old story about the painter, and decided to embellish it – use it for his own ends. He told me that he’d spent time in the Netherlands.’ Philip collapsed further into his chair. ‘It’s a scam. I sell the chain for a fortune and then up pops another one and my reputation’s down the toilet—’

‘So let’s put one of the chains in the bank and forget about it,’ Gerrit suggested. ‘I could be encouraged to forget what I know.’

‘And then you’d have that over me for ever, wouldn’t you?’

‘I don’t see that you have a choice,’ Gerrit replied.

Philip thought for a moment. ‘If Nicholas Laverne organised this, he had to have a reason. Laverne isn’t involved in the art world. His family was, and his uncle still buys, but not him. So why would he do it?’

Gerrit shrugged.

‘Because Nicholas Laverne wants to get his own back on the Catholic Church, the institution which excommunicated him. Disgraced him, abandoned him—’

‘Yeah, yeah, I get the point. Get on with it.’

‘He wants revenge. So how could he get it? By uncovering another scandal, of course. But it had to be a scandal which involved the Catholic Church.’ Philip paused. ‘Are you following me?’

‘All the way off the fucking cliff.’

‘He needed something which was newsworthy, something which involved money and power. I think that’s why Laverne chose the art world. Unless he has a grudge against us as well. Think about it,’ Philip said, pausing for a second. ‘Who found the chain?’

Gerrit kept his voice steady. ‘Sabine Monette—’

‘You know that Nicholas Laverne was close to Sabine Monette? He lived on her estate in France … You didn’t know?’

‘I do now.’

Philip was thinking rapidly. ‘Sabine found the chain, yes. But she didn’t find the papers. Laverne was the one who found those. Laverne uncovered them, hidden between the links of the chain. Or did he?’ He stared at Gerrit. ‘Perhaps he didn’t find anything. Perhaps he pretended to find them. That little Bosch picture you sold to Sabine Monette – you said it had come from some old guy who wanted you to sell it on his behalf.’

‘Yeah, that’s right.’

‘And he gave you papers which authenticated the validity of the painting, which by extension authorised the validity of the papers?’

‘You’ve got the papers. So?’

‘How can I contact him?’

‘You can’t. He sold up and pissed off abroad after I gave him the money from the sale of the painting. Said he wanted to retire, although he must have been fucking ninety,’ Gerrit replied. ‘He never left a forwarding address.’