Of course when he went public Luca Meriss knew that he would be setting himself up as a target. And not just for abuse. Revealing the portrait would be a coup, its history extraordinary, likely to catch the interest of the world. Luca wanted that. Fillide Melandroni was his ancestor: a beautiful, violent whore whose image shimmered out of many of Caravaggio’s paintings. Who wouldn’t want to own it? But The Nativity would stagger the art world. A painting valued at more than £60,000,000 would incite interest and greed across the globe. Every collector, gallery, connoisseur – and villain – would desire it.

But only he knew its whereabouts. Only Luca Meriss. Anyone who wanted it had to come to him. And if anything happened to him? It would be lost forever.

As guarantees went, it was irrefutable.

The only part of his face he truly liked was his eyes. Dark brown, but not welcoming. Hard. Compelling. At times inviting, at other times cold. Rough trade eyes… His gaze moved down to the waiter’s uniform he was wearing. An outfit soaked in resentment, sticky with humiliation. Everything that a customer thought was in their eyes: words were irrelevant. Their expression said it all at they looked at him – man nudging middle age, waiting on tables. Trying to be pleasant and obsequious instead. An outsider, with his slicked-down Mediterranean hair and rent-boy lips. Overblown, slipping out of his good looks and youth…

Yes, Luca thought. I know how you see me.

But not for much longer.

Breathing in, he relaxed. Everything was in place, at last. Within hours he would launch himself on the internet. He would also contact the papers, magazines, radio and television, and begin his blog. Facebook and Twitter were poised like greyhounds in the slips, ready to run.

He had the name, after all. A name that was famous and, more importantly, infamous. The name of a painter who was also a murderer. Of course Luca knew that people might not believe him, might never accept that he was a descendant of Caravaggio and the notorious Roman prostitute Fillide Melandroni. But he was prepared for that, prepared for people to scoff and think him a madman.

He knew better. He knew his bloodline and what it meant. How it carried a secret. How he was the only man alive who knew the whereabouts of Fillide Melandroni’s portrait, long thought destroyed. But that wasn’t all: Luca also knew the hiding place of the most famous missing painting in the art world, The Nativity with St Francis and St Lawrence, stolen from Palermo, Sicily, in 1969. Allegedly by the Mafia.

As for the portrait of Fillide Melandroni – that was believed to have perished in Germany in 1945. Apparently there had been a direct hit on the Flak Tower and the resulting fire had destroyed all the works of art which had been temporarily housed there.

Or had it? Luca smiled to himself, secure in the knowledge no one else possessed. The paintings hadn’t been destroyed. They weren’t missing. They were simply in hiding. And he, Luca Meriss, was the only man alive who could bring them back into the light.

THE KILLER London, 2014

As Luca Meriss went public with his claim to know the whereabouts of the two Caravaggio paintings, the behemoth of the art world stirred itself. From New York to London, from Paris to Berlin, the news travelled and the scavengers came out.

It was barely six thirty in the morning when Sebastian and Benjamin Weir found themselves becoming slowly paralysed. Beyond their gallery walls, London was taking her first morning breaths, while inside the twin brothers were stripped and bound together with wire fastened around their throats. Unable to defend themselves, their legs were posed in the lotus position, their attacker loading a nail gun in front of them.

Unable to move, both men had watched as the gun was loaded. Sweat trickled down their backs, their skin pressed against each other, low gurgling noises in their throats. For some reason the killer had turned up the heating and the gallery was suffocatingly hot. The killer approached them, looked down at the two brothers, and then slowly and methodically laid the nail gun against Sebastian Weir’s scrotum.

He pulled the trigger and Sebastian’s body jerked, saliva running from the side of his mouth as the man kept firing nails, eight in total. Tied to his brother, Benjamin could feel Sebastian pass out and watched, eyes bulging, as the man reloaded. He paused for several moments, watching Benjamin struggle against his paralysis, his teeth biting down on his tongue, blood oozing onto his chin.

And then he fired. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven and eight times. When he had finished, the murderer stood up and inserted a piece of metal into the wire which was wound around the brothers’ necks. He began to twist it like a garrotte and continued twisting it, cutting off their air supply. As the temperature inside the room increased and the gallery began to steam, Sebastian’s bowels relaxed and the smell of faeces was pungent as the killer stepped back from the dying men.

Curious, he watched Benjamin and Sebastian Weir turn into corpses. He saw the pink of their flesh fade to the colour of putty and their blood congeal. Then he picked up the two syringes he had emptied into them, wrapped them in a towel, and put them into the small holdall he had brought with him. Taking out a container, he unscrewed the lid and laid a paintbrush beside it. Finally he unsheathed the hunting knife he had brought with him and, grasping the front of Sebastian’s hair, cut into his scalp. It took only seconds for the killer to scalp both brothers.

He worked quickly and with precision, and when he had finished he made sure that nothing was left to give him away. When he finally left the Weir Gallery the temperature was nearing ninety degrees inside, the cold of the winter day shocking as he moved into the street.

The murders would unnerve the London, New York and Berlin art world. Seven years earlier two other gallery owners had been killed in Berlin, in the same manner, and no one – neither the investigator brought into the case nor the police – had caught the murderer. For years the killer had been silent, but now, as the news of the missing paintings became public, he had become active again.

And like the last time in Berlin, no one had any idea who the murderer was.

*

It would take one man, Gil Eckhart, to piece together the relevance of the missing paintings, a secret association between dealers in London and Berlin and the stolen Caravaggios – to uncover a labyrinthine, bloodied plot which encompassed the globe.

Now read the whole story in The Caravaggio Conspiracy.

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