Ian Rankin - Beggars Banquet

Throughout, Jance was giving me his pitch, though without much enthusiasm. Where did he collect these people? (The unkind said he sought out the least popular exhibits at art school graduation shows.) More to the point, where did he sell them? I hadn’t heard of him making any impact at all as an agent. What money he made, he seemed to make by other means.

Finally, he lifted a handful of polaroids from his pocket. ‘My latest find,’ he confided. ‘Scottish. Great future.’

I looked through them. ‘How old?’

He shrugged. ‘Twenty-six, twenty-seven.’

I deducted five or six years and handed the photos back. ‘Gregory,’ I said, ‘she’s still at college. These are derivative – evidence she’s learning from those who have gone before – and stylised, such as students often produce. She has talent, and I like the humour, even if that too is borrowed from other Scottish artists.’

He seemed to be looking in vain for the humour in the photos.

‘Bruce McLean,’ I said helpfully, ‘Paolozzi, John Bellany’s fish. Look closely and you’ll see.’ I paused. ‘Bring her back in five or ten years, if she’s kept hard at it, if she’s matured, and if she has that nose for the difference between genius and sham…’

He pocketed the photos and gathered up his slides, his eyes glinting as though there might be some moisture there.

‘You’re a hard man,’ he told me.

‘But a fair one, I hope. And to prove it, let me buy you a drink.’

I didn’t put my proposition to him quite then, of course, not over coffee and sticky cakes in the Tate cafeteria. We met a few weeks later – casually as it were. We dined at a small place in a part of town neither of us frequented. I asked him about his young coterie of artists. They seemed, I said, quite skilled in impersonation.

‘Impersonation?’

‘They have studied the greats,’ I explained, ‘and can reproduce them with a fair degree of skill.’

‘Reproduce them,’ he echoed quietly.

‘Reproduce them,’ I said. ‘I mean, the influences are there.’ I paused. ‘I’m not saying they copy.’

‘No, not that.’ Jance looked up from his untouched food. ‘Are you coming to some point?’

I smiled. ‘A lot of paintings in the storerooms, Gregory. They so seldom see the light of day.’

‘Yes, pity, that. Such a waste.’

‘When people could be savouring them.’

He nodded, poured some wine for both of us. ‘I think I begin to see,’ he said. ‘I think I begin to see.’

That was the start of our little enterprise. You know what it was, of course. You have a keen mind. You are shrewd and discerning. Perhaps you pride yourself on these things, on always being one step ahead, on knowing things before those around you have perceived them. Perhaps you, too, think yourself capable of the perfect crime, a crime where there is no crime.

There was no crime, because nothing was missing from the quarterly inventory. First, I would photograph the work. Indeed, on a couple of occasions, I even took one of Jance’s young artists down to the storeroom and showed her the painting she’d be copying. She’d been chosen because she had studied the minimalists, and this was to be a minimalist commission.

Minimalism, interestingly, proved the most difficult style to reproduce faithfully. In a busy picture, there’s so much to look at that one can miss a wrong shade or the fingers of a hand which have failed to curl to the right degree. But with a couple of black lines and some pink waves… well, fakes were easier to spot. So it was that Jance’s artist saw the work she was to replicate face to face. Then we did the measurements, took the polaroids, and she drew some preliminary sketches. Jance was in charge of finding the right quality of canvas, the correct frame. My job was to remove the real canvas, smuggle it from the gallery, and replace it with the copy, reframing the finished work afterwards.

We were judicious, Jance and I. We chose our works with care. One or two a year – we never got greedy. The choice would depend on a combination of factors. We didn’t want artists who were too well known, but we wanted them dead if possible. (I had a fear of an artist coming to inspect his work at the Tate and finding a copy instead.) There had to be a buyer – a private collector, who would keep the work private. We couldn’t have a painting being loaned to some collection or exhibition when it was supposed to be safely tucked away in the vaults of the Tate. Thankfully, as I’d expected, Jance seemed to know his market. We never had any problems on that score. But there was another factor. Every now and then, there would be requests from exhibitions for the loan of a painting – one we’d copied. But as curator, I would find reasons why the work in question had to remain at the Tate, and might offer, by way of consolation, some other work instead.

Then there was the matter of rotation. Now and again – as had to be the case, or suspicion might grow – one of the copies would have to grace the walls of the gallery proper. Those were worrying times, and I was careful to position the works in the least flattering, most shadowy locations, usually with a much more interesting picture nearby, to lure the spectator away. I would watch the browsers. Once or twice, an art student would come along and sketch the copied work. No one ever showed a moment’s doubt, and my confidence grew.

But then… then…

We had loaned works out before, of course – I’d told the dinner party as much. This or that cabinet minister might want something for the office, something to impress visitors. There would be discussions about a suitable work. It was the same with particular benefactors. They could be loaned a painting for weeks or even months. But I was always careful to steer prospective borrowers away from the twenty or so copies. It wasn’t as though there was any lack of choice: for each copy, there were fifty other paintings they could have. The odds, as Jance had assured me more than once, were distinctly in our favour.

Until the day the Prime Minister came to call.

This is a man who knows as much about art as I do about home brewing. There is almost a glee about his studious ignorance – and not merely of art. But he was walking around the Tate, for all the world like a dowager around a department store, and not seeing what he wanted.

‘Voore,’ he said at last. I thought I’d misheard him. ‘Ronny Voore. I thought you had a couple.’

My eyes took in his entourage, not one of whom would know a Ronny Voore if it blackballed them at the Garrick. But my superior was there, nodding slightly, so I nodded with him.

‘They’re not out at the moment,’ I told the PM.

‘You mean they’re in?’ He smiled, provoking a few fawning laughs.

‘In storage,’ I explained, trying out my own smile.

‘I’d like one for Number Ten.’

I tried to form some argument – they were being cleaned, restored, loaned to Philadelphia – but my superior was nodding again. And after all, what did the PM know about art? Besides, only one of our Voores was a fake.

‘Certainly, Prime Minister. I’ll arrange for it to be sent over.’

‘Which one?’

I licked my lips. ‘Did you have one in mind?’

He considered, lips puckered. ‘Maybe I should just have a little look…’

Normally, there were no visitors to the storerooms. But that morning, there were a dozen of us posed in front of Shrew Reclining and Herbert in Motion. Voore was very good with titles. I’ll swear, if you look at them long enough, you really can see – beyond the gobbets of oil, the pasted-on photographs and cinema stubs, the splash of emulsion and explosion of colour – the figures of a large murine creature and a man running.