Jeffrey Archer: False Impression

“I don’t know, is the truth,” Arabella admitted. “After I married Angus, we only came down from Scotland for a couple of weeks in the summer and every other Christmas. It wasn’t until my husband died that I returned to live in Surrey” — the chief superintendent nodded but didn’t interrupt — “and heard the same rumors. Local gossips were even letting it be known that some of the furniture in my shop had come from the estate in order that Victoria could still pay the staff.”

“And was there any truth in those rumors?” asked Stephen.

“None at all,” replied Arabella. “When Angus died and I sold our farm in Perthshire, there was more than enough to allow me to return to Wentworth, open my little shop, and turn a lifelong hobby into a worthwhile enterprise. But I did ask my sister on several occasions if the rumors of Father’s financial position were true. Victoria denied there was any problem, always claiming that everything was under control. But then she adored Father, and in her eyes he could do no wrong.”

“Can you think of anything that might give some clue as to why...”

Arabella rose from the sofa and, without explanation, walked across to a writing desk on the far side of the room. She picked up the blood-spattered letter that she had found on her sister’s table, walked back, and handed it across to him.

Stephen read the unfinished missive twice before asking, “Do you have any idea what Victoria could have meant by ‘a solution has been found’?”

“No,” admitted Arabella, “but it’s possible that I’ll be able to answer that question once I’ve had a word with Arnold Simpson.”

“That doesn’t fill me with confidence,” said Stephen.

Arabella noted his comment but didn’t respond. She knew that the chief superintendent’s natural instinct was to mistrust all solicitors who appeared unable to disguise a belief that they were superior to any police officer.

The chief superintendent rose from his place, walked across and sat next to Arabella. He took her hand. “Call me whenever you want to,” he said gently, “and try not to keep too many secrets from me, Arabella, because I’ll need to know everything, and I mean everything, if we’re to find who murdered your sister.”

Arabella didn’t reply.

“Damn,” muttered Anna to herself when an athletic, dark-haired man jogged casually past her, just as he’d done several times during the last few weeks. He didn’t glance back — serious runners never did. Anna knew that it would be pointless to try and keep up with him, as she would be “legless” within a hundred yards. She had once caught a sideways glimpse of the mystery man, but he then strode away and all she had seen was the back of his emerald green T-shirt as he continued toward Strawberry Fields. Anna tried to put him out of her mind and focus once again on her meeting with Fenston.

Anna had already sent a copy of her report to the chairman’s office, recommending that the bank sell the self-portrait as quickly as possible. She knew a collector in Tokyo who was obsessed with Van Gogh and still had the yen to prove it. And with this particular painting there was another weakness she would be able to play on, which she had highlighted in her report. Van Gogh had always admired Japanese art, and on the wall behind the self-portrait he had reproduced a print of Geishas in a Landscape , which Anna felt would make the painting even more irresistible to Takashi Nakamura.

Nakamura was chairman of the largest steel company in Japan, but lately he’d been spending more and more time building up his art collection, which, he’d let it be known, was to form part of a foundation that would eventually be left to the nation. Anna also considered it an advantage that Nakamura was an intensely secretive individual, who guarded the details of his private collection with typical Japanese inscrutability. Such a sale would allow Victoria Wentworth to save face — something the Japanese fully understood. Anna had once acquired a Degas for Nakamura, Dancing Class with Mme. Minette , which the seller had wished to dispose of privately, a service the great auction houses offer to those who want to avoid the prying eyes of journalists who hang around the sale rooms. She was confident that Nakamura would offer at least sixty million dollars for the rare Dutch masterpiece. So if Fenston accepted her proposal — and why shouldn’t he? — everyone would be satisfied with the outcome.

When Anna passed the Tavern on the Green, she once again checked her watch. She would need to pick up her pace if she still hoped to be back at Artisans’ Gate in under twelve minutes. As she sprinted down the hill, she reflected on the fact that she shouldn’t allow her personal feelings for a client to cloud her judgment, but frankly Victoria needed all the help she could get. When Anna passed through Artisans’ Gate, she pressed the stop button on her watch: twelve minutes and four seconds. Damn .

Anna jogged slowly off in the direction of her apartment, unaware that she was being closely watched by the man in the emerald green T-shirt.

Jack Delaney still wasn’t sure if Anna Petrescu was a criminal.

The FBI agent watched her as she disappeared into the crowd on her way back to Thornton House. Once she was out of sight, Jack resumed jogging through Sheep Meadow toward the lake. He thought about the woman he’d been investigating for the past six weeks, an inquiry that was hampered by the fact that he didn’t need Anna to find out that the Bureau was also investigating her boss, who Jack had no doubt was a criminal.

It was nearly a year since Richard W. Macy, Jack’s supervising special agent, had called him into his office and allocated him a team of eight agents to cover a new assignment. Jack was to investigate three vicious murders on three different continents that had one thing in common: each of the victims had been killed at a time when they also had large outstanding loans with Fenston Finance. Jack quickly concluded that the murders had been planned and were the work of a professional killer.

Jack cut through Shakespeare Garden as he headed back toward his small apartment on the West Side. He had just about completed his file on Fenston’s most recent recruit, although he still couldn’t make up his mind if she was a willing accomplice or a naïve innocent.

Jack had begun with Anna’s upbringing and discovered that her uncle, George Petrescu, had emigrated from Romania in 1972 to settle in Danville, Illinois. Within weeks of Ceauşescu appointing himself president, George had written to his brother imploring him to join him in America. When Ceauşescu declared Romania a socialist republic and made his wife, Elena, his deputy, George wrote to his brother renewing his invitation, which included his young niece, Anna.

Although Anna’s parents refused to leave their homeland, they did allow their seventeen-year-old daughter to be smuggled out of Bucharest in 1987 and shipped off to America to stay with her uncle, promising her that she could return the moment Ceauşescu had been overthrown. Anna never returned. She wrote home regularly, begging her mother to join them in the States, but she rarely received a response. Two years later she learned that her father had been killed in a border skirmish while attempting to oust the dictator. Her mother also repeated that she would never leave her native land, her excuse now being, “Who would tend to your father’s grave?”

That much, one of Jack’s squad members had been able to discover from an essay Anna had written for her high school magazine. One of her classmates had also written about the gentle girl with long fair plaits and blue eyes who came from somewhere called Bucharest and knew so few words of English that she couldn’t even recite the Pledge of Allegiance at morning assembly. By the end of her second year, Anna was editing the magazine, from which Jack had gathered so much of his information.