Her eyes settled briefly on tweedy Jeremy Crabbe.
“Bonhams?” asked Simon, aghast.
Sarah smiled over her drink. “If you snooze, you lose, darling.”
The talk soon spread from the insular art world of St. James’s to the palaces of high finance in Mayfair and the City of London, until finally it reached the ears of Amelia March ofARTnews. She too made several attempts to contact Knight, but like Simon Mendenhall she received no response. She nibbled around the periphery, though—the periphery being Sarah’s corner table at Wiltons—and twenty-four hours later she posted a lengthy story on theARTnewswebsite. Edward Knight, having no other recourse, or so it seemed to the uninitiated, issued a statement through the real estate investment firm that bore his name, confirming the story’s accuracy.
Needless to say, Amelia’s account made no mention of Knight’s connections to the much-sanctioned Russian oligarch Dmitri Savin or the Secret Intelligence Service, only that after careful reflection he had decided to dispose of a portion of his collection of museum-quality Old Master paintings. There was intense speculation in the London art world, the story went on to say, that Knight had consigned the paintings to Bonhams, which quickly issued a press release of its own. The auction, it said, would be held in just ten days’ time, not at the firm’s New Bond Street salesroom but at Knight’s grand manor house near the coast of Devon. The proceeds would be donated to organizations dedicated to combating violence against women in all its forms, with Bonhams receiving a fraction of its usual commission. Edward Knight, the statement read in conclusion, planned to attend.
A furious battle soon commenced on social media, and in the less high-minded press, as to Knight’s motives. His legion of detractors,which now included the gadfly podcaster who had originally broken the story of his wife’s disappearance, saw a rather transparent attempt to repair an irreparably damaged image. The opposing camp, led by friends and associates of the billionaire, was far more magnanimous. Losing Alice, they said, had left Knight a changed man—and for the better.
And yet none of those friends and associates, including his employees in Berkeley Square, had laid eyes on Edward Knight in ages. Indeed the first verified sighting occurred on the Wednesday afternoon of that week, when Knight was spotted at Taylor Taylor hair salon in Regent Street. His glamorous wife, missing and presumed dead, was at that same moment trudging across the windswept hills of Dartmoor, accompanied by two SIS minders. Knight dined that evening at his Hans Place mansion, she at Wormwood Cottage. Miss Coventry prepared a mixed green salad, lightly dressed with a lemon vinaigrette, followed by grilled haddock and a medley of steamed vegetables. Parish complained bitterly throughout the meal. Tomorrow evening, he declared while helping Miss Coventry with the dishes, they were having steak and kidney pie.
“With butter,” he added. “The more butter the better.”
There was a bit of grousing, but then that was to be expected. After all, the auction had been scheduled for the first week of August, a time when most of the London art world decamped to the south of France or Tuscany, and so flights had to be rebooked and hotel reservations revised. No one was more put out than Nicky Lovegrove, who had to delay his departure for New Zealand in order to attend. Niles Dunham happily threw away three nonrefundable nights at a villa hehad rented in the Loire Valley. The last gathering at Edward Knight’s Devon manor house had been the most fun he’d had in years.
The inconvenient timing of the auction notwithstanding, there was no shortage of those wishing to attend, if only to catch a glimpse of the billionaire whose wife had disappeared from the face of the earth. In the first twenty-four hours alone, some two hundred art world figures and assorted hangers-on requested admission to the event. Not surprisingly media interest was high. The BBC asked Bonhams whether it could send a camera crew, as did CNN’s London bureau. Jeremy Crabbe put it to Edward Knight’s personal assistant, a certain Nigel Whitcombe, and Whitcombe ran it past the Sapphire team. The request rattled around the upper floors of Vauxhall Cross for a day or two before receiving the stamp of approval. Television camera crews were welcome, the more the merrier.
In all, some sixteen paintings would go under the gavel, which would be wielded by Jeremy Crabbe himself. High-resolution photographs soon appeared on Bonhams’s website, along with a detailed provenance for each work. Five days before the auction a select group of dealers, curators, and consultants were allowed to view the paintings at Wickham House. One work, however, was not yet on display, for it was still propped on a pair of easels in a studio in deepest West Cornwall.
Gabriel believed that the craft of restoration was a bit like making love, that it was best done slowly and with painstaking attention to detail, with occasional breaks for rest and refreshment. But in a pinch, if the craftsman and his subject matter were adequately acquainted, it could be done at extraordinary speed, with more or less the same result. The primary challenge of the Bellotto was its scale; at 136 by 242 centimeters it was the size of a barn door. Still, the losses were far from catastrophic. He repaired them swiftly, with histrademark invisible touch. Even Bellotto himself would have been hard-pressed to discern his original brushstrokes from Gabriel’s inpainting.
He worked each day from dawn until dusk, isolated from those around him. Only Raphael dared to enter his studio. He lay on the floor at Gabriel’s feet, with the tip of his Faber-Castell pencil scratching against an open Strathmore Series 300 sketchpad. Occasionally Gabriel looked down and was astonished by what he saw there. He had no doubt that his gifted son, should he choose to study art, would one day find fame and fortune as a painter.
The boy’s incorrigible twin sister, her career path seemingly determined, spent those days contentedly in the company of Ingrid, whom she adored. They hiked the Coast Path, they sunned themselves on the sands of Sennen Beach, they attended a small but spirited protest in Penzance sponsored by the Climate Coalition. Radio Cornwall reported that there had been five arrests. Gabriel was relieved to learn his daughter had not been among those taken into custody.
He checked in with Christopher at least once a day using a secure phone provided to him by Vauxhall Cross, usually while standing before the easel in his studio, where for some mysterious reason the cell reception was the best. During one such call, he received an update on the latest news from Moscow, courtesy of GCHQ.
“Our friend Dmitri got picked up on a hot mic, as it were.”
“The hot mic being his compromised mobile phone?”
“I’m not at liberty to say.”
“To whom was Dmitri speaking?” asked Gabriel.
“The director of the GRU. Evidently they go way back.”
“And?”
“The director is concerned that Edward Knight might spill the beans to British intelligence.”
“The train has left the station on that one.”
“Not as far as the Russians are concerned.”
“Sounds to me as though Edward has a target on his back.”
“Dead man walking,” agreed Christopher.
Once upon a time the GRU’s operatives and assassins moved in and out of the United Kingdom at will on ordinary Russian passports. But the war in Ukraine, with its accompanying sanctions and expulsions and travel bans, had made that impossible. A GRU officer attempting to enter Britain now would have no choice but to pose as a citizen of another country. More than one hundred thousand foreign visitors entered the UK each day—by air, by rail, and by passenger ferry. Christopher and the Sapphire team, with the help of their colleagues from MI5, scrutinized each new visitor, including the one hundred or so refugees who washed ashore each day in inflatable rafts. It was their abiding hope that one of the foreign visitors planned to attend an art auction in Devon and kill Edward Knight.
Gabriel’s contribution to Sapphire seemed inconsequential by comparison; he had only to complete the restoration of a large Venetian canal scene by Bernardo Bellotto. He did so with only twenty-four hours to spare, and at four o’clock the following afternoon, after entrusting his children to the care of Cecily Newton of Sennen Cove, he set off for Devon, accompanied by Chiara and Ingrid. This time, he thought, he had no one to blame but himself.
43
Wickham House
