Giotto's Hand

Argyll’s reintroduction to his native country the following day took the form of a valiant battle with the antique state of the London underground system. He was in a bad mood, and had been ever since he’d arrived at the passport section at Heathrow airport to discover that most of the globe had touched down a few minutes ahead of him. Then it took an age to recover his luggage and, on top of that, the tube trains into London were all delayed by what a scratchy announcer said, with not the slightest apology in his voice, were technical problems. “Welcome to England. You are now entering the third world,” he muttered to himself half an hour later as he hung desperately from an overhead support in the train which rattled and squeaked out of the station, so crammed full of jet-lagged travellers it was difficult to see how anyone else could possibly squeeze in. But they did at the next station, only to have the thing stop dead for fifteen minutes a few hundred yards down the tunnel.

About an hour later he emerged at Piccadilly Circus, feeling like Livingstone after cutting his way through a particularly dense piece of jungle, and went into a cafe to restore himself.

Mistake, he realized the moment the coffee was delivered; a grey, weak solution with a smell which, whatever it was, had nothing to do with coffee. Dear God, he thought when he discovered that it tasted as bad as it looked, what’s happening to this country of mine?

He gave up after a while and wandered back out into the street, walked down Piccadilly then turned up into Bond Street. A few hundred yards up was his destination. He shivered. Moving from Rome to England in July can be something of a shock to the system: the skies were dark grey and leaden, he was under-dressed and had forgotten to bring an umbrella. He had a feeling already that he was merely wasting time and money for no other reason than to sidestep decision-making for a few days.

“Jonathan, dear boy. Good trip?” Edward Byrnes said as Argyll walked into the empty gallery and found his former employer carrying what looked like a painting by Pannini from one side of the room to another.

“No,” he said.

“Oh.” Byrnes put the painting down, looked at it for a few seconds, then called an assistant from the back and told him to hang it just there while he was out. “No matter,” he went on when this was done. “Let’s go straight out for lunch. That might restore your flagging spirits a bit.”

There was that to be said about the trip. Byrnes had always been something of a bon viveur, and liked a good lunch. At the very least, Argyll was going to spend the rest of the day feeling well fed. Byrnes led the way out of the gallery door, leaving his minion in charge of the Pannini and with strict instructions about what to do in the unlikely event of a client coming in, then walked at a brisk pace into increasingly narrow streets then, finally, down a set of shabby steps into a basement.

“Nice, don’t you think?” Byrnes said complacently as they emerged into what was presumably a restaurant at the bottom.

“Where are we?”

“Ah, it’s a dining club. Set up by a group of art dealers who were getting fed up with the vastly inflated prices that all restaurants charge round here. The sort of place you can bring the more potentially lucrative client without having to double the price of their purchase to pay for their entertainment. Marvellous idea. We get good food and wine, partly own a new business and have somewhere civilized to sit. Splendid, eh?”

For his part, Argyll preferred not to have to associate too closely with colleagues all the time; the idea of having to eat with them, as well as attend auctions with them, didn’t strike him as such a good idea. On the other hand, he could see the attractions for an incorrigible gossip like Byrnes. The idea of having a large chunk of the art market under his eye at the same time as a plate of food lay on his table was, probably, as close to paradise as he could envisage.

“Come, dear boy,” he said with mounting enthusiasm as his eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, “I’m starving.”

They sat down, ordered drinks and Byrnes beamed at him for a few seconds before curiosity got the better of him and his gaze wandered off to survey the surrounding tables.

“Hmm,” he said meditatively as he spotted a smooth, moon-faced young man attentively pouring a glass of wine for an elderly lady with an elongated nose.

“Ah,” he continued, moving on to a group of three men, their heads conspiratorially close together.

“Well, well,” he mused thoughtfully at the sight of another pair, one wearing a fine piece of Italian tailoring for the well-to-do male, the other in slacks and sports jacket.

“Are you going to fill me in on any of this? Or just keep it to yourself?” Argyll asked in a tone that just avoided a slight touch of pique.

“I am sorry, I thought you didn’t approve of gossip.”