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The arrival of the waitress gave him a moment’s breathing space. She removed the debris. ‘So this would be strictly off the record?’
‘Information only,’ I agreed.
The waitress returned with a cheerful smile and two huge plates. I stared down at mine, where enough rabbit to account for half the population of Watership Down sat in a pool of creamy sauce. ‘Nouvelle cuisine obviously passed this place by,’ I said faintly.
‘I suspect we Mancunians are too canny to pay half a week’s wages for a sliver of meat surrounded by three baby carrots, two mangetouts, one baby sweetcorn and an artistically carved radish,’ he said wryly.
‘And is it that Mancunian canniness that underlies your assessor’s underhand suggestion?’ I asked innocently.
‘Nothing regional about it,’ Michael said. ‘You have to have a degree in bloody-minded caution before you get the job.’
‘So you think it’s OK to ask your clients to hang fakes on the wall?’
‘It’s a very effective safety precaution,’ he said carefully.
‘That’s what your assessor told Henry. He said you’d be prepared not to increase his premium by the equivalent of the gross national product of a small African nation if he had copies made of his remaining masterpieces and hung them on the walls instead of the real thing,’ I said conversationally.
‘That’s about the size of it,’ Michael admitted. At least he had the decency to look uncomfortable about it.
‘And is this a general policy these days?’
Slicing up his vegetables gave Michael an excuse for not meeting my eyes. ‘Quite a few of our clients have opted for it as a solution to their security problems,’ he said. ‘It makes sense, Kate. We agreed this morning that there isn’t a security system that can’t be breached. If having a guard physically on site twenty-four hours a day isn’t practical because of the expense or because the policyholder doesn’t want that sort of presence in what is, after all, his home, then it avoids sky-high premiums.’
‘It’s not just about money, though,’ I protested. ‘It’s like Henry says. He knows those paintings. He’s lived with them most of his life. You get a buzz from the real thing that a fake just doesn’t provide.’
‘Not one member of the public has noticed the substitutions,’ Michael said.
‘Maybe not so far,’ I conceded. ‘But according to my understanding, the trouble with fakes is that they don’t stand the test of time.’ Thanking Shelley silently for my art tutorial that afternoon, I launched myself into my spiel. ‘Look at Van Meegeren’s fake Vermeers. At the time, all the experts were convinced they were the real thing. But you look at them now, and they wouldn’t even fool a philistine like me. The difference between schneid and kosher is that fakes date, but the really great paintings don’t. They’re timeless.’
He frowned. ‘Even if you’re right, which I don’t concede for a moment, that’s not a bridge that our clients will have to cross for a long time yet.’
I wasn’t about to give up that easily. ‘Even so, don’t you think it’s a bit of a con to pull on the public? A bit of a swizz to spend your bank holiday Monday in a traffic jam just so you can ogle a Constable that’s more phoney than a plastic Rolex? Aren’t you in danger of breaching the Trades Descriptions Act?’ I asked.
‘Our clients may be,’ Michael said carelessly. ‘We’re not.’
The brazen effrontery of it gobsmacked me. ‘I can’t believe I’m hearing this,’ I said. ‘You work in a business that must spend hundreds of thousands a year trying to catch its customers out in fraud, and yet you’re happily suggesting to another bunch of clients that they go off and commit a fraud?’
‘That’s not how we see it,’ he said stiffly. ‘Besides, it works,’ he said. ‘In at least two cases that I know about personally, customers who have been burgled have only lost copies. Surely that proves it’s worthwhile.’
In spite of the blazing fire, I felt a chill on the back of my neck. Only a man with no personal knowledge of the strung-out world of crime could have made that pronouncement with such self-satisfaction. It doesn’t take much imagination to picture the scene when an overwrought burglar turns up at his fence’s gaff with something he thinks is an old master, only to be told it’s Rembrandt by numbers. Scenario number one is that the burglar thinks the fence is trying to have him over so he takes the appropriate steps. Scenario number two is that the fence thinks the burglar is trying to have him over, and takes the appropriate steps. Either way, somebody ends up in casualty. And that’s looking on the bright side. Doubtless law-abiding citizens like Michael think they’ve got what they deserve, but even villains have wives and kids who don’t want to spend their spare time visiting hospital beds or graves.
My silence clearly spelled out defeat to Michael, since he leaned over and squeezed my hand. ‘Trust me, Kate. Our way, everybody’s happy,’ he said.
I pretended to push my chair back and look frantically for the door. ‘I’m out of here,’ I said. ‘Soon as an insurance man says “trust me”, you know you should be in the next county.’
He grinned. ‘I promise I’ll never try to sell you insurance.’
‘OK. But I won’t promise I’ll never try to pitch you into using Mortensen and Brannigan.’
‘Speaking of which, how did you get into the private eye business?’ Michael said.
I couldn’t decide whether it was an attempt to change the subject or a deliberate shift away from the professional towards the personal. Either way, I was happy to go along with him. I didn’t think I was going to get any more useful information out of him, and I only had to look across the table to remember that when I’d agreed to this dinner, my motives hadn’t been entirely selfless. By the time we’d moved on to coffee and Armagnac, he knew all about my aborted law degree, abandoned after two years because the part-time job I’d got doing bread-and-butter process serving for Bill Mortensen was a damn sight more interesting than the finer points of jurisprudence.
‘So tell me about your most interesting case,’ he coaxed me.
‘Maybe later,’ I said. ‘It’s your turn now. How did you get into insurance?’
‘It’s the family business,’ he said, looking faintly embarrassed.
‘So you followed in Daddy’s footsteps,’ I said. I felt disappointed. I couldn’t put my finger on why, exactly. Maybe I expected him to live up to that profile with a suitably buccaneering past.
‘Eventually,’ he said. ‘I read Arabic at university, then I worked for the BBC World Service for a while. But the money was dire and there were no prospects. My father had the sense to see that sales had never interested me, but he persuaded me to take a shot at working in claims.’ Michael raised his shoulders and held out his hands in an expressive shrug. ‘What can I say? I really enjoy it.’
All of a sudden, I remembered one of the key reasons I like being with Richard. He lives an interesting life: music journalist, football fan and Sunday morning player, part-time father. I was sure if I hung around with Michael Haroun, I’d learn a lot of invaluable stuff. But not even the most brilliant raconteur can make insurance interesting for ever. With Richard, no two days are the same. With Michael, I suspected variety might not be the spice of life.
Now I’d established that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life with the man, I felt a sense of release. I could take what I needed from the encounter, and that would be that. My life wasn’t about to be turned on its head because I’d fallen in love with a profile when I was fourteen.
With that comforting thought in the front of my mind, I had no hesitation about inviting him back for more coffee. The fact that I’d forgotten to mention Richard to him somehow didn’t seem too important at the time.
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