Long Time Coming by Robert Goddard Page A

bottle. Then he started hitting Mom. And me. And my kid brother, Joey. Mom divorced him in the end. But the end was a long time coming. Then Joey went off to Vietnam. He came through without a scratch. Not a scratch you could see, that is. But inside … there were plenty. He lives with Grandma now.’
    ‘Your grandmother’s still alive?’
    ‘Yeah. She’ll be ninety this year. Pretty fit, if mentally fuzzy. She went back to her old home in Antwerp after Mom got married. That’s where Joey is now. He said he couldn’t settle in the States after the Army had finished with him. I don’t blame him. A lot of the time, I don’t like it there much myself.’
    ‘When did you realize the Picassos had been stolen from you?’
    ‘When the Brownlow Collection went on view for the first time, at the Met three years ago. All eighteen of them together. All acquired post-war. It was too big a coincidence. Mom knew then Cardale had shafted us. She’d always assumed her father had believed the paintings to be genuine – otherwise why would he have gone to such lengths to save them? – and that he must have been cheated by the dealer who’d sold them to him in the first place. Three years ago, she realized they really had been genuine and that Cardale was the one who’d done the cheating. But he was dead by then. His grandson denied all knowledge. And the Brownlow estate stonewalled her. She spent a lot of money on lawyers and got nothing for it. Now she says she wishes she’d never found out. I guess she’s right. It probably would have been better for us to have gone on in ignorance. It wasn’t bliss. Take my word for it. But it beat turning over and over in your mind the things you coulddo and the changes you could make … with all those millions.’
    ‘Maybe you should stop coming here, Rachel. It doesn’t sound as if it’s … good for you.’
    ‘That’s what my friends tell me. Forget it. Give it up. Put it behind you. Write it off. Move on. Well, I tried, but it just didn’t work. So then I decided to attack the problem head on. I fixed myself up with a year off from the UN and came to Europe to check the Brownlow estate’s version of how he’d acquired the Picassos. It’s what our lawyers were supposed to have done, but I reckoned, if I double-checked everything, I’d find what they’d missed: the crucial connection to Cardale I needed to clinch our claim.’
    ‘But you never found it?’
    ‘No. The story was the same in Paris and Geneva and the other cities I moved on to, chasing leads. The dealer Brownlow had used was dead or retired or had bought the picture from another dealer who was dead or retired – or untraceable. Memories had failed. Documentation was missing. No one knew anything – or was prepared to admit it if they did. It was a maze without a centre. Eventually, I gave up. Since then, I’ve been staying here in London with an old college friend who works at the American Embassy, putting off as long as I can the day when I have to admit defeat and go home.’
    ‘Well, maybe you don’t have to admit defeat now.’
    ‘Thanks to good old Uncle Eldritch and the anonymous moneybags who’s signed him up?’
    ‘Something like that.’
    ‘Go on, then.’ Her half-smile was wholly sceptical. ‘Tell me he’s homing in on proof positive that Cardale stole the Picassos.’
    ‘It’s early days.’
    ‘Not for me.’
    ‘Do you know who the forger was that Cardale used?’
    ‘No. Do you?’
    ‘Yes. Hiring him was as far as Eldritch got before he was arrested. His name’s Desmond Quilligan.’
    ‘Still alive?’
    ‘I don’t know. But I mean to find out. And it’s something, isn’t it? Something more than you’ve uncovered.’
    She paused to put another cigarette in her mouth. I leant across the table to light it without waiting to be asked. For a second, we were so close I could feel her breath fanning my fingers. She went on looking at me, searching my face for some clue that she