you what I’ve discovered.”
“I assume that you’ve found something very interesting.”
“Why would you assume that?”
“If you hadn’t, you wouldn’t still be here.”
I gave him a quick smile for his rationale and turned to the monitors. “They are all one man.”
“Who are?”
“The poets.” I organised my discoveries to be displayed on the screens for easy show and tell.
“What poets?” Phillip sounded bemused. “I think you should start at the beginning and tell me as if I am not as intelligent as you.”
“But you aren’t.” The moment the uncensored words left my mouth, I knew it was a faux pas. I slowly turned to Phillip, only to see him clench his teeth so hard that his cheeks were bulging.
“Just tell me from the beginning.”
“Right. The beginning.” I really had to watch my mouth. “I decided to look more deeply into that piece of Gauguin that was discovered on the murdered girl. Our information says that the painting Still Life, The White Bowl was stolen during the Second World War and had been on Interpol’s list of stolen artworks. It was discovered by a Mister Henry Vaughan in 2004. This Mister Vaughan is an art historian who helped a friend move into an old mansion the friend had purchased. In the attic they discovered this painting. It was very fortunate that Mister Vaughan was at hand to identify what it was and make sure that it went back to its rightful owners. And it did, but only after proving provenance and a vigorous authentication process. A year later it was sold at an auction to our client.”
“I know all of this. What was strange about it?” When it came to artwork that had been stolen during any war, Phillip was paranoid about its authenticity and rightful provenance.
“There is no such person as Henry Vaughan, the art historian.”
“Are you sure?”
I ignored his inane question. Of course I was sure. I had not only used my usual internet sources to check the existence of this man, I had also used an EDA database search, not that it did much good. All I got were people with this name not matching any other of the parameters. “There is also no trace of any work record for this man.”
“Interesting.”
“If you look at this article”—I pointed to one of the monitors and zoomed in on the text—“you’ll see quite an impressive resume that he gave to the journalist. It no doubt gave him more credibility for this article and also for the find.”
“I remember reading this interview. He was extremely knowledgeable about the Cloisonnism and Primitivism eras in which Gauguin worked.”
I made a sound of disbelief. “What is interesting about his resume in this article is that there is no mention of any specific institution where he studied or worked. I spent a lot of time searching for anything else on him and found nothing. Not a published paper, not another interview, nothing. It was as if he only existed for this one occasion.”
“Why would he appear in the public eye only once and then disappear?” Phillip’s eyes widened. “Maybe he died.”
“No, I also checked that. Lacking any other avenues, I decided to see what other artefacts were discovered and returned to their owners and that was when things got interesting. Look at this.”
I used all ten monitors to display more than a dozen different newspaper clippings.
“These are artefacts that were stolen during some conflict in the last century or so. There were so many that it took me hours to sift through them to get to these particular ones. In these articles the artefacts were discovered by a man who claimed to be a museum curator, an amateur archaeologist, a gallery owner”—I pointed to all the different articles—“an art dealer and in this one, an art restorer.”
Phillip was staring intently at the monitors. “All very interesting. It is wonderful that these owners got their art back. I don’t see anything suspicious in this.”
“The museum curator’s name