A missing signature, p.1
A Missing Signature, page 1
A MISSING SIGNATURE
Tiggy Jones Mystery Series
Book 2
Virginia King
TIGGY JONES MYSTERY SERIES
A Scrap of Silk
A Missing Signature
A Deadly Concoction
(Coming 2024)
Copyright © 2023 by Virginia King
The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.
This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Contents
Author's Note
1. Chapter 1
2. Chapter 2
3. Chapter 3
4. Chapter 4
5. Chapter 5
6. Chapter 6
7. Chapter 7
8. Chapter 8
9. Chapter 9
10. Chapter 10
11. Chapter 11
12. Chapter 12
13. Chapter 13
14. Chapter 14
15. Chapter 15
16. Chapter 16
17. Chapter 17
18. Chapter 18
19. Chapter 19
20. Chapter 20
21. Chapter 21
22. Chapter 22
23. Chapter 23
24. Chapter 24
25. Chapter 25
26. Chapter 26
27. Chapter 27
28. Chapter 28
29. Chapter 29
30. Chapter 30
31. Chapter 31
32. Chapter 32
33. Chapter 33
34. Chapter 34
35. Chapter 35
36. Chapter 36
37. Chapter 37
38. Chapter 38
39. Chapter 39
40. Chapter 40
41. Chapter 41
42. Chapter 42
43. Chapter 43
44. Chapter 44
45. Chapter 45
46. Chapter 46
47. Chapter 47
48. Chapter 48
49. Chapter 49
50. Chapter 50
51. Chapter 51
52. Chapter 52
53. Chapter 53
54. Chapter 54
55. Chapter 55
56. Chapter 56
57. Chapter 57
58. Chapter 58
59. Chapter 59
60. Chapter 60
61. Chapter 61
62. Chapter 62
63. Chapter 63
64. Chapter 64
65. Epilogue
Art Facts behind A Missing Signature
A DEADLY CONCOCTION
About the Author
Other books by Virginia King
Acknowledgements
Author's Note
Topsham and Exeter (Devon) and Taunton (Somerset) are real places in the UK, but most of the locations that feature in the Tiggy Jones Mystery Series are fictional, along with all the characters.
Many thanks to my editors and cultural advisors. Any errors are my own.
Chapter 1
“Fake!”
The breathless voice behind us stops the action. Cameras flash. We all turn to watch as the man in the elegant suit strides down the central aisle.
At the front of the room the auctioneer is frozen, gavel raised above the lectern. “This is highly irregular, sir.”
Mild words. The interloper has just interrupted the final knockdown of a lost-and-rediscovered drawing by Henry Moore. It’s about to go for over thirty thousand pounds.
“Irregular,” the man says, turning to speak to the whole gathering, “but true.”
“Explain yourself, sir,” the auctioneer says.
“How do I know it’s a fake? I’m the artist.”
The room erupts.
Raising their voices above the reeling crowd, staff members announce that all other auctions are delayed until two o’clock.
The crush on the stairs is deafening with chatter. As we all pour onto the pavement, the winter air hits my face like a slap. That’s when I see her. A woman who’s so like my missing friend that I start to run.
“Nessa!”
She’s already a long way ahead, darting in and out of the dispersing crowd and making me do the same.
“Nessa, it’s me, Tiggy!”
People are glaring at me. This is London. My accent is Australian and my voice is echoing off the surrounding buildings. I don’t care.
“Nessa. Wait!”
She turns left down a side street and just as I’m about to glimpse her profile, a puff of wind blows her hair across her cheek. When I get to the corner, she’s gone.
Henry finds me leaning against a wall, catching my breath and fighting back tears.
“I was so sure it was her. She ignored me.”
“Did your eyes start to water back there?” Henry asks. “When we stepped out into the cold air?”
“You think my eyes were playing tricks?”
“It’s possible, Tiggy. You’re probably not used to these December temperatures in Sydney. And you’ve been so worried about Nessa, you could have imagined her onto that woman.”
“But her hair. The way she moved. It was so familiar.”
“You didn’t see her face?”
“No.” I feel ridiculous.
Henry takes my arm and guides me down the same side street. “I’ve heard of people having flashbacks when they’ve lost a loved one.”
But wouldn’t that mean … Nessa’s dead?
My mood has plummeted. I barely notice the route we take past eateries where queues of patrons are forming. Then we’re going into a homewares shop full of crockery, pots and kitchen gadgets. Henry leads me towards a doorway at the back, and I’m about to say I need plates with food on them, when we enter a secret dining room.
“Everywhere else will be bursting,” he murmurs. “It’s private here and they don’t need a menu because they only do one thing. An international degustation platter for two. It’s excellent.”
I trust Henry. He’s a connoisseur.
Within a few minutes a waiter brings an oval plate crammed with a mix of dips, breads, antipasto, tapas and dumplings.
“Do you want to talk about Nessa?” Henry reaches for a pizza bite.
“Nothing new to say. Except I’m relieved I didn’t pounce on that poor lookalike. Nessa’s office says she’s on leave. And I haven’t found anyone who knows where she’s gone.”
Our last communication was back in August, a message that said she had a surprise. Was she coming back to the UK?
“Do you have reasons to think she’s in London?”
“Only because I saw that woman. And Nessa is English. Now I’ll be seeing her everywhere.” To fend off a wave of panic about her safety and my sanity, I sink my teeth into a heavenly rice paper roll. “Let’s talk about the real bombshell of the morning. The fake.”
“If someone caught it on their phone, it will be all over the news by now.”
“Would you describe it as ‘irregular’?”
“Explosive, shocking … and believable.”
“Why believable?”
“Fakes are big business. Especially drawings and lithographs. It’s how Bernie makes a living.”
Bernard Hood sleuths out the provenance of artworks for Henry’s antiques business.
“Because drawings and lithographs are easier to forge than paintings?” I ask.
“Authentic papers and inks are easier to find and use. Paintings are more hazardous. A famous forger of the masters was very careful with his paint pigments, but he finally got caught using a paint containing titanium white, a 20th century ingredient.”
“But why did our forger out himself just now?”
“My guess is he wasn’t making money from the auction,” Henry says. “He created the fake for an agent who was about to cut him out of the proceeds.”
“Honour amongst thieves. What will happen now?”
“That could be interesting. The auction house has authenticated it and there are buyers ready to invest in what they thought was a Henry Moore. The seller will insist it’s genuine, forcing the self-professed forger to prove he faked it. Probably by bringing out his cache of vintage papers and creating another drawing in front of the investigators.”
“Ooh, that would be fun to watch.” The food is making me recover from the fake Nessa.
“A TV crew will probably film it for a documentary. The public has an insatiable appetite for fraudulent art, although drawings by Moore don’t have quite the same cachet as paintings by the old masters.”
“Will the forger be charged?”
“That depends. It’s not against the law to copy the greats – it’s how art students learn their craft. It’s only a crime if you try to pass it off as an original. If our forger wasn’t the seller, he might argue he’s a victim of an unscrupulous agent. Or if he did the drawing as a demonstration of Moore’s style in an art class, for example, and the work was stolen and put up for auction as genuine, then he couldn’t be charged with forgery for another person’s crime.”
Back at the auction rooms, the atmosphere is subdued. With Henry’s encouragement I bid on a vintage bracelet in sterling silver, ready to add charms from my new life in Topsham, Devon. Henry picks up several lots of collectibles for less than he expected. It’s why we came up to London – to boost the stock in his antiques shop in time for Christmas shopping. As a mystery writer, I tagged along for the fun, also known as ‘research’, but the day out has been a bigger adventure than planned.
Henry drives us home and I scroll through my photos of Nessa. We met when she rescued me from a café toilet, after I’d tried to climb out – researching again – and got stuck. It’s a story we’ve dined out on many times. In another photo I’m under a blanket on her sofa when I stayed with her until I found a share-townhouse with three fabulously gay flight attendants who were almost never home. There are endless pics of the two of us getting ready for dress-up parties. Nessa’s creative mind can combine items from her huge box of charity-shop finds in a thousand different ways.
As I revisit the good times, my mind returns to that first glimpse of her lookalike today. If my eyes weren’t playing tricks, why did Nessa run away?
It’s dark when Henry drops me at the corner of the High Street and Punt Lane. It’s a quiet Monday evening and only a few short steps around the corner and up the stairs to my flat – right opposite the shell of the boathouse I inherited from my grandmother about six months ago. When the wind off the estuary blows off my hood, I put my head down and run to my stairwell.
But as I reach the bottom step, a hot breath hits the back of my neck. Did I hear revellers nearby? His arm goes around my neck and I twist to see a looming masked head with horns. Something on his ear flashes silver. A dragon?
I fall against the stairs. But as my attacker leans over and growls like a demon, I roll onto my back and launch a kick into his groin. He shrieks and doubles over, to a roar of laughter from other masked men who appear behind him. That’s when sharp tentacles wrap themselves around my legs, sending searing pain through my leggings to my skin.
The others pull his hunched and sobbing form away and I run for my life up to my flat, throw myself inside and bolt the door.
Chapter 2
With the locked door at my back, I pant out jagged breaths. Then my knees give way and I slide down to the floor and burst into tears. What did he do to me? My legs are hurting like burns.
Suddenly Raider, my Dalmador, is at my side, pressing his spotted body against me and showing me big sad eyes. It helps me decide to call the police.
“I’ve just been assaulted.” I give the woman the details.
She asks if I’m still threatened and says she’ll alert the local patrol. “And a doctor needs to look at your injuries tonight. Take photos. Can you get yourself to the hospital?”
“I’m not sure. I’m in shock.”
“Call a friend or a taxi? An ambulance might take longer, that’s all.”
I feel the urge to call Rupert Chester, an estate agent who’s become a friend. He answers straight away.
“How did the auction go?” he asks. “I saw there was a stir about a fake. Were you in the room?”
My sob escapes.
“Tiggy, what’s wrong?” He listens to the short version. “Is he gone? Are you hurt?”
“He whipped me with something. My legs are burning.”
“Bleeding?”
“I don’t know. But pain. With a capital P.”
“Stay put. Don’t drink any water in case they need to sedate you. I’ve had a few drinks, so I’ll ring a taxi and pick you up, then the hospital. Ten minutes.”
“I can call a cab, Rupert. I just wanted someone … to know.”
“I’m coming. Would you recognise your attacker?”
“Wearing masks. A group of them. Maybe a dress-up party turned violent. I’ve rung the police.”
With Raider comforting me, the time passes quickly in spite of my throbbing legs, and soon Rupert is pounding on the door.
The next challenge is getting to my feet, but Raider lets me lean on him.
Rupert charges in and gives me a bear-hug. Then he perches me on the arm of the armchair while he races into my bedroom and returns with a tote bag, the legs of my pyjamas dangling from it.
“Toothpaste and toothbrush, check. Phone charger?”
I point to the desk.
After making sure that Raider has food and water, he gives the dog’s ears a rub. “You’re in charge till Tiggy gets back.”
Within two minutes of his arrival, I’m leaning heavily on Rupert to get my shuddering legs down the stairs and into the waiting cab.
The festive lights of the December night make the journey surreal. I’m floating, with Rupert’s grip on my hand the only thing holding me down.
At the hospital entrance, he procures a wheelchair and we sit amidst other pre-Christmas casualties, perhaps fewer on a Monday night but still busy. Then a triage nurse determines that the leggings must come off NOW.
“We can do that.” Rupert looks at me for agreement. “Give us two minutes.”
The nurse points to an area where a curtain can be drawn. Using the skills he perfected from caring for our injured friend a few months ago, Rupert lifts me out of the chair to lean against his chest. He eases my leggings over my backside and down my legs to my ankles while I suck in staccato breaths with each stab of pain. He signals the nurse, then takes out my pyjama pants. I’m not fussed but it’s such a caring gesture, I slip them on.
Then he crouches and rolls up the legs. “Hell.”
My skin is covered in thin bright-red slashes, starting to form ridges.
The nurse comes in. “Welts,” she says. “Skin’s broken in some places. You’ve been whipped. Something with knots. Flogged hard. Several times.”
“Only once,” I murmur, the shock of it thrashing me again.
She looks at Rupert as if I’m delusional, then at my fur-lined leggings. “Lucky you were wearing these.”
“One whipping, multiple welts, knots.” Rupert looks at me. “That’s a cat-o’-nine-tails.”
After asking Rupert to leave us briefly, the nurse checks if I’ve been sexually assaulted. I’m relieved to say no, but if I believed that rape was on my attacker’s mind, it explains why my kick was so automatic. She administers pain-killers while the stinging welts remind me of the jellyfish called blue-bottles that sent me screaming out of the summer surf in Sydney.
Rupert returns until my wounds are photographed, then bathed, disinfected and dressed. We’re both stunned by the weapon and me as quarry. If the masked men were escapees from a pre-Christmas dress-up party, what was one of them doing with a barbaric weapon named for the way it claws the skin like a cat? Rupert was a tearaway teen who’s reformed into a man-about-town, but this is way out of his experience.
In the early hours, another cab takes us back to the flat where my carer produces his own toothbrush and PJs from a coat pocket.
“Like a magician,” I say.
“I’ll put you to bed, then sleep on the couch.” A couch that’s too short for him.
“But you’ve got work tomorrow.”
“No early appointments and I want to support you when the police come round.”
I first met Detective Constable Beth Moore during a previous skirmish with the police. It might be why she’s here to investigate my assault. They drew straws.
She nods at Rupert and sits in an armchair to look at photos of my injuries and then at the wounds themselves.
“Nasty. And without those thick leggings they would have been much nastier.” She sits back. “I think you were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. There were a couple of other reports early last night. A masked group spooking people as they entered venues. A gang. But we don’t know who they are.”
“Why the masks, the horns – and the whip?”
“Have you heard of the Krampus?”
“No,” Rupert and I chime together.
“I hadn’t either.”
She explains that it’s a pagan tradition from Europe. In early December, young men from alpine villages dress up in masks and horns as mythical demons called the Krampus. While St Nicholas gives out toys for good behaviour, the Krampus chase after the giggling children with sticks and cowbells to remind them that they’ve also been naughty.
