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“It was left on his desk,” Percival tells me, sinking into the seat beside mine.
The more I read over the note, the more it niggles at me. “Every life has a price.”
“The irony,” Julian scoffs at me.
“No, not the irony, Jules. When does a life have a price?” I stare up at him as he glowers down at the note I place on the table along with the two of the buttons. The one I carved, I fist in my hand. “What in this world has a price?”
“Everything,” he replies.
“Do you honestly believe that everything has value?” Jules shakes his head. “No. For something to have a price, we have to care for it.”
“What’s your point?” Julian slaps his hand down on the note. “You’re touching what he cares about and he’s retaliating?”
“No, Jules. I didn’t make the first kill.”
“So what? This is a game of who has more to lose? Or who will go further?”
“I don’t know yet, but Chapman’s right.”
“Every life has a price,” he mutters down at the photo of Lord Alastair Sterling, his godfather and a Wolf.
“Does his life have a price to you?”
“He was like a father to me. He didn’t care who I am or who I love…”
“What are you willing to pay, Jules? Your morality? Maybe your righteousness?”
“When does it end?” he asks while Percival watches on silently.
“When do you think, Percy? When does all of this end?”
With a shake of his head, he sits back in his chair. “It doesn’t. Not until either he or us is gone.”
“So, Julian, what is it you want me to do now? Sit back and wait for a benevolent miracle? Or maybe until another one of us is dead?”
“You’re a bastard,” Julian spits. The cutting tone of his voice nowhere near as sharp to cut me as he intended.
“One of us has to be.” The truth lingers bitterly between us. One day he’ll realise that we’re not here to keep peace or to make this world a wonderful place. The reason we exist is to defend and protect—to rain hell when the world threatens to demolish everything that history has carved out.
“You asked about the wife?” Percival swipes the screen of the iPad to pull up a photo of Chapman’s wife leaving a gallery. “On the first Saturday of every month, she attends the private art auction. Tomorrow, there’s going to be a Bram Bogart lot that she’s been searching for.”
“Bogart?”
“Since he died in 2012, his paintings have amassed unbelievable value. One of my contacts at the Tate thinks that within the next decade, his works are going to be as valuable as Kandinsky’s.”
“How cultured,” Julian laughs.
The Seymours own one of the largest baroque collections in the world. Art is in Julian’s blood. Perhaps it’s time that he got his hands dirty too.
“You’re going to go to that auction, and you’re going to win that lot with enough of a tussle that Mrs. Chapman will be put out and she’ll want a private word.” A look of disgust twists his face, and before he argues, I tell him, “Don’t worry, you’re just the honey trap. I’ll do the bloody work.”
It’s time for Chapman to make another payment for the lives of the Wolves he’s taken. Slowly, we’ll get to him—the final instalment of his debt.
Softly, softly, catchee monkey.
* * *
The light September rain drizzles over the city. I don’t like the rain; it makes these things messy. Weaving through the parked cars to the side of the gallery, I cut the cable to the CCTV camera pointing to the back of the building, where the smoking area is situated.
