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‘You spoke to Sean about me? Recently?’ she said, aghast.
‘Don’t worry, the sleeping bulldog settled smugly back down,’ he said drily. ‘I only poked him very delicately during a general chat about an investment I’m thinking of making in Shanghai, which is his area of expertise. He likes to boast. I mentioned your name in passing, and he bit, but not viciously—so I guessed that whatever you had done was done successfully without his knowledge, and not at the expense of his pride or his wallet, but for a motive as yet unexplained…’ The lilt in his voice made it a question, not a statement.
Emily swallowed, ripping at a leaf. ‘I was desperate…’
‘I get that bit.’ He sounded impatient.
She took a deep breath. ‘I don’t know where to start—’
‘I presume it has something to do with your grandfather. What did he have? Alzheimer’s?’
When her eyes widened he growled: ‘For God’s sake, I may occasionally be a blind fool, but I’m not an idiot. You’ve been bloody protecting someone, and it obviously isn’t yourself or you wouldn’t be doing such a rotten job of it.’
She pushed back a curl that was tickling the top of her ear. ‘Not Alzheimer’s,’ she sighed, ‘but just as devastating as far as Grandpa was concerned. He developed a fine tremor in his right hand—an intention tremor, it’s called—a neurological condition. His hand would tremble whenever he started to do something—it didn’t happen when he was relaxed—and for quite a long while he managed to hide it from me, from everyone. But it’s incurable and in most cases progressive and eventually it was getting to the point where it would compromise his work, so he got very depressed…’ She looked down at the shredded leaf, folding it into little pieces. ‘While this was going on I—I’d met someone—a man, at a seminar in Wellington, Conrad Nichols—another restorer, someone I felt—I thought…’ She floundered, sensing Ethan lean forward, his elbows on his knees, his interest intensifying. ‘He seemed very genuine, personable—’
‘Handsome?’
She flushed at his cynicism. He clearly saw where this was leading. ‘Very,’ she said stiffly. ‘He was looking for a job, so I introduced him to Grandpa and they liked each other—so he came to work with us—’
‘And live with you?’
Her flush deepened. ‘No, he—Grandpa was old-fashioned. Conrad had his own apartment—’
‘You were in love with him.’ he said flatly.
‘I—he was so sunny and charming,’ she admitted obliquely.
‘He made it so easy to trust him. Too easy,’ she added with painful benefit of hindsight. ‘It was his idea that he could act as Grandpa’s aid, as his right hand, I suppose—in a literal sense—so that he could keep on working. I was relieved, because Grandpa was so proud—he refused to even consider any supervisory role in the business. He’d started to scale back, and let our other two employees go without telling me, because he couldn’t bear the thought of them seeing him dwindle, of losing their respect. He hated the idea of anyone pitying him. So while I was flat out trying to compensate for the dip in business by building my own client list I simply assumed that Grandpa was strictly supervising each and every thing that Conrad did, the way he had always done with me, but he was getting fatigued more easily and Conrad was taking responsibility for more of the work himself, only he simply wasn’t up to it—his knowledge and expertise was all superficial. He didn’t have the patience to be a top-notch restoration artist, but he would have been OK if he simply worked to order. Instead he was touting for jobs under the Quest name, padding out bills, and claiming Grandpa had worked on jobs that he never even saw.
‘It wasn’t until we had several commissions returned asking for them to be redone that I realised what was going on, but by then Conrad had skipped out with the cash he’d creamed off the top of the bills—’ she heard Ethan’s explosive curse but hurried on, wanting to get her mortifying confession over as soon as possible. ‘We had to pay refunds and do some free work to square things up but, thank God, James Quest’s name still carried enough weight to stop the whispers in their tracks.’
Unfortunately, Conrad had left one other time bomb ticking behind him, which she had discovered when she had been combing through the notes he had left in the studio. It was a repair he had done just before he disappeared, in which he had used the wrong fixing agent, a contact adhesive rather than the capillary one that was James Quest’s trademark for such delicate pieces. Even without seeing the repair itself she had known as soon as she had re
ad of his technique that it was a botched job. Within a very short time that particular adhesive would start to change colour, and become obvious even to the inexperienced eye. To make things worse, he had already shipped the seventeenth-century Chinese flask back to its notoriously litigious owner, who would have grounds for accusing James Quest, whose signature was on a quote clearly stating the correct method of repair, of fraud or at the very least of criminal incompetence.
‘Sean Webber,’ guessed Ethan and Emily nodded.
‘I knew he would go ballistic. He broke it himself, you see, showing it to some friend, so he was already looking to offload some blame. And he was furious that his insurance company wouldn’t pay out the full value—they insisted on a restoration job and partial payout.
‘I tried to ring and explain that there had been a mix-up, but I found out the Webbers were overseas. Conrad had shipped it back to them without even checking they were going to be there!’ she recalled, still hot at this further evidence of his appalling lack of professionalism. ‘As it happened Michael signed for it, so I thought I’d have a chance to get it back and redo the repair before Sean even got wind of it, but unfortunately Michael wasn’t answering any of my messages and was always out when I called. When I did get hold of him on the phone, he wasn’t interested, he told me that anything I had to say could wait until his father came home. So I got myself invited to a party there and did a temporary swap.’ Remembered panic pitched her words high and breathless.
‘You stole it back,’ Ethan said, his voice a mixture of stark incredulity and grim admiration. ‘I can’t believe that your grandfather let you take a risk like that…’
‘He didn’t know,’ she said defensively. ‘He was shattered by what happened, I didn’t see the point of worrying him further. And then he had a bad fall, and went for tests with the neurologist that showed the tremor was getting worse—’
‘So you took the worry on yourself. What if someone had noticed you’d switched flasks? You took a hell of a risk!’ Ethan’s admiration turned to anger.
‘I know, but I had to do something—and it worked,’ she said, glossing over the agonies she had suffered over her brief foray into a life of crime. ‘It was a simple break and it was a new one, which always makes things a lot easier. All I had to do was remove the adhesive, dismantle the flask, clean it and put it back together. It only took a few days.’ A few days without sleep or solid food, in a constant state of sweating anxiety every time the phone rang…
‘When Sean Webber came home he found lots of messages from me trying to contact him on his answer machine, and when he did I explained that there had been a shipping mistake, and that he had got another collector’s flask—one that was fully intact, patterned differently from his, and worth more—so it was blatantly not an attempt at fraudulent substitution. He was rude and obnoxious about it when I went round to make the exchange, but not suspicious, thank God, and he was pleased that the repair on his flask was undetectable except under a magnifying glass. So it all turned out all right in the end,’ she announced with an airy gesture of finality.
But Ethan had no intention of letting her get away so easily. He got up, and plucked her hand away from its act of nervous destruction. ‘But how did you get a substitute flask of that quality at such short notice?’ he asked. ‘Surely they’re fairly rare.’
She looked away, licking her dry lips. She had hoped it wouldn’t come to this, but she should have known he’d leave no rock unturned.
His curiosity instantly congealed into suspicion. God, he was quick.
‘Emily?’ His hand tightened on hers, warning her not to prevaricate.
