The Brodsky Affair: Murder is a Dying Art Read Online Free Page A

up at seven.”
    “Great.” In less than five minutes, she gulped back her drink, leant forward, puckered her lips and kissed him hard on his unshaven cheek. “Be lucky. See you later.” She turned and headed out of the door, sending another gust of cold damp air across the bar.
    He watched her leave. Damn it . I really ought to chill out a bit.
    Their relationship had grown and now they were partners. He knew that without her he wouldn’t be doing what he was doing now, and wouldn’t have discovered the Nicholson painting. In retrospect, he recognised her subtlety in steering him towards a path of sanity, and getting him off his excessive use of the bottle. That would have had him joining up with Mac in the alleyway.
    Whenever he thought of why he had fallen in love with her, his list never quite encapsulated her spirit. She had numerous talents – artistic, cultural and physical - and of course, a natural wisdom and a sinful wit. Her friends had been so, for years, and she had never found it difficult to make new ones. He could sit with her for hours without a word being spoken, and they both knew that was not hostility, but a genuine compatibility with each other. When things got bad, she encouraged him with an energetic optimism. But he didn’t fool himself. He knew at times their relationship got stretched out too far for comfort. His intensity with his work often placed her in a secondary role. That had caused near breakups. Her threats of leaving him had increased over the last six months, and he didn’t want that to happen.
    Her lovemaking could be soft, gentle, also outrageous and shocking. Once, she had hunkered up to him in a crowded London tube train and went through a routine as if she had been a porn star, oblivious or not caring whether anybody could see or not. Nothing he could say defined Tamsin. She had a way of seeing her world, and his, and linking them together in her own particular way. She was unique.
    He’d nurtured the idea that she found in him a wild or unconventional potential. She had convinced him, even with the danger of financial catastrophe stretching over him, that better things lay ahead. He wondered at times whether beneath her unconventional persona and the traumas of her earlier life, if she yearned for a simple, uncomplicated life.
    Another hour slipped away, and yet another pint of London Pride sat alongside him. It didn’t look like anything of value were coming up for sale. But before he decided to switch off, he found himself clicking on images at the badly-constructed website of an Australian auction house, Zimmerman’s, situated in Perth, Western Australia. Jack had never heard of them and doubted if anyone else had either. But sometimes, with these smaller houses, you could get lucky.
    He clicked on the ‘Paintings & Works of Art’ section, and began his customary quick-view technique - skimming through dozens of thumbnails - a method he’d perfected. For an obscure house, they had a surprising number of works coming up for auction, three hundred in total. Scrolling through the lots, he noted the customary rubbish, amateur, pretty, ‘chocolate-box’ views – vases of flowers, cute kittens and puppies, followed by varied attempts by would-be artists to emulate Van Gogh and other Impressionists.
    He began thinking that the exercise had become a waste of time, but as he had been trained to do so, he pressed on. He reached lot 275, then lot 279… then he stopped. An alarm rang inside his brain. He scrolled back to 275. Enlarging the view, he found himself looking at an indistinct image on his screen. Lot 275 represented a pair of paintings. Moving the cursor across, he read the catalogue entry:
    A pair of European oil paintings, 60 cm x 80 cm, Nightly Performance and Dancing Women at Rest. Signed, not decipherable. Circa 1930s, approx. $300-500.
    That didn’t tell him much. He enlarged the view before further magnifying various areas. Leaning back in the armchair,