The Gallery Page 7

  ‘Of course,’ he assured her, running a hand down the inside of her left arm until she thought she’d scream from the gently arousing touch that was adding to her frustration.

  ‘Marcia!’ Guy called to his mistress as she stood by the window, dressing. ‘Alice is going to give herself an orgasm. I thought you might like to watch.’

  Marcia did up the last buttons of her dress and turned towards the couple. She felt back in control now and her voice was cool and brisk. ‘What a good idea. Where are you planning to do it, Alice? Isn’t the glass table a little cold?’

  ‘Marco obviously didn’t realise what this room would be used for when he designed it!’ said Guy with a smile. ‘Let’s put the cushions from the two easy chairs on to this pine floor. They’ll make a good makeshift bed.’

  Quickly he and Marcia laid out the removable backs and seats of the chairs, then Guy took hold of Alice’s hand and drew her down on to them. ‘Lie on your face,’ he murmured. ‘Put your hands underneath you and remember to keep squeezing your thighs together. It adds to the overall stimulation.’

  Alice’s face felt flushed and she was glad that she didn’t have to see the expressions of the two spectators as she removed her skirt and then lay down on the soft cushions.

  Her hand slid down through her pubic hair and her outer sex lips parted easily for her. She didn’t need any additional lubrication because watching Guy and Marcia had been so arousing, and as her fingers slid around her rigid clitoris her body started to twist and writhe. A delicious hot sensation flooded through her genitals.

  ‘Prolong it,’ said Guy quietly. ‘See how long you can make the pleasure last.’

  Alice didn’t need encouraging. It was bliss to be in charge of her own release at last after the frustration of the past twenty minutes. Her fingers roamed around the clitoris, moved lower to the entrance of her vagina and then she inserted two fingers just inside the entrance and rotated them until she found her G spot.

  The moment she touched it her body drew in on itself as a deep piercing shaft of pleasure ran upward behind her pubic bone. Now she became totally lost in the sensations and Guy and Marcia watched as she moaned and thrashed on the cushions, her hand hidden beneath her. At last she was ready to move her fingers upward again – to touch the delicate area around the clitoris itself, an area that was now pulsating desperately as her orgasm approached.

  Guy saw her bottom lift a fraction into the air, watched her toes go rigid and noted the way her head was moving frantically from side to side. She was perched right on the edge of release now, and when she uttered tiny whimpers of frantic excitement he quietly picked up the latex whip that he’d used on Marcia and at the precise moment that Alice finally climaxed he struck her twice across the back of her upper thighs.

  The shock of the blows mixed with the searing hot pleasure that they caused meant that Alice’s climax doubled in intensity, and she was startled to hear herself shouting out loud as her body contorted in its spasms of release. ‘Again!’ she shouted, sounding more desperate than ever before. ‘Do that again, now! Now!’

  But Guy didn’t. He merely nodded thoughtfully to himself as he stored away the knowledge that this was possibly the key to controlling Alice. When the naked young woman was finally still, Marcia walked briskly out of the room, leaving Guy alone with Alice. He knelt down by her side and stroked her sweat-streaked hair.

  ‘Did you enjoy that?’ he asked kindly, trailing the latex whip softly across her shoulders.

  ‘More than I’ve ever enjoyed anything!’ gasped Alice, still shattered by what had happened.

  ‘Then we’ll see what we can do when we next meet up. Be good though, or I might find I’m too busy to fit you in.’

  Alice knew then that no matter how much the trustees pestered her, she wouldn’t talk any more about her suspicions concerning Guy and the fact that he might have double-crossed her late husband. This evening had been far too pleasurable for her to give up the prospect of further delights.

  She knew that her housekeeper was right; most of the friends she and Michael had shared had deserted her now. Not only because there was trouble with her stepchildren over the estate, but also because she wasn’t ‘one of them’. They thought Michael had married beneath him, and now he wasn’t there to protect her from their disdain they were free to make it clear.

  She was a very physical young woman who needed sex, and until she was able to free herself from the complex legal wranglings and make a new life elsewhere, she needed Guy to provide her with that. ‘I’ll be good,’ she said slowly, and felt Guy’s lean fingers massage her scalp.

  ‘See you soon,’ he promised, and then she heard him cross the floor and close the door behind him. A few minutes later there was the sound of his car starting up and she was alone once more. Alone, but at least for now she was sated, relaxed and much happier. She never had cared about Michael’s art collection anyway.

  ‘Well?’ demanded Marcia, as they sped away from the house. ‘Did it work?’

  He nodded. ‘I think it worked very well, both as a warning and as a promise. The stick and carrot method, as it were. It’s a pity you can’t lose yourself in some of our sex better when we’ve got an audience,’ he added idly. ‘You enjoy everything when we’re alone together.’

  Marcia, like Alice, recognised a warning when she heard one, and although she and Guy were tied together by far more than a sexual liaison, she knew that he was capable of ditching her should she cease to please him.

  ‘The solicitor’s visit unsettled me,’ she snapped defensively.

  ‘There’s no need to let him rattle you,’ Guy assured her. ‘We’re perfectly safe. In any case, this isn’t a new problem. Just before he was killed Sir Michael mentioned to me that you seemed rather detached at times.’

  ‘That’s why I suit you,’ said Marcia with a brittle laugh. ‘No one could be more detached than you.’

  ‘Where sex is involved I’m never detached,’ responded Guy. ‘All I ask is that you abandon yourself to every kind of pleasure when we’re working, just as you do in our private life. I trust I make myself clear?’

  ‘Perfectly,’ responded Marcia. ‘Perhaps you think you know someone who could fulfil my role better?’ she added sarcastically.

  ‘No,’ said Guy, ‘but I’m always looking.’

  He laughed, leaving Marcia so uneasy that she hardly slept at all after she got home. She was very aware that Guy was ruthless, and although she couldn’t believe he’d ever find anyone to take her place there was always the chance that somewhere out there, there could be a woman who’d fit the bill.

  Guy too lay awake for quite some time, replaying the evening in his mind and mentally replacing Marcia with other women. He was surprised to discover that when he replaced her with Cressida, their new gallery assistant, the entire scenario took on a new edge of excitement for him. He decided that the next day he must take a closer look at Cressida, and then he fell asleep.

  Cressida, blissfully unaware of everything, slept well after Tom had gone. Alice, alone in her huge king-size bed, slept the sleep of exhaustion.

  Detective Chief Inspector Williams would have been very pleased with the way things were developing.

  Chapter Four

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING Cressida arrived at the gallery at 8.30. She was determined to make the most of the time she had to herself, knowing that Detective Chief Inspector Williams was hoping she’d find some concrete evidence linking the gallery to the art forgeries.

  She went into Marcia’s office and opened the top right-hand drawer of the older woman’s desk. She’d been afraid that it might be locked, but to her relief not only was it open, it also contained the key to the other drawers in the desk.

  Swiftly she unlocked them and then began going through the files. The headings were vague: ‘Promising’, ‘Rejections’, ‘Overseas Contacts’ and ‘Active’ all nestled amidst files marked A – Z that could contain anything at all. With a sinking heart, Cressida re
alised that it would take her hours to go through everything. She’d have to choose some at random this time and hope for another opportunity at a later date.

  ‘Overseas Contacts’ sounded useful, given the fact that Interpol were interested in Guy Cronje’s activities, but when Cressida went through it she found that it consisted entirely of a list of collectors in France, Switzerland, Holland and Germany, all on the look-out for promising new artists whose works they could buy at a relatively low price but who Guy considered a good financial investment.

  Cressida was rather shocked by this calculated approach. It was no different to buying stocks and shares and where artistic talent was concerned she found that unforgiveable.

  ‘Come on, Cressida, you’ve no time for moralising,’ she chided herself. ‘Keep looking for something useful.’ File after file was taken out and then replaced without anything of interest coming to light, and she was about to move over to the filing cabinet in the corner of the room when purely by chance she saw one headed ‘Renovations’, filed by mistake under the letter E.

  The file was thick and divided into several sections. One was marked ‘Lord Summers’ and Cressida went straight to those pages. Sir Michael’s full name and address was listed, along with his wife’s name and the names of her parents. Beneath that was a long list of paintings, most of which had been purchased from the gallery and had nothing to do with renovations, but then near the bottom of the page she found a note to the effect that a Rembrandt and a Monet had been brought in for cleaning at the end of the previous year.

  Cressida’s heart began to race. She frequently experienced a mixture of excitement and fear when on undercover work, and the fact that this time she was working in an upmarket art gallery rather than a downbeat nightclub didn’t change the underlying frisson of fear that always came when she felt that she was on to something.

  There was no record of where the pictures went to be cleaned, or when they were returned to Lord Summers, and so Cressida decided to start checking out other names in the file. As she flicked through the sections she caught sight of the name Sir Peter Thornton, and tried to think why that rang a bell. Then she remembered. It was the name of the man whose daughter, Leonora, was coming to work at the gallery, a man who was also a friend of Detective Chief Inspector Williams. At the bottom of his page she found a note that a Holbein had been brought in for ‘skilled repair work’ at the end of April.

  Now she knew that Guy and Marcia had definitely had the opportunity to forge reproductions of the paintings missing from the Summers’ estate. Furthermore, it seemed likely they were about to do the same to one of Sir Peter Thornton’s paintings.

  There was a photocopier in the small room behind her desk in the gallery and she was just about to take the two relevant pages out of the file and copy them when the door to the office opened and Marcia walked in.

  ‘What on earth are you doing, Cressida?’ she asked in astonishment.

  Cressida knew that she mustn’t blush or look guilty and her mind raced as she struggled to come up with an acceptable excuse for being caught going through Marcia’s private drawers.

  ‘A man called in just after I opened up,’ she said swiftly. ‘He wouldn’t give his name, but he said he’d recently inherited a Matisse from his grandfather and it needed a good clean and possibly some restoration work done on it. I remembered Sue saying that the gallery did do cleaning work on valuable paintings and was trying to find out some details. He said he’d call back.’

  Marcia glanced at her wristwatch. ‘You must have opened up very early. It’s only ten now but you say you’ve already had a nameless visitor with a valuable painting to be cleaned?’

  Cressida straightened up and smiled at Marcia. She was grateful now for her years of police work and her training in keeping calm in difficult situations, because there was a definite look of suspicion in Marcia’s eyes. ‘I was early,’ she admitted. ‘I’d hoped for some private time to look over Rick Marks’ work again. I can’t get it out of my mind, it seems to haunt me. I suppose that says something about my sexuality, but I’m not sure what!’ she laughed.

  Marcia didn’t laugh. ‘What did the man with the inherited Matisse look like?’ she asked abruptly.

  ‘Tall, heavily built, about forty-five and with a shock of grey hair,’ said Cressida, improvising wildly. ‘Do you know him?’

  ‘I’m hardly likely to know him if he came here to see whether or not we could help out, am I? Why didn’t you get his name?’

  ‘I tried,’ Cressida assured her. ‘He was very evasive about giving me any details. He wouldn’t even say what the title of the painting was.’

  ‘If he comes back, please show him through to me,’ said Marcia.

  ‘Of course. I’m sorry I opened your desk drawers, but I didn’t think you’d mind since you’d left the key where anyone could find it.’

  ‘Only someone who opened the top drawer in the first place,’ said Marcia coldly. ‘As I recall, Sue didn’t mention anything about renovations on your job resumé did she?’

  ‘No, but she must have mentioned it some other time,’ said Cressida. ‘It isn’t a secret, is it? I mean, I didn’t do anything wrong telling this man we could probably help?’

  ‘Why on earth should anything about our work be a secret?’ asked Marcia, walking over to Cressida and removing the file casually from her hands. ‘If we offer a service we advertise it. There wouldn’t be much point in doing it otherwise – that would prove financially rather unrewarding, don’t you think?’

  ‘I wondered if it was something you only did for personal friends,’ said Cressida, trying to ease the tension in the room.

  ‘We mention the service in our catalogue,’ said Marcia shortly. ‘Perhaps you should try reading that before you go and stare at Rick’s work again. Guy told me it fascinated you,’ she added, closing the desk drawers and re-locking them. ‘Rick’s calling in later this morning. You’ll have an opportunity to tell him what a fan you are then.’

  Cressida decided to try and cover her confusion over being caught snooping by using Rick’s visit as an excuse. ‘I don’t think I really want to meet him,’ she said, backing away from Marcia’s desk and finally allowing the blush that had been threatening for the past few minutes to suffuse her face and neck. ‘I won’t know what to say.’

  ‘Tell him you think his drawings are the most erotic you’ve ever seen. That should keep him happy. And next time you want to look through a file, please ask my permission first.’

  ‘I will,’ said Cressida hastily. ‘Is Rick married?’ she continued, certain that this would divert Marcia. She was right.

  ‘His pictures have certainly made an impression on you!’ laughed the older woman. ‘As a matter of fact, no, he isn’t married. At least, not to a woman. I think, like most truly creative people, he’s probably married to his art. That doesn’t stop him taking a very enthusiastic interest in the opposite sex though, so you might be in with a chance!’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking of anything like that,’ protested Cressida, relieved to see that Marcia’s face had lost its look of suspicion. ‘But when you see images like the ones he creates you can’t help wondering what kind of man he is.’

  ‘Quite ordinary really,’ said Marcia dismissively. ‘He’ll like you; he’s always drawn to enigmatic women.’

  ‘I don’t think I’m enigmatic!’ protested Cressida.

  Marcia looked thoughtfully at her. ‘I do, and so does Guy.’

  Cressida didn’t know whether to be pleased that Guy and Marcia had discussed her or not. On a professional level it was certainly what her superiors would want, but on a personal level it made her uncomfortable.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Marcia, seeing the look of discomfort on her assistant’s face. ‘Guy didn’t tell me that, but I always know when he’s interested in a woman. Not that his interest usually leads to anything – only the occasional brief fling but never any true commitment.’

  It was a warning, and Cress
ida knew it, but she pretended that she didn’t know what Marcia was driving at. ‘He doesn’t look the marrying kind to me,’ she admitted lightly. ‘Not that I’ve seen much of him, but I imagine it would be hard for anyone to hold his interest for long.’

  Marcia nodded. ‘He and I have known each other six years now, and that’s probably a record for Guy even as far as friendships go. He’s rather a loner.’

  ‘But a good business partner,’ said Cressida brightly, moving thankfully towards the door and freedom from Marcia’s questions and suggestions.

  ‘Oh yes,’ agreed Marcia. ‘He’s certainly a good partner, in more ways than one.’

  As soon as Cressida got back to her desk in the reception area she started to work out how she could contact Detective Chief Inspector Williams and get him to come up with someone who would act as her imaginary caller early that morning. She knew that Marcia was still highly suspicious about the unknown man and his inherited Matisse.

  While she was working out how she could get a message to him before the end of the day, a young man walked in through the door. He was tall – well over six feet in height – and had a mass of long, wavy blond hair. Coming directly to the desk he leant against the corner and stared at Cressida. ‘Who the hell are you?’

  ‘My name’s Cressida Farleigh and I’m the new assistant here,’ she said politely. ‘Can I help you at all?’

  The blond man grinned, showing very white even teeth. ‘Probably, but not where my work’s concerned. I want to speak to Guy Cronje. Is he in?’

  ‘No, but Marcia Neville is. Would you like to see her?’ asked Cressida.

  ‘Sure, Marcia will do. Tell me, Cressida, how long have you been working here?’

  ‘Less than a week.’

  ‘And are you enjoying it?’ His light blue eyes were bright with curiosity and his good humour so obvious that she couldn’t help smiling at him.