The henchman hauled him to his feet. His face was stinging.
‘Let’s have some manners and some decorum, Mr Hegarty,’ Kilgore said, his Southern drawl sounding totally out of place here. ‘And let’s all calm down before someone gets hurt bad.’
‘My wife,’ Hegarty said. ‘If you touch—’
He stopped in mid-sentence as he saw Natalie, a gag tied across her mouth, her eyes a picture of terror, hands cable-tied in front of her, appear at the bottom of the stairs, with another big thug, also all in black. The two men could have been twins. They were twins, he realized. The right hand of the one with Natalie sported a ring with a massive, vulgar-looking ruby-coloured stone. His twin wore a similar ring, with an emerald.
Elbowing the henchman beside him hard in the groin and hearing a satisfying grunt of pain, Hegarty hurled himself towards his wife. But before he’d got close, he received a massive punch in his stomach, which sent him staggering back, completely winded, and crashing into the pine dining table. He reeled off it, unsteadily, lost his balance and fell, painfully, back onto the floor.
‘Just calm down, Mr Hegarty, and take a seat,’ Kilgore said, pulling out one of the wooden chairs while still steadily holding the gun in his other hand.
Before he could react, a powerful hand hauled Hegarty back up to his feet, propelled him towards the chair and pushed him down onto it. An instant later, a tie-cord was pulled around his midriff and secured behind the chairback. Then the thug similarly secured his legs. All the time Hegarty looked impotently and helplessly at Natalie, who stared pleadingly back at him.
Kilgore stepped into centre stage. ‘Are you sitting comfortably?’ he asked.
‘Very funny.’
‘My friends and I are not here on any laughing matter, Mr Hegarty.’ He nodded at the henchmen in turn. They were standing on either side of Natalie now. ‘I’d like you to take a look at your wife, Mr Hegarty. She’s a very attractive lady, wouldn’t you say?’
Hegarty glared in silence, thinking hard, desperately, about what he could do.
‘Oh,’ Kilgore frowned. ‘You don’t agree.’
‘Touch her and I’ll kill you. I’ll kill all three of you.’
Kilgore smiled. ‘Nice sentiment, but I don’t think any of us three are too worried right now about that. What I would say is that your wife has very elegant hands. Beautifully slender fingers. My mama would have called them pianist’s fingers. Or maybe more appropriately right now, surgeon’s fingers.’ He walked over to her, dragging another wooden chair behind him, and raised her cuffed hands in the air, as the two henchmen forced her down onto the chair. Then he dropped her arms, dug into his inside jacket pocket, and produced a small pair of bolt-cutters.
Fear coiled in Hegarty’s stomach as he saw them.
‘Here’s the thing, Mr Hegarty. My employer and I originally thought that threatening to cut off some of your fingers would be a good way to get what we want from you, and you know exactly what that is. Then we thought about it some more and figured that would prevent you from painting further copies for us. Not smart, right? Not smart, because you are one stubborn son-of-a-bitch.’
Increasingly terrified for Natalie about where this was going, Hegarty said, ‘Do what you want to me, but please don’t hurt my wife. She’s got nothing to do with you people.’
Kilgore smiled. It was the kind of smile that reminded Hegarty of the jaws of a predatory fish frozen inside a block of ice. ‘Is that right? Well, the choice is yours, Mr Hegarty.’ He pocketed the gun and then the bolt-cutters, raised Natalie’s arms and harshly prised two of her fingers apart. ‘I’m a very fair man, Mr Hegarty. So I’m going to give you the choice of which two of your wife’s fingers I cut off first.’
A terrible, plaintive sound came from his wife’s gagged mouth. It tore Hegarty’s heart to shreds. ‘No, please, cut mine off, not hers.’
‘Well, I’d sure like to, but as I explained, Mr Hegarty, that really would not be forward thinking.’
‘You seriously think I’m ever going to work for you bastards again?’
Kilgore nodded then frowned, as if he was suddenly deep in thought. ‘Oh, I think you will, Mr Hegarty. Because when word gets around the art world about what you’ve done, no one else is going to touch you with a goddamn ten-foot barge pole.’
‘Please,’ Hegarty said. ‘Please tell me just what the hell I’m supposed to have done? You brought me photographs of a Fragonard painting of Summer and you asked me to make a copy of it, which I did. I just kept another copy for myself. What the hell is your problem?’
‘It’s not my problem, Mr Hegarty. It’s your problem.’ He pulled out the bolt-cutters again and held them in front of Natalie’s terrified face. ‘You thought you could cheat me, and more importantly my employer. I think at some time you’ve had the original painting in your possession. So, if you want your pretty little lady to retain all her fingers, it’s very simple. Give me the original that you’ve stolen, I’ll take it back to my employer, and we’ll all be friends again.’
‘You have this all wrong, and you’ve a very weird idea of friendship, Mr Kilgore.’
The American lowered his head and looked directly at Hegarty. ‘Any more weird than your idea of honesty? Integrity? Do you know the definition of integrity, Mr Hegarty?’
The forger stared back at him without replying for some moments. ‘And you think you know it, do you?’ he retorted acidly.
‘Integrity is doing the right thing, even when no one is watching.’ Kilgore smiled. ‘True?’
‘And your point is?’
‘You have that Watteau which you claim is the original, and that one of your undetectable fakes is the version hanging in the Uffizi in Florence. You were given that original painting in good faith. No one was watching you make a fine copy. No one could challenge you when you duped the gallery into thinking you had given them back the original, as you’ve proudly boasted to me.’
‘I was just joking,’ Hegarty said, nervousness raising the pitch of his voice.
A sharp noise startled them all. It came from behind them.
Kilgore turned and looked in horror at the huge picture-window. Hegarty turned his head, along with the two henchmen. They saw a squeegee on a wooden pole rubbing up and down the glass.
‘The window cleaner,’ Hegarty explained, unnecessarily.
‘Get him the hell out of—’
A moment later a reedy-thin man in his fifties, in dungarees, gave them a happy smile and a wave.
‘You have curtains? Blinds?’ Kilgore demanded, with panic in his voice now.
‘Afraid not.’
‘Tell him to go get the hell out of here,’ Kilgore said.
‘You tell him yourself, I’m a bit tied up right now.’
The American instinctively slipped his hand inside his jacket pocket and gripped his gun.
‘Shoot him, why don’t you?’ Hegarty suggested. Then, gathering confidence, he added, ‘He’s seen your face and your two gorillas. You’re going to have to shoot him. POW! POW!’
‘Shut it. Make one signal to him and you’re all dead, you both and him. Understand?’
‘Actually, Kilgore, I don’t understand. You’re not in the Wild West of the nineteenth century. You are in twenty-first-century England. Saltdean has one murder every ten years. Three in one day isn’t going to look good on your CV.’
‘I said shut it.’ Kilgore ushered the twins to stand behind the table and, by joining them, the three of them blocked the window cleaner’s view.
‘He’s a Jehovah’s Witness,’ Hegarty said. ‘Very nice man. He could save your soul, and your mates’.’
‘Don’t push me.’
‘I don’t need to push you, you’re already on the edge of the cliff. That nervous twitch in your eyes is a dead giveaway. Oh, and further bad news, he and his son, who is probably around the front at the moment, will be coming inside in a few minutes, using the key we leave in the shed.’