The Kill Artist Read Free

alarm. Mounted on a pair of heavy wooden easels were two paintings. One was large, very old looking, a religious scene of some sort. Parts had flaked away. On the second easel was a painting of an old man, a young woman, and a child. Peel examined the signature in the bottom right-hand corner: Rembrandt.
    He turned to leave and found himself face-to-face with the stranger.
    "What are you doing?"
    "I'm's-s-sorry," Peel stammered. "I thought you were here."
    "No you didn't. You knew I was away, because you were watching me from your bedroom window when I left. In fact, you've been watching me since the summer."
    "I thought you might be a smuggler."
    "Whatever gave you that idea?"
    "The boat," Peel lied.
    The stranger smiled briefly. "Now you know the truth."
    "Not really," said Peel.
    "I'm an art restorer. Paintings are old objects. Sometimes they need a little fixing up, like a cottage, for example."
    "Or a boat," said Peel.
    "Exactly. Some paintings, like these, are very valuable."
    "More than a sailboat?"
    "Much more. But now that you know what's in here, we have a problem."
    "I won't tell anyone," Peel pleaded. "Honest."
    The stranger ran a hand over his short, brittle hair. "I could use a helper," he said softly. "Someone to keep an eye on the place while I'm away. Would you like a job like that?"
    "Yes."
    "I'm going sailing. Would you like to join me?"
    "Yes."
    "Do you need to ask your parents?"
    "He's not my father, and my mum won't care."
    "You sure about that?"
    "Positive."
    "What's your name?"
    "I'm Peel. What's yours?"
    But the stranger just looked around the room to make certain Peel hadn't disturbed any of his things.
    TWO
    Paris
    The stranger's restless Cornish quarantine might have gone undisturbed if Emily Parker had not met a man called René at a drunken dinner party, which was thrown by a Jordanian student named Leila Khalifa on a wet night in late October. Like the stranger, Emily Parker was living in self-imposed exile: she had moved to Paris after graduation in the hope that it would help mend a broken heart. She possessed none of his physical attributes. Her gait was loose-limbed and chaotic. Her legs were too long, her hips too wide, her breasts too heavy, so that when she moved, each part of her anatomy seemed in conflict with the rest. Her wardrobe varied little: faded jeans, fashionably ripped at the knees, a quilted jacket that made her look rather like a large throw pillow. And then there was the face-the face of a Polish peasant, her mother had always said: rounded cheeks, a thick mouth, a heavy jaw, dull brown eyes set too closely together. "I'm afraid you have your father's face," her mother had said. "Your father's face and your father's fragile heart."
    Emily met Leila in mid-October at the Musée de Montmartre. She was a student at the Sorbonne, a stunningly attractive woman with lustrous black hair and wide brown eyes. She had been raised in Amman, Rome, and London, and spoke a half-dozen languages fluently. She was everything that Emily was not: beautiful, confident, cosmopolitan. Gradually, Emily unburdened all her secrets to Leila: the way her mother had made her feel so terribly ugly; the pain she felt over being abandoned by her fiancé; her deep-rooted fear that no one would ever love her again. Leila promised to fix everything. Leila promised to introduce Emily to a man who would make her forget all about the boy she had foolishly fallen for in college.
    It happened at Leila's dinner party. She had invited twenty guests to her cramped little flat in Montparnasse. They ate wherever they could find space: on the couch, on the floor, on the bed. All very Parisian bohemian: roast chicken from the corner rotisserie, a heaping salade verte, cheese, and entirely too much inexpensive Bordeaux. There were other students from the Sorbonne, an artist, a young German essayist of note, the son of an Italian count, a pretty Englishman with flowing blond hair called Lord Reggie, and a jazz musician