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Prologue

The Auction (3 July)

It was going to be the sale of the century.

From first light a crowd had started gathering and by the late afternoon it stretched from the monumental grey portico of the auction house, Monachorum & Sons (est. 1756), across the wide pavement and out into Houghton Street. At noon, metal barriers were erected to keep a central walkway clear and at 4 p. m. two uniformed Monachorum doormen rolled out a thick red carpet from the fluted Doric columns all the way to the edge of the pavement. The sun beat down on the crowd, and the auction house, as a gesture of good will, handed out free bottles of water and ice-lollies. As Big Ben struck six mournful chimes, the police diverted normal traffic and sent two mounted officers and eight on foot to patrol the street. The paparazzi, carrying step ladders, laptops and assorted lenses, were corralled into a small pen to one side, where they peered longingly through the door at three television crews and various accredited journalists who had managed to secure passes to cover the event from inside.

‘What’s going on?’ a passer-by asked a member of the crowd.

‘They’re selling that picture, you know the one on the news,’ explained Felicia Speers, who had been there since breakfast. ‘The Impossibility of Love. ’

‘The Improbability of Love,’ corrected her friend Dawn Morelos. ‘Improbability,’ she repeated, rolling the syllables slowly over her tongue.

‘Whatever.

‘Are they expecting trouble?’ asked the passer-by, looking from the police horses to the auction house’s burly security guards.

‘Not trouble – just everyone who’s anyone,’ said Dawn, holding up her smartphone and an autograph book that had the words ‘Rock and Royalty’ embossed in gold lettering across its front.

‘All this hullaballoo for a picture?’ asked the passer-by.

‘It’s not just any old artwork, is it?’ said Felicia. ‘You must have read about it?’

At the top of the broad steps of Monachorum four young women in black dresses and high-heeled shoes stood holding clipboards waiting to check off names. This was an invitation-only event. From certain vantage points, the crowd outside could just glimpse the magnificent interiors. Formerly the London seat of the Dukes of Dartmouth, Monachorum’s building was one of Europe’s grandest surviving Palladian palaces. Its hallway was large enough to park two double-decker buses side by side. The plaster ceiling, a riot of putti and pulchritudinous mermaids, was painted in pinks and golds. An enormous staircase, wide enough for eight horsemen to ride abreast, took the visitor upstairs to the grand saleroom, an atrium, its walls lined with white and green marble and top lit by three rotunda. It was, in many ways, quite unsuitable for hanging and displaying works of art; it did, nevertheless, create a perfect storm of awe and desire.