Bombing in Belgravia (A Cozy Mystery) (Cassie Coburn Mysteries Book 2) Read online

  “Good luck,” I said as I watched Linda and Kiki walk back toward Kensington Palace. Frowning, I took out my phone while Biscuit sat at my feet watching his friend leave.

  “You’ll get to see him again soon, I’m sure,” I told Biscuit as I opened up my Facebook app and typed in the name “Aaron Stone”.

  The third profile down was obviously the guy Linda was describing. He certainly did bear a certain resemblance to Channing Tatum. I quickly scrolled through his profile, but there was nothing there that would obviously tell me whether or not he had siblings.

  I sighed as I put the phone down. I didn’t know what I was doing at all. Why was I looking this guy up? This was totally Violet’s territory.

  And yet, I couldn’t help myself. I wanted to know whether or not Linda was right and he was lying about having siblings. As I got up and continued to walk Biscuit, it slowly dawned on me why I was doing this: I wanted to try my hand at a very simple problem. I wanted to pretend to be Violet, and solve problems, all on my own.

  I smiled to myself. I wasn’t a detective. I had no idea what I was doing. But I could give it a shot, right? After all, what could I possibly have to lose?

  Chapter 8

  When I went to bed that night just a little after eight o’clock, I had never felt like more of an old lady in my life. My Stanford days of pulling all-nighters before exams were definitely over. I’d slept for about three hours the night before and I was completely wiped.

  I slept straight through until seven thirty the next morning when I woke up to a text from Violet.

  Meet me at the Natural History Museum. Nine fifteen, front entrance.

  I groaned and forced myself out of bed. Biscuit stretched and curled himself up in the warm spot I’d just vacated, and promptly fell right back to sleep. I muttered about how unfair it was that Biscuit got to be warm and comfortable while dragging myself to the shower.

  Ninety minutes later I was showered, dressed, had left some food out for Biscuit and grabbed a breakfast burrito and a latte from a coffee shop on the way to the Natural History Museum, which, was where I found myself taking one of the last few bites of my burrito when I saw Violet coming up toward me. She wrinkled her face when she saw what I was eating.

  “Do they not teach people in America about the necessity of fruits and vegetables in a diet?” she asked me as she eyed the burrito.

  “There’s hash browns in here and potatoes are a vegetable,” I replied haughtily. Not all of us wanted to eat a kale smoothie for breakfast. “Besides, I put some ketchup on it before too, and that counts as tomato,” I said as I finished off the burrito.

  Violet just shook her head as we made our way through to the entrance of the Natural History Museum. As we entered through the doors and into the building, my breath was completely taken away. The entrance hall was enormous, with ceilings that were at least fifty feet high. Gorgeous Roman arches lined every wall, and a large skeleton of a Diplodocus dinosaur towered over everyone, guarding the stairs behind that led toward the exhibits.

  “His name is Dippy,” Violet said, motioning toward the dinosaur as we moved past him. We made our way up the large staircase, but rather than going through an exhibit, Violet led me through one of the side doors and into the back alleyways of the museum.

  We carefully made our way through a maze of narrow corridors and small rooms that housed a number of objects that weren’t ready for display on the museum floor. Eventually we reached a small office that was so filled with rocks it almost looked as though we were in a cave. Shelves lined the room from floor to ceiling, each covered with rocks and minerals ranging in size from that of a piece of gravel to a geode the size of a beach ball.

  In the middle of the room, the rocks being used as paperweights, was a desk behind which was a small man with wire-rimmed glasses who must have weighed ninety pounds soaking wet. At a glance he looked to be in his late forties, maybe early fifties, and he ran his hands through his thinning hair as he muttered to himself while reading a textbook so large that it would have given Gray’s Anatomy a run for its money, size-wise.

  “Hello, Edward,” Violet greeted the man cheerily, and he jumped to his feet.

  “Ah! Violet! How good to see you again. What are you here for? Oh, and you brought a friend! Can I make you a cup of tea?” he asked, shuffling his way to a corner where a kettle and teapot were perched precariously on a thin table.

  “No, thank you, Edward. We’re fine. I called and set up a meeting with you, remember?”

  “Oh yes, oh yes. Of course. Something about… oh dash it all, I cannot for the life of me remember what it was about.”

  “Lead carbonate,” Violet replied.

  “Of course, of course. White lead.”

  Violet turned to me. “Edward here is the most knowledgeable man in England in the field of Renaissance and Dutch Golden Age paintings. He’s also an eminent expert on mineralogy.”

  I looked dubiously at the man in front of me, who was now fumbling around his desk in an attempt to find his glasses, which Violet deftly grabbed off the top of one of the shelves and handed to him. This guy didn’t look like he was much of an expert in anything.

  “Ah, thank you, Violet. Yes, yes, where we we. Right. White lead. Now, sit down,” he motioned, but there was nowhere for us to sit. Violet simply leaned against the wall, and I stayed where I was.

  “How much do you know about white lead?” he asked.

  “It’s a pigment that used to be used in painting,” Violet said. “It was very common in oil painting to make very luminous whites. It also happens to be incredibly toxic.”

  “Yes, correct. A fact that was known during most of the paint’s use, but accepted as a necessity in order to get the whites truly correct. Nowadays, titanium white is used in the stead of white lead to create a strong white tint in oil paintings, in large part because white lead has become nigh on impossible to obtain legally. But for two millennia, white lead was the main pigment to create white paint, before zinc whites came into style, and were eventually replaced with titanium white.”

  “I have a murder victim who was found with white lead under her fingernails. Her lifestyle doesn’t fit the type of person who might accidentally come into contact with white lead in any kind of legitimate fashion. I believe she was smuggling stolen or missing art pieces from Europe into Taiwan, but I need to be able to find out what pieces she might have been moving recently. Can you help me with that?”

  “Ohhh but that is juicy gossip,” Edward told Violet, his head bobbing up and down. “There has, of course, been an emergence of a large market for western classic paintings in Asia these past few years. It is very lucrative, for those able to move the goods across borders without arousing suspicion.”

  “Being the child of an ambassador from the UK certainly would do that,” Violet agreed.

  “Oh yes. That is an excellent cover indeed. Now, there are certainly a large number of such paintings that could have been moved over the years. We have the Nazis to thank for that; they lost so many incredible artworks that belonged to Jews in mainland Europe that are now nigh on impossible to trace. So much time has passed, and in so many cases, those poor families all died, so no one was left to tell us that the paintings had at one point belonged to them…”

  Edward trailed off, shaking his head sadly as he pulled an iPad from his desk. He began to type on it at a glacial pace. “However,” he continued, “you say you’re looking for a painting that might have been moved recently. I read about a theft the other day that I guarantee you the thieves would want out of the country as quickly as possible.” After what felt like an eternity, Edward tapped a link on his screen and a picture appeared. He held out the iPad to Violet, who took it, and we both looked at the image for a second.

  “This is…” I said softly, my voice trailing off.

  “Yes,” Violet finished for me. “It is Vermeer’s masterpiece, The Milkmaid.”

  Even for someone like me, who didn’t have any spe
cial knowledge of art besides what I learned in a first year undergrad Art History class years ago, the painting was recognizable. It featured a plump woman in a yellow and blue dress, wearing a white head covering, pouring milk into an earthenware container on a table next to a window. The painting was so realistic; it almost could have passed for a photograph.

  “Exactly. It was only reported stolen four nights ago. The painting was in transit between the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam where it usually stays, and a small, private gallery in Liverpool where it was supposed to start a tour of Europe over the next three months,” Edward told us. “The museums involved had not notified the media as of yet, for fear of the negative publicity. However, they will not be able to hold them off for much longer.”

  “And I assume the white in this painting is white lead?”

  Edward nodded. “Yes, Vermeer was known to be a common user of the tint. He not only used it directly, but also frequently used it to lighten his other shades as well.”

  “So if Jenny Lin had lightly scraped the painting before her death, say by accident, she would have had trace amounts of white lead under her nails,” Violet said, almost to herself.

  “But then that means that chances are the painting’s been blown to bits, doesn’t it?” I said worriedly. “If Jenny Lin had it, wouldn’t she most likely have kept it in her home?”

  Violet shook her head. “No. That does make the most sense, but think about it. If she stole the painting, or if it was stolen and given to her to smuggle, and she was killed for the painting, don’t you think the thief would have made sure she had stored the painting elsewhere before blowing up the house? No, I do not think the painting was in the house. But a stolen priceless Vermeer about to be smuggled out of the country is an excellent motive for murder.”

  “So let me get this straight,” I said. “You think that someone stole the paintings, that they were then given to Jenny Lin to smuggle into Taiwan, but before she was able to smuggle them out of the country she was killed?”

  “Yes, exactement,” Violet replied.

  “But why? Did someone else want to steal the painting off her? It hasn’t been in the news yet. No one should know that the painting was even stolen.”

  Edward wagged a finger at me, and I somehow felt shamed, like I was in second grade again.

  “Oh no no, friend of Violet,” he told me. “Not at all. There are people who know these things. I, for one, knew of the theft. The underground world all know of the theft.”

  “Ok,” I sighed, feeling completely overwhelmed by everything I’d just learned. “So all the people who might want to steal from the thieves know about the theft.”

  “Yes,” Edward said, nodding profusely. “That is a certainty.”

  “So basically we now have a suspect list that includes a whole bunch of criminals,” I said, putting my head in my hands. Violet laughed.

  “It is not as bad as you say,” she told me. “Besides, if the case were easy to solve, then there would be no challenge.”

  “There’s a lot more challenge here than we originally thought,” I told Violet. “First the only challenge was figuring out who killed Jenny Lin. Then it turned out her brother was also a target, so we have to figure out what part he played in this. Jenny, and maybe also her brother, was involved in painting smuggling, and possibly the theft of one of the most famous Dutch Masters’ paintings in the world. And then on top of that, MI5 is pressuring you not to continue this case.”

  Saying all those words out loud made me feel so overwhelmed I was starting to get dizzy. The explosion had happened less than thirty-six hours earlier and already this case was getting so complicated I was wondering if even Violet could solve it, but she simply shrugged.

  “I have solved much more difficult cases than this,” she told me. “Ask me one day about the case I worked in Morocco. Thanks to that one I am the owner of sixteen hectares of land outside of Marrakesh.”

  Of course Violet would think this case was just a piece of cake. It only involved international smuggling of stolen masterpieces.

  I pinched my nose to ward off the headache I could feel coming on.

  As we left Edward in his office full of rocks and minerals and exited the museum, I could tell Violet was deep in thought. Her head was down and she wasn’t watching where she was going; at one point I had to stop her from pitching headfirst down a flight of stairs.

  “If you’re going to think without watching where you’re going, you might as well sit down while doing it,” I scolded her. “Let’s get some lunch or something.”

  Violet stared at me without saying anything for a good thirty seconds, and I was about to let her know that she was being incredibly creepy, when she finally nodded.

  “Yes. Lunch is a good idea.” She strode off at a blistering pace and I struggled to follow after her—while I no longer had any pain in my knee, I still had a tiny bit of a limp—and five minutes later we were in another one of those hipster cafés that Violet seemed to be able to conjure up out of nowhere. I couldn’t wait until unhealthy food was back in style again.

  I ordered the least healthy sounding thing on the menu—vegan mac and cheese with quinoa—while Violet ordered a smoothie bowl with extra chia seeds. When the waiter left, having taken our orders, Violet began to tap her fingers along the edge of the table, staring at a spot past me on the wall.

  “Do you want to talk about it?” I prodded, and Violet nodded.

  “Yes. There is something strange about this case.”

  “You mean besides the fact that this simple murder has turned into an international smuggling case?”

  “Yes, beside that. I believe that we have to assume Jenny and Kevin Lin were working together. After all, it stands to reason that the person who killed them planned on killing them both, which I still believe. So they were both involved in the smuggling.”

  “But they couldn’t have been the only two people involved. I’ve seen Ocean’s Eleven; there would have to be more people involved.”

  “Yes. The pop culture reference aside, I simply cannot see Jenny and Kevin Lin as being the only people involved in this. It is possible, of course, but the chances of two people so young being that experienced in the heist of major works of art is unlikely. I suspect the actual thief is significantly older. Not to mention, the twins had no way of knowing the inner workings of the art market.”

  “So you think they were just the middlemen?”

  “Yes. I imagine their only role is to smuggle the paintings into Taiwan.”

  “So we have to find out who they were working with.”

  “Well that part is relatively easy. They were smuggling masterpieces into Taiwan. They were working with a gang of Triads.”

  “Great, that was just what this case needed. An actual gang to be involved.”

  “Did you actually think that every art thief is a respectable man who wears a suit like your George Clooney?” Violet shook her head. “No. In fact, as with everything else, the large organizations are often the ones who must be looked at.”

  Just then, our food arrived.

  “For now, we eat,” Violet said. “Then after, we go to see if we can find the people with whom Jenny and Kevin Lin were working.”

  All of a sudden I felt a total loss of appetite, and it had nothing to do with the vegan cheese sauce on the noodles I was about to eat.

  Chapter 9

  “How do you know where to go?” I asked Violet. “I can’t imagine you just hold a sign out in the middle of the street reading ‘Triads please say hi, looking for a murderer’.”

  Violet cracked a smile. “No, certainly nothing quite so… crude. When you have worked in my line of work for as long as I have, you begin to know people. They tell you things. I know exactly where we will go to find the Triads we are after.”

  We finished our food and headed down to London Chinatown. Depending on who you ask in London, Chinatown is considered to be either in Soho, or just next to it. We crossed under the Chin
ese gate on Gerrard Street, with red Chinese lanterns criss-crossing the road. Everywhere I looked there was a different Chinese restaurant, souvenir shop, bakery or other Chinese-themed store. A hawker on the street tried to sell tourists souvenirs from London, and the air smelt of roasted meat and spices. Coming from San Francisco, this Chinatown seemed a bit small, but it was no less impressive than the one back home.

  Violet let me down the main street, and into an unassuming shop selling souvenirs and random other wares. It seemed like every useable inch of space was taken up with either lucky cat dolls, containers of tea, chopsticks and other things that I didn’t even recognize. The shopkeeper, a short woman who had to be at least in her seventies, eyed us suspiciously as we walked past, but Violet ignored her and immediately made her way to the back of the shop.

  She pulled back the beaded curtain that blocked the back room from view and I followed her past stacks of boxes piled from floor to ceiling labeled with Chinese characters. The further we got from the street, the more uncomfortable I got. What were we doing here? We moved past the boxes, Violet pushing one of them aside completely, revealing a hidden concrete-walled hallway. Water dripped from somewhere and streaks of mud lined the floor. This was totally the sort of place where people were murdered. I hope they find our bodies, give my mom some closure, I thought to myself as we walked down the hidden hall, turned a corner and found ourselves face to face with the largest Chinese man I’d ever seen in my life.

  He was at least six feet four inches tall, and built like an absolute tank. His neck had to be the size of my waist, for sure. He stood in front of a wooden door, and with his legs spread apart they spanned almost the whole doorframe. His large arms were crossed in front of him, and he peered out at Violet and me from behind a long set of bangs that grazed his eyelashes.