59 London

59 London

The 1922 Committee of Tory backbenchers convened in Room 14 of the Palace of Westminster at two o'clock that afternoon and

in a unanimous voice vote elected former prime minister Jonathan Lancaster the new Conservative Party leader. He met with

the King at Buckingham Palace an hour later and at 4:00 p.m. addressed a shell-shocked Britain from the doorstep of 10 Downing

Street. He promised competence, stability, and a return to decency. The Whitehall press corps, having just witnessed the most

turbulent day in modern British political history, was justifiably dubious.

Inside, Lancaster met for the first time with his hastily assembled Cabinet. Stephen Frasier stayed on at the Foreign Office,

but Nigel Cunningham, a brilliant lawyer before entering politics, became the new home secretary. Cunningham's successor as

chancellor of the Exchequer was none other than Hillary Edwards. Her family's personal possessions, having been extracted

from Number Ten earlier that very morning, were carted into her new official residence next door.

The press declared the move a masterstroke on Lancaster's part, and one prominent columnist from the Telegraph went so far as to predict that a return to normalcy was possible, after all. He was forced to backtrack a few hours later,

though, when his colleague Samantha Cooke published another explosive article, this one detailing the size and scope of the

plot against Hillary Edwards. The epicenter of the conspiracy was Harris Weber it was Charlotte Blake, the Oxford art historian and provenance research specialist

who had been murdered near Land's End in Cornwall, allegedly by the serial killer known as the Chopper. Professor Blake had

determined that the painting's rightful owner was Emanuel Cohen, a Paris physician who had fallen to his death down the steps

of the rue Chappe in Montmartre. The timing of his death, coming just three days after Professor Blake's murder, suggested

a possible connection—and foul play on the part of someone. If nothing else, the painting for which Dr. Cohen was searching

finally gave the scandal a name. From that point forward, the press referred to it as the Picasso Papers.

The French police immediately opened an investigation into Dr. Cohen's death, and their counterparts in Cornwall quietly lowered the number of killings attributed to the Chopper from six to five. The S?reté de Monaco, long tolerant of tax evasion and other financial shenanigans, issued a rare pledge of cooperation, but were soon investigating the first known case of homicide in the principality in living memory. The victim was Ian Harris, founding partner of the corrupt law firm that bore his name. He died on the pavement of the boulevard des Moulins after having been struck by no fewer than twelve bullets. Later it would be widely assumed, though never conclusively proven, that the two gunmen had been dispatched by an angry client.

The rest of the firm's lawyers wisely shredded their files and went into hiding. Konrad Weber returned to his native Zurich,

where he was soon the target of a wide-ranging investigation led by FINMA, the Swiss financial regulatory agency. He met his

end on the Bahnhofstrasse beneath the wheels of a Number 11 tram. A hand to the back, and down he went. No one saw the man

who pushed him.

***

Nearly lost in the daily deluge of disclosures were the Graveses. Hugh tried briefly to cling to his seat in the Commons but

was told he faced expulsion if he did not resign. He did so with a written statement, thus avoiding a nasty confrontation

with the Whitehall press corps. In a special by-election held just six weeks later, the Tories surrendered a seat they had

held for more than a generation. Still, the margin of Labour's victory was sufficiently small that the political team at Party

Headquarters held out hope that the next election would result in a respectable trouncing rather than a complete and utter

annihilation.

Lucinda fared little better. A return to Lambeth Wealth Management was out of the question, for Lambeth was forced to close its doors after being abandoned by its clients. She sought work at other investment houses—several of which had taken part in the plot to maneuver her husband into Downing Street—but not even the wealth management division of Deutsche Bank would touch her. Determined to salvage her reputation, she hired London's top crisis-management firm, only to be advised that it would be best if she and her husband disappeared. Her high-priced criminal lawyers thought it a fine idea.

They sold off the grand houses in Holland Park and Surrey—to anonymous shell companies, of course—and vanished so quickly

that it was almost possible to imagine they had never existed in the first place. Where they went was anyone's guess. There

were purported sightings in the usual places, Mustique and Fiji and the like, but no documentary evidence to support the claims.

A wholly unsubstantiated theory circulated that Lucinda had met with the same fate as Ian Harris and Konrad Weber. Another

rumor implied that she had stashed more than a billion pounds in the Cayman Islands. This one had a ring of truth, as the

Telegraph was soon to discover. The actual amount of Lucinda's offshore holdings was closer to a half billion pounds, all of it held

by shell companies.

When at last the Graveses resurfaced, it was in Malta, a favorite port of call for scoundrels and tax evaders the world over.

The prime minister, a client of Harris Weber & Company, issued the couple Maltese passports in record time and was a frequent

visitor to their luxurious seaside villa. Lucinda found work as a rainmaker with one of Malta's most corrupt banks. Hugh,

having nothing better to do, began work on a novel, a steamy thriller about a British politician who seeks power at any cost

and loses his soul. A once fabled British publishing house purchased the work sight unseen for four million pounds.

The reinvention of Hugh Graves as a literary figure—not to mention the appalling size of his advance—ignited a firestorm of criticism in the British press. The minor scandal was soon overshadowed, however, by the brutal murder of a twenty-three-year-old woman from the Cornish village of Leedstown, by all appearances the Chopper's latest victim. With the Metropolitan Police still in control of the investigation, Detective Sergeant Timothy Peel, having returned to duty after a brief leave of absence, was free to pursue a private matter. Someone, it seemed, had stolen his sailboat.