The Rembrandt Secret by Alex Connor Page A

later Marshall was driving into Albemarle Street. He would pick up his father and together they would leave for Thurstons. The evening had come into play, shaking out the tourists and the collectors alike, pushing the buyers along Piccadilly, into the lure of yellow taxi lights or the white belly of the underground.
    Finally parking across from the Zeigler Gallery, Marshall looked at his father’s achievement. The window was dressed with a Pieter de Hoogh painting, nothing more.
    Never overcrowd , Owen always said, let the painting breathe …
    Slowly Marshall’s gaze moved up to the flat above. He couldn’t imagine the building belonging to anyone else and felt a real dread of being banned from his childhood home. Memories, filled with the dust of poignancy, smoked around him. The sounds of the gallery porters, Gordon Hendrix and Lester Fox, reorganising the picture rails and hanging space, Owen cutting out newspaper shapes of the paintings, which he would hold up against the wall to judge where the originals would look best. Then he would start again, Lester muttering into his moustache, the morose Gordon dying for a cigarette in the backyard, but both men waiting for their employer’s next instructions, knowing that in a couple of weeks it would have to be done all over again.
    Down would come the paintings. Down from the walls, down into the cellar’s belly. Dry down there, because heating had been put in. But unwelcoming nevertheless. The walls had been shelved for picture storage, and at the very back of the cellar was a partition, behind which Lester and Gordon ate their lunch, or played cards if they had a quiet half hour. In other galleries around the area, there were other stalwarts. But in some there had been an influx of young gay men, eager to work in the glamour of the art world, amongst the nearby exclusive shops, with the possibility of meeting powerful, homosexual collectors. Some got lucky, managing to hook a gallery owner and a rapid promotion from lowly gallery assistant to in situ lover. Others were caught out in fellatio delicto in the cellars, storage nooks, and crannies of their subterranean world. And then, when the Aids epidemic struck, a number of the beautiful lily-white boys died …
    Marshall’s thoughts moved on, his gaze travelling to the window of his old bedroom. He had looked out of that window throughout his childhood, scrutinising the hassle of shoppers, seeing his father’s comings and goings. And at night Marshall would watch the lights make a Christmas card out of the London street. With no other children living nearby Marshall had been forced to make his own amusement. His one friend, Timothy Parker-Ross, was five years older than he, but as much an outcast. Poor Timothy, with his spectacular father, Butler Parker-Ross, one of the most admired – and respected – dealers in London. But he was too much for some, and definitely too much for Timothy. His father’s bullish arrogance was not intentionally unkind, but he terrified his son. For a while Butler had convinced himself that Timothy would be trained up for the business, but his son had no talent or feel for paintings. He wasn’t stupid, but thought in a slow, deliberate manner – a direct contrast to Butler’s adrenalin-spiked behaviour. If asked a question, Timothy would consider his answer for so long his father would lose interest and move on. When Timothy was in his teens, Butler was so anxious about his son’s shyness that he shipped him off to public school, where a reserved child is fair game for bullies. By the time Timothy was fourteen he had a stammer and had grown to six feet in height.
    When he came back in the holidays, Timothy had developed a stoop to disguise his height and a shock of fair hair which fell over his eyes, blocking the world out. By the time he was eighteen, he’d just managed to scrape through his exams and was used to keeping quiet and out of trouble. But once back in London there was