Picture You Dead

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Charlie Porteous was fond of quoting Auden’s poem, about the hare that was happy in the morning because it was unable to read the hunter’s waking thoughts. But as he left home on this drizzling autumnal morning, he had no way of knowing that today, he was that hare. And that he wouldn’t be making it back to his bed tonight. Or ever.

To all who knew him, and indeed to any casual stranger who happened to glance at him, the good-humoured sixty-two-year-old, who would always stop to drop a banknote on a busker’s mat, appeared to be a man without a care in the world. With his confident gait, well-lunched face and stout frame, in his Savile Row three-piece chalk-striped suit, handmade shirt and salmon-pink-and-green-striped Garrick Club tie, he exuded the very image of old money and all the confidence that came with it.

But the much-liked — despite his mercurial temper — proprietor of the eponymously named Porteous Fine Arts Gallery was, right now, properly, badly and seriously in need of a big deal. Preferably cash. A lot of the stuff. The private bank which had once considered him an undoubted client, and for years had fawned over him, was now threatening foreclosure on a loan, on an amount which would bring his entire comfortable edifice crashing down.

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