Code 17.3: Code 17, #3

Praise for Code 17

‘A wild and witty thriller’

Set in London in the swinging sixties with a brief whizz over to New York and back, this is a thrilling, action-packed page-turner. Lady Laura (not her long name) is a glamorous international art dealer who can handle a gun, a sword and, in fact, any kind of weapon. She cons and is conned, shoots and is shot at as she fearlessly seeks the one who is targeting her. Ruthlessly, she pursues her enemy, wiping out anyone who gets in her way with a nod to Twiggy, Warhol and all the other icons of the time who hover in the background of her life among the rich and famous. There are many twists and turns as the reader gasps breathless unable to put the book down. At times you laugh out loud shouting yes, yes, yes as, once more Lady Laura extricates herself from a seemingly impossible situation. She’s unputdownable - like the book.

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‘Compelling, assured and darkly satisfying’

Now here’s a novel that churns with contradictions. Compelling, assured and darkly satisfying, Code 17 thrills and chills. Its deeply dislikeable characters have exquisitely addictive redeeming factors that keep us coming back for more. The plot shocks and amazes on every page. Its unexpected format and terrifying subject matter force the reader to ask questions of himself: wouldn’t we behave similarly, in such situations, if only we could get away with it? Code 17 is set primarily in Swinging-Sixties London, plunders the intriguing worlds of fine art and forgery, aristocracy and auction houses, and drops names. Twiggy, John and Yoko, Warhol and the Velvet Underground are all here. The sex is zipless, the crime ruthless, and it’s every man, woman and murderer for himself. Kill or be killed. Read this novel, but notez bien: it will turn your stomach even as it curdles your heart. It’s the size of it.

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‘Smashing!!!’

I’m a child of the 60s and fondly remember all the great TV series of the time: The Man from Uncle, The Girl from Uncle (perhaps a little more fondly. . . swoon), Department S, The Persuaders and of course The Avengers. Beautiful girls running around in catsuits shooting people and karate chopping people is all okay by me. This book has it all . . . Go-Go boots, Twiggy, Venus in Furs, Jensen FFs . . . smashing!!!

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‘Had me gripped’

This book had me gripped. The characters transported me back to the swinging sixties. It had me reading ‘just one more chapter’ before I could put it down and I didn't want it to end! Can't wait for the sequel.

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‘Vitesse .... Inspired choice .... Soundtrack please!’

Fast moving 60s thrill ... our heroine drives a Triumph Vitesse (oh so cool, well-chosen Mr Booth) ... I believe there's a soundtrack that goes with this. Great fun, brilliant touch points throughout, one almost wants to be transported back for a few days.

Author’s Note

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Code 17 was originally a musical idea. Ten years ago I made an album that paid homage to the theme music of 1960s British TV spy series like The Man from UNCLE, The Baron and Department S, and to films like Modesty Blaise and The Ipcress File. The music on the album was from an imaginary TV series called Code 17, featuring the glamorous art dealer/spy Lady Laura Summers. She was imagined as a cross between Sharron Macready of The Champions, Emma Peel of The Avengers and Lady Penelope Creighton-Ward of Thunderbirds, though none of these women was the lead character.

Ten years later I thought I could make a novel out of Code 17 and Lady Laura, set in the Swinging London of 1967. I kept to the format of a twelve-episode TV series and tried to imagine each chapter as a fast-moving thirty minute episode, split into short scenes. For Series Two and Three of Code 17 the episodes have been expanded to an hour but I hope they are just as fast-paced and thrilling.

The music is at mixcloud.com/planckmusic/code-17

Francis Booth

EPISODE 1 – JULY 1968

one

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‘I want to bring them down, Laura. All of them.’

Hell hath no fury like a woman spurned. Yes, I know most people say a woman scorned but that makes no sense. Muffie has been spurned. Badly. She recently married a handsome, charming conman who immediately betrayed her with an old university chum of ours, though Venezia wasn’t much of a chum then and she certainly isn’t one now.

‘You’re not the only one who can be the Wrath of God, Laura.’

I’ve been telling Muffie about how my father was killed. My father was briefly Muffie’s first husband – they were married last year, just before Daddy was shot on the Glorious Twelfth on the grouse moor of an aristocratic friend.

Again, not much of a friend now.

All of the shooting party were members of the shadowy Code 17, which turns out to be a very nasty bunch of old, upper-class neo-fascists. I have been, as Muffie says, acting as the Wrath of God in helping to bring down their European network. Muffie doesn’t know all the gory details but she knows I have become the implacable avenger.

‘I’ve got an idea, Laura.’

Muffie has been staying with me in the flat above my art gallery, Summers Chelsea on the Kings Road, in the heart of what only American tourists still call Swinging London. My flat is very small and it seems a great deal smaller with Muffie and six-month-old baby Cosmo sleeping in my bed while I sleep on the sofa. Cosmo is my half-brother, and despite his age he has the title Earl Summers, which he inherited from his and my late father. Muffie was herself Countess Summers until she remarried, less than a month ago.

Muffie unwisely accepted an invitation from the said university chum to spend the honeymoon at her villa on the Côte d’Azur. Venezia has always been a wicked, ruthless temptress; I am one of the unfortunate people to have been seduced by her, as you may remember. Muffie soon caught her handsome husband in flagrante with the evil seductress, left him in her clutches and moved in with me. I hope it’s going to be temporary; I love Muffie more than any sister and we have been best friends since we started at Girton together but six-month-old babies in a very confined space are more than I can bear, even for her sake.

‘I want us to go back to our old business, Laura.’

Muffie is possibly the greatest living forger of Old Master and modern paintings. While we were still at Cambridge we started selling fakes to greedy, wealthy, amoral aristocrats – friends and clients of my investment-manager father. They didn’t ask too many questions when they smelled a profit, even if that profit was not entirely above board and honest; as Daddy himself said, you can’t con an honest man. Daddy conned far more people than Muffie and me and he conned them out of far more money; Muffie and I got cold feet and got out of the forgery business while he was being investigated for massive financial irregularities. It turned out that Daddy had been lying to his clients on an epic scale for many years – not to mention to his daughter and to his innocent new wife Muffie.

Since then Muffie has been carrying on a perfectly legitimate if rather dull business: copying works of art that have been hanging in dusty, musty and fusty stately homes for generations. The families then hang the copies on their walls while I handle the sales of the originals – all perfectly legal and above board. But the Muffie who has emerged from two humiliating marriages to two plausible conmen in less than a year is a different Muffie to the mild-mannered mouse I used to know. She is now fierce and feisty, with steel in her eyes and iron in her soul.

Frankly, I preferred the old Muffie – the new one scares me. But at least I’m thankful she hasn’t been crushed by her awful experiences, as a lesser woman would have been.

‘We can use my house, my new house, as the base of operations.’

I don’t know if you remember Ellin, the elder sister of my late and very much lamented Swedish assistant Xanthe? Ellin lives in a big house in Holland Park with her two young children and their nanny. Until recently she also had her English husband living  there. But Ellin threw him out on his ear after she discovered his infidelities – multiple in his case. Muffie and Ellin have kept in touch ever since Ellin’s nanny briefly looked after baby Cosmo when he was kidnapped by an evil neo-fascist. The two spurned young mothers and their children have since all become fast friends.

Ellin now wants to sell the husband-free house and move back to Sweden with her children. The Holland Park house is owned by her wealthy diplomat father, so the errant husband will be left with nothing; there is at least some justice in the world, however small. Muffie meanwhile wants to sell the fine, if modest Queen Anne house she has been living in; it’s in the village that used to be part of my father’s estate until the government seized it to pay his victims. Muffie was married twice in the village church and humiliated by both husbands; she understandably feels that she can’t go back there. And in any case the new, spurned, Wrath of God Muffie would find village life too boring.

So Muffie has put her house up for sale and agreed to buy Ellin’s house; Ellin has agreed to let Muffie move in straight away. Ellin’s nanny is English and doesn’t want to move to Sweden so she is staying in situ and becoming nanny to Cosmo. A rather neat result all round.

Having encouraged me only a year ago to get into the contemporary art business and open my own gallery, Muffie is now trying to persuade me to give it up and go back to dealing in Old Masters – faked Old Masters as well as some genuine ones. It is very tempting. Unlike the discreet, gentlemanly – or in my case ladylike – world of Old Masters, the world of contemporary art dealing is brutal and competitive; contemporary dealers are blown around like feathers on the breath of fashion. And in the last couple of years the clientele for contemporary art has become almost entirely composed of rock stars, celebrity photographers, designers, and assorted nouveaux riches. They have no appreciation of quality and historic importance; they only care about passing fads, the ability to brag to their friends about having bought the newest, latest and most challenging thing. Their world seems to consist solely of parties, drugs and free sex.

At the ripe old age of twenty-four, this is not the world for me. All the clubs and discotheques on the Kings Road are open until around 4 AM, sometimes later; I’m usually tucked up in bed by midnight. I have never taken drugs and I only drink socially and in moderation. As for sex, free or otherwise: well, if you have been following my exploits so far you will know my views on that.

‘We could use the new studio for viewings – it’s totally secure.’

Muffie’s new house has an orangery attached to the rear. Orangery is perhaps too grand a term for it, it’s just really a glorified conservatory, but it will make a perfect studio. Muffie’s plan is to board up the glass sides but leave the glass roof. That way she will have both wall space and natural light. Even if anyone got in to the private walled garden that surrounds it they still wouldn’t be able to see in to the studio itself. There is a very sturdy wooden door at the end of the garden that could be well secured; it opens out onto a private, unmade road at the back of the house – just a track really but wide enough to get our Bedford van down to bring paintings in and out without being seen.

I am definitely tempted; after all I’ve been through recently, contemporary art seems a bit tame. Even the fashion world leaves me cold these days: the maxi dresses and psychedelic patterns that designers like my neighbours Ossie Clark and Celia Birtwell have made all the rage are really not for me. I’m still loyal to the mini-dresses of Jean Varon, the geometrics of Foale & Tuffin and the space-age whites and chromes of André Courrèges. The idea of withdrawing from both the fashion and contemporary art worlds and selling Old Masters – even if they are fakes they will be world class ones – to discerning, aristocratic clients again is quite exciting.

You may remember that Mickey – who is technically Muffie’s half-brother-in-law – had a business that involved stealing paintings from museums, replacing them with fakes and selling the originals to wealthy, secretive, unscrupulous businessmen. Except that Mickey was a conman not a thief and what the buyer actually got was the fake – Mickey never did steal the originals. This of course involves finding these wealthy, secretive, unscrupulous buyers, people who don’t know enough about art to know the difference. But this was Mickey’s specialty, with the help of his brother Sebastian, Muffie’s errant husband, who has ‘relationships’ with the kind of wealthy older homosexual men who are Mickey’s ideal client, or ‘mark’ as we say in the con trade.

But in our proposed new business, Muffie wants us to do the actual stealing as well as the actual forging. We have of course stolen a world-class Titian, now destined for the National Gallery, though that did not go at all according to plan. But a lot of water has flowed under both our bridges since then; perhaps we would do a better job next time, with no one dying and neither of us going to prison.

Perhaps.

‘I know where to start, Laura.’

‘Yes, Muffie?’

‘Matisse.’

‘Matisse?’

‘Matisse.’

two

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‘Matisse?’

‘Laura, stop being a parrot.’

‘Sorry, Muffie.’

‘The Weasel and I went to the Matisse Museum in Nice a couple of times. He’s easy to do.’

Muffie has taken to calling her adulterous husband Sebastian ‘The Weasel’ and his seductress Venezia ‘The Snake’. Whether snakes do in fact eat weasels alive I couldn’t say, but it does seem an appropriate metaphor. After Venezia has tired of him, the plaything of an idle hour will no doubt be thrown out on his ear and may come crawling back to Muffie.

At which point, if Muffie doesn’t kill him herself I probably will.

On the other hand, Sebastian is a very convincing conman and Venezia is wealthy, stupid and completely immoral – the perfect mark. So perhaps he has already found a way to part her from her money. In which case, good luck to him and good riddance to her, even though the thought of my best friend’s unfaithful husband getting wealthy, even from such a deserving cause, rather sticks in the craw.

‘Easy to do?’

‘Laura, you have become Little Miss Echo. Stop it.’

‘Sorry . . . Oh, I said that already. Sorry . . . I . . .’

‘Laura, you seem rather distracted.’

I am of course; among other things by my mother – or whoever she is. You may remember that I spent my whole life believing my mother died giving birth to me, but now I’m not so sure. I met – or rather I was lured to – a woman in New York who said she was my mother and then gave me to a network of neo-Nazis who tried to kill me. She accused me of ruining her life and said she hated me. But was she actually my mother or just an impostor paid to play the role by my nemesis, the late head of MI6, who claimed to be my father? His evil and cunning knew no bounds – he would have done anything to disrupt my life. But I haven’t told Muffie anything about her and I don’t intend to until I know what’s going on.

‘Yes . . . No . . . I mean, carry on Muffie. I’m all yours. Matisse. Easy to do.’

‘In fact I’ve already done a couple.’

‘Done a couple?’

‘Laura! Concentrate.’

‘I am. Really. You’re saying you’ve done a couple of copies of paintings in the Matisse Museum in Nice?’

‘I have. And very good they are too.’

‘And you want me to sell them?’

‘No, Laura. I want you to sell the real ones.’

‘Which are in the Matisse Museum?’

‘They are now, Laura. But they’re about to be shipped to England.’

‘For the Hayward show?’

‘Exactly, Laura.’

The Hayward is a new gallery on the South Bank. It’s a great big ugly brutalist slab of concrete with no windows. But inside it’s a huge, dramatic space on multiple levels with great lighting. Along with some other London dealers I was offered a tour a couple of weeks ago, just before it was completely finished. It’s opening on the eleventh with a major Matisse exhibition – around a hundred and fifty works on loan from all over the world. I’ve got an invitation to the private view on the ninth.

‘But surely they are already in transit, Muffie.’

‘They are.’

‘So . . ?’

‘I happen to know that the driver is staying in Troyes tonight, on his way to London. We stayed there overnight when we went to the south of France, Laura. Remember?’

‘Of course. But, tonight?’

‘If we leave now we can get there in the middle of the night, while the driver is asleep.’

‘Tonight?’

‘Laura!’

‘Sorry . . . But . . ?’

‘Laura, don’t pretend to be stupid. You’re not stupid.’

‘Oh . . . Okay . . . I get you. We could steal the paintings from the van. While the driver is asleep in some hotel room.’

‘Exactly, Laura. It’s a small town. There are only a handful of auberges he could be staying in. If one of them has a van outside it, that will be the one; I’ll recognise the van when I see it. The lock should be easy enough to pick for international art thieves like us.’

‘But, Muffie, he’d be bound to check before he drives off. Even if he doesn’t they’ll find out as soon as the driver gets to the Hayward.’

‘Laura, don’t be so silly. We switch the paintings in the van for my copies. No one will ever know.’

‘Your copies? Where are they now?’

‘In the Bedford. Parked outside.’

‘What?’

‘The Weasel and I drove down to the Côte d’Azur in it, thinking we’d both be doing paintings and perhaps wanting to show them locally. I left France in a hurry but not such a hurry that I left the Matisses behind.’

‘Wow. Muffie . . . I . . .’

‘Thank you Laura.’

‘But . . .’

‘Laura, don’t just sit there with your mouth open. You might swallow a fly.’

I close my mouth.

I concentrate.

I am the old Lady Laura; ice maiden, ruthless warrior.

I do still have some qualms though.

‘The last time we stole a painting, someone died, Muffie.’

‘Well you’d better try not to kill anyone this time, Laura.’

‘I’ll try my best, Muffie. I promise I will.’

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Although I really don’t want anyone to get hurt, let alone killed this time I quickly load my standard arsenal into the Bedford before we leave: my competition rifle and antique épée under a blanket in the back, my Japanese kaiken in my right boot and my P38