“What did they steal?”

“A rare coin collection. Apparently, they got a couple thousand quid for it.”

“Have you spoken to the occupant of the house on Tresawle Road in Falmouth?”

“He hasn’t returned my call.”

“I’m not surprised.” Gabriel took a pull at the beer, then shook his head slowly. “Didn’t they teach you anything at detective school, Timothy?”

62

Tresawle Road

“His name is Miles Lennox.”

“Sounds like a serial killer to me.”

“It’s a perfectly fine name.”

“For an axe murderer,” said Gabriel.

“Hatchet, Mr. Allon. The Chopper uses a hatchet.” Peel turned into Hillhead Road and streaked across darkened farmland toward Falmouth. “And I’m sure there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for why he didn’t call us after his coins were stolen.”

“There is,” said Gabriel. “He didn’t call you because he didn’t want you to discover his collection of bloody hatchets.”

“It makes a certain amount of sense, I have to admit. He also happens to fit our profile. Right age, right height and weight, right marital status and occupation.”

“Rare coin collector?”

“Lorry driver. He works for a beverage distributor.”

“Which gives him a perfect excuse to drive around Cornwall and Devon looking for young women to kill.”

“We’re not there yet.”

“We will be in about five minutes.”

“More like three,” said Peel as they reached the fringes of Falmouth. He worked his way eastward across town and rolled to a stop outside a terraced house in Tresawle Road. It was two floors in height, with a gray pebble dash exterior. A light burned behind the lace curtains of the sitting room window.

Peel switched off the engine. “I should probably call the boys from the Met. It’s their case, after all.”

“Probably,” agreed Gabriel. “But it will do wonders for your career if you make the collar yourself.”

“I need backup.”

“Not for a routine burglary inquiry. Besides, you have backup.”

“You?” Peel shook his head. “Not a chance, Mr. Allon.”

Gabriel offered him the Beretta. “At least take this.”

“Put that thing away.”

Gabriel returned the weapon to the small of his back. “Slap the cuffs on him while you’re introducing yourself. And whatever you do, don’t turn your back on him.”

Peel climbed out of the car and headed up the garden walk. The door opened to reveal the very face of death. Peel displayed his identification and after a moment’s hesitation was granted permission to enter the premises. Gabriel heard nothing to indicate there was a struggle within.

Finally, his phone rang. “You’d better be on your way, Mr. Allon. Things are about to get pretty busy around here.”

Gabriel slipped out of the car and set off along the darkened street. He heard the first sirens as he rounded the corner into Old Hill. Chiara called him a moment later.

“Mind telling me where you are?” she asked.

“Falmouth.”

“Any particular reason?”

“Change of plan. And tell that daughter of ours not to worry,” said Gabriel. “I took care of that little problem.”

Author’s Note

A Death in Cornwall is a work of entertainment and should be read as nothing more. The names, characters, places, and incidents portrayed in the story are the product of the author’s imagination or have been used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

There is indeed a civil parish called Gunwalloe on the western coast of the Lizard Peninsula, but it bears little resemblance to the place that appears in A Death in Cornwall or three previous Gabriel Allon novels. Sadly, there is no Cornish Bakery, no Corner Market, and no public house known as the Lamb and Flag. The rest of the remarkable region is, for the most part, accurately rendered. Deepest apologies to the Devon and Cornwall Police for the deplorable conduct of Detective Sergeant Timothy Peel, but I required a literary mechanism for inserting a prominent Venice-based art restorer into a British murder investigation.

The restorer in question could not possibly have left a Bentley in a car park in Garrick Street, because no such car park exists. There is indeed an art gallery on the northeast corner of Mason’s Yard, but it is owned by Patrick Matthiesen, one of the world’s most successful and respected Old Master art dealers. I am happy to report that the theft and recovery of Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear by Vincent van Gogh, one of the Courtauld Gallery’s most cherished possessions, took place only in the universe inhabited by Gabriel Allon and his associates. The iconic painting was stolen in a daring smash-and-grab robbery in the opening pages of The Rembrandt Affair. The perpetrators were never identified, but I suspect that one of them was none other than René Monjean.

The surrealist Picasso portrait depicted in A Death in Cornwall is fictitious, as is its provenance. Therefore, the painting could not have been sold at Christie’s in London for fifty-two million pounds. The venerable auction house was the target of a lawsuit filed in 2018 over the sale of Alfred Sisley’s First Day of Spring in Moret. Art dealer Alain Dreyfus paid $338,500 for the painting in 2008, only to discover that it had once belonged to the French Jewish collector Alfred Lindon. Before fleeing Paris in August 1940, Lindon placed his entire collection in a vault at the Chase Manhattan Bank on the rue Cambon. The paintings eventually fell into the hands of Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, a frequent visitor to Paris during the Occupation. The rapacious Nazi gave eighteen of Lindon’s paintings, including the Sisley landscape, to a corrupt art dealer in exchange for a single work by Titian.

The Musée du Louvre has in fact hired a renowned expert on the wartime French art market to purge its collection of looted paintings, but I’m confident she would have declined Gabriel’s request to create six fabricated provenances for six forgeries. There are indeed art galleries operating inside the Geneva Freeport, but none bear the name Galerie Edmond Ricard SA. I granted myself a certain amount of license regarding some of the Freeport’s more arcane rules and regulations, but on matters of importance I adhered to the truth. There are an estimated 1.2 million paintings stored in the Freeport, including more than a thousand works by Picasso. Nearly all of the Freeport’s clients rent their vaults using anonymous shell companies to conceal their identities. A collector can purchase a painting at auction in New York and avoid all taxation simply by shipping the work into the Freeport. If the collector elects to sell his painting within the Freeport, he will face no tax liability. Typically, the money changes hands offshore, anonymous shell company to anonymous shell company, making the transactions largely invisible to tax authorities and law enforcement. The paintings themselves are then moved to a new vault.

Many of the Freeport’s superrich customers undoubtedly reside in Monaco, regarded by many European governments as a haven for tax evaders and money launderers. Visitors to the tiny principality can dine at Le Louis XV or play English roulette at the famed Casino de Monte-Carlo, but they will search in vain for a law firm called Harris Weber & Company, for no such entity exists. There are countless firms like it, though, including Mossack Fonseca & Company, the now defunct offshore services provider at the center of the 2016 Panama Papers scandal.

Like my fictitious Harris Weber, Mossack Fonseca created and administered thousands of anonymous shell companies to help its clients avoid taxation and conceal their wealth and possessions. It did so, in many cases, at the behest of banks, more than five hundred in all. They included Credit Suisse, Société Générale, and HSBC, which, according to Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative journalist Jake Bernstein, purchased dormant shell companies from Mossack Fonseca in bulk. It was because of the banks’ previous association with the firm that I felt free to mention their names in the same breath as my fictitious Harris Weber. Furthermore, none of the three institutions are exactly pillars of the global financial community. US regulators fined HSBC a record $1.9 billion in 2012 for laundering more than $881 million for the Mexican and Colombian drug cartels. Société Générale, for its part, reached an $860 million settlement with the Justice Department in 2018 for bribing Libyan officials and manipulating the benchmark LIBOR interbank lending rate. And Credit Suisse? Well, what more needs to be said?

Five years after the Panama Papers scandal, the same group of reporters—the remarkable International Consortium of Investigative Journalists—released an even larger trove of documents they dubbed the Pandora Papers. Obtained from fourteen separate offshore providers, the paper trail revealed that 130 individuals regarded as billionaires by Forbes magazine had offshore accounts. So, too, did some 330 government officials and heads of state. They included Jordan’s King Abdullah, who used an extensive network of shell companies and bank accounts to secretly purchase $80 million worth of luxury real estate in Malibu and Georgetown—glittering additions to an international property portfolio that already included extensive holdings in the United Kingdom. Never mind that, according to a recent regional survey, His Majesty’s people are among the poorest in the Arab world.

The Pandora Papers also raised uncomfortable questions about the source of several large contributions made to Britain’s Conservative Party. It was not the first time the Tories’ fundraising had faced public scrutiny. As the New York Times reported in May 2022: “It is no secret that wealthy Russian industrialists have given heavily to the Conservative Party over the years.” Nor is it a secret that politicians from both of Britain’s two main parties welcomed the flood of tainted Russian money that poured into London after the fall of the Soviet Union. The bankers, wealth managers, lawyers, accountants, and estate agents welcomed the Russian money, too. And why wouldn’t they? Many grew enormously rich as a result.

Only recently has the British government acknowledged that it was unwise to open London’s door to organized criminals and robber barons from a corrupt petrostate ruled by the likes of Vladimir Putin. In a stunning report released in July 2020, the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament found that Russia had engaged in a prolonged and sophisticated campaign to undermine Britain’s democracy and corrode its institutions. The Kremlin’s weapon of choice, of course, was money. Among the report’s more alarming findings was that several members of the House of Lords were in business with pro-Kremlin Russian oligarchs. The names of the lords were redacted from the public version of the report, as were the names of the British politicians who had accepted contributions from Russian sources.

The report also used the unflattering word laundromat to refer to London’s financial services industry, long regarded as the money laundering capital of the world. Britain’s own National Crime Agency declared recently: “Although there are no exact figures there is a realistic possibility that the scale of money laundering impacting the UK annually is in the hundreds of billions of pounds.” So pervasive is the problem, concluded the NCA, that it “has the potential to threaten the UK’s national security, national prosperity and international reputation.” Financial journalist Nicholas Shaxson, in his 2018 book The Financial Curse, described the UK’s reputation as follows: “Britain is the country of first choice for every kleptocrat and dictator in the world.” But the so-called London Laundromat could not function, as Shaxson documents in painstaking detail, without the archipelago of tax havens that sprung up in the remnants of the British Empire—tiny island territories with limited financial controls that effectively “hoover up” the world’s dirty money. The Pandora Papers linked 956 offshore companies to government officials, but two-thirds of those entities were registered in the same offshore financial center: the British Virgin Islands.

In February 2022, days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Prime Minister Boris Johnson introduced legislation to impose transparency on Britain’s opaque property market, declaring, “There is no place for dirty money in the UK.” The journalist and corruption specialist Misha Glenny compared the proposed reforms to “shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted.” Six months later, with the London Laundromat still open for business, Johnson announced his resignation, bringing to a close a turbulent premiership plagued by personal and financial scandals too numerous to mention. His successor, Liz Truss, survived for all of forty-four days before being forced out of Downing Street in a revolt that one Cabinet minister likened to a coup d’état. In all, there have been five Conservative prime ministers since Labour surrendered power in May 2010. During the previous period of Tory dominance, which lasted a remarkable eighteen years, there were two: Margaret Thatcher and John Major.

During a testy confrontation with an executive from my fictitious Harris Weber & Company, Gabriel Allon dryly suggests that the firm should donate a billion pounds to British charitable organizations to atone for helping the wealthy avoid paying their fair share of taxes. Sadly, the figure, while substantial, would represent little more than a rounding error to the estimated total of uncollected taxes globally. The truth is, no one really knows how much money is flowing through the invisible offshore world—or how much money has been unethically or criminally diverted from national treasuries.

The growing disparity between rich and poor, however, is plain to see. The richest 1 percent now control more than half the world’s privately held wealth, which in 2024 was estimated to be $454.4 trillion. The World Bank estimates that 9.2 percent of Earth’s inhabitants, or 719 million human beings, live on just $2 a day, the measure of extreme poverty. In the United States, the world’s richest country, 11.6 percent of the population, or 38 million people, are poor. In the United Kingdom the figure is a shocking 20 percent.