Submit Your Evidence

Letter Fragment I

My dear friend,

I followed the paperwork first. One name appeared where it shouldn't have, then another. Different collections, different cities — but the same intermediary quietly attached to each transfer.

By the time I reached Rome, I had found three paintings with histories that looked perfect on paper and fell apart under closer inspection. This was no isolated substitution. Someone had built a system for making originals disappear without anyone realising they were gone.

Yesterday, I found the first trace of how they communicate. I am following it.

Letter Fragment II

Their messages are hidden inside ordinary things — photographs, advertisements, tickets, tourist leaflets. Nothing incriminating on its own. Only someone who knows where to look would ever notice.

I learned that yesterday. I also noticed the same man for the second time. By evening, an encrypted message had been slipped beneath my hotel-room door.

It contained no threat. It did not need one. They knew which room was mine.

The next courier is heading north. So am I.

Letter Fragment III

Monza finally showed me what I had been missing. The courier's ticket was counterfeit — almost flawless, except for two figures in the wrong order.

I had seen that exact mistake before, on one of the painting's documents. It wasn't carelessness. It was a signature.

The same people producing false paperwork are producing the copies themselves. They don't steal a painting and leave an empty wall behind. They replace it. The forgery stays where the original once hung, while the genuine work disappears unnoticed.

The trail continues to Florence. And I am no longer certain I am the only one following it.

Letter Fragment IV

I was followed through Florence. I changed direction, crossed the river and avoided the obvious streets until I reached the one person who could confirm what I needed to know.

He had worked on the original years ago. There is a mark beneath its surface that the copy does not have. The original is still in Italy.

Tomorrow night, it will be taken to a private masquerade in Venice.

I also know now that we have been looking in the wrong direction. The courier did not arrange this. Neither did the forger. Someone much closer to the painting did.

I cannot put the name in this letter. Not yet.

Final Letter Fragment

If you have recovered this, then you know where the trail ends. The courier did not arrange the theft. Neither did the forger.

The person behind it is the painting's owner. He commissioned the copy himself, replaced the original, and now intends to sell the genuine painting privately in Venice while everyone still believes it hangs safely in his collection.

The masquerade is the handover. I have hidden the final access code across the evidence I sent you.

Find it. If you reach the exchange before they do, there may still be time.

— Lucia