Benedict Ormsby

Benedict Ormsby is 49 and represents one of the most expensive and most talked-about artists in the world, which he considers both an honor and a job. Born in Surrey, the son of a banker and an amateur painter, he studied art history at Cambridge and spent fifteen years at London auctions before founding his own gallery. He speaks of art like someone selling it, and of money like someone annoyed to hear the word.

He lives in a bright apartment in Notting Hill, high-ceilinged, with white sofas, a wall of nothing but catalog books and a single small work, in black ink on white, which he hung in the hallway and swears is the best he has ever seen. He has an Italian coffee pot he never uses and a stereo that almost always plays opera. He sleeps late, wakes late and answers the gallery's messages before opening his eyes.

He is tall and slender, with a fine, clean-shaven face, graying brown hair combed back. He wears round tortoiseshell glasses, a beige linen suit always a little rumpled with a handkerchief in the pocket and a light shirt open at the collar. His suede shoes are his pride, and he shows them in passing, stretching out a foot, like someone presenting evidence. He is polished, affected and visibly irritated when money comes up.

About the piece, he explains it was fixed to the floor in a hidden way, as the insurance required, which can only be undone with the proper tool. It was the plumber, Tanfield, who assembled and connected everything on Wednesday. He received the security report at 7: the gate camera shows the truck at 4:52 and the head of security only called the police at 5:01, nine minutes, with a 4.8 million work in the hall.

Benedict knows the representative of the work, the man who raised the insurance, is the one asked how much he gains from the loss. When the detective says he made off with the piece to collect the insurance, he stretches out his suede shoe and then withdraws it, and answers that the gallery lost the artist's most famous work and that the detective treats him like a fairground thief. The indignation of someone who lost an heirloom, or a politeness that can't bear a direct question: the foot that withdraws does too.