I was responsible for the physical act of reproducing the drawing. Francis, who had taken several photographs of the picture from all angles, was charged with finding someone who could make a copy of the frame, and with trying to develop a method of ageing the paper. He found an antique framers down in Parsons Green who would do specific commissions, and got the idea for treating the paper from a section on producing fake treasure maps on the Blue Peter website. We were all amazed by the effectiveness of his simple techniques, and he began to mass produce sheets for me to work on. Jessica was in charge of the logistics of the swap, the actual exchange and transport of the painting down to London. She assumed this responsibility by default, as it was the last thing that needed doing. Lisa was looking for a buyer for us, and figuring out a way of stashing the money. Her style when she filled us in on the week’s events was clipped and precise, and she reeled off enormous figures and sketched frightening characters with seeming indifference. Francis’s estimate of four million had begun to look reasonable, but required much haggling. Her calmness breathed confidence through us all. With her at our side, we felt as we walked the edges of the criminal underworld like a party of tourists in the company of a local guide. She understood the legalese of high finance and the slang of low money. She was the only person who could bridge the two worlds our intentions spanned.

Sometimes at these weekly meetings the discussion would move from the practical to the moral, and here Francis would come into his own. Lisa would lean back in her plastic chair and drift off into thought, indicating that the conversation had passed beyond her specialist field, and thus beyond her interest. Jessica and I would lean forwards in our chairs, seeking absolution. Francis would tell us about the vanity of art critics, the absurdity of the sums paid for original works, and the fact that if two objects looked exactly the same, and their aesthetic value was based entirely on how they looked, then there was no moral difference between a copy and the original. He would bang his fist on the scarred plastic tablecloth, which was patterned with fading strawberries and cigarette craters, and declare that the only difference lay in the financial value, in the painting as artefact rather than art. This laid bare the hypocrisy at the heart of the art world, which claimed to value genius but only really valued the price tag which genius attracted. For a while after Francis delivered one of his sermons, I would sip my sweet tea in contentment. The small voice of dissent that attended my ambitions would be silent, and I would feel that we were not only going to make a great deal of money, but were also engaged in a fight against an untruth.

There is only one truly negative association that I have with our preparations, for it was during this period, this lengthy process of haggling and negotiation, coupled with the scientific reproduction of the masterpiece, that my relationship with my own drawing began to sour. I became increasingly frustrated that I could not render Misha in my own way. The whole crime was a passionate enterprise, with many bouts of fear, doubt and joy. I wanted to express these things in my own way through the medium of my art, but Francis saw to it that all my energies were devoted towards the reproduction. I spent hours studying Picasso’s harlequin period, both in books and in galleries. I stood until my back became sore at the National. I read Gertrude Stein. I saturated myself so thoroughly with his work that it obliterated the nascent style that I had begun to develop at Cambridge, my own pencil strokes disappearing like fresh ink on a letter dropped into water. I traced the same lines again and again until they were deeply carved into my brain, and they had lost all meaning, like a phrase repeated to absurdity.