Forthcoming Atrocities

6. Chapter Heads

Part One – NFT

Martínez saw me safely into a cab and I promised to call if saw anything or anyone suspicious, in or out of my new hotel.

The last thing I wanted to do was think anymore about Raposo. Instead I called Jules and talked her through the afternoon's events trying to find a line between not scaring her silly but ensuring she took it seriously enough to take the precautions that local police would suggest.

A spoke to my step-daughters, Bex and Tabitha and we arranged that I'd head out from London tomorrow to take Jules for lunch and meet the girls from school and do something together.

Raposo hadn't finished with me though. The Times' freelance reporter, Declan Cooke, called. He wanted a date in the diary. He was efficient and needed to deliver the feature into his editor's hands while 'Billion Dollar Book' headlines were still reverberating in readers' heads. He had done some research already and knew what his story would cover.

I had the impression that Cooke and the features editor at the Times had largely written the piece together earlier that afternoon. My role was likely confined to offering up the dictated quotes in the gaps they had left in the story. There was no mention of Charlie Fox. It seems no-one else beyond the shooters, snatchers and intimidators had made the connection.

Cooke's parting shot was: 'Are you involved in this Raposo NFT thing at all?'

'No, I doubt I'd recognise an NFT if one propositioned me in the street. I live in the dry and dusty material world of books and documents, not the digital one.'

There was an unbelieving huff from the phone. 'But you know what a Non Fungible Token is, right?'

'Yes, a kind of digital certificate that confirms ownership of a piece of digital art. Knowing that, doesn't mean I approve of them, though.'

'Well you need to know the Raposo-sphere is going batshit crazy over an NFT announcement these last coupl'a weeks.' Cooke sounded put out.

'I've been out of the country,' I said. 'On the road for six weeks and I steer clear of the more rabid conspiracy fringe. They don't do her story any favours.'

'But the NFT stuff is all over your Twitter.'

'My publishers have a team that runs that,' I lied. 'Runs' was a euphemism for: moderated any tirades or swearwords – almost certainly by software – and did the minimum necessary so that people wouldn't assume I'd died. 'I'll definitely get on top of it before we meet up.'

'Please do, it will make a great side bar within the feature.'

Next morning, on the train from Liverpool Street, I ventured into my Twitter feed and found it busy like never before. For someone who'd promised to keep a low profile, my head was above the parapet and arrows were flying in my direction. There was a lot of speculation that I was behind the NFT and the current theory was that my silence on the matter, confirmed this.

I knew more about Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) than I'd admitted to the reporter. They were a way of conferring 'ownership' of digital content and particularly digital art. That market had exploded after Christie's auction house sold an NFT of an artwork for sixty-nine million dollars in spring 2021 and digital art wasn't ready for it.

Like most 'gold-rush' markets, NFTs attracted as many chancers, fraudsters and get-rich-quick wannabees as legitimate artists. Buy a traditional artwork and you take it away with you and stick it your lounge wall, but if you bought a digital artwork, nearly always through a crypto currency, you owned an entry on a digital ledger, protected by password.