A Pistol Shot: A tale of delayed revenge

A pistol shot shatters the early morning silence of the Great Hall. A lead ball flies to its target. A miss? The man lowering his pistol has never been known to miss.
Decades later Bernard Mollison, master restorer, examines a hole in a family portrait – a hole where the heart is. Beside him stands Graham, a young Englishman. It is a long way from the veggie restaurant above Plymouth Arts Cinema where Graham met and fell in love with Mollison's son to the Mollison atelier in Prague where he finds himself drawn into an international world of forgery, duelling and adventure, exciting and glamorous for someone whose experience had been confined to books
How could he resist?
But Bernard Mollison had intimated that his son was under sentence of death: a fatal illness? a defect waiting to strike? An appalling situation but how is a man to extricate himself when all the magnets are pulling in one direction and how, if he headed back to his books, was he to discover his role in an unfolding tragedy?