‘What’s going on – and where’s the painting?’
He stepped inside and closed the door behind him. The house smelled of grilled fish.
‘Where’s the painting?’ she asked. ‘Why didn’t you call me? I’ve been worried sick you were in an accident.’
‘I wanted to surprise you with my news, my love.’
She gave him a dubious look. ‘I called you four times and you didn’t answer.’
‘I’m sorry, but trust me!’
‘Where’s the painting?’ she asked again.
‘It’s safe, don’t worry!’ He kissed her again and strode through into the kitchen. Opening a cupboard door, he removed two tall glass flutes, set them down on the work surface and walked over to their massive fridge. He took out the bottle of Taittinger that had been chilling.
‘Harry,’ she said, both irritated and grinning at the same time. ‘Just bloody tell me?’
In reply he sat the bottle down beside the glasses, removing the foil and wire. Grabbing a clean dishcloth, he wrapped it around the top of the bottle and, after some silent exertion, popped the cork and poured. ‘How’s Tom?’
‘Up in his room. He had his dinner earlier. His sugars were getting low.’
He carried their glasses over to the kitchen table. Then he pulled up a chair and beckoned Freya to join him. ‘You need to sit down for this!’
Still looking hesitant, she sat.
He raised his glass. ‘Well, it looks like we might well be multimillionaires!’
‘Might be?’ she quizzed, almost reluctantly clinking his glass before sipping the wine.
‘I took the painting to the valuations department of Sotheby’s in Bond Street this morning, and the expert there got very excited. She studied the back of the painting almost as much as the front. I was with her for three hours, during which she showed it to several colleagues and made a number of phone calls and internet searches. She asked if I could leave it with her for a few days, to show to a gentleman she said was the number-one expert in Fragonards in the UK, but I didn’t want to do that.’
‘Why not?’
‘I’ll come to that. What she did say was that if, as she suspects, it’s an original Jean-Honoré Fragonard painting of Summer, then it would be worth upwards of five million pounds, and she cited two recent sales of Fragonards, one of which had fetched well in excess of that figure!’
‘We don’t need that kind of money, Harry.’
He frowned. ‘What do you mean, we don’t need it?’
‘We’re good as we are, aren’t we? We have everything we need. We have each other and we have Tom. We have a good life.’
Harry frowned again. ‘Would it be such a problem if we had a whole lot more money? It would be like winning the lottery, right?’
Freya shrugged. ‘I read a piece in a magazine about lottery winners – about how few were actually made happy by winning. Mostly, the vast sums destroyed their lives.’
‘Fine, we could give it away to charity – or some of it, anyway. We could keep enough so we never needed to worry about money – wouldn’t that be good? You find teaching stressful, more than ever these days you keep telling me, with all the regulations about how you can and cannot treat your kids. And I’m constantly stressed out by my customers, especially this bloody Steyning job. We could buy a place in Spain and give two fingers to the world.’
‘And just abandon Tom? And end up among a bunch of drunk ex-pats who spend their time going from one bar to the next?’
He reached out and touched her arm. ‘Hey, what is it, what’s bothering you?’
Freya took a long gulp of her champagne, almost draining her glass. Harry refilled it.
‘I’ve had a particularly stressful day. I’ve had to deal with an angry parent whose twelve-year-old boy has been playing up in school and bullying. Then, on top of that – and this may just all be in my mind – I think someone might be following me.’
‘What?’
‘Like I said, I may be imagining it but I don’t think so. When I drove Tom to Varndean this morning, I noticed a Range Rover in my mirrors. Then a dark Range Rover, I don’t know if it was the same one or not, seemed to follow me to Tom’s school this afternoon, and then back home – and drove straight on past when I turned into the driveway and up Mackie Crescent.’
Instantly concerned, Harry asked, ‘Did you get the registration?’
‘No, I was so shaken I didn’t think straight. Maybe it’s nothing, just my imagination. I’m not even sure the two cars were the same colour.’ She gave a thin smile. ‘I’m probably just being paranoid.’
Harry nodded, thinking. The episode of Antiques Roadshow hadn’t been broadcast. Only a handful of the public at the event would have seen the art expert’s assessment of the painting, and he could give no guarantee it was authentic. It was too soon for someone in London today who might have seen it to pass it to a contact, surely. And anyhow, for a while, the painting would not be in their house. ‘I think we’re both jittery at the moment. But if you see the car again try to get its number plate.’
‘I’ll try. So – so where’s the painting now?’
‘You know I was mentioning Daniel Hegarty, right?’
‘The forger.’
Harry beamed. ‘He is my plan!’
Freya frowned. ‘OK – do you want to explain exactly how?’
‘I think you’re going to like it,’ he said, reaching for the bottle and topping up both of their glasses. ‘A lot.’
34
Wednesday, 2 October
Roy Grace had been intending to spend more time, especially weekends, at home with Cleo and Noah. Family had never been more important than right now, especially with the imminent arrival of their new baby. He needed to try to rebalance his priorities and leave behind at work the effects of the everyday violence he dealt with, separating it from his life at home.
But Sussex, with its crime hotspots of Brighton and Hove, Crawley, Hastings and once sedate and genteel Worthing, was going through something of a violence epidemic. The growing scourge of knife crime, which he’d seen first-hand during his secondment to London’s Met Police, had started to permeate Sussex in particular, and there had recently been a spate of stabbings in the county, three of them fatal – and a new stabbing in the centre of Brighton and Hove last night, with the male teenage victim in hospital, in a critical condition.
In addition to the usual crimes which sometimes involved his team, the relatively new and iniquitous crime of illegal puppy farming was fast becoming a major problem. The same OCGs – Organized Crime Gangs – which had control over much of the drugs supply into Sussex, and its surrounding counties of Kent, Surrey and Hampshire, were now behind this new, lucrative, vile – and easy – trade.
Easy, because unlike the massive efforts that went into tackling drugs, at all levels, until very recently puppy farming was little known about, there were few resources thrown at it, and ludicrously light sentences, under the Animal Welfare Act, for anyone prosecuted. But fortunately this was starting to change, thanks to actions by the RSPCA inspectors bringing two successful prosecutions for illegal puppy-farming elsewhere in England on charges of conspiracy to commit fraud, which carried a much more punitive ten-year sentence.
Cruelty to animals of any kind was one of the few things that made Roy Grace really angry. The Surrey and Sussex Major Crime Team was now working closely with the RSPCA on monitoring the situation and steadily building files on suspects, but no arrests of any real significance had been made in Sussex – yet. But, with the blessing of the Chief Constable, herself a dog lover, he had delegated two detectives to liaise with the current Rural Crimes case officer, Sergeant Tom Carter, based in Midhurst, and work with him on monitoring the situation.