The soft Southern voice said, ‘This is good, boss. This is very good. You anywhere near a television?’
Kilgore knew full well his boss had a television in just about every room in the house, including all the toilets.
‘Why?’
‘Antiques Roadshow.’
‘Why would I want to watch that stupid show? A load of dumb fucking morons thinking they’ve found something of value in their attics or their dead granny’s handbag?’
Calm as ever, Robert Kilgore said, ‘I think you ought to take a look at tonight’s episode. Take a look right away, check it out on catch-up. Then call me back.’
‘What is this? Don’t play fucking games with me, Bobby. What is it?’
‘A solution to your mathematical puzzle. Remember the one you set me, sir? A few weeks back? Some kind of riddle, sir.’
‘I don’t do riddles.’
‘Beg pardon, but back in September you set me a riddle. Y’asked me if I knew the difference between five million and fifty million pounds? Remember?’
‘I did?’
‘The three Fragonards on your wall. Spring, Autumn, Winter. Anything coming back now?’
‘Uh huh. Kind of.’
‘Watch tonight’s Antiques Roadshow on catch-up or iPlayer or whatever. Then call me back, doesn’t matter what time. I don’t reckon I’ll be sleeping much and nor will you.’
‘I always sleep well.’
‘Watch that show and you won’t. Trust me. I’m guessing you’re gonna be awake all night.’
39
Monday, 21 October
Roy Grace had been woken around 2 a.m. by the pitiful squealing outside, somewhere close, of a creature being taken by a fox, and furious barking from Humphrey. Worried that a fox might somehow have got into their now well-protected chicken coop, he’d pulled on his dressing gown and slippers and gone outside, with Humphrey in tow, to check. But all was quiet in the coop. Probably an unfortunate rabbit.
Just as he’d drifted back into sleep, Noah had begun wailing from a nightmare. Cleo had gone to comfort him and carried him back into bed with them. From then on, Roy had lain awake pretty much all night, or so it now felt as he looked at the smart metal tracker ring Cleo had bought him for his last birthday to monitor his steps, sleep and all kinds of other metrics.
Just gone 5.45 a.m. and he was wide, wide awake. Too bloody awake. Cleo was sound asleep, as was Noah. Right now, with her advanced pregnancy, her obstetrician had advised her to get as much sleep as possible.
He closed his eyes and tried to go back to sleep. Then, after what seemed like a good half hour, but was only seven minutes according to his watch, he gave up, slipped as quietly as possible out of bed, to not disturb Cleo and their son, and walked through into the bathroom, closing the door quietly behind him. Then he checked his sleep on the app on his phone.
Total sleep: 4.10
Efficiency: 50 %
Restfulness: Pay attention
REM sleep: 24 minutes
Deep sleep: 32 mins
Shit. Thanks for that, Antiques Roadshow! A big day of meetings ahead to get through and on a fraction of the sleep he needed. He decided to deal with it the way he always handled stress, which was to go out for a run with Humphrey.
Half an hour later, on top of the Downs in the breaking dawn, maintaining a steady pace, with a happy dog bounding along near him, Grace was feeling a lot better, and thinking through what he had seen last night. The couple on the Antiques Roadshow, with the painting that the expert, Oliver Desouta, had become really animated about. He hadn’t gone as far as declaring it to be an original, but his message to the couple was very clear. That it might be.
They’d come over as pretty ordinary folk, telling Desouta how they’d bought a painting in a car boot sale, and then discovered there was another painting beneath. Grace didn’t think they were lying — why would they have been? If they were crooks, they’d never have gone public on that show, would they?
Oliver Desouta had told the couple that the painting could well be one of the four long-lost paintings Jean-Honoré Fragonard had created of the four seasons, a decade before the French Revolution and the Terror that followed under the regime of the maniac Robespierre.
Charlie Porteous had been murdered after openly touting around a painting he believed might be another in the same series by Fragonard, Spring.
The Antiques Roadshow was one of the most popular programmes on television, watched by many millions. Might whoever had murdered Charlie Porteous have seen it? And if not, might someone close to the killer have?
He needed to find that couple and interview them. Both to establish how they had come by this painting — if they’d told the truth on the show — and even more importantly, if the painting was genuine, how to safeguard them? He would get on it first thing tomorrow.
As he arrived back home, letting himself and Humphrey in through the garden gate, their newly acquired arrogant cockerel, whom Cleo had nicknamed Billy Big Balls, crowed loudly.
‘Go for it, Billy!’ Grace said. ‘But don’t take me on, because I’m a far meaner son-of-a-bitch than you’ll ever be!’
40
Monday, 21 October
After dropping Tom off at his friend’s to walk to school, at 8.15 a.m., Freya groaned in frustration at the roadworks that were causing a long back-up of traffic to the route she would have taken to her own school, to avoid the worst of the rush hour traffic by cutting through the backroads of Patcham.
Instead she diverted, heading down Surrenden Crescent to the London Road, where she had to wait, increasingly impatiently, as the heavy commuter traffic into Brighton streamed past in stop-start fashion, with no one having the courtesy to give her a gap.
‘Come on!’ she shouted through the windscreen. ‘Let me out, it’s not going to delay your journey one bit!’
As she edged her little Fiat cautiously forward, staring challengingly at each oncoming driver, a vehicle appeared in her mirrors. A black Range Rover.
She froze.
Then she saw a bus had stopped, politely, for her. Waving a thank-you, she pulled out across the road, checked there was a good gap to her left, and turned right, accelerating away, hard. As did she, she saw the Range Rover had made the dash too and was right on her tail.
Who the hell are you?
Her nerves tightened. For some moments she debated whether to pull over, forcing it to pass her, and get its number as Harry had suggested. But they were now approaching the mini-roundabout at the bottom of Carden Avenue. A white van had already started across it, and she cheekily accelerated across its path, getting an angry blast of the horn from the vehicle, then headed on towards Patcham, white van man giving her several angry flashes and another blast of his horn before he turned off left.
The Range Rover immediately closed the gap between them, looming larger in her mirrors again. She tried to see who was driving it, but the interior was too dark. Someone in a cap was all she could make out. And she was now approaching a long, almost stationary queue of traffic to the big roundabout at the bottom of Mill Road. As she braked to a crawl, the Range Rover appeared to brake harder, as if deliberately creating a larger gap between them. She tried to read the number plate in her mirror, then, realizing everyone in front of her had stopped, stamped on the brake pedal, locking the wheels with a scream of tyres as she almost rear-ended a taxi ahead.