‘Are you OK, darling?’ she asked.
Tom lifted away the headphones and replied sleepily, ‘What’s — what?’
‘A window’s been broken. Did you hear anything, darling? Anyone downstairs?’ Stupid question she knew. He never heard anything.
Tom frowned. ‘I dunno. Like what? I didn’t break the window.’
‘Go back to sleep, darling,’ she said, backing out of the room, switching off the light and closing the door.
Harry was opening the spare room door.
‘Be careful!’ she urged. Speaking quietly, she said, ‘We need to call the police.’
‘Jinx might have broken it,’ he said.
‘And unlocked the door?’
‘Are you sure it was locked?’
She looked at him. ‘We double checked all the windows and doors.’ She lifted the landline phone from its cradle and dialled.
48
Sunday, 27 October
Twenty anxious minutes later, during which Harry had downed a double espresso while standing near the foot of the stairs still brandishing the carving knife, they heard a car pull up outside, and saw blue flashing lights through the glass panels at the top of the front door.
Two officers came into the house, a tall, burly man who introduced himself as PC Alldridge and a shorter police officer whose warrant card showed PC Dave Simmons. Freya explained they’d recently been in a broadcast of the Antiques Roadshow, at which they’d shown a painting that might possibly be of very high value.
‘Has that been taken?’ Simmons asked.
‘No.’
‘Is anything missing?’
‘We’ve not had a good look around, but if someone was going to break in that’s what they would most likely have been after.’ She led them through into the lounge and pointed the painting out to them.
Over the next fifteen minutes the two police officers made a thorough search of the house, opening all wardrobe and cupboard doors, as well as checking the loft, then the garden, the shed and the greenhouse.
Back inside the house, PC Alldridge said, ‘You have a CCTV camera at the property. Is it active?’
‘It is,’ Freya said. ‘But it’s pretty basic — we’d have to take the card out and look through it on a computer.’
Alldridge nodded. ‘That will take you a little time. I think we’ve established there isn’t any intruder present in your house now — are you both comfortable with that?’
‘We are, thank you, officers,’ Harry said, glancing at his wife for confirmation.
‘And you’ve not been able to establish that anything is missing?’
‘Not that we are able to tell so far,’ Freya said.
PC Simmons was looking puzzled. ‘It’s possible you might have surprised the intruder by arriving home unexpectedly.’
‘At a quarter to two in the morning?’ Freya replied sharply.
Simmons looked nonplussed. ‘Perhaps you should do a careful check on all your possessions to make sure nothing is missing — any watches, jewellery, anything like that.’
He gave them his card. ‘When you’ve checked, if you find any valuables have been taken, get in touch immediately.’
They thanked the officers and saw them out into the night.
49
Monday, 28 October
Daniel Hegarty’s dad, Len, had been a small-time career criminal, who had missed his true vocation. That had been a real talent for drawing wildlife in his spare time, and, spending over half of his adult life in and out of prison, he’d found himself with plenty of spare time on his hands. The art forger’s fondest childhood memories had been the times he’d gone fishing with his dad, sitting on the banks of the river Arun, keeping an eye on the bobbing float while his dad worked away on his easel.
His dad had committed burglaries when Daniel was growing up. From when Daniel was ten, Len Hegarty had taken him out with him, sending him climbing in through tiny windows to open up bigger ones or doors. But, Daniel rued, the old sod never gave him a cut of anything he had stolen. By the time he reached seventeen, his dad had graduated to bank and post-office robbery, and, two months after getting nicked for the last time, he’d dropped dead of an aneurism in prison, leaving Daniel to care for his mother and three younger siblings.
All he had inherited from the old bugger was an eye for the main chance, and a talent for drawing. His last school report had damned his consistent lack of attendance with the faint praise that if he could ever bother to apply himself, he could have a future as a graphic designer.
And that chance presented itself two years later, when Daniel had been on a fishing holiday in Ireland with a couple of mates and was returning on the car ferry from Dublin to England. Going through customs, he’d overheard two Border Control officers talking to each other, saying how hard it was to identify faked Irish vehicle logbooks.
Hegarty set up a studio in his little bedroom in their council house and created a lucrative business forging logbooks, making enough money over the next year to buy his mum a small house on the outskirts of the city, which he paid for in cash.
His bigger chance came in the form of the looming handover of Hong Kong, when the British Government were due to cede it to China on 1 July 1997, after 156 years of British rule. Many of its citizens were desperate to leave and flee to the United Kingdom and there was a rush for British passports. Hegarty realized there was a potential goldmine for him and set about exploiting it.
He began producing, initially in small batches, seemingly very accomplished passport forgeries — and soon had a queue of Chinese customers lined up. Within three months, charging £1,000 a pop, he’d made enough to buy a period terraced property in the centre of Brighton, close to the Clock Tower, where he set up a full-scale mini-factory, employing a printer, a binder and a salesman. He began literally minting money.
But unfortunately for Hegarty, his printer was lousy at spelling. On the inside front cover of every British passport is the wording, Her Britannic Majesty’s Secretary of State requests and requires in the Name of Her Majesty all those whom it may concern to allow the bearer to pass freely without let or hindrance, and to afford the bearer such assistance and protection as may be necessary.
The printer managed to make two spelling errors in his otherwise impeccable forgeries, by having just one ‘N’ in Britannic and replacing the ‘J’ in Majesty with a ‘G’. Despite the crass mistakes, it took over a year for it to come to the attention of the police, during which time Daniel Hegarty had made so much money he’d put down a £300,000 deposit on a small castle in Scotland, intending it as his bolthole should the balloon go up. But he never got the chance to flee. One morning, while the team in his handsome period house were flat-out printing, binding and dispatching passports, the front door was kicked open and five police officers burst into the premises, bringing his dream to an abrupt halt.
During the ensuing five years he served at Her Majesty’s Pleasure — or Magesty, as spelled on his passports — he learned to paint, and discovered he had a real talent for copying the works of almost any artist.
Immediately on his release from prison, Hegarty began another lucrative career, forging the works of big-name artists and selling them for big money on eBay, until, following complaints, eBay took him down. Undeterred, he continued making copies of the work of these artists but now signed them with his own distinctive interlinked DH. Rather than his business falling off, it grew even larger, his clientele, as befitted his celebrity status, including rock stars, DJs, actors, authors and even politicians. Galleries in both Brighton and London eagerly offered him permanent space to show his work.