Natalie and he loved each other. They were cool. Life was good. Actually sixty but feeling closer to thirty, his reputation in the art world was beyond his wildest dreams. Never ever had he imagined, way back in his earliest teens, that one day he’d achieve this kind of success and fame. He didn’t reckon anyone who’d known him had. Certainly not his art master at Patcham High School, who told him, drily, he had a talent for drawing and maybe he should consider a career using that skill.
Yeah, right, Mr Tosser Turner. You might have shared the same name as one of England’s greatest ever artists, but that was as far as your talent — and vision — stretched. One of his biggest regrets was that his teacher had died long before he’d become a household name in the art world.
As the opening credits of the crime drama rolled, along with sombre, moving, orchestral music, Hegarty sipped his wine distractedly, trying to figure out just what it was that was making him so uneasy. Was it that text?
He didn’t have to wait long.
His phone, which he’d switched to silent, to not be disturbed during the programme, was vibrating.
A number he did not recognize.
He was tempted to leave it to ring out, but then he wondered — a little irrationally — if it was going to be some information about the dead man outside his house, and made the decision, nodding apologetically to Natalie, to answer it.
He was right, in the wrong way.
64
Sunday, 3 November
‘I’m real sorry to be intruding on your cosy Sunday evening, Mr Hegarty,’ said the polite Southern US accent. ‘I know how sacrosanct Sunday evenings are to you English folk.’
Hegarty put down his wine glass, jumped up from the sofa and headed to the living room door.
‘Want me to pause it, darling?’ Natalie asked.
He shook his head and hurried out, closing the door behind him. ‘How can I help you, Mr Kilgore?’ he asked breezily.
‘Well, Mr Hegarty, I’m guessing you noticed some activity outside your home today?’
‘You guess right. It was a little hard not to notice. The whole of Saltdean noticed it, and all the local media.’ He didn’t like the tone of Kilgore’s voice.
‘They sure did, I saw it on the news. Very tragic.’ Kilgore hesitated. ‘If I’m still guessing right, you are wondering about the location. Did this gentleman drop dead on the street outside your house, did someone deposit his body there randomly, or was the location chosen specifically for a reason? Am I correct that’s what you might be wondering right now, Mr Hegarty?’
‘You seem to be talking in riddles, Mr Kilgore. I’m a little confused.’
‘Well, Mr Hegarty, I apologize for that,’ he said, his voice maintaining his courtly charm but with a steely undertow. ‘Confused is the last thing I want you to feel — and my boss, too. We would just like you to understand loud and clear the message we sent to you this morning.’
‘Like a message in a bottle?’ Hegarty said facetiously. ‘Like a dead man in a bottle?’
‘Mr Hegarty,’ Kilgore said, his tone now sounding more steely, ‘a short while ago I gave you photographs of an original Fragonard to copy, and you were paid good money for this job. When we swapped the pictures over at the Kiplings’ house, we discovered the painting on his wall was also a fake. You are the only forger good enough to have done that. So here’s what I think: Goff brought the original to you — and I want it. Here’s the deal. I will come by tomorrow morning, and you will hand me the original. Mess with us again, and the next time you head out to walk your dogs, it won’t be a stranger lying dead on the sidewalk. It will be your wife. Goodnight, Mr Hegarty. Enjoy your evening.’
‘Hey!’ Hegarty said. ‘I haven’t—’
But Kilgore had hung up.
Hegarty quickly hurried upstairs to look out at the pavement to see what was happening. But all looked quiet. The floodlights the CSIs had erected, along with the tent, had gone, and so had the crime scene tape. It was all back to normal, as if nothing had happened.
Which, ironically, now made him feel more vulnerable.
65
Sunday, 3 November
Arriving home shortly after 8 p.m., deep in thought, Roy Grace thanked their nanny, Kaitlynn, for coming in on a Sunday and staying so late, but asked her if she could hang on a little longer while he walked the dog. She told him that Noah was sound asleep and had been good as gold all day.
He pulled on his Barbour and a baseball cap, against the falling drizzle, grabbed his torch and took Humphrey out for a short walk. As he walked through the darkness, wondering about Archie Goff’s deposition site outside Hegarty’s house, he called the Force Control Room to get an operation name assigned to the enquiry into the man’s murder. He was given Operation Porcupine and the option to have another if it caused any issues.
He said it was fine.
Where Goff had been deposited could of course have been sheer coincidence. But his body could have been dumped in any number of woods or lay-bys, or outside any of the 430,000 houses and apartment buildings in and around the city of Brighton and Hove and its neighbouring towns and villages.
But it had been dumped on the doorstep of the city’s most famous art forger.
Grace wasn’t a gambling man, but he understood odds. One and a half million people lived in the county of Sussex — East and West. The odds of Goff ending up on Hegarty’s doorstep by sheer chance were astronomical.
He spent the next twenty minutes of his walk, guided by his torch beam, up through the fields behind their house, using the time to call the key members of the new team he was assembling, asking them to attend an 8.30 a.m. briefing on Op Porcupine in the morning.
Before going back inside, he entered the hen run, checked on the birds, which were all in their shed, asleep on their perches, and retrieved four eggs — two dark brown, his favourites, one white and one blue. As an added precaution against foxes, he shut their door with a breezy, ‘Goodnight, girls and Billy!’
Then he went into the kitchen, said goodbye to Kaitlynn and used the date stamp Bruno had bought to mark each egg, then laid them at the back of the tray on the work surface. His son was always in his thoughts. Feeling pensive, he turned his attention to preparing supper, Humphrey sitting on the floor at his feet, looking up expectantly.
‘Still hungry, are you, boy? You’ve already been fed by Kaitlynn, you gannet! Are you ever not hungry?’ Grace asked. Cleo had told him after her last visit to the vet that the vet had said he was five pounds overweight.
But as he removed the cheeses from the fridge, unwrapping them and putting them on a wooden board, Humphrey continued staring up at him, making him feel guilty. He cut a few slivers off and slipped them to the dog, who swallowed them like he was inhaling them, and then looked up at his master for more.
‘Last slice, boy, OK? And don’t tell your mistress.’ He kneeled down and patted the dog, hard. ‘Fatty boom-boom, are you? Or is it all muscle tone?’
Down on his haunches, Humphrey barked at him. One sharp bark. Grace cut him one more slice — a large one. As he did so he heard the front door opening. Quickly, he slipped it into the dog’s jaws and immediately heard Cleo’s rebuke.
‘Hey, you, I saw that!’
Turning towards her, he grinned. ‘I had to — he was fifteen seconds away from dialling the RSPCA to complain we were starving him to death.’
‘Yeah yeah, you big softy!’ She stood there, in mock disapproval, in a leather jacket over a turtleneck sweater and jeans. ‘Overweight dogs are much more likely to get arthritis — no more cheese treats, OK?’
‘Understood.’ He went across and kissed her. ‘Long day, eh, my darling.’