And a wild, blue-sky thought was going through his mind right now. Stuart Piper’s name had showed up on the crashed Audi linked to Charlie Porteous’s death. Potting and Wilde had interviewed Piper — a significant art collector — in his grand country house, filled with fine paintings. Archie Goff was a career country house burglar. His body had been deposited outside the house of a renowned art forger. Stuart Piper, despite having no criminal record, was of interest to Interpol, and a major player in the art world. Charlie Porteous had a seemingly high-value painting in his possession at the time of his murder. The Kiplings had had an attempted burglary shortly after appearing on the Antiques Roadshow television programme with a potentially high-value painting. The burglary had happened very shortly after Archie Goff had been released on bail from prison.
How to make the connection, if there was one...
Follow the money? That had in recent times become one of the tenets of major crime investigations. He turned to Denyer. ‘Emily, make sure your financial profiling confirms who might have put up the bail money.’
Luke Stanstead raised his arm. ‘Boss, intel on Goff is that he had a new love in his life, a lady called Isabella Reyzebal. What we know about her is that she is a lab technician with a hobby of belly dancing.’
‘Woo-hooo!’ exclaimed Potting. ‘If I had a lady like that in my life, I’d do anything to find fifty K to get out and be with her!’
Smiling, and ignoring the reaction of his team, Grace replied, ‘You’re saying, Norman, if you were Goff, you’d sell your soul for that bail money?’
Potting frowned. ‘Meaning what, chief?’
‘Meaning just that, Norman,’ Grace replied. ‘Perhaps Goff, desperate to be with his girlfriend, agreed a deal with one of his network of dodgy pals in exchange for a favour. A pretty big favour.’
Potting nodded. ‘I think I’m on your bus, chief.’
‘Hope you bought a ticket, Norman,’ Velvet Wilde said. ‘Or did you use your free Senior Citizen bus pass?’
Everyone laughed, including Grace. ‘What I’m positing is that someone wanted Archie Goff out of jail to do a job for them.’ He noticed that Jack Alexander was no longer listening but absorbed in reading something on his screen.
‘Sir.’ Jon Exton raised a hand. ‘Are you thinking Goff might have been tortured because he failed to deliver whatever the person who stood his bail wanted?’
‘Exactly that, Jon, that is my primary hypothesis right now. We need to find out who really provided the fifty thousand pounds, and establish Goff’s movements from his release from Lewes Prison to the time of his death. I’d like you and Polly to see what you can establish from the prison’s exterior CCTV — did someone pick him up on his release, on the morning of 24 October, or did he take a bus or train back to Brighton that morning? If someone picked him up in a car, then you might be able to track its movements through the ANPR cameras and Brighton Police’s own network of CCTV cameras — we know they cover all the main routes in and out and through the city.’
‘Will do, boss,’ Exton said and looked at Sweeney, who nodded.
Grace glanced at his notes. ‘Our next briefing will be at 6 p.m. Does anyone want to add anything?’
Alexander raised his arm. ‘Something of interest has literally just come in, sir.’ He pointed at his laptop. ‘It’s from Andy Slark at the Collision Investigation Unit. It’s quite long so I’ll summarize. He’s managed to retrieve the data from the airbag sensors of the crashed Audi A6 that was discovered in Burgess Hill, on the morning of 16 October 2015. This is the vehicle that was linked to the murder of Charlie Porteous.’
Grace felt a surge of excitement. ‘Yes, Jack.’
Alexander continued. ‘Slark reports that the airbag sensors fitted to this vehicle — and many other of the more modern upmarket models — measure and record the weight and height of the driver and front-seat passenger with a fair degree of precision, in order to gauge the force of deployment in the event of a collision.’
‘Anything else?’ Grace asked.
‘Slark says that the height and weight of both the driver and passenger were similar.’
After a brief silence, Norman Potting quizzed, ‘How similar, Jack? Do you know how accurately the sensors measured? After all, we knew they were about the same height already.’
‘He said that within the sensor computer parameters, the driver was six foot one and the passenger six foot. Both weighing approximately one hundred and ten kilograms.’
Potting turned to Velvet Wilde. ‘Stuart Piper’s house? His hired muscle, they fit that description, right?’
‘So do a lot of people, Norman,’ she replied.
Potting raised a finger in the air. ‘Ah, but the muscle guys are identical twins.’
‘Piper’s bodyguards?’ Grace quizzed sharply.
‘Yes, chief,’ Potting said.
‘It wouldn’t necessarily rule them out, Norman. Identical twins aren’t always exactly the same height, and we’re talking just one inch difference here.’
Potting conceded with a reluctant nod.
Grace carried on. ‘First Piper pops up on the crashed Audi’s phone list. Which indicates that Porteous’s killer knew him. He appears to be a major player in the art world, and significantly, although he has no criminal record, he is on an Interpol watch list. You don’t make that list without good reason.’
Potting raised his hand. ‘I have spoken over the weekend to a helpful American detective at Interpol, sir,’ he said. ‘To see if we can get any updates on what we already know, and there is something of possible significance. They believe Piper and a former US national who works for him, by the name of Robert Kilgore — now domiciled in the UK — have an inside track on a substantial number of high-value art works that were looted by the Nazis during the Second World War and ended up in Brazil, Chile and Argentina. They don’t have enough for an arrest warrant for either man at this stage, but they have a financial investigation team looking into recent payments that may be linked to them.’
‘Do we know the whereabouts of this Robert Kilgore?’ Grace asked.
‘I’m working on it — he owns a property, an apartment on the seafront in Kemp Town. He also has properties in Savannah, Georgia, and in Buenos Aires, Argentina.’
Grace frowned at the latter. ‘A bolthole?’
‘Could well be, chief. But it could simply be for business purposes — several countries on the South American continent have historically provided a safe haven for looted art.’
‘As well as for looters themselves,’ Grace added. ‘Yes, it would make sense for someone like him to have some kind of a base there. Good work, Norman. If he’s here in England at the moment, we need to talk to him.’ Grace turned to Wilde and Potting. ‘Remind us, what impression did you get from Stuart Piper when you went to his house recently?’
‘Apart from the bum’s rush from him and his heavies, chief?’ Potting said, only partly in jest.
‘I think we got that he’s not the nicest or most helpful man,’ Wilde added. ‘He was very reticent about Porteous, claiming he’d never had dealings with him. Almost pretending he’d never heard of him. Norman and I discussed that afterwards and it seemed strange. Piper is clearly a very rich man, with vast amounts of period art in his house. Porteous was a major London art dealer. It struck us as unlikely that they wouldn’t have known each other.’