Jack popped the cork from the brandy and poured four glasses.
Jack placed a large brandy in front of Penny and handed a second to Josh. ‘People don’t take drugs because they’re mysterious and exciting. They’re addicts who can’t stop by themselves and who need help. They’re the ones we do this for.’
Penny swirled her brandy around the bowl of the glass. She knew she’d said something naive and didn’t know how to backtrack. So she did the only thing she could: ‘This is Remy Martin, Josh. A favourite of my late husband’s. Do you like it?’
Josh smiled and raised his glass. ‘I think your husband was a connoisseur, Penny.’
Chapter 21
Jack woke to a silent house. Josh had made his way home around midnight, after making a friend for life in Penny. She adored his polite American way of calling her ‘ma’am’, and how he said words like ‘gosh’ and ‘heck’ instead of, as she put it, ‘the base words my son feels the need to use’. Josh had wholeheartedly agreed with her that cussing was a sign of weakness in a man, confident that Jack and Maggie wouldn’t snitch on him for effing and blinding in the lounge earlier that evening whilst they’d all been out of Penny’s earshot.
Maggie and Penny had taken Hannah to church. It wasn’t a weekly ritual for any of them but every now and then Penny felt the need to reaffirm her faith. With all of the recent wedding plans and with the big day getting closer, she was becoming acutely aware of the fact that she would not have her husband by her side. Maggie’s parents were lovely people, but there were two of them, while the wedding photos would show that Penny was a widow, which simply wasn’t fair. Not for her, but for Charlie. He should be by her side, crying with pride as their boy married the woman he loved.
Jack made a large mug of tea and checked his messages and emails. Andre Boogaard was now a name being traced by Laura in the UK and Anik in Amsterdam. Between them, they were checking births, deaths and marriages to track his family and personal history, and they were checking for any international movements over the past thirty or forty years. There was a possibility that Boogaard could be Adam Border’s father; this, in turn, could explain why Adam had been so hard to track down. Maybe he had been born and lived mainly abroad, regardless of what Hester thought? Maybe Boogaard was his birth name, explaining why they could find so little information for Adam Border prior to him attending Chelsea Art College. And why they couldn’t find him now. Jack called Anik.
‘Lieutenant Visser, Garritt, saved my arse yesterday ’cos he knew this guy, Sergeant Bosch, and he knew Andre Boogaard. Once we had the military link, it took ten seconds. But if I’d not had Garritt with me, I’d still be trawling through all the crap Laura sent my way.’ Anik was on a roll, so Jack didn’t interrupt. He just put his mobile on speaker and made himself some toast. ‘I’m still tracing his timeline from the photo, to now. The Chis — God, I hate telling people that someone’s dead — Garritt’s keeping in touch with them over the next day or two and he’ll help them sort travel to London. They definitely need interviewing again.’ Jack opened his mouth to ask if that was because they had information on Adam Border, but Anik spoke first. ‘Not because of Adam Border — they didn’t know much about him — but because of some stolen Rossetti painting they caught Jessica with.’ The toaster popped in Jack’s kitchen. ‘You only just having breakfast?’ Anik mocked. ‘I’ve been up and working for an hour.’
As Jack raced upstairs, he pointed out that Amsterdam was one hour ahead, so that made them quits. Anik mentioning a Rossetti painting had instantly jogged a memory in the back of Jack’s mind. Whilst Anik continued talking, Jack rushed into his office, grabbed Avril Jenkins’ red notebook from his jacket and headed back down into the kitchen.
‘The Chis are both artists,’ Anik continued, ‘so they knew this painting wasn’t a copy, as Jessica claimed, but the real deal. They told her to return it to the original owner. That’s why they thought I was in Amsterdam. They thought I was gonna tell them that I’d nicked their daughter.’ Anik’s mobile peeped in his ear. ‘Listen, Jack, my battery’s going. I’m about to send a full report of everything I just told you. I need to know how long Ridley might want to me to stay out here. Only my petty cash float has gone, so now I’m spending my own money and I can’t...’ Anik’s mobile died.
Before Jack settled down to work, and before he forgot, he sent Laura a quick text message:
Thx for printing that stuff last night. Saved my skin. Went down a storm!
Jack flicked through the red notebook until he found the list of items Avril had reported as stolen. Top of the list, which was ordered by value, was a Rossetti painting. Then a connected thought occurred to him. As he flicked through the notebook he was mentally kicking himself for not looking sooner... and there it was. On a torn page, close to the back of the notebook, was an art gallery address and a scribbled-out phone number for Jason Marks.
Currently, no one knew that Jack had Avril’s red notebook, and nor did he want them to. It was the one piece of evidence found at the house that seemed more relevant to the murder than the drugs, so Jack was eager to keep it away from Steve Lewis until he’d got everything he needed from it. And Ridley didn’t need to be bothered by unsubstantiated hunches. Jack would fill him in, in good time.
Jack wrote the name ‘Andre Boogaard’ on a piece of paper and slipped that inside the notebook. Then he went upstairs for a shower before his girls came home.
Jack cooked Sunday brunch for everyone, which consisted of sliced sausages, bacon and mushrooms being fried together. At the last minute, Jack broke eight eggs into the same pan so that the fried egg whites held the entire breakfast together as one, and he then slid the whole thing out onto a chopping board for people to slice up like a pizza. He made sure that each ‘slice’ contained one fried egg plus a good selection of everything else. Charlie had taught him to make breakfast this way and claimed that it made your basic fry-up look like a piece of artwork on the plate. In truth, it was so he only ever had to wash one pan. Hannah’s slice of breakfast pizza was laid face down in the still-hot frying pan for another thirty seconds, to make sure that the yolk was cooked through.
Today was Maggie’s hen night. She’d insisted on it starting in the early afternoon, because some of her friends were on night shift and she would be up with Hannah at 5 a.m. There was no way she was still going to be awake past 10.30 so, to get in the required number of drinking hours, Penny and Maggie were starting with a film and a bottle of pink champagne at 2 p.m.
By 6 p.m, Maggie and Penny were ready to head out. Maggie wore a black T-shirt with sparkly pink lettering on the front boasting BRIDE, and Penny wore one announcing her as MOTHER OF THE GROOM. Jack and Hannah kissed them both goodbye, then they headed upstairs for Hannah’s bath, bedtime feed and story.
As she fought sleep, Hannah’s eyelids would close, and then her eyebrows would lift, dragging her eyes open again. Her stubborn refusal to sleep, even though she was exhausted, made him giggle. Eventually, Hannah’s body relaxed and felt heavy in his arms, and he knew she was asleep.
Jack slouched on the sofa with the red notebook, half a bottle of red wine left over from the previous evening, and half a bottle of Remy Martin brandy. He committed the rest of his evening to going through the notebook from cover to cover. Towards the back of the book, in tiny writing was a list: alcohol, steel stock pots, stainless steel rice cooker, electric cooling pan, plastic funnels, coffee filters, large syringe... then the list stopped abruptly where two pages had been torn out at the spine.