Freya collected Toby jugs, teapots, art deco figurines and Brighton prints. Harry loved police memorabilia – in particular badges – old photographs, Victorian watercolours and, more recently, silver teaspoons.
As usual, the scavenging dealers ran ahead of him, scouring the tables and the unpacked boxes below them, putting item after item into their old carrier bags. The grass was damp underfoot and the early morning air had a slight chill.
Harry was glad of his waterproof work boots, gilet and baseball cap keeping the mist at bay. There was an appetizing smell of coffee, doughnuts and frying bacon in the air. He looked forward to their Sunday guilty treat – which they didn’t tell Tom about – of stopping at the stall serving all those, after they’d satisfied themselves they’d missed nothing, for their egg and bacon sarnie breakfast fix, with an Americano for him, latte for Freya.
He walked past a trestle table loaded with old clothes and soft toys. Another with horrible porcelain ornaments. But all the same, he stopped, checking them out carefully, and spotted a tarnished old Brighton Police badge. He negotiated it down from £7.50 to a fiver, slipped it into his pocket and moved on. The next stall was mostly Dinky and Corgi toys, with the occasional Matchbox car, but none of them looked particularly old. He scanned them for a police vehicle, but spotted none and moved on again.
On the next, he saw two hideous clowns and shuddered, wondering who on earth would want them – they looked like they would haunt you forever. But next to them were several Toby jugs, and he texted Freya to alert her. Then he noticed a large box containing pictures, on the grass beneath the stall. On the other side of the table sat a friendly-looking young couple, sharing a cigarette, the tantalizingly sweet smoke drifting his way.
Harry sniffed appreciatively. ‘That smells so good!’ he said.
‘Have one!’ the young man said, offering him an open pack.
‘I just quit. I’d kill for one, but my wife would kill me if I did,’ Harry replied. ‘Thanks all the same. Mind if I take a look in that box?’
‘Go ahead,’ the woman said. ‘We’ve just been clearing out my nan’s house – the stuff that was up in her loft. Some frames are OK, but the pictures aren’t that special.’
Harry pulled the box out and began to rummage through the contents, hoping for a Victorian watercolour or a Brighton print. She was right about the quality of the paintings, he thought; they were complete grot. A horrible vase full of flowers in an ugly cream frame; a Cornish harbour seascape with yachts looking like they were balanced on top of the water; a cheesy sunset over a flock of what he presumed were meant to be sheep.
Then he came to an ornate, gilded frame, which looked genuinely old. He lifted it out. The painting, in oil, was about ten by twelve inches. It was an ugly portrait, an elderly woman’s face so thin it resembled a skull with skin stretched over it, with strands of wispy white hair. Some bad amateur’s attempt at a portrait of their granny? he wondered.
But the gilded frame was beautiful. Real quality. He ran his hands around the edges, noticed some damage here and there, but he knew a chap in the nearby town of Lewes who specialized in repairing frames. He turned it over and looked at the rear. It was canvas, clearly old, with some markings too faded to read.
The frame alone, he figured, would be worth fifty quid, if not more, judging by the prices the restorer in Lewes charged for his. A few Sundays ago, he’d bought a watercolour of the old Brighton chain pier that was about this size. It would look stunning in this frame.
Standing up, holding the picture, he asked, ‘How much do you want for this?’
‘Twenty-five quid,’ the young man said after a few moments.
‘Would you take twenty?’
‘Go on then.’
As he peeled off a banknote from his wad, Harry asked, ‘Don’t suppose you’ve got a bag for it?’
The young woman smiled. ‘Actually, I do. It’s your lucky day!’ She dug an arm down to the ground and produced a white plastic bag.
Twenty minutes later, munching on their egg and bacon baps, Freya and Harry triumphantly showed each other their purchases. Freya produced a flat-sided teapot painted with flowers. ‘This is similar to a Clarice Cliff, I really like it; it was nowhere near that kind of money but still worth something!’
He looked at it carefully, admiring it. ‘You could be right, well done you!’
‘What did you get, darling?’
‘A police badge, and this!’ He pulled the painting out of the bag.
‘Oh my God, she is horrible!’ Freya exclaimed. ‘Like, really creepy! Yech.’
‘Forget the picture, it’s the frame! Don’t you think it’s lovely?’
She nodded reluctantly. ‘Yes, fine, but the picture, yech, it freaks me out.’
‘I agree, I don’t like the picture either, but the frame is a total bargain.’
‘As long as you get rid of that creepy head staring at me!’ She wrinkled her face.
‘I’ll cut it out and burn it as soon as we get home.’
But, like so many jobs Harry promised to do, he didn’t. When they got home, shortly after 11 a.m., Tom was still up in his room, no doubt asleep after spending half the night playing Fortnite or whatever the latest game he was now into. He leaned the picture against a glass wall in the conservatory annexe to the kitchen, which served as both family room and depository for their purchases, flopped on a sofa with another mug of coffee and watched golf on the television for half an hour, before jumping up to begin the lunch preparations.
As he did so, he saw their adored rescue cat, Jinx, was eyeing the painting suspiciously.
‘See,’ Freya said, walking in, ‘Jinx doesn’t like her either.’
‘Reminds you both of your mother, does she?’ he said, then ducked as, grinning, she threw a tangerine at him.
5
Monday, 16 September
Roy Grace sat in his small office, his swivel chair turned sideways, giving him a view of some of the particularly uninspiring concrete buildings of this part of the Sussex Police HQ campus, a patch of grass and a car park. The sky was overcast, matching his gloomy mood. It was just two weeks since his son, Bruno, had died, hit by a car crossing the main road outside his school, and he was finding work a welcome distraction.
As he had done so many times in the days since, he was fighting tears. A fight he regularly lost and was losing again now. He pulled his handkerchief out and dabbed his eyes. Shit. Why, why, why? A year and a half ago he hadn’t even known that Bruno existed. Before she had disappeared, his former wife, Sandy, had kept it secret from him that she had been pregnant.
The first he had known about Bruno was a phone call from a friend in the Munich branch of the Landeskriminalamt – the LKA. Marcel Kullen informed him that a woman in a coma, after being hit by a taxi while crossing the road, might be his long-missing wife Sandy. And she did indeed turn out to be her. She had died then, and now the son they’d had was dead, in similar circumstances.
How Bruno came to be crossing that road, just an hour or so after he’d dropped him at school on that fateful morning, no one could explain. Nor could anyone explain, as yet anyhow, why Bruno had failed to see the car which had been travelling within the speed limit, according to the report from the Collision Investigation Unit. The only eyewitness to the accident itself, a woman walking her dog, had said he’d appeared to be absorbed in his phone.
Roy Grace was desperately sad, thinking about the upcoming funeral. And if it wasn’t going to be harrowing enough, the presence of Sandy’s parents, with whom he had never got on, and who at one point had suspected him of murdering Sandy, would for sure not make it any easier.