Branson gave him a sideways look. ‘Optics? So Cassian Pewe’s lingo’s rubbed off on you?’
Grace pulled on his cloth head-cover, then selected a fresh gauze mask. ‘It may not seem like it at this moment, but I’m doing what I always try to do, which is to advance your career.’
‘Really?’
Grace shrugged. ‘You’ve gone from a PC to DC to DS to Detective Inspector in how few years?’
‘And lost my wife, nearly lost my kids and now I’m about to lose my fiancée in the process. Should I be grateful?’
‘Depends; how do you define gratitude?’
‘There you go again, you bastard! Answering with a question.’
‘So tell me?’
Grace saw Glenn wringing his hands in frustration. ‘Glenn,’ he said, trying to calm him, then secured his mask. ‘Let’s go do it.’
They walked out into the narrow corridor and turned right, passing the closed door of the isolation room and into the wide, open-plan twin postmortem rooms separated only by an arch.
The mortuary operated normal working-week hours, on the basis that in general, their occupants weren’t in any particular hurry to be postmortemed and nor were their loved ones, most of the time. So the regular team of three pathologists who carried out postmortems on deaths that weren’t suspicious had the luxury of weekends off.
For Home Office pathologists, who specialized in suspected murder victims, where time was almost always critical, there was no such luxury. They were far more highly paid, but they earned their money by being on-call 24/7, ready to travel anywhere, instantly, and spend however many hours it took, both at the crime or deposition scene, and then in the mortuary, examining every aspect of the body, and often of the surroundings where it was found, in scrupulous detail. Few took less than six hours, and some far longer.
To Grace’s left were four empty stainless-steel postmortem tables. To his right were another four that were empty, on this Sunday afternoon, and one on which lay the body of Archie Goff, still at this moment fully clothed, beneath bright lights, and the centre of attention of a number of people, all in identical blue gowns, white boots and blue and white gauze hats and face masks. Coroner’s Officer Michelle Websdale, Crime Scene Photographer James Gartrell, alternating between taking stills and video, Darren Wallace, the Assistant Anatomical Pathology Technician, and Cleo, who was taking notes alongside centre-stage, flame-haired Nadiuska De Sancha who was at this moment taping every inch of Goff’s clothing, while Gartrell moved his plastic ruler up the body each time she nodded.
This was the part of the murder investigation Roy Grace always found unpleasant. If he’d had any other Deputy SIO, he would have happily left them to it and gone home to enjoy his Sunday. But he felt obligated to Glenn. The moment they’d first met, when Glenn had joined his Major Enquiry Team as a very junior Detective Constable, Grace had taken a liking to him, recognizing in him, perhaps, something of his own young, ambitious self and ability. Ever since then he’d been on a mission to nurture Glenn, becoming close friends in the process.
‘Daniel Hegarty,’ Grace said.
‘What about him?’
‘He lives in the house right where the body was dumped outside.’
‘He does? You found that out already?’ Branson questioned.
‘Elementary, my dear Branson. Isn’t Rule One to check the ground under your feet?’
61
Sunday, 3 November
Freya Kipling lay back on the recliner sofa, a glass of red wine in one hand and a novel, Where The Crawdads Sing, in the other. Harry sat beside her with a can of lager, watching a replay of Match of the Day, his team, Brighton and Hove Albion, beating Norwich 2–0. Tom was up in his room, gaming with friends online, and Freya glanced at the Libre app to check his glucose level. 8.9. At the high end of the range, but OK.
She and Harry had spent the morning covering three different car boot sales and returned with a small amount of booty. Harry’s purchases had been an ancient, empty tin of Players Medium Navy Cut cigarettes, a tiny bronze statuette of a golfer swinging his club, and a Brighton print, in remarkably good condition, of the old, ill-fated Daddy Long Legs railway, which ran on stilts above the English Channel, along part of Brighton seafront between Kemp Town and Rottingdean, from 1896 to 1900 before being closed down. Freya had bought a pair of matching, purple-tinted glass vases which the vendor had said were Victorian, and a silver salt and pepper cruet set.
Yet again, there had been no sign of the matching paintings that Harry hoped against hope they might find. To Freya’s relief, he was finally coming around to the view they ought to put the Fragonard – well, possible Fragonard – into a major auction house sale and see what happened. Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips were all interested and had kept in regular contact, updating them on their future fine arts sales.
As the game ended, Harry put his can down on the coffee table, then slipped an arm around her shoulder, and nuzzled her ear. She grinned, knowing exactly what he wanted. And why not? Despite being engrossed in her book, even after all these years she still did really fancy him.
She felt an erotic tingling deep inside her, put down her glass and book and turned to kiss him, knowing Tom was in his room and absorbed in the computer game with his mates.
At that moment, their landline phone rang.
As she reached for it, Harry restrained her. ‘Later, baby.’ He nuzzled her ear again, whispering, ‘Now’s not the time for phone calls. It’s probably some insurance company telling us we’ve been in an accident.’
‘It might be Dad, he gets lonely on Sundays sometimes.’
Freya’s mother had died two years ago and her father, whom Harry liked, had been a lost soul since, but determinedly and fiercely independent, refusing to leave his home in Scarborough and come down to live with them.
Harry leaned forward and picked the cordless up off the table and saw it said Number Withheld. He hesitated then answered, ‘Kipling residence, Harry Kipling speaking.’
It wasn’t his father-in-law, but another elderly-sounding man who spoke with a soft, measured American drawl.
‘Good afternoon, sir,’ the man said, consummately polite. ‘I apologize for intruding on your Sunday, but I understand you own a painting that is a good copy of one by the French artist Jean-Honoré Fragonard. Would I be correct?’
‘Who am I speaking to?’ Harry asked.
‘I’m calling on behalf of my employer, who is a major collector of works of art from this period. He would be interested in making you an offer for a private sale – such a sale would save you the very costly fees of an auction house.’
‘And what makes you think I might be interested in selling, even supposing I have such a painting?’
‘Mr Kipling, my employer saw you with this picture on Antiques Roadshow. He is willing to make you a very generous offer, given that the painting is almost certainly a fake.’
‘Really?’ Harry sounded more belligerent than he had intended. ‘Exactly how generous?’ He put the phone onto loudspeaker so Freya could hear.
‘I’m instructed to offer you the sum of fifty thousand pounds.’
Harry caught Freya’s frown. ‘You are joking?’ he replied.
‘Mr Kipling, I am deadly serious. If the picture is a fake, it would be worth, at very best, a few hundred pounds – and that much only if you were lucky. I appreciate that if it did turn out to be original, then it would be worth many multiples of that sum. But really, do you seriously believe something you bought from a car boot sale could be genuine?’