Freya was signalling to him to consider the offer, waving a hand in the air to get him to negotiate upwards.
Ignoring her, Harry said, ‘Actually I do. Three of the major London auction houses want to include it in their next sales. I’ve been given estimates of around four to five million. Your offer is a joke.’
Sounding offended, the American said, ‘Mr Kipling, my employer is a gentleman who doesn’t joke about art.’
Freya signalled. Negotiate, she was indicating.
‘So what would be your employer’s best offer?’
‘I just gave you my employer’s best offer.’
The phone went dead.
Harry, shaken, stared at the phone for some moments, then put it down. Had they been cut off? He looked at Freya.
‘Maybe we should have taken it,’ she suggested.
‘No way! You’ve seen the auction estimates from those houses.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘The estimates if the painting is original.’
‘None of them would be offering to list it if they thought it was a fake. That American was just a dickhead – a chancer.’
‘Fifty thousand pounds would be very useful money, darling,’ she said.
‘Five million would be a lot more useful. He’ll ring back, don’t you worry.’
The American did not ring back.
62
Sunday, 3 November
In this room that always felt to Roy Grace like it was perpetual winter, a grey and bleak winter with its grey walls, grey steel tables, sinks and worktops, and the grey faces of the cadavers unlucky enough to fetch up here, the Home Office pathologist worked in steady, quick, concentration.
Thinking hard about the dubious coincidence of Archie Goff’s body being dumped outside Daniel Hegarty’s house, Grace shivered from the refrigerated air. Even on the brightest summer day, the dense frosted glass of the exterior wall leached all the colour from the sunlight, and the bright overhead lights added only starkness, no warmth. He tried to breathe through his mouth, as he always did in here, to shut out the cloying smells of death and disinfectant.
Nadiuska De Sancha had been looking at her watch regularly, and then at the clock on the wall, as if to double check it, and he wondered if she was on some kind of a deadline. She had certainly been proceeding refreshingly quickly, assisted by Cleo, who had cancelled the lunch with her sister. They were positively galloping through the postmortem compared to Dr Frazer Theobald, who carried out his so slowly that one of the team had once joked it was hard to tell which was the corpse and which the pathologist.
Including the brief time she’d spent with the body in situ on the pavement, less than five hours had elapsed in total, and De Sancha was almost done. It was coming up to 5 p.m. If they’d had Theobald, Grace doubted they would even be halfway through by now.
Archie Goff lay naked on the steel table, with his hair shaven directly above the gash behind his right ear, giving that side a bizarrely fashionable look. There was also a contusion at the base of his neck. His clothes had been removed when he’d first been brought here, each item carefully bagged and labelled for later forensic examination for fibres, hairs and blood spots that might yield clues about who had killed him.
Nadiuska dictated into her machine at intervals throughout the process, providing Roy Grace and everyone else present with a steady commentary. Despite her decades of living in England, she still retained some of her origins in her accent, and it was a voice, Grace thought, that even in a situation as grim as this, was laced with charm as well as frequent flashes of humour.
‘The deceased was found on a pavement in a Saltdean residential street, so one of my tasks is to try to establish if that is where he actually died. Was it on this street or in another location and his body later deposited there? I don’t have sufficient information to give a clear time of death but,’ her eyes twinkled, ‘our good friend Dr Rigor Mortis is very happy to share some of his little clues with us. When I first began my examination, the deceased had fairly well-developed rigor mortis over his whole body – the fingers, jaw joints, arms and legs all stiff, the joints all difficult to move, and he was completely cold to touch.’ She turned to Grace.
‘Roy, it would be helpful if we could establish how long he had been lying on the pavement, because the length of time he was exposed to the elements would help us to be more precise about the rigor mortis development.’
‘I have a team doing a house-to-house in the area, Nadiuska,’ he replied. ‘They’re asking if anyone saw anything, and also whether anything was picked up on any private CCTV cameras.’
‘Excellent.’
Grace saw her look at her watch again, then shoot a glance at the wall clock once more. ‘What’s your gut feeling about where he died, Nadiuska? The pavement or somewhere else?’
‘It’s more than a gut feeling, Roy. I’m fairly confident from what I’ve seen so far that he died in another location and was subsequently deposited on the pavement – possibly thrown out of a car. One thing that leads me to that is he was lying in the street in a different position to the one in which he lay at the location where he died.’
Grace glanced at Branson and saw him frown; he was pretty sure why she had deduced this but asked her all the same, for confirmation. ‘OK, interesting, what makes you think that?’
‘A major clue is the presence of what I would term inappropriate hypostasis.’ She pointed at the purple mottling colour around part of Goff’s stomach. ‘Hypostasis develops gravitationally after death, in the parts of the body lowest to the ground. When the heart stops pumping, the blood pools instead of circulating, and it collects wherever gravity draws it. This purple blotching around the stomach indicates the deceased lay on his front for some hours after death, allowing the blood to pool in the stomach area. But, on the street, he was lying on his back. If he had died in that position, we could have expected to have seen hypostasis on his back, but there isn’t any present.’
Grace nodded in agreement. He looked at the gash and the congealed blood behind Goff’s right ear. ‘Have you been able to determine the likely cause of death?’
She pointed at the injury. ‘That didn’t happen from a fall – it looks to me that he was struck deliberately – if I had to hazard a guess, I’d say that wound could have been made by an object with a sharp edge.’
She turned to the CSI, James Gartrell. ‘James, please take a series of close-ups with right-angle scale of this injury.’
The photographer complied meticulously. Grace knew this would allow for any images to be subsequently produced on a 1:1 scale and compared by the forensic scientists. This could be invaluable evidence if the object that had caused this wound was subsequently found.
Next, she pointed at the dead man’s right nipple. ‘See that tiny mark? This looks to me like a burn – possibly from an electrode clamp.’ She walked down the body and pointed to a burn mark on his scrotal sack. ‘This too indicates he may well have been tortured.’
Out of the corner of his eye, Grace saw Branson wince. ‘Shit,’ he said. ‘Poor bastard.’
‘I can only imagine the pain,’ she said.
‘Not sure I even want to imagine it!’ Glenn Branson added.
Next, she pointed to a blackened circle in the middle of his chest. ‘That looks to me like a cigarette burn.’ Then, with a gloved hand, she raised the dead man’s left arm. ‘You noticed his fingers, Roy, when you first saw him on the street. All four fingers of both hands crushed, the nails blackened, as you can see. Did you ever hit one of your fingernails with a hammer, or slam one in a door?’