The sun, already high in the sky, was beating down, and Harry, perspiring, wished he’d brought a hat, and had stuck with a T-shirt and his trademark shorts, rather than opting to dress a bit fancy in a cream linen suit. Freya had been more sensible, looking gorgeous in a broad straw hat, simple sundress and espadrilles with a blue bow on them.

  On either side of them were more lines of people, clutching objects. The good, the bad, and the complete tat.

  Harry said to Freya, ‘You know, the one thing that I always find fascinating about this show is the expressions people have on their faces when they get told the value of what they’ve brought along.’

  ‘Me too,’ she said. ‘Especially the ones who look so clearly disappointed when they’re told it is worth fifty quid, when they were expecting to be told it’s worth many thousands. Let’s try not to look disappointed.’

  ‘Or too excited?’

  Harry and Freya suddenly heard a loud tut-tut behind them, and a horsey female voice exclaiming, ‘Ridiculous! The way they organize this!’

  Unsure who she was addressing, they turned to see a small, rotund woman in her late sixties, silver hair in a bun, tweed skirt and stout shoes. She was clutching a painting protectively to her chest.

  ‘God knows what rubbish people here have brought along,’ she said and tapped the back of her canvas. ‘They really ought to separate us into those who have something clearly genuine and those who have an obvious waste of everyone’s time.’

  ‘Well I guess they have no way of knowing until the experts see it,’ Freya replied pleasantly.

  ‘What’s the painting you have?’ Harry asked.

  ‘It’s been in my family for three generations,’ she said haughtily, then held it up, quite furtively, as if for them to sneak a peep.

  It was a wooded landscape, with trees and water in the foreground and a Gothic cathedral with a very tall spire, beneath dark clouds, in the background.

  ‘That’s beautiful,’ Freya said.

  ‘Indeed, and so it should be, given its provenance.’

  ‘What do you know about it?’ Freya asked.

  Lowering her voice, as if not wanting to be overheard by the people behind her, she mouthed, ‘It’s a Constable. John Constable. You’ve heard of The Hay Wain?’

  ‘Of course,’ Freya said.

  She gave them a very smug smile. ‘Well, this is one of the paintings he did of Salisbury Cathedral.’

  ‘Wow!’ Harry said. ‘You’ve never thought of putting it into an auction – with one of the major houses?’

  ‘Oh yes, but I’ve heard what a lot of rogues there are in the art world, so I thought I’d get its authenticity proven by Oliver Desouta – he’s the paintings expert here today, a renowned authority on old masters – and then of course we’ll take it straight to Sotheby’s.’

  ‘How wonderful,’ Harry said, and waited for her to ask a question about their painting, but she didn’t. Instead she said, ‘I don’t suppose you’d let me go in front of you? I really would like Mr Desouta to see this before he gets jaded by too much rubbish.’

  Harry had two pet hates, something he and Freya had always shared. The first was people you met who talked about themselves but never asked you a single question, and the second was pompous people who had a sense of entitlement. ‘I’m afraid not, no,’ he replied testily, the heat making him increasingly irritable. ‘My wife and I got here very early and we’re quite far enough back in the queue as it is.’

  He turned his back on the woman and immediately heard her loud protest, ‘Well, really!’

  He shot a sly grin at Freya, who nodded back; she got it too.

  A few minutes later he noticed a man in a sharp white suit, shirt and overtly conspicuous tie, and two-tone co-respondent shoes, in his late thirties, making his way along the queue ahead of them, stopping to examine each of the paintings the people in front of them had brought along. Over the next twenty minutes, he and Freya saw several despondent-looking people leave the queue and walk away with their pictures, and suddenly the line moved forward faster than before. Clearly this man was weeding out the obvious crap.

  Was the same going to happen to them? he wondered, with a stab of panic. Were they going to be dismissed even before they got to the expert? Sent off, like a dozen in front of them, clutching their parcels on the walk of shame? And under the smug gaze of Lady Pompous behind them?

  Eventually it was the turn of the young couple in front of them, who held a huge abstract painting of something that vaguely resembled, with a bit of imagination, a giant multicoloured grasshopper. White suit held it up, turned it around and studied the back, nodding approvingly. Straining to listen, Harry heard him murmur, ‘Yes, very nice, very nice indeed.’

  Harry removed his painting from the bag and then the bubble wrap just as the man handed the couple’s picture back and approached them, preceded by a pleasant, if pungent, reek of cologne.

  ‘Well, hello, good morning, so what do we have here?’

  Prepared to be cut to shreds, Harry held the painting up. And saw the man’s eyes widen. ‘May I?’ he asked, shooting his cuffs and putting his manicured hands out to the frame.

  ‘Sure,’ Harry said.

  The man took it and studied the back a lot more carefully than he had studied the front, before turning it around and studying the front again. Then he frowned. ‘This is very beautiful,’ he said. ‘Really, this is something quite exceptional. Has it been in your family a long time?’

  ‘My husband – we – bought it in a car boot sale a few weeks ago,’ Freya said.

  ‘Well, actually there was another painting over it, we discovered what was underneath by accident,’ Harry added.

  The man produced a small tablet from his pocket. ‘May I have your names?’

  Harry gave them to him.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Thank you for bringing this along, it is very interesting indeed. Really quite special.’ He handed the picture back to Harry. ‘Please stay in this line, I think Oliver Desouta will be most interested to see this. Most interested indeed!’

  Then he moved on to Lady Pompous behind them. Elated by what the man had said, Harry hardly heard the first exchange of words behind him. Then there was a very indignant protestation from her.

  ‘Young man, this Constable has been in my family for three generations. You have no ruddy idea what you are talking about. I am going to see the expert.’

  ‘Madam,’ he replied, ‘I am the senior old masters consultant to Bonhams. What you have here is a copy – I’m afraid to say a very mediocre copy – of one of John Constable’s masterpieces, his Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows. He was much copied because of his fame, and sometimes by very talented artists, and this was one of his most copied works. I’m sorry to disappoint you, the quality here is very poor indeed. I appreciate this may sound harsh, but you really would be wasting your own and everyone’s time to stand in this queue. It’s a decent frame, you might get a few pounds for it, but as for the painting itself, really I find it almost offensively bad.’

  ‘And I find you quite offensive, young man. Are you saying that my family, which can be traced back to William the Conqueror, knows nothing about art?’

  ‘No, madam, I’m not criticizing your family. I’m telling you it is not worth your while standing in this queue for the next two hours or so with this particular painting – it has very little value, fifty pounds perhaps if you were lucky. If your family does have such a wonderful history, perhaps you could find something else to bring along to a future Antiques Roadshow?’

  Both Harry and Freya had been unable to stop themselves from turning round. The woman’s face was puce with rage. As the man moved on to the next painting, Harry couldn’t help himself. ‘What a shame,’ he said. ‘How disappointing for you.’

  ‘That man is an idiot,’ she retorted. ‘Mr Smarmy has no idea what he is talking about. I’m happy to wait, I’ll show it to the proper expert.’

  ‘Good luck with that,’ Harry said.

  25

  Saturday, 28 September

  In 1901, a French surgeon, René Le Fort, published his work on a series of experiments he had been carrying out on trauma to human skulls. Among these were dropping cannon balls onto cadaver skulls, crushing skulls in vices, whacking them with wooden clubs, kicking them or simply throwing them against tables and stone walls. From these experiments he determined that there were three predominant types of facial fractures.

  This publication contained the definitive templates for surgeons carrying out facial reconstructions for much of the twentieth century. Excluded from Le Fort’s comprehensive work was damage to the facial nerves inflicted by knife trauma, because no knowledge of that field had then existed and there was no mapping of these nerves.

  In the early hours of a Saturday morning in 1979, outside a gay club in Brighton’s Kemp Town district, a twenty-two-year-old man’s face had been slashed repeatedly by a modified Stanley knife with a coin inserted between two blades, inflicting a series of parallel, tramline cuts – fortunately missing his eyes – as well as beaten and kicked to a pulp by a trio of youths, to the yells of poof and poofter, and he was left badly injured on the pavement.

  The maxillofacial surgeon, Andrew Lyons, at the Royal Sussex County Hospital where Stuart Piper had first been taken, told him some days later, when he had eventually regained consciousness, that his skull had been so badly fractured it resembled a jigsaw puzzle. A week later, when he had been fully stabilized and the feared kidney damage from all the kicks had turned out to be no more than bad bruising, Lyons made the decision, in view of his extensive facial injuries, for Piper to be transferred to the Queen Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead, under the care of the specialist facial reconstruction plastic and maxillofacial surgeons there.

  The Queen Victoria Hospital is credited as the place where the discipline of plastic surgery had begun. Back in the 1940s an extraordinarily talented New Zealander, Archibald McIndoe, later Sir Archie, ensured his fame, and that of the hospital, by treating severely burned Battle of Britain pilots. Such patients did not exist before the Second World War because pilots inevitably perished in their wooden-framed aircraft, which weren’t equipped with parachutes and rapidly went up in flames.

  The same was not applicable to the 1940s Spitfire and Hurricane fighter planes, whose brave pilots suffering horrific burns were soon arriving at the unit in East Grinstead. By transferring skin from other parts of their bodies, McIndoe was able to reconstruct their disfigured faces and hands. It was a painstakingly slow process. While they would never win any beauty contests, these airmen were given back functioning faces and hands that enabled them to lead normal, active lives again. Although many needed further skin grafts for many decades after.

  During the months of reconstructive surgery on Stuart Piper’s face, some former Battle of Britain pilots were still attending the hospital for review and further facial surgery.

  Surgeons in the late 1970s did not have the benefit of computerized scanning and 3D reconstructions to tell them precisely where the bones should be and to give them exact details of facial height. Nor were they able to map and repair facial nerves. They simply had to do the best they could to patch up Stuart Piper’s once-handsome features. During all this time, much of it with his face swathed in bandages, Piper had plenty of time to think. He was thinking about two things, with equal fervour. The first was how to build his future career. The second was how to exact his revenge on the people who had done this to him.

  On a morning ward round a few days after the latest operation on Piper, the plastic surgeon he was under, Andrew Brown, noticed that Piper could not close his eyelids properly, leaving him with sore, dry eyes and problems sleeping. It was clear that the Stanley knife cuts had seriously and irrevocably damaged both the left and right nerves that controlled facial expression. He also noticed that Piper’s face was flatter on the right than on the left. His eyes were wider apart than they should have been, because the canthal ligaments that should have kept the eyes close to the side of the nose had been crushed, causing a telecanthus.

  Despite further surgery, the team of surgeons were unable to correct this, leaving Piper with his left eye further from the centre line than the right. This left him with an unnerving appearance; as it was such a small difference it wasn’t obvious to anyone looking at him, but it made him seem menacing. No one meeting him could understand quite why he made them feel so unsettled. That sensation was worsened by his complete lack of facial expression, other than through his eyes and tiny movements of his mouth.

  He was given a further operation to insert gold weights into his upper eyelids, to enable him to close his eyes properly, which left him with a squinting appearance to add to his lack of facial movement.

  During the eight months Piper had spent in hospital, the three thugs had been subsequently identified by witnesses, arrested, brought to trial and sentenced, in Piper’s opinion, to ludicrously short prison terms.

  But he’d been ready after their release from prison, to ensure they would never do what they had done to him to anyone else, ever again.

  A careful, calculating and financially independent young man, happy to bide his time to ensure he wasn’t linked to the revenge attacks on these thugs, Piper picked each one of his attackers off at two-year intervals with the aid of hired muscle.

  The first one, the ringleader, he had blinded and melted his face with sulphuric acid, while forcing him to listen, at maximum volume, to the Tom Robinson band playing ‘Glad to be Gay’.

  The second and third assailants he’d also badly beaten, satisfied in the knowledge that they would realize the reason for their assault.

  Piper was too smart ever to be arrested, or ever connected to these attacks. Just as he’d succeeded in keeping his criminal activities largely under the police radar for decades.

  Now approaching his sixty-third birthday, and a fitness fanatic, Piper was in lean shape. He had a narrow face, topped with slick, dyed black hair with carefully curated grey streaks, hard-man looks that reminded people of the actor Clive Owen, but the tramline scars down his cheek giving him a cruel aura. He was invariably dressed in a hand-stitched pinstripe suit, white shirt and sharp tie, even when he was relaxing.

  No one could ever tell from Piper’s face whether he was in a good or bad mood. A sarcastic man at best when he was in a good mood, when Piper was in a bad mood, none of the handful of people who worked for him dared say a word. Not even Robert Kilgore, even though he was well aware he was the one indispensable member of the boss’s team, as well as the most highly paid, by a long margin. Piper had made him an extremely wealthy man.

  And at this moment, Piper was in a proper bad mood. They were in the Long Gallery of his mansion, Bewlay Park, a Grade I-listed former stately home. It was a room with a stuccoed ceiling, Wedgwood-blue pilastered walls, and hung with magnificent paintings.

  Piper, suited, was pacing along, with Kilgore in tow and not knowing quite where his boss was going with today’s bad mood. Kilgore worked out of converted stables at the rear of the house. The boss had called him at 1.45 p.m. this afternoon saying he wanted to see him, and when the boss called, Kilgore jumped – well, as much as a chain-smoking, albeit slim, seventy-two-year-old man, who’d not done a day’s exercise since leaving the army, other than spirited sex, could jump.

  26

  Saturday, 28 September

  Finally, shortly after 2 p.m., it was the turn of the couple in front of Harry and Freya in the queue, who were holding their watercolour of what looked like an abstract grasshopper. The paintings expert, Oliver Desouta, took their picture, placed it on the easel, securing it in place carefully. A tall man in his late fifties with gelled salt-and-pepper hair, pencil moustache, flamboyant pink suit and lime-green tie, oozing real charm and bonhomie, he examined the front and back carefully. A cameraman stood alongside with the camera trained on him and the young couple.

  Then Desouta began to question them about the piece. He clearly liked it and named a watercolour artist neither Harry nor Freya had ever heard of. But both of them eagerly listened for his pronouncement of its value, as did its young owners.

  ‘Well,’ Desouta pronounced, finally, ‘if I were to put this into auction, I would expect to see it realize between one thousand and fifteen hundred pounds.’

  They looked both surprised and genuinely pleased.

  He handed it back to them and they went off happily.

  ‘Time to rock’n’roll,’ murmured Harry to his wife as they stepped forward and a young female assistant asked their names.

  As soon as Freya told her, the assistant’s eyes lit up. ‘Ah yes,’ she said, and turned to a floppy-haired man behind her, in jeans and a T-shirt, holding a clipboard. ‘Mr and Mrs Kipling,’ she said and mouthed something that the couple were unable to hear.

  Floppy hair nodded and made a note on his board, before turning to Desouta. ‘This is the possible Fragonard, Oliver.’

  Telling the cameramen to hold off, Oliver Desouta stepped forward and said, in his almost impossibly posh voice, ‘Aha, Mr and Mrs Kipling – related to Rudyard by chance?’

  Both of them, nervous as hell, smiled politely. ‘Well no, but we do get asked that a lot, as you can imagine,’ Harry said.

  Desouta took the proffered painting from Harry’s hands, glanced at it admiringly for some moments, then secured it on his easel. He studied the front carefully, then screwed a magnification eyepiece into his right eye socket and looked even more closely. Then he walked around the easel and spent what seemed to them both to be several minutes scrutinizing the back. Finally, he beamed at them and asked them how they came across it.

  After they had told him, he responded pleasantly, ‘This looks very interesting. Would you be willing to appear on camera, Mr and Mrs Kipling?’

  Harry glanced at Freya, who hesitated for a moment before nodding. ‘Yes,’ she said.