He drove along the dark, tree-lined avenue, turned in and pulled up outside the wrought-iron gates of his home, in the faint glare of the street light across the road. He was looking forward to the crazy greeting he would get from his lurcher, Poussin, and hoped his barking wouldn’t wake his wife. It was 12.40 a.m. – Susan would be well asleep by now. He reached down into the cubbyhole below the dash, found the clicker and pressed it.

  Nothing happened.

  He pressed again, but still the gates did not move. He frowned. Was the battery dead? He pressed again and the little red light came on. But the gates didn’t move.

  It wasn’t the first time this had ever happened. Cursing and making a mental note to call the gate people in the morning, he lowered his window and reached out to the panel to punch in the key code manually. But he was too far away.

  Cursing again, he opened the car door and leaned across, oblivious to the shadow moving towards him from behind a tree as he tapped in the code: 7979 followed by the plus sign. Instantly the gates began, jerkily, to open and the bright security lights came on.

  At the same instant, lights exploded inside his head as he felt a blow just behind his ear. It was followed immediately by a crashing whack from an iron bar. Shooting stars. Meteorites. The wildest fireworks display of his life going on in there while he stumbled forward and hit the ground, all his lights going out.

  He never heard the words of his assailant, cursing him for being such a fat, heavy bastard as he heaved Porteous back into the driver’s seat of the car.

  He never heard the slam of the driver’s door as blood oozed from the back of his smashed skull into the tan – with contrast cream stitching – Connolly leather headrest.

  4

  Sunday, 21 July 2019

  Harry Kipling made every customer feel like they were his new best friend. With his twinkly eyes, cheeky grin and messy hair, and invariably wearing shorts on all but the coldest of winter days, the stocky forty-five-year-old was constantly bursting with boyish enthusiasm and energy. He gave each customer the impression he could not do enough for them, and he sure tried.

  Call me Harry and I’ll hurry! was his catchphrase. Heck, when you inherited an identical surname to the brand of one of Britain’s most famous cake makers, you either had to make a joke of it or change it.

  And not so easy to change your name when your family business, Harold Kipling & Sons, Brighton’s Premier Builders, had been established in 1892 and carried all that goodwill with it.

  Besides, it was an icebreaker for a new customer, when discussing extensions to the rear of their house, invariably to tell Harry to make sure he brought some exceedingly good cakes with him, heh-heh.

  Business was busy right now, the demand for extensions and for loft conversions better than ever, and a decent turnover was coming in. But he struggled to make a profit year on year. His business would be considerably more profitable, his wife Freya often chided him, if he wasn’t quite so obliging to his customers.

  Freya, also forty-five and his childhood sweetheart, was deputy head of a local school. Still the beautiful former head girl, with her long blonde hair and trim figure, she was the organized one in the marriage, and in the rare free time she had after dealing with all the paperwork mountain from her school, and doing her workouts, she helped Harry out with the books of his business – something he was rubbish at. And sometimes what she saw worried her.

  Because he always wanted to be helpful, and because he was a genuinely kind man, Harry constantly did his customers favours here and there at no extra charge – invariably eating into his all-too-thin profit margins.

  It would be nice, Freya mentioned, and very pointedly, if just occasionally he would do them some favours, too. Such as fixing the floor tile in the downstairs loo of their house, which had been loose for months, or the damp patch in the ceiling of their fourteen-year-old son Tom’s room. Not to mention the wonky wall light in their lounge. And the kitchen cabinet door which had had a broken hinge for as long as she could remember. And everything else that was wrong with their small, attractive but increasingly cluttered 1950s corner house in Mackie Crescent in the leafy Brighton suburb of Patcham.

  ‘It’s on my list, darling,’ was his standard response. ‘I’ll do it at the weekend.’

  But he never did, because most Saturdays, if he wasn’t going with Tom to football at the Amex, to cheer on the Seagulls, or taking him to play rugby or tennis – the two sports Tom was obsessed with playing, which he and Freya encouraged – he would be putting in extra hours at a customer’s house, trying to get a job finished.

  And on the alternate Sundays when he didn’t play golf, and while Tom slept in until midday, Harry enjoyed indulging with Freya in their favourite pastime together: scouring car boot sales. And then, when they returned home, after examining and cleaning or polishing their booty, he would take command of the kitchen – or the barbecue on summer days – to cook a roast.

  Tom was a Type-1 diabetic. Increasingly, due to him badgering his parents that it was better both for the planet and his sugar levels, Harry had been experimenting with vegetarian and vegan roasts – and discovered to his and Freya’s surprise that they enjoyed both of these, as well as his increasing repertoire of fish and seafood, as much as, if not even more than, meat.

  Invariably, after lunch, any good intentions Harry might have had of putting in an hour or two of DIY on the house were nixed by the several large glasses of the red Rioja he and Freya favoured. It would be feet up in front of the television for pretty much the rest of the day and evening, while Tom, if there wasn’t a major sports game on to watch, disappeared up to his room, into his world – alien to them – of computer gaming.

  One of the passions Harry and Freya shared was a love of bric-a-brac, and on this Sunday morning they were among the first in line for the 8 a.m. opening of the Sayers Common car boot sale, five miles north of Brighton.

  Both were well aware, from long experience, that if you wanted to snap up bargains, you had to be there at doors opening to have any chance against the professional dealers. And they had a well-rehearsed and practised plan of splitting up the moment they entered, Freya going left and Harry going right, scouring the stalls for bargains.

  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.

  He dabbed his eyes again, took several deep breaths and turned his focus back to work, pretty much the only thing, along with Cleo’s support, that had got him through these past days. They were expecting their second child together in December, which was at least something to focus on. And at work, fortunately, he had a cold case that deeply interested him.

  The murder clear-up rate in the UK averaged around 90 per cent year-on-year – among the highest in the world. But that still left one in ten murders unsolved and he was acutely aware that for each of these there was a victim for whom justice had not been served, and bereft loved ones left without answers. Murders made sensational news headlines, but as the saying went, today’s news wraps tomorrow’s fish and chips. While the rest of the nation moved on to the next day’s stories, for those loved ones of the victim the pain would never cease. But at least a successful conclusion, in the form of a conviction, would bring some closure and enable them to carry on with their lives.

  And as the Detective Superintendent also well knew, most experienced homicide detectives had at least one unsolved case they’d handled that bugged them for years after. For some, that case continued to haunt them even beyond the end of their careers. The one that got away, leaving them forever thinking, what have I missed – what vital clue? Some retired detectives went to their graves with that question still unanswered.

  Police files on unsolved murders in the UK never closed. And all the time, when there was the likelihood that the offender was still alive, or there were family members who would benefit from closure, these cases were kept under periodic review.

  Relationships changed, and with them, sometimes, loyalties. A partner or spouse who had once provided an alibi might, after the relationship had ended – especially if badly and they were angry enough – come forward to the police. In addition, as technology advanced, improved techniques for recovering vital evidence such as fingerprints and DNA could put someone who had long thought they’d got away scot-free behind bars.

  Every piece of evidence recovered from a crime scene was carefully tagged and filed in a locked storeroom. Ready to yield its secrets years, maybe even decades, after the crime had been committed.

  As Head of Major Crime for Surrey and Sussex Police, Roy Grace had overall responsibility for both current homicide investigations and the regular review of cold cases. He’d recently had a drink with a newly retired colleague, Nick Sloan, a brilliant Detective Superintendent he’d greatly respected and had learned a lot from. Sloan had confessed, over a pint, that he had one regret in his career, a murder case that still haunted him, which he’d been unable to nail. He’d missed something, he was certain, but what?

  A wealthy London art dealer, Charlie Porteous, had been bludgeoned to death in his Bentley in the entrance to the driveway of his house. The murder had happened late at night in a public street, in an exclusive residential area in the city of Brighton and Hove.

  Sloan’s team had established that Porteous had some cash-flow problems and, shortly before his murder, had been touting a painting he’d acquired from a dubious source. He’d paid cash – something apparently completely out of character, as ordinarily he would have paid by cheque or bank transfer, to leave a trail, as was the customary procedure for art dealers in case of any come-back.

  On the night of Porteous’s death, Sloan’s team had established that the dealer had been out to dinner with his god-daughter, Carrie Hepworth. She worked part-time at the gallery and they had a close relationship. The investigation was satisfied that this was purely platonic, a totally avuncular relationship rather than anything untoward. They’d also established his wife, Susan, a pillar of Brighton and Hove society, was very fond of Carrie too, and she had stayed at the couple’s house on many occasions. They’d taken her under their wing after some troubled teenage years.

  But the massive and extensive investigation, given the name Operation Canvas, had drawn a blank. The long list of potential suspects had included Porteous’s employees, a dealer they’d identified to whom he had touted this painting – seemingly a long-lost work by the eighteenth-century French artist Fragonard – and the wealthy collector in Sussex who had expressed interest in seeing the painting.