As the opening credits of the crime drama rolled, along with sombre, moving, orchestral music, Hegarty sipped his wine distractedly, trying to figure out just what it was that was making him so uneasy. Was it that text?

  He didn’t have to wait long.

  His phone, which he’d switched to silent, to not be disturbed during the programme, was vibrating.

  A number he did not recognize.

  He was tempted to leave it to ring out, but then he wondered – a little irrationally – if it was going to be some information about the dead man outside his house, and made the decision, nodding apologetically to Natalie, to answer it.

  He was right, in the wrong way.

  64

  Sunday, 3 November

  ‘I’m real sorry to be intruding on your cosy Sunday evening, Mr Hegarty,’ said the polite Southern US accent. ‘I know how sacrosanct Sunday evenings are to you English folk.’

  Hegarty put down his wine glass, jumped up from the sofa and headed to the living room door.

  ‘Want me to pause it, darling?’ Natalie asked.

  He shook his head and hurried out, closing the door behind him. ‘How can I help you, Mr Kilgore?’ he asked breezily.

  ‘Well, Mr Hegarty, I’m guessing you noticed some activity outside your home today?’

  ‘You guess right. It was a little hard not to notice. The whole of Saltdean noticed it, and all the local media.’ He didn’t like the tone of Kilgore’s voice.

  ‘They sure did, I saw it on the news. Very tragic.’ Kilgore hesitated. ‘If I’m still guessing right, you are wondering about the location. Did this gentleman drop dead on the street outside your house, did someone deposit his body there randomly, or was the location chosen specifically for a reason? Am I correct that’s what you might be wondering right now, Mr Hegarty?’

  ‘You seem to be talking in riddles, Mr Kilgore. I’m a little confused.’

  ‘Well, Mr Hegarty, I apologize for that,’ he said, his voice maintaining his courtly charm but with a steely undertow. ‘Confused is the last thing I want you to feel – and my boss, too. We would just like you to understand loud and clear the message we sent to you this morning.’

  ‘Like a message in a bottle?’ Hegarty said facetiously. ‘Like a dead man in a bottle?’

  ‘Mr Hegarty,’ Kilgore said, his tone now sounding more steely, ‘a short while ago I gave you photographs of an original Fragonard to copy, and you were paid good money for this job. When we swapped the pictures over at the Kiplings’ house, we discovered the painting on his wall was also a fake. You are the only forger good enough to have done that. So here’s what I think: Goff brought the original to you – and I want it. Here’s the deal. I will come by tomorrow morning, and you will hand me the original. Mess with us again, and the next time you head out to walk your dogs, it won’t be a stranger lying dead on the sidewalk. It will be your wife. Goodnight, Mr Hegarty. Enjoy your evening.’

  ‘Hey!’ Hegarty said. ‘I haven’t—’

  But Kilgore had hung up.

  Hegarty quickly hurried upstairs to look out at the pavement to see what was happening. But all looked quiet. The floodlights the CSIs had erected, along with the tent, had gone, and so had the crime scene tape. It was all back to normal, as if nothing had happened.

  Which, ironically, now made him feel more vulnerable.

  65

  Sunday, 3 November

  Arriving home shortly after 8 p.m., deep in thought, Roy Grace thanked their nanny, Kaitlynn, for coming in on a Sunday and staying so late, but asked her if she could hang on a little longer while he walked the dog. She told him that Noah was sound asleep and had been good as gold all day.

  He pulled on his Barbour and a baseball cap, against the falling drizzle, grabbed his torch and took Humphrey out for a short walk. As he walked through the darkness, wondering about Archie Goff’s deposition site outside Hegarty’s house, he called the Force Control Room to get an operation name assigned to the enquiry into the man’s murder. He was given Operation Porcupine and the option to have another if it caused any issues.

  He said it was fine.

  Where Goff had been deposited could of course have been sheer coincidence. But his body could have been dumped in any number of woods or lay-bys, or outside any of the 430,000 houses and apartment buildings in and around the city of Brighton and Hove and its neighbouring towns and villages.

  But it had been dumped on the doorstep of the city’s most famous art forger.

  Grace wasn’t a gambling man, but he understood odds. One and a half million people lived in the county of Sussex – East and West. The odds of Goff ending up on Hegarty’s doorstep by sheer chance were astronomical.

  He spent the next twenty minutes of his walk, guided by his torch beam, up through the fields behind their house, using the time to call the key members of the new team he was assembling, asking them to attend an 8.30 a.m. briefing on Op Porcupine in the morning.

  Before going back inside, he entered the hen run, checked on the birds, which were all in their shed, asleep on their perches, and retrieved four eggs – two dark brown, his favourites, one white and one blue. As an added precaution against foxes, he shut their door with a breezy, ‘Goodnight, girls and Billy!’

  Then he went into the kitchen, said goodbye to Kaitlynn and used the date stamp Bruno had bought to mark each egg, then laid them at the back of the tray on the work surface. His son was always in his thoughts. Feeling pensive, he turned his attention to preparing supper, Humphrey sitting on the floor at his feet, looking up expectantly.

  ‘Still hungry, are you, boy? You’ve already been fed by Kaitlynn, you gannet! Are you ever not hungry?’ Grace asked. Cleo had told him after her last visit to the vet that the vet had said he was five pounds overweight.

  But as he removed the cheeses from the fridge, unwrapping them and putting them on a wooden board, Humphrey continued staring up at him, making him feel guilty. He cut a few slivers off and slipped them to the dog, who swallowed them like he was inhaling them, and then looked up at his master for more.

  ‘Last slice, boy, OK? And don’t tell your mistress.’ He kneeled down and patted the dog, hard. ‘Fatty boom-boom, are you? Or is it all muscle tone?’

  Down on his haunches, Humphrey barked at him. One sharp bark. Grace cut him one more slice – a large one. As he did so he heard the front door opening. Quickly, he slipped it into the dog’s jaws and immediately heard Cleo’s rebuke.

  ‘Hey, you, I saw that!’

  Turning towards her, he grinned. ‘I had to – he was fifteen seconds away from dialling the RSPCA to complain we were starving him to death.’

  ‘Yeah yeah, you big softy!’ She stood there, in mock disapproval, in a leather jacket over a turtleneck sweater and jeans. ‘Overweight dogs are much more likely to get arthritis – no more cheese treats, OK?’

  ‘Understood.’ He went across and kissed her. ‘Long day, eh, my darling.’

  She nodded. ‘How about a couple of Virgin Marys? I really crave one.’

  ‘Great idea, I’ll make them.’

  She grinned and looked at the platter containing an array of cheeses, crackers, nuts, fruit and pickles. ‘I’m impressed.’

  He mock-bowed, filling two glasses of cold water from the fridge dispenser and placing them on the kitchen table.

  ‘You have recently become quite the Domestic God, haven’t you?’ she said with an approving grin.

  He grinned back. ‘Every team needs a water carrier.’

  ‘Is that in the Murder Manual?’

  ‘Page one! So, what was it you needed to go and check?’

  ‘Tell you over supper – I think you’ll be impressed. Maybe I should be a detective too!’

  ‘Oh?’

  66

  Sunday, 3 November

  Cleo helped herself to slices from each of the cheeses, taking a particularly large chunk of the Manchego, then, after hungrily eating several mouthfuls of the cheese and biscuits, as well as a couple of grapes and a slice of cucumber, she said, ‘That gash behind Archie Goff’s ear, right?’

  Grace frowned. ‘OK?’

  ‘Nadiuska said she thought it was made by an object with a sharp edge.’

  ‘She did, yes,’ he said, picking up a sourdough cracker and smearing some beetroot chutney on it.

  ‘It reminded me of something I’d seen before – it had really been bugging me all afternoon and I needed to go and check to see if I was right.’

  ‘Were you? Tell me.’

  She popped another grape in her mouth, chewed and swallowed it, then looking decidedly pleased with herself, she said, ‘I think I might be. You’ve been reviewing the case of that art dealer who was murdered in Brighton a few years ago, right?’

  ‘Operation Canvas. It was one of Nick Sloan’s. His name was Charlie Porteous. Yes, we are reopening it, some significant new evidence has come to light.’

  She ate a walnut, then another sliver of cheese. ‘So you’ve looked at the crime scene photographs?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I remember it all very clearly: it was the first unsolved murder case I was involved with after joining the mortuary team. Charlie Porteous had a wound on the right side of his face, behind his ear, do you recall?’

  Grace thought for a moment, it was coming back to him. ‘Yes, he did.’ He stopped eating, very curious now. Had he missed something?

  ‘I just looked up the postmortem report on our records – it took a while as it had been misfiled, somehow, when we changed our system. The postmortem was done by Frazer Theobald, and he had put in his notes that the wound was caused by something sharp. Do you see where I might be going?’

  Grace looked at her excitedly. ‘Go on!’

  She smiled. ‘From my examination, I think the wounds of Porteous and Goff are similar and may have been caused by some sort of ring with a stone. I’ve seen similar injuries on other bodies where they have been badly beaten. Maybe I should be on your team?’

  ‘Brilliant, Cleo! You are on the team!’ he said.

  Humphrey nudged his master’s leg, hoping for another scrap but, deep in thought now, Grace ignored him. ‘You’re right, it could possibly be a link and, if so, a very significant one. Might be a long shot, but – hold on a sec.’ He jumped up from the table. ‘I’ll be back in a mo.’

  He hurried upstairs to his den, and it was several minutes before he returned. ‘Sorry, darling, I had to look up the name of a specialist in identifying and matching wounds – I’ve got it. Dr Colin Duncton at Liverpool University Hospital – he’s developed some very smart software that can analyse damage to every skin and muscle cell and run a database search for matches. He’s been to the mortuary before to look at a wound on a case a while back. Talk me through this again, all you have found.’

  Cleo showed him the paperwork and photographs and explained what she had identified, with the potential link between the two murders.

  ‘Darling, this is brilliant. You could be on to something here. I’ll have the team looking at it first thing tomorrow. If the doctor can positively link the injuries this could be a breakthrough!’

  She smiled. ‘Good. Now we’ve solved that, how about next weekend, regardless of work, we take Noah to the petting zoo at Middle Farm? He’d love that – and it would do us both some good to at least have an afternoon out together as a family.’ She nestled her chin in her hands, her eyes looking up at him.

  ‘Love your face!’ he said.

  ‘I love yours too. I don’t get to see enough of it. So?’

  ‘You’re right, let’s do that. It’s a plan.’

  She patted her tummy. ‘Bump agrees.’

  ‘He or she?’

  Cleo shrugged. ‘We don’t know, do we?’

  ‘Nope.’ He thought for a moment. ‘But we have that envelope the obstetrician gave us after the last scan. Would you like to know?’

  ‘Would you?’

  He hesitated.

  ‘It would help us to know, to choose the right colours for the baby’s bedroom, wouldn’t it? Shall we?’

  He grinned. ‘It’s in a drawer in my desk. Do you care whether it’s a boy or a girl?’

  ‘We’ll love her or him just as much. I don’t care at all. Do you care?’

  Roy Grace smiled back at his wife. ‘I’ll go get it, but I’m the same as you, I don’t care.’

  67

  Sunday, 3 November

  Stuart Piper cared.

  In truth, he cared far more for the past than the present. You had to live in the now, you were trapped in that, he knew. But the present was a conveyor belt that was forever tipping you off its edge, unprepared, into an uncharted future. You could only get perspective by looking at the past and – unlike the present and the future – if you had the luxury to choose, you could decide where in the past you wanted to be.

  Piper had just that luxury of choice. And this Sunday night he spent surrounded by the past in his favourite room, the Hidden Salon. It was windowless and paintings hung on all four walls. Soft light glowed from the crystal chandeliers suspended from the ceiling, and subtle light from the lamps over each picture. The log fire blazing in the hearth made it as warm as the womb. Real candles burning in two candelabras on the table in front of him completed the ambience he loved so much.

  In the sixteenth century, Europe was under the spiritual leadership of the Roman Catholic Church. Religious beliefs were a matter of life and death. When Henry VIII sought an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, who had failed to give him a male heir, the Pope refused. Henry responded by splitting from the Catholic Church and founding the Church of England. After his death, his son, Edward VI, during his brief reign, helped turn England further into a Protestant nation.

  Edward was succeeded by his sister, Mary, who did an immediate reversal, turning England back into a Catholic state. Anyone who refused to give up their Protestant beliefs was burned at the stake, earning the Queen the soubriquet Bloody Mary. Subsequently, her sister, Queen Elizabeth, who wanted a strong, independent England with its own religion and trade and foreign policy, re-established the Church of England. She made it high treason for a Catholic priest to even enter England, and anyone found aiding or abetting a Catholic priest faced torture and death.

  Priest hunters were established to locate any such Catholic priests. Hiding places, known as priests’ holes, became commonplace. Sometimes, in smaller houses, these were little more than cubby-holes behind fireplaces, in attics and in cellars. But in grander Tudor houses, such as the one Piper owned, there was often fine accommodation behind false walls. Like this salon, concealed behind a secret door in the library.

  Some collectors bought art for investment. Others to display their wealth. Both kinds of people, Piper despised. The art on his walls was there because he loved it, much of it representing a world he wished he could have lived in. At least through these paintings he could achieve some of that, albeit vicariously.

  This Hidden Salon was where he loved to spend his evenings. Oftentimes thinking about who might once have been concealed here. Catholic priests. Outcasts, like himself.

  Cohiba cigar in one hand, 1967 Hine single cask cognac in the balloon in the other, he loved to lounge back, in his crimson smoking jacket, on one of the three ornately embroidered – and original – Louis Quatorze sofas arranged around the Queen Anne coffee table, surrounded by the paintings on the wall that brought him the most happiness of all the art in his vast collection.

  All of these in this room were by French artists of the fête galante period.

  He found such tranquillity in these works in particular. They took him back to a place long before he’d had his face irreparably smashed and where his bitterness and anger had been ignited. Long before the humiliation of his parents when he’d come out, at eighteen, and they’d pretty much disowned him from that point. They could never accept his sexuality.

  These paintings were from a point in history where hedonism rocked and anything went. These elegant people, in their fine clothes, in such beautiful settings. Where lovers forever stared into each other’s eyes; where musical instruments were played with abandon; where breasts were proudly and shamelessly bared; where life was eternally bacchanalian and sublime. A world where the trees were forever dappled by a sun that never set. Where time was suspended on a state of permanent elegance and joie de vivre.

  Like the Keats poem of the two lovers frozen forever on a Grecian urn, all these characters on his walls lived eternal gilded lives inside their gilded frames. They gave the delicious lie, Piper thought, that the past was somehow a less dark and murderous place than the present.

  And in this room, with everything old or vintage, including his cigar and Patek Philippe watch – although, at sixty years old, that pretty much counted as modern in this environment – the only real intrusion of the modern day was the presence of the three mobile phones laid out on the table in front of him.

  Unless anger counted as an intrusion, too.

  And Piper was feeling anger tonight. He didn’t like being screwed over, and someone was doing just that, royally. Instead of indulging his normal Sunday evening pastime of looking at one of these paintings, studying the characters, trying to imagine their lives, and visualizing himself there, he was staring at a blank piece of wall. Onyx-coloured. A blank space where there should have been a painting hanging tonight.

  Spring. Autumn. Winter. Those three pictures by Jean-Honoré Fragonard were there, with the glaring gap of the missing Summer between them. A painting that right now he was being cheated out of by a clever-dick forger.

  He took a deep sip of his drink and puffed hard on his cigar to bring it back to life, then blew a series of smoke rings at the ceiling. He always blew smoke rings when he was angry, to calm himself down. Watching their perfect grey-blue circles rise upwards and slowly dispersing. Then he allowed his mind to reflect on how he’d acquired these first three of the Four Seasons.