‘He’s a Jehovah’s Witness,’ Hegarty said. ‘Very nice man. He could save your soul, and your mates’.’

  ‘Don’t push me.’

  ‘I don’t need to push you, you’re already on the edge of the cliff. That nervous twitch in your eyes is a dead giveaway. Oh, and further bad news, he and his son, who is probably around the front at the moment, will be coming inside in a few minutes, using the key we leave in the shed.’

  ‘You tell them both to go away and come back some other time.’

  ‘I’m not doing that,’ Hegarty said, emboldened now as he saw the menace in Kilgore’s face turn to concern. ‘They are very busy and I need clear windows. We get a lot of salt off the sea – hence the name of this place, Saltdean.’

  ‘You are starting to really piss me off, Mr Hegarty.’

  ‘Not half as much as you are pissing my wife and me off.’

  An instant later the doorbell rang.

  ‘You do not answer it,’ Kilgore said.

  Hegarty smiled. ‘Not a problem, I don’t need to.’

  A young male voice called out from upstairs. ‘Mr Hegarty, Mrs Hegarty, it’s Charlie and Joey, just come in to do the windows!’

  73

  Monday, 4 November

  ‘I’d advise you untie us pretty quickly, Mr Kilgore,’ Hegarty said quietly. ‘It won’t look too good. And I’d also advise you to put your piece away. Charlie up there is a black-belt mixed martial arts fighter, and if I ask him nicely, he’ll shove that gun so far down your throat you’ll need an enema to get it back.’

  ‘You’re not in any position to threaten me, Mr Hegarty.’

  ‘Actually, I am, and you know that.’

  ‘Shall I start upstairs, Mr and Mrs Hegarty?’ the window cleaner called down.

  Kilgore, momentarily panic-stricken, told his two heavies not to react.

  ‘Great, thanks, Charlie,’ Hegarty called out. ‘Tea with three lumps?’

  ‘Top man!’ the reply came.

  ‘Tell him to get lost,’ Kilgore demanded, but his voice had lost its authority. He stepped back, blocking the view of the window cleaner outside.

  ‘You tell him,’ Hegarty retorted.

  Kilgore frowned, looking thrown and uncertain what to do next, the gun jigging up and down. Then he said quietly to the twins, ‘Untie them.’ Levelling the gun first at Hegarty then Natalie, he retreated to the bottom of the staircase.

  As the twins removed the bonds around the couple, and the gag from Natalie’s mouth, Kilgore announced quietly, ‘Here’s what we’re gonna do, Mr and Mrs Hegarty. We’re all going to sit calmly around your kitchen table, like we’re having a real friendly meeting, until these two jokers have done their stuff and gone away.’

  Still covered by the gun, both Hegartys shook some blood back into their arms, then complied. Natalie exchanged a nervous glance with her husband, sitting next to her. The hired muscle perched opposite and Kilgore took the head of the table, holding his gun low, out of sight. Addressing the couple, Kilgore said, ‘If either of you attempt to call for help, I’ll shoot you both and the window cleaners, I promise.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Hegarty said.

  ‘Darling,’ Natalie cautioned her husband.

  Hegarty grinned at Kilgore. ‘Four dead bodies? Really? You and these apes don’t want to spend the rest of your lives in prison, do you?’

  ‘I mean what I said, Hegarty.’

  ‘You do, so go ahead, shoot me.’ He stared at the American hard in the eyes. ‘Might be wiser to talk, don’t you think?’ He stood up.

  ‘Sit down,’ Kilgore said.

  ‘I have to make our window cleaners their tea. For Charlie upstairs and Joey outside.’

  ‘SIT!’ he snapped.

  Rambo growled at Kilgore, who glared down at the dogs then up at the forger. ‘I never took you for being a comedian, Mr Hegarty.’

  ‘And I never took you for being a man without a plan, Mr Kilgore,’ he said, calmly walking over to the kettle and switching it on.

  The twins stood, but Kilgore snapped a hand at them, indicating them to remain seated.

  A Banksy copy was mounted on the wall above the cupboards over the worktop. It depicted two helmeted male police officers embracing passionately and snogging.

  Kilgore pointed at it. ‘That does not do anything for me.’

  ‘Really? Banksy is one of the greatest modern artists of our time,’ Hegarty said, taking two mugs from the cupboard and setting them down on the worktop.

  ‘There are no greatest artists of our time. Good art stopped in the nineteenth century,’ Kilgore said.

  Hegarty looked at him. ‘And there I was thinking you were an art connoisseur.’ He dropped a teabag into each mug.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Natalie butted in. ‘Could we not discuss your issue in a calm and sensible manner, Mr Kilgore? I’m needed on duty, where we are already short-staffed.’

  As the kettle started to come to the boil, Kilgore looked at her. ‘It’s very simple, Mrs Hegarty. On behalf of my employer, I commissioned your husband to paint a copy of a Fragonard for which he was paid well. I believe he has the original painting and I want it. All he has to do is give us the original, Summer, and we’ll be out of here.’ He nodded at Hegarty. ‘I’d be prepared to say, nice try and let it rest at that. How fair does that sound?’

  ‘My husband is not a liar,’ Natalie said firmly.

  Pouring water into the mugs, Hegarty shook his head. He counted out sugar lumps from a bowl, dropped some into each mug then turned. ‘Mr Kilgore, do you really think if I cheated my customers I would have survived this long in business? You asked me to paint a copy of Fragonard’s Summer. I obligingly made the quality of copy you requested – one that would stand up to visual inspection, but not a forensic one. And last week, having done the job, I gave it to you. Sure, I made an extra copy for myself, as I’ve already explained. You can tell from the back easily enough – there are none of the markings you’d expect to find on a painting of that age.’ He shrugged.

  ‘What exactly are you saying, Mr Hegarty?’ Kilgore asked.

  ‘Let me explain some background, which you are very clearly unaware of. Several weeks ago I was contacted by Mr Harold Kipling, who did some building work here for us a couple of years ago. He told me he’d bought a painting in a car boot sale, which he believed might possibly be an original Fragonard – Summer – part of the artist’s long-lost Four Seasons paintings. He asked me if I could make a copy which he could hang on a wall in his home, saying he wanted to put the original into a secure storage unit for safe keeping until he could establish whether it was an original or not.’ Noting the surprise on Kilgore’s face, he went on. ‘I duly made a copy for him and gave him the copy plus his original back and kept my cabbage. As I’ve just told you, Mr Kilgore, what would be the point in trying to hang on to the original, which would be unsellable? My business is copying famous paintings, and forging originals. I’m not in the business of stealing art.’

  ‘You know fine well that is bullshit, Mr Hegarty. There are plenty of collectors around the world, in Russia and China among other countries, who pay big money for famous works of art regardless of their provenance.’

  The kettle came to the boil and Hegarty filled each of the mugs, then put the kettle down, allowing the tea to steep. ‘Not my scene, Mr Kilgore.’

  Kilgore looked like he was about to explode. ‘You must have known it was your own goddamn copy that we took from the Kiplings’ house. Why the hell didn’t you say something? You knew why we wanted the copy.’

  Ignoring Natalie’s anxious glance, Hegarty pulled the teabags out of the mugs, opened the fridge, removed a carton of milk, poured out two measures into each of the mugs, then popped a teaspoon from the drying rack into each.

  ‘Mr Kilgore, I never question the motives of my clients. I make copies of paintings to order, that’s a big part of how I earn my living.’ He calmly opened a cupboard door, removed a pack of Jammy Dodger biscuits and emptied some onto a plate. Scooping up the two mugs with one hand, he picked up the plate with the other and headed towards the staircase. ‘Excuse me,’ he said.

  Too discombobulated to respond, the American stepped aside.

  As he walked out of the room, Hegarty called, ‘If you want to threaten anyone, then go and threaten Mr and Mrs Kipling. We saw them on Antiques Roadshow, just like you or your employer did. That’s where I would start, if you’re after the original. You’re barking up the wrong tree by coming here.’ He hesitated on the third step and went, ‘GRRR, WOOF WOOF!’

  Rambo and Rocky immediately responded by barking back.

  ‘I don’t think they like you and your buddies, Mr Kilgore. Let me give you some advice: always trust the instincts of animals.’

  ‘Why the hell didn’t you tell me this about Kipling in the first place?’ Kilgore demanded, his voice close to a snarl, as Hegarty came back into the room. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  He smiled. ‘Because you never asked.’

  74

  Monday, 4 November

  ‘Never asked?’ Stuart Piper exploded. ‘Because you never fucking asked? We’re going to fix that bastard good and proper for this. I’ll send the boys over. He’ll have his arms and fingers broken so badly he’ll never be able to pick up a brush again.’

  Robert Kilgore had been brought up by parents with proper manners. His father, a lecturer in fine arts at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Atlanta, Georgia, and his mother, who had lectured on the history of art at the same college until she’d stopped to raise her large family, of which Kilgore was the fifth child, had instilled values of morality and decency into all their children.

  Despite the fact that he had been employed for the past fifteen years by a criminal, Robert Kilgore had justified this, by his own moral compass, because he was engaged in the work of recovering fabulous works of art by the great masters of the fête galante period, which he particularly loved. Nothing thrilled him more than hunting down and securing their works. But as he grew older, he was increasingly concerned that his employer, who he had once thought shared his values of preserving these works for posterity, was far shallower than he’d assumed. He was beginning, increasingly, to feel conned. Used. That Stuart Piper did not really want all these fine paintings for any altruistic purpose, but purely to satisfy his own massive ego.

  Nevertheless, seated in Piper’s study, he kept his calm. Lighting yet another cigarette, he said, ‘It seems like we’ve been fooled by the sheer quality of Hegarty’s work.’

  ‘We?’ Piper queried acidly, tapping the end of his cigar in a large grey ashtray, with the name Courvoisier emblazoned in gold lettering along the side. ‘There’s no we about this, Bobby. I pay you a big salary and you can’t tell the difference between an original and a fake?’

  ‘Not when it comes to an artist of Hegarty’s skills, no, sir, I sometimes cannot. Not without a lot of forensic tests. But what we do know now is that the original is with Mr and Mrs Kipling, and that’s a real positive.’

  ‘Is it? They turned down our last offer for the picture. A very generous offer, considering we had no evidence that it is an original,’ Piper reminded him. ‘Now word on the street is that it is the original. Are you hearing that?’

  Kilgore nodded. ‘I am, yes.’

  ‘So, any day, those fuckwit Kiplings are likely to hand it to an auction house. Sotheby’s or Bonhams or Christie’s or Phillips, right?’

  ‘We don’t know that for sure,’ Kilgore said.

  ‘They want money.’ Piper, behind his desk, tapped a sheaf of papers, with a bunch of blown-up photographs clipped to them. ‘What I have here are my notes from the report Archie Goff gave us when he first went into the Kiplings’ house. We asked him to photograph any financial documents he could find, right?’

  ‘We did,’ Kilgore agreed.

  ‘We figured from these statements that the amount we offered, fifty thousand pounds, would get the Kiplings interested – and they threw it back in our faces.’

  ‘Maybe we should have gone higher?’ Kilgore suggested.

  ‘I’ve never paid over the odds in my life, Bobby.’ There was a sneer in his voice that did not appear on his face. ‘And I’m not going to now. Archie Goff did a better job for us than we realized.’ He slid out some of the close-ups of bank statements, and held them up, one at a time.

  Kilgore dug his half-frame spectacles from his pocket and pulled them on, although he had already studied all of these statements some while back. ‘He did do a good job, sir,’ he agreed. ‘It enabled us to figure out that the Kiplings’ finances could be better.’

  Kilgore picked up one and studied it. In a corner of the picture, near the bank statement, was the partial image of a small yellow box, marked FREESTYLE LIBRE 2. FLASH GLUCOSE MONITORING SYSTEM. SENSOR. He looked at his boss and frowned.

  ‘Look at the other one, Bobby.’

  It was a photograph of a paper bag bearing a chemist’s logo. On the side was stuck a prescription label, marked TOM KIPLING. Kilgore frowned again. ‘This is what, exactly?’

  ‘A diabetes monitor,’ Piper said. ‘I know all about it because Frank’s a Type-1 diabetic.’ Frank was his head gardener. ‘It’s a smart bit of kit – he wears a Libre sensor on his arm and monitors his blood-sugar levels through it via an app on his phone. It tells him if his sugar levels are too low or too high. If they drop too much he can pass out and if he doesn’t get sugar, die in a matter of hours. Similarly, if his sugar levels get too high and he doesn’t inject enough insulin, he can go into a coma, and again die in a matter of hours. The Kiplings’ kid is evidently, from this, a Type-1 diabetic.’

  ‘And you are saying what, exactly, sir?’ Kilgore asked.

  ‘I think you know exactly what I’m saying, Bobby.’ His lips widened a fraction into what, in Piper’s almost frozen face, Kilgore had long ago learned to interpret as a smile. ‘And what I’m also saying is that we need to move fast. This is our chance, and I’m coming up with a plan.’

  75

  Monday, 4 November

  Daniel Hegarty, in his paint-spattered smock, stepped back from his easel, which he had set up in the bright living room. It was where he liked to work on fine days, the dogs curled up asleep close by. He was putting the finishing touches to the Lowry painting he’d been commissioned to do by a radio celebrity.

  Nice work, five thousand quid for something that had taken him just three days. Half a dozen spindly bookies, each sporting a trilby at a jaunty angle, stood on their stools beside their boards displaying betting odds, bagmen to their right, while racegoers in their finery paraded in front of them.

  It had been a very long morning, after the unwelcome intrusion earlier, but he smiled with some satisfaction looking out across the Saltdean vista, which he could now see through sparkling windows. And thanks to the window cleaners, Kilgore and his men had been shown a clean pair of heels.

  But he was deeply upset about the trauma Natalie had been put through, and she would no doubt have a few choice words about his promise to her of going straight, when she returned from her shift with the Samaritans. But maybe she’d appreciate the situation when he told her what the truth really was. He grinned again at the knowledge. His little guilty secret. Hegarty one, Kilgore nil!

  He was feeling hungry, and as he now needed to leave the painting for an hour, while the cocktail of chemicals he’d just brushed on did their work in ageing the picture, it was a good time for lunch. He would make himself a ham and tomato sandwich on sourdough, using some of the delicious Serrano ham he’d bought from a local deli, and maybe a small beer to steady his nerves, and inspire him to dash off a few convincing saleroom marks on the rear of the canvas this afternoon.

  The doorbell rang. Instantly the dogs raced up the stairs in a tornado of yapping. He frowned, not expecting anyone. Probably a new book he had ordered from Amazon to help him with a very lucrative fresh commission, copying a Dante Gabriel Rossetti painting for a rogue middleman he’d known for years, Ron Patchouli, as slippery as the oil but less fragrant.

  The fixer, who had handed him the picture along with a down-payment of £10,000 in cash, had told him the copy was for a wealthy Saudi client who loved the English poet and artist’s work. Hegarty knew the painting, it was famous, considered one of Rossetti’s finest works, and formed part of a collection in a Midlands stately home. ‘Is this hot?’ he’d asked him dubiously.

  ‘Nah,’ Patchouli had replied brazenly. ‘We’ve only borrowed it!’

  Rocky and Rambo raced ahead of him up the stairs and began jumping up and down against the front door. Warily, he peered through the spyhole, in case it was Kilgore and his boys, and saw two people standing outside, a portly man in a suit and a smartly dressed woman beside him. Engaging the safety chain, he opened the door a crack, and above the yapping of his dogs asked, ‘May I help you?’

  ‘Mr Daniel Hegarty?’ asked the female with a Belfast accent.

  ‘Who are you?’

  The man held up a warrant card. ‘Detective Sergeant Potting and Detective Constable Wilde from the Surrey and Sussex Major Crime Team. Could we have a word with you, sir?’

  ‘Is this about the body?’

  ‘We won’t take up too much of your time, sir,’ the female officer said pleasantly. ‘We appreciate you’ve probably had your fill of police around here in the past twenty-four hours.’

  Unhooking the chain and grappling with the dogs at the same time, Hegarty let them in, closing the door quickly to keep the dogs safe. Immediately the female detective kneeled and began making a fuss over both of them, while her male colleague stood looking at them warily.

  ‘Do they bite?’ Potting asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ Hegarty replied. ‘All dogs bite, that’s how they eat. But it’s all right, they’ve already had a whole postman today, so they’re not hungry.’

  As he led them through, Hegarty heard a voice and a crackle of static behind him, then indicated for the detectives to sit at the table at which he and Natalie had, just a few hours earlier, been held captive by Kilgore.