And another pint of Harvey’s now, as he sat in the conservatory of his home, with the patio doors wide open, the Sports section of The Sunday Times and a mail order catalogue on his lap, was helping his mood even further still. He’d sort out Vine Cottage, maybe the cost would be less than he feared – he’d figure something. He took another sip of beer and turned his attention away from the catalogue back to the television. South Africa were giving India a trouncing at cricket. That, combined with the smell of burning charcoal on the barbecue outside, and the sunlight streaking in, was improving his spirits even further.

  He looked lovingly at their son, lounging at the other end of the sofa, orange headphones clamped over the fourteen-year-old’s ears as always, head tilted down towards his phone, Jinx, their rescue cat, snuggled on his lap. Tom was dressed in a Seagulls T-shirt, Nike skinny tracksuit bottoms and immaculate white Air Force 1 trainers, which he scrubbed clean obsessively, almost every day – pretty much the only thing he did ever clean. The glass of cider they now allowed him as a Sunday treat sat on the coffee table in front of him, dangerously close to being knocked over by his clumsy, gangly legs alongside it. With his eyes half closed it was hard to tell, as it usually was these days, whether Tom was looking at his phone or was in a trance. And ever since the big scare, just over two years ago, both Harry and Freya always kept a close watch on him.

  On his twelfth birthday they’d arranged for Tom and a dozen school friends to have an afternoon at the go-kart track at Albourne, for racing followed by pizzas and cake. But the following morning when Harry was at work, Freya had been unable to rouse Tom to drive him to school. For some dreadful moments of panic, she actually thought he was dead. Then she’d calmed enough to remember her first aid training and checked his pulse. Just a faint pulse she thought – hoped – prayed – and dialled 999, barely able to speak when the call handler answered. Then a long, agonizing wait for an ambulance.

  Later the A&E consultant had told them, gravely, that Tom had been diagnosed as Type-1 diabetic. He had gone into a coma and if he’d been left for just a few more hours, he would almost certainly have died.

  From that moment, Freya had become obsessed with Tom’s sugar levels, to the point where Harry sometimes felt she was mollycoddling him. But he understood. Tom was their miracle baby, who had come along after over eleven years of their trying for one, including numerous very expensive and failed attempts at IVF. Finally, when they’d given up on all avenues and instead had decided to look at adopting, Freya fell pregnant.

  The boy had always been particularly precious to both of them, as Harry guessed all kids were to their parents, but these past two years since his diagnosis, she worried constantly, especially as Tom resented that his diagnosis meant he wasn’t supposed to eat the kind of treats all his friends enjoyed. While he was good much of the time, he regularly had major lapses, bingeing on chips, chocolate and soft drinks, sending his sugar levels into orbit.

  Harry and Freya had had long debates over which school he should attend. Freya had wanted Tom at her own school, where she could keep an eye on him, and Harry had resisted vigorously, feeling that being the son of the deputy head could have a stifling effect on him.

  But now she had an even better way of keeping an eye on Tom, via an app on her phone. Tom wore a circular Libre patch on his arm which monitored his blood-sugar levels around the clock via a tiny needle permanently inserted in his skin beneath the patch, which was changed every two weeks. If the levels went too low or too high, an alarm pinged on both his phone and her own.

  Freya was lying on the sofa opposite them, sipping a glass of rosé and reading through a thick pile of paperwork from her school. She wrinkled her nose a couple of times, sniffed, frowned, then focused on her reading again.

  On the screen the Indian batsman blocked a fast ball and that was the end of the over. Harry jumped up, taking the opportunity to check on the barbecue. Hopefully the weather would stay fine, and they’d eat outside on the deck. The garden, with its hot tub, miniature plastic dinosaur, slide and swing – which Tom had long ago stopped using – immaculate lawn and lush flower beds and shrubs, was Freya’s pride and joy.

  Nearly ready. A row of bowls he’d prepared earlier sat on the table beside the Weber. King prawns, salmon steaks, No Bull vegan burgers, corn on the cob, and skewers of courgettes, red peppers and paneer. Sweet potatoes were baking in the oven.

  He returned to the sofa and quickly glanced at a few more pages of the catalogue. Harry loved household gadgets and was forever buying them from the inserts that regularly arrived with the papers, much to Freya’s amusement. His most recent purchase had been a tool to slice carrots into a floral spray, and it had done an effective job on his forefinger an hour ago, as the antiseptic cream and bandage she had patiently applied to his throbbing finger reminded him. Another gadget now caught his eye and he held it up to Freya.

  ‘What’s that? It looks like some medieval torture instrument,’ she said.

  ‘It’s really clever – long-reach toenail scissors!’

  She was about to reply when she was interrupted by two sharp pings, almost instantaneous, one from Tom’s phone, the other from hers. She looked down immediately and saw a high glucose alert on her monitoring app. It was reading 28.

  She jumped up and went over to Tom who, with his headphones on, had been oblivious to the sound. She prised one away from his ear and he looked up at her, irritated. ‘Mum!’

  ‘Your sugar’s high, darling,’ she said. ‘Have you been eating chocolate or ice cream or something?’

  ‘Just Haribos,’ he mumbled. ‘Oh, yeah, and a caramel Magnum.’

  ‘Just Haribos? You know how much sugar is in them?’ she said. ‘And the ice cream?’

  He shrugged. ‘Whatever.’ He looked back down at the game he was playing.

  ‘You need to give yourself a jab,’ she insisted.

  ‘OK, I will.’

  ‘Now!’

  He glared at her, but then, trying not to disturb Jinx, reluctantly dug in his pocket for his insulin pen and clicked out a measure. She felt sorry for him. Tom was a kind person, and life had dealt him a crap hand by giving him this disease at such a young age. She used to binge on all the sweet treats he now craved and knew how she’d have felt if she’d been denied them.

  As she settled back down on the sofa, she noticed again a smell that had bothered her earlier. She sniffed hard. ‘Harry, can you smell something burning?’

  ‘The barbecue, darling.’

  She frowned. ‘It’s not a barbecue smell.’

  Like a fish momentarily surfacing from the ocean depths, Tom raised his head and sniffed, then returned to the safety of the depths.

  Without looking away from the television, as the Indian batsman hit a ball dangerously high in the air, Harry sniffed, too. The South African fielder dropped the easy catch, and the ball rolled towards the boundary. He sniffed again. Freya was right. There was a different, acrid smell, one he recognized instantly as the smell of burning paint.

  He looked around, puzzled. Was it a light fitting or some other electrical problem? It was getting stronger. Coming from inside the conservatory.

  Then, yelling, ‘Shit, shit, shit!’ he ran to the painting, the one he’d bought at the car boot sale and had left face out towards the glass side of the room. The south-west-facing side.

  A thin, grey stream of smoke was curling up from that side.

  He grabbed the frame, lifted it up, blowing frantically at the centre of the old crone’s face, where the smoke was rising from a bulging blister.

  Freya, who had followed him, watched him in horror as he ran through into the kitchen with the painting and over to the sink where he grabbed the spray mixer tap off its cradle, squeezed the lever and directed the fierce jet at the woman’s face. After a few seconds the smoke subsided and stopped, as water ran down the picture.

  Leaving it perched on the draining board, he went back into the hallway, momentarily baffled. After some moments Freya, looking at the window with the direct sunlight streaming in, and then at the shelf above the low sill where they lined up pots of cacti and a few other ornaments, realized what had happened.

  She lifted up the offending article, a clear glass globe paperweight. ‘This is what caused it.’

  ‘Oh God, yes, it is!’ he said, smiling with relief. ‘Do any of your kids at school ever use a magnifying glass to refract the sun’s rays and burn holes in pieces of paper? We used to do that all the time at school, in summer.’

  She shook her head. ‘No, we don’t, things have tightened up since we were at school, sadly!’

  ‘What, you don’t teach them basic physics?’

  ‘Yeah, but we leave out the bit about how to burn the school down.’

  ‘When I was in the boy scouts, we used to do that to light camp fires. And we did it to piss off teachers! Don’t you remember old Mr Leask?’

  ‘The geography teacher?’

  ‘Yep! No one liked him. We used to take magnifying glasses into his lessons and then, when he was sitting up at his desk, we’d try to set his things on fire by all focusing our magnifying glasses on his jacket!’

  ‘I didn’t realize I’d married a monster.’

  He grinned. ‘It would really annoy him and make him yell at us!’

  Harry had been expecting her to smile at this, but she didn’t. Instead, she was looking at him with a horrified expression. ‘I can’t believe you did that,’ she said. ‘You could have hurt him.’

  Harry shrugged. ‘Yep, well, we were just stupid kids, we didn’t think about consequences.’

  Freya nodded thoughtfully. ‘Actually, remember my old friend Rachel?’

  ‘Vaguely.’

  ‘She spent a couple of years in Israel, living with a family. She told me they used to draw the curtains in the daytime to prevent the bright sun rays from refracting through glass objects and causing a fire.’

  ‘That’s exactly what’s just happened.’

  ‘Jesus, Harry, this is scary. Can you imagine if we’d been out today? The house could have burned down.’

  He put the paperweight down on the island unit, shrugged again and went back to the kitchen. He checked the picture wasn’t still burning before dabbing it dry with a tea towel. And stared at the blistered centre of the woman’s face. He poked the blackened bulge tentatively with his forefinger, checking it wasn’t still hot, and flakes of it fell away. He knocked away the rest of the fist-sized bulge, then stood still in amazement.

  ‘Oh my God,’ he said. ‘Look at this. Look, look! There’s something underneath. Another painting!’

  11

  Sunday, 22 September

  ‘What do you mean?’ Freya said, standing a short distance back. ‘Something underneath? Like a palimpsest?’

  Harry was beaming with excitement. ‘A what?’

  ‘A palimpsest – it’s when you have a piece of paper – or parchment – with writing on, that’s overwritten something else that was there before. But where if you look closely, you can see the original text beneath – or an impression of it.’

  ‘Exactly – but in this case in paint. Look at the centre of the woman’s face.’

  She stared hard. At the jagged, roughly circular gap inside the blackened edges, at the space where most of the face had been. Replacing it was an exquisitely detailed painting of part of a tree, part of a woman’s arm, and what looked like sunlit water beyond. After some moments she said, ‘You’re right, there is something underneath. Very definitely.’

  ‘What if it’s a long-lost old master?’

  She gave him a reproachful look. ‘Really? In a car boot sale?’

  ‘It does happen, we’ve seen it on Antiques Roadshow, right?’

  ‘We’ve also seen on Fake or Fortune? where people have bought what they thought was an old master, and which turned out to be a fake,’ she said. ‘Someone probably painted over it because it was a rubbish picture.’

  He carried the painting out into the darkness of the hallway, laid it against the bottom of the staircase, safely away from light, then hurried upstairs to his den, grabbed his laptop and went back down into the conservatory. He sat on the sofa, flipped open the lid and began tapping the keys.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Freya asked.

  ‘Googling,’ he replied. ‘I’m looking up solvents that could dissolve a surface painting.’

  ‘To reveal whatever’s underneath?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  She looked at him dubiously. ‘My love, you’re a house builder, not a picture expert. You don’t want to risk damaging what’s underneath – on the one in a million chance there is something of value. If you’re not careful you’ll dissolve what’s underneath, too. You’d be better off looking up picture restorers. Talk to a professional. Maybe you should take it to an expert, to see what they think.’

  He cocked his head quizzically. ‘So, you actually believe there might be something of value, do you?’

  She shook her head. ‘One in a million is what I said.’

  ‘Yep, well, right now I’ll take those odds.’

  She gave him a strange look. ‘Something I should know about?’

  ‘No – I – you know – was just thinking wouldn’t it be amazing if we found we had something of real value. It does happen.’

  ‘Who was that guy you did the extension for a couple of years ago? The famous art forger – in Rottingdean?’

  ‘Saltdean,’ he replied.

  ‘What was his name – Daniel something?’

  Harry nodded. ‘Hegarty. Daniel Hegarty.’

  ‘That’s it. He copied all kinds of artists, didn’t he?’

  ‘Yeah, he’s really good.’ Harry nodded. ‘These days he makes good money by faking old paintings but signing them himself – his DH signature now has kudos – he has quite a celebrity clientele.’

  ‘So, he’d probably know how to remove a surface painting, don’t you think? Would he tell you?’

  ‘Brilliant idea!’ Cricket forgotten as well as the barbecue, he pulled up his contacts list on his phone. ‘I’ll bell him.’

  Ten minutes later, ending the call to a very chatty Hegarty, Harry beamed at his wife. ‘He’s told me exactly what to do – acetone and cotton buds! He says it’ll dissolve anything relatively recent, but if the painting beneath is genuinely old, it will be so hardened the acetone won’t touch it. He said to do it slowly, bit by bit.’

  He shot a glance at Tom who, oblivious to the excitement, continued to lie on the sofa, the world around him blotted out by his headphones. Whether he was watching the cricket or simply staring at the back of his own eyeballs, Harry had no idea.

  ‘Where can you get acetone from?’ he asked.

  She smiled. ‘Simples – my dressing table. Nail varnish remover.’

  12

  Tuesday, 24 September

  The crow was old, not long for this world. Like himself. Crows were lucky, Archie Goff reflected; their hair didn’t turn grey the way his had long ago – it was now nearly white. Not that he was vain or had much to be vain about, with his ageing, beat-up face. Isabella told him affectionately he looked like a scarecrow that had been left out in too many storms.

  But at least, unlike this bird, his time wasn’t up, not just yet. Not, please God, for a while yet.

  The words he’d read last time he was in prison came to mind. The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.

  And he had a big promise to keep. To his daughter, to pay for her studies through veterinary college. Ironic, Archie Goff reflected, looking down at the bird sitting, almost resigned, in a trap, that Kayleigh was studying to learn how to keep animals alive and he was paying for it by killing birds. But only crows. Nasty creatures that murdered chicks and ducklings. They were both bullies and thieves. But hey, who was he to moralize?

  That was the thought he held, bending his gangly, increasingly creaky frame down, on the edge of the woods, dark and deep, as he removed the creature from the trap he’d baited the day before. It barely resisted as he placed it in the cardboard box, the top punched with air holes. There was food in the box, some strips of chicken, and a foil tray of water. Then he placed it in the bottom of his large sack, alongside the brick. ‘Enjoy your last supper, pal,’ he said, feeling sorry for the creature. He couldn’t help it. He didn’t really like killing anything. But needs must.

  There had never been a shortage of crows and never a shortage of country houses to burgle in these past forty-five years, to supply him with a living. Mostly a good one but sometimes less so. But all careers had their ups and downs, didn’t they?

  His times in prisons had been the downs, when he’d missed out on many of the important years when his kids were growing up, and when all three of his marriages had fallen apart. Prison itself was OK: the electricity was paid for, there was television in the cells and the grub was all right. And he had his mates, especially on those stretches when he was fortunate enough to be sent to his second home, as he jokingly called it, the local Sussex big house, Lewes Prison.

  But now Archie was tired of the game. He wanted to settle down with his new love, beautiful Isabella from Cape Town, a lab technician whose hobby was belly dancing. She genuinely loved him, despite knowing his background, and he was crazy about her.

  All he needed was a couple of good jobs. Maybe just one, if tonight panned out the way he hoped. And he was long enough in the tooth to know how not to get caught, these days.

  Hope Manor.

  Archie smiled. There was the sign right there in the name!

  He checked his watch. Coming up to 4 p.m. It would be a long wait for darkness, but he didn’t mind, he loved being in the woods, surrounded by nature and all the beautiful trees, many of which had been around long before he’d been born and would still be here decades, maybe even centuries, after he was gone. He was happy to wait, he had time.

  As the Irishman he’d once shared a cell with told him, When the Good Lord made time, he made plenty of the stuff.