Picture you dead, p.22
Picture You Dead, page 22
A uniformed officer stood steadfast behind another line of blue and white crime scene tape. A motionless male human shape sprawled on the pavement behind her, between the grass verge and a low brick wall that protected the car port of the long, low house beyond that was sunk down below street level. A large off-roader was parked on the far side of the wall, obscuring the view of the front door area.
On the outside of the tape a bewildered-looking man, with gelled silver hair, was in conversation with a police officer. Three officers stood nearby. One he recognized as Detective Sergeant Sally Walker, the other two, a male and a female officer, he didn’t know.
No press, so far, but that wouldn’t last long. He wouldn’t be surprised to see Glenn’s fiancée, Siobhan, arrive any minute – as the Argus’s senior crime reporter, she was normally the first of the press pack at any scene. He parked and approached the group.
‘Good morning, sir,’ DS Walker said. She was tall, fair-haired and all smiles despite the seriousness of the situation.
‘What do we have?’ Grace asked.
She indicated the silver-haired man, who looked, in Grace’s view, very traumatized – and he wasn’t surprised. Finding a dead body on your doorstep was rarely going to be the best start to anyone’s day.
‘This is Mr Hegarty, who lives at the house, number 20, who called it in. He was about to walk his dogs when he came across the body.’
Hegarty, Grace thought. Interesting. Then out of the corner of his eye, he saw the youthful-looking figure of Crime Scene Manager Chris Gee, in full protective clothing, climb out of the CSI van.
Grace hurried back to his car, opened his go-bag in the boot and wormed into a hooded protective suit and then pulled on overshoes and gloves. He greeted Gee, then both of them signed the crime scene log, ducked under the tape and walked towards the body.
Grace could smell the reek of petrol while he was still yards away. He pulled on his mask, glad for the protection against the stench it gave him, and kneeled down a few inches away.
The dead man lay on his back with congealed blood behind his right ear. He was in his sixties, Grace estimated, lean and tall with thinning strands of grey hair. He was dressed in jeans, trainers and a jacket, with a white T-shirt beneath. His pasty face was craggy, tiny shrivel-creases in the skin indicating he had probably been a heavy smoker, this backed up by the ochre shade of his visible front teeth. The fingertips of both his hands looked crushed, the nails dark with congealed blood. Torture? he wondered.
He studied the injury behind the man’s right ear carefully, wondering if it could have been made from impact with the pavement, but it looked too deep, as if something had gouged it. And there were no blood spots on the pavement. It had been a dry night, so no rain could have washed it away.
From what he could see, other than the wound, there was no other injury. He touched the man’s arm with a gloved hand. The flesh was stiff.
It was currently just gone 9.30 a.m. From his observations, he probably died a good few hours earlier at the very least, and possibly longer. Which meant, if he had died here, he’d been lying in this residential street some time and no one had noticed. Pretty unlikely.
Not wanting to disturb the body’s position more than he needed, he asked Gee to help lift him up a little to check for any obvious injuries to his back. But they could see none – no visible wounds to the back of the head, or slash marks from a knife or visible gunshot holes in his clothes.
‘Clearly been dead a while,’ Gee said.
Nodding, Grace replied, ‘I know him. I once nicked him, around twenty years ago, when I was in uniform. He looked a bit prettier then. Archie Goff is – was –’ he corrected himself, ‘a career house burglar.’ He stood up, wanting to get away from the smell, but continued staring down at the body, trying to study it dispassionately, but at the same time unable to detach himself from it emotionally.
There was always something intrusive about being in the presence of a dead human being. All the time you were alive you had options about who you invited into your personal space. The moment you were dead, those ceased. You didn’t even own your body any more, it had become the property of the coroner.
It was coming back clearly now, when he had arrested this man, all those years ago. Archie Goff had broken into a mansion on the outskirts of the city, where the unfortunate man had subsequently been cornered in the garden, backed up against a tree after fleeing, by a particularly aggressive Rhodesian Ridgeback. The owners were out, and it had required two Sussex Police dog handlers to restrain the Ridgeback and cuff the man.
So what was Goff doing here? His normal MO, from memory, was large country houses. And he’d been nicked again back in September for just such a burglary. But he’d made bail. Goff had recently been of interest to Roy and his team as part of the Porteous investigation but was just one of many lines of enquiry. This was a comfortable middle-class area, but not somewhere that would generally house the kind of valuables Goff specialized in nicking. And why doused in petrol?
From the way Goff lay, it looked to Grace highly unlikely that he’d doused himself in petrol and then collapsed on this spot. He had died somewhere else and his body been deposited here. But how had he died, who had dumped him here and why had he been doused in petrol – and why this location? What was that about?
And how inflammable was he now?
‘We need a fire extinguisher,’ he said to Gee. ‘As a precaution.’
‘I’ll get one from the van.’ Gee hurried off.
Grace glanced around at the neighbouring houses, looking for any outward-facing CCTV camera that might provide a clue. There were none he could immediately see but they could be hidden anywhere. To get to this house, whoever had brought Goff here would have to have driven along a zigzag of residential streets. Hopefully one or more of the houses in this neighbourhood might have cameras that would have picked up the vehicle. Or at least someone might have seen an unfamiliar vehicle.
As the Crime Scene Manager returned with a small fire extinguisher, Grace said, ‘Chris, I’m treating this as a suspicious death.’
‘I agree, sir.’
Grace turned to DS Walker. ‘Sally, we need to liaise with the Coroner’s Officer and be authorized to contact the on-call Home Office pathologist. Once we know who it is, get their sanction to move the body.’
Home Office pathologists these days were paid by the job, not the hour, so it was rare for them to spend time at the crime scene itself, although occasionally they insisted on doing that.
‘I’ll get right on it, sir.’
Grace turned back to Gee. ‘We don’t yet know what we’re looking for, but we need a Police Search Adviser and a POLSA team doing a fingertip search in the area.’
Gee nodded. ‘I’ll organize it.’
Grace then thought hard and calmly about what Hegarty’s link might be to the body. A major league art forger. Charlie Porteous and the Fragonard. The Kiplings, who had taken a Fragonard to the Antiques Roadshow and had subsequently reported a break-in after the programme had aired. Was there a link with Archie Goff?
It could of course be a complete coincidence that the old lag’s body had been dumped here in this particular location, but, just as the petrol on his clothes didn’t smell right, the deposition site stank.
But what the hell could the connection be? Goff had been assaulted, doused in petrol. Now he was dead. It looked like he’d been murdered.
Hopefully the postmortem might provide the evidence.
Whatever had ended Archie Goff’s life, Grace was as certain as could be that natural causes was only a bit-part player in his demise. He pulled out his phone and called Glenn Branson.
When his sleepy friend, colleague and protégé answered, Grace asked, ‘How’s your Sunday, so far?’
‘It was pretty good until now,’ Branson retorted, with a yawn. ‘I’ve got plans – me and Siobhan are going to have a nice day and talk through all our issues. Don’t tell me you’re going to mess all that up?’
So the reporter wasn’t about to turn up here, Grace thought. And he was pleased to hear his friend sounding positive. Which made what he had to say next even harder. With his voice tinged with genuine apology, he replied, ‘Sorry, I am going to mess all that up.’
60
Sunday, 3 November
‘You’re not really sorry at all, are you, boss?’ Glenn Branson said, a few hours later in the mortuary.
It was just gone 2 p.m. The one positive about today, Grace thought, was that Dr Frazer Theobald was unavailable. Instead they’d been assigned Nadiuska De Sancha, who was far quicker, just as thorough and much more fun to work with.
‘Depends, how do you define sorry?’ Grace raised his eyebrows. They were gowning up in the cramped changing room of the Brighton and Hove Borough Mortuary.
The DI shook his head, seated on a bench and pulling on white gum boots. ‘There you go again, pissing me off by answering a question with a question. You’ve screwed up my Sunday, and you’ve probably screwed up my life,’ he joked.
‘Welcome to the Major Crime Team,’ Roy Grace retorted. ‘Anytime you want out and decide you’d like to return to your former life working nightclub doors, be my guest. I won’t stop you.’
‘But seriously, Roy. My wedding – it’s like hanging on a knife edge.’
‘Because you’ve been called out to be Deputy SIO on a murder enquiry?’ Grace was being serious now. ‘Siobhan’s a top crime reporter. Get real, she didn’t achieve that by sticking to office hours. Reporters and coppers are part of the same breed. We have to drop everything for a murder, reporters have to drop everything for a story. If she doesn’t get why you’re here at this moment, instead of having a cosy Sunday brunch with her in some trendy cafe, then the optics aren’t good.’
Branson gave him a sideways look. ‘Optics? So Cassian Pewe’s lingo’s rubbed off on you?’
Grace pulled on his cloth head-cover, then selected a fresh gauze mask. ‘It may not seem like it at this moment, but I’m doing what I always try to do, which is to advance your career.’
‘Really?’
Grace shrugged. ‘You’ve gone from a PC to DC to DS to Detective Inspector in how few years?’
‘And lost my wife, nearly lost my kids and now I’m about to lose my fiancée in the process. Should I be grateful?’
‘Depends; how do you define gratitude?’
‘There you go again, you bastard! Answering with a question.’
‘So tell me?’
Grace saw Glenn wringing his hands in frustration. ‘Glenn,’ he said, trying to calm him, then secured his mask. ‘Let’s go do it.’
They walked out into the narrow corridor and turned right, passing the closed door of the isolation room and into the wide, open-plan twin postmortem rooms separated only by an arch.
The mortuary operated normal working-week hours, on the basis that in general, their occupants weren’t in any particular hurry to be postmortemed and nor were their loved ones, most of the time. So the regular team of three pathologists who carried out postmortems on deaths that weren’t suspicious had the luxury of weekends off.
For Home Office pathologists, who specialized in suspected murder victims, where time was almost always critical, there was no such luxury. They were far more highly paid, but they earned their money by being on-call 24/7, ready to travel anywhere, instantly, and spend however many hours it took, both at the crime or deposition scene, and then in the mortuary, examining every aspect of the body, and often of the surroundings where it was found, in scrupulous detail. Few took less than six hours, and some far longer.
To Grace’s left were four empty stainless-steel postmortem tables. To his right were another four that were empty, on this Sunday afternoon, and one on which lay the body of Archie Goff, still at this moment fully clothed, beneath bright lights, and the centre of attention of a number of people, all in identical blue gowns, white boots and blue and white gauze hats and face masks. Coroner’s Officer Michelle Websdale, Crime Scene Photographer James Gartrell, alternating between taking stills and video, Darren Wallace, the Assistant Anatomical Pathology Technician, and Cleo, who was taking notes alongside centre-stage, flame-haired Nadiuska De Sancha who was at this moment taping every inch of Goff’s clothing, while Gartrell moved his plastic ruler up the body each time she nodded.
This was the part of the murder investigation Roy Grace always found unpleasant. If he’d had any other Deputy SIO, he would have happily left them to it and gone home to enjoy his Sunday. But he felt obligated to Glenn. The moment they’d first met, when Glenn had joined his Major Enquiry Team as a very junior Detective Constable, Grace had taken a liking to him, recognizing in him, perhaps, something of his own young, ambitious self and ability. Ever since then he’d been on a mission to nurture Glenn, becoming close friends in the process.
‘Daniel Hegarty,’ Grace said.
‘What about him?’
‘He lives in the house right where the body was dumped outside.’
‘He does? You found that out already?’ Branson questioned.
‘Elementary, my dear Branson. Isn’t Rule One to check the ground under your feet?’
61
Sunday, 3 November
Freya Kipling lay back on the recliner sofa, a glass of red wine in one hand and a novel, Where The Crawdads Sing, in the other. Harry sat beside her with a can of lager, watching a replay of Match of the Day, his team, Brighton and Hove Albion, beating Norwich 2–0. Tom was up in his room, gaming with friends online, and Freya glanced at the Libre app to check his glucose level. 8.9. At the high end of the range, but OK.
She and Harry had spent the morning covering three different car boot sales and returned with a small amount of booty. Harry’s purchases had been an ancient, empty tin of Players Medium Navy Cut cigarettes, a tiny bronze statuette of a golfer swinging his club, and a Brighton print, in remarkably good condition, of the old, ill-fated Daddy Long Legs railway, which ran on stilts above the English Channel, along part of Brighton seafront between Kemp Town and Rottingdean, from 1896 to 1900 before being closed down. Freya had bought a pair of matching, purple-tinted glass vases which the vendor had said were Victorian, and a silver salt and pepper cruet set.
Yet again, there had been no sign of the matching paintings that Harry hoped against hope they might find. To Freya’s relief, he was finally coming around to the view they ought to put the Fragonard – well, possible Fragonard – into a major auction house sale and see what happened. Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips were all interested and had kept in regular contact, updating them on their future fine arts sales.
As the game ended, Harry put his can down on the coffee table, then slipped an arm around her shoulder, and nuzzled her ear. She grinned, knowing exactly what he wanted. And why not? Despite being engrossed in her book, even after all these years she still did really fancy him.
She felt an erotic tingling deep inside her, put down her glass and book and turned to kiss him, knowing Tom was in his room and absorbed in the computer game with his mates.
At that moment, their landline phone rang.
As she reached for it, Harry restrained her. ‘Later, baby.’ He nuzzled her ear again, whispering, ‘Now’s not the time for phone calls. It’s probably some insurance company telling us we’ve been in an accident.’
‘It might be Dad, he gets lonely on Sundays sometimes.’
Freya’s mother had died two years ago and her father, whom Harry liked, had been a lost soul since, but determinedly and fiercely independent, refusing to leave his home in Scarborough and come down to live with them.
Harry leaned forward and picked the cordless up off the table and saw it said Number Withheld. He hesitated then answered, ‘Kipling residence, Harry Kipling speaking.’
It wasn’t his father-in-law, but another elderly-sounding man who spoke with a soft, measured American drawl.
‘Good afternoon, sir,’ the man said, consummately polite. ‘I apologize for intruding on your Sunday, but I understand you own a painting that is a good copy of one by the French artist Jean-Honoré Fragonard. Would I be correct?’
‘Who am I speaking to?’ Harry asked.
‘I’m calling on behalf of my employer, who is a major collector of works of art from this period. He would be interested in making you an offer for a private sale – such a sale would save you the very costly fees of an auction house.’
‘And what makes you think I might be interested in selling, even supposing I have such a painting?’
‘Mr Kipling, my employer saw you with this picture on Antiques Roadshow. He is willing to make you a very generous offer, given that the painting is almost certainly a fake.’
‘Really?’ Harry sounded more belligerent than he had intended. ‘Exactly how generous?’ He put the phone onto loudspeaker so Freya could hear.
‘I’m instructed to offer you the sum of fifty thousand pounds.’
Harry caught Freya’s frown. ‘You are joking?’ he replied.
‘Mr Kipling, I am deadly serious. If the picture is a fake, it would be worth, at very best, a few hundred pounds – and that much only if you were lucky. I appreciate that if it did turn out to be original, then it would be worth many multiples of that sum. But really, do you seriously believe something you bought from a car boot sale could be genuine?’
Freya was signalling to him to consider the offer, waving a hand in the air to get him to negotiate upwards.
Ignoring her, Harry said, ‘Actually I do. Three of the major London auction houses want to include it in their next sales. I’ve been given estimates of around four to five million. Your offer is a joke.’
Sounding offended, the American said, ‘Mr Kipling, my employer is a gentleman who doesn’t joke about art.’
Freya signalled. Negotiate, she was indicating.
‘So what would be your employer’s best offer?’
‘I just gave you my employer’s best offer.’
The phone went dead.
