by Peter James
‘So that works in our favour?’ Grace said.
‘Yes and no. What happens in reality is the stolen items go underground, which is the bugger. Most, if not all, are likely to have been stolen to order or presold to private buyers. In twenty, thirty or fifty years’ time, if those buyers want to sell, the items will have long since dropped off the register.’
‘Where do we begin looking?’
‘I understand Mrs McWhirter’s brother is Gavin Daly?’
‘Yes.’
The antiques expert nodded. ‘He has a tremendous reputation. At one time he was one of the most important dealers in this country – and very respected.’ He smiled. ‘That’s not to say possibly a bit of a rogue.’
‘Oh?’ That piqued Grace’s interest.
‘Most of the old dealers in Brighton were. They operated an illegal cartel called the Ring, where they’d band together to rig prices at auction, for instance. But that’s not to deny Gavin Daly’s expertise. It’s clear from looking through the list of items taken from Mrs McWhirter that she had some jolly fine stuff. Clearly someone was advising her when she bought them – I would imagine her brother. But, like everyone, she’d have had some less good stuff as well.’ He raised a finger. ‘I think one of the first areas you should be looking at is the low-hanging fruit.’
‘Low-hanging fruit?’ Grace frowned and took a tentative sip of his scalding coffee. Light rain was falling outside and it felt chilly in the room. Almost autumnal. Outside, in the large open-plan detectives’ area, a phone warbled, unanswered. He felt desperately tired, and it was going to be a struggle to make it through the very long day ahead, although he had no option but to get on with it. And more importantly, he wanted to get on with it. He wanted the bastards who did this. Very badly.
‘Well, from the amount taken, and the size of some of the pieces, we can assume there were at least two men, probably three, if not even a fourth. In my experience, when hired hands are sent to steal to order, they almost always help themselves to some extra items not on the list, and pass them on to fences for a bit of extra cash.’ He blew on his coffee again. ‘Almost certainly Mrs McWhirter would have photos, taken for insurance purposes, of the contents in each room. If you can get hold of them, then you can check what has been taken and what is still there, beyond the high-value items her brother has already identified. If there are other items missing, then I’d put some officers out, with their photographs, around all the antiques shops, street stalls and car boot sales in the area, as well as getting them to carefully trawl through eBay.’
Grace made some notes. ‘When you say steal to order, that implies insider knowledge.’
The antiques expert nodded. ‘You said you found a knocker-boy leaflet in the house?’
‘Yes. Someone called R. C. Moore.’
‘This has all the classic hallmarks,’ Stuart-Simmonds said. ‘The knocker-boy charms his way into the house, and sees a treasure trove of beautiful things. He makes a note, and often takes surreptitious photographs. Then he sells on the address and a contents summary. Some of the big players have connections to the insurance companies – an employee they bribe within them – and they get the full inventory that way.’
‘Interesting,’ Grace said. ‘The one item that wasn’t insured was the pocket watch.’
‘Why on earth not?’
‘For the very reason you’ve just told me. Gavin Daly reckoned if it was registered with an insurance company, it would be a target. No one knew it was there, in her safe. Also, it was an extremely well-concealed safe. He designed it himself as a double safe.’
‘Double?’
‘Yes, very ingenious. If you opened it, you would think that was it. But the wall at the back of it is false; you insert an Allen key, twist and it opens, and there is a second combination lock behind. Ordinarily that false wall would fool any burglar.’
The expert chewed the inside of his mouth for some moments. ‘If they didn’t know about the watch, then it won’t have been presold. Whether they handed it to whoever hired them or try to sell it themselves, a Patek Philippe from 1910 is a damned rare thing. I’d say finding possible buyers for that should be a major line of enquiry for you, Detective Superintendent. That watch will lead you to the perpetrators, for sure.’
‘If it surfaces,’ Grace said.
‘It will, I guarantee. It may be the biggest value item they’ve taken, but it’s also the most dangerous for them.’
25
YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE CRAZY TO WORK HERE. BUT IT HELPS!
Some offices had that sign up as a joke, but there was no sign here. You had to be crazy to do this job. Really, you did. Being crazy was probably the best qualification, Gareth Dupont thought. And he was crazy all right, he knew that. He’d done drugs, done time for GBH – the jerk he’d beaten up had deserved it for goosing his girl in a pub, but maybe it hadn’t been worth the two years he’d served in prison and the criminal record, he reflected. And more recently, he’d done serious time for burglary.
Gareth Dupont was thirty-three. He had handsome, olive-skinned looks and shiny dark hair from his mother’s Hispanic genes, along with a toned body from obsessive weight training in gyms and his passion for Salsa dancing. He’d made a shedload of money in a Spanish-based telesales stock market scam – most of which had gone up his nose – sold loft insulation until Friday, and now, at the start of this new week after the Bank Holiday, was selling advertising space in sports club magazines for the Brighton-based company Mountainpeak Publishing. In addition he had his sideline, which could, on occasion, become a nice little earner. Also, he talked to God a lot. Occasionally God talked back, but not as often as he would have liked. Recently, he reckoned, God was pretty displeased with him. Quite rightly. But hey, you couldn’t always be perfect. God had to understand that.
After school, he’d toyed with becoming a monk. Except, he realized at the last moment that he liked women too much. And booze. And coke. And the money to buy them. But the pull was always there. Something about a monk’s cell. A sanctuary. One day, but not right now. Right now, telesales gave him good money, which he needed because he was always skint by the end of every weekend, and all the more so after a long weekend. Skint and usually hungover. And today he was very skint and badly hungover.
And in love.
Hey, that’s what weekends were for, weren’t they? Partying and getting trashed – oh, and going to church, but the less said about that the better. Not really his thing, church, he was starting to think. He wasn’t much enjoying spending time either with old ladies with hatpins and elderly rectors with clattering teeth, or the happy clappy alternatives. You could do God without doing church, right? God was inside you: in your heart, in your head, in your eyes.
God was in the vision of Suki Yang. She was Chinese-American, over here working for an IT media company; he’d met her late on Friday night in Brighton’s hip Bohemia bar. They’d slept together in the small hours of Saturday morning, and spent most of the rest of the weekend heavy-duty shagging, fuelled by all kinds of stuff they’d swallowed and snorted.
The slight problem was the few lies he had told her. Like he hadn’t mentioned the other lady he was seeing, he didn’t actually own the flat, as he had claimed, but only rented it, and he didn’t at the moment have enough dough for the next quarter’s payment – due in seven weeks’ time. And he’d lied about the great job he had in media. Well, Mountainpeak was a media company. Sort of.
There were six teams of five telesales people and a manager – all men – in this second-floor office on the industrial estate just outside the port of Newhaven, ten miles east of Brighton. Each of them in shirtsleeves, some with ties at half-mast, some open-necked, seated at bland modern desks. No one in here, apart from the pleasant boss, Alan Prior, seated over the other side, was older than thirty-five. Each of them had a flat screen in front of him, a keyboard, a phone, coffees and bottles of water. It was 9.30 and Gareth had only been at his desk for thirty minutes, but t
he morning was already feeling several hours old. Nine calls so far and no sales. Maybe now he’d get lucky.
Gareth sucked on a small scab on his right knuckle, then dialled the number in front of him, abdicating responsibility to God for the call when it was answered. Hey, despite everything, God owed him a whole bunch of credits. This one’s down to you, God, he mouthed silently, his eyes momentarily closed.
A female voice, sharp, brittle. You could tell from the way they answered if it was going to be a tough or an easy sell. This already felt tough. He looked down at the script in front of him and read from it, sounding all bright and breezy.
‘Hi there, it’s Gareth Dupont here. I’m calling on behalf of the North Brighton Golf Club. May I speak to the business owner or whoever’s in charge of your marketing and advertising, please?’
Silence at the other end. He wondered if the cow had already hung up. Then she said, ‘What is this about, exactly?’
He skipped down the script to the paragraph that dealt with this kind of a response, then read aloud, still sounding breezy and chatty. ‘The reason I’m calling is that we’re producing the official annual corporate brochure for the North Brighton Golf Club in a couple of months’ time, and we’re going to be distributing extensively across the area. Thousands of homes and most businesses in the area will be covered, not to mention the club itself.’
‘We don’t have any connection with golf in our business,’ she replied icily.
‘Well, you might not think that. But I’ve been asked to source well-established businesses and offer them an opportunity to get involved. With your particular category, we see it as an ideal match. We’re targeting a demographic of wealthy and affluent people who have the money to pay for your services, and I’ve been asked to make sure that only reliable and professional companies go in. What I’m doing is making it so there’s only one of each profession or trade available within the entire publication. It literally locks out all of your competitors and means you’re the only company available to turn to.’
‘We are funeral directors,’ she replied. ‘Why would we want to advertise in a golf club brochure?’
‘The club is bound to have many elderly members. Sooner or later they’re going to die. I’ll give you the broad strokes, briefly—’
There was a click.
The bitch had hung up.
Thanks a bunch, pal, Gareth Dupont mouthed to God. He moved on to the next name on his list, took a swig of his water, and punched in the number.
*
By five o’clock, when the office was winding down for the day, Gareth had sold one half-page, to a flooring company in Portslade called D. Reeves. Not a great start to his new job, he knew. But hey, maybe tomorrow would be better. It needed to be.
He left the office, pulled on his Ray-Bans against the bright, afternoon sun, climbed into his leased black Porsche cabriolet, started the engine and lowered the roof. He sat for a moment, pensively. He was thinking about the apartment rental, and the next lease payment due on the Porsche. Maybe a bit of prayer was needed, which he hadn’t done in a while, not in any serious way. Although he was always wary of praying too soon after he had pissed off God. Better to leave some distance.
He drove off, heading down into Newhaven. Then, as he threaded through the town, heading for the coast road that would take him home to the Marina Village, the Argus newspaper banner hoarding outside a newsagent’s proclaimed, in large black letters:
McWHIRTER MURDER £100,000 REWARD
Ignoring the car behind him, Gareth Dupont slammed on the brakes and pulled over onto the kerb. He ran into the shop, bought a copy of the paper, then stood in the entrance reading the frontpage splash, ignoring the traffic jam along the narrow street his car was causing.
Gavin Daly, brother of Aileen McWhirter, who was murdered in her Withdean Road mansion last week, has announced a reward of £100,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of his sister’s brutal killers.
He read on. There was a phone number to the CID Incident Room, and also the one for anonymous calls to Crimestoppers.
He grinned. Sometimes in life you got lucky! He mouthed, silently, Thank you, God. All’s forgiven!
26
The Scenes of Crime Officers had finished at his sister’s house, and the rota of scene guards had been stood down. Now, at six o’clock in the evening, beneath a clear sky, Gavin Daly sat in the back of his Mercedes at the top of the driveway down to the house.
Yellow police signs had been placed a short distance apart, either side of the driveway, each with the same wording on them:
WERE YOU HERE BETWEEN 6 P.M. AND 10.30 P.M. LAST TUESDAY, 21 AUGUST?
DID YOU SEE A VAN HERE?
IF SO, PLEASE CONTACT THE POLICE AND ASK FOR
THE INCIDENT ROOM FOR OPERATION FLOUNDER.
01273 470101
OR PHONE CRIMESTOPPERS ANONYMOUSLY ON:
0800 555 111
He instructed his driver to take him down to the house. Then he climbed out, told the driver to leave, that he would call him when he needed him back, walked around to the front of the silent house, and entered the porch.
His hand was shaking as he put the key in the lock of the front door, and he had a lump in his throat.
Then he hesitated, unsure if he actually wanted to go in. Except that he had work to do.
It was a warm evening, the garden was alive with birdsong, wasps, butterflies, and he could hear, a short distance away, the swish . . . swish . . . swish of a secluded neighbour’s lawn sprinkler. Summer was officially coming to an end in a few days. How many more summers would he see? he wondered.
How many more did he want to see?
Any?
Everyone he had ever loved was now dead. His mother in a hail of bullets in her bedroom. His father dragged away into the night. He had buried two wives and his brother-in-law. Now, when the Coroner released her body, he would be burying his sister.
He did not know how many years he had left before his son would be burying him. He was still mobile, and, despite the walking stick, he remained fairly agile. Thanks to the skills of a local plastic surgeon, his face still looked two decades or so younger than his years. He’d beaten off heart trouble with a triple bypass, although he had angina now. He’d had his prostate removed. He’d reached what everyone called a ripe old age. But he did not feel ripe. He felt rotten.
And unfulfilled.
He twisted the key and pushed the door open, then stepped inside, carefully using his walking stick to steady himself on the floor plates the SOCOs had laid down, the smells of the place instantly saddening him further. Old age. Furniture polish. Decaying fabrics. And the new smells of the Crime Scene chemicals. He looked at the empty space, a darker colour than the rest of the floor, where a particularly fine hall table had stood for decades. At the rectangles on the walls where his sister’s stunning art collection had once hung. The silence was so leaden he felt it on him like a heavy coat.
His aunt used to take him and Aileen to church every Sunday. But he’d not had any time for religion as a child. And even less so now. Sure, there had been a time when he was happy – or at least content. He’d been one of the biggest players in antiques in the country. He’d enjoyed the entertaining, the celebrity that went with it, the customers he befriended. But all the time it had been clouded by his sadness that he and Ruth could not have children. The Daly name would live on with his one idiot son from his first marriage, to Sinead.
Now, as he looked around the emptiness in here, it seemed to him that life was little more than a bad joke. An endurance test. Every person a Job if you were into that Old Testament stuff.
Well, one thing he was determined to do, was to get an item back, even if it killed him. And he had a name to begin the search with. The name of a very nasty little shit.
He walked through into the drawing room, with its faded green flock walls, green sofas and armchairs. More shadows on the walls. The marble mantelpiece, on which h
ad once sat a stunning Giacometti sculpture, was bare, apart from one framed photograph of happier times.
Aileen, a beautiful, raven-haired twenty-eight-year-old, with the love of her life, Bradley Walker, a USAF pilot and Cary Grant lookalike. He’d flown as a B24 bomber pilot on Operation Tidal Wave, a huge and unsuccessful mission to bomb the oil refineries around Ploiesti, in Romania, in August 1943. His was one of fifty-four Liberator aircraft that never returned, and he was one of hundreds of airmen reported missing, presumed killed.
For years she had harboured a hope that somehow, miraculously, he had survived. She’d kept up her spirits, somehow. She’d kept them up better than he ever had. That was women for you, he rued. Many seemed to have inner resources that were denied to males.
He climbed the stairs to the landing, past the radiator that Aileen had been left chained to for two days, and went into her bedroom, which was directly opposite. After her husband had died she’d had their marital double bed replaced with a single. It looked strange to see it in this large room that still smelled very faintly of her scent. Propped up against the pillows was Mr Stuffykins, the ragged little one-eyed, one-eared bear she’d brought from New York. He made a mental note to ensure he put it in the coffin with her. He removed a pair of her long black Cornelia James gloves, from her dressing table, to put those in the coffin with her as well. Aileen would like that, he thought; she always believed a woman was not properly dressed unless she was wearing gloves. He took a brief walk through into her bathroom, then went downstairs and into her book-lined study.
First he peered inside the opened wall-safe again, just to double-check nothing had been overlooked. But it was bare. And that dark void pained him, and angered him in so many ways. It had contained their father’s pocket watch. The only truly personal thing belonging to him that either of them had.
He sat down at Aileen’s walnut bureau. A black Parker pen, in a holder embossed with gold letters reading HSBC – probably a Christmas gift years ago from the bank, he thought, sat on the curling leather surface of the writing area. Tiny oval-framed photographs of her husband, her children and himself were arranged on the top of it. The drawers were stuffed with correspondence, bills, stamps. There was a fresh sheet of blue headed writing paper, with an envelope beside it, and an unwritten birthday card. A letter she had been going to write to someone, which now would never be written, and a card that would never be sent. Her diary was gone, he noticed, and assumed the police had taken it.