Picture You Dead

39

Monday, 21 October

Roy Grace had been woken around 2 a.m. by the pitiful squealing outside, somewhere close, of a creature being taken by a fox, and furious barking from Humphrey. Worried that a fox might somehow have got into their now well-protected chicken coop, he’d pulled on his dressing gown and slippers and gone outside, with Humphrey in tow, to check. But all was quiet in the coop. Probably an unfortunate rabbit.

Just as he’d drifted back into sleep, Noah had begun wailing from a nightmare. Cleo had gone to comfort him and carried him back into bed with them. From then on, Roy had lain awake pretty much all night, or so it now felt as he looked at the smart metal tracker ring Cleo had bought him for his last birthday to monitor his steps, sleep and all kinds of other metrics.

Just gone 5.45 a.m. and he was wide, wide awake. Too bloody awake. Cleo was sound asleep, as was Noah. Right now, with her advanced pregnancy, her obstetrician had advised her to get as much sleep as possible.

He closed his eyes and tried to go back to sleep. Then, after what seemed like a good half hour, but was only seven minutes according to his watch, he gave up, slipped as quietly as possible out of bed, to not disturb Cleo and their son, and walked through into the bathroom, closing the door quietly behind him. Then he checked his sleep on the app on his phone.

Total sleep: 4.10

Efficiency: 50%

Restfulness: Pay attention

REM sleep: 24 minutes

Deep sleep: 32 mins

Shit. Thanks for that, Antiques Roadshow! A big day of meetings ahead to get through and on a fraction of the sleep he needed. He decided to deal with it the way he always handled stress, which was to go out for a run with Humphrey.

Half an hour later, on top of the Downs in the breaking dawn, maintaining a steady pace, with a happy dog bounding along near him, Grace was feeling a lot better, and thinking through what he had seen last night. The couple on the Antiques Roadshow, with the painting that the expert, Oliver Desouta, had become really animated about. He hadn’t gone as far as declaring it to be an original, but his message to the couple was very clear. That it might be.

They’d come over as pretty ordinary folk, telling Desouta how they’d bought a painting in a car boot sale, and then discovered there was another painting beneath. Grace didn’t think they were lying – why would they have been? If they were crooks, they’d never have gone public on that show, would they?

Oliver Desouta had told the couple that the painting could well be one of the four long-lost paintings Jean-Honoré Fragonard had created of the four seasons, a decade before the French Revolution and the Terror that followed under the regime of the maniac Robespierre.

Charlie Porteous had been murdered after openly touting around a painting he believed might be another in the same series by Fragonard, Spring.

The Antiques Roadshow was one of the most popular programmes on television, watched by many millions. Might whoever had murdered Charlie Porteous have seen it? And if not, might someone close to the killer have?

He needed to find that couple and interview them. Both to establish how they had come by this painting – if they’d told the truth on the show – and even more importantly, if the painting was genuine, how to safeguard them? He would get on it first thing tomorrow.

As he arrived back home, letting himself and Humphrey in through the garden gate, their newly acquired arrogant cockerel, whom Cleo had nicknamed Billy Big Balls, crowed loudly.

‘Go for it, Billy!’ Grace said. ‘But don’t take me on, because I’m a far meaner son-of-a-bitch than you’ll ever be!’