Picture You Dead

49

Monday, 28 October

Daniel Hegarty’s dad, Len, had been a small-time career criminal, who had missed his true vocation. That had been a real talent for drawing wildlife in his spare time, and, spending over half of his adult life in and out of prison, he’d found himself with plenty of spare time on his hands. The art forger’s fondest childhood memories had been the times he’d gone fishing with his dad, sitting on the banks of the river Arun, keeping an eye on the bobbing float while his dad worked away on his easel.

His dad had committed burglaries when Daniel was growing up. From when Daniel was ten, Len Hegarty had taken him out with him, sending him climbing in through tiny windows to open up bigger ones or doors. But, Daniel rued, the old sod never gave him a cut of anything he had stolen. By the time he reached seventeen, his dad had graduated to bank and post-office robbery, and, two months after getting nicked for the last time, he’d dropped dead of an aneurism in prison, leaving Daniel to care for his mother and three younger siblings.

All he had inherited from the old bugger was an eye for the main chance, and a talent for drawing. His last school report had damned his consistent lack of attendance with the faint praise that if he could ever bother to apply himself, he could have a future as a graphic designer.

And that chance presented itself two years later, when Daniel had been on a fishing holiday in Ireland with a couple of mates and was returning on the car ferry from Dublin to England. Going through customs, he’d overheard two Border Control officers talking to each other, saying how hard it was to identify faked Irish vehicle logbooks.

Hegarty set up a studio in his little bedroom in their council house and created a lucrative business forging logbooks, making enough money over the next year to buy his mum a small house on the outskirts of the city, which he paid for in cash.

His bigger chance came in the form of the looming handover of Hong Kong, when the British Government were due to cede it to China on 1 July 1997, after 156 years of British rule. Many of its citizens were desperate to leave and flee to the United Kingdom and there was a rush for British passports. Hegarty realized there was a potential goldmine for him and set about exploiting it.

He began producing, initially in small batches, seemingly very accomplished passport forgeries – and soon had a queue of Chinese customers lined up. Within three months, charging £1,000 a pop, he’d made enough to buy a period terraced property in the centre of Brighton, close to the Clock Tower, where he set up a full-scale mini-factory, employing a printer, a binder and a salesman. He began literally minting money.

But unfortunately for Hegarty, his printer was lousy at spelling. On the inside front cover of every British passport is the wording, Her Britannic Majesty’s Secretary of State requests and requires in the Name of Her Majesty all those whom it may concern to allow the bearer to pass freely without let or hindrance, and to afford the bearer such assistance and protection as may be necessary.

The printer managed to make two spelling errors in his otherwise impeccable forgeries, by having just one ‘N’ in Britannic and replacing the ‘J’ in Majesty with a ‘G’. Despite the crass mistakes, it took over a year for it to come to the attention of the police, during which time Daniel Hegarty had made so much money he’d put down a £300,000 deposit on a small castle in Scotland, intending it as his bolthole should the balloon go up. But he never got the chance to flee. One morning, while the team in his handsome period house were flat-out printing, binding and dispatching passports, the front door was kicked open and five police officers burst into the premises, bringing his dream to an abrupt halt.

During the ensuing five years he served at Her Majesty’s Pleasure – or Magesty, as spelled on his passports – he learned to paint, and discovered he had a real talent for copying the works of almost any artist.

Immediately on his release from prison, Hegarty began another lucrative career, forging the works of big-name artists and selling them for big money on eBay, until, following complaints, eBay took him down. Undeterred, he continued making copies of the work of these artists but now signed them with his own distinctive interlinked DH. Rather than his business falling off, it grew even larger, his clientele, as befitted his celebrity status, including rock stars, DJs, actors, authors and even politicians. Galleries in both Brighton and London eagerly offered him permanent space to show his work.

In addition he was in demand by serious art collectors unable or unwilling to pay the escalating insurance premiums on their works, to make copies which could still be displayed in their homes, while the originals remained secure in bank vaults.

Which was why Daniel Hegarty was totally unfazed by the photographs of the front and rear of the painting he was now looking at, early on this glorious October Monday morning. Two lovers in a forest of sun-dappled trees, with a lake behind them, and a plinth close to them on which sat a winged figure. He was already familiar with this painting and had some difficulty concealing a smile.

The man who had brought them to his Saltdean home was Robert Kilgore, for whom he had done a number of previous commissions copying old masters.

‘Yeah, Robert,’ Hegarty said. ‘No problem. How long can you give me?’

‘How long do you need, Mr Hegarty?’ Kilgore asked him politely.

They were seated in the large open-plan living room, the walls lined with Hegarty’s paintings ranging from Norman Rockwell to Caravaggio, and there was a smell of oil paint in the air.

The artist wore his years well; with an elegant head of gelled, spiky silver hair, he exuded the aura of a fit man comfortable in his skin, and had an easy demeanour to go with it, as well as his charming and confident wife, Natalie, who sat in the room with them.

‘Well, Robert,’ he said, staring at the highly detailed photographs, ‘that would depend as usual on how far you went and how much you want to pay. If you want a pukka job that would stand up to every forensic test, that will cost you more. I’d use an old French religious canvas – I’ve a mate in France who’s an antiques dealer and sources them for me – that would be several grand extra. Up to you. But I’ll tell you, what you have here, if it is real, is one of the most stunning pieces anyone has ever brought me.’

‘Do you think it is real, Mr Hegarty?’

He shrugged. ‘Hard to tell from photographs. But from what I can see, if it is a Sexton Blake, whoever did it is a better man than me, Gunga Din.’ He shrugged again. ‘What about you? Do you think it’s real, Robert? Do you believe it’s real?’

‘My employer and I have reason to believe it might be.’

Hegarty whistled. ‘So, two questions. Firstly, where the hell is it, and why couldn’t you bring it here – assuming it’s not hot? And secondly, why do you want a copy?’

‘Too many questions, Mr Hegarty.’

He gave Kilgore a sideways look. ‘Meaning?’

‘Just tell me how long you’d need.’

‘Four weeks, maybe six weeks to be safe.’

‘What? Six weeks? You’re busy?’

He nodded. ‘Yeah, but that’s not the issue. I can do the copy in a couple of days, no problem, but I need to get rid of the smell of the oil and the varnish – that’s the giveaway with a copy of an old master. I can buy canvas from around this same period that Fragonard was painting, in the late seventeen hundreds, but not the paints themselves. I’d have to grind them up from the same plants and insects Fragonard used to make his pigments. Cochineal, all of that, if you want to avoid modern tests rumbling it. Then I’d need to get the craquelure on it. After that, my mate Billy, a chain smoker, has it in his house for a few days – that way the paintings get properly aged.’

‘For my purposes and my employer’s none of that will be necessary,’ Kilgore said. ‘All we need is a perfect facsimile. We’re not talking about sophistication here. The people who currently have this picture already think it might be a fake – a Sexton Blake, as you call it – but they aren’t certain. Let’s just say all we want to do is convince them it is a fake, for sure.’

Hegarty looked at him levelly, then grinned broadly. ‘I think I’m beginning to understand your game.’

Kilgore nodded, unsmiling. ‘A perfect copy, two days?’

‘Give me three.’

‘And your price?’

‘Ten thousand.’

‘That’s a lot more than the last commission we gave you.’

‘This is a lot harder.’

The American pursed his lips, then nodded. ‘I’ll grant you that. It had better be good.’

‘Robert, it will look good. Just don’t smell it or subject it to forensic analysis. Do we have a deal?’

Kilgore reached into his inside pocket and pulled out a wad of £50 notes held together by an elastic band.