Picture You Dead

63

Sunday, 3 November

Sunday evenings were for flopping in front of the television, Daniel and Natalie Hegarty had long agreed, the way they agreed, comfortably, on most things. They lay back, large glasses of red wine in their hands, the bottle on the coffee table in front of them, Rocky and Rambo snuggled between them on the sofa, both watching, as attentively as their owners, the start of a new crime drama on catch-up.

It had been, by any stretch of the imagination – and the master forger’s imagination stretched a very long way – a different Sunday. Certainly, an unusual start to the day, finding a dead body outside your front garden gate. And he could tell, from his long involvement with the police – not all of it great – that this wasn’t just any Joe Schmo who’d pegged out on the pavement in front of their house.

Certainly not judging by the speed at which a CSI tent had been erected to shield the body from view, and the number of police vehicles that had rocked up during the following hours, the crime scene tape that had sealed off the pavement around the body, and then the fingertip search by officers that had gone on around where the body had lain, long after it had been bagged and removed.

But despite his questions, they’d remained tight-lipped, both to him and to the newspaper reporters who had turned up, about the dead man’s identity – he’d seen them take out his wallet and then his driving licence, so they knew, for sure, who he was.

In the absence of any information forthcoming from the police officers, the media had turned to him. The reporters from the Argus, the Brighton and Hove Independent, the Sussex Express, Radio Sussex and camera crews from BBC South and ITV News Meridian had relentlessly interviewed, recorded and filmed him. Always the publicity hound, Hegarty had relished the exposure, making sure to get his message across that his new art exhibition of Lowry, Picasso and Modigliani paintings – each dutifully signed by him – was opening next week.

But despite his bonhomie towards the media, after they had all drifted away he was left feeling increasingly uneasy. With his artist’s eye for detail, he’d observed the injury on the side of the dead man’s head carefully, noting it had been caused by something sharp. And he’d noticed the crushed fingers on both hands. Neither of these things had happened to him out on this quiet and pleasant street. They’d been done somewhere else.

He’d not conveyed this to his wife, and she seemed relaxed by the story he’d fed her. But then, he hadn’t given her the full low-down. All he had told her was that the police were doing their normal due diligence that they would do whenever a dead body was found, and it looked like the poor sod had dropped dead from a heart attack, or a stroke. Whatever.

Natalie and he loved each other. They were cool. Life was good. Actually sixty but feeling closer to thirty, his reputation in the art world was beyond his wildest dreams. Never ever had he imagined, way back in his earliest teens, that one day he’d achieve this kind of success and fame. He didn’t reckon anyone who’d known him had. Certainly not his art master at Patcham High School, who told him, drily, he had a talent for drawing and maybe he should consider a career using that skill.

Yeah, right, Mr Tosser Turner. You might have shared the same name as one of England’s greatest ever artists, but that was as far as your talent – and vision – stretched. One of his biggest regrets was that his teacher had died long before he’d become a household name in the art world.

As the opening credits of the crime drama rolled, along with sombre, moving, orchestral music, Hegarty sipped his wine distractedly, trying to figure out just what it was that was making him so uneasy. Was it that text?

He didn’t have to wait long.

His phone, which he’d switched to silent, to not be disturbed during the programme, was vibrating.

A number he did not recognize.

He was tempted to leave it to ring out, but then he wondered – a little irrationally – if it was going to be some information about the dead man outside his house, and made the decision, nodding apologetically to Natalie, to answer it.

He was right, in the wrong way.