Picture You Dead

74

Monday, 4 November

‘Never asked?’ Stuart Piper exploded. ‘Because you never fucking asked? We’re going to fix that bastard good and proper for this. I’ll send the boys over. He’ll have his arms and fingers broken so badly he’ll never be able to pick up a brush again.’

Robert Kilgore had been brought up by parents with proper manners. His father, a lecturer in fine arts at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Atlanta, Georgia, and his mother, who had lectured on the history of art at the same college until she’d stopped to raise her large family, of which Kilgore was the fifth child, had instilled values of morality and decency into all their children.

Despite the fact that he had been employed for the past fifteen years by a criminal, Robert Kilgore had justified this, by his own moral compass, because he was engaged in the work of recovering fabulous works of art by the great masters of the fête galante period, which he particularly loved. Nothing thrilled him more than hunting down and securing their works. But as he grew older, he was increasingly concerned that his employer, who he had once thought shared his values of preserving these works for posterity, was far shallower than he’d assumed. He was beginning, increasingly, to feel conned. Used. That Stuart Piper did not really want all these fine paintings for any altruistic purpose, but purely to satisfy his own massive ego.

Nevertheless, seated in Piper’s study, he kept his calm. Lighting yet another cigarette, he said, ‘It seems like we’ve been fooled by the sheer quality of Hegarty’s work.’

‘We?’ Piper queried acidly, tapping the end of his cigar in a large grey ashtray, with the name Courvoisier emblazoned in gold lettering along the side. ‘There’s no we about this, Bobby. I pay you a big salary and you can’t tell the difference between an original and a fake?’

‘Not when it comes to an artist of Hegarty’s skills, no, sir, I sometimes cannot. Not without a lot of forensic tests. But what we do know now is that the original is with Mr and Mrs Kipling, and that’s a real positive.’

‘Is it? They turned down our last offer for the picture. A very generous offer, considering we had no evidence that it is an original,’ Piper reminded him. ‘Now word on the street is that it is the original. Are you hearing that?’

Kilgore nodded. ‘I am, yes.’

‘So, any day, those fuckwit Kiplings are likely to hand it to an auction house. Sotheby’s or Bonhams or Christie’s or Phillips, right?’

‘We don’t know that for sure,’ Kilgore said.

‘They want money.’ Piper, behind his desk, tapped a sheaf of papers, with a bunch of blown-up photographs clipped to them. ‘What I have here are my notes from the report Archie Goff gave us when he first went into the Kiplings’ house. We asked him to photograph any financial documents he could find, right?’

‘We did,’ Kilgore agreed.

‘We figured from these statements that the amount we offered, fifty thousand pounds, would get the Kiplings interested – and they threw it back in our faces.’

‘Maybe we should have gone higher?’ Kilgore suggested.

‘I’ve never paid over the odds in my life, Bobby.’ There was a sneer in his voice that did not appear on his face. ‘And I’m not going to now. Archie Goff did a better job for us than we realized.’ He slid out some of the close-ups of bank statements, and held them up, one at a time.

Kilgore dug his half-frame spectacles from his pocket and pulled them on, although he had already studied all of these statements some while back. ‘He did do a good job, sir,’ he agreed. ‘It enabled us to figure out that the Kiplings’ finances could be better.’

Kilgore picked up one and studied it. In a corner of the picture, near the bank statement, was the partial image of a small yellow box, marked FREESTYLE LIBRE 2. FLASH GLUCOSE MONITORING SYSTEM. SENSOR. He looked at his boss and frowned.

‘Look at the other one, Bobby.’

It was a photograph of a paper bag bearing a chemist’s logo. On the side was stuck a prescription label, marked TOM KIPLING. Kilgore frowned again. ‘This is what, exactly?’

‘A diabetes monitor,’ Piper said. ‘I know all about it because Frank’s a Type-1 diabetic.’ Frank was his head gardener. ‘It’s a smart bit of kit – he wears a Libre sensor on his arm and monitors his blood-sugar levels through it via an app on his phone. It tells him if his sugar levels are too low or too high. If they drop too much he can pass out and if he doesn’t get sugar, die in a matter of hours. Similarly, if his sugar levels get too high and he doesn’t inject enough insulin, he can go into a coma, and again die in a matter of hours. The Kiplings’ kid is evidently, from this, a Type-1 diabetic.’

‘And you are saying what, exactly, sir?’ Kilgore asked.

‘I think you know exactly what I’m saying, Bobby.’ His lips widened a fraction into what, in Piper’s almost frozen face, Kilgore had long ago learned to interpret as a smile. ‘And what I’m also saying is that we need to move fast. This is our chance, and I’m coming up with a plan.’