Picture You Dead

37

Sunday, 20 October

There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.

That quote from Lenin, which Roy Grace had come across a couple of weeks back in The Week, had lodged in his mind. It was like one of those tunes that suddenly sticks and you can’t get rid of. Earworms. And it had sure been true of these past few weeks.

As ever, the eternal yin and yang of life. Roy Grace wasn’t a religious man, and never had been, but there were times when it felt like an unseen hand had reached down from out of the sky, instantly turning your life to shit, then with the other hand offered you a biscuit.

He was still grief-stricken over Bruno’s death. The biscuit he’d been offered was in the shape of the arrest of the man, ACC Cassian Pewe, his direct boss, who had been making his life hell for the past two years.

He’d seen Cassian Pewe carted away in the back of an unmarked car accompanied by two burly detectives from the Metropolitan Police Directorate of Professional Standards. The ACC would be facing an internal disciplinary hearing, and very likely also a criminal trial for insider trading.

All the same, Roy Grace felt far from complacent at the thought of Pewe’s impending fate of being sacked from the police force, as well as facing a jail sentence. The latter was a potential nightmare for any copper – as police officers tended to be ranked alongside nonces and grasses by other prison inmates, and faced their own vigilante justice. His disgraced former colleague Guy Batchelor had drawn a lucky straw when he was sent to Ford open prison, a Category D. Cassian Pewe might not be so fortunate.

Grace wasn’t complacent about it, firstly because he knew just how manipulative Pewe could be, and that if he did somehow manage to wriggle out of any charges brought against him, he would be back with a vengeance, on a mission to hang him out to dry. And secondly, because however much he loathed Pewe for all the hell he had made his working life for so long now, he felt a twinge of guilt – however irrational, and however much he hated the man – at potentially destroying his career and his future.

But for now the die was cast and he had to put all these thoughts behind him and focus on what lay immediately ahead. This included somehow coming to terms with Bruno’s death, his cold case workload and, hopefully happier times, Glenn Branson’s forthcoming wedding and his role as his best man – if the wedding went ahead.

He knew the best way to deal with his grief over Bruno was to do what he always did with every shitty curve ball life threw at him, by immersing himself in work. But he also needed to keep the balance with his family life, and a new baby on the way would help that. As a homicide detective, he could never bring the dead back to life, but the one thing he could do was to help those bereaved by a murder to find some kind of closure, to find some way of moving forward again in their lives. And his team on Operation Canvas was making some good progress on their review of the murder of art dealer Charlie Porteous. He was close to being in a position to inform the ACC that he was formally reopening the investigation. Porteous’s killers were still out there, and he would love nothing more than to bring them to justice and to give closure to Porteous’s widow, Susan, and his children.

Consumed during the summer by two large major enquiries, he and his officers had had to postpone the start of the cold case review. But now he had a gap – and not only that, but an itch that had been scratching him constantly that this was a case he could solve. And wanted so badly to. But it was a sensitive case at the same time, trying to deal with the fact that the dead man had been involved in an unorthodox, not to say shady, dealing over a painting.

He just needed that one break. The one that would cut the muscle of the oyster shell and let him prise it open. But this evening he needed to put all of that out of his mind and relax. He’d been sleeping badly for months and had recently read a book on sleep that told him, among other things, to switch off from work well before bedtime. And now on this Sunday night, on a week in which he wasn’t the on-call SIO, he was doing just that. Seated with Cleo on the big sofa in front of the television, with a platter of cheeses, grapes, sliced apple and nuts in front of them, holding a glass of red wine in his hand – which Cleo, heavily pregnant, glanced at enviously – they were both enjoying one of their favourite television programmes, Antiques Roadshow. It had started a few minutes ago.

A tubby, middle-aged man was proudly displaying a staggering collection of Dinky and Corgi toy police and emergency service vehicles, all with their original boxes. The show’s expert in these, attired in a purple jacket, pointed at a Mini Panda car, pale blue and white.

‘I was out in one of those when I first joined!’ Grace exclaimed. ‘God, I remember them so well!’

‘Wouldn’t have been much use in a chase, would it?’ Cleo asked.

He shook his head. ‘Nope. The idea was for neighbourhood patrols – instead of bobbies on the beat, we cruised around in those. They were the start of the rot.’

‘Rot?’

He nodded. ‘The day they ended foot patrols was the day neighbourhood crime began to soar. When I was a probationer, we’d walk a specific beat, get to know the people in the areas, particularly the troublemakers, and be able to engage with them. And occasionally we’d be able to spot if something odd was going on, like a house containing a local terrorist cell. Once we were all put into cars, all that changed. Sure, we could cover more ground more quickly, so fewer neighbourhood police were needed – nice economics, but very short-sighted.’

‘Weren’t you out in one of those pandas when you had your first big job in the force?’ she said, grinning. It was a dig. ‘Your first Grade One shout? What was it – something involving a swimming pool, I seem to remember? And my brave soldier handled it in a manly fashion!’

‘Yeah, yeah!’ He grinned back, remembering all too well. It was his first week out of his probationary period, fresh in uniform, when he’d had to go and assist in pulling a donkey out of a swimming pool.

A cut on the screen from the toy cars to a painting on an easel on the television caught his eye and, instantly, his attention.

A couple in their mid-forties were standing in front of a rather fine and clearly very old painting of two young lovers in period dress, in an ornate frame. The couple were being addressed by the fine arts expert Oliver Desouta, whom Grace recognized as a veteran of this show.

The woman was in a floral sundress with a wide-brimmed straw hat; the man, evidently her husband, with unruly brown hair and wearing a rumpled cream linen suit, looked like a newspaper reporter out of a 1950s movie. Both wore the eager, puppy-like expressions of so many people featured on this show, waiting for the magical pronouncement of the value of what they had brought along, that might – just – be life-changing for them.

Then the flamboyantly dressed Desouta said, ‘Are you familiar at all with the works of Jean-Honoré Fragonard?’

And Roy Grace jerked upright, almost spilling his glass of wine. ‘Shit!’ he said. ‘Bloody hell!’

‘What?’ Cleo asked.

But he leaned forward, riveted, without answering.