Picture You Dead

41

Tuesday, 22 October

Roy Grace, sipping a strong coffee, checked his watch, then, as if for back-up confirmation, checked the clock on the wall of the conference room. 9.01 a.m. He addressed Velvet Wilde and Norman Potting. ‘The action I gave you yesterday to find and interview the couple with the Fragonard painting on Antiques Roadshow. Any luck?’

‘Yes, sir,’ Wilde said. ‘We contacted the producer, Robert Murphy, who was understandably reluctant to give us the name of the couple. But when we explained the situation to him, and scanned and sent copies of our warrant cards, he was helpful and gave us their names, a Mr and Mrs Kipling. He’s a builder and she’s deputy head of Patcham High School. It wasn’t then hard to find their address in Mackie Crescent, Patcham – very coincidentally the previous residence of a former Sussex officer, Steve Curry and his wife Tracey.’

Grace smiled.

‘DS Potting and I visited Mrs Kipling late yesterday afternoon, sir,’ Wilde said. ‘She told us her husband was in London meeting with an auction house. At the time we spoke to her she’d not heard from her husband. She tried to call him while we were there but was unable to reach him. She left a message.’

‘What time was that?’ Grace asked.

She looked down at her notes. ‘5.35 p.m., sir.’

‘Have either of you heard from her since?’

‘No, sir.’

‘What did she tell you about the painting?’

‘She said her husband, Harry, had bought it in a car boot sale some weeks earlier, for twenty quid. At that time it was just a mediocre portrait of an old lady – which she hated. He told her he’d bought it because he liked the frame and thought they could put something else into it. When they took it home, they left it, unintentionally, exposed to the sunlight, because they’d pretty much forgotten about it – they buy a lot of bric-a-brac, it’s one of their hobbies. Then they saw that some of the surface painting had melted away and there was something else beneath. Her husband rang an art expert he’d done some building work for, Daniel Hegarty, to ask for advice on how to clean off the surface painting—’

Potting interrupted, ‘Daniel Hegarty is an old rogue! I nicked him years ago for forging vehicle logbooks.’

‘He’s come a long way since then, Norman,’ Luke Stanstead said. ‘He’s now considered to be an accomplished artist.’

Grace frowned and made a note in his notebook. ‘He’s been on my radar, too, but I can’t recall exactly when. Thanks, Luke.’ He nodded to Wilde to continue.

‘Freya – Mrs Kipling – told us that they’d heard Antiques Roadshow was coming to a venue in Sussex and they decided to take it there, to see if the painting beneath, which looked old to them, might be of any value.’

‘Did you believe her?’ Grace looked at both detectives in turn.

‘Yes,’ Wilde said.

Potting nodded. ‘I did, chief. She’s a nice lady, I didn’t get any sense of criminal activity. She is what it says on the tin.’

‘Best before?’ Wilde quipped.