Picture You Dead

81

Tuesday, 5 November

Roy Grace sat in the passenger seat of the Ford Focus, tight-lipped as Glenn drove, wondering, as he always did, why he’d again let his friend loose behind the wheel. ‘How did your swotting up on the fête galante go?’

‘Pretty good. Antoine Watteau; Jean-Baptiste Pater; Jean François de Troy; Jean-Honoré Fragonard; Nicolas Lancret; Pierre-Antoine Quillard.’

Glenn’s reciting the names had the effect Grace had hoped of slowing down his driving. A few minutes later they arrived, to his relief, and with little thanks to the talent of his chauffeur, at very swanky wrought-iron gates. A discreet plaque fixed to the wall, with gold letters on a black background, said BEWLAY PARK.

Glenn put down his window, pressed a button on the control panel, and gave as good as he got back to the disembodied voice who challenged them. The gates opened and they drove through and up a long avenue of plane trees, with lawns that were almost impossibly green on either side.

‘Reckon the grass is dyed, boss?’ Branson said, driving now at a civil pace.

‘Hand-painted,’ Grace replied. ‘Every blade.’ Then he saw in the mirror of his sun visor that they had an escort behind them. A matt black Mercedes. Branson had seen it, too.

‘Stop!’ Grace instructed.

Branson obliged, stamping on the brake a little too keenly, bringing the Ford to an abrupt halt. The Mercedes stopped behind them in a squeal of tyres.

Roy Grace unclipped his seat belt, climbed out and walked up to the off-roader. As he approached, the driver’s window slid down, and he saw a piece of shaven-headed muscle with stupid sunglasses, all in black, with a smaller, fatter thug beside him. ‘Can I help you guys?’ Grace asked facetiously. ‘Are you lost, is that why you’re following us?’

‘Keep driving,’ the muscle behind the wheel said in a surly voice.

Grace pulled out his warrant card and held it up a few inches from the man’s eyes. ‘Can you read English?’

‘I can read English.’

‘Good. Now here’s the deal. Stop following me or I’ll start following you, twenty-four-seven. You won’t even be able to go to the toilet without a pair of eyes on you. Do you understand?’

He got a sullen nod.

Smiling, Grace said, ‘I don’t like being followed, understand? So turn around and sod off. And I’m giving you just sixty seconds to do that before I nick you for threatening a police officer. Are we good?’

Without replying, the driver began reversing the vehicle, searching for a space between the trees to turn. Grace climbed back into the Ford.

‘Respect!’ Branson said.

Grace grinned. ‘Drive on, Macduff.’

A short while later, Piper’s vast mansion came into view on the far side of a circular driveway around an ornamental lake, across which a pair of black swans glided with supreme elegance. A powder-blue convertible Rolls-Royce was parked outside the front door.

‘Reckon anyone could acquire a place like this from honest money?’ Branson asked, eyes wide open, pulling up behind the Rolls. Its number plate had a combination of letters and numbers arranged, illegally close together, spelling out ARTMAN.

‘A few rock stars and tech gazillionaires,’ Grace replied. ‘Or inheriting it from an ancestor.’

‘None of these, from what we know about Stuart Piper,’ Branson said. ‘Must be a lot of dough in art.’

They walked up the steps to the imposing white front door. It was opened, as they reached it, by a hunk of beefcake, all in black, with a coiled earpiece, a large emerald ring on his right hand, and an expression that was about as hostile as a face could look before imploding into a thousand fragments. ‘Mr Piper don’t see no one without an appointment,’ he said, repeating what they’d heard through the speakerphone at the entrance gates.

‘Well,’ Grace said, smiling pleasantly and holding up his warrant card, ‘I think he’d be smart to make an exception for us.’ Then he made a play of looking closely at the man’s hand. ‘Nice ring.’

As he spoke, a figure appeared down the hall, who looked every inch this man’s identical twin. And wearing a ruby-red ring.

‘My colleague will take you to Mr Piper,’ he said.

‘Colleague?’ Grace said. ‘Or brother?’

There was no answer.

The two detectives followed the twin with the red ring along an oak-panelled corridor lined on both sides with framed paintings that were clearly old and probably important, Grace thought.

‘Jesus, this reminds me of National Trust houses Ari liked to visit,’ Branson said, referring to his ex-wife, ogling both the pictures and marble busts in recesses.

Grace nodded. ‘See yourself living in a place like this?’

Branson shook his head. ‘I reckon the heating bill’s more than my annual salary. You?’

Grace shook his head. ‘Nope, wouldn’t fancy spending all my weekends mowing the lawns.’

A pair of double doors ahead of them were opened and ruby ring ushered them into a cavernous room with a domed ceiling. A lean man of about sixty, with an expressionless face, immaculately dressed, sat behind a beautiful desk, flanked on each side by a stationary Dalmatian dog. Neither animal reacted as Grace and Branson entered.

Piper stood up, his eyes cold, his face steely. Confident in his grand setting, Grace thought, he addressed them. ‘Yes, gentlemen, what can I do for you?’

‘Stuart Piper?’

‘Yes.’

Grace held up his warrant card. ‘I’m Detective Superintendent Grace and my colleague is Detective Inspector Branson from the Surrey and Sussex Major Crime Team.’

Piper waved an arm at the two chairs in front of his desk. ‘Have a seat, officers – or should I say, detectives?’ His expression revealed nothing. ‘So, I’ve got an upgrade, eh?’

‘Upgrade?’ Grace was finding his complete lack of expression unnerving. He rarely found people’s eyes hard to read, but this man’s were.

‘Sure.’ There was a trace of humour in Piper’s voice now, but it was not reflected in his face. ‘A couple of weeks ago, I was visited by a humble Detective Sergeant and a Detective Constable. Now I get a Detective Superintendent and a Detective Inspector. I’d call that an upgrade. Enough to have me turning left on an aeroplane, instead of slumming it in economy, wouldn’t you say?’

Piper didn’t look like a man who ever slummed it in economy, Grace thought, but didn’t rise to it. ‘Our colleagues came to ask you if you’d ever had any dealings with the late art dealer Charlie Porteous,’ he said. ‘You said you had not. You also said you had no idea why one of the persons we believe may be connected with the murder of art dealer Charlie Porteous in October 2015 had your number on his phone.’

Piper fixed his cold eyes on each of them in turn. ‘Well, it’s good to know you detectives have such a joined-up team. Is there anything else you’d like to tell me that I already know, or have you just taken a jolly ride out into this beautiful part of the countryside for fun, and to piss away taxpayers’ money instead of doing the job we pay you for, of catching criminals?’

Grace glanced at Branson and could see he was riled as he was too by Piper’s arrogance. He cut to the chase. ‘Mr Piper, you employ two identical twins, Ross and Maurice Briggs. Is that correct?’

‘What does that have to do with anything, officer – sorry, Detective Superintendent?’

‘Quite a bit actually, Mr Piper. An Audi A6 vehicle linked to the murder of Mr Porteous has been also linked to your employees.’

‘So?’

‘You informed our colleagues, DS Potting and DC Wilde, that you had no knowledge of Charlie Porteous, owner of the Porteous Fine Arts Gallery in Duke Street, and had never had any dealings with him.’

‘Correct.’

‘Would you say you have a good memory? I’m aware you had an unfortunate incident in your life back in 1979 when you suffered a very severe assault, leaving you with multiple head injuries. You never suffered from an impaired memory subsequently?’

‘My memory is excellent,’ he replied flatly. ‘Pretty much photographic if you really want to know.’

‘Well, if that’s the case, I’m surprised you’ve forgotten this.’ Grace pulled a folded sheet of paper from his inside pocket, laid it on Piper’s desk, opened it, smoothed it out and passed it across to him.

Piper took it and stared at it impassively.

‘I imagine you have the original somewhere, for safe keeping, for insurance purposes?’ Grace questioned.

‘It’s a receipt from the Porteous Fine Arts Gallery, dated 15 May 2014, for two sketches by Pierre-Antoine Quillard,’ Glenn Branson said.

‘Not that long ago to remember,’ Grace added. ‘Especially not for someone with photographic recall.’

To Piper’s credit, Grace thought, the man handled the potential bombshell with aplomb. ‘Oh, those – to be honest those are utterly insignificant, mere ephemera.’

‘You paid £150,000 each for two pieces of ephemera?’ Branson quizzed.

Piper stared back at him so coldly, both his eyes could have been glass, Branson thought. Even though they had the man on the back foot, his gaze chilled him. ‘Detective Inspector,’ he said, ‘most of the art I buy is in multiples of million pounds. You’ll have seen some of my collection on the walls as you walked along the corridor.’ He waved his arms expansively around the room. ‘You can see more of it here. I rarely pay less than five million for a work, and much of what I acquire is well north of twenty million. You’ll have to excuse my small memory slip for the purchase of a couple of insignificant sketches, made by my associate.’

‘Would that be Mr Robert Kilgore?’ Grace asked.

‘You two clearly have been doing your homework, haven’t you? Let me explain something. Robert Kilgore, who looks out for works of art of the fête galante period for me – the period I collect above all others – has a budget I give him, along with a figure below which he doesn’t need to obtain my sanction.’ He glanced down at the receipt. ‘These two sketches fall well below that threshold. If your enquiry is about these two sketches, you’d best go and talk to him.’

‘Can you give us his contact details?’ Branson asked.

‘Really?’ Piper retorted. ‘You mean I have something you don’t know? Top detectives – two of Sussex’s finest – and you’ve spent all this time, come all this way for a phone number? You could have just called me.’ His lips parted, just a fraction, to reveal his veneered teeth. It could have been a smile or a snarl, Grace thought.

‘Thank you, Mr Piper.’ He stood up, followed by Branson. ‘You’ve been very helpful.’

‘Any time, detectives. I’m a big supporter of the police, you know. If you ever need a donation to the Sussex Police Charitable Trust, just ask.’

‘We’ll bear that in mind,’ Grace said.

‘Very big-hearted of you,’ Branson added.

‘I’m all heart,’ Piper replied.