Dead Man's Time (11 page)

The Scenes of Crime Officers had finished at his sister’s house, and the rota of scene guards had been stood down. Now, at six o’clock in the evening, beneath a
clear sky, Gavin Daly sat in the back of his Mercedes at the top of the driveway down to the house.

Yellow police signs had been placed a short distance apart, either side of the driveway, each with the same wording on them:

He instructed his driver to take him down to the house. Then he climbed out, told the driver to leave, that he would call him when he needed him back, walked around to the front of the silent
house, and entered the porch.

His hand was shaking as he put the key in the lock of the front door, and he had a lump in his throat.

Then he hesitated, unsure if he actually wanted to go in. Except that he had work to do.

It was a warm evening, the garden was alive with birdsong, wasps, butterflies, and he could hear, a short distance away, the swish . . . swish . . . swish of a secluded neighbour’s lawn
sprinkler. Summer was officially coming to an end in a few days. How many more summers would he see? he wondered.

How many more did he want to see?

Any?

Everyone he had ever loved was now dead. His mother in a hail of bullets in her bedroom. His father dragged away into the night. He had buried two wives and his brother-in-law. Now, when the
Coroner released her body, he would be burying his sister.

He did not know how many years he had left before his son would be burying him. He was still mobile, and, despite the walking stick, he remained fairly agile. Thanks to the skills of a local
plastic surgeon, his face still looked two decades or so younger than his years. He’d beaten off heart trouble with a triple bypass, although he had angina now. He’d had his prostate
removed. He’d reached what everyone called a ripe old age. But he did not feel ripe. He felt rotten.

And unfulfilled.

He twisted the key and pushed the door open, then stepped inside, carefully using his walking stick to steady himself on the floor plates the SOCOs had laid down, the smells of the place
instantly saddening him further. Old age. Furniture polish. Decaying fabrics. And the new smells of the Crime Scene chemicals. He looked at the empty space, a darker colour than the rest of the
floor, where a particularly fine hall table had stood for decades. At the rectangles on the walls where his sister’s stunning art collection had once hung. The silence was so leaden he felt
it on him like a heavy coat.

His aunt used to take him and Aileen to church every Sunday. But he’d not had any time for religion as a child. And even less so now. Sure, there had been a time when he was happy –
or at least content. He’d been one of the biggest players in antiques in the country. He’d enjoyed the entertaining, the celebrity that went with it, the customers he befriended. But
all the time it had been clouded by his sadness that he and Ruth could not have children. The Daly name would live on with his one idiot son from his first marriage, to Sinead.

Now, as he looked around the emptiness in here, it seemed to him that life was little more than a bad joke. An endurance test. Every person a Job if you were into that Old Testament stuff.

Well, one thing he was determined to do, was to get an item back, even if it killed him. And he had a name to begin the search with. The name of a very nasty little shit.

He walked through into the drawing room, with its faded green flock walls, green sofas and armchairs. More shadows on the walls. The marble mantelpiece, on which had once sat a stunning
Giacometti sculpture, was bare, apart from one framed photograph of happier times.

Aileen, a beautiful, raven-haired twenty-eight-year-old, with the love of her life, Bradley Walker, a USAF pilot and Cary Grant lookalike. He’d flown as a B24 bomber pilot on Operation
Tidal Wave, a huge and unsuccessful mission to bomb the oil refineries around Ploiesti, in Romania, in August 1943. His was one of fifty-four Liberator aircraft that never returned, and he was one
of hundreds of airmen reported missing, presumed killed.

For years she had harboured a hope that somehow, miraculously, he had survived. She’d kept up her spirits, somehow. She’d kept them up better than he ever had. That was women for
you, he rued. Many seemed to have inner resources that were denied to males.

He climbed the stairs to the landing, past the radiator that Aileen had been left chained to for two days, and went into her bedroom, which was directly opposite. After her husband had died
she’d had their marital double bed replaced with a single. It looked strange to see it in this large room that still smelled very faintly of her scent. Propped up against the pillows was Mr
Stuffykins, the ragged little one-eyed, one-eared bear she’d brought from New York. He made a mental note to ensure he put it in the coffin with her. He removed a pair of her long black
Cornelia James gloves, from her dressing table, to put those in the coffin with her as well. Aileen would like that, he thought; she always believed a woman was not properly dressed unless she was
wearing gloves. He took a brief walk through into her bathroom, then went downstairs and into her book-lined study.

First he peered inside the opened wall-safe again, just to double-check nothing had been overlooked. But it was bare. And that dark void pained him, and angered him in so many ways. It had
contained their father’s pocket watch. The only truly personal thing belonging to him that either of them had.

He sat down at Aileen’s walnut bureau. A black Parker pen, in a holder embossed with gold letters reading
HSBC
– probably a Christmas gift years ago from the bank, he
thought, sat on the curling leather surface of the writing area. Tiny oval-framed photographs of her husband, her children and himself were arranged on the top of it. The drawers were stuffed with
correspondence, bills, stamps. There was a fresh sheet of blue headed writing paper, with an envelope beside it, and an unwritten birthday card. A letter she had been going to write to someone,
which now would never be written, and a card that would never be sent. Her diary was gone, he noticed, and assumed the police had taken it.

He pulled open one of the deep side drawers and immediately, along with a faint woody smell, caught a whiff of her scent again. After a few moments of rummaging through papers, he pulled out a
leather photograph album containing pictures that had been taken of the highest-value items in the house, mostly for insurance purposes. His sister had a fine collection of oil paintings, clocks
and furniture, all of which he had advised her on, and some of which he had bought for her, at knock-down prices, at rigged auctions.

He laid it in front of him and opened it up. The first photograph should have been the uninsured gold Patek Philippe pocket watch, still with a slim gold chain attached, that their father had
always worn in his waistcoat. The glass had splinter cracks, and the crown was bent at an angle, the winding arbor frozen, with the pinion inside disconnected from the centre wheel so that the
hands would not move when the crown was rotated. He hadn’t seen the watch for a long time, since he’d moved it to Aileen’s safe. But he could still picture every detail, vividly.
The last time he had looked at it was to check the serial number, after he had become an expert in watches and realized it possibly had a high value. He had been right.

The watch was extremely rare and even in its busted form had a value of at least two million pounds today. Not that he or Aileen needed the money or would ever have sold it. They had both wanted
to keep it as it was, the day he had been given it. Often he had thought of having it repaired and using it, wearing it with pride, but he could never bring himself to do it. With this busted watch
he felt a connection with his father and he was scared to lose that.

He had never questioned in his mind how his father, a humble stevedore, had come by something so valuable. He’d stolen it from somewhere, almost certainly.

As executor of his sister’s will, Gavin knew she’d left everything to her granddaughter, with the exception of some bequests to her staff and to charity. As he stared at it, tears
welling in his eyes, a voice from the past came back to him, like a ghost. It was long, long, ago.

On the Manhattan wharf in 1922. As he stood there, a small boy, with his sister and his aunt, the youth with a cap, pushing through the crowd, thrusting a heavy brown-paper bag into his hand,
containing a gun, the watch and the newspaper front page.

Watch the numbers.

He had been trying to puzzle out what the boy had meant for ninety years. He was scared he would go to his grave never knowing.

Tears rolled down his cheeks. He felt an unbearable emptiness.

He stared at the watch.
I’m going to get you back
, he promised silently.
I don’t care what it costs, I’m getting you back.

Gareth Dupont liked modern churches. In particular he liked the Church of the Good Shepherd in Portslade. The district to the west of Brighton, inland from Shoreham Harbour,
was where he had lived as a child, and he had always been drawn to the sharp, angular brick building.
Surely God didn’t just do old stuff?
he always thought. He always felt more in
tune communing with God in here than in some dusty old place.

He entered beneath a sign which proclaimed:
THERE ARE NO STRANGERS IN THIS CHURCH, ONLY FRIENDS YOU HAVEN’T MET
. He breathed in the smell of dry wood, polish and
candle wax, and walked a short distance along the aisle and sat down, placing his copy of the
Argus
next to him. Then he knelt, closed his eyes and pressed his hands together, the way his
mother had taught him, the way you were supposed to pray. He was
supposed
to be in a Catholic church, but he preferred Anglican, and he figured that would be okay with God. Particularly as
the Anglican church was okay with divorce, thanks to Henry VIII, and, by inference, infidelity. And he was currently mixing it with two ladies: one single and one very married. Playing with fire.
He liked fire.

When he left it was 7.15 p.m. He needed to hurry home to shower and change; he was picking up Suki Yang at 8 p.m. and taking her for a meal at Spoons. A couple of hours ago he’d been
worrying about taking her to such an expensive place and wondering whether to go for something cheaper. But now he felt much better about it.

He climbed into the Porsche, but kept the roof shut, and keyed in a number on his phone.

A crisp, hostile voice he recognized answered.

‘It’s Gareth Dupont,’ he said.

‘I don’t like being called on my mobile – what do you want?’

‘I just saw the
Argus.’

‘What about it?’

‘It’s pretty tempting.’

‘Are you insane?’

‘Not at all. I’d like to talk business. Like – renegotiate terms?’

‘I’m not talking any more on this phone. I’ll meet you at the Albion pub, Church Road, Hove at 8 p.m.’

Dupont was thinking about his date with Suki Yang. ‘Eight’s difficult.’

‘Not for me it isn’t.’

Trudie’s was one of the few perks of Sussex House, Roy Grace thought. The former CID HQ – now renamed, in the ever changing police world, as the Force Crime and
Justice Department – was situated on a dull industrial estate. But this mobile cafe, a short walk away, produced the best bacon butties to be had in the county, along with the cheeriest staff
behind the counter. Despite Cleo’s best efforts at persuading him to eat a healthy diet, Roy Grace had picked up a fried egg and bacon sarnie from them on his way in at 7 a.m.

Then he had become so absorbed in checking through the overnight logs of serious crimes in Sussex, responding to a ton of emails, and answering some more questions from the Prosecuting Counsel
on the Venner court case, he had forgotten to eat it.

He munched it now, not caring that it had gone cold, washing it down with mouthfuls of coffee as he sat, suited and booted, in Major Incident Room One going through his briefing notes for
Operation Flounder as he waited for his team to assemble, and listened to the pelting rain outside. The names of operations were thrown up at random by the Sussex Police computer. At the moment it
was working its way through fish.
Flounder
was particularly appropriate, Grace thought, because at this moment, exhausted after yet another sleepless night thanks to Noah, he truly felt
that he was floundering on this case.

It was a week since Aileen McWhirter had died. The time of the robbery was estimated sometime between 6 and 9 p.m. on the night of Tuesday, 21 August. If there had been three perpetrators, it
was estimated it would have taken them a good couple of hours to have physically removed the items they took and wrapped and stowed them in a vehicle. The perps had vanished into thin air with ten
million pounds’ worth of antiques and fine art. And in ninety minutes’ time he was going to have to give his mercurial boss, ACC Rigg, an update on progress.

Great.

Running murder enquiries was the job Roy Grace loved, and it was what he wanted to do for the rest of his career. He had been fascinated by homicides ever since the first one he had attended,
many years back as a young DC. Normally at the start of each new day of an enquiry he would feel energized, however late he might have gone to bed. But this morning, thanks to a case of
baby
brain
, he was struggling.

He stared up at the large colour photograph of the old lady’s wrinkled, but still handsome, face, which was stuck to a whiteboard. Next to it, on another whiteboard, were SOCO photographs
of three different shoeprints, and catalogue illustrations of the trainers they had come from, and two other whiteboards were almost covered with photographs of antique furniture, pictures and
jewellery that had been stolen from the house in Withdean Road.