Dead Man's Time

nodded.
    ‘Something that’s very important is if you could indicate as much as you can of what’s been taken. I understand you know this house well, sir?’ Glenn Branson said.
    ‘I guided my sister on just about everything she bought,’ Daly said. ‘She and her late husband. I don’t see anything important remaining in this hall. Whoever’s
done this knew what they were doing. I can list everything that was in here. There should be a photograph album somewhere of all the most valuable items.’
    ‘That could be very helpful.’
    Daly was silent for some moments. Then he said, ‘Helpful to whom?’
    ‘This enquiry, sir.’
    Daly looked at him sceptically. ‘You really think so?’
    ‘It would help us if you could identify, as much as possible, everything that’s been taken.’
    ‘From what I’ve seen just in this room, it might be easier to identify what’s been left behind.’
    Branson looked at him uneasily. ‘It does seem like the perpetrators are professionals.’
    Daly did not reply. He walked through into the drawing room. Above the mantelpiece used to be one of his sister’s most valuable pictures, a Landseer landscape, worth a good half a million
pounds. He had long tried to convince her to move it to another location for fear of heat damage from the fire. Now, fire damage was the least of her problems, he thought, staring at the dark
rectangle. On the wall opposite had hung a gilded, hand-made, eighteen-wheel Whitehurst clock, made in 1791. It had exposed workings, which showed the time anywhere on the globe. Its auction value,
today, would be over three hundred thousand pounds.
    He looked around at other dark rectangles on the walls. At empty spaces in the display cabinets, and on the walnut bureau. Everything of high value was gone. Almost everything. But there was one
thing he was more anxious about than anything else. He went through into his sister’s office and stared at the wall. As he suspected, the safe door was open. He peered in, but the door to the
second, secret chamber at the back was open, also.
    His heart sank, but anger rose inside him.
    ‘Bastards,’ he said, quietly. He shook his head, stared again, just to be quite certain. ‘Bastards.’
    Then he walked back into the hall, followed by the Detective. There was a pile of mail sitting on top of a Victorian table, one he had never particularly cared for. Ignoring Branson’s
caution not to touch it without his gloves on, he began sifting through it. Halfway through the pile was a single A4 sheet of paper with a form letter.
    It was headed: R. C. MOORE .
    Below was an address in Brighton’s Kemp Town. And beneath that the wording:
    Dear Sir or Madam
    In the many years that I have been visiting this area, I have never ceased to take satisfaction from the pleasure people gain from realizing money from some unwanted, often
     forgotten item. Funds that you can put to good use – items that I, in turn, can sell.
    I am always interested in buying items such as:
    Old leather and crocodile suitcases
    Children’s books
    Old jewellery
    Scrap silver and gold
    ‘Looks like a knocker-boy leaflet,’ Glenn Branson said, bagging it to get it fingerprinted later.
    Brighton’s knocker-boys hailed back to the post-war days of the rag and bone men, and they had been a scourge of the elderly and vulnerable for decades, using leaflets like these to get
inside houses and then either rip off the owners or pass on tips about valuable items to professional burglars.
    Daly nodded. He knew. He’d been one himself, years back. Then suddenly his phone rang. Excusing himself, he stared at the display. There was no name showing.
    ‘Gavin Daly,’ he answered.
    ‘It’s Nurse Wilson, Mr Daly. Your sister is weakening. I think you should come back quickly.’

18
    Roy Grace, in protective clothing like everyone else in Aileen McWhirter’s house, stood alone in her ground-floor study, at the rear of the property, on his phone, with a
map of the area in front of him. He paused from his task of putting together his enquiry team, and issuing instructions to each person he called, to text Cleo and warn her he would be very late
home tonight.
    The only information Aileen McWhirter had been able to give was that two of the men who attacked her were in brown uniforms, saying they were from the Water Board. He needed to cocoon an area
around the property, and arrange for a house-to-house enquiry team to approach neighbours to see if any of