Dead Man's Time

are other items missing, then I’d put some officers out, with their photographs, around all the antiques shops, street
stalls and car boot sales in the area, as well as getting them to carefully trawl through eBay.’
    Grace made some notes. ‘When you say
steal to order
, that implies insider knowledge.’
    The antiques expert nodded. ‘You said you found a knocker-boy leaflet in the house?’
    ‘Yes. Someone called R. C. Moore.’
    ‘This has all the classic hallmarks,’ Stuart-Simmonds said. ‘The knocker-boy charms his way into the house, and sees a treasure trove of beautiful things. He makes a note, and
often takes surreptitious photographs. Then he sells on the address and a contents summary. Some of the big players have connections to the insurance companies – an employee they bribe within
them – and they get the full inventory that way.’
    ‘Interesting,’ Grace said. ‘The one item that wasn’t insured was the pocket watch.’
    ‘Why on earth not?’
    ‘For the very reason you’ve just told me. Gavin Daly reckoned if it was registered with an insurance company, it would be a target. No one knew it was there, in her safe. Also, it
was an extremely well-concealed safe. He designed it himself as a double safe.’
    ‘Double?’
    ‘Yes, very ingenious. If you opened it, you would think that was it. But the wall at the back of it is false; you insert an Allen key, twist and it opens, and there is a second combination
lock behind. Ordinarily that false wall would fool any burglar.’
    The expert chewed the inside of his mouth for some moments. ‘If they didn’t know about the watch, then it won’t have been presold. Whether they handed it to whoever hired them
or try to sell it themselves, a Patek Philippe from 1910 is a damned rare thing. I’d say finding possible buyers for that should be a major line of enquiry for you, Detective Superintendent.
That watch will lead you to the perpetrators, for sure.’
    ‘If it surfaces,’ Grace said.
    ‘It will, I guarantee. It may be the biggest value item they’ve taken, but it’s also the most dangerous for them.’

25
    YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE CRAZY TO WORK HERE. BUT IT HELPS!
    Some offices had that sign up as a joke, but there was no sign here. You had to be crazy to do this job. Really, you did. Being crazy was probably the best qualification, Gareth Dupont thought.
And he was crazy all right, he knew that. He’d done drugs, done time for GBH – the jerk he’d beaten up had deserved it for goosing his girl in a pub, but maybe it hadn’t
been worth the two years he’d served in prison and the criminal record, he reflected. And more recently, he’d done serious time for burglary.
    Gareth Dupont was thirty-three. He had handsome, olive-skinned looks and shiny dark hair from his mother’s Hispanic genes, along with a toned body from obsessive weight training in gyms
and his passion for Salsa dancing. He’d made a shedload of money in a Spanish-based telesales stock market scam – most of which had gone up his nose – sold loft insulation until
Friday, and now, at the start of this new week after the Bank Holiday, was selling advertising space in sports club magazines for the Brighton-based company Mountainpeak Publishing. In addition he
had his sideline, which could, on occasion, become a nice little earner. Also, he talked to God a lot. Occasionally God talked back, but not as often as he would have liked. Recently, he reckoned,
God was pretty displeased with him. Quite rightly. But hey, you couldn’t always be perfect. God had to understand that.
    After school, he’d toyed with becoming a monk. Except, he realized at the last moment that he liked women too much. And booze. And coke. And the money to buy them. But the pull was always
there. Something about a monk’s cell. A sanctuary. One day, but not right now. Right now, telesales gave him good money, which he needed because he was always skint by the end of every
weekend, and all the more so after a long weekend. Skint and usually hungover. And today he was very skint and badly hungover.
    And in love.
    Hey, that’s what weekends were for, weren’t they? Partying and getting trashed – oh, and going to church, but the less said about that the better. Not really his thing, church,
he was starting to think. He wasn’t much enjoying spending time either with old ladies with hatpins and elderly rectors with clattering teeth, or the happy clappy alternatives. You