by Peter James
Unlike the modern, soulless building of the CID headquarters at Sussex House where he was now based, the big cheeses were all housed in this handsome Queen Anne mansion, at the centre of the untidy cluster of buildings that comprised Sussex Police headquarters, on the edge of the ancient county town of Lewes.
The building’s fine original features had been left intact in most of the grander offices, in particular the delicate stucco work and the ornate ceilings. Alison Vosper’s was a fine example. Her ground-floor room was immaculate, with a fine view out over a manicured lawn, and it was furnished with elegant antiques which gave a sense of both authority and permanence.
The centrepiece was a large expanse of polished rosewood desk on which sat a black-edged blotter, a slim crystal vase containing three purple tulips, framed photographs of her husband – a police officer several years older but three ranks her junior – and her two children, a boy and a girl, immaculate in their school uniforms, an ammonite pen holder, and as always a stack of the morning’s papers fanned out. Mercifully Grace did not feature on any of the front pages.
Assistant Chief Constable Alison Vosper was not only sour this morning, she was extremely frosty, an effect enhanced by her starchy-looking high-necked blouse the colour of ice, cinched at the front by an equally icy-looking diamanté brooch. Even her perfume had an acidic tang to it.
As usual Vosper did not invite him to sit down – a technique she had long used on all juniors as a way of keeping meetings short and to the point. Grace informed her of everything that had happened since yesterday’s very late briefing. The only visible reaction he got was when he came to the beetle – enough revulsion to show that beneath her hard carapace Alison Vosper was still human.
‘So we have three possibles among the women reported missing in the past few days?’ she said. Her accent was a flat Midlands Brummie, which made her sound even harder.
‘Yes, and we’ve couriered material collected from their homes up to Huntingdon for DNA analysis – I’ve called in a favour there. We’ll get a match sometime today.’
‘And if there is no match?’
‘We’ll have to go wider.’
Her phone rang. She pressed a button, held it down and snapped, ‘I’m busy.’ Then she looked up at the Detective Superintendent again. ‘You know there’s a lot riding on this for you, Roy?’
He shrugged. ‘More than any other case?’
She gave him a long, hard, silent look. ‘I think we both know that.’
Grace frowned, unsure what was coming next and uncomfortable at her words.
She twisted her gold wedding band around on her finger for a moment, and it seemed to soften her. ‘You’ve been lucky, spending your career so far in one area, Roy. A lot of police officers have to move around, constantly, if they want to get promotion. Like me. Birmingham’s my home, but I’ve spent just three years in my whole career in Brum. I’ve been all over the place – Northumberland, Ipswich, Bristol, Southampton. It’s different to your dad’s day. He spent all his career with the force in Brighton, didn’t he?’
‘If you include Worthing as well.’
She gave a thin smile. Worthing was only a few miles down the coast. Then her demeanour hardened again. ‘Your father was a well-loved and respected man, so I am told. But it doesn’t seem to many people that you are your father’s son.’
She left the words hanging in the air. Roy felt them like a sting in his heart. It was as if he had been lanced and his energy was now leaking out. He stared back at her, confused and suddenly feeling very vulnerable indeed. ‘I – I know I have my critics,’ he said, and he was aware, too late, how lame that sounded.
She shook her head, then this time pulled her wedding band right off, holding it out in front of her, as if symbolizing that nothing was permanent, that she could flick him out of her life as easily as she could flick the gold band into a bin. ‘It’s not your critics I’m worried about, Roy. The Chief is worried about the damage you’ve done to Sussex Police. You nearly caused a mistrial a couple of weeks ago by taking a piece of evidence to a medium – and you got splashed all over the nation’s headlines as a result, making you and us a laughing stock. You’ve lost a lot of respect among colleagues for dabbling in the supernatural. Then you allowed two suspects to get killed during a pursuit.’
Grace tried to interrupt, thinking she was being totally unreasonable, but she raised a hand, blocking him.
‘Now we’re forty-eight hours into a murder enquiry, you can’t name the victim, you don’t have a suspect; all you have is the life history of a damned beetle found at the scene.’
Now he was getting angry. ‘I’m sorry; this is just not fair, and you know it.’
‘This is not about what’s fair, Roy; this is about the police being seen to be competent, protecting the public.’
‘Those two who died in the car – they were guilty as hell, and they were dangerous. They’d driven through roadblocks, they hijacked two cars, they knocked an officer off his motorcycle. Would you rather we had just let them go?’ He shook his head in exasperation.
‘What I’m saying to you, Roy, is that it might be better to move you to an area where you aren’t known. Up north somewhere, perhaps. Somewhere busy that can use your skills. Somewhere like Newcastle. I’ve been asked by one of my colleagues there for the services of an experienced SIO for a sensitive investigation that could take several months, maybe a year. And I think you are the right person for that.’
‘You’ve got to be joking. This is my home. I don’t want to be transferred anywhere. I’m not even sure I’d want to stay in the force if that happened.’
‘Then pull yourself together and make sure it doesn’t. I’m drafting in another officer to share your cold-case workload as I don’t think you are making as much progress there as you should. He’s a former Detective Inspector from the Met, and we’ve promoted him to the same rank as you.’
‘Do I know him?’
‘His name is Cassian Pewe.’
Grace thought for a moment, then groaned inwardly. Detective Inspector Cassian Pewe, now to be Detective Superintendent Cassian Pewe. Grace had had a run-in with him a couple of years ago, when the Met had sent in reinforcements to help police Brighton during the Labour Party conference. He remembered him as deeply arrogant. ‘He’s coming here?’
‘He starts on Monday. He’ll be working out of an office here. Do you have a problem with that?’
Yes, he wanted to say, his brain spinning. Of course, teacher’s pet. Where else would she station him? Here was perfect, so that she and Pewe could have regular cosy chats – about how and where to undermine pain-in-the-arse Roy Grace.
But he had no choice but to say, ‘No.’
‘Your card is marked, Roy. OK?’
He felt so choked he could only nod his reply. Then his phone rang. She signalled for him to answer it.
He stepped away from her desk and looked at the display. It was from the Major Incident Suite. ‘Roy Grace,’ he answered.
It was DC Nicholl, calling him excitedly to tell him they had heard back from the lab at Huntingdon. They had a positive DNA match for the body.
24
‘I can’t believe your music, man,’ Branson said. ‘It’s crap, it’s just total crap. There’s no other word for it.’
They were on a long stretch of downhill dual carriageway heading west, past the grassy expanse of the old World War II fighter base, down to their left, that had now become Shoreham Airport, a busy base for private aircraft and commercial flights to the Channel Islands, and in the direction of Southampton.
Shoreham was the extreme western suburb of Brighton, and Grace always felt a strange mixture of relief and loss when he left it behind him. Loss, because Brighton was where he really felt at home, and anywhere else felt like uncharted waters where he was out of his depth, a little insecure. And relief, because all the time he was in the Brighton and Hove City conurbation he felt a sense of responsibility, and away from it he could
relax.
After his years in the force it was his second nature to subconsciously assess every pedestrian and the occupants of every car on the street. He knew most of the local villains, certainly all of the street drug dealers, and some of the muggers and burglars; knew when they were in the right place and when in the wrong place. That was one of the things so ridiculous about Alison Vosper’s threat to transfer him. A lifetime of knowledge and contacts down the pan.
Roy Grace had decided to drive, because his nerves wouldn’t take another journey with Branson showing off his high-speed pursuit skills. Now he wasn’t sure his nerves could take any more of the Detective Sergeant’s poking about with the CD player. But Branson wasn’t finished with him yet.
‘The Beatles? Who the hell listens to the Beatles in their car these days?’
‘Me, I like them,’ Grace said defensively. ‘Your problem is you can’t differentiate between loud noise and good music.’ He brought the Alfa Romeo to a stop at a red light, the junction with the Lancing College road. He had decided to take his own car because it hadn’t had a long run in a while and the battery needed a good charge. More importantly, if he had taken a pool car, Branson would probably have insisted on driving and been hurt if he hadn’t let him.
‘That’s well funny, coming from you,’ Branson said. ‘You just don’t get music!’ Then suddenly changing the subject, he pointed at a pub across the road. ‘The Sussex Pad. Do good fish there, went there with Ari. Yeah, it was good.’ Then he turned his attention back to the CD player. ‘Dido!’
‘What’s wrong with Dido?’
Branson shrugged. ‘Well, if you like that kind of thing, I suppose. I hadn’t realized how sad you were.’
‘Yeah, well I do like that kind of thing.’
‘And – Jesus – what’s this? Something you got free with a magazine?’
‘Bob Berg,’ Grace said, getting irritated now. ‘He happens to be a seriously cool modern jazz musician.’
‘Yeah, but he’s not black.’
‘Oh, right, you have to be black to be a jazz musician?’
‘I’m not saying that.’
‘You are! Anyhow he’s dead – he was killed in a crash a few years ago and I love his stuff. Just an awesome tenor saxophonist. OK? Want to pull anything else apart? Or shall we talk about your hunch?’
A tad sullenly, Glenn Branson switched on the radio and tuned it into a rap station. ‘Tomorrow, right, I’m taking you clothes shopping? Well I’m going to take you music shopping as well. You get a hot date in this car and she sees your music, she’s going to be looking in the glove locker for your pension book.’
Grace tuned him out, turning his mind back to the immediate task ahead of them and all the other balls he had to keep in the air simultaneously.
His nerves were frayed this morning, both from his meeting with Alison Vosper, which had left him feeling very down, and from the task that was facing him in about an hour’s time. Ordinarily, Grace could have said with complete honesty that he liked almost every aspect of police work – except for one thing, and that was breaking the news of a death to a parent or loved one. It wasn’t something he had to do very often these days as it was a task for family liaison officers, detectives who were specially trained. But there were some situations, like the one he was going to now, where Grace wanted to be present himself to gauge the reaction, to glean as much information as he could in those key early moments after the news was broken. And he was taking Glenn Branson because he thought it would be good training for him.
Newly bereaved people followed an almost identical pattern. For the first few hours they would be in shock, totally vulnerable, and would say almost anything. But rapidly they would start to withdraw, and other members of the family would close ranks around them. If you wanted information, you had to tease it out within those first few hours. It was cruel but almost always effective, and otherwise you were stuffed for weeks, maybe months. Newspaper reporters knew that, too.
He recognized the two family liaison officers, DC Maggie Campbell and DC Vanessa Ritchie, sitting in their car, a small grey unmarked Volvo parked over on the grass verge of the lane outside the entrance to the house, and pulled the Alfa up just past them. Their two faces, frosty with disapproval, stared through the Volvo’s windscreen at him.
‘Shit, man! How do people afford these places?’ Glenn said, staring at the steel gates between two columns topped with stone balls.
‘By not being cops,’ Grace retorted.
Money had never been a big factor in Grace’s life. Sure he liked nice things, but he’d never had swanky aspirations and he had always been careful to live within his means. Sandy had been terrific at saving here and there. It always amused him that she used to buy the next winter’s Christmas cards in the January sales.
But from these savings she was always buying them little treats, as she liked to call them. During the first few years of their marriage, when she worked for a travel agent and could get discounted holidays, she had twice saved enough for an entire fortnight abroad.
But no amount of scrimping and saving on his salary, even with all the overtime bonuses in the world that he used to get as a junior officer, would ever buy him anything close to the magnitude of the spread he was looking at now.
‘Remember that film, The Great Gatsby?’ Branson said. ‘The Jack Clayton version, with Robert Redford and Mia Farrow, right?’
Grace nodded. He remembered it vaguely, or at least the title.
‘Well that’s what this place is, innit? That’s a fuck-off house you’re looking at.’
And it was: a dead straight tree-lined drive, several hundred yards long, opening into a circular car park with an ornamental pond in the middle, in front of a substantial white Palladian – or at least Palladian-style – mansion.
Grace nodded. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the doors of the Volvo open. ‘Here comes trouble,’ he said quietly. The DCs climbed out of their car.
Maggie Campbell, a dark-haired woman in her early thirties, and Vanessa Ritchie, a tall thin redhead, two years her senior, with a harder face – and demeanour – strode up to them, both in smart but sombre plain clothes.
‘There’s no way four of us can go in, Roy,’ DC Ritchie said. ‘It’s too many.’
‘I’ll go in first with Glenn, and break the news. Then I’ll phone you when I think you should come in and take over.’
He saw Maggie Campbell frown. Ritchie shook her head. ‘It’s the wrong way round – you know that.’
‘Yes, I do, but that’s the way I want to play this.’
‘Play this?’ she responded angrily. ‘This isn’t some kind of a bloody experiment. It’s wrong.’
‘What’s wrong, Vanessa, is that a father shouldn’t have to find out that part of his daughter has been found, short of a few important bits such as her head, in a bloody field with a beetle up her rectum. That’s what’s bloody wrong.’
The FLO tapped her chest. ‘That is what we did our training for. We are specialists in all aspects of bereavement.’
Grace looked at the women in turn. ‘I know all about your training and I know both of you – I’ve worked with you before and I respect you. This has nothing to do with your abilities. Your training gives you guidance, but at the end of the day there’s also the policing aspect. On this occasion I have my reasons for wanting to break the news, and as the SIO on this case I set the rules, OK? I don’t want any more sour faces from you, I want cooperation. Understood?’
The two FLOs nodded but still did not look comfortable.
‘Have you decided how much you are going to tell the father?’ Vanessa Ritchie said tartly.
‘No, I’m going to play it by ear. I’ll bring you up to speed before I call you in, OK?’
Maggie Campbell smiled in a half-hearted, conciliatory way. DC Ritchie gave him a reluctant You’re the boss shrug.
On a nod from his boss, Branson pressed the bell, and moments later the gates swung jerkily open. T
hey drove up to the house. Grace parked between the two cars outside, an old, rather grubby BMW 7 series and a very ancient Subaru estate.
As they approached the front door it was opened by a distinguished-looking man in his mid-fifties, with dark hair streaked with silver at the temples, wearing an open-necked white business shirt with gold cufflinks, suit trousers and shiny black loafers. He was holding a mobile phone.
‘Detective Superintendent Grace?’ he said in an upper-crust accent which was slightly muffled as he seemed to speak through his teeth, scanning both police officers uncertainly. He had a pleasant smile, but sad blue-grey eyes like a pair of little lost souls.
‘Mr Derek Stretton?’ Grace asked. Then he and Branson both showed him their warrant cards out of courtesy.
Ushering them in, Derek Stretton asked, ‘How was your drive?’
‘It was fine,’ Grace said. ‘I think we picked a good time of day.’
‘It’s a beastly road; can’t think why they can’t just make it motorway. Janie’s always spending hours stuck when she comes down here.’
The first thing Grace noticed as he entered the hallway was how sparsely furnished the place was. There was a fine long inlaid table, and a tallboy and antique chairs, but there were no rugs or floor coverings, and he observed a row of shadows along the walls where paintings had clearly recently been removed.
Leading them through into an equally barren drawing room, with two large sofas on bare boards and what looked like a plastic picnic table put between them as a coffee table, Derek Stretton seemed in a hurry to explain, gesturing at the bare walls of the room and the large rectangular shadows, many with bare wires poking out, some with small lights at the top. ‘Afraid I’ve had to let go of some of the family silver. Made a few bad investments . . .’
That explained the shadows on the wall, Grace thought. They’d probably gone to auction. Stretton looked so distressed, he felt genuinely sorry for the man, and that was without the bombshell he was about to drop.
