Left You Dead

by James, Peter

  ‘So,’ Polly said, ‘you stepped into the breach, a kind of support?’

  ‘It’s not like that.’

  ‘Really?’ Grace said. ‘What exactly is it like?’

  She looked at each of them for a brief moment, warily. ‘I’m afraid I’ve told you all I know.’

  ‘I don’t think you have,’ Grace replied calmly. ‘I think you know a lot more.’

  She paused. ‘If I’m reading you right, you suspect that Niall and I killed – murdered – Eden?’

  Grace leaned forward across the table, locking eyes with her. ‘Did you?’

  She stood up abruptly. ‘I’m sorry, you asked me to come in to help you with your enquiries about Eden Paternoster being missing. You didn’t tell me you were going to accuse me of her murder. This interview is over. I’m not prepared to talk to you any more without a lawyer present. If you want to arrest me, go ahead – otherwise I’m out of here.’ She stared at both of them in turn, challenging them. ‘Are you going to arrest me?’

  Grace shook his head. ‘No, we are not.’

  ‘Fine, goodbye.’

  Scooping up her handbag, she turned her back on them and strode out of the room.

  91

  Saturday 7 September

  As the door slammed behind Rebecca Watkins, the wake of her perfume hanging in the air, Roy Grace and Polly Sweeney looked at each other.

  ‘Nice lady,’ Polly said. ‘Not.’

  ‘Her junior work colleague confides in her about her marital difficulties, so she lends a sympathetic ear, then goes and shags the woman’s husband. What does that say about her?’

  Polly looked bemused. ‘She’s just a kind and caring person who thought it would be the best way to help her colleague through her difficulties?’

  ‘My thoughts exactly. Very altruistic of her.’ Grace looked equally bemused. ‘You know what surprises me the most about human behaviour, Polly?’

  She shook her head. ‘What?’

  ‘It’s that the older I get, the less anything surprises me. When I first joined the force, I met so many old sweats who were such cynical bastards – as my dad was. I vowed never to become like them, that I would always keep my faith in human decency. But that gets harder with every passing year. I’m turning into my dad.’

  ‘My dad had an expression – he used to say it often after a particularly trying day.’ Polly’s father had been a copper, too.

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘Don’t make excuses for shitty people. You can’t put a flower in an asshole and call it a vase.’

  Grace laughed. And suddenly realized it felt like a long time since he had. ‘I’ll remember that one.’ Then, serious again, he said, ‘So, what’s your assessment of Rebecca Watkins?’

  ‘A proper ice maiden. What a bitch.’

  ‘Well said, but personally I wouldn’t be so polite.’

  Polly raised her eyebrows. ‘She’s hiding something.’

  ‘For sure. The question is, what? She’s definitely lying to us, but her arrogance – confidence – is telling me she’s not done anything illegal here – not committed any crime.’

  ‘Such as murdering Eden?’

  Grace nodded. ‘My reading of her is she’s defensive of Niall, which indicates she doesn’t think he’s committed any crime.’

  ‘What do you think, sir?’

  Grace took a moment to reply. ‘Something’s been bothering me from the very start. When Sandy vanished, I was frantic with worry that something bad had happened to her. In those first hours and days I was in a complete state of panic, particularly when it became evident she really had gone and wasn’t just staying away overnight. I don’t get any sense of panic – or even caring – from Niall.’

  ‘You loved Sandy,’ Polly said. ‘Seems like a different situation with Niall.’

  ‘And with Eden, too? If we follow the money, we have a trail going back some months of her moving assets out of her husband’s reach. Why is that? To shield her assets against a divorce? Or to build up a war chest to fight any divorce proceedings? Or . . .?’ His voice tailed off.

  ‘Or?’ she prompted after some moments.

  ‘Did she have some other plan?’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Grace said. ‘As I’ve wondered all along, there might be something else going on here, all being not what it seems on the surface. I suspect our surveillance on Niall Paternoster might lead us to the answer. What I—’

  His job phone rang.

  Answering it, he heard a voice he recognized, DI Lawrence Thompson, Staff Officer to Cassian Pewe.

  ‘Sir,’ he said, respectfully, ‘the ACC would like to see you as soon as convenient in his office.’

  Grace quickly checked the calendar on his computer. ‘I can be there in fifteen,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you, sir. I will inform him.’

  And stick your phone up his jacksie while you’re at it, Grace thought irreverently. He knew that Lawrence Thompson shared his views on Pewe. Not many employees of Sussex Police who’d ever encountered the man didn’t.

  92

  Saturday 7 September

  Usually these days, the ACC didn’t invite Roy Grace to sit, instead making him stand in front of his desk for their meetings. But today, with an odd, almost simpering smile, he shook his hand firmly. ‘Good to see you, Roy, thanks for sparing the time to see me.’

  As Cassian Pewe spoke, he ushered him to one of the two-seater corner sofas and perched himself on the other. ‘Would you like some coffee?’

  That was almost another first. This must be Pewe’s way of showing sympathy, Grace thought.

  ‘I’m fine, thank you, sir.’

  Pewe looked closely at him, still with his faintly unintelligent expression. ‘How are you bearing up?’

  ‘OK, thank you. Being at work is helping.’

  ‘And your lovely wife, is she coping all right?’

  ‘Cleo’s trying to be strong – she’s gone into work today as well.’

  A frown flitted across his face. ‘I understand the PM on Bruno was carried out at Worthing, is that right?’

  ‘Yes, to spare Cleo from having to be involved. The funeral directors are collecting his body from there.’

  ‘Very sensible,’ Pewe said. ‘I’m so extremely sorry, Roy, for your loss. You have my very deepest sympathy. You will please pass my condolences to Cleo and his grandparents.’

  ‘I will, thank you.’

  ‘I think it was Aristotle who said, “The gods have no greater torment than for a mother to outlive her child.”’

  ‘Fortunately for Sandy, if you can call her a mother, she didn’t.’

  The wan smile again. ‘I’m sure it applies to the father, as well.’

  ‘It does,’ Grace replied. ‘And Aristotle was right.’

  Pewe nodded, clasping his hands together in a gesture of sympathy. ‘If there is anything I can do, if you need to take some time out as I’ve said before, please let me know.’

  ‘I appreciate that, sir.’

  ‘And when you have made the funeral arrangements, please also let me know.’

  Was he intending to send a donation to the charity he and Cleo decided on – which they were still discussing – Grace wondered? God forbid he was planning to attend. All the more reason to make it a private, family one. It had been bad enough when he’d attended Sandy’s, he didn’t want this creep polluting their grief at Bruno’s.

  ‘We’ll be putting an announcement in the Argus,’ he replied.

  Pewe nodded.

  ‘Perhaps you could let me know, in case I miss it.’

  Grace grimaced by way of a reply.

  There was a moment of silence. Then Pewe’s face clouded into a back-to-business expression. Evidently the ACC was still blissfully unaware of the tsunami heading his way. That thought was the only thing that cheered Grace up at this moment.

  ‘Right,’ Pewe said. ‘Good. So, I need to talk to you about resourcing, Roy.’

&nb
sp; ‘Resourcing?’

  ‘As you are well aware, Operation Lagoon is currently using half the entire Major Crime Team’s available manpower, as well as one of only two Surveillance Teams our finances currently stretch to, so I thought you might like to give me an update?’

  ‘With pleasure, sir.’ Grace said the word sir happy in the knowledge he wouldn’t be saying it for much longer. Not from the moment Professional Standards acted on the information Guy Batchelor had provided. But for now, he maintained a facade of respect. ‘Should we still be calling it manpower, sir? Not a very up-to-date expression, is it?’

  Pewe looked, as he so often did when confronted by anything distasteful to him, as if he could smell something nasty. ‘Do you have a better term for it?’

  Grace gave him a deadpan look. ‘Resources?’

  For the next five minutes he filled Pewe in on their progress to date and the major turn of events with the discovery of Rebecca Watkins’s affair with Niall Paternoster. When he had finished, Pewe sat for a while, saying nothing. Finally, he nodded.

  ‘You’ve established, through the surveillance, that Eden Paternoster’s husband and her boss, Rebecca Watkins, are having an affair? Nice work.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ Grace said politely, expecting the sting was about to come.

  Pewe didn’t disappoint.

  ‘Clearly, Roy, you believe in the possibility that Eden Paternoster, far from being murdered and her body dissected, may still be alive and well and in hiding?’

  ‘It’s one hypothesis.’

  ‘Do you have others?’

  ‘Three. The second is that she was murdered, either by her husband or by Rebecca Watkins – or by both of them – and her body subsequently dismembered, some of it buried in Ashdown Forest, some deposited in the sea off Shoreham Harbour. My third is that Niall and Eden Paternoster have conspired together to fake her disappearance.’

  ‘For what reason?’

  ‘Financial. I’ve been reading up on that couple, the Darwins, where the husband, John, faked his death to look like a canoe accident in the North Sea some years ago. He did it with the connivance of his wife for financial reasons in that case, collecting the life insurance on him. Emily Denyer is currently looking hard into the Paternosters’ finances as a major part of our enquiries.’

  Pewe ran a manicured finger, sporting a Wedgwood signet ring, through his golden hair. ‘Would I be correct in saying that in your view, Roy, in all three of your theories, there is no life at stake at the present time? No life in danger? Eden Paternoster is either dead, or alive and well and in cahoots with her husband, or something else entirely? Would you agree with that summary?’

  ‘On the evidence so far, yes. Sir.’

  Pewe smiled, his upper lip rising like a theatre curtain, revealing a stage set of immaculately whitened teeth. He looked to Grace, at this moment, like a piranha in a blond wig.

  ‘Here’s my dilemma, Roy. With the greatest respect, one of our Surveillance Teams is currently engaged in an operation to try to protect a teenage girl we believe is being trafficked into the sex trade by a Brighton criminal gang. This is vital work to protect a vulnerable person.’ The gleam of his teeth again, before he continued with the sucker punch.

  ‘I have a request, from the Divisional Intelligence Unit, for surveillance to monitor a very large drugs consignment believed to be on its way from Liverpool to Brighton. If they can put this in place, they think they could scoop up some of the major players on the Brighton drugs scene. So, what should I do with my resources? Deploy my Surveillance Team to discover the outcome of a marital dispute or to potentially save the lives of many Sussex citizens by cutting off a major drugs supply chain? I don’t like to raise this today of all days, but life has to go on and decisions have to be made.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s as straightforward as you think, sir,’ Grace said.

  ‘You’re suggesting it’s not as clear-cut about the Paternosters?’ Pewe retorted.

  ‘Correct – sir.’

  Pewe opened out his arms expansively. ‘So, convince me.’

  ‘I need more time to keep him under surveillance,’ Grace said calmly. ‘As I told you, something’s going on that I’m not happy about. At this moment I’m still of the opinion that Niall Paternoster may have murdered his wife, with or without the help of Rebecca Watkins.’

  ‘But you are also considering that Eden Paternoster may have set this up and disappeared of her own volition? Or conspired with her husband?’

  ‘Yes, I am.’

  Pewe picked up a globe paperweight on top of a stack of papers on his desk, then laid it back down again. ‘To repeat myself, you currently have no evidence of a life at stake. You also currently have very little evidence that Mrs Paternoster has been murdered. Correct?’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘So what do you need the Surveillance Team for now?’

  ‘I need them to continue monitoring Niall Paternoster’s movements. If he has conspired with his wife, he may lead us to her. If he has murdered her, he may lead us to her body – we know that killers frequently return to the deposition site. It’s possible that the grave in Ashdown Forest could be a decoy. As I told you, I’m unhappy about the location the kitchen knife was found in.’

  ‘You’ve also told me you don’t think Niall Paternoster is very bright. Now you’re saying he’s bright enough to have created a decoy grave and left a clue, in the knife, in an obvious place? Or perhaps conspired with his wife to fake her disappearance?’

  ‘All of these are current possibilities, sir.’

  ‘There’s a tracker in place beneath his rental car, placed there by the Surveillance Team?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you have access to the data from the tracker?’

  ‘We do. On our computers and phones – and tablets.’

  ‘Fine,’ Pewe said. ‘It seems to me that for now the Surveillance Team has served its purpose. I’ll leave it with you until 6 p.m. today after which I’m going to redeploy it to the Liverpool operation. But I will instruct Mark Taylor to leave the tracker in place. You and your team will be able to monitor Paternoster’s car on your computers, tablets and phones. The rest you’ll have to do the old-fashioned way. Right, I think that’s all. Don’t forget to let me know when Bruno’s funeral is.’

  Grace glared back at him.

  93

  Saturday 7 September

  As Roy Grace left Pewe’s office, his private phone rang. It was Cleo. He answered walking down the stairs. ‘Hi, darling.’

  ‘How’s your day going?’ She sounded strangely on edge.

  ‘Not great, tell you in a moment, just hang on.’ He hurried along the ground-floor corridor, past the offices of several senior officers and support staff who worked in the handsome Queen Anne building that gave the HQ its name, Malling House, and out into daylight. ‘Just been properly dicked about by you-know-who again, even after everything we’re going through. Such an idiot,’ he said quietly, although safely out of earshot now.

  ‘You won’t be for much longer, hopefully.’

  ‘Nope. How are you? You OK?’

  ‘I was OK, until a boy, a year older than Bruno, was brought in – went under the rear wheels of a twenty-tonner yesterday on an electric scooter.’

  ‘The one I read about in the Argus?’

  ‘That’s it. I told the team I was sorry – I just couldn’t handle it. I’ve come home.’ She began crying. After a few moments, through sobs, she said, ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be disturbing you.’

  ‘Of course you should. I couldn’t have handled that either, certainly not at the moment. I’ll be home as early as I can.’

  ‘No,’ she said, her voice on the edge of cracking. ‘Stay as long as you need, keep your mind occupied – there’s no point sitting at home dwelling . . . I just needed to get away.’

  There was a brief silence as Roy walked on up the hill towards his office, then, sounding a little more composed, Cleo said, ‘I’ve
just spoken to the funeral director – Mr Greenhaisen. Subject to a couple of lab reports from Bruno’s postmortem that she’s waiting on, the Coroner is happy to release his body tomorrow. The vicar of All Saints, a lovely man, says he could fit the funeral in on Monday, September the thirtieth.’

  ‘Thanks, that’s good news.’

  ‘He’s given me a list of stuff we need to go through – we can discuss all that tonight when you get back. We’ll need to decide on the music and whether anyone should do a eulogy.’

  ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘I can’t immediately think who.’

  ‘Maybe you could say a few words?’

  ‘OK, we’ll discuss it later. I really do want this to be a private family affair. I’ve a feeling bloody Pewe is planning to come and I want to keep him out.’

  ‘I’ve just had Bruno’s headmaster on the phone. The school are already conducting their own investigations and it appears Bruno got out over the gates. He asked me to pass on his sincere condolences and said that he and several teachers would like to attend, and perhaps some of Bruno’s schoolmates.’

  I didn’t know Bruno had any mates, Grace nearly said, but he held it back. ‘OK, I love you.’

  ‘Love you, too,’ she said forlornly.

  He ended the call just as he reached the entrance to the Major Crime suite and made his way to his office, his mind swirling with thoughts both about the impending funeral and his meeting with Pewe.

  He made himself a coffee, putting the milk in the mug first and then the coffee before adding the water, something Sandy had taught him, insisting it tasted better that way – and she was right. He used the time it took for the kettle to boil to start focusing back on the investigation.

  Carrying the mug through to his office, he sat at his desk, glanced through his emails, then called Glenn Branson and Jack Alexander, in turn, asking them to come to see him right away.

  When both detectives were seated in front of him, he told them of the developments following his meeting with Pewe. Neither of them, nor any other members of his team, had any inkling about the ACC’s impending fate.