by Peter James
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55
At ten fifteen on Sunday morning, David Curtis, a young probationary Police Constable on his second day at Brighton, was partway through his shift. A tall nineteen-year-old with a serious demeanour and dark brown hair that was short and tidy, but with a nod towards fashion, he was in the passenger seat of the Vauxhall police patrol car, which smelled of last night’s French fries, being driven by the John Street police station club’s biggest bar bore.
Police Sergeant Bill Norris, a crinkly haired, pug-faced man in his early fifties, had been everywhere, seen it all and done it all, but never quite well enough to get raised above the level of sergeant. Now, just a few months short of his retirement, he was enjoying teaching this youngster the ropes. Or more accurately, was enjoying having a captive audience for all the war stories no one else wanted to hear yet again.
They were cruising down litter-strewn West Street, the clubs all shut now, the pavements littered with broken glass, discarded burger and kebab wrappers, all the usual detritus from Saturday night. Two road-sweeping vehicles were hard at work, grinding along the kerbs.
‘Course it was different then,’ Bill Norris was saying. ‘In them days we could run our own informants, see? One time when I was in the drugs squad, we staked out this deli in Waterloo Street for two months from information I’d had. I knew my man was right.’ He tapped his nose. ‘Copper’s nose, I got. You either got it or you haven’t. You’ll find out soon enough, son.’
The sun was in their eyes, coming obliquely at them across the Channel at the end of the street. David Curtis raised his hand to shield his eyes, scanning the pavements, the passing cars. Copper’s nose. Yep, he was confident he had that all right.
‘And a strong stomach. Got to have that,’ Norris continued.
‘Cast iron, I’ve got.’
‘So we sat in this derelict house opposite – used to go in and out via a passage round the back. Bloody freezing it was. Two months! Froze our bollocks off! I found this old British Rail guards overcoat some tramp had abandoned there, and wore it. Two months we sat there, day in and night out, watching with binoculars by day and night scopes in the dark. Nothing to do, just swinging the lantern – that’s what we used to call, you know? Telling stories – swinging the lantern. Well, anyhow, one evening this saloon car pulled up, big Jag—’
The probationary PC was reprieved, temporarily, from this story, which he had already heard twice before, by a call from Brighton Central Control.
‘Sierra Oscar to Charlie Charlie 109.’
Using his personal radio set, sitting in its plastic cradle on the clip of his stab vest, David Curtis replied, ‘109, go ahead.’
‘We’ve got a grade-two cause for concern on the queue. Are you free?’
‘Yes, yes. Go ahead with details, over.’
‘Address is Flat 4, 17 Newman Villas. The occupant is a Sophie Harrington. She didn’t turn up to meet a friend yesterday, and she’s not answered her phone or doorbell since yesterday afternoon, which is out of character. Can you do an address check so we can take it off the queue?’
‘Confirm Flat 4, 17 Newman Villas, Sophie Harrington?’ Curtis said.
‘Yes, yes.’
‘Received. En route.’
Relieved to have something to actually do this morning, Norris swung the car around in a U-turn so hard and fast that the tyres squealed. Then he made a left turn at the top into Western Road, accelerating faster than was strictly necessary.
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56
Apologizing to Marcel Kullen, he put the phone to his ear and pressed the green button. ‘Roy Grace,’ he answered.
Then, when he heard the acerbic voice at the other end, he immediately wished he had left the damn phone ringing.
‘Where are you, Roy? It sounds like you’re abroad.’ It was his boss, Assistant Chief Constable Alison Vosper, and she seemed a little astonished. ‘That wasn’t a UK ring tone,’ she said.
This was one call he simply had not expected today and he had no answer prepared. When he had phoned Marcel in Germany he had noticed the ring tone was quite different, a steady, flat whine instead of the normal two-tone ring in the UK. There was no point in lying, he knew.
Taking a deep breath, he said, ‘Munich.’
From the other end of the phone came a sound like a small nuclear device detonating inside a corrugated-iron shed filled with ball bearings. It was followed by some moments of silence. Then Vosper’s voice again, very abrupt: ‘I’ve just spilled some coffee. I’ll have to call you back.’
As he finished the call he cursed for not having thought this through better. Of course, in a normal world he was perfectly entitled to a day off, and to leave his deputy SIO in charge. But the world in which Alison Vosper prowled was not normal. She had taken a dislike to him, for reasons he could not figure out – but no doubt in part because of his recent unfortunate press coverage – and was looking all the time for a reason to demote him, or freeze his career path, or transfer him to the other end of the country. Taking the day off on the third day of a major murder inquiry was not going to improve her opinion of him.
‘Everything is OK?’ Kullen asked.
‘Never better.’
His phone was ringing again now. ‘What exactly are you doing in Germany?’ Alison Vosper asked.
Roy hated lying – as he knew from recent experience, lies weakened people – but he was also aware that the truth was not likely to be met with much civility, so he fudged. ‘I’m following up a lead.’
‘In Germany?’
‘Yes.’
‘And when exactly will we be able to expect your leadership back in England?’
‘Tonight,’ he said. ‘DI Murphy is in charge in my absence.’
‘Excellent,’ she replied. ‘So you will be able to meet me straight after your briefing meeting tomorrow morning?’
‘Yes. I can be with you about nine thirty.’
‘Anything to report on the case?’
‘We’re making good progress. I’m close to an arrest. I’m just waiting for DNA tests to come back from Huntington, which I expect tomorrow.’
‘Good,’ she said. Then, after a moment, she added, without any softening of her tone, ‘I’m told they have excellent beer in Germany.’
‘I wouldn’t know.’
‘I spent my honeymoon in Hamburg. Take it from me, they do. You should try some. Nine thirty tomorrow morning.’
She hung up.
Shit, he thought, angry with himself for being so badly prepared. Shit, shit, shit! And tomorrow morning she would ask him for sure to tell her about the lead he was following up here. He needed to think of something pretty damn good.
They were passing a high-rise block of flats, with the BMW roundel prominently displayed near the top. Then a Marriott hotel.
He quickly checked his BlackBerry for messages. There were a dozen emails waiting to be read that had come in since getting off the plane, most of them relating to Operation Chameleon.
‘The old Olympic stadium!’ Kullen said.
Grace looked over to his left and saw a building designed in the shape of a half-collapsed marquee. They forked right, down an underpass, then turned left over tramlines. He opened his map on his knees, trying to orient himself.
Kullen looked at his watch and said, ‘You know, I am thinking, it was my plan we go to end up at my office first, and put up all the details of Sandy on the system, but I think it will be better we go to the Seehausgarten first. It will be busy now, many people. Perhaps you will have a chance of seeing her. Is better we go to the office after, is OK?’
‘You’re the tour guide, your decision!’ Grace said. He saw a blue tram with a large advertisement for Adelholzener on its roof.
As if misinterpreting him, Kullen began pointing out the names of galleries as they drove down a wide avenue. ‘Museum of Modern Art,’ he said. Then, ‘This over here is the Haus der Kunst – an art gallery built during the Hitler regime.’
Marcel continued diligently pointing out the names of sights they were passing and the districts of the city they were in. He listened, continually staring down at the street map open on his knees, trying to fix the geography of the place in his mind, and thinking to himself, If Sandy is here, what part of this city will she be living in? The centre?
A suburb? A village outside?
Each time he looked up he clocked everyone on the pavement and in every car, on the off-chance, however small, of spotting Sandy. For some moments he watched a thin, studious-looking man ambling along in shorts and a baggy T-shirt, a newspaper tucked under his arm, munching on a pretzel he was holding in a blue paper napkin. Do you have a new man in your life? Does he look like this? he wondered.
‘We are go to the Osterwald Garten. It is also beer garden close to the Englischer Garten – easier we parking there and a nice foot walk to the Seehaus,’ Kullen announced.
A few minutes later they turned into a residential area and drove along a narrow street with small, attractive houses on either side. Then they passed an ivy-clad pink and white columned building. ‘For weddings – marriage registry. You can get married in this place,’ Kullen said.
Something cold suddenly churned inside Grace. Marriage. Was it possible Sandy had married again in some new identity she had adopted?
They drove on down a leafy street, with a hedge on their right and trees on their left, then came into a small square, with a cobbled pavement and other ivy-clad houses, and if it weren’t for the left-hand drive cars and the German writing on the parking signs, it could have been somewhere in England, Grace thought.
The Kriminalhauptkommisar swung into a parking space and switched off the engine. ‘OK, us start here?’
Grace nodded, feeling a little helpless. He was not sure exactly where he was on his map, and when the German helpfully pointed a finger, he realized he had been looking in the wrong place entirely. He then pulled out of his pocket the one-page map that Dick Pope had printed from the internet and faxed him, with a circle showing where he and his wife had seen the person they believed was Sandy on their day in this city. He handed it to Marcel Kullen, who studied it for some moments. ‘Ja, OK, super!’ he said, and opened his door.
As they walked down the dusty street in the searing morning heat, it was clouding over. Grace, removing his jacket and slinging it over his shoulder, looked around for a bar or a caf�Despite the adrenaline pumping, he felt tired and thirsty, and could have done with some water and a caffeine hit. But he realized he didn’t want to waste precious time, he was anxious to get to that place, to that black circle on the fuzzy map.
To the only positive sighting, in nine years, of the woman he had loved so much.
His pace getting more urgent with every step, he strode with Kullen towards a large lake. Kullen navigated them across a bridge and left along the path, with the lake and a wooded island on their right and dense woodland to their left. Grace breathed in the sweet scents of grass and leaves, savouring the sudden delicious coolness of the shade and the slight breeze from the water.
Two cyclists swerved past them, then a young man and a girl, chatting animatedly, on roller blades. Moments later a large French poodle bounded along, with an irate man with a centre parting and tortoiseshell glasses running after it, shouting out, ‘Adini! Adini! Adini!’ He was followed by a very determined-looking Nordic walker in her sixties, wearing bright red Lycra, teeth clenched, ski poles clacking on the tarmac path. Then, rounding a bend, the landscape opened up in front of them.
Grace saw a huge park, teeming with people, and beyond the island now the lake was far larger than he had at first realized, a good half-mile long and several hundred yards wide. There were dozens of boats out on the water, some of them elegant, wooden, clinker-built rowing boats, and the rest white and blue fibreglass pedalos, and flotillas of ducks.
People crowded the benches that lined the water’s edge, and there were sunbathing bodies lying everywhere, on every inch of grass, some with iPods plugged into their ears, others with radios, listening to music or perhaps, Grace thought, trying to shut out the incessant shrieks of children.
And blondes everywhere. Dozens. Hundreds. His eyes moved from face to face, scanning and discarding each one in turn. Two small girls ran across their path, one holding an ice-cream cornet, the other screaming. A mastiff sat on the ground, panting heavily and drooling. Kullen stopped beside a bench on which a man with his shirt completely unbuttoned was reading a book, holding it at an uncomfortable-looking arm’s length as if he had forgotten his glasses, and pointed across the lake.
Grace saw a sizeable, attractive – if rather twee-looking – pavilion, in a style that might have been interpreted from an English thatched cottage. Crowds of people were seated at the beer-garden tables outside it, and to the left there was a small boathouse and a wooden deck, with just a couple of boats tied up, and one pedalo pulled out of the water and lying on its side.
Grace suddenly felt his adrenaline surging at the realization of what he was looking at. This was the place! This was where Dick Pope and his wife, Lesley, reckoned they had seen Sandy. They had been out in one of those wooden rowing boats. And had spotted her in the beer garden.
Forcing the German to quicken his pace, Grace took the lead, striding along the tarmac path that girded the lake, past bench after bench, staring out across the water, scanning every sunbather, every face on every bench, every cyclist, jogger, walker, roller-blader that passed them. A couple of times he saw long, fair hair swinging around a face that reminded him of Sandy, and locked on to it like a Pavlovian dog, only to dismiss it when he looked again.
She might have had it all cut off. Dyed another colour, perhaps.
They passed an elegant stone monument on a mound. He absorbed the names engraved on the side: VON WERNECK . . . LUDWIG I . . . Then, as they reached the pavilion, Kullen stopped in front of a selection of menus pinned to an elegant, shield-shaped board, under the heading Seehaus im Englischer Garten.
‘You like we eat something? Perhaps we can go inside in the restaurant, where it is cooler, or we can be outside.’
Grace cast his eyes over at the rows and rows of densely packed trestle tables, some under the shade of a canopy of trees, some beneath a large green awning, but most out in the open. ‘I’d prefer outside – for looking around.’
‘Yes. Of course. We get a drink first – you like something?’
‘I’d better have a German beer,’ he said with a grin. ‘And a coffee.’
‘Weissbier or Helles? Or would you like a Radler – a shandy – or maybe a Russn?’
‘I’d like a large, cold beer.’
‘A Mass?’
‘Mass?’
Kullen pointed at two men at a table drinking from glasses the size of chimney stacks.
‘Something a little smaller?’
‘A half-Mass?’
‘Perfect. What are you going to have? I’ll get them.’
‘No, when you coming Germany, I buy!’ Kullen said adamantly.
The whole thing was attractively done, Grace thought. Elegant lamp posts lined the waterfront; the outbuildings housing the bar and the food area were in dark green and white, and recently painted; there was a funky bronze of a naked, bald man, with his arms folded and a tiny penis, on a marble plinth; orderly stacks of plastic crates and green rubbish bins for empties and rubbish, and beer glasses, and polite signs in German and in English.
A cashier sat under a wooden awning, dealing with a long queue. Waiters and waitresses in red trousers and yellow shirts cleared away debris from tables as people
left. Leaving the German police officer to queue at the bar, Grace stepped away a short distance, carefully studying the map, trying to pinpoint from it at which of the hundred or so eight-seater trestle tables Sandy might have sat.
There must be several hundred people seated at the tables, he estimated, a good five hundred, maybe more, and almost without exception they each had a tall beer glass in front of them. He could smell the beer in the air, along with wafts of cigarette and cigar smoke, and the enticing aromas of French fries and grilling meat.
Sandy drank the occasional cold beer in summer, and often, when she did, she would joke that it was because of her German heritage. Now he was starting to understand that. He was also starting to feel very strange. Was it tiredness, or thirst, or just the enormity of being here? he wondered. He had the ridiculous feeling that he was trespassing on Sandy’s patch, that he wasn’t really wanted here.
And suddenly he found himself staring into a stern, headmasterly face that seemed to be agreeing with him, admonishing him. It was a grey, stone head-and-shoulders sculpture of a bearded man that reminded him of those statues of ancient philosophers you often saw in junk shops and car-boot sales. He was still in the early stages of his studies, but this man definitely looked like one of them.
Then he noticed the name, paulaner, embossed importantly on the cornerstone, just as Kullen came up to him, carrying two beers and two coffees on a tray. ‘OK, you have decided where you want to sit?’
‘This guy, Paulaner, was he a German philosopher?’
Kullen grinned at him. ‘Philosopher? I don’t think. Paulaner is the name of the biggest brewing house in Munich.’
‘Ah,’ Grace said, feeling decidedly dim-witted. ‘Right.’
Kullen was pointing to a table at the water’s edge, where some spaces were being freed up by a group of youngsters who were standing and hauling on backpacks. ‘Would you like to sit there?’
‘Perfect.’
As they walked over to it, Grace scanned the faces at table after table after table. Packed with men and women of all ages, from teens to the elderly, all in casual dress, mostly T-shirts, baggy shirts or bare-chested, shorts or jeans, and just about everyone in sunglasses, baseball caps, floppy hats and straw hats. They were drinking from Mass or half-Mass glasses of beer, eating plates of sausages and fries, or spare ribs, or tennis-ball-sized lumps of cheese, or something that looked like meatloaf with sauerkraut.
