by Peter James
‘And where’s that going to get you?’
Smallbone gave an oily smile. ‘Revenge, all right? And a bit of money. I’ve spent twelve years dreaming about paying him back. You know what he did to me last night?’
‘You told me twice already.’
‘Yeah, well, I ain’t Amis Smallbone for nothing.’
‘You sure about that?’
‘I thought you was my friend.’
‘I am, mate, so let me give you some straight talking. The world has changed in the last twelve years, in case you was too busy to read a newspaper. Burgling’s a mug’s game, too much hard work, too high risk. Drugs and the internet’s where the dough is – and with minimal risk. And you need to remember something.’
‘What?’ Smallbone asked, sullenly. He had the feeling he was being put in his place.
‘You were never as good as you thought you was. Your dad – now there was a class act. Everyone feared your dad, and everyone respected him. You’ve always lived on that, traded on being your dad’s son, but you was never half the man he was.’
‘Shut the fuck up.’
‘You need to hear this,’ Tilney went on. ‘You’ve always been small time, talking the big talk. You had all that flash stuff, the fancy houses, the cars, the yacht, but did you ever actually own any of it? It was all rented, wasn’t it? All smoke and mirrors, that’s why you ain’t got nothing now.’ He took a swig of his beer and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘You know what I do? I look forward. You and Roy Grace, that’s history. Forget about it. Forget Gaia – she’s going to have bodyguards coming out of her jacksie while she’s here.’
Smallbone glared at him.
‘Grab yourself a beer, sit down, relax, chill out a little. In fact, hey, while you’re about it grab two beers – one for yourself and one for your ego.’
50
David Green’s strategy was to start a ground search of the area around the lake by Scenes of Crime officers, supervised by himself, and an underwater search of the lake by divers from the Specialist Search Unit, supervised by Police Search Adviser Sergeant Lorna Dennison-Wilkins, who had managed the search of the chicken farm.
The large yellow SSU truck was parked behind the growing collection of vehicles along the track which, to Glenn Branson’s relief, so far did not include any reporters – one positive about this remote location.
Lorna Dennison-Wilkins was an elfin, attractive woman of thirty, with short brown hair. Glenn always found it hard to believe how ably she coped with the tough, grim jobs her unit faced almost daily. The SSU had to do all the tasks that were considered beyond the remit of ordinary police officers. These ranged from recovering decomposing corpses from sewers, wells, drains, the seabed and from lakes like this one, to crawling on their hands and knees doing fingertip searches in mud or excrement, such as in the chicken farm, to conducting the same kind of searches for body parts or murder weapons in waste tips. When they weren’t doing that, they searched through the homes of drug dealers, risking at every moment being spiked by hidden hypodermic needles.
One image that had never left him was Lorna’s description, a year or so back, of how she and her team had had to recover, from a frozen tree, fragments of the face, skull and brains of a man who had stuck a twelve-bore shotgun under his chin.
The silence of the lake and surrounding woodland was broken by the rasp of the outboard motor of the Specialist Search Unit’s grey inflatable dinghy. Two of the team were in the boat, in scuba gear but minus their masks and tanks, one helming, the other studying the screen of the sidescan sonar. Glenn stood watching on the jetty. The smell of spent petrol from the outboard’s exhaust suddenly reached his nostrils, momentarily blotting out the pleasant tang of muddy water and plants. As there was no permanent boat on this lake, they restricted the search area to what they estimated to be throwing distance from the bank.
The dinghy suddenly slowed, and there was a splash as a pink marker buoy was dropped into the water, marking the spot where there was an anomaly – something on the screen that looked as if it did not belong on the lake bed.
Over the course of the next forty minutes three more marker buoys were dropped – two in the far section of the lake. Then the dinghy returned to the jetty, and Glenn followed the two men back to their truck for a debrief.
The interior of the vehicle smelled of rubber, plastic and diesel. They sat around the small table, and Glenn was grateful for the mug of tea someone pushed in front of him. Jon Lelliott, one of the most experienced members of the unit, well able to read accurately the often indistinct images on the screen, said, ‘There are four anomalies. Wrapped up, I think, corresponding in shape and size to human limbs.’
*
Outside, twenty minutes later, Crime Scene Photographer James Gartrell had finished taking photographs of the strip of suit cloth, which had now been bagged. He was now positioning his camera on a tripod directly above a muddy footprint that had been found in close proximity to where the fabric had been snagged on the gorse bush. A plastic yellow marker, stencilled with a black number 2, was wedged into the ground beside it, and a ruler lay alongside the footprint. This would enable him to make an exact size photographic print of it later. Working with precision, he was using a spirit level to ensure the camera was exactly perpendicular to the footprint, before setting up lights to ensure the camera recorded all the intricacies of the footprint as clearly as possible.
Five SOCOs were working through the dense, wooded surrounds of the lake in line formation. To avoid further contaminating the area by treading anywhere unnecessarily, Glenn returned to the observation post on the wooden decking of the jetty, where he had stationed himself, watching and waiting, on his phone most of the time, getting updates from members of his enquiry team. He also took a call from his solicitor, which ended with him shouting down the phone at the woman who was informing him that Ari had now changed her mind about the agreed custody arrangements for their children. In the meantime Bella was having a hard time back at the entrance gate, explaining to several club members who had turned up anticipating a quiet day’s fishing, that their lake was now a cordoned-off crime scene.
Glenn ended the call to his solicitor, and glared out across the water for some moments. Bitch. Bitch. Bitch. Dappled sunlight was beaming down through the overhead branches from a clear sky. A pair of coots paddled jerkily out of a tall screen of reeds, curious but seemingly unconcerned about the divers. He watched a water boatman, about an inch long, sculling along just beneath him. Startled by a light splash from a fish rising, he looked back towards the middle of the lake and saw the concentric ripples where it had been.
Two divers were entering the water, one on the right and one on the left, each holding a black and red underwater recovery bag. They were in scuba outfits, with bright yellow harnesses from which a green and yellow cord trailed up to a spool held by an attendant, also in a dry suit, for each of them. A dive supervisor stood observing. Glenn, standing near him, watched as they sank below the surface in a maelstrom of bubbles.
This was a beautiful, peaceful place, he thought. There were worse places to spend a day. A fly-fishing club – William Pitcher had explained the difference between fly fishing and coarse fishing. As Branson now understood, anglers would only cast their feather trout flies on the surface; there were no weights to drag them down to the bottom. Whatever lay beneath could remain undiscovered for years, perhaps for ever. Making this a smart choice for a deposition site?
Behind him, he heard rubber-soled footsteps clumping along the wooden boards, then Bella’s voice. ‘This is so beautiful!’ she said.
‘Yeah,’ he replied, with a grimace, still very churned up from the phone call. He could understand at this moment how people could murder their spouses.
Bella stood beside him and nodded, with a strangely sad smile. ‘Ever fished?’ she asked him.
‘No, not my thing. Not sure I’d have the patience. You?’
‘I prefer to catch min
e already battered, with plenty of chips.’
He laughed, and then they began to chat more easily, although she still seemed more distant and less responsive today than last night. Perhaps it was him who was distracted, by his troubles with Ari and his constant longing for his kids – or perhaps she was fretting about her mother?
After some minutes, Jon Lelliott began wading out of the water towards them, holding a recovery bag with strands of weed hanging from it. He carried it across to the small SOCO tent which had been erected close by the SSU lorry.
Watched by Glenn and several others, he unzipped the bag very carefully. It contained what looked at first like a thin, dark-coloured log. It was only when Glenn looked closer that he could see clearly exactly what it was. A black bin bag, tied with fuse wire, wrapped around a long, narrow object, with something white protruding from the end.
A hairless human hand.
Glenn flinched in revulsion, but Bella stared at it with professional detachment. ‘Left hand. It doesn’t look at all decomposed, I would say it’s not been in the water very long,’ she stated with certainty in her voice.
Although he’d attended a number of grim crime scenes, Glenn had not, to his relief, had to deal with many dismembered corpses before. Even so, it didn’t require any expertise to tell that this was not the work of someone with surgical skills. The partial limb looked like it had been hacked off with a blunt blade – the bone was splintered and there were tendrils of muscle and skin hanging around the end like a ragged fringe. It could almost have been a theatre prop, he thought. Or something from a joke shop. There was no smell of decay coming from it, another indicator that Bella was probably right that it had not been long in the water.
In which case, he thought, disappointed, it was unlikely to be connected to the torso from the chicken farm which had been there many months.
‘Twenty-four hours, tops,’ David Green said, joining them around the table. ‘I would say much less. Otherwise crayfish, rats, voles or pike – if there are any – would have started taking nibbles from the exposed flesh. I’m actually surprised nothing’s had a go at it already – crayfish are normally present within a couple of hours.’
‘Unless there are more body parts down there which are keeping them happy,’ Bella said.
‘Quite,’ Green agreed.
There were indeed more down there.
During the next hour and a half, the police divers recovered the rest of the left arm up to the shoulder, the lower right arm and hand, also severed at the elbow, and the rest of that, too. As well as both legs, each chopped into three parts. But no head.
Each body part had been wrapped in a bin-liner, weighted with a rock and tied with fuse wire.
Also, around the muddy and partly boggy shore of the lake, there were some footprints identical to the one close by the strip of cloth that had been spotted by William Pitcher, each in a position corresponding with throwing distance of where one of the body parts had been located. A numbered yellow marker lay beside each of them.
At the same time as the last of the body parts was being recovered, the SOCO team, in their line search, followed a trail of footprints leading away from the lake. At the end of this trail, in a shallow and evidently hastily dug hole, covered in branches, lay suit trousers and a jacket, matching exactly their sample strip of fabric.
A few minutes later, back at the rear of the Specialist Search Unit truck, each of the body parts lay wrapped in white plastic sheeting, tagged and dated. Glenn, sipping a mug of coffee, examined the suit through the plastic bags. But to his disappointment, whatever labels had once been sewn in had been removed.
Turning to Bella he said, ‘So, what do you think?’
She shrugged. ‘That there’s a sodding Great White in there that ate the head and torso. The dive team must have missed it.’
He grinned. ‘Yeah, my thoughts exactly.’
‘Failing that, we might have some of the missing bits of our human jigsaw puzzle. Except the body is months old and these aren’t.’
‘With powers of observation like that, you could make a fine detective!’
‘Flattery will get you anywhere,’ she replied, and gave him a warm smile.
She seemed so vulnerable, he thought. She was a tough detective but a lost human soul. He wanted to put his arms around her and hug her, but this was not the time or place.
But, he decided, at some point in the very near future he would find the right time – and place.
51
Amis Smallbone decided he would find the right time and place, too. He stood alone on the terrace steps of Brighton’s Grand Hotel, a Chivas Regal on the rocks in one hand, a cigarette in the other. He dragged hard on it, staring with small, hateful eyes out across the busy traffic of King’s Road at people strolling along the promenade on the far side, and at the flat blue sea beyond.
He was dressed nattily but in dated style: blue blazer with shiny brass buttons, open-neck white shirt with a paisley cravat, blue chinos and blue and white Sebago deck shoes. He looked like he might have just stepped off a yacht. Like the sodding great one he was staring at right now, a showy motor cruiser, powering through the sea at a fast lick, a tall, mare’s tail wake arcing behind it.
That could have been him on that yacht, he thought, taking another drag. If it had not been for Detective Roy Grace.
Henry Tilney was right, he knew. Leave it, put it behind him. But that had never been his way. People needed to be taught lessons. Grace had wiped him out. He’d lost everything. Twelve fucking years of his life locked up in shithole prisons, surrounded by losers.
Gaia was here in this hotel. Up in the Presidential Suite, having a cosy chat with Roy Grace at this moment, together with Chief Superintendent Graham Barrington and a bunch of other cops. He smiled as he crushed out the cigarette, drained the whisky and contemplated going back inside to order another. At least he still had some of his old sources. And one of them could give him access to any room in this hotel, twenty-four seven.
He could listen to the conversation in the Presidential Suite, too, at this moment, if he wanted, thanks to his old contact. But there was no need. He pulled another cigarette pack out of his left-hand jacket pocket. A tiny light winked on it – so faint it was almost impossible to see in this bright daylight. He returned it to his pocket with a smug smile. He would listen to the recording later, at his leisure.
*
One floor above Smallbone, in the imposing, eau-de-nil, deep-carpeted sitting room of the Presidential Suite, Roy Grace, who was never normally star-struck, had to pinch himself. He was sitting on a sofa next to Gaia! And she was nice – she was warm, friendly and funny, not at all the diva he had been anticipating; but her presence was mesmerizing.
She was dressed in a man’s shirt, white with the sleeves rolled up, ripped blue jeans and black suede ankle boots with buckles similar to a pair that Cleo had, except these looked more expensive. Her blonde hair had the freshness of someone who has just stepped out of the hairdresser’s salon, and her face looked closer to thirty than the thirty-seven years she was carrying; she had a radiant complexion and not a single wrinkle. She was far more gorgeous in the flesh than in her photographs. And she smelled of an amazingly sexy, musky scent.
Glenn Branson would have killed to have been here, he thought, trying to avoid staring at her too much. But that was hard, especially with several top buttons of her shirt undone, revealing an erotic glimpse of her cleavage.
Lying on his tummy on the carpet, a short distance away from them and absorbed in an electronic game, was her son Roan, in jeans, a yellow T-shirt and sneakers, his hair awry.
‘Presidential Suite’ was a fitting name for this collection of rooms, he thought, sneaking another surreptitious glance at her. They were traditionally furnished in a sumptuous but traditional Regency style and had a regal air about them. Also seated with them in the room were two of Gaia’s power-dressed female personal assistants, and her security chief Andrew Gulli, a dry,
serious man, dressed in a business suit, white shirt and sombre tie. The police officers present were Chief Superintendent Graham Barrington, who was in uniform, DI Jason Tingley who was running the security operation for Brighton and Hove, and Greg Worsley from the Close Protection Unit, like Tingley wearing a suit and tie. All three of them seemed a little star-struck, Grace thought, like himself.
Outside on the landing, two of Gaia’s man-mountain bodyguards stood sentry, and two other pairs covered each of the two fire escape doors from the five-room suite. In here, she was as safe as in Fort Knox.
And that was the problem.
All the time she was in here, they could keep her safe. But she had made it very clear she did not want to be a prisoner – she wanted to go jogging early morning every day, and more importantly to her, she did not want her son being brought up in a cocoon. She insisted on being able to take him to the beach, walk around the city freely with him, take him to a pizza place, or anywhere else he fancied.
It would have been a problem to protect a star of her calibre under normal circumstances, Grace knew, and these were far from normal. Someone had tried to kill her, and the perpetrator was still at large. That person could be here in this city right now. For all he knew, he – or possibly she – could even be in this hotel. The Threat Management Unit of the Los Angeles Police Department, who had been in close contact with Graham Barrington, were deeply concerned.
At least the Chief Constable, Tom Martinson, had had the good sense to throw the rule book – which restricted armed protection to royalty and diplomats – out of the window and sanction round-the-clock Armed Response Unit officers to protect her, provided the total cost did not fall on budget-restricted Sussex Police. Two of them had shadowed her car down from Heathrow Airport, and another two, in plain clothes, were in the hotel lobby. Close protection of this kind was expensive, but as Martinson had reasoned, the alternative, of something happening to Gaia while here in this city, would in the long term be far more expensive in terms of damage done to the city’s image, and the fear it would instil in every potential visitor.
