RG8 - Not Dead Yet

by Peter James

  But Rigg had not tried to hide his fury. Sitting in front of him, Roy Grace felt as if he were back in the presence of his former boss, the acerbic Alison Vosper, who delighted in putting him on the spot at any opportunity. When he attempted to explain the difficulties of securing a site to which the general public had daily access, the ACC snorted in derision. ‘My dear fellow,’ he said, pompously. ‘You were tasked with overall responsibility for Gaia’s safety while she is a guest in our city – and so far you’ve given a less than impressive performance. You knew there was a threat to her life; did it not occur to you to check the roof spaces, as something utterly elementary?’

  ‘It did, sir, and they were checked. The police checked thoroughly, initially, and it has been down to the Pavilion’s own security since then. I’m a homicide investigator, not a security analyst or expert.’

  ‘Thank God you’re not. I’d hate to be in a situation where my life or the safety of my family was dependent on any plan you produced to protect them. What’s up, man, were you sleepwalking, or something? It’s all over the bloody news – you’ve seen the front page of the Argus?’

  Gaia son escapes death by inches

  The ACC’s criticism wasn’t fair, Grace knew. If they’d had an unlimited budget, no one would have got into that damned roof space, but the truth was, with the battle he’d had to get even very limited resources for Gaia’s security, there were inevitably going to be gaps. It wasn’t unreasonable to expect that the Pavilion would have been capable of protecting itself.

  And Rigg was very definitely being unreasonable at this moment. But he wasn’t about to tell him that. The police force was a hierarchical system. In many ways it was like the military; you respected ranks senior to yourself and obeyed them without question, whatever you really thought.

  ‘There were gaps in the security that should not have been there,’ Roy Grace conceded. ‘It looks like we were lucky.’

  ‘I don’t like that word lucky,’ the Assistant Chief Constable said.

  Being lucky was better than the alternative, Grace thought, but did not say.

  107

  Shortly after 4 p.m., the steady concentration of the seventeen people currently packed around the three large workstations in MIR-1 was broken by a loud curse from Norman Potting. Several people looked up. Then the steady putter of keyboards resumed. A mobile phone rang, playing ‘Greensleeves’, and Nick Nicholl answered it quickly.

  Bella crunched on a Malteser. She had been tasked with contacting all the bidders on this and previous eBay auctions of Gaia memorabilia, in the hope one of them might know the elusive Anna Galicia personally. Meanwhile, down in the High Tech Crime Unit, Ray Packham was trying to navigate a path through a complex trail of encrypted email accounts. If they’d hoped to find her quickly by following the trail back from PayPal, they were going to have to be very patient. It was going to take days, and possibly weeks – if ever.

  Potting cursed again. Then he said, ‘Bloody banks! Can you bloody believe it?’

  ‘Believe what, Norman?’ Glenn Branson asked, secretly pleased that Potting was struggling. Badly though he wanted this case solved, he really hoped it wouldn’t be Potting who made the breakthrough.

  Potting turned to face him. ‘We’re reasonably certain that Anna Galicia went to one of the two HSBC hole-in-the-wall machines in Queen’s Road, at around 8.30 p.m. on Monday. The CCTV room has images of her approaching the machine and then leaving at around that time. The bank are telling me there were seven withdrawals from those two machines between 8.15 and 9 p.m. that night – and all of them were male accounts.’

  ‘Maybe her card didn’t work in those machines?’ Branson said. ‘We’ve all had that happen. Don’t they have CCTV running – a lot of them have a camera that looks outward – so you can see the faces of everyone using the machines.’

  ‘I’ve asked for that,’ Potting said. ‘It’s going to take them an hour or so – they’re going to email me the image sequence they have, along with all the names and addresses of the people who used the machine. So we’ll see then if she appears.’

  ‘Have you got a list of all the other cash machines in easy walking distance from those two?’ Bella asked him.

  Glenn watched her face. She looked more attractive every time he looked at her, and it really stung him to see this interaction between her and Potting. It was almost like she was feeding him a pre-rehearsed prompt, to big him up.

  ‘I have,’ Potting said, grinning smugly as ever. There’s a Santander Bank, a Barclays and a Halifax. I’m waiting for information back from all of them.’

  Roy Grace entered the room, turning his head to see who was here. Then he turned to Glenn. ‘How are we doing?’

  ‘Apart from the doorman of The Grand confirming the Anna Galicia we are looking for is the same person involved in the incident with Gaia’s bodyguards last week, nothing else so far, boss. What’s happening at the Pavilion?’

  ‘The chandelier’s been removed into police storage,’ Grace reported, ‘much to the outrage of the Curator. The Search Team have found a baby monitor transmitter underneath a table in the Banqueting Room – it’s a Mothercare make, consistent with the receipt in Wheeler’s hotel room – and consistent with the broken receiver up in the roof space above the chandelier. I’ve given permission to the producers to re-enter the building and film in the Banqueting Room tonight – they’re planning to shoot indoors, without the chandelier. The producer just told me that they will be able to add it in afterwards through some computer generated technique.’

  Grace looked at his watch, worried. ‘So, we can’t be certain that email was not sent by Wheeler, but it’s looking unlikely. Is that about the right assessment?’

  ‘The timings don’t work for Wheeler,’ Branson said.

  Timings were very much on Grace’s mind at the moment. Within the next hour Gaia would be leaving the security of her hotel suite and going to the Pavilion. On his advice she had remained in her suite all day, and her son was staying in the suite this evening. Grace had arranged for his god-daughter Jaye Somers to come over for a couple of hours to play.

  He knew Gaia was safe all the time she was in the hotel, but he was worried about the Pavilion. Had Rigg been too harsh on him, or did the ACC have a valid point? Had it been a visit from a member of the Royal Family or a senior politician, they would have searched the building with a fine-toothed comb, and sealed off all areas such as cellars and roof spaces where a potential perpetrator could hide either themselves or a bomb. But as the film company required unrestricted daily access, and it remained open to the public, security was always going to be an issue.

  Had he been too complacent?

  Well that wasn’t going to happen again tonight. During the past two hours the building had been searched with the same rigour as if a political conference were being staged there.

  But even so, it was impossible to protect someone totally against a lone fanatic. He was still mindful of the chilling words of the IRA after they blew up The Grand Hotel back in 1984 in a failed attempt to murder the then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. They sent a message saying, ‘Today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always.’

  He was not going to let Gaia be lucky. Luck was damned well not going to come into this equation. Quality police work, that was all. And everyone was briefed.

  108

  Much of the central area of the city was under constant CCTV surveillance, with cameras capable of zooming in to a tight close-up from a distance of several hundred yards.

  The nerve centre of the operation was the CCTV room on the fifth floor of Brighton’s John Street Police Station. It was a large space, with blue carpet and dark blue chairs. There were three separate workstations, each comprising a bank of monitors, keyboards, computer terminals and telephones.

  Civilian controllers sat behind two of the workstations. One of them, wearing a headset, was busily engaged in a police operation, t
racking a drug dealer’s movements, but the other, Jon Pumfrey, a fresh-faced man in his late thirties, with neat brown hair, wearing a lightweight black jacket, was occupied with helping Haydn Kelly navigate through the system in his search for sightings of Anna Galicia.

  The forensic podiatrist, cradling a tepid Starbucks coffee, had cramp in his right thigh. He had been seated at this console since shortly before midday, with the exception of one quick break to grab a sandwich and this coffee. It was now coming up to 5 p.m. A kaleidoscope of images of parts of the city of Brighton and Hove, and other Sussex locations, changed constantly on the multiple screens. People walking. Buses moving. A sudden zoom shot on to a man standing by a wheelie bin.

  Kelly had spotted Anna Galicia on six different cameras so far, during Monday evening. In the first she was seen walking in the direction of Café Conneckted. In the second she was heading towards the location of the HSBC cash machines in Queen’s Road. In the third, fourth and fifth images she was walking around the outside of the Pavilion grounds, threading her way through the crowds of onlookers. In the sixth, she was walking towards the Old Steine, at 11.24 p.m. Although there was extensive camera coverage around that area, she did not reappear. Jon Pumfrey told Kelly that her disappearance from vision indicated she had probably taken a bus or jumped into a taxi and gone home for the night.

  They were now scrolling through the images in the area around the Pavilion grounds from yesterday, fast-forwarding through the whole day on each of the different cameras in turn, in the hope of seeing her again. Kelly glanced at his watch, mindful that he needed to be back at Sussex House for the 6.30 p.m. briefing. It was almost 5 p.m. He already had more than enough for his purposes, and he was excited about what he had to report.

  Then something caught his eye. He frowned.

  ‘Jon, go back a few seconds!’

  The controller moved his joystick, and the image began reversing.

  ‘Stop!’ Kelly commanded. The time on the screen displayed as 1 p.m., yesterday, Tuesday.

  The image froze.

  ‘What street is this?’ Kelly asked.

  ‘New Road.’

  ‘Okay, zoom in on that guy, please.’

  The image of a balding man in a business suit filled the screen. He stepped out of the front door of an office building, hesitated, held a hand out as if to check if it was still raining.

  ‘Now, go slow forward, please.’

  Kelly watched, with growing excitement, as the man walked out of frame. Then he said, ‘Keep it running – you can fast forward. I think he’ll be back.’

  The forensic podiatrist was right. Ten minutes later the man returned, holding a small paper bag. He shot a glance at a bicycle chained to a lamp post, then went back into the office building.

  ‘I need a copy of that, please,’ he said to the controller.

  A few minutes later, when Pumfrey handed it to him, he loaded it straight into his laptop, then ran the software he had developed for gait analysis on it. After he had taken off the measurements and calculations, he made a comparison with the figures computed from the footage of Anna Galicia walking.

  And now he could barely contain his excitement.

  109

  Norman Potting sat at his workstation in MIR-1, puzzled. He now had images emailed to him from all the hole-in-the-wall machines within a short walking distance of Café Conneckted. HSBC, Barclays, Halifax and Santander banks had responded quickly and efficiently.

  He scrolled through them, looking, in turn, at four female and sixteen male faces, and something was not making sense. All twenty people had made cash withdrawals from these machines, within his parameter of 8.15 and 9 p.m. Monday evening. Despite the poor image quality, one woman bore a reasonable resemblance to Anna Galicia. She had apparently attempted a transaction from an HSBC machine on Queen’s Road at 8.31 p.m. But there was no withdrawal showing under her name. One explanation, the bank had told him, was that her card had been declined. But they were still a bit mystified why no record showed up at all. Another suggestion was that she was using a card that had been stolen but not yet reported missing: a withdrawal was made one minute later, at 8.32 p.m. in a man’s name.

  The Detective Sergeant was on the verge of deciding he had drawn a blank with this particular line of enquiry, when for the second time this afternoon, the normal studious quiet of the Major Incident Room was broken. This time there was an exuberant whoop from Haydn Kelly, who entered with such speed and force that the door swung back and struck the wall behind it with a bang loud enough to make everyone look up with a start.

  ‘I’ve cracked it!’ he shouted across the room at Roy Grace, beaming like an exuberant kid and brandishing two CD cases in the air.

  ‘What? What have you cracked? Anna Galicia?’ Grace asked.

  The forensic podiatrist moved Grace’s keyboard aside and set his laptop down on the worktop. He flipped open the lid and tapped in his code. Moments later Grace was staring at a screen that was split vertically. On the left-hand side he saw what looked like CCTV footage of the woman he recognized from earlier, Anna Galicia, walking along a street in Brighton. On the right-hand side of the screen was a balding man in a business suit. Along the top were several columns of spinning numbers and algebraic symbols that seemed to be calibrating and re-calibrating as each person walked.

  Haydn Kelly pointed at the left screen. ‘See our mysterious Anna Galicia?’

  Grace nodded.

  ‘There’s a good reason why no one’s been able to find her.’

  ‘Which is?’

  Kelly pointed at the right-hand screen. At the balding man in the business suit. ‘Because that’s her.’

  Grace looked at the forensic podiatrist’s face for an instant, in case he was joking. But he appeared deadly serious. ‘How the hell do you know?’

  ‘Gait analysis. See all those computations on the screen? I can do the analysis visually, to a pretty high degree of accuracy because I’ve done it for so long, but those calculations done by the algorithm I developed add certainty. There is a very minor variation because the woman is on high heels and the man is wearing conventional male shoes. But they’re the same person. No question.’

  ‘Beyond doubt?’

  ‘I’d bet my life on it.’

  110

  Roy Grace stared at the screen, his eyes switching from the woman to the man to the woman again, feeling a sudden chill deep in the pit of his stomach. ‘Glenn,’ he said. ‘Come and see this.’

  Branson stepped over, looked at the screen and exclaimed, ‘That looks like our friend Eric Whiteley!’

  ‘Whiteley?’ Grace said, the name ringing a strong bell, and trying to place it.

  ‘Yeah – the weirdo accountant me and Bella interviewed. That’s the outside front door of his office – who’s taken it?’

  Norman Potting looked up. ‘I’ve got something interesting here about Eric Whiteley, assuming it’s the same one, Glenn.’

  ‘In what context?’

  ‘Could just be a strange coincidence. I’ve got the name Eric Whiteley just come in on an email from HSBC,’ Potting said. ‘I’ve got a list of all people who made cash withdrawals at hole-in-the-wall machines close to Café Conneckted on Monday night. According to the bank, he drew fifty pounds out of one of one of their machines in Queen’s Road, at 8.32 p.m.’

  ‘Do they have his photograph?’

  ‘Well, this is the strange thing, they haven’t.’ Potting pointed at his own screen. ‘This is the person who appears to have withdrawn the money – Anna Galicia. The bank think it’s possible she’s stolen his card.’

  Glenn Branson was shaking his head. ‘No, she hasn’t stolen Eric Whiteley’s card. She is Eric Whiteley!’

  Grace looked at his watch. 5.20 p.m. He radioed the Control Room and asked for the on-duty Ops 1 Controller. Moments later he was through to Inspector Andy Kille, a highly competent man he liked working with. He explained the situation as quickly as he could, and asked for uniformed and pla
in clothes officers to go to Whiteley’s office, with luck catching him before he left for the day, and arrest him. He told Kille to warn them the man could be violent.

  When he ended the call he instructed Guy Batchelor and Emma Reeves to take an unmarked car to Whiteley’s home address, and sit close by in case Whiteley showed up. Next he told Nick Nicholl to get a search warrant for both Whiteley’s home and his office signed by a magistrate, and then to head directly to Whiteley’s house.

  Next, he spoke to the Ops 1 Controller again, and asked for a unit from the Local Support Team – the public order unit which specialized in executing warrants and wore full protective clothing, including visors, for the purpose – a POLSA and Search Officers to stand by near to Whiteley’s house, but out of sight, until Nicholl arrived with the search warrant, then to go straight in, accompanied by DS Batchelor and DC Reeves. Again he cautioned the man might be violent.

  Less than five minutes later, Andy Kille radioed Roy Grace back with news from two Response officers who were now on site at the offices of accountants Feline Bradley-Hamilton. Eric Whiteley had not turned up for work today. His office hadn’t heard from him and he had not responded to their calls.

  Shit, Roy Grace thought, shit, shit, shit. The deep chill inside him was rapidly turning into the white heat of panic. The innocuous ones. So often it was the meek, mild-looking guys who turned out to be monsters. The UK’s worst ever serial killer Harold Shipman, a bearded, bespectacled, kindly looking family doctor who just happened to have a penchant for killing his patients, and despatched 218 of them, and possibly many more.