Dead Man's Grip

by Peter James

  Rigg went on, ‘It tells me that my predecessor, Alison Vosper, was right when she said I should keep a careful eye on you.’

  29

  Grace drove out of the police headquarters and threaded his way around the outskirts of Brighton towards the hospital, seething with anger and feeling totally humiliated.

  All the goodwill he’d built up with ACC Rigg on his previous case, the hunt for a serial rapist, was now down the khazi. He had hoped the spectre of Alison Vosper had gone away for good, but now he realized to his dismay that she had left a poisonous legacy after all.

  He dialled Kevin Spinella’s mobile phone number on his hands-free. The reporter answered almost immediately.

  ‘You’ve just blown all the goodwill you ever had with me and with HQ CID,’ Grace said furiously.

  ‘Detective Superintendent Grace, why – whatever’s the matter?’ He sounded a tad less cocky than usual.

  ‘You bloody well know what the issue is. Your front-page splash.’

  ‘Oh – ah – right – yeah, that.’ Grace could hear a clacking sound, as if the man was chewing gum.

  ‘I can’t believe you’ve been so damned irresponsible.’

  ‘We published it at Mrs Revere’s request.’

  ‘Without bothering to speak to anyone on the inquiry team?’

  There was a silence for some moments, then, sounding meeker by the moment, Spinella said, ‘I didn’t think it was necessary.’

  ‘And you didn’t think about the consequences? When the police put up a reward it is in the region of five thousand pounds. What do you think you are going to achieve with this? Do you want the streets of Brighton filled with vigilantes driving around in pick-up trucks with gun racks on their roofs? It may be the way Mrs Revere does things in her country, but it’s not how we do it here, and you’re experienced enough to know that.’

  ‘Sorry if I’ve upset you, Detective Superintendent.’

  ‘You know what? You don’t sound at all sorry. But you will be. This’ll come back to bite you, I can promise you that.’

  Grace hung up, then returned a missed call from Glenn Branson.

  ‘Yo, old-timer!’ the Detective Sergeant said, before Grace had a chance to get a word out. ‘Listen, I just realized something. Operation Violin – that’s well clever! Kind of suitable for something involving the New York Mafia!’

  ‘Some Like It Hot?’ Grace said.

  Branson sounded crestfallen. ‘Oh, you’re there already.’

  ‘Yep, sorry to ruin your morning.’ Grace decided not to spoil his rare moment of one-upmanship on films with his friend by revealing his source. Then rapidly changing the subject, he asked, ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘We got doorstepped outside the mortuary by that shit Spinella. I imagine there’ll be something in the Argus tonight.’

  ‘There’s already something in the online edition,’ Grace said.

  Then he told him the gist of the piece, his dressing-down from ACC Rigg and his conversation just now with the reporter.

  ‘I’m afraid I couldn’t do anything, boss. He was right outside the mortuary, knew exactly who they were and took them aside.’

  ‘Who tipped him off?’

  ‘Must have been dozens of people who knew the parents were coming over. Not just in CID – could have been someone in the hotel. I’ll say one thing about Spinella, he’s a grafter.’

  Grace did not reply for a moment. Sure, it could easily have been someone at the hotel. A porter getting the occasional bung for tipping off the paper. Perhaps that’s all it was. But there was just too much consistency about Spinella always being in the right place at the right time.

  It had to be an insider.

  ‘Where are the parents now?’

  ‘They’re with Bella Moy and the Coroner’s Officer. They’re not happy that the body’s not being released to them right away – that it’s up to the Coroner. The defence may want a second postmortem.’

  ‘What kind of people are they?’ Grace asked.

  ‘The father’s creepy but he’s pretty sensible. Very shaken. The mother’s poison. But, hey, she identified her dead son, right? That’s not a good place to judge anyone, so who can tell? But she wears the trousers, for sure, and I’d say she’s the bitch queen from hell. I wouldn’t want to tangle with either of them.’

  Grace was heading west on the A27. Coming up on his right was the campus of Sussex University. He took the left slip, heading to Falmer, passing part of Brighton University on his right, where the dead boy had attended, and the imposing structure of the American Express Community Stadium where the local football team, the Albion, would soon be moving to, a building he was beginning to really like as it took shape, even though he wasn’t a football fan.

  ‘The wording Spinella used about the reward. Do you see anything sinister behind that – about paying money for the van driver’s identity rather than his arrest and conviction?’

  His question was greeted with silence and Grace realized the connection had dropped. He leaned forward and redialled on the hands-free.

  When Glenn answered, Grace told him the ACC’s concerns.

  ‘What does he mean by the potential to go pear-shaped?’ Branson queried.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Grace answered truthfully. ‘I think a lot of people get nervous at any mention of the word Mafia. The Chief Constable’s under pressure to get rid of Brighton’s historic image of a crime-ridden resort, so they want to keep the Mafia connection as low key as possible, I’m guessing.’

  ‘I thought the New York Mafia had been pretty much decimated.’

  ‘They’re not as powerful as they used to be, but they’re still players. We need to find that white van fast and get the driver under arrest. That’ll take the heat off everything.’

  ‘You mean get him into protective custody, boss?’

  ‘You’ve seen too many Mafia movies,’ Grace said. ‘You’re letting your imagination run away with you.’

  ‘One hundred grand,’ Glenn Branson replied, putting on an accent mimicking The Godfather, sounding as if he had a mouth full of rocks. ‘That’s gonna be an offer someone can’t refuse.’

  ‘Put a sock in it.’

  But, Grace thought privately, Branson could well be right.

  30

  Lou Revere didn’t like it when his wife drank heavily, and these past few years, since their three kids had gotten older and left home, Fernanda hit the bottle hard most evenings. It had become the norm for her to be tottering unsteadily around the house by around 8 p.m.

  The drunker she was, the more bad-tempered she became, and she would start blaming Lou for almost anything that came into her head that she was not happy about. One moment it was the height at which a television was fixed to the wall, because it hurt her neck to watch. The next might be because she didn’t like the way he’d left his golf clothes on the bedroom floor. But the most consistent of her tirades was blaming him for their younger son, Tony, on whom she doted, going to live with that piece of trash in England.

  ‘If you were a man,’ she would shout at him, ‘you’d have put your foot down and made Tony complete his education in America. My father would have never let his son go!’

  Lou would shrug his shoulders and say, ‘It’s different for today’s generation. You have to let kids do what they want to do. Tony’s a smart boy. He’s his own man and he needs his independence. I miss him, too, but it’s good to see him do that.’

  ‘Good to see him getting away from our family?’ she’d reply. ‘You mean, like, my family, right?’

  He did mean that, but he would never dare say it. Privately, though, he hoped the boy would carve out a life for himself away from the clutches of the Giordinos. Some days he wished he had the courage himself. But it was too late. This was the life he had chosen. It was fine and he should count his blessings. He was rich beyond his wildest dreams. OK, being rich wasn’t everything, and the money he handled came in dirty and sometimes bloody. But that was how the wo
rld worked.

  Despite his wife’s behaviour, Lou loved her. He was proud of her looks, proud of the lavish gatherings she hosted, and she could still be wild in bed – on the nights when she didn’t fall into a stupor first.

  It was true also, of course, that her connections had not exactly done his career any harm.

  Lou Revere had started out as an accountant, with a Harvard business degree behind him. Although related to a rival New York crime family, during his early years he’d had no intention of entering the criminal world. That changed the night he met Fernanda at a charity ball. He was lean and handsome then, and she’d particularly liked him because he made her laugh, and something about him reminded her of the deep inner strength of her father.

  Sal Giordino had been impressed with Lou’s quietly strategic mind and for some time he had wanted to forge links with Lou Revere’s own crime family. Wanting the best for his daughter, Sal saw the way to do that was to help the man she intended to marry. And then maybe, in turn, the guy could be of use to him.

  Within five years, Lou Revere had become the principal financial adviser to the Giordino crime family, taking charge of laundering the hundreds of millions of dollars’ income from their drugs, prostitution and fake designer goods businesses. Over the next twenty years he spread the money through smart investments into legitimate businesses, the most successful of all being their waste disposal empire, which stretched across the United States and up into Canada, and their pornographic film distribution. He also extended the family’s property holdings, much of it overseas in emerging countries including China, Romania, Poland and Thailand.

  During this period, Lou Revere had cunningly covered his own and his immediate family’s backs. When Sal Giordino was initially indicted for tax evasion, Lou was untouched. A close associate of Giordino, faced with the loss of all his money, did a deal with the prosecutors and spent three months giving evidence against the Capo. As a result, what started out as a historic tax investigation ended up with Giordino on trial for multiple counts of conspiracy to murder. He would be dying in jail, and if that bothered the old monster, he was damned well not admitting it. When a newspaper reporter asked him how he felt about never getting out alive, he growled back at the man, ‘Gotta die somewhere.’

  Fernanda was drunk now. The crew of the Gulfstream jet, chastened by her abuse on the flight over to England, had stocked up with Grey Goose vodka, ice and cranberry juice for the flight back home, as well as an assortment of food which she had not touched. By the end of the seven-hour flight she had finished one bottle and started to make inroads into a second. She was still clutching a glass as the plane touched down at Republic Airport in East Farmingdale at 2.15 p.m. local time.

  Lou helped her down the short gangway on to the tarmac. She was barely aware of much of what was happening as they re-entered America through the relaxed immigration control, and fifteen minutes later she was rummaging in the drinks cabinet in the back of the limousine that drove them the short distance home to East Hampton.

  ‘Don’t you think you’ve had enough, hon?’ Lou asked her, putting out a restraining hand.

  ‘My father would know what to do,’ she slurred in reply. ‘You don’t know anything, do you?’ Clumsily, she thumbed through the Favourites address list on her iPhone, squinting at the names and numbers, which were all slightly out of focus. Then she tapped her brother’s name.

  She was just sober enough to check that the glass partition to the driver’s compartment was closed and the intercom was off, as she lifted the phone to her ear, waiting for it to ring.

  ‘Who you calling?’ Lou asked.

  ‘Ricky.’

  ‘You already told him the news, right?’

  ‘I’m not calling to give him any news. I need him to do something.’ Then she said, ‘Shit, got his stupid voicemail. Ricky, it’s me. Call me. I need to speak to you urgently,’ she said into the phone, then ended the call.

  Lou looked at her. ‘What’s that about?’

  Her brother was a sleazebag. Lazy, smug and nasty. He’d inherited his father’s ruthless violence, but none of the old man’s cunning. Lou tolerated him because he had no choice, but he had never liked him.

  ‘I’ll tell you what it’s about,’ she slurred. ‘It’s about a drunk woman driver, a goddamn van driver who didn’t stop and a truck driver who should not have been on the road. That’s what it’s about.’

  ‘What do you want Ricky to do?’

  ‘He’ll know someone.’

  ‘Someone?’

  She turned and glared at him, her eyes glazed, as hard as drill bits.

  ‘My son’s dead. I want that drunken bitch, that van driver and that truck driver who killed him, OK? I want them to suffer.’

  31

  Reading from his prepared notes to the team assembled in the conference room of Sussex House, Roy Grace said, ‘The time is 8.30 a.m., Saturday 24 April. This is the sixth briefing of Operation Violin, the investigation into the death of Tony Revere, conducted at the start of day four.’

  It was of little consequence that it was the weekend. For the first few weeks of any major crime inquiry, the team worked around the clock, though with the current financial cutbacks overtime was controlled much more tightly.

  At the previous evening’s briefing, PC Alec Davies played CCTV footage he had retrieved from a betting shop a short distance along the road from the scene of the accident. The video was grainy, but it showed that although it had been a near miss, there was no impact between the cyclist and the Audi car. Inspector James Biggs, from the Road Policing Unit, had confirmed that after a second interview with the woman driver, Mrs Carly Chase, and forensic examination of her vehicle, they were satisfied that no contact between the cycle and the Audi had occurred. Moreover they were not intending to charge her with any further offence other than driving while unfit through alcohol.

  Carly Chase’s mistake, Grace knew, was thinking, like most people, that the alcohol in her blood from the previous night would have all but gone by the following morning. It was something that used to bother him about Cleo. There were times before her pregnancy when she would drink quite heavily after work. He sometimes reckoned he would drink heavily if he did that job, too. He had hoped that she would be coming home yesterday, but at the last minute the consultant decided to keep her in for one more day. Grace was going to pick her up this afternoon.

  A major focus of this morning’s meeting was on damage limitation concerning the massive reward the dead boy’s parents had offered. It had made big headlines in many of the nation’s papers, prompting any number of conspiracy theories. These ranged from Tony Revere being murdered by a Brighton crime family in a drugs turf war to this being a revenge killing by a rival crime family or Tony being an undercover agent for the CIA.

  Glenn Branson and Bella Moy took the team once more through the reactions of the dead boy’s parents. It was agreed that there was no indication from them that their son’s death might have been a targeted hit, or that he had any enemies. The only issue with the parents, DS Branson added, had been their anger that they could not take their son’s body home with them and that it might be necessary to subject it to a second Home Office post-mortem. Philip Keay, the Coroner’s Officer, had explained to them that it could be in their interests. If the van driver was found and brought to trial, his defence counsel would not necessarily be content with the results of the first post-mortem.

  In reply, Tony Revere’s father had told him, in plain English, that the cause of his son’s death did not require fucking Sherlock Holmes.

  Tracy Stocker, the Crime Scene Manager, raised her hand and Grace indicated for her to go ahead.

  ‘Chief, Philip Keay and I explained to the parents that regardless of whether there needed to be a second PM, the Coroner would not release the body until after the results of the toxicology reports. We could be looking at two weeks minimum for those, maybe more. Tony Revere was on the wrong side of the road and that suggests to
me that he might have had drugs or alcohol in his system, possibly from the night before.’

  ‘Are we having a full tox scan, Roy?’ asked David Howes.

  The Chief Constable, Tom Martinson, was under the cosh from the government to lop £52 million from the annual police budget. CID had been asked to send only what was essential to the labs, as every forensic submission was a big expense. A full toxicology scan, including eye fluids, cost over £2,000.

  Ordinarily, Grace would have tried to save this money. The cyclist was clearly in the wrong. The woman in the Audi had been driving while over the limit, but she had not, from what he’d seen, been a contributory factor in the accident. The van driver, however, had gone through a red light and when found would be facing serious charges. The lorry driver, regardless of being over his legal hours, could have done nothing to avoid the collision. The toxicology report was not going to add anything to the facts as they stood, other than to explain the possibility of why the cyclist was on the wrong side. But it could feature in any defence case by the van driver.

  Besides, this was not a normal situation. The deceased’s parents were demonstrating anger, a natural reaction by any parent, but these people were in a position to do something about their anger. He was pretty sure they would go straight to their lawyers back in New York. Tom Martinson was a belts-and-braces man. If a slew of claims were made by the parents against the woman driver of the Audi, against the missing van driver and against the lorry driver, the insurers would come to the police as their first port of call, wanting to see what they had done to establish the possible culpability of the cyclist. And they would be asking a lot of awkward questions if thorough toxicology tests had not been done.

  ‘Yes, we are, David,’ Grace replied. ‘I’m afraid it’s necessary.’ He outlined his reasons to the team, then changed the subject. ‘I’m pleased to report a possible breakthrough this morning,’ he went on. ‘A fingerprint taken from the damaged wing mirror found at the scene, and presumed to have snapped off the door of the Ford Transit van on impact with the cyclist, has been identified. This was from a further fragment discovered during the continued search of the scene yesterday.’