Dead Man's Grip

by Peter James

  ‘If he was strangled by another prisoner at Ford, that DNA analysis will give us him,’ Duncan Crocker said.

  ‘With luck,’ Branson said. ‘It is being fast-tracked and we should have a result back later today or tomorrow.’ He glanced down at his notes again, then looked at Roy Grace as if for reassurance. Grace smiled at him, proud of his prote´ge´. Branson went on. ‘According to Officer Setterington, who has spoken with several of the prisoners whom Preece and Tulley hung out with, Tulley was shooting his mouth off about the reward money. They all saw it on television and in the Argus. He was boasting he knew where Preece was and was weighing up his loyalty to his friend against the temptation of a hundred thousand dollars.’

  ‘Did he genuinely know?’ asked Bella Moy.

  Branson raised a finger, then tapped his keypad. ‘Every prisoner in a UK jail gets given a PIN code for the prison phone, right? And they have to nominate the numbers they will call – they can have a maximum of ten.’

  ‘I thought they all had mobile phones,’ Potting said with a sly grin.

  Branson grinned back. It was a standard joke. Mobile phones were strictly forbidden in all prisons – and as a result they were an even more valuable currency than drugs.

  ‘Yeah, well, luckily for us, this fellow didn’t. Listen to this recording on the prison phone of a call made by Warren Tulley to Ewan Preece’s number.’

  He tapped the keypad again, there was a loud crackle, then they heard a brief, hushed conversation, two scuzzy, low-life voices.

  ‘Ewan, where the fuck are you? You didn’t come back. What’s going on?’

  ‘Yeah, well, had a bit of a problem, you see.’

  ‘What kind of fucking problem? You owe me. It’s my money in this deal.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, keep yer hair on. I just had a bit of an accident. You on the prison phone?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Why don’t you use a private?’

  ‘Coz I ain’t got one, all right?’

  ‘Fuck. Fuck you. I’m lying low for a bit. All right? Don’t worry about it. I’ll see you right. Now fuck off.’

  There was a clank and the call ended.

  Branson looked at Roy Grace. ‘That was recorded at 6.25 p.m. last Thursday, the day following the accident. I’ve also checked the timing. Prisoners working on paid resettlement, which is what Preece was doing, are free to leave the prison from 6.30 a.m. and don’t have to be back until 10 p.m. That would have given him ample time to be driving in Portland Road around 9 a.m.’

  ‘Lying low,’ Grace said pensively. ‘You need someone you can trust to lie low.’ He stood up and went over to the whiteboard where Ewan Preece’s family tree was sketched out. Then he turned to Potting. ‘Norman, you know a fair bit about him. Any ideas who he was close to?’

  ‘I’ll speak to some of the neighbourhood teams, boss.’

  ‘My guess is, since the van seems to have disappeared in Southwick, that he’ll be there, with either a girlfriend or a relative.’ Grace looked at the names on the whiteboard.

  As was typical with the child of a single, low-income parent, Preece had a plethora of half-brothers and sisters as well as stepbrothers and sisters, with many of the names well known to the police.

  ‘Chief,’ Duncan Crocker said, standing up. ‘I’ve already been doing work on this.’ He went over to the whiteboard. ‘Preece has three sisters. One, Mandy, emigrated to Perth, Australia, with her husband four years ago. The second, Amy, lives in Saltdean. I don’t know where the youngest, Evie, lives, but she and Preece were pretty thick as kids. They got nicked, when Preece was fourteen and she was ten, for breaking into a launderette. She was in his car later when he was done for joyriding. She’d be a good person to look for.’

  ‘And a real bonus if she just happens to be living in Southwick,’ Grace replied.

  ‘I know someone who’ll be able to tell us,’ Crocker said. ‘Her probation officer.’

  ‘What’s she on probation for?’ Branson asked.

  ‘Handling and receiving,’ Crocker said. ‘For her brother!’

  ‘Phone the probation officer now,’ Grace instructed.

  Crocker went over to the far side of the room to make the call, while they carried on with the briefing. Two minutes later he returned with a big smile on his face.

  ‘Chief, Evie Preece lives in Southwick!’

  Suddenly, from feeling despondent, Grace felt a surge of adrenalin. He thumped the worktop with glee. Yayyy!

  ‘Good work, Duncan,’ he said. ‘You have the actual address?’

  ‘Of course! Two hundred and nine Manor Hall Road.’

  The rest of this briefing now seemed redundant.

  Grace turned to Nick Nicholl. ‘We need a search warrant, PDQ, for two hundred and nine Manor Hall Road, Southwick.’

  The DC nodded.

  Grace turned back to Branson. ‘OK, let’s get the Local Support Team mobilized and go pay him a visit.’ He looked at his watch. ‘With a bit of luck, if the warrant comes through and we get there fast enough, we’ll be in time to bring him breakfast in bed!’

  ‘Don’t give him indigestion, chief,’ Norman Potting said.

  ‘I won’t, Norman,’ Grace replied. ‘I’ll tell them to be really gentle with him. Ask him how he likes his eggs and if we should cut the crusts off his toast. Ewan Preece is the kind of man who brings out the best in me. He brings out my inner Good Samaritan.’

  48

  An hour and a half later, Grace and Branson cruised slowly past 209 Manor Hall Road, Southwick. Branson was behind the wheel and Grace studied the house. Curtains were drawn, a good sign that the occupants were not up yet, or at least were inside. Garage door closed. With luck the van would be parked in there.

  Grace radioed to the other vehicles in his team, while Branson stopped at their designated meeting point, one block to the south, and turned the car around. The only further intelligence that had come through on Evie Preece was that she was estranged from her common-law husband and apparently lived alone in the house. She was twenty-seven years old and had police markers going back years, for assault, street drinking, possession of stolen goods and handling drugs. She was currently under an ASBO banning her from entering the centre of Brighton for six months. All three of her children, by three different fathers, had been taken into care on the orders of the Social Services. She and her brother were two peas in a pod, Grace thought. They’d no doubt be getting plenty of lip from her when they went in.

  ‘So, old-timer, tell me, how was the concert last night? What did Cleo think of your sad old git band?’

  ‘She thought the Eagles were great, actually!’

  Branson looked at him quizzically. ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘Yeah!’

  ‘You sure she wasn’t just humouring you?’

  ‘She said she’d like to see them again. And she bought a CD afterwards.’

  Branson tapped his head. ‘You know, love does make people go a bit crazy.’

  ‘Very funny!’

  ‘You probably had an old person’s nap in the middle of it. The band probably did too.’

  ‘You’re so full of shit. You are talking about one of the greatest bands of all time.’

  ‘And you going to London on Friday night to see Jersey Boys?’ Glenn said.

  ‘Are you going to trash them, too?’

  ‘Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons – they’re all right.’

  ‘You actually like their music?’

  ‘Some of it. I don’t think all white music’s rubbish.’

  Grace grinned and was about to say something to Glenn, but then he saw in the mirror the dog handler’s marked van pulling up behind them. After another few moments the unmarked white minibus, containing eight members of the Local Support Team, halted alongside them, momentarily blocking the road. Two other marked police cars reported they were now in position at the far end of the street.

  Jason Hazzard, the Local Neighbourhood Team Inspector, looked in at them and Grace g
ave him the thumbs up, mouthing, ‘Rock ’n’ roll.’

  Hazzard pulled his visor down and the three vehicles moved forward, accelerating sharply with a sense of urgency now, then braking to a halt outside the house. Everyone bundled out on to the pavement. Thanks to Google Earth they’d had a clear preview of the geography of the place.

  Two sets of dog handlers ran up the side to cover the back garden. The members of the Local Support Team, in their blue suits, protective hard plastic knee pads, military-style helmets with visors lowered and heavy-duty black gloves, ran up to the front door. One of them carried a metal cylinder, the size of a large fire extinguisher – the battering ram, known colloquially as the Big Yellow Door Key. Two others, bringing up the rear, carried the back-up hydraulic ram and its power supply, in case the front door was reinforced. Two more stood outside the garage to prevent anyone escaping that way.

  The first members of the team to reach the door pounded on it with their fists, at the same time yelling, ‘POLICE! OPEN UP! POLICE! OPEN UP!’ It was a deliberate intimidation tactic.

  One officer swung the battering ram and the door splintered open.

  All six of them charged in, shouting at the tops of their voices, ‘POLICE! POLICE!’

  Grace and Branson followed them into a tiny hallway that stank of stale cigarette smoke. Grace’s adrenalin was pumping. Like most officers, he’d always loved the thrill of raids, and the fear that went with it. You never knew what you were going to find. Or what missiles or weapons might be used against you. His eyes darted everywhere, warily, ever conscious of the possibility that someone might appear with a weapon, and that both himself and Glenn were less well protected than the members of this team, wearing only stab vests beneath their jackets.

  The LST members, all experienced and well trained in this kind of operation, had split up in here. Some were bursting into different downstairs rooms and others at the same time were charging up the stairs, yelling menacingly, ‘POLICE! STAY WHERE YOU ARE! DON’T MOVE!’

  The two detectives stayed in the narrow, bare hallway and heard doors banging open above them. Heavy footsteps. Then a female member of the team, whom Grace knew and rated as a particularly bright and plucky officer, Vicky Jones, called out to him in a concerned voice, ‘Sir, you’d better come in here!’

  Followed by Glenn Branson, he walked through the open doorway to his right, into a small and disgustingly cluttered sitting room that reeked of ingrained cigarette smoke and urine. He noticed a wooden-framed settee, bottles of wine and beer littering a manky carpet, along with unwashed clothes, and a massive plasma TV screen on the wall.

  Face down, occupying whatever floor space wasn’t littered with detritus, was a writhing, moaning woman in a fluffy pink dressing gown, bound hand and foot with grey duct tape, and gagged.

  ‘No one upstairs!’ shouted Jason Hazzard.

  ‘Garage is empty!’ another voice called out.

  Grace ran upstairs very quickly, glanced into the two bedrooms and the bathroom, then went back down and knelt beside the woman, as Vicky Jones and another member of the team worked away the tape over her mouth, then the rest of the bindings.

  The woman, in her mid-twenties, had a shock of short, fair hair and a hard face with a flinty complexion. She spoke the moment her mouth was freed.

  ‘Fuckers!’ she said. ‘What took you so fucking long? What’s the fucking time?’

  ‘Five past ten,’ Vicky Jones said. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Evie Preece.’

  ‘Are you injured, Evie?’ She turned to another officer and said, ‘Call an ambulance.’

  ‘I don’t need no fucking ambulance. I need a bleedin’ drink and a fag.’

  Grace looked at her. He had no idea at this stage how long she had been there, but she looked remarkably composed for someone who had been tied and gagged. He wondered if it was a set-up. This was not a woman you could trust with any story.

  ‘Where’s your brother?’ Roy Grace asked her.

  ‘Which bruvver?’

  ‘Ewan.’

  ‘In prison. Where you pigs put him.’

  ‘So he hasn’t been staying here?’ he pressed.

  ‘I didn’t have no one staying.’

  ‘Someone’s been sleeping in your spare bed,’ Grace said.

  ‘Must have been the Man in the Moon.’

  ‘Was that who tied you up? The Man in the Moon is into bondage, is he?’

  ‘I want a solicitor.’

  ‘You’re not under arrest, Evie. You only get a solicitor if you are charged with something.’

  ‘So charge me.’

  ‘I will do in a minute,’ Grace said. ‘I’ll charge you with obstructing a police officer. Now tell me who slept in your spare room?’

  She said nothing.

  ‘The same person who tied you up?’

  ‘No.’

  Good, he thought. That was a big step forward.

  ‘We’re concerned about your brother,’ he said.

  ‘That’s bleedin’ touching, that is. You been nicking him since he was a kid, but you’re suddenly concerned about him? That’s rich!’

  49

  At the evening briefing, Grace brought his team up to speed on the raid. Evie Preece was unable to give any information about her assailant, but the fact that she consented, albeit reluctantly, to a medical examination was an indication to Grace that the attack on her had been real and not a put-up job by herself and her brother, as he had first suspected. The house was such a tip it was hard to gauge whether it had been rifled through, which could have given robbery as a possible motive for the attack.

  The police doctor’s opinion was that the severe bruising to her neck was indicative of a sharp blow. She added that the side of the neck, just above the collarbone, was the place where someone experienced in martial arts would strike, if they wanted to render their victim instantly unconscious.

  This was consistent with Evie’s story that around eleven the previous night she had gone out into the garden to let her cat out, and the next thing she had found herself lying, trussed up, on her living-room floor. She was continuing to refute the allegation that her brother had been in the house and she denied vehemently that any vehicle had been in her garage recently, despite evidence to the contrary. The first piece of which was a pool of engine oil on the surface of the garage floor, which looked recent. The second and even more significant was the discovery of male clothing in the spare bedroom. A pair of trainers and jeans that were consistent with Ewan Preece’s size, and a T-shirt, also his size, found in her washing machine.

  Grace had ordered her to be arrested on suspicion of harbouring a fugitive and obstructing the police, and assigned a trained interview adviser, Bella Moy, to come up with an interview strategy for her while she was being held in police custody.

  In addition, he had put a highly experienced POLSA – Police Search Advisor – and a search team under him into the property to see if they could find anything else in the house or garden. So far, in addition to the oil and the clothes, they had come up with what they believed to be signs of a forced entry through kitchen patio doors at the rear of the house. It was very subtly done, with an instrument such as a screwdriver handled by someone with a good knowledge of locks.

  To Grace’s mind that ruled out the kind of low-life Ewan Preece and his sister dealt with, who might have been after money or drugs. Their scumbag associates would have broken a window or jemmied a lock. Whoever had come in here was skilled. Not just in breaking and entering, but in assault and in bindings. They had found no fingerprints so far, nothing that might yield DNA and no other clues. It was still early days, but it wasn’t looking good.

  50

  Dressed in a heavy fleece jacket, thick jeans, a lined cap and rubber boots, David Harris began his workday at 7.00 a.m. sharp, as he had every day for the past forty-one years, by checking the rows of smokehouses, where the fish had been curing overnight. He was in a cheery frame of mind: business was booming de
spite the recession and he genuinely loved his work.

  He especially loved the sweet scents of the burning wood and the rich, oily tang of the fish. It was a fine, sunny morning, but there was still a crisp chill in the air. The kind of mornings he liked best. He looked at the dew sparkling on the grassy slopes of the South Downs, which towered up behind the smokery, a view which still, after a lifetime of working here, he never tired of looking at.

  He might have been less cheery had he known he was being watched and had been since the moment he arrived here this morning.

  Springs Smoked Salmon was a household name throughout Europe and the family were proud of the quality. Harris was second-generation, running the company that had been started by his parents. The location, tucked away in a valley in the South Downs, close to Brighton, was an improbable one for a fish company, and the place had an unprepossessing air – the ramshackle collection of single-storey buildings could have belonged to a tumbledown farm rather than containing a business that had become an international legend.

  He walked up an incline, past a fork-lift truck and a line of parked delivery vans, between the identical cold-storage sheds. Inside them the rows of headless Scottish salmon and trout, his company’s speciality, were being smoked, hung on hooks suspended from overhead racks that stretched back the full hundred-foot length of the shed, or lay packed in white Styrofoam boxes, ready for dispatch to gourmet stores, restaurants and catering companies around the globe. Also stacked on pallets were other fish and seafood products they supplied to their customers, in particular langoustines and scampi, most of which came from Scotland as well as scallops, lobsters and crabs.

  He unlocked the padlock on the first door and pulled it open, checking that the temperature was fine. Then he checked each of the next three sheds as well, before moving on to the smokery ovens. These were nearly fifty years old, but still going strong. Huge, grimy, brick and steel walk-in boxes, each with a wood-fired kiln in the base, and the ceiling covered with racks and hooks, on which hung rows of pink and golden-brown fillets of smoking fish.