Dead Man's Grip

by Peter James

  He stared at Preece’s fingers. They were wrapped tightly around the large steering wheel.

  ‘We haven’t tried to remove them,’ she said. ‘In case we damage any forensic evidence.’

  As in his past dealing with this woman and her team, Roy Grace was impressed by her understanding of the importance of not contaminating a potential crime scene. But why was Preece holding on to the steering wheel? Had he frozen in stark terror? Grace knew that if he’d just driven off a harbour quay into water, he’d be doing everything he could to get out – not trying to steer.

  Had he been knocked unconscious by the impact? That was one possibility. There was no apparent mark on his head, and he was wearing a seat belt, but that was something the pathologist would be able to determine at the post-mortem. What other reason did he have for clinging to the wheel? Trying deliberately to drown? But Ewan Preece seemed an unlikely suicide candidate. From the intelligence he had read about him, and his own prior experience with the man, Preece didn’t give a shit about anything in life. He was hardly going to be driven into a state of suicidal grief over the death of a cyclist. And in a short time he would have been out of prison.

  Grace snapped on a pair of disposible gloves which he kept in his oversuit pocket, then leaned in through the window and attempted to prise the dead man’s right index finger away from the wheel. But it would not move. A tiny crab the size of a fingernail scuttled across the top of the dashboard.

  Once more from somewhere in the back of the van he heard the metallic scuttling sound. He tried again to prise the finger off the wheel, conscious of not wanting to risk tearing the flesh and lose the potential for a print, but it would not move.

  ‘Bloody hell!’ Keith Wadey said suddenly.

  The port engineer ducked in through the rear doors. Moments later he stood up again, holding a large black lobster. It was a good two feet long, with claws the size of a man’s hand, and was wriggling furiously.

  ‘This is a nice specimen!’ Wadey called out at a group of the SSU, showing them his find.

  Immediately he had the attention of everyone on the quay.

  ‘Anyone fancy treating their loved one to lobster thermidor tonight?’

  There were no takers. Only looks of disgust and a few exclamations.

  He tossed the creature back out into the canal and it disappeared beneath the choppy surface.

  53

  After a phone discussion with Roy Grace and the Crime Scene Manager, the Home Office pathologist agreed with them that she should definitely see the body in situ, prior to its being taken to the mortuary. But she was finishing a job at a lab in London at the moment, which meant a long wait for the team on the cold harbour front.

  The good news was that of the two regular Home Office pathologists for this area, they had been allocated Nadiuska De Sancha, the one whom Grace and everyone else preferred to work with. As an added bonus to the fact that the statuesque, red-haired Spaniard was both good and swift at her job, and extremely helpful with it, she also happened to be very easy on the eye.

  In her late forties, Nadiuska De Sancha could easily pass for a decade younger. If people wanted to be bitchy, they might comment that perhaps her plastic-surgeon husband’s skills had something to do with her continuing to look so youthful. But because of her warm and open nature, few people were bitchy about her. Far more were envious of her appearance, and half of the males in the Major Crime Branch lusted after her – as well as lusting after Cleo Morey.

  A body found in the sea, on its own, would have been taken to the mortuary, where the post-mortem would be carried out the following day by one of the team of local pathologists. But when there were any grounds to give the Coroner suspicion, a full forensic post-mortem would need to be carried out by a trained specialist, of which there were thirty in the UK. A standard post-mortem usually took less than an hour. A Home Office one, depending on the condition of the body and the circumstances, and very much on who was performing it, could take from three to six hours, and sometimes even longer.

  As the Senior Investigating Officer, Roy Grace had a duty to attend. And that meant, he realized with dismay, that he did not have a snowball’s chance in hell of making it to Jersey Boys in London tonight with Cleo. He’d booked a hotel up there, and tomorrow, the start of the May Day holiday weekend, they had tickets to the Army and Navy rugby match at Twickenham – at the invitation of Nobby Hall and his wife, Helen. Nobby was an old friend who had been running the Maritime Police in Cyprus.

  At least Cleo would understand – unlike Sandy, he thought, with a sudden twinge of sadness. Although Sandy was fading further from his mind by the week, whenever he did think of her it was like a dark cloud engulfing him and leaving him disoriented. Sandy used to go off at the deep end, regardless of the fact he had carefully explained to her that a murder inquiry meant dropping everything, and the reasons why.

  She would tell him she disliked it that she came second to his work. No matter how much he tried to refute this, she was adamant about it, to the point of fixation.

  Who would you pick? she had once asked him. If you had to choose between me and your work, Grace?

  She always called him ‘Grace’.

  You, he had replied.

  Liar! She had grinned.

  It’s the truth!

  I watched your eyes. That movement trick you taught me – if they move one way you are lying, the other you are telling the truth. Yours moved to the right, Grace, that’s the side you look to when you are lying!

  A gull cried overhead. He glanced at his watch. Almost 12.30 p.m.

  A dredger slipped past them in mid-channel, heading towards the lock and then on to the open sea. Nadiuska estimated she would be here by about 2 p.m. She would take a good hour on site at the very minimum, studying and noting the exact position of the body, photographing everything, checking Preece’s body for bruises and abrasions that might or might not be consistent with contact with the interior of the van, and searching for clothing fibres, hairs and anything else that might be lost as a result of the body being moved. Although, after several days’ immersion in water, Grace doubted there could be much in the way of fibres or hairs on the body, he was constantly surprised at the details good forensic pathologists could find that had eluded hawk-eyed detectives and trained police search officers.

  He stared in through the open driver’s window. Preece’s lean, sharply delineated features from his photographs were unaltered, but his skin now had a ghostly, almost translucent sheen. At least no visible nibbles had been taken from him by any scavengers. Preece was wearing a white, mud-spattered T-shirt and black jeans, and was barefoot. Odd to be driving barefoot, Grace thought, and cast his mind back to the pair of trainers that had been found in the spare bedroom of his sister’s house. Had Preece left in too much of a hurry to put them on?

  An undignified end to a short, sad and squandered life, he thought. At least Preece had been saved from the crustaceans. Or perhaps, with this particular specimen of human trash, it was the other way around.

  54

  Grace phoned the Incident Room to tell them to call off the search for Ewan Preece and the Ford Transit and instead to concentrate on the immediate neighbours of Preece’s sister, to see if anyone had seen or heard anything during the night of Monday 26 April or early morning of Tuesday the 27th. He also wondered whether the dead man’s sister might be sufficiently shocked into telling the truth about what had happened that night – if she genuinely knew.

  An hour later, Grace completed a careful inspection of the surrounding area. He was looking in particular for any CCTV cameras that might have the approaches to this quay in view, but without success. Freezing cold, he gratefully accepted the offer of coffee inside the Specialist Search Unit truck, where there was a snug seating area around a table.

  He clambered up the steps, followed by Branson, both of them rubbing some warmth back into their hands. A PCSO had been dispatched to a nearby supermarket to get some sandwiche
s. They were joined moments later by the tall figure of Philip Keay, the Coroner’s Officer, and Tracy Stocker, who announced that Nadiuska De Sancha had phoned to say she was only a few minutes away. Two members of the SSU, one a burly man nicknamed Juice by his colleagues and the other, slightly built with fair hair, who was nicknamed WAFI, which stood for Water Assisted Fucking Idiot, moved over to make room.

  Grace tried to call Cleo, but both her mobile phone and the mortuary phone went to voicemail. He felt a prick of anxiety. What if she was alone in the place and had collapsed? Most of the time, when no post-mortems were being carried out, there were only three people – Cleo, Darren and Walter – in the building. If Darren and Walter went out to recover a body, she could have been left on her own. If anything happened to her, she could lie undiscovered for a couple of hours.

  He had often worried in the past about her being in that place on her own, but now he felt it even more acutely. He rang her house, but there was no answer there either. He was seriously considering driving to the mortuary to make sure she was OK, when suddenly, to his surprise, he heard her voice.

  ‘Oi! Call this working?’ she called out cheekily, standing at the door of the truck.

  Grace stood up. Not many people make blue paper oversuits look like a designer garment, he thought, but Cleo did. With the trousers tucked into her boots, her hair clipped up and the bump in her stomach, she looked like someone who had just arrived in a spaceship from a planet where everyone was much more beautiful than here on earth. A new world that he still could not totally believe he was now a part of. His heart flipped with joy, the same way it did each time he saw her.

  Juice and WAFI both wolf-whistled at her.

  With some colour back in her face now, Cleo looked more radiant than ever, he thought, going down the steps to greet her with a light peck on the cheek.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked, wanting to hug her, but not in front of a bunch of cynical colleagues who would rib him at the slightest opportunity.

  ‘Well, I figured the musical was off, so I thought I’d take a trip to the seaside instead. Gather you’ve got a particularly interesting species of underwater creature.’

  He grinned. ‘You are under strict doctor’s orders not to do any lifting, OK?’

  She jerked her head, pointing. ‘It’s OK. I’ll use that fork-lift truck!’ Then she smiled. ‘Don’t worry, Darren’s here with me. Walter’s off sick today.’

  A voice came through Grace’s radio. It was the scene guard at the entrance. ‘Sir, there’s someone here to see you – says you’re expecting him. Kevin Spinella?’

  Grace was expecting him, the way he would expect to see blowflies around a decomposing cadaver. He walked around the corner and up to the barrier. Spinella stood there, short and thin, collar of his beige mackintosh turned up in the clichéd fashion of a movie gumshoe, chewing a piece of gum with his ratty teeth, his gelled spiky hair untouched by the wind.

  ‘Good morning, Detective Superintendent!’ he said.

  Grace tapped his watch. ‘It’s afternoon, actually.’ He gave the reporter a reproachful glance. ‘Unlike you to be behind the times.’

  ‘Ha-ha,’ Spinella said.

  Grace stared at him quizzically but said nothing.

  ‘Hear you’ve got a body in a van,’ the reporter said.

  ‘Surprised it took you so long,’ Grace replied. ‘I’ve been here for hours.’

  Spinella looked nonplussed. ‘Yeah, right. So, what can you tell me about it?’

  ‘Probably not as much as you can tell me,’ he retorted.

  ‘Don’t suppose it could be Ewan Preece, could it?’

  An educated guess, Grace wondered? Or had one of the team here phoned Spinella?

  ‘There is a body in a van, but the body has not been identified at this stage,’ Grace replied.

  ‘Could it be the van you are looking for?’

  He saw Nadiuska De Sancha, gowned up in an oversuit and white boots, walking towards them, carrying her large black bag.

  ‘Too early to tell.’

  Spinella made a note on his pad.

  ‘It’s ten days since the accident. Do you feel you are making progress with your enquiries regarding the van and its driver, Detective Superintendent?’

  ‘We are very pleased with the level of response from the public,’ Grace lied. ‘But we would like to appeal to anyone in the Southwick area who saw a white van between the hours of 6 p.m. Monday 26 April and 8 a.m. Tuesday 27 April to contact us on our Incident Room number, or to call Crimestoppers anonymously. Do you want the numbers?’

  ‘I’ve got them,’ Spinella said.

  ‘That’s all I have for now,’ Grace said, nodding a silent greeting at the pathologist and signalling he would be with her in a moment. ‘Perhaps you’ll be kind enough to let me know when you’ve identified the body and confirmed what the van is?’

  ‘Very funny.’

  Nadiuska signed the scene guard’s log, then ducked under the tape which Grace lifted for her.

  ‘Home Office pathologist?’ Spinella said. ‘Looks to me like you could have a murder inquiry going on.’

  Grace turned and eyeballed him. ‘Makes a change, does it, being the last to know?’

  He turned, with great satisfaction, and escorted Nadiuska De Sancha towards the quay and across to the right, out of the reporter’s line of sight. Then, knowing that she liked to work alone, in her own time, he left the pathologist and went to join Cleo and the rest of the team inside the warmth of the SSU truck.

  Half an hour later Nadiuska De Sancha came up the steps and said, ‘Roy, I need to show you something.’

  Worming himself into his anorak, Grace followed her outside and around to the white van. The pathologist stopped by the driver’s door, which was open.

  ‘I think we can safely rule out accidental death, Roy, and I’m fairly confident we can rule out suicide, too,’ she said.

  He looked at her quizzically.

  She pointed up at a small cylindrical object Grace had not taken in before, clipped to the driver’s-side sun visor. ‘See that? It’s a digital underwater camera – and transmitter. And it’s switched on, although the battery’s dead.’

  Grace frowned and at the same time felt annoyed that he had not spotted it. How the hell had he missed it? About an inch in diameter and three inches long, with a dark blue metal casing and a fish-eye lens. What was it there for? Had Preece been filming himself?

  Then, interrupting his thoughts, she pointed at the man’s hands and gave him a bemused look.

  ‘Dead man’s grip is caused by rigor mortis, right?’

  Grace nodded.

  She reached in with a blue, latex-gloved hand and raised one of Preece’s fleshy, alabaster-white fingers. The skin of the tip remained adhered to the steering wheel. It looked like a blister with tendrils attached.

  ‘I’ll need to do some lab tests to confirm it, but there’s some kind of adhesive that’s been applied here. Looks to me, as an educated guess, that the poor man’s hands have been superglued to the steering wheel.’

  55

  Tooth sat at the desk in his room at the Premier Inn, in front of his laptop, sipping a mug of coffee and editing the video of Ewan Preece’s last few minutes. The smoke detector in the ceiling was still taped up and a pack of cigarettes and a plastic lighter lay beside the saucer that he was using as an ashtray.

  He had used three cameras: the one on his wrist, the one he had fitted to the interior of the van and one he had balanced on the edge of the skip. The film, still in rough-cut stage, which he would refine, began with an establishing exterior shot of the van at night, at the edge of the quay. There was a bollard to its right. A time and date print at the top right of the frame showed it was 2 a.m., Tuesday 27 April. Preece could be seen at the wheel, apparently unconscious, with duct tape over his mouth.

  Then it cut to the interior. There was a wide-angle shot of Preece, buckled into his seat, in a grubby white T-shirt. He was op
ening his eyes as if awaking from sleep, seemingly confused and disoriented. Then he peered down at his hands, which were on the steering wheel, clearly puzzled as to why he could not move them.

  He began to struggle, trying to free his hands. His eyes bulged in fear as he started to realize something was wrong. A hand appeared in frame and ripped the duct tape from his mouth. Preece yelped in pain, then turned his head towards the door, speaking to a person out of shot. His voice was insolent but tinged with fear.

  ‘Who are you? What are you doing? What the fuck are you doing?’

  The driver’s door slammed shut.

  The camera angle changed to an exterior shot. It showed the whole driver’s side of the van and a short distance behind it. A figure, wearing a hoodie, his face invisible, drove a fork-lift truck into view, steered it right up to the rear of the van, rammed it a few inches forward and began to push it steadily towards the edge of the quay.

  Then the van suddenly lurched downwards, as the front wheels went over and the bottom of the chassis grounded on the stonework, with a metallic grating sound.

  The film cut back to the interior of the van. Ewan Preece was bug-eyed now and screaming, ‘No, no! What do you want? Tell me what you want? Please tell me! Fucker, tell me!’ Then he visibly lurched forward, held by the seat belt, and his mouth opened in a long, silent scream, as if, in his terror, he could not get any more words out.

  The film cut back to the exterior again. The fork-lift truck gave a final shove and the rear of the van disappeared over the edge of the quay and momentarily out of sight. There was a hollow splash.

  Now there was a new exterior angle. It was the van floating, rocking in the waves, a short distance away from the quay. It was looking distinctly nose-heavy, and sinking slowly but steadily, bubbles erupting around it