by Peter James
There was a sudden appetizing smell of French fries in the room.
‘Nice to think whoever’s taken Mungo would be dumb enough to leave their geo-mapping on,’ Grace said.
‘Indeed.’
He was about to say something else when he was interrupted by DC Alec Davies. ‘Sir, what was it you ordered?’
‘Ordered?’
‘To eat. From the Big Mouth Burger Bar. John Palmer’s just made the delivery.’
‘Great, I’m ravenous. A cheeseburger and fries with onion rings, thanks, Alec.’
His phone rang.
‘Roy Grace,’ he said.
He heard a hubbub at the other end; it sounded like the din of a rammed pub or bar. Then, above it, he heard a precise, clear voice.
‘Detective Superintendent, it’s PC Denero. I have some information you requested.’
‘Great, Nikki, what have you got?’
‘Well, sir, from what I’ve been able to find so far, this Kipp Brown character has been cultivating clients from the Albanian business community in the city. He appears to be the go-to man for them for unsecured – or poorly secured – cash loans and mortgages. I’m with twenty or so Albanians at the moment and almost all of them have had dealings with him – pretty happily, they assured me. You might be interested to know that Edi Konstandin is one of his major clients.’
‘When you’ve finished, could you come to the Intel suite at HQ CID? I’d like you on my team until we find the boy.’
‘Yes, sir – I could be there in an hour.’
‘Thank you.’ Ending the call, he looked down at the texts again. The spelling errors.
instruxxion
derelick
The kind of mistakes that might be made by someone for whom English was their second language?
He looked behind him at the whiteboards, stood up and went over to the one on which there was now an association chart for the dominant Brighton Albanian crime family. At the top was the name Edi Konstandin, who Intel put as the local Godfather – the equivalent to a Mafia Don or Capo. Directly beneath him was the consigliere, Jorgji Dervishi, Aleksander’s father, and beneath him the underboss, Valdete Gjon. He turned to another whiteboard, on which was the photograph of the man in the red cap.
‘This is a person of extreme interest to us. He vanishes just after the sign for the South Stand Waste Management. OK, we know from all the CCTV at the Amex that people cannot just disappear there, so what happened? My hypothesis is that this camera was deliberately disabled at this point. It was done so that Man-in-Red-Baseball-Cap could change his clothes and perhaps so that Mungo Brown could be concealed somewhere at the same time. The contradictory evidence regarding Mungo is that his phone was recovered after being thrown from a BMW car leaving the car park at high speed. How did he get from the stadium to the car park without being seen?’
He looked around at a sea of blank faces.
‘Is his middle name Houdini, guv?’ Norman Potting asked.
‘Thank you, Norman,’ Grace retorted. ‘His middle name is actually Eric.’
‘Houdini’s real name was Erik Weisz,’ Potting retorted.
‘Is that helpful to our enquiry, Norman?’ Kevin Hall interjected.
Potting mumbled that it probably wasn’t. Hall, answering a call on his phone, did not hear him.
Grace, ignoring the banter, said, ‘I’ve contacted Forensic Podiatrist Haydn Kelly, who is, fortunately, available and is on his way down from London now. I’ve also contacted the Met Police Super Recognizer Unit, and they are sending down one of their team. I’m going to have both Haydn and the Super Recognizer look at all footage of the crowd leaving the Amex after the game, to see if they can spot Red Cap, either from his gait or a facial feature.’
Ending his phone call, Kevin Hall said animatedly, ‘Guv, I may have something.’
Grace looked at him. ‘Yes?’
‘DI Branson got the IMEI code off the phone Kipp Brown brought back from the Dyke – I sent it straight to Digital Forensics and we have a result from it!’
Criminals used pay-as-you-go phones – so-called burners – under the impression these could not be traced. That was true to an extent, but every phone had a unique IMEI code that could be accessed by entering a series of digits and numbers: *#06#. This would reveal the identity of the phone, from which Digital Forensics could find out its provenance and history.
Excitedly, Grace asked, ‘Tell me?’
‘Well, guv, this is interesting. It’s a phone that’s been used before by a character called Fatjon Sava – who was linked to this burner two years ago. At the time, we had him on file as one of Dervishi’s henchmen. Do you remember the case of an Albanian left in the middle of Churchill Square with both his eyes burned out with a cigarette lighter? The charmer who did this, who was never identified, sent a text on behalf of Mr Jorgji Dervishi to the victim, politely warning him not to tread on Mr Dervishi’s toes again.’
‘Nice work, Kevin,’ Grace said. ‘What happened – was Dervishi arrested?’
‘No, the Albanian wall of silence came down. No one would say a word, not even the victim’s wife, she was too frightened. But we knew Fatjon Sava was probably the offender, although we didn’t have sufficient grounds to arrest him.’
‘The eyes have it,’ Potting announced, looking around, pleased with himself.
No one smiled.
Grace’s thoughts immediately returned to the spelling mistakes. Someone not quite a hundred per cent fluent in the English language, or someone trying to misdirect him? He looked down at his notes, thinking, before looking up again at his team. ‘OK, we understand that Mungo Brown’s best friend at Brighton College is Aleksander Dervishi, son of Jorgji Dervishi, and Dervishi might well have had business dealings with Kipp Brown. I want Dervishi interviewed tonight.’
‘It’s late, guv,’ Hall said. ‘10.15 p.m.’
‘This is a kidnap, Kevin, where every second counts. I don’t care if it’s 3 a.m. Call him and tell him we need to speak to him tonight, urgently. Hopefully his son will be home and you can talk to him, too. If Dervishi is difficult you can tell him he can do it the pleasant, informal way or we can arrest him in connection with the blinding of one of his countrymen – and the phone.’ He looked around at his team, considering who might be appropriate to interview him. Detective Sergeant Norman Potting was a blunt straight-talker who could stand up to anyone. To offset him, DC Velvet Wilde, who had a more subtle approach to people, might make a good foil. He gave them the action.
Moments later his phone rang again. It was Oscar-1, Inspector Keith Ellis.
‘Guv, we’ve just had in an ANPR track on BMW index Echo X-ray One-Three Bravo Delta Uniform’s movements. It pinged three cameras after leaving the Amex Stadium.’
‘Which direction, Keith?’
‘It headed east on the A27, past Lewes. The last camera to pick it up was at the Beddingham roundabout, where the vehicle either carried on eastwards towards Polegate and Eastbourne or could have turned right on the A26 and down towards Newhaven and the cross-Channel ferry port. But it didn’t get picked up by the next camera along the A27, nor the next one on the A26, just north of Newhaven. And I’ve got some significant further information on the vehicle. The East Sussex Fire and Rescue team are currently tackling a car on fire on a farm track just off the A26 south of Beddingham. It’s the suspect vehicle, index Echo X-ray One-Three Bravo Delta Uniform.’
‘Shit!’ Grace said. ‘So, it might have put Mungo Brown down somewhere in that area.’
‘Sounds very likely, guv.’
Sensing a possible breakthrough, Grace jumped up from the table and walked over to a large-scale map of Sussex on the wall in front of him, still holding his phone to his ear. He picked up a red marker pen from a holder beneath it and drew a circle round the area that Ellis had given him, which covered several square miles.
‘This is mostly rural, farming community all around here, Keith,’ he said. ‘Any number of barns. Sounds ve
ry possible Mungo might have been taken to a hiding place in this area.’
‘It does,’ Ellis said.
Grace thought hard. Both the A27, which was the main route connecting East and West Sussex, and the A26, which had ferry traffic to and from Newhaven Harbour, were busy roads. Whoever had taken Mungo, and had then dumped and torched the BMW, must have left in another vehicle either parked down that farm track or which had been driven there to pick them up. But with the numbers of vehicles travelling on both roads, it would be a near-impossible task to check up on them all. Mungo might have been transferred to another vehicle and taken to the Newhaven–Dieppe ferry, and spirited away to France – although the plug in the photograph indicated otherwise. However, all that meant was that the photograph had probably been taken in England. He could then have been taken on to France. Or the kidnappers could be holding him somewhere inside the red circle.
The police helicopter was equipped with a heat-seeking camera, which could detect living – or recently dead – bodies out in the open or inside buildings. ‘Keith,’ he said. ‘Can you see if NPAS-15 is available to do a fly-over of the area, looking at barns, outbuildings, anywhere Mungo might be?’
‘Right away, guv.’
Ending the call, Grace turned to DC Hall. ‘Kevin, get on to the Newhaven ferry company and find out the times of any sailings to France after 6 p.m. today. It’s a three-and-a-half-hour crossing, so if Mungo Brown is on a ferry, perhaps locked in the boot of a car, it’s possible he’s not yet in France. Then arrange with the port authorities in France to be vigilant and to look out for a teenage boy, possibly with a topknot, in any vehicle leaving the ferry – and get a photograph of him pinged to them.’
Hall nodded. ‘Yes, guv.’
Keith Ellis rang back. ‘NPAS-15’s attending an RTC in Kent, guv. Won’t be available for at least ninety minutes.’
‘God love our budget cuts!’ Grace said, frustrated. Until a few years ago, when the then Home Secretary, Theresa May, had started to decimate police budgets around the country, Sussex Police had had their own helicopter. Now they not only had to share one with Kent and Surrey but, because it doubled as an air ambulance, it was only occasionally available when it was actually needed.
‘Cheer up, boss,’ Norman Potting said. ‘The good news is that the money saved on our helicopter is helping people in need. Such as al-Qaeda and ISIS terrorists getting legal aid of a quarter of a million pounds a pop to fight their deportation orders. There’s always a silver lining, eh?’
Grace’s phone rang again. It was Glenn Branson.
‘Boss, we’ve just had a ransom demand come in. And it’s a strange one in a couple of ways.’
49
Saturday 12 August
21.30–22.30
The receiving bay of the Brighton and Hove City Mortuary was on the far side of the building, out of sight of the general public. Whoever originally designed the building was clearly on a mission not to make it look grim – and had fallen victim to the old adage that ‘No good deed goes unpunished’.
From the outside, the building looked like the kind of provincial, pebbledash-rendered bungalow with a steeply pitched roof and an attached garage that would, in estate agency parlance, have ideally suited an elderly retired couple. But the very innocent cuteness made it all the more grim when anyone realized what this building actually housed: a large postmortem suite, fridges capable of holding up to eighty bodies, a chapel and viewing room, and an office.
Cleo loved driving, and Darren Wallace, her deputy, was always happy to ride shotgun beside her. Their very silent passenger was zipped up in a black plastic body bag in the rear.
On the busy M23 motorway south from Gatwick Airport towards Brighton, in the dark van with the Coroner’s emblem on each side, Cleo and Darren had been chatting about the new lady in Darren’s life, called Natasha, whom Cleo had met and really liked. This was a tough job of many parts. You had the grim task of recovering bodies – sometimes badly mangled in accidents, charred or decomposed or partially eaten by insects or crustaceans – and helping to prepare them for postmortems; you tried, where it was possible, to make them look presentable for their loved ones to view; and you had the constant emotional challenge of receiving the loved ones who had come to identify their wives, husbands, partners; often it was someone who had kissed them goodbye just hours before.
You needed to have some normality you could escape to at the end of your day – or night. Cleo counted her blessings constantly that she had finally found love with such a decent and caring human being as Roy. Although she never stopped worrying about him. In the relatively short time they had known each other, and even shorter time they had been together, he had put his life on the line in the course of his job on too many occasions for her liking. And she knew that for as long as he remained in the police service, he always would. His commitment to what he did was an essential part of the man she had fallen in love with and married, the father of their child, the man with whom she wanted to spend the rest of her life.
Each day that he was at work, she tried not to think about the knock on her door that might one day come from two police officers. But for now, as they arrived at their destination, Cleo’s mind was focused on the pretty young woman she and Darren had zipped into the bag. All she knew about her at this stage was her name on her passport, Florentina Shima, which the Border Agency said was a bad forgery. Her possessions had consisted of a small amount of clothes and toiletries, and a mobile phone, all of which had been taken for analysis.
Cleo drove behind the mortuary, which was well out of sight of the public, reversed up to the doors, clicked the button to raise them, then reversed further into the receiving bay.
Mindful of her bad back, injured from lifting the body of a 350-pound woman a few months ago, she helped Darren move the young woman out of the rear of the van and wheel her through into the chilly interior of the mortuary.
Before doing this job, Cleo had worked in a number of hospitals as part of her nursing degree. Mostly, the workplaces she previously knew had a quieter, slacker feel at the weekends. But ever since she had started here, every day, whether a weekday or weekend, felt the same – it was always quiet and still. Although tonight it was particularly silent and cold. The only sound was the tick of fridges, the hum of their motors and fans.
The hospitals had mostly smelled sterile. This mortuary smelled of decaying flesh and clinical disinfectants, an odour that seemed ingrained into the walls – and the very soul of this place. If asked to explain why she had ever applied for this job, she probably couldn’t. She found it grim, but fascinating. A kind of twilight world where life met death. A place where she could help and comfort the living in a time of deep distress. A place where she could make a difference in some small way. And she found it, constantly and morbidly, engaging.
The mortuary was clinical in the extreme. The harsh, cold lighting. The grey tiled walls and tiled floor. Everything designed to be sterile and minimize the risk of infection. Hoses and drain gullies to wash away blood. The scales for weighing every cadaver’s internal organs. The trophy cabinet where bits of metal recovered from bodies had been placed. Pacemakers that would explode during a cremation. Shrapnel from historic war wounds of veterans.
The place gave her a buzz every time she entered. Sometimes she wondered, irreverently, what she would do if a fridge door opened and someone climbed out. That had not yet happened here, but some years ago her predecessor, Elsie, had told her that a woman certified dead by paramedics on the beach had once sat up, asking where she was. And, sometimes, genuinely dead corpses did move or make sounds from the gases building up inside them.
Those gave Cleo the real heebie-jeebies. There was little dignity in death, but one of her tasks was, always, to try to find it.
Although she was a suspected drugs mule, because of the nature of her death Florentina was classified as High Risk – someone who might have died of a contagious tropical disease – and was to be pla
ced straight into the mortuary’s isolation room, where the postmortem would be conducted under sterile conditions tomorrow.
As they laid the young woman on a gurney, Cleo unzipped the bag enough to look at her face, so like a porcelain doll.
You’re just a teenager, she thought. What happened?
Hopefully, Dr Frazer Theobald would find out tomorrow.
Knowing that until then she must not touch anything, she zipped up the bag again and pushed Florentina Shima into the room, where the two of them lifted her onto the postmortem table.
They carefully disinfected and sterilized the mortuary van, then returned to the office to fill in the requisite forms, before washing diligently, locking up and heading home.
50
Saturday 12 August
21.30–22.30
Open a Bitcoin account. If you wish to see Mungo alive again, you will send the sum of £250,000 as directed shortly. We will contact you again. By the way, how is your new fridge?
Roy Grace stared at the latest text purportedly from the kidnappers, which Glenn Branson had forwarded. The ransom demand. And he understood Glenn’s comment, it’s a strange one.
The mention of the fridge was, he presumed, to underline that they were watching Kipp Brown. Fine. But what bothered him was the amount of the ransom demand and the vehicle through which the kidnappers wanted it paid.
He called the DI. ‘Glenn, what’s going on? Who kidnaps someone for this amount? Who in God’s name would go to all this trouble for a relatively poxy £250k? More likely to be a million – or even five million – wouldn’t you think?’
‘But we’ve dealt recently with a kidnap ransom of just a hundred quid,’ Branson reminded him.
‘You’re right,’ Grace said. ‘But those small demands – from fifty quid to a few hundred – are usually just scuzzy little squabbles over drug debts. Something doesn’t feel right about this. They’ve made spelling mistakes, maybe they missed off a zero. What’s Brown saying?’