by Peter James
George Fletcher showed him his ID. ‘Is Mr Skeggs in?’
‘No, mate, he’s away on business.’
Norman Potting showed him a photograph of Ronnie Wilson and watched the man’s eyes. He had never got the hang of Roy Grace’s technique for sussing a liar, but he reckoned he was pretty good at telling, anyway.
‘Have you ever seen this man?’ he asked.
‘No, mate.’ Then the Australian touched his nose, a dead giveaway.
‘Take another look.’ Potting showed him two more photographs.
He looked even more awkward. ‘No.’ He touched his nose again.
‘I think you have,’ Potting said insistently.
Cutting in, George Fletcher said to the assistant, ‘What’s your name?’
‘Skelter,’ he replied. ‘Barry Skelter.’ He made it sound like a question.
‘OK, Barry,’ George Fletcher said. He pointed to Potting and Nicholl. ‘These gentlemen are detectives from England, helping Victoria Police on a murder inquiry. Do you understand that?’
‘Murder inquiry? Right, OK.’
‘Withholding information in a murder inquiry is an offence, Barry. If you want the technical legal term, it is perverting the course of justice. In a murder inquiry that carries a likely minimum sentence of five years’ imprisonment. But if the judge wasn’t happy, you could be looking at ten to fourteen years. I just want to make sure you are quite clear about that. Are you clear about that?’
Skelter suddenly changed colour. ‘Can I see those photographs again?’ he asked.
Potting showed them to him again.
‘Actually, you know, I can’t swear, but there is a resemblance to one of Mr Skeggs’s customers, now I come to think about it.’
‘Would the name David Nelson help you think about it a bit more clearly?’ Potting asked.
‘David Nelson? Oh yeah. David Nelson! Of course. I mean, he’s changed a bit since these were taken. You see, that’s why I kind of didn’t recognize him immediately. You get my drift?’
‘We’re drifting with you all the way,’ Potting said. ‘Now let’s just drift along to your customer address book, shall we?’
*
Outside afterwards, Norman Potting turned to George Fletcher.
‘That was brilliant, George,’ he said. ‘Ten to fourteen years. Is that right?’
‘Shit,’ he said, ‘I don’t know. I made it up. But it worked, right?’ For the first time since he had set foot in Australia, Nick Nicholl smiled.
110
OCTOBER 2007
The landscape changed rapidly. Ahead of them, Nicholl saw the glimmering water of the ocean. The wide street they were driving down had a resort feel to it, with bleached, low-rise buildings on either side. It reminded him of some of the streets on the Costa del Sol in Spain, which was pretty much the limit of his previous travel horizons.
‘Port Melbourne,’ George Fletcher said. ‘This is where the Yarra river comes out into Hobson’s Bay. Expensive property round here. Young, wealthy community. Bankers, lawyers, media types, those kinds of people. They buy nice flats overlooking the bay before they get married, then graduate to something a little bigger further out.’
‘Like you,’ Troy ribbed his colleague.
‘Like me. Except I could never afford to be here first.’
They parked outside yet another bottle store, then walked up to the smart entrance of a small apartment block and George rang the bell for the caretaker.
The door clicked open and they went into a long, smartly carpeted corridor that was freezing cold from the air-conditioning. After a few moments, a man in his mid-thirties with a shaven head, wearing a purple T-shirt, baggy shorts and Crocs, strutted up to them. ‘How can I help you?’
George again showed the man his ID. ‘We’d like to have a word with one of your residents, Mr Nelson, in Flat 59.’
‘Flat 59?’ he said cheerily. ‘You beat me to it.’ He raised a clutch of keys in his hand. ‘I was about to go up there myself. Had a few complaints from the neighbours about a smell. At least, they think it may be coming from there. I haven’t seen Mr Nelson in a while and he hasn’t picked up his post in several days.’
Potting frowned. Reports of smells from neighbours were rarely good news.
They entered the lift and travelled up to the fifth floor, then went out into the corridor, which smelled strongly of new carpet and nothing else. But as they walked along it, towards the flat at the far end, their nostrils started picking up something very different.
It was a smell with which Norman Potting had long if uncomfortably been acquainted. Nick Nicholl less so. The heavy, cloying stench of decaying flesh and internal organs.
The caretaker gave the four detectives a hope-for-the-best raise of his eyebrows, then opened the front door. The stench became instantly stronger. Nick Nicholl, covering his nose with his handkerchief, brought up the rear.
It was stiflingly hot inside, the air-conditioning evidently not on. Nicholl stared around apprehensively. It was a nice pad in anybody’s terms. White rugs on polished boards and smart modern furniture. Unframed erotic canvases lined the walls, some showing women’s loins, others abstract.
The smell of rotting flesh hung heavily in the corridor, getting denser with every step the five men took forward. Nick, increasingly uncomfortable about what they were going to find, followed his colleagues into an empty master bedroom. The huge bed was unmade. An empty tumbler lay on the table, along with a digital clock radio that appeared to be off.
They walked through into what looked like a den converted from a spare room. A hard-drive back-up sat on a desk, along with a keyboard and a mouse, but no computer. Several cigarette butts lay in an ashtray and had evidently been there a while. The window looked across to the grey wall of the building opposite. There was a pile of bills on the side of the desk.
George Fletcher lifted one of them. It had large red printing on it.
‘Electricity,’ he said. ‘Final reminder. Several weeks ago. That’s why it’s so hot. They’ve probably cut him off.’
‘I’ve had the landlords on my back about Mr Nelson,’ the caretaker prompted. ‘He’s behind with the rent.’
‘Badly?’ Burg asked him.
‘Several months.’
Nick Nicholl was looking around for family photographs, but could not see any. He stared at a stack of bookshelves, noticing that alongside the volumes of stamp catalogues there were several collections of love poems and a dictionary of quotations.
They entered a large, open-plan living and dining room, with a view across a wide balcony with a barbecue and loungers on it, and a neighbour’s rooftop tennis court, to the harbour. Nick could just make out the hazy silhouette of industrial buildings on the far shore.
He followed the three detectives through into a smart but narrow kitchen, and by then he was having to pinch his nose against the worsening smell. He heard the buzz of flies. A mug of tea or coffee sat on the draining board with mould on top of it and there was rotten fruit, covered in grey and green mould, in a wire basket. A wide, dark stain lay on the floor at the base of the swanky silver fridge-freezer unit.
George Fletcher pulled open the bottom door of the refrigerator and suddenly the smell got even worse. Staring at the green, decaying cuts of meat that lined the freezer shelves, he said, ‘Lunch is off, guys.’
‘I think someone must have told Mr Nelson we were coming,’ Troy Burg said.
Fletcher closed the door. ‘He’s gone all right.’
‘Done a runner, you think?’ Norman Potting said.
‘I don’t think he’s planning to come back any time soon, if that’s what you mean,’ the Detective Senior Sergeant replied.
111
OCTOBER 2007
The plane landed at Gatwick at 5.45, twenty-five minutes early, thanks to a tail wind, as the captain proudly reported. Roy Grace felt like shit. He always drank too much booze on overnight flights, in the hope it would knock him out. It did, bu
t only for a short while and then, like this morning, it left him with a headache and a raging thirst. On top of which, he felt uncomfortably stuffed from a revolting breakfast.
If his bag came through quickly, he thought, he might just have time to go home and grab a shower and change of clothes before getting to the morning briefing. His luck was out. The plane might have come in early, but the delay at the baggage carousel wiped out that advantage, and it was 6.40 before he lugged his bag through the green customs channel and headed down to the buses for the long-term car park. Standing at the stop, in the dry but chilly morning air, he dialled Glenn Branson for an update.
His friend sounded strange. ‘Roy,’ he said, ‘are you going to go home?’
‘No, I’m coming straight in. What’s new?’
The Detective Sergeant brought him up to speed, firstly with a progress report from Norman Potting in Sydney. Information on the passports held by David Nelson and Margaret Nelson had come to light during the course of the day, revealing them both to be forgeries. And Nelson had gone from his flat. Potting and Nicholl were now door-stepping all David Nelson’s neighbours, in the hope of finding out more information on his lifestyle and circle of friends.
Then Branson moved on to Katherine Jennings. She was waiting for a call from Skeggs to arrange the time and location of their meeting for the handover of the stamps and her mother. Branson told him they had two surveillance units on stand-by, up to twenty people available if they decided they needed them.
‘What about the firearms unit?’ Grace asked.
‘We don’t have any intelligence that Skeggs is armed,’ he replied. ‘If that changes, we’ll involve them.’
‘Are you OK, mate?’ Grace said when Branson had finished. ‘You sound a little strained. Ari?’
Branson hesitated. ‘Actually it’s you I’m worried about.’
‘Me?’
‘Well, your house really.’
Grace felt a prick of alarm. ‘What do you mean? Did you stay there last night?’
‘Yes, I did, thanks. I appreciate it.’
Grace wondered whether his friend had broken something. His precious antique juke box, which Glenn was always fiddling with, maybe.
‘It might be nothing, Roy, but when I was leaving this morning, I saw – at least I could swear I saw – Joan Major driving down your street. It wasn’t fully light, so I could be mistaken.’
‘Joan Major?’
‘Yeah, she drives one of those rather distinct little Fiat MPV things – you don’t see many of them about.’
Glenn Branson had impressive powers of observation. If that was who he said he had seen, then almost certainly he had. Grace stepped on the bus, holding the phone to his ear. It was curious that Glenn should see the forensic archaeologist driving down his street, but hardly any big deal.
‘Maybe she does a school run in the area?’
‘I doubt it. She lives in Burgess Hill. Perhaps she was dropping something off to you?’
‘That doesn’t make any sense.’
‘Perhaps something occurred to her and she wanted to see you.’
‘What time did you leave?’
‘About 6.45.’
‘You don’t pop around to someone’s house for a chat at that time in the morning. You use a phone if it’s urgent.’
‘Yeah. Yeah, I think you would.’
Grace told him he hoped to be at the office in time for the briefing, but when he reached his car he decided that, provided the morning rush-hour traffic wasn’t too bad, he would dash home first. Something he could not put a finger on was bothering him.
112
OCTOBER 2007
At 8 o’clock, when her phone finally rang, Abby had been up, dressed and ready for a good two hours. She hadn’t been able to sleep properly all night, but had just lain on her hard bed, with its tiny pillow, listening to the traffic on the seafront, the occasional wail of sirens, the shouts of drunken yobs and the slamming of car doors.
She was worried out of her wits about her mother. Could she survive another night without her medication? Would the distress and the spasms bring on a heart attack or a stroke? She felt so damned helpless, and she knew that bully Ricky would be playing on that. Counting on that.
But she was well aware too that he’d seen just how devious she could be, from their time together in Melbourne and now from the events of the past few days. It wasn’t going to be easy. He wasn’t going to trust her an inch.
Where would he dictate that they meet? In a multi-storey car park? A city park? Shoreham harbour? She tried to think where people in films met to hand over kidnap victims. Sometimes they dumped them from moving cars; or left them in a car abandoned somewhere.
Every one of her speculations ran into buffers. She didn’t know, couldn’t predict. But one thing she had decided, totally and utterly non-negotiable, was that she would want absolute proof, to see with her own eyes, that her mother was alive before she did anything.
Could she trust the police? What would happen if he saw them and panicked?
Weighed against that was how much she could trust him to deliver her mother back at all. If she was even still alive. He’d shown what a total, feelingless shit he was in taking an old lady and putting her through this torment.
The display said the usual Private number calling.
She pressed the button to answer.
113
OCTOBER 2007
Grace stared in disbelief as he drove down his street just after 8 o’clock. He recognized Joan Major’s distinctive slab-shaped silver Fiat too now, parked outside his house. But it was the vehicle in the drive that astonished him the most. It was one of the Sussex Police white Scientific Support Branch vans.
Also in the street, behind Joan Major’s car, was a plain brown Ford Mondeo. He knew from the number plate that it was one of the CID pool cars. What the hell was going on?
He pulled up, leaped out of his car and ran into the house. It was silent.
He called out, ‘Hello? Anyone here?’
No reply.
He walked through into the kitchen to check that the automatic feeder fixed to the bowl of his goldfish, Marlon, had been working. Then he looked out of the window into the rear garden.
The sight that met his eyes defied belief.
Joan Major, and two SOCO officers he knew, were walking up his lawn. The forensic archaeologist, in the centre, was holding a long piece of electrical equipment in the shape of a canoe paddle, supported by a shoulder brace, and with a display screen of some kind in the centre. The SOCO officer on her right was peering intently at the screen, while the one on her left wrote down something on a large pad.
Stunned, Grace unlocked the rear door and sprinted out. ‘Hey! Excuse me! Joan, what on earth are you doing?’
Joan Major’s face reddened with embarrassment. ‘Oh, good morning, Roy. Umm. I assumed you knew we were here.’
‘I had no idea. Do you want to fill me in? What is that?’ He nodded at the equipment. ‘What on earth is going on?’
‘It’s GPR,’ she replied.
‘GPR?’
‘Ground Penetrating Radar.’
‘What are you doing with it?’
Her face reddened even more. Then, as if he was having a bad dream, out of the corner of his eye he saw one of the few police officers in the CID that he really did not like. On the whole, in Grace’s experience, most police officers got on with each other reasonably well. Just occasionally he had come across one whose attitude really irked him, and emerging through his garden gate at this moment was a young DC he just could not stomach. His name was Alfonso Zafferone.
A sullen, arrogant man in his late twenties, with Latino good looks and shiny, mussed-about hair, Zafferone was slickly dressed in a smart beige mackintosh over a tan suit. Although he was a sharp detective, Zafferone had a serious attitude problem and Grace had written a scathing report after his last experience working with the man.
Now Zafferone was stridi
ng across his lawn, chewing gum and holding a sheet of paper in his hand of the kind that Grace was all too familiar with.
‘Good morning, Detective Superintendent. Nice to see you again.’ Zafferone gave him a smarmy smile.
‘You want to tell me just what is going on?’
The young DC held up the signed document. ‘A search warrant,’ Zafferone said.
‘For my garden?’
‘And the house too.’ He hesitated, then added a reluctant, ‘Sir.’
Now Grace was almost beside himself with rage. This was not real. No way. Absolutely no way.
‘Is this some kind of a joke? Just who the fuck is responsible for this?’
Zafferone smiled, as if he was in on this too and was really enjoying his moment of power, and said, ‘Detective Superintendent Pewe.’
114
OCTOBER 2007
Cassian Pewe was sitting in his office, in his shirtsleeves, reading through a policy document, when his door burst open and Roy Grace came in, his face contorted with rage. He slammed the door shut behind him, then put both hands on Pewe’s desk and glared at him.
Pewe sat back and put his hands up defensively. ‘Roy,’ he said. ‘Good morning!’
‘How dare you?’ Grace yelled at him. ‘How fucking dare you? You wait until I’ve gone away and you do this? You fucking humiliate me in front of my neighbours and the entire force?’
‘Roy, calm down, please. Let me explain—’
‘Calm down? I’m not going to fucking calm down. I’m going to cut your fucking head off and use you as a hat stand.’
‘Is that a threat?’
‘Yes, it’s a threat, you creep. Go run to Alison Vosper and ask her to blow your nose while you sit her on her lap and blub your eyes out, or whatever it is you do with each other.’
‘I thought with you being away – it would be less embarrassing for you.’
‘I’m going to have you, Pewe. You are going to really regret this.’