by Peter James
The police had learned, over the years, the most effective ways to obtain information from victims and witnesses during interviews. The first principle concerned dress code. Never wear anything that might distract the subject, such as stripes or vivid colours. DC Westmore was dressed appropriately, in a plain blue open-neck shirt beneath a navy V-neck jumper, black trousers and plain black shoes. Her shoulder-length fair hair was swept back from her face and cinched with a band. A simple silver choker was the only jewellery she was wearing.
The second principle was to put the victim or witness in the dominant position, to relax them, which was why the interviewee – Nicola Taylor – was on the sofa, while the DC was on the single chair.
Mirroring was a classic interview technique. If you mirrored everything that the subject did, sometimes it would put them at ease to such an extent that they began to mirror the interviewer. When that happened, the interviewer then had control and the victim would acquiesce, relating to the interviewer – and, in interview parlance, start to cough.
Grace jotted down occasional notes as Westmore, in her gentle Scouse accent, slowly and skilfully attempted to coax a response from the traumatized, silent woman. A high percentage of rape victims suffer immediate post-traumatic stress disorder, their agitated state limiting the time they are able to concentrate and focus. Westmore was intelligently making the best of this by following the guidelines to go to the most recent event first and then work backwards.
Over his years as a detective Grace had learned, from numerous interviewing courses he had attended, something that he was fond of telling team members: there is no such thing as a bad witness – only a bad interviewer.
But this DC seemed to know exactly what she was doing.
‘I know this must be very difficult for you to talk about, Nicola,’ she said. ‘But it would help me to understand what’s happened and really help in trying to find out who has done this to you. You don’t have to tell me today if you don’t want to.’
The woman stared ahead in silence, wringing her hands together, shaking.
Grace felt desperately sorry for her.
The SOLO began wringing her hands too. After some moments, she asked, ‘You were at a New Year’s Eve dinner at the Metropole with some friends, I understand?’
Silence.
Tears were rolling down the woman’s cheeks.
‘Is there anything at all you can tell me today?’
She shook her head suddenly.
‘OK. That’s not a problem,’ Claire Westmore said. She sat in silence for a short while, then she asked, ‘At this dinner, did you have very much to drink?’
The woman shook her head.
‘So you weren’t drunk?’
‘Why do you think I was drunk?’ she snapped back suddenly.
The SOLO smiled. ‘It’s one of those evenings when we all let our guard down a little. I don’t drink very much. But New Year’s Eve I tend to get wrecked! It’s the one time of year!’
Nicola Taylor looked down at her hands. ‘Is that what you think?’ she said quietly. ‘That I was wrecked?’
‘I’m here to help you. I’m not making any assumptions, Nicola.’
‘I was stone cold sober,’ she said bitterly.
‘OK.’
Grace was pleased to see the woman reacting. That was a positive sign.
‘I’m not judging you, Nicola. I’d just like to know what happened. I honestly do understand how difficult it is to speak about what you have been through and I want to help you in any way I can. I can only do that if I understand exactly what’s happened to you.’
A long silence.
Branson drank some of his Coke. Grace sipped his coffee.
‘We can end this chat whenever you want, Nicola. If you would rather we leave it until tomorrow, that’s fine. Or the next day. Whatever you feel is best. I just want to help you. That’s all I care about.’
Another long silence.
Then Nicola Taylor suddenly blurted out the word, ‘Shoes!’
‘Shoes?’
She fell silent again.
‘Do you like shoes, Nicola?’ the SOLO probed. When there was no response she said chattily, ‘Shoes are my big weakness. I was in New York before Christmas with my husband. I nearly bought some Fendi boots – they cost eight hundred and fifty dollars!’
‘Mine were Marc Jacobs,’ Nicola Taylor said, almost whispering.
‘Marc Jacobs? I love his shoes!’ she replied. ‘Were they taken with your clothes?’
Another long silence.
Then the woman said, ‘He made me do things with them.’
‘What kind of things? Try – try to tell me.’
Nicola Taylor started to cry again. Then, in between her sobs, she began talking in graphic detail, but slowly, with long periods of silence in between, as she tried to compose herself, and sometimes just plain let go, waves of nausea making her retch.
As they listened in the observation room, Glenn Branson turned to his colleague and winced.
Grace acknowledged him, feeling very uncomfortable. But as he listened now, he was thinking hard. Thinking back to that cold-case file on his office floor, which he had read through only very recently. Thinking back to 1997. Recalling dates. A pattern. An MO. Thinking about statements given by victims back then, some of which he had re-read not long ago.
That same wintry gust he had felt earlier was rippling through his veins again.
1997
12
Friday 26 December
‘Thermometer says tonight!’ Sandy said, with that twinkle in her brilliant blue eyes that got to Roy Grace every time.
They were sitting in front of the television. Chevy Chase’s Christmas Vacation had become a kind of ritual, a movie they traditionally watched every Boxing Day night. The sheer stupidity of the disasters normally made Roy laugh out aloud. But tonight he was silent.
‘Hello?’ Sandy said. ‘Hello, Detective Sergeant! Anyone home?’
He nodded, crushing out his cigarette in the ashtray. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘You’re not thinking about work, are you, my darling? Not tonight. We didn’t have a proper Christmas, so let’s at least enjoy what’s left of Boxing Day. Let’s make something special out of it.’
‘I know,’ Roy said. ‘It’s just—’
‘It’s always, It’s just . . .’ she said.
‘I’m sorry. I had to deal with a family who didn’t have a Christmas or a Boxing Day celebration, OK? Their daughter left her friends early on Christmas morning and never arrived home. Her parents are frantic. I – I have to do what I can for them. For her.’
‘So? She’s probably busy shagging some bloke she met in a club.’
‘No. Not her pattern.’
‘Oh, sod it, Detective Sergeant Grace! You told me yourself about the number of people who get reported missing by loved ones every year. Around two hundred and thirty thousand in the UK alone, you said, and most of them turn up within thirty days!’
‘And eleven thousand, five hundred don’t.’
‘So?’
‘I have a feeling about this one.’
‘Copper’s nose?’
‘Uh-huh.’
Sandy stroked his nose. ‘I love yours, Copper!’ She kissed it. ‘We have to make love tonight. I checked my temperature and it seems like I might be ovulating.’
Roy Grace grinned and stared into her eyes. When colleagues, off duty, got wrecked in the bar upstairs at Brighton nick or out in pubs, and talk turned, as it always did among men, to football – something in which he had little interest – or to birds, the girls got divided fifty-fifty into those that blokes fancied because of their tits and those that blokes fancied because of their legs. But Roy Grace could honestly say that the first thing he had fancied about Sandy was her mesmerizing blue eyes.
He remembered the first time they met. It was a few days after Easter and his father had died a month before from bowel cancer. His mother had just been diagnosed
with secondaries from breast cancer. He was a probationary police officer and feeling about as low as it was possible to feel. Some colleagues had encouraged him to join them for an evening at the dogs.
With little enthusiasm he’d turned up to the Brighton and Hove greyhound stadium and found himself seated across from a beautiful, bubbly young woman whose name he failed to clock. After some minutes busily chatting to a guy sitting beside her, she had leaned across the table to Grace and said, ‘I’ve been given a tip! Always bet on any dog that does its business before it races!’
‘You mean watch and see if it has a crap?’
‘Very sharp,’ she’d said. ‘You must be a detective!’
‘No,’ he’d replied, ‘not yet. But I’d like to be one day.’
So, while eating his prawn cocktail, he’d carefully watched the dogs for the first race being paraded out towards the starting gate. No. 5 had stopped for a serious dump. When the woman from the Tote had come round, the girl had bet a fiver on it and, to show off, he’d bet a tenner on it that he could ill afford to lose. The dog had romped home last by about twelve lengths.
On their first date, three nights later, he had kissed her in the darkness to the sound of the echoing roar of the sea beneath Brighton’s Palace Pier. ‘You owe me a tenner,’ he’d then said.
‘I think I got a bargain!’ she replied, fumbling in her handbag, pulling out a banknote and dropping it down the inside of his shirt.
*
He looked at Sandy now, in front of the television. She was even more beautiful than when they had first met. He loved her face, the smells of her body and of her hair; he loved her humour, her intelligence. And he loved the way she took all life in her stride. Sure, she had been angry that he’d been on duty over Christmas, but she understood because she wanted him to succeed.
That was his dream. Their dream.
Then the phone rang.
Sandy answered it, said coldly, ‘Yes he is,’ and handed the receiver to Roy.
He listened, jotted down an address on the back of a Christmas card, then said, ‘I’ll be there in ten minutes.’
Sandy glared at him and shook a cigarette out of the packet. Chevy Chase continued his antics on the screen.
‘It’s Boxing Night, for Christ’s sake!’ she said, reaching for the lighter. ‘You don’t make it easy for me to quit, do you?’
‘I’ll be back as quickly as I can. I have to go and see this witness – a man who claims he saw a man pushing a woman into a van in the early hours.’
‘Why can’t you see him tomorrow?’ she demanded petulantly.
‘Because this girl’s life may be at risk, OK?’
She gave him a wry smile. ‘Off you go, Detective Sergeant Grace. Go and save the sodding world.’
13
Thursday 1 January
‘You seem very distracted tonight. Are you OK, my love?’ Cleo said.
Roy Grace was sitting on one of the huge red sofas in the living room of her town house in a converted warehouse development, and Humphrey, getting larger and heavier by the day, was sitting on him. The black puppy, nestled comfortably in his lap, was pulling surreptitiously at the strands of wool of his baggy jumper as if his game plan was to unravel it entirely before his master noticed. The plan was working, because Roy was so engrossed in the pages of case-file notes on Operation Houdini he was reading that he had not noticed what the dog was doing.
The first reported sexual assault in Operation Houdini had been on 15 October 1997. It was a botched attack on a young woman late one evening in a twitten – a narrow alleyway – in the North Laine district of Brighton. A man walking his dog had come to her rescue before her assailant had removed her panties, but he had run off with one of her shoes. The next was, unfortunately, more successful. A woman who had attended a Halloween ball at the Grand Hotel at the end of the month had been seized in the corridor of the hotel by a man dressed as a woman and was not found by hotel staff until the morning, bound and gagged.
Cleo, curled up on the sofa opposite him, wrapped in a camel poncho over woollen black leggings, was reading a tome on the ancient Greeks for her Open University philosophy degree studies. Pages of her typed and handwritten notes, all plastered with yellow Post-its, were spread out around her. Her long blonde hair tumbled across her face and every few minutes she would sweep it back with her hand. Grace always loved watching her do that.
A Ruarri Joseph CD was playing on the hi-fi and on the muted television screen Sean Connery, in Thunderball, held a beautiful woman in an urgent clinch. During the past week, since Christmas, Cleo had developed a craving for king prawn kormas and they were waiting for the delivery of tonight’s meal – their fourth curry in five days. Grace didn’t mind, but tonight he was giving his system a rest with some plain tandoori chicken.
Also on the table sat one of Grace’s Christmas presents to Cleo, a big new goldfish bowl, replacing the one that had been smashed by an intruder the previous year. Its incumbent, which she had named Fish-2, was busily exploring its environment of weed and a miniature submerged Greek temple in sharp, nervy darts. Next to it was a stack of three books that had been Glenn Branson’s Christmas present to him. Bloke’s 100 Top Tips for Surviving Pregnancy, The Expectant Father and You’re Pregnant Too, Mate!
‘Yup, I’m fine,’ he said, looking up with a smile.
Cleo smiled back and he felt a sudden rush of such intense happiness and serenity that he wished he could just stop the clock now and freeze time. Make this moment last forever.
‘And I’d rather share your company,’ Ruarri Joseph was singing to his acoustic guitar, and yes, Grace thought, I’d rather share your company, my darling Cleo, than anyone else’s on this planet.
He wanted to stay here, on this sofa, in this room, staring longingly at this woman he loved so deeply, who was carrying their child, and never, ever leave it.
‘It’s New Year’s Day,’ Cleo said, raising her glass of water and taking a tiny sip. ‘I think you should stop working now and relax! We’ll all be back in the fray on Monday.’
‘Right, like the example you’re setting, working on your degree. Is that relaxing?’
‘Yes, it is! I love doing this. It’s not work for me. What you’re doing is work.’
‘Someone should tell criminals they’re not permitted to offend during public holidays,’ he said with a grin.
‘Yep, and someone should tell old people they shouldn’t die over the Christmas break. It’s very antisocial! Morticians are entitled to holidays too!’
‘How many today?’
‘Five,’ she said. ‘Poor sods. Well, actually three of them were yesterday.’
‘So they had the decency to wait for Christmas.’
‘But couldn’t face the prospect of another year.’
‘I hope I never get like that,’ he said. ‘To the point where I can’t face the prospect of another year.’
‘Did you ever read Ernest Hemingway?’ she asked.
Grace shook his head, acutely aware of how ignorant he was compared to Cleo. He’d read so little in his life.
‘He’s one of my favourite writers. I’m going to make you read him one day! He wrote, “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.” That’s you. You’re stronger, aren’t you?’
‘I hope so – but I sometimes wonder.’
‘You have to be stronger than ever now, Detective Superintendent.’ She patted her stomach. ‘There are two of us who need you.’
‘And all the dead people who need you!’ he retorted.
‘And the dead who need you too.’
That was true, he thought ruefully, glancing at the file again. All those blue boxes and green crates on his office floor. Most of them representing victims who were waiting from beyond the grave for him to bring their assailants to justice.
Would today’s rape victim, Nicola Taylor, get to see the man who did this brought to justice? Or would she end up one day as just a name on a p
lastic tag on one of those cold-case files?
‘I’m reading about a Greek statesman called Pericles,’ she said. ‘He wasn’t really a philosopher, but he said something very true. “What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.” That’s one of the many reasons I love you, Detective Superintendent Grace. You’re going to leave good things woven into the lives of others.’
‘I try,’ he said, and looked back down at the files on the Shoe Man.
‘You poor love, your mind really is somewhere else tonight.’
He shrugged. ‘I’m sorry. I hate rapists. It was pretty harrowing today up in Crawley.’
‘You haven’t really talked about it.’
‘Do you want to hear about it?’
‘Yes, I do. I really do want to hear about it. I want to know everything you learn about the world that our child is going to be born into. What did this man to do her?’
Grace picked up his bottle of Peroni from the floor, took a long pull on it, draining it, and could have done with another. But instead he put it down and thought back to this morning.
‘He made her masturbate with the heel of her shoe. It was some expensive designer shoe. Marc Joseph or something.’
‘Marc Jacobs?’ she asked.
He nodded. ‘Yes. That was the name. Are they expensive?’
‘One of the top designers. He made her masturbate? You mean using the heel like a dildo?’
‘Yes. So, do you know much about shoes?’ he asked, a little surprised.
He loved the way Cleo dressed, but when they were out together she rarely looked in shoe-shop or fashion-shop windows. Whereas Sandy used to all the time, sometimes driving him to distraction.
‘Roy, darling, all women know about shoes! They’re part of a woman’s femininity. When a woman puts on a great pair of shoes, she feels sexy! So, he just watched her doing this to herself?’
‘Six-inch stilettos, she said,’ he replied. ‘He made her push the heel all the way in repeatedly, while he touched himself.’