Dead Like You

by Peter James

  Roy Grace was not involved in the Shoe Man investigation. But he had an increasingly certain feeling that Operation Houdini and the search for Rachael Ryan were one and the same thing.

  We’re going to get you, Shoe Man, he promised silently.

  Whatever it takes.

  23

  Monday 29 December

  Rachael was in a helicopter with Liam. With his long, spiky hair and his sulky, boyish face he looked so much like Liam Gallagher of Oasis, her favourite group. They were swooping low through the Grand Canyon. Crimson rocks of the cliff face were passing either side, so close, dangerously close. Below them, a long, long way down, the metallic blue water snaked along through jagged grey-brown contours.

  She gripped Liam’s hand. He gripped hers back. They couldn’t speak to each other because they had headsets on, listening to the pilot’s commentary. She turned and mouthed I love you to him. He grinned, looking funny with the microphone partially obscuring his mouth, and mouthed I love you back.

  Yesterday they’d walked past a wedding chapel. For a joke he’d suddenly dragged her through the door, into the tiny golden-coloured interior. There were rows of pews either side of the aisle and two tall vases of flowers acting as a kind of cheesy non-denominational altar. Fixed to the wall behind was a glass display cabinet containing on one shelf a bottle of champagne and a white handbag with a floral handle, and on another an empty white basket and big white candles.

  ‘We could get married,’ he said. ‘Right now. Today!’

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ she’d replied.

  ‘I’m not being daft. I’m serious! Let’s do it! We’ll go back to England as Mr and Mrs Hopkirk!’

  She wondered what her parents would think. They’d be upset. But it was tempting. She felt so intensely happy. This was the man she wanted to spend the rest of her life with.

  ‘Mr Liam Hopkirk, are you proposing to me?’

  ‘No, not exactly – but I’m thinking, you know, screw all the crap and bridesmaids and stuff that goes with a wedding. It would be fun, wouldn’t it? Surprise them all?’

  He was being serious and that shocked her. He meant it! Her parents would be devastated. She remembered sitting on her father’s knee when she was a child. Her father telling her how beautiful she was. How proud he would be one day to walk her down the aisle on her wedding day.

  ‘I couldn’t do this to my parents.’

  ‘They mean more to you than me?’

  ‘No. It’s just . . .’

  His face darkened. Sulking again.

  The sky darkened. Suddenly the helicopter was sinking. The walls turning dark and rushing past the big bubble window. The river beneath rushing up towards them.

  She screamed.

  Total darkness.

  Oh, Christ.

  Her head was pounding. Then a light came on. The feeble glow of the dome lamp of the van. She heard a voice. Not Liam, but the man, glaring down at her.

  ‘You stink,’ he said. ‘You’re making my van stink.’

  Reality crashed through her. The coils of terror spiralling through every cell in her body. Water. Please. Water. She stared up at him, parched and weak and dizzy. She tried to speak but could only make a feeble deep whine in her throat.

  ‘I can’t have sex with you. You revolt me. Know what I’m saying?’

  A faint ray of hope lifted her. Perhaps he would let her go. She tried again to make a coherent sound. But her voice was just a hollow rumbling mumble.

  ‘I should let you go.’

  She nodded. Yes. Yes, please. Please. Please.

  ‘I can’t let you go, because you saw my face,’ he said.

  She pleaded with her eyes. I won’t tell anyone. Please let me go. I won’t tell a soul.

  ‘You could put me behind bars for the rest of my life. Do you know what they do to people like me in prison? It’s not nice. I can’t take that chance.’

  The knot of fear in her stomach spread like poison through her blood. She was trembling, quaking, whimpering.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, and he really did sound sorry. Really apologetic, like a man in a crowded bar who had just accidentally stepped on her foot. ‘You’re in the papers. You are on the front page of the Argus. There’s a photograph of you. Rachael Ryan. That’s a nice name.’

  He stared down at her. He looked angry. And sulky. And genuinely apologetic. ‘I’m sorry you saw my face,’ he said. ‘You shouldn’t have done that. It wasn’t clever, Rachael. It could all have been so very different. Know what I’m saying?’

  24

  Monday 5 January

  The newly formed Cold Case Team was part of Roy Grace’s Major Crime Branch responsibility. It was housed in an inadequate office within the Major Incident Suite on the first floor of Sussex House, with views across a yard cluttered with wheelie bins, emergency generator housings and SOCO vehicles to the custody block, which cut out much of the natural light.

  There were few things in the world, Roy Grace always thought, that could create as much paperwork as a Major Crime investigation. The grey-carpeted floor was piled high with stacks of large green crates and blue cardboard boxes, all labelled with operation names, as well as reference books, training manuals and a doorstop of a tome sitting on its own, Practical Homicide.

  Almost every inch of the desktop space of the three workstations was covered by computers, keyboards, phones, racks of box files, crammed in trays, Rolodex files, mugs and personal effects. Post-it notes were stuck on just about everything. Two freestanding tables visibly sagged beneath the weight of files piled on them.

  The walls were plastered with news cuttings of some of the cases, and photographs and old wanted posters of suspects still at large. One was a picture of a smiling dark-haired teenager, with the wording above:

  HAVE YOU SEEN THIS WOMAN?

  £500 reward

  Another was a black-and-white Sussex Police poster featuring an amiable-looking man with a big smile and a shock of unruly hair. It was captioned:

  SUSSEX POLICE

  MURDER of JACK (John) BAKER.

  Mr Baker was murdered at Worthing, Sussex on 8/9 January 1990.

  Did you know him? Have you seen him before?

  IF YOU HAVE ANY INFORMATION PLEASE CONTACT THE MURDER INCIDENT ROOM

  telephone no. 0903-30821,

  OR ANY POLICE STATION.

  There were hand-drawn sketches of victims and suspects, computer-generated E-Fits, one of a rape suspect shown with different hats and hoods, with and without glasses.

  In charge of this entire new cold case initiative, and answering to Roy Grace, was Jim Doyle, a former detective chief superintendent with whom Grace had worked many years back. Doyle was a tall, studious-looking man, whose appearance belied his mental – and physical – toughness. He had about him more the courteous air of a distinguished academic than a police officer. Yet with his firm, unflappable manner, his enquiring mind and a precision in the way he approached everything, he had been a devastatingly effective detective, involved in solving many of the county’s most serious violent crimes during his thirty-year career. His nickname in the force had been Popeye, after his namesake, Jimmy ‘Popeye’ Doyle in the film The French Connection.

  Doyle’s two colleagues were similarly experienced. Eamon Greene, a quiet, serious man, was a former Sussex under-16 chess champion and was now a grand master, still playing and winning tournaments. Before retiring at just forty-nine, and then returning to the force as a civilian, he had reached the rank of detective superintendent in Sussex CID, Major Crime Branch. Brian Foster, a former detective chief inspector known as Fossy, was a lean sixty-three-year-old, with close-cropped hair and still, despite his age, boyishly handsome features. In the previous year he had run four marathons in four consecutive weeks in different countries. Since retiring from Sussex CID at the age of fifty-two, he had worked for the past decade in the prosecutor’s office of the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague, and had now returned home eager to start
a new phase in his career.

  Roy Grace, wearing a suit and tie for his first meeting with the new Assistant Chief Constable later that morning, cleared a space on one of the work surfaces and sat down on it, cradling his second mug of coffee of the day. It was 8.45 a.m.

  ‘OK,’ he said, swinging his legs. ‘It’s good to have the three of you. Actually, let me rephrase that – it is bloody brilliant!’

  They all grinned.

  ‘Popeye, you taught me just about everything I know, so I don’t want to sit here and teach you how to suck eggs. The “Chief” – ’ by which he meant Chief Constable Tom Martinson – ‘has given us a generous budget, but we’re going to have to deliver if we want the same again next year. Which is shorthand for saying if you guys still want your jobs next year.’

  Turning to the others, he said, ‘I’m just going to tell you something Popeye told me when I first worked with him. As part of his work-load back in the 1990s he had just been given responsibility for cold cases – or whatever they were called then!’

  That raised a titter. All three retired officers knew the headaches caused by the ever-changing police terminology.

  Grace pulled a sheet of paper from his pocket and read from it. ‘He said, and I quote, “Cold-case reviews utilize the forensic technology of today to solve the crimes of the past, with a view to preventing the crimes of the future.”’

  ‘Glad all those years with you weren’t wasted, Roy,’ Jim Doyle said. ‘At least you remembered something!’

  ‘Yep. Impressive to have learned anything from an old sweat!’ quipped Foster.

  Doyle did not rise to the bait.

  Roy Grace went on: ‘You’ve probably seen it on the serials or in the Argus that a woman was raped on New Year’s Eve.’

  ‘In the Metropole Hotel?’ Eamon Greene said.

  ‘That’s the one.’

  ‘I attended the initial interview of the victim last Thursday, New Year’s Day,’ Grace said. ‘The offender, apparently disguised in drag, appears to have forced the victim into a hotel room on the pretext of asking for help. Then, wearing a mask, he tied her up and sexually assaulted her vaginally and anally with one of her stiletto shoes. He then attempted to penetrate her himself, with only partial success. This has similarities to the MO of the Shoe Man cold case back in 1997. In those cases, the Shoe Man adopted a series of different disguises and pretexts for requiring help to lure his victims. Then he stopped offending – in Sussex at any rate – and was never apprehended. I have a summary of this case file which I’d like you all to read as a priority. You will each have your own individual cases to review, but for now I want you all to work on this one, as I think it could help with the case I’m investigating now.’

  ‘Was there any DNA evidence, Roy?’ Jim Doyle asked.

  ‘There was no semen from any of the women, but three of his victims said that he wore a condom. There were clothing fibres, but nothing conclusive from those. No nail scrapings, no saliva. A couple of his victims reported that he had no pubic hair. This man was clearly very forensically aware, even back then. No DNA was ever found. There was just one common link – each of the victims was seriously into shoes.’

  ‘Which covers about 95 per cent of the female population – if my wife is anything to go by,’ Jim Doyle said.

  ‘Precisely.’ Grace nodded.

  ‘What about descriptions?’ asked Brian Foster.

  ‘Thanks to the way in which rape victims were treated back then, not much. We have a slightly built man, with not a lot of body hair, a classless accent and a small dick.

  ‘I’ve spent the weekend reading through the files of those victims, and all other major crimes committed during this same period,’ Grace went on. ‘There is one more person that I suspect might have been a victim of the Shoe Man – possibly the last victim. Her name is Rachael Ryan. She disappeared in the early hours of Christmas Eve – or rather Christmas Day, 1997. What has brought her to my attention is that I was a DS back then on the day she was reported missing. I went to interview her parents. Respectable people, completely mystified that she never turned up for Christmas dinner. By all accounts she was a decent young woman of twenty-two, sensible, although low after having split up with a boyfriend.’

  He nearly added, but did not, that she had vanished off the face of the earth, just like his own wife, Sandy, had vanished.

  ‘Any theories?’ asked Foster.

  ‘Not from the family,’ Grace said. ‘But I interviewed the two friends she was out with on Christmas Eve. One of them told me that she was a bit obsessed with shoes. That she bought shoes which were way beyond her means – designer shoes at upwards of a couple of hundred quid a pop. All the Shoe Man’s victims wore expensive shoes.’ He shrugged.

  ‘Not much of a peg to hang your coat on there, Roy,’ said Foster. ‘If she’d split up with her boyfriend she could have topped herself. Christmas, you know, that’s a time when people feel pain like this. I remember my ex walking out on me three weeks before Christmas. I damned near topped myself over that Christmas holiday – 1992, it was. Had Christmas dinner on my own in a bloody Angus Steak House.’

  Grace smiled. ‘It’s possible, but from all I learned about her at that time I don’t think so. Something I do think is significant is that one of her neighbours happened to be looking out of his window at three o’clock on Christmas morning – the timing fits perfectly – and saw a man pushing a woman into a white van.’

  ‘Did he get the registration?’

  ‘He was shit-faced. He got part of it.’

  ‘Enough to trace the vehicle?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You believed him?’

  ‘Yes. I still do.’

  ‘Not a lot to go on, is it, Roy?’ said Jim Doyle.

  ‘No, but there’s something strange. I came in early this morning to look up that particular file before this meeting – and do you know what?’ He stared at each of them.

  They all shook their heads.

  ‘The pages I was looking for were missing.’

  ‘Who would remove them?’ Brian Foster said. ‘I mean – who would have access to them to be able to remove them?’

  ‘You used to be a copper,’ Grace said. ‘You tell me. And then tell me why?’

  25

  Monday 5 January

  Maybe it was time to quit.

  Prison aged you. Ten years it put on – or took off – your life, depending on which way you looked at it. And right now Darren Spicer wasn’t too happy about either of the ways he was looking at it.

  Since he was sixteen, Spicer had spent much of his life inside. Doing bird. A revolving-door prisoner, they called him. A career criminal. But not a very successful one. He’d only once, since becoming an adult, spent two consecutive Christmases as a free man, and that had been in the early years of his marriage. His birth certificate – his real one – told him he was forty-one. His bathroom mirror told him he was fifty-five – and counting. Inside he felt eighty. He felt dead. He felt . . .

  Nothing.

  Lathering up, he stared at the mirror with dull eyes, grimacing at the lined old geezer staring back at him. He was naked, his gangly, skinny body – which he liked to think of as just plain lean – toned up from daily workouts in the prison gym.

  Then he set to work on his hard stubble with the same blunted blade he had been using for weeks in prison before his release and which he had taken with him. When he had finished, his face was as clean-shaven as the rest of his body, which he had shaved last week. He always did that when he came out of prison, as a way of cleansing himself. One time, in the early days of his now long-dead marriage, he’d come home with lice in his pubes and chest hair.

  He had two small tattoos, at the top of each arm, but no more. Plenty of his fellow inmates were covered in the things and had a macho pride in them. Macho pride equalled mucho stupidity, in his view. Why make it easy for someone to identify you? Besides, he had enough identifying marks already – five scars on
his back, from stab wounds when he’d been set on in prison by mates of a drug dealer he’d done over some years back.

  This last sentence had been his longest yet – six years. He was finally out on licence now after three of them. Time to quit, he thought. Yeah, but.

  The big but.

  You were supposed to feel free when you left prison. But he still had to report to his probation officer. He had to report for retraining. He had to obey the rules of the hostels he stayed in. When you were released, you were supposed to go home.

  But he had no home.

  His dad was long dead and he’d barely spoken a dozen words to his mum in twenty-five years – and that was too many. His only sibling, his sister Mags, had died from a heroin overdose five years back. His ex-wife was living in Australia with his kid, whom he hadn’t seen in ten years.

  Home was wherever he could find a place to doss down. Last night it was a room in a halfway house just off the Old Steine in Brighton. Shared with four pathetic, stinking winos. He’d been here before. Today he was going to try to get into a better place. St Patrick’s night shelter. They had decent grub, a place you could store things. You had to sleep in a big dormitory but it was clean. Prison was meant to help your rehabilitation back into the community after serving your time. But the reality was that the community didn’t want you, not really. Rehabilitation was a myth. Although he played the game, went along with the concept.

  Retraining!

  Ha! He wasn’t interested in retraining, but he had shown willing while he had been at Ford Open Prison these past six months in preparation for his release, because that had enabled him to spend days out of prison on their work placement scheme. Working Links, they were called. He had chosen the hotel handyman course, which enabled him to spend time in a couple of different Brighton hotels. Working behind the scenes. Understanding the layouts. Getting access to the room keys and to the electronic room-key software. Very useful indeed.