by Peter James
His client was on the autism spectrum, Ken Acott had informed them. John Kerridge, who kept insisting he be called Yac, suffered from Asperger’s syndrome. His client had informed him that he was in pursuit of a passenger who had run off without paying. It was patently obvious that it was his client’s passenger who should have been apprehended, not his client. His client was being discriminated against and victimized because of his disability. Kerridge would make no comment without a specialist medical expert present.
Grace decided he would like to strangle Ken sodding Acott too at this moment. He stared at the smooth solicitor in his elegantly tailored suit, his shirt and tie, and could even smell his cologne. In contrast his client, also in a suit, shirt and tie, cut a pathetic figure. Kerridge had short dark hair brushed forward, and a strangely haunted face that might have been quite handsome, were his eyes not a little too close together. He was thin, with rounded shoulders, and seemed unable to keep totally still. He fidgeted like a bored schoolboy.
‘It’s nine o’clock,’ Acott said. ‘My client needs a cup of tea. He has to have one every hour, on the hour. It’s his ritual.’
‘I’ve got news for your client,’ Grace said, staring pointedly at Kerridge. ‘This is not a Ritz-Carlton hotel. He’ll get tea outside of the normal times that tea is provided here if and when I decide he can have it. Now, if your client would care to be more helpful – or perhaps if his solicitor would care to be more helpful – then I’m sure something could be done to improve the quality of our room service.’
‘I’ve told you, my client is not making any comment.’
‘I have to have my tea,’ Yac said suddenly.
Grace looked at him. ‘You’ll have it when I decide.’
‘I have to have it at nine o’clock.’
Grace stared at him. There was a brief silence, then Yac eye-balled Grace back and said, ‘Do you have a high-flush or low-flush toilet in your home?’
There was a vulnerability in the taxi driver’s voice, something that touched a chord in Grace. Since the news of the reported abduction in Kemp Town two hours ago, and the discovery of a shoe on the pavement where it had allegedly taken place, there had been a development. A young man had arrived to collect his fiancée for an evening out at a black-tie function, thirty minutes after the time of the abduction and she had not answered the door. There was no response from her mobile phone, which rang unanswered, then went to voicemail.
It had already been established that the last person to have seen her was her kick-boxing instructor, at a local gym. She’d been in high spirits, looking forward to her evening out, although, the instructor had said, she was nervous at the prospect of introducing her fiancé to her parents for the first time.
So she could have funked out, Grace considered. But she didn’t sound the type of girl to stand up her boyfriend and let down her family. The more he heard, the less he liked the way the whole scenario was developing. Which made him even angrier here.
Angry at the smugness of Ken Acott.
Angry at this creepy suspect hiding behind no comment and behind his condition. Grace knew a child with Asperger’s. A police officer colleague and his wife, with whom he and Sandy had been friends, had a teenage son with the condition. He was a strange but very sweet boy who was obsessed with batteries. A boy who was not good at reading people, lacking normal social skills. A boy who had difficulty distinguishing between right and wrong in certain aspects of behaviour. But someone, in his view, who was capable of understanding the line between right and wrong when it came to things as major as rape or murder.
‘Why are you interested in toilets?’ Grace asked Kerridge.
‘Toilet chains! I have a collection. I could show you them some time.’
‘Yes, I’d be very interested.’
Acott was glaring daggers at him.
‘You didn’t tell me,’ Kerridge went on. ‘Do you have high flush or low flush in your home?’
Grace thought for a moment. ‘Low flush.’
‘Why?’
‘Why do you like ladies’ shoes, John?’ he replied suddenly.
‘I’m sorry,’ Acott said, his voice tight with anger. ‘I’m not having any questioning.’
Ignoring him, Grace persisted. ‘Do you find them sexy?’
‘Sexy people are bad,’ Yac replied.
102
Saturday 17 January
Roy Grace left the interview room feeling even more uneasy than when he had gone in. John Kerridge was a strange man and he sensed a violent streak in him. Yet he did not feel Kerridge possessed the cunning or sophistication that the Shoe Man would have needed to get away undetected with his crimes of twelve years ago and those in the past few weeks.
Of particular concern to him at the moment was the latest news of the possible abduction of Jessie Sheldon this evening. It was the shoe on the pavement that really worried him. Jessie Sheldon had been in her tracksuit and trainers. So whose was the shoe? A brand-new ladies’ shoe with a high heel. The Shoe Man’s kind of shoe.
But there was something else gnawing at him even more than John Kerridge and Jessie Sheldon at this moment. He couldn’t remember exactly when the thought had first struck him – some time between leaving the garage behind Mandalay Court this afternoon and arriving at the Ops Room at the police station. It was bugging him even more now.
He walked out of Sussex House and over to his car. The drizzle had almost stopped and now the wind was getting up. He climbed in and started the engine. As he did so, his radio crackled. It was an update from one of the officers attending the burning van at the farm north of Patcham. The vehicle was still too hot to enter and search.
A short while later, coming up to 10.15 p.m., he parked the unmarked Ford Focus in the main road, The Drive, some way south of his destination. Then, with his torch jammed out of sight into his mackintosh pocket, he walked a couple of hundred yards up to Mandalay Court, trying to look like a casual evening stroller, not wanting to risk putting off the Shoe Man, or whoever used the garage, should he decide to return.
He’d already spoken to the on-site surveillance officer, to warn him he was coming, and the tall figure of DC Jon Exton, from the Covert Team, stepped out of the shadows to greet Grace as he walked down the ramp.
‘All quiet, sir,’ Exton reported.
Grace told him to stay on lookout and to radio him if he saw anyone approaching, then walked around the rear of the block of flats and along past the lock-ups to the one at the far end, no. 17.
Using his torch now, he strode along the length of it, counting his paces. The garage was approximately twenty-eight feet long. He double-checked as he retraced his steps, then walked back around to the front and pulled on a pair of latex gloves.
Jack Tunks, the locksmith, had left the garage unlocked for them. Grace lifted the up-and-over door, closed it behind him and shone his torch beam around the inside. Then he counted his paces to the end wall.
Twenty feet.
His pulse quickened.
Eight feet difference.
He rapped on the wall with his knuckles. It sounded hollow. False. He turned to the floor-to-ceiling wooden shelves on the right-hand side of the wall. The finishing on them was poor and uneven, as if they were home-made. Then he looked at the row of rolls of grey duct tape. The stuff was a favoured tool of kidnappers. Then, in the beam of the torch, he saw something he had not noticed on his visit here earlier today. The shelves had a wooden backing to them, bringing them out a good inch from the wall.
Grace had never been into DIY, but he knew enough to question why the lousy handyman who had made these shelves had put a backing on them. Surely you only put a backing to shelves to hide an ugly wall behind them? Why would someone bother in a crappy old garage?
Holding the torch in his mouth, he gripped one of the shelves and pulled hard, testing it. Nothing happened. He pulled even harder, still nothing. Then he gripped the next shelf up and instantly noticed some play in it. He jiggled it and sud
denly it slid free. He pulled it out and saw, recessed into the groove where the shelf should have fitted, a sliding door bolt. He propped the shelf against the wall and unlatched the bolt. Then he tried first pulling, then pushing the shelving unit. It would not budge.
He checked each of the remaining shelves and found that the bottom one was loose too. He slid that out and discovered a second bolt, also recessed into the grove. He slid that open, then stood up, gripped two of the shelves that were still in place and pushed. Nothing happened.
Then he pulled, and nearly fell over backwards as the entire shelving unit swung backwards.
It was a door.
He grabbed the torch and shone the beam into the void behind. And his heart stopped in his chest.
His blood froze.
Icy fingers crawled down his spine as he stared around him.
There was a tea chest on the floor. Almost every inch of the walls was covered in old, yellowing newspaper cuttings. Most of them were from the Argus, but some were from national papers. He stepped forward and read the headlines of one. It was dated 14 December 1997:
SHOE MAN’S LATEST VICTIM CONFIRMED BY POLICE
Everywhere that he pointed his torch, more headlines shouted out at him from the walls. More articles, some showing photographs of the victims. There were photographs of Jack Skerritt, the Senior Investigating Officer. And then, prominently displayed, a large photograph of Rachael Ryan stared out from beneath a frontpage headline from the Argus from January 1998:
IS MISSING RACHAEL SHOE MAN’S VICTIM NO. 6?
Grace stared at the photograph, then at the headline. He could remember when he had first seen this page of the paper. This chilling headline. It had been the shoutline on every news-stand in the city.
He tested the lid of the tea chest. It was loose. He lifted it up and stood, his eyes boggling, at what was inside.
It was crammed with women’s high-heeled shoes, each wrapped and sealed in cellophane. He rummaged through them. Some packages contained a single shoe and a pair of panties. Others, a pair of shoes. All of the shoes looked as if they’d barely been worn.
Shaking with excitement, he needed to know how many. Mindful of not wanting to damage any forensic evidence, he counted them out and laid them on the floor in their wrapping. Twenty-two packages.
Also bundled together in one taped-up sheet of cellophane were a woman’s dress, tights, panties and bra. The Shoe Man’s drag gear, maybe. He wondered. Or were these the clothes taken from Nicola Taylor at the Metropole?
He knelt, staring at the shoes for some moments. Then he returned to the cuttings on the wall, wanting to ensure he did not miss anything significant that might lead him to his quarry.
He looked at each one in turn, focusing on the ones on Rachael Ryan, big and small, which covered a large section of one wall. Then his eyes fell on an A4 sheet of paper that was different. This wasn’t a newspaper cutting; it was a printed form, partly filled out in ballpoint pen. It was headed:
J. BUND & SONS, FUNERAL DIRECTORS
He walked across so that he could read the small printing on it. Beneath the name it said:
Registration Form
Ref. D5678
Mrs Molly Winifred Glossop
D. 2 January 1998. Aged 81.
He read every word of the form. It was a detailed list:
Church fee
Doctor’s fee
Removal of pacemaker fee
Cremation fee
Gravedigger’s fee
Printed service sheets fees
Flowers
Memorial cards
Obituary notices
Coffin
Casket for remains
Organist’s fee
Cemetery fee
Churchyard burial fee
Clergy’s fee
Church fee
Funeral on: 12 January 1998, 11 a.m. Lawn Memorial Cemetery, Woodingdean.
He read the sheet again. Then again, transfixed.
His mind was racing back to twelve years ago. To a charred body on a post-mortem table at Brighton and Hove Borough Mortuary. A little old lady, whose remains had been found, incinerated, in the burnt-out shell of a Ford Transit van, and who had never been identified. As was customary, she had been kept for two years and then buried in Woodvale cemetery, her funeral paid for out of public funds.
During his career with the police to date, he’d seen many horrendous sights, but most of them he had been able to put out of his mind. There were just a few, and he could count them on the fingers of one hand, that he knew he would carry to his grave. This old lady, and the mystery accompanying her, he had long thought would be one of them.
But now, standing in the back of this shabby old lock-up garage, something was starting, finally, to make sense.
He had a growing certainty that he now knew who she was.
Molly Winifred Glossop.
But then who had been buried at 11 a.m. on Monday 12 January 1998 in the Lawn Memorial Cemetery in Woodingdean?
He was pretty damned sure he knew the answer.
103
Sunday 18 January
Jessie heard the vibrating sound of her phone, yet again, in the half-darkness. She was parched and she had no idea of the time. She could detect the faintest grey light. Was it dawn? Once in a while she drifted into a fitful doze, then woke again in stark panic, unable to breathe through her bunged-up nose and fighting for air.
She had agonizing pains in her shoulders, from her arms being stretched out in front of her. There were noises all around her: clankings, creakings, bangings, grindings. With every new sound, she was terrified that the man was returning, that he might be creeping up behind her at this very moment. Her mind swirled in a constant vortex of fear and confused thoughts. Who was he? Why had he brought her here, wherever it was? What was he planning to do? What did he want?
She couldn’t stop thinking about all the horror films that had most scared her. She tried to shut them out, to think of happy times. Like her last holiday with Benedict on the Greek island of Naxos. The wedding they had been discussing, their life ahead.
Where are you now, darling Benedict?
The vibrating sound continued. Four rings, then it stopped once more. Did that mean there was a message? Was it Benedict? Her parents? She tried again and again, desperately, to free herself. Shaking and tossing, struggling to loosen the bonds on her wrists, to work one of her hands free. But all that happened was that she bounced around, painfully, her shoulders almost wrenched out of their sockets, her body crashing down against the hard floor, then up again, until she was exhausted.
Then all she could do was lie here in utter frustration, the damp patch around her groin and thighs no longer warm and starting to itch. She had an itch on her cheek too that she desperately wanted to scratch. And all the time she was fighting constantly to swallow back the bile that kept rising in her throat, which could choke her, she knew, if she allowed herself to vomit with her mouth still clamped shut.
She cried again, her eyes raw with the salt from her tears.
Please help me, somebody, please.
For a moment she wondered whether she should just let herself vomit, choke on it and die. End it all before the man came back to do whatever terrible things he had in mind. To at least deprive him of that satisfaction.
Instead, putting a faltering half-trust in the man she loved, she closed her eyes and prayed for the first time in as long as she could remember. It took her a while before she could properly remember the words.
No sooner had she finished than her phone rang again. The usual four rings, then it stopped. Then she heard a different sound.
A sound she recognized.
A sound that froze her.
The roar of a motorbike engine.
104
Sunday 18 January
The Coroner for the city of Brighton and Hove was a doughty lady. When she was in a bad mood, her demeanour was capable of scaring quite a few of her sta
ff, as well as many hardened police officers. But, Grace knew, she possessed a great deal of common sense and compassion, and he’d never personally had a problem with her, until now.
Perhaps it was because he’d just called her at home after midnight and woken her – from the sleepy sound of her voice. As she became more awake, she grew increasingly imperious. But she was professional enough to listen intently, only interrupting him when she wanted clarification.
‘This is a big thing you’re asking, Detective Superintendent,’ she said, when he had finished, distinctly school-marmy now.
‘I know.’
‘We’ve only ever had two of these in Sussex. It’s not something that can be granted lightly. You’re asking a lot.’
‘It’s not normally a life or death situation, madam,’ Grace said, deciding to address her formally, ‘but I really believe it is here.’
‘Solely on the evidence of the missing girl’s friend?’
‘In our search for Jessie Sheldon, we contacted a number of her friends, from a list given to us by her fiancé. The one who is apparently her best friend received a text from Jessie last Tuesday, with a photograph of a pair of shoes she had bought specifically for this evening. The shoes in that photograph are identical to the one shoe found on the pavement outside her flat, exactly where her reported abduction took place.’
‘You’re certain her fiancé is not involved in any way?’
‘Yes, he’s eliminated as a suspect. And all three of our current prime suspects for the Shoe Man are eliminated from being involved.’
Cassian Pewe was confirmed as being at a residential course at the Police Training Centre at Bramshill. Darren Spicer had returned to St Patrick’s night shelter at 7.30 p.m., which did not work with the timeline of the abduction, and John Kerridge was already in custody.