by Peter James
‘Is Erik keen on football?’ Grace asked.
‘Crazy about it!’ his father replied.
‘What team does he support?’
‘Bayern, of course! But also he likes in your country Manchester United.’
‘Oh?’
Ingo shrugged. ‘Bruno, also, he likes football.’
‘I’ll have to get him to switch his allegiance to Brighton – the Seagulls!’
‘He’s been talking about them.’
‘Good.’ Then he hesitated. ‘So, how is he?’
He caught the fleeting glance between the German couple, before Ingo responded. ‘Oh, he’s doing well, you know. It’s difficult, yes?’
‘Incredibly, I would imagine.’
There was an uncomfortable silence.
‘But he’s a strong boy,’ Anette added, with a reassurance in her voice that was not matched by her expression.
And in that moment, picking up on their unease, he thought, but did not say, They can’t wait for him to be gone.
Anette called out, up the stairs, ‘Bruno! Your father is here!’ Then she walked over to the coffee machine and began filling it with water.
Ingo ushered Grace to the island unit in the middle of the kitchen and both men sat up on bar stools.
‘You and your wife speak very good English,’ Grace said, politely, then instantly wished he had used this time to ask him something about Bruno.
‘We were for three years in New York.’
‘Ah, right. Great city.’
‘Oh sure.’
‘So, can you give me any advice about Bruno – from what you know of him?’
He noticed the evasive look in the man’s eyes. ‘Advice? Well – you know – Anette and I—’
Then he fell silent. Grace saw that he was looking past him, and turned.
An extremely good-looking, slim, small boy stood in the entrance to the room. Still. As if he had appeared like a ghost.
And Roy Grace’s heart stopped.
The boy was dressed in a checked shirt, tight chinos and a canvas jacket. His hair was gelled and neatly brushed, and his expression was intensely serious.
Christ. It could have been his father standing there. A miniature – bonsai – version of his dad, Jack Grace.
He slid off the stool, then walked towards him. It felt as if he was walking in slow motion. Aware of the eyes of both Lipperts on him.
The boy’s face was blank, registering absolutely no emotion. As if he was on sentry duty.
As he reached the boy, he was uncertain for a moment whether to hug Bruno or more formally shake his hand. He stopped in front of him and smiled.
He hadn’t known what to expect, he realized. The kid to run towards him screaming, ‘Papa, Papa, Papa,’ with delight? A handshake?
Then the boy held out his hand, and Roy’s heart began to melt.
‘Bruno,’ Roy said, shaking the small, warm hand. ‘Hello. I’m your father.’
There was a long, awkward moment as the two of them stood there, father and son. Total strangers, but with one immensely strong link. He continued to hold the boy’s hand, afraid to let it go, to break this tiny bond between them.
‘Hello, Papa,’ the boy said quietly, with a slight American accent.
‘It’s great to meet you, Bruno. Listen, I’m so sorry about everything – I wish we could be meeting in a different situation. How are you feeling about coming to England?’ He let go of the boy’s hand and it dropped to his side.
Bruno looked down at the floor with a forlorn expression, as if he was close to tears.
There had been few occasions in his life when Roy Grace had been lost for words. This was one of them. As he stared back at the sad-looking youngster he struggled, very hard, to think of something more to say.
It felt like an eternity before the right thing occurred to him. ‘I’m told you like football – what team do you support?’
The boy’s reply was a barely audible whisper. ‘Bayern.’
‘I like football, too.’
Bruno said nothing for some moments, then he asked, very politely, ‘Do you support Bayern, too?’
‘I think they’re brilliant,’ Roy said with a smile. ‘I watch them a lot in the Champions League, but my home team is Brighton, the Seagulls.’
His son nodded, then said, ‘They have a good season so far.’
‘That’s right, they’ve had a run of bad luck just recently, but should make the play-offs.’
Again the boy nodded. Then he asked, with a sudden flash of excitement in his eyes, ‘Will you take me to a football match?’
‘Sure, of course. You’d like that?’
He shrugged. ‘If they are any good.’
Grace smiled, happy to have a channel of communication with him, and feeling a burst of optimism. It was going to work out fine, it really was.
He hoped.
35
Friday 22 April
As the postmortem continued, with Dr Frazer Theobald moving at his customary slow – at times glacially slow – pace, Guy Batchelor stepped away several times into the tiny office, to make calls. He was trying to find a relative of Lorna Belling who could make the formal identification of her body, as well as assembling his enquiry team, but it wasn’t proving easy. She had a sister who was in Australia, whom he had managed to contact, but it would be at least two days before she arrived in England. And Lorna’s parents, who were on a cruise, had been contacted, but could not get back here until sometime after the weekend.
He appointed a crime scene manager, an office manager, a POLSA – police search advisor – a HOLMES team, an analyst, and the small group of detectives Roy Grace had requested, all but two of whom were available. The first briefing would be at 6 p.m. this evening.
He had already organized an outside enquiry team, and set their parameters. They were to speak to the landlord and the letting agent, if there was one; to all Lorna Belling’s neighbours in the building; to check any CCTV footage they could find in the immediate surrounding areas to see if they could place the husband around the flat; to try to make contact with her friends; and to contact her dead husband’s work colleagues to see if he’d disclosed anything to them. A search of the Bellings’ home was currently under way, and any computers or phones found there would be taken to Digital Forensics – formerly known as the High Tech Crime Unit – to be interrogated. Batchelor also instructed them to make sure they found the appointments book for Lorna’s hairdressing clients.
Determined to make a good impression in his first SIO role, he logged on to the Murder Manual, ticking through every rigid step of a murder enquiry, dutifully and laboriously writing his decisions down in his pale-blue Policy Book. It was the document with which all SIOs covered their backs – details of every decision you made, and the reasons. If an investigation ever went south and you were called to account, you had it right there, in black and white. And in this modern age of accountability in the police force, where you walked constantly on eggshells, it seemed at times, sadly, that covering your back had become almost more important than solving the crime.
He felt pleased that this one was falling into place. If the lab could follow up the fingerprints on the beer cans with DNA matches from around the tops of the cans and maybe on the cigarette butts – and add to that the husband’s DNA from the semen in Lorna Belling’s vagina – it would be strong evidence. Overwhelming.
Case closed.
Then his phone rang. It was Cassian Pewe. And he was surprised at what the Assistant Chief Constable was telling him. Equally, there was no way he could refuse.
‘Yes, sir,’ he said, bemused, as he ended the call. ‘Of course we’ll look after him, sir. It will be a pleasure.’
36
Friday 22 April
As Marcel Kullen drove him and Bruno from the Lipperts’ house, Grace heard the ping of an incoming text and glanced at his phone. It was a message from Guy Batchelor:
Hi Roy, tried calling but it goes to vo
icemail. Pls call me urgently.
He apologized to Kullen, and to Bruno on the rear seat, who appeared absorbed in something on his phone, and called Batchelor immediately. He answered on the first ring. ‘Boss, sorry to bother you at such a tough time.’
‘It’s no problem – what’s up?’
‘We have a new member of our team foisted on us by Pewe – one of these Direct Entry guys.’
‘What?’
The Home Secretary had introduced a controversial new scheme under which people from civilian life – the community at large – could bypass all the usual training and career ladder process of the police force, and instead of starting as probationers, then becoming constables, then moving on through the ranks, were able to come straight into the police at inspector level and higher.
Grace understood that there were advantages to having people with business experience coming into the force, but the value they could bring, in his view, was in management roles – not operational ones.
‘The ACC has dumped a civilian bean-counter on us, in the role of detective inspector.’
‘What do you know about him?’
‘Get this. He was previously a sales manager at a pharmaceutical company and you’re going to love his name. Donald Dull.’
‘You’re kidding. Sounds like a real Mickey Mouse detective!’
‘Very good, boss. He pronounces it Dool.’
‘Have you met him?’
‘I’ve got that treat coming up shortly. He’s going to be just the kind of person I’d be happy to know was behind me, protecting my back as I crash through the door of an armed suspect.’
‘OK, I can’t do much right now. Just put him in a role where he’s not any danger to any of the team – or himself. I’ll do what I can when I get back.’
‘What’s the police motto?’ Batchelor said. ‘To serve and protect? I thought we were meant to protect the public, not count their sodding beans!’
37
Friday 22 April
Like everyone in Major Crime, Guy Batchelor was still getting used to his new surroundings. For all the inadequacies of their old HQ in Hollingbury, at least there had been parking in and around the place. Here most of the team had to leave their private cars a good fifteen to twenty minutes’ walk away from the entrance, angering the local residents by taking their parking spaces, to the point where cars were being vandalized. Officers heading home, exhausted after a long shift, were finding they had flat tyres, or worse, keyed paintwork.
One of the perks for Batchelor of his current role was that he was permitted to use an HQ car park.
At a quarter to six in the evening he settled into one of the twenty red chairs arranged around the long, light-coloured table in the narrow conference room on the first floor. The cream walls were bare, apart from a large flat-screen monitor and a round white clock. On one end of the table sat a Polycom telephone conferencing device that looked a bit like a three-legged drone. It had a round, brushed-metal head on a stalk that, voice-activated, would swivel disconcertingly like a robot towards whoever might be speaking.
He’d set up four whiteboards. On one, headed OPERATION BANTAM, were crime-scene photographs of the victim; on the next were postmortem photographs; on the third was an association chart for Lorna Belling, to which was also pinned a police mugshot of her husband, Corin; and on the fourth a street map of the area around her flat, with the building ringed in red.
He suddenly noticed one of his team had stuck on the door the name of the operation, together with an image from the old film Chicken Run. It brought a smile to his face.
In front of him, Guy had placed a mug of coffee, his Policy Book and the notes for the briefing printed out by Roy Grace’s secretary. He ran through them, feeling apprehensive at managing his first ever murder briefing as an SIO, yet confident they were already close to a conclusion. Supremely confident, actually, thanks to the information that had just come in.
Ten minutes later his team was assembled around the table. There were the trusty regulars that Grace favoured, DS Norman Potting, DS Jon Exton, DC Jack Alexander, as well as DC Kevin Hall, the temporary replacement for Tanja Cale who was away on holiday, David Watkinson, the Office Manager, Georgie English, the Crime Scene Manager, Sergeant Lorna Dennison-Wilkins, the POLSA, and Annalise Vineer, the HOLMES indexer. In addition there were two new detective constables, Velvet Wilde, a slim, attractive woman in her late twenties, with close-cropped blonde hair and a distinct Belfast accent, who had recently moved from uniform to CID, and Arnie Crown, a short, wiry American of thirty-six, who had been seconded to Major Crime from the FBI as part of an exchange.
In addition they were also lumbered with the Direct Entry detective inspector, Donald Dull. He looked fittingly named, a quiet, mild-tempered man in his late thirties, in a slightly old-fashioned suit. With his porcine figure he looked like he would have struggled with the ‘beep’ test – the fitness test that officers had to pass every year. But maybe Direct Entries were exempt from this, Guy wondered – especially if they were Cassian Pewe’s pet. Peering into a tablet in front of him, over the top of a pair of half-frames, Dull exuded all the charisma of a back-room accountant. Batchelor sensed he was going to be trouble.
‘This is the first briefing of Operation Bantam, the investigation into the death of Lorna Jane Belling,’ Batchelor read from his notes, and went on to outline the circumstances surrounding her death, and the initial findings of the pathologist. ‘After an assault, causing a head trauma, and a possible attempt at strangulation, resulting in severe bruising round her neck and sufficient oxygen starvation to cause petechial haemorrhages, death appears to have been caused either by electrocution from a hairdryer dropped into the bathtub where she was partially immersed or by head trauma. We are not ruling out suicide at this stage.’
Norman Potting raised a hand, and Batchelor acknowledged him. ‘Yes, Norman?’
Potting’s hair was short, after having his head shaven for a recent undercover operation. Everyone thought this style suited him, and looked a lot better than his usual limp comb-over. It also knocked a good decade off his fifty-five years. Wearing a smart blue suit he’d been given for the same operation and new glasses, he was looking almost cool. His rural West Country accent was the only remnant of his former persona. ‘Guv, is it established it was the same offender who strangled her and put the hairdryer into the bath?’
‘Good question, Norman. No, not at this stage. On the balance of probability it would seem likely, but there were no prints found on the hairdryer nor round her neck, so we can’t be certain.’
‘Unless this lady had a lot of enemies,’ Jon Exton said, with his usual serious intensity, ‘it would be a bit of a stretch to think that one person strangled her and left her for dead, and another person entered the flat and finished her off.’
‘I have some further evidence that has just come in this afternoon,’ Batchelor said. ‘As I mentioned to a number of you earlier, we have a prime suspect, her husband, Corin. There is already considerable evidence linking him to the crime. During the past year Lorna has called the police to report instances of domestic abuse by him. The most recent was on Monday of this week, when she complained he had tried to push dog crap into her mouth. He was angered by the mess the litter of puppies she had bred was making. He was arrested, but she refused to press charges, out of fear I understand, and he was released on Tuesday evening, a day before we believe she was killed.’
‘What a bastard,’ Potting said.
‘His fingerprints were found on a couple of empty beer cans at a flat she had rented in Hove – possibly as a bolthole to get away from the husband.’ Batchelor pointed at the red-circled area on the street map. ‘There were also a number of cigarette butts of the Silk Cut brand he is known to have smoked found at this same address – we’ve established from the victim’s sister that she was a non-smoker. We had these butts and the beer cans sent for fast-track DNA testing and the results have just come back in. His DNA
has been found present in saliva around the tops of two cans, as well as on two cigarette butts. During the postmortem, Theobald found semen in her vagina, indicating she had intercourse sometime shortly before her death.’
‘Could it have been after, boss?’ Kevin Hall asked in his friendly but blunt voice.
‘A bit of necrophilia?’ Potting butted in. ‘Dead good sex, eh?’
He looked around, but no one laughed, or even grinned.
‘Thanks, Norman,’ Batchelor said, sharply, then replied to Hall. ‘It’s a possibility – we’ll know more when it has been analysed. At this stage my hypothesis is that once released from custody, the husband went to the flat and killed her. We’re hoping that the DNA from the semen will add strength to this theory. If it is him, there will need to be a review and of course the Independent Police Complaints Commission will become involved, looking into the circumstances of his release. It’s just unfortunate that the husband will never be brought to trial – I think all of you know the circumstances of his death? Detective Superintendent Grace and DS Exton went to his office to talk to him, and he did a runner, which is a fairly good indicator of his guilt.’
‘A good defence brief would get him off, guv,’ Potting said.
‘Oh?’
‘He’d just say he was legless at the time.’
Even Batchelor found himself grinning at this. As the SIO, perhaps he should have considered coming down on him like a ton of bricks. But he knew the old detective was still in a fragile state following the death of his fiancée, Detective Sergeant Bella Moy. And, dammit, when he’d first joined Major Crime, gallows humour had been everyone’s way of coping.
DI Dull raised a hand. ‘Guy, I don’t want to be the party pooper—’
‘But you’re going to be, right?’ Batchelor retorted, interested to see what this new addition to the team had to say.
‘Well, I hope not. I’m just bothered by this bolthole idea.’ Dull tapped a key on his tablet. ‘From what we already know, Lorna Belling had been renting this flat for some time. I’ve done a spreadsheet on rents in the area.’ He began to pass round copies. ‘The rent she has been paying is relatively low for the area, because of the condition of the place, but even so, how could she have afforded it, working from home as a hairdresser? I’ve done another spreadsheet on the charges made by home hairdressers – compared to those in salons.’