by Peter James
‘See you in a bit – and I mean it, Jon. Anytime you’d like to talk. OK?’
‘Appreciate it. I’m getting it sorted, it’ll be fine.’
Grace looked around. Pewe was still talking to Bruno. Sandy’s parents weren’t here. Good. He hadn’t been sure what he might say to them if he saw them. He didn’t trust himself not to have a blazing row with them and this was not the time or place. But he couldn’t help wondering, if they had known Sandy was alive – and presumably her whereabouts since she disappeared over a decade ago – then who else had?
A ridiculous thought came into his head. Pewe? Could he have known?
He dismissed it.
Then he heard a Scottish accent. ‘Roy, remember us – cousins of Sandy – we were at your wedding! Bill and Helen Ross, from Aberdeen!’
He turned and saw an elderly but spritely couple.
‘Yes, of course, how very nice to see you again,’ he said, politely, shaking hands with them. He had pretty much a photographic memory for faces but could not really remember them.
‘Such sad circumstances,’ Helen said, ‘our hearts go out to you.’
He chatted for some minutes with them, aware that the wake was rapidly thinning out. When he next looked around, Pewe had vanished. Cleo said she and Bruno would cadge a lift with Roy’s sister, and if he was up for it later, take him for a little drive – he was keen to collect some Pokémon – and it would give her the chance to chat with him.
Grace had been sad in the church, and at the grave, he thought, as he drove away from the pub and headed to the Police HQ. But now he didn’t feel sad any more. He felt angry and puzzled. Anger at Sandy’s parents, puzzled by Cassian Pewe’s behaviour, and wondering.
Were Sandy’s parents the only people who had known the truth all this time? Yet Sandy had never been fond of them or close to them. Was it really likely she had been in touch with them, in regular contact, sharing her secret? To spare them the agony of not knowing?
Or had Sandy sent them a suicide note too, that he was not aware of, telling them everything as well? And they were just winding him up, out of spite? But why would they do that?
To score a pathetic little victory?
God, he had thought that in burying Sandy today, he would at last have closure; but instead she had sprung on him not only a son he never knew he had, but also another mystery.
Right now, as he approached the barrier at Malling House, he parked those thoughts, and switched his mind back to the myriad complexities of Operation Bantam. And something that was worrying him about it.
A definite shadow.
As he entered his office that shadow darkened. There was a message awaiting him that instantly made him deeply worried.
79
Thursday 28 April
Grace stared at the yellow Post-it note stuck, prominently, on his desk. It was written in his secretary’s handwriting.
Any request to see a Professional Standards officer was a concern. It might mean a complaint had been made by a member of the public, or by another officer; there were intractable procedures the PS department followed, in some cases requiring an officer’s suspension during the enquiry and, fortunately rarely, in some cases his or her dismissal.
That feeling of being back at school and summoned to the headmaster’s study, the one he had every time he visited the Chief Constable or one of the ACCs, was with him now. If it was about Corin Belling’s death, why was it so urgent?
If Professional Standards just wanted some information from him, on some minor matter, it would have been someone more junior contacting him, not Superintendent Paula Darke. He picked up the phone, wanting to get it over with as quickly as possible. But to his frustration he heard her clear, authoritative voice with its faint North London inflexion, requesting the caller to leave a message.
Shit.
That summons on the little yellow sticky square of paper had totally thrown his concentration. He looked at the separate piles on his desk, and knew, after a whole morning out of the office, there would be a good fifty or more new emails in his inbox awaiting him. He sat and started going through them, quickly, to see if any might hold a clue as to what Darke was going to speak to him about. But moments later his phone rang and he heard the Superintendent’s voice.
‘Roy, thanks for calling me. I know you’ve been at your former wife’s funeral this morning, but I’ve got a delicate matter to discuss with you – do you have a moment this afternoon?’
He checked the time on his computer. It was half past two. ‘I’ve got a meeting at 3 p.m., but I could come straight over now, Paula,’ he said.
‘I think we might need a bit longer than that.’ Her tone was neutral, amicable but giving nothing away. ‘What about after that?’
Whatever this was, he wanted to find out quickly and not sit in suspense. And he didn’t like that it was not going to be a quick meeting – that sounded ominous. ‘It’s OK, I can put the meeting back and come over now, if you are free?’
‘Good,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’
For all its power and authority, Professional Standards was, like so much of Sussex Police, squeezed into far too small a space for the number of people in the department. Paula Darke’s office was tiny; her tidy desk against the wall, with a view through a large window of a steep grass bank. The only personal object on the desk was a picture of a grinning hunk of a man with a shaven head. Her husband, recently qualified as a detective after years in the Met as a PC. Most of one wall was taken up with a large-scale map of Sussex, sectored up into divisions.
As she swivelled round in her chair to face him, Grace was sitting so close their knees almost touched. The Superintendent had deservedly risen through the ranks, with a reputation for being hardworking, tough but fair. In her early forties, with a strong physique, she was an attractive woman, with classic features framed by short, brown, wavy hair, and dressed, unusually, in uniform – a white shirt with epaulettes bearing her silver crown, a black tie, trousers and shoes.
‘Thanks for coming to see me, Roy – I’ve just returned from a discipline hearing,’ she said and smiled. As always, she exuded energy, as if bursting to deal with a challenge. ‘Nice suit, by the way!’
‘Thank you, what’s the fascination with my suit? That’s the third compliment I’ve had today! It’s a few years old – I bought it in New Orleans.’
‘It’s very slimming on you,’ she said and added quickly, ‘Not that you are exactly overweight! Lucky you, New Orleans is on my bucket list.’ Then her expression became serious and her voice more sombre. ‘It’s a very delicate matter, I’m afraid, Roy.’
Grace felt his heart sinking. ‘What does it involve?’ His own voice sounded strange to him, several octaves higher than normal.
‘It’s about one of your team. DS Exton.’
‘DS Exton?’
Instantly the cloud over him lifted. He hoped the relief didn’t show in his face. Exton. He had a feeling he knew what she was going to say about him, but he was wrong.
‘I think you know, Roy, that at Professional Standards we’ve been running random checks on all force computers. And now, with phones becoming more like computers, we’ve started to include those – something not many officers know. I’ve been tipped off anonymously that DS Exton has recently been accessing escort service sites on his job phone.’ She looked at him quizzically for a reaction.
‘I’m astonished to hear this. He’s one of the most strait-laced officers I know.’
‘A dark horse, perhaps?’
‘A large number of sites, or just one in particular, Paula?’
‘Enough.’ She pushed a printout towards him. ‘It’s all there, the numbers marked.’
‘What a bloody idiot. Well, what I can say is I think he has a problem at the moment. I’d actually been planning to speak to him this afternoon.’
‘What kind of problem?’ In addition to her reputation for being tough, Roy had also seen her caring side before, and was aware
he was looking at it now.
‘Well, he’s been coming to work looking very dishevelled – some days not having shaved or brushed his hair, and he seems withdrawn. He’s normally careful with his appearance – as I said, he’s very strait-laced and totally dependable. He’s got the nickname Agenda Man, because he’s so thorough when he gives any instructions to anyone. I’m worried he might be having some kind of a breakdown. Accessing these kinds of sites is totally out of character – and of course quite unacceptable on his police phone.’
‘Is he married?’
‘He was divorced some years ago – I understand reasonably amicably, from what he told me once, and has a daughter. I believe he’s been in a stable relationship with a lady from Australia for some years – a very nice woman called Dawn. He brought her along to an event last year – a Sussex Police Charitable Trust fundraiser. Would you like me to see what I can find out and report back to you?’
She hesitated. ‘I had been thinking about someone from this department talking to him.’
‘Would you let me speak to him first? He’s a good officer – I really believe that.’
She gave him a quizzical look.
‘Trust me, I believe in this man.’
‘OK, Roy,’ she said, hesitantly. ‘But we can’t let this go on.’
‘I’ll speak to him as soon as I can this afternoon.’
‘I’d be grateful. Any officer behaving erratically is a worry. Perhaps even more so in these days of heightened security.’
‘I agree.’
Walking away from her office, he was thinking hard, and extremely concerned. Was there something seriously wrong with his friend and colleague Jon Exton?
80
Thursday 28 April
Glenn Branson and Guy Batchelor were already heading down the corridor towards his office when Grace entered the building, still reflecting on his meeting with Paula Darke. Gesturing them to sit down at the tiny desk in front of his own that he used as a conference table, he decided not to say anything about Exton at this stage; instead he fetched his notes from his desk and joined them.
‘OK, I want to have a word about strategy in advance of this evening’s Op Bantam briefing,’ he said. ‘As I see it we have a number of really good suspects, each of them more than capable of killing Lorna Belling. Her deceased husband, Corin; Seymour Darling; Kipp Brown; and now this mystery lover of Lorna’s introduced into the investigation by her friend, known only as Greg. We have a vague description of the person who might be Greg from Seymour Darling, but in my view he’s an unreliable witness.’
Both the other detectives nodded.
‘Totally,’ Batchelor agreed. ‘I’m not sure we can trust anything that weasel says. And we’re still not able to rule out suicide, especially now we know one of the causes of death was electrocution.’
‘Correct. Now, there is one thing we’ve not considered about Lorna,’ Grace said. ‘The facts we have so far are that we know she was in an abusive relationship with her husband. She worked from home as a hairdresser. She had a secret apartment, the address where she was found dead. And we know from her sister she was planning to leave her husband and move to Australia, and was in the process of raising cash to do just that – hence the probable reason she was selling her car.’ He looked at both men then continued. ‘I have a supposition. Think the unthinkable. What if the real reason she had the apartment was not as a bolthole from her husband, but because she had a secret life as an escort of some kind? Could the reason that there was no phone or computer found in her flat be that the offender took them, knowing his details would be on them?’
Glenn Branson nodded. ‘Interesting thinking, boss.’
‘I think we have just the person to carry out a search of all the escort sites online and advertised in the local media – Spreadsheet Man – Donald Dull. Analysis like that would be right up his alley,’ Batchelor said.
‘Never a dull day,’ Glenn quipped.
‘Every day is if your name’s Dull,’ added Batchelor.
Grace barely noticed the comments. He was thinking again. Lorna had told her friend, Kate Harmond, she had a lover, Greg. Wouldn’t she have told her the whole name and some details about her lover? Could that have been just a ruse, to distract her from knowing the truth? That she was funding her escape to a new life in Australia through sexual services? He looked down at his notes again. ‘Glenn, I want you to pick a small team to look at each of the suspects in depth. Pull together the witness evidence, the forensics, the intel and anything else we have. See if any of them have been accessing escort sites. Grade the suspects – establish who is our most likely one.’
‘I’ll get straight on it.’
Grace looked at Batchelor. ‘Guy, we need a new media strategy targeting the local community. Vallance Mansions is bounded on two sides by residential buildings and Kingsway in front is a very busy thoroughfare. Someone in the apartment block or in the surrounding area may have seen something on the afternoon or night she was killed. And I think we need to update the strategy, and to appoint a house-to-house supervisor to pull in all the PCSOs in the area and get them knocking on doors, and make sure we’ve not missed any CCTV. You can’t walk ten feet in this city without being captured on a camera somewhere. I’ve said I consider the man an unreliable witness – but if Darling is correct and Greg exists and has been a frequent visitor, someone must have seen him, and a CCTV camera must have caught him.’
‘Leave it with me, boss.’ Batchelor hesitated. ‘There is actually something else.’ He shot a glance at Branson, then Grace, who both nodded.
‘I’ve been running an ANPR sweep. I created a matrix, with the help of NotMuch – he’s had a lot of FBI experience in his previous role in Homeland Security, plotting possible routes for attackers into an area. We used the same basic algorithm to plot vehicles travelling from different parts of the city to Vallance Mansions, to see if we could pick up any non-residents visiting frequently – and something interesting has showed up. I could illustrate it better on my computer, but in short summary,’ he said awkwardly, ‘DS Exton has been in the vicinity several times, mostly evenings and often all night. Significantly, he was there on the night of Wednesday, April 20th.’ He looked at Grace expectantly.
Grace frowned, not liking what he was hearing at all. Exton calling sex workers on his phone. Now known to be in the vicinity on the day Lorna died. There was no one on his team who looked less likely than mild, quiet, serious Exton.
This development was potentially horrendous. Could it possibly be true? What were the implications, and how could he deal with this? It hardly bore thinking about. Surely there must be a simple explanation, otherwise this could be his worst nightmare.
‘Where does Exton live, Guy?’ he asked.
‘Hailsham, boss.’
‘And he lives there with his partner, Dawn?’
‘As I understand, yes.’
Hailsham was some twenty miles to the east of the city. ‘Has anyone said anything to him?’ Grace asked.
Batchelor shook his head. ‘I’ve told Glenn but no one else.’
‘Do you have any view on this, Glenn?’
‘I don’t, no. It may be entirely innocent – but he’s not his usual self at the moment.’
‘He told me he had some issues but didn’t go into detail,’ Grace replied.
‘His relationship’s on the rocks, I heard,’ Batchelor said.
‘I asked him the other day,’ Branson said. ‘Told him if he wanted to talk about anything, you know, man to man, I’d go and have a beer with him. He nearly bit my head off.’
‘He’s been like this for a while?’
‘Can’t say for sure, but that feels about right.’
‘Thanks, guys, leave it with me.’
Grace sat still, waiting some moments after the two detectives had left before calling Exton. Thinking. The Detective Sergeant was calling sex workers on his phone. His car repeatedly in the vicinity. His erratic behaviour startin
g around the time of Lorna Belling’s death.
The unthinkable?
He hoped more than anything in the world, right now, not. Despite all its problems, and the occasional total prick like Cassian Pewe, he loved the police – and particularly his own force, Sussex – with all his heart. There were few things worse than a rogue cop, because internally that damaged the trust that was vital in any team. You looked after each other, watched each other’s backs. The day you lost trust in a fellow officer was a slippery slope, because it diminished everyone in your eyes.
Not relishing the task ahead of him, he tapped the speed-dial buttons on his phone for the DS.
81
Thursday 28 April
Cleo knelt on the living-room floor encouraging Noah, who was sitting on his play mat, to touch the birds and animals on the mobile suspended above him. ‘Dog!’ she said. ‘Duck!’
Noah reached up and suddenly punched an elephant hard. It swung into a pig, making a clacking sound, and he giggled. Humphrey, asleep on his blanket, which he always dragged out of his basket, was making strange squeaking noises and twitching. Having a doggie dream, Cleo thought.
‘Humphrey!’ she said softly. ‘Humphrey, it’s OK!’
Suddenly there was a series of crashing sounds above them, like brutal overhead thunder. Noah looked up, startled. Humphrey, instantly awake, began barking loudly.
A metallic clanging sound. Another rumble of thunder.
‘Jesus!’ Cleo sprinted up the stairs and along to Bruno’s room, just as there was another shattering boom-boom-boom followed by a cataclysmic clash of cymbals, and pushed open the door.
It was Bruno, with his drum kit assembled, in full flow. He’d already explained them to her yesterday, as she had helped him unpack them, telling her very solemnly in great detail what each was called and its role. There were five black and white drums – a snare drum, a bass drum and three toms; two of them stood flat, three of them were angled towards him and had a black cross taped on them. The brand was stencilled in black on each of the cymbals. Paiste.