by Peter James
This was something that had been backed up by a recent conversation he’d had with a police sergeant who was a regular crew member of the police helicopter. Part of her duty was to do a weekly check, while flying along near the bottom of Beachy Head. The beauty spot, a chalk headland a few miles to the east of Brighton, had a dark side to it. With its 531-foot sheer drop onto rocks at the edge of the English Channel, it was a notorious suicide spot, claiming victims most weeks of the year, and vied with California’s Golden Gate Bridge and Japan’s Aokigahara Woods for the dubious status of the world’s most popular suicide destination. There was a permanently manned chaplaincy post there to help try to talk desperate people around.
The sergeant had told him that a significant number of victims they recovered from the bottom of the cliffs had chalk under their fingernails – indicating, horrifically, that they must have changed their minds on the way down.
Every sudden death that Roy Grace encountered, whether an accident, suicide or murder, affected him. Death was something that everyone liked to believe happened to other people. Other, less fortunate people. Not many people set out to become victims, and this place haunted him with its sadness.
He and Sandy had had no children. If he had died during the time they had been together, Sandy would have coped fine. She was a strong person. Cleo would cope, too, if anything ever happened to him; her family were comfortably off and, additionally, he’d made life assurance provisions for her and for Noah. But the recent birth of his son had made him think about his death in a way that he never had before. Cleo would always be a brilliant mother to Noah, but as a young, very beautiful woman, she would almost certainly marry again one day – and that person would then become Noah’s father.
A total stranger.
It was an odd thought to be having, he knew, but now that he was a father, he valued life more than ever before. He wanted to be around for his son. To be a good father to him, the way his own father, Jack Grace, had been there for him, to try to help prepare him for the world out there. A world that was rich and beautiful, but constantly lay in the shadow of evil.
Even though he had some good associations with the mortuary – it was where he had met Cleo, after all – the place still made him deeply uneasy, as it did most people who came here, and that included police officers. The gates here were always open, 24/7. Always ready to receive the newly dead and, like the skeletal remains of the as yet unknown woman at the Lagoon, sometimes the long-term dead.
Roy Grace always felt that the blandness of the exterior of the building, which looked like a suburban bungalow, added a curiously stark contrast to the grim tasks that were performed inside it. It was a long, single-storey structure with grey pebbledash rendering on the walls, overlooked by a row of houses, and with a covered drive-in on one side deep enough to accommodate an ambulance or a large van. On the other side was a huge opaque window, and a small, very domestic-looking front door.
He drove past a line of cars parked against a flint wall at the rear, and halted in the visitors’ parking area. Then he walked around to the front door and rang the bell. It was answered by Darren Wallace, in Cleo’s absence, the Acting Senior Anatomical Pathology Technician. He was in his early twenties, with fashionably spiky dark hair, and dressed in blue scrubs, with a green plastic apron and white boots. He greeted the Detective Superintendent and led him through into the changing room.
As he gowned up, Roy wrinkled his nose, trying not to breathe in the all-too-familiar smell of the place, a combination of Jeyes Fluid, Trigene disinfectant and decaying human bodies. A smell that stayed with you long after you left. As did the feeling of cold from the chilled air. Then he went through into the post-mortem room itself, and all the smells became stronger – and the air even colder.
The room was divided into two working areas separated by an open archway, the walls lined with grey tiles and with stark overhead lighting. There was a wide, tall fridge, with a row of numbered doors accessing it; behind each of them, four bodies could be stacked one above the other. The spaces that were occupied were indicated by a buff handwritten tag jammed in the metal frame holder on the door. Accommodation here was stark and functional, Grace thought, it didn’t matter whether you were a billionaire or a homeless person, you’d be rubbing shoulders – or at least body bags – in the void behind these doors for however long it took for the Coroner to release you. He shuddered, trying not to think about it. It didn’t matter, did it, if you were dead? You’d vacated your body, it was just an empty shell, a husk.
Wasn’t it?
That was how he’d felt seeing his dad’s body, years back, laid out in a funeral parlour.
There were six stainless-steel post-mortem tables in the two areas, and scales with whiteboard charts on the walls above them, labelled NAME, BRAIN, LUNGS, HEART, LIVER, KIDNEYS, SPLEEN. The weights of each of the organs would be marked up here during a post-mortem – except in the rare cases, such as the one now, where there was nothing left of them.
Three of the steel tables were bare and gleaming. On another two, bodies were laid out beneath white plastic sheeting, the foot of one visible, a buff tag hanging off the big toe. Out of curiosity, as he walked past, Grace read the name, ‘Bob Tanner’, and wondered What was his story?
Then he nodded a greeting at the others in the room, similarly gowned, who were gathered around a table on which lay a grubby-looking skeleton, some parts of it held together by desiccated sinewy tissue, the remainder laid out separately like a painstakingly partially completed puzzle.
It was the skull that drew his eyes. Small, with a full set of immaculately shaped teeth – if badly in need of some whitening. A white ruler had been placed across the left cheekbone by James Gartrell, who was standing by the skull, taking a set of photographs. Near him stood the tall figure of Philip Keay, talking into a hand-held dictating machine, and beside him was Glenn Branson, having a conversation with Deborah Morrison, the Assistant Technician. Lucy Sibun was studying one of the leg bones, and making notes.
Nadiuska De Sancha was bending over the skeleton, carefully probing with a thin steel instrument. A striking-looking woman in her early fifties, the pathologist had high cheekbones and clear green eyes that could be deadly serious one moment and sparkling with humour the next, beneath fiery red hair, which at this moment was pinned up, neatly. She had an aristocratic bearing, befitting someone who was, reputedly, the daughter of a Russian duke, and always wore a pair of small, heavy-rimmed glasses that gave her a distinctly studious appearance. She turned and greeted Roy Grace with a friendly smile.
‘Thanks for coming over, Roy, there are a couple of things that Glenn felt you ought to see.’ She replaced her tool with a pair of tweezers from a tray of instruments, walked over to the skull and studied it for some moments. Then she pinched something that was almost invisible, at first, and raised the tweezers above the skull.
Grace followed her over, and saw for himself: it was a single strand of brown hair, about eighteen inches long.
‘This might be helpful in establishing her identity,’ she said. ‘It’s one of the few remaining strands of hair left on her scalp, but from its length it would indicate that at the time of her death she had a full head of brown hair this length.’
Grace stared at it. His thoughts went to the photographs he had seen of Logan Somerville, who had similarly long brown hair. So, he remembered, had Emma Johnson, who had disappeared from her home in Worthing, turned up in Hastings some while later, then had recently been reported as having disappeared again. Could there be a connection? It seemed unlikely. But possible, even allowing for the gap of decades. He always kept an open mind in any enquiry. It was easy to dismiss something as coincidence – and in doing so potentially overlook a vital clue that might one day come back to bite you.
He turned to the forensic archaeologist. ‘Lucy, you said you estimated the woman’s age to be around twenty at the time of death?’
She turned to look at him. ‘Yes, everythi
ng points to that. And I would estimate that she died around thirty years ago. I’d like to get soil analysis done on a number of spores I’ve found, so far, on part of the remains, because to me they don’t look like they come from the sandy soil in the Lagoon vicinity. They appear to be clay deposits, more likely found some distance inland – quite a lot of the interior of Sussex farm and woodland is on clay. This makes me even more certain that the Lagoon wasn’t the original crime scene, but merely the deposition site. It’ll take me some days – possibly a week or two – to get this confirmed.’
Grace frowned. ‘Why would someone move her to the Lagoon from an inland burial site – to such a public place?’
‘Possibly because they knew the path was being laid, boss,’ said Glenn Branson. ‘And that then her remains would never be discovered.’
Grace stared down at the remains, pensively.
‘What about,’ Branson went on, ‘the possibility that the offender was part of the crew laying that path?’
Grace nodded. ‘Yes, it’s a possibility. You’re on to that, aren’t you?’
‘Yes.’
Grace looked at his watch, conscious of the need not to be late for Pewe. ‘Anything else that you have for me?’
Branson nodded with a wry smile. ‘Yeah, there is something else.’ He exchanged an almost conspiratorial glance with Nadiuska De Sancha. Then he jerked a finger towards the front of the skull.
The pathologist went over to the work surface by the large, opaque window, picked up a magnifying glass and brought it over. ‘Take a close look, Roy.’
Peering hard with his naked eye on the front of the skull, where he estimated the top of the forehead would have been, he could just see what looked like a mark, about two inches wide by half an inch high. Then he raised the glass and looked through that. He could make out, very faintly, letters:
U R DEAD
He turned back to Nadiuska De Sancha. ‘Strange tattoo to have. Might she have been a Goth, or whatever it was back then?’
‘It’s not a tattoo, Roy.’ She shook her head.
‘It’s not? So what is it?’
‘I think it burned through the skin. It must have been done with a branding iron.’
26
Friday 12 December
Logan grew up on a small farm near Ripe in East Sussex. Her parents were third-generation tenant farmers, and as the EEC regulations gradually bit deeper, their income dropped progressively. They needed to make savings, and the only real ones they could make were staff. They had to let two of their farmhands go, and a few months later their herdsman, who had been working for their family for thirty years. From the age of eleven, Logan had to take turns with the rest of her family to get up at 5 a.m. and milk the cows. It was a daily routine, seven days a week, every day of the year. Cows didn’t understand things like Christmas Day. They just wanted to be milked.
Her father was a committed Green environmentalist who did not believe in mod cons. The only heating in the house was supplied by a coke-fired Esse oven in the kitchen that was kept going all year round, and a wood-burning stove in the hall, that was unlit during the summer months. Years later, although she now lived in a centrally-heated flat in Brighton, she still woke up some nights with the smell of burning coke in her nostrils.
She could smell it now. Sharp, acrid. Was she hallucinating?
Then she opened her eyes and realized she was not, she could smell it clearly. Burning coke. Tickling her nostrils. She saw a blurry, diffused red glow above her. And pinpricks of green light beyond.
Then the familiar sliding sound, and musty-smelling air on her face. Now she could see the red glow much more clearly, directly above her.
Someone was standing over her. Someone holding something that was glowing bright red.
‘Who are you?’ she said, trembling with fear, her voice quavering. ‘Who are you?’
Suddenly she felt a gloved hand clamp her throat, forcing it down against the hard surface she was lying on. Then the red glow descended towards her midriff. An instant later she felt an agonizing burning sensation on her right thigh. She howled, crushing her eyes shut against the pain, writhing, trying to move away, but she was pinioned down. She screamed. Heard the hiss of burning flesh.
Her flesh.
‘Nooooooooooooooooo!’
It was like being stung by a swarm of hornets. She screamed again.
‘Ssshhhhh!’ a muffled voice said. ‘Ssshhhh! It’s OK, babe!’
She writhed in agony, as far as she could move. It was burning, stinging, hurting like hell. She tried to bite into the glove holding her down. The pain was getting worse.
More intense.
‘Owwwwwwwww. Owwwwwwww.’ It was burning right through her as if her entire leg was on fire.
‘Owwwwwwwwwwwwww.’
Then she felt something cold and soothing on her thigh, for a brief instant. But rapidly the excruciating pain returned.
She saw the red glow rising above her. The hand released her. She gasped. The pain was unbearable.
She vomited.
Moments later a cloth, wet and reeking of some vile disinfectant, was wiping her mouth. The pain in her thigh felt as if it was burning right through to her bone, like corrosive acid.
Then the muffled voice again. ‘You’ll be OK. The pain will go. No harm done. You’ll be fine.’
‘What have you done, you bastard? Is this how you get your kicks?’
The sliding sound above her. Then silence. Through her tears of pain she shook in terror.
27
Friday 12 December
At four o’clock in the afternoon Roy Grace sat in his office on the first floor of the CID HQ, with its view out across the road. The glistening wet grey slab of the Hollingbury Asda superstore sat in the foreground, in the fading light, with the rainy landscape of the city beyond. He slipped the DVD of the interview with Jamie Ball, which he had just been handed, into his desktop computer.
The burly figure of the young man, in a grey suit, shirt and tie and black shoes, was seated, looking awkward, in one of the three red chairs in the tiny Witness Interview Room. Two detectives, DS Guy Batchelor in a sports jacket and black trousers, and DC Liz Seward, a petite woman with short, spiky blonde hair, dressed in a white shirt and dark trousers, sat with him. Above their heads the lens of a wall-mounted camera stared down at them.
Grace watched the formalities of today’s date and time being announced, and Ball acknowledging he was aware that the interview was being recorded. Batchelor asked Ball to outline the circumstances of his fiancée, Logan Somerville’s, disappearance.
Ball related the events in a precisely identical manner as he had to Roy Grace the previous evening, and that struck Grace as a little strange. Was it rehearsed, he wondered?
‘How would you describe your relationship with Ms Somerville?’ DC Seward asked.
Grace watched the man carefully. He was replying in a calm voice, but he looked anything but calm. ‘We were deeply in love and planning our wedding. I thought everything was great.’
‘Are you sure about that?’ Guy Batchelor pressed. ‘And that she felt the same way?’
‘I thought so.’
Ball looked even more uncomfortable. He stared up for some moments at the camera, then scratched his right ear, before checking the knot of his tie.
‘Do you know a lady by the name of Louise Brice?’ DC Seward asked.
‘Yes, very well.’
‘How would you describe her relationship to Logan?’ the DC asked.
‘She’s Logan’s best friend. They go back to nursery school days. They’re very close.’
‘How close would you say?’
‘They spoke or texted each other all the time. Several times a day, most days.’
‘So Louise Brice would be likely to know quite a lot about her?’
He hesitated. Grace noted his expression change. ‘Yes.’
‘The thing is, Jamie, one of my colleagues spoke to Louise Brice earlier
today. I have the transcript of the conversation in front of me.’ She looked down for some moments at a sheet of printout. ‘Louise Brice told her the same thing that she told a reporter on the Argus newspaper who contacted her. That Logan had broken off your engagement. Can you comment on that?’
Again Ball looked uncomfortable for some moments. ‘We were very deeply in love,’ he said, with a tinge of defiance in his voice. ‘But recently there’s been some friction – as Logan was suddenly unsure.’
‘Why do you think her best friend would have said that to a newspaper reporter?’ Liz Seward asked him.
Ball shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Louise Brice and I never got on that well, if you want to know the truth. She runs Brices estate agency. She told Logan she thinks I’m a bit of a loser, and that she could do better.’
‘Better than what?’ Guy Batchelor asked.
‘Me.’
‘How did Logan react to her friend’s view?’ he asked.
Ball was silent for some moments. ‘She told me what Louise had said.’
‘And how did you feel when you heard that?’ Batchelor stared at him intently.
Ball touched his beard, then his stacked hair. ‘I told her that was very hurtful.’
‘I spoke to Louise Brice earlier today,’ DC Seward said. ‘She told me that Logan had a number of concerns about the relationship. Do you want to comment on that?’
Ball’s temper visibly flared. ‘That’s just bullshit! Louise’s a snotty bitch, she never liked me, she was always trying to undermine me. Logan and I had disagreements like any couple.’
‘What about?’