by Peter James
‘A month?’ Grace tried to remember the last time he’d had that amount of time off, and couldn’t. Instantly he was suspicious. ‘I’m sure I won’t need that long.’
‘It’s not an option, Roy, it’s an order. I’ve seen too many marriages in the police ruined because of the workload of officers.’ He grinned, exposing a set of immaculate white teeth, and shiny, rosebud lips.
Five minutes later, to Roy Grace’s relief, Pewe left.
106
Saturday 27 December
‘I can’t believe I have you home for an entire month!’ Cleo said, holding the door, then taking his arm to help him out of the car. ‘Welcome back!’ She handed him his stick, then went around to the rear of the car to get his little suitcase.
Roy Grace grinned, gripping the walking stick, supporting himself on his good leg, and stood in the unseasonably warm sunlight staring excitedly at the cottage, and breathing in the smells of the country air. He could hardly believe he was actually, finally, back. For years he had dreamed of living in the countryside, and whilst they were only eight miles from his beloved Brighton, this was wonderfully rural.
The house was small and rectangular, with whitewashed walls, a white front door and a steeply pitched tiled roof, approached down a bumpy drive that was little more than a cart track. All the tiny windows were a different shape, and one side of the house was covered in unruly ivy. The garden was an overgrown riot of shrubs, bushes and long grass. In a slightly elevated position, it had a view from the rear across miles of open fields. They’d got it for a good price because it was in need of modernization, but he loved it all the more for that. Cleo had great taste and had already begun the redecorating.
As he reached the front door he heard Humphrey barking excitedly inside. Moments later it was opened by Cleo’s younger sister, Charlie, in paint-spattered dungarees.
Humphrey came bounding out, almost knocking him over in his excitement, jumping up at him.
Steadying himself on his stick, he hugged the dog. ‘Good boy, like your new pad, do you?’ Moments later Humphrey spotted something and raced off into the undergrowth, barking furiously.
He went into the hallway, treading carefully across the dust sheets, inhaling the heady smell of fresh paint combined with the sweet smell of an open fire. As he kissed Charlie, wishing her a belated Happy Christmas, he heard Noah gurgling.
‘He’s been good as gold all morning!’ Charlie said. ‘He must be excited to have his Daddy home!’
‘I’ll bring him down!’ Cleo said and hurried up the stairs. ‘Go through to the living room. I’ve put a bottle of champagne in the fridge – we’ve got some overdue celebrating to do!’ she called out.
Ten minutes later, on a sofa in front of the crackling, popping fire in the inglenook, with a glass in his hand, and Noah lying on his play mat on the floor, Roy Grace felt almost overwhelmed with happiness. Finally, he felt, his new life was really beginning.
Charlie, whose love life had been a disastrous series of wrong choices, was dating a television commercials director whom the whole family – apart from him – had met and really liked, and she looked happier than he had ever seen her. Humphrey was wrestling to the death with a squeaky rubber toy.
‘So,’ Charlie said, ‘Detective Superintendent Grace is now a country squire. How does that feel?’
He grinned, drained his glass and looked up at Cleo. ‘Pretty damned good!’
Charlie refilled their glasses and went to the kitchen to prepare lunch. ‘We’ve got a whole month together, darling,’ Roy said to Cleo. ‘What are we going to do with it? Have that house-warming for starters?’
‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘And let’s have a couple of dinner parties. And we should go to London shopping in the sales – now’s the best time to buy stuff for the house. And there’s a Bryan Ferry concert coming on at the Dome in three weeks – shall we try to get tickets?’
Later on, when the bottle was almost empty, Cleo scooped Noah into her arms to take him upstairs for a feed.
Charlie excused herself to serve lunch. Grace sat and sipped more of his champagne. Then his phone rang.
It was his German Landeskriminalamt friend, Marcel Kullen.
Instantly his mood changed, as if the sky had clouded over.
‘Hey, Roy, Happy New Year. How are you?’
‘Happy New Year, Marcel. I’m OK – apart from being shot in the leg just before Christmas.’
‘Shot? You have been shot?’
‘Eleven pellets removed from my leg.’
‘You are serious?’
‘Yep, they were an early Christmas present from someone who didn’t like me very much.’
‘My God, but you are OK?’
‘I’m OK, thanks. It hurts a bit to walk, but I’ll be fine in another week or so. Alcohol helps! So how are you?’
There was a moment’s silence, then Kullen said, ‘This lady in the hospital I spoke to you about, yes?’
‘Uh huh,’ he replied hesitantly.
‘I have some more information about this woman. Tell me something, did your Sandy – was she ever taking drugs?’
‘Drugs? What do you mean, Marcel? What kind of drugs?’
‘Heroin?’
‘No way! No.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘I think I would have known!’
‘I do not think always people know, Roy.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘I have another question. This lady, they are calling Frau Lohmann – she has a son I mentioned who is ten years and six months old. Do you think there is any possibility your Sandy could have had such a son by you?’
He stared at the dancing flames in the grate. ‘A son? By me?’
‘Could she have been pregnant when she left you?’
‘Pregnant? Pregnant, no – no.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes,’ Grace said hesitantly and tried to do the maths. It was just possible, he calculated. Just.
‘This son has told the friends he is staying with that his mother has taken him twice to Brighton. The last time he said he went to a wedding with her in November and she seemed very upset. They left the wedding.’
Grace listened, feeling numb. ‘Why did you ask about drugs, Marcel?’
‘We circulated her three identities and photographs to all police forces and agencies in Germany that might be able to help us. One responded which is in Frankfurt. They have, how do you call it, a drugs consumption room there. It is a place where drug users can go and inject themselves under supervision. They said they knew this woman who came regularly for two years. I think you should come over here, Roy, and make sure this woman is not Sandy. It would be helpful to us if you were able at least to eliminate her.’
‘What other details do you have?’
‘Well, Roy, with one identity, the one her son gave us, Alessandra Lohmann is the one she seems to be using now. But it is the variation of her first name that she gave to the drugs clinic that might be interesting to you.’
‘Which is?’
‘Sandy.’
107
Friday 2 January
Roy Grace stared out of the aeroplane window at the vast expanse of flat land beneath him, as they began their descent into Frankfurt. Was he on a wild goose chase after a ghost?
God, he hoped so.
And yet he could not dismiss that JPEG on his phone. It could be Sandy.
Three faked identities?
She was a multimillionaire?
She had a son.
The son’s age would have put her just pregnant at the time she vanished. She might not even have known she was pregnant then.
A son who had been twice with his mother to Brighton, last year. Once to a wedding in Brighton on the day he and Cleo had got married?
A son who had said the wedding had upset his mother.
Roy thought again about the nightmare he’d had before the wedding, in which he had dreamed he had seen Sandy in the church
. And then, during the wedding itself, when he had turned to watch Cleo walk down the aisle and had seen the strange woman in black with a small boy at the back of the church.
Was it possible? Could Marcel be right?
Was she still alive and had come back to Brighton after all these years? And if so, why? Out of curiosity?
And if it really was her, how the hell would he – could he – deal with that?
His leg had healed to the point where he felt ready to start walking again, although the physio had told him to wait several weeks more before he attempted to start running. He had almost four more weeks at home before returning to work. And whilst he was going to miss work, to some extent, he was looking forward to the time he would spend with Cleo and Noah – and to getting stuck into stripping paint and paper and redecorating.
After the plane touched down he switched on his phone, then waited for a signal. As soon as he had one he texted Cleo to say he had landed. Feeling guilty that for the first time in their relationship, he had lied to her, telling her he had to make this one brief trip because of a witness’s vital testimony on a cold case he had been working on.
Immersed in his thoughts in the back of the taxi, he barely noticed the journey into the city. The cab driver, who spoke little English, had given him a dubious look when he had shown him the address. Forty minutes later, at midday, German time, the taxi turned into a seedy, rundown-looking Frankfurt street, with graffiti on the walls, and he could now understand the driver’s strange expression.
He saw the street name, Elbestrasse. Amid the strip clubs and sex shops, they passed several construction sites. To his left he saw a row of breeze blocks on the pavement behind a steel cage, and a blue tube running from the top of the building, down past the scaffolding and into a skip. Next to it was a garish-looking club, with the billboard announcing, CABARET. PIK-DAME. On his right they passed the shabby exterior of Hotel Elbe, then Eva’s Bistro and Hotel Garni. Then the taxi pulled over to the right and stopped beside several small, beat-up cars partially parked on the pavement, pointed at a drab, four-storey building, outside which several down-and-outs were gathered, some sitting, some standing, and said something to him in German that he did not understand. But he got the message.
They were here.
He paid the driver, went up the steps, lugging his overnight bag, and rang the bell. Moments later he heard a sharp buzz, pushed open the heavy glass door and entered a small, tiled reception area. A young woman sat behind a high counter at the rear, smiling pleasantly.
‘Do you speak English?’ he asked.
‘Ja, a little.’
‘My name is Roy Grace – I’ve come to see Wolfgang Barth – he is expecting me.’
She directed him up the steps past her and along a short corridor towards a door. ‘You will find him on the second floor.’
There was a plate-glass window to his left. Through it he could see down into an adjoining room. The drugs consumption room. There were functional plastic chairs against a narrow metal table that ran around three sides of the room. Three of the chairs were occupied, two by young men, one in a baseball cap, and the other by a wizened, bearded man, with long straggly hair, in his late fifties, Grace estimated. All of them were hunched over their part of the table, studiously preparing their drugs. The room was presided over by a young woman, who had a row of metal spoons and hypodermic syringes on paper towels laid out in front of her.
He stopped and stared, driven by curiosity, then moved on through the door. Is this where Sandy had been? Taking drugs?
He climbed the stairs and as he reached the second floor a door opened and a friendly looking man, in his mid-forties, emerged. He was dressed in a blue checked shirt and jeans, and his shoulder-length brown hair and craggy good looks gave him the appearance of a rock musician.
‘Detective Superintendent Roy Grace?’ he asked in perfect English, with a cultured German accent. ‘I am Wolfgang Barth.’
They shook hands and Grace followed him into a bright, airy, cream-painted office, furnished with two desks, an aerial map of the city and several posters on the walls, one prominently worded, CANNABIS.
They sat down at a small conference table and Barth got him a coffee. There was a bowl of assorted chocolate biscuits on the table, which the German pushed towards him. ‘Help yourself if you are hungry.’
‘I’m good, thanks.’
‘So,’ Barth said, sitting opposite him, ‘you are a detective with Sussex Police. Do you know Graham Barrington?’
‘Indeed, very well. He was a Chief Superintendent who recently retired.’
Barth frowned. ‘Retired? Such a young man?’
Grace smiled. ‘That’s the system we have. Most officers retire after thirty years.’
‘He was here two years ago, looking at our work – he was keen to introduce what we are doing here into your city of Brighton.’
‘He was very forward-thinking. Unfortunately I don’t think my country’s politicians are as enlightened as yours in dealing with drug problems.’
Barth shrugged. ‘In 1992 we had one hundred and forty-seven drug deaths in this city. Now, since we introduced the consumption rooms, like this one, we have thirty. And the number is still reducing.’ He shrugged again. ‘So tell me, how can I be of help to you?’
Roy Grace unzipped his bag, and pulled out a stiff brown envelope. From it he removed a photograph of Sandy, taken just before she vanished, and handed it to him. ‘Do you recognize this woman?’
The German studied it intently.
‘About a month ago,’ Grace said, ‘Munich police circulated a photograph of a woman who was involved in an accident, whose identity was uncertain. They discovered she appeared to have three different names – aliases. One of them was Alessandra Lohmann. You responded that you recognized her, and that she had been a regular at this consumption room a couple of years back, using the first name, Sandy.’
Wolfgang Barth put the photograph down and nodded, thoughtfully. Then he went over to a tall metal rack of box files, peered at the covers, pulled one out and opened it up.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Sandy Lohmann. She was a recovering drug user who wanted to help by providing counselling services to others. She worked here for free every day from March 2009 until December 2011. But then she stopped coming.’
He replaced the file and sat back down again. Grace leaned forward and pointed at the photograph. ‘Is that her? Do you recognize her?’
Barth stared at it again for some moments, then looked at Grace and shrugged. ‘You know, this is very difficult. So many faces here. I remember Sandy a little, but she had red hair and wore a lot of, how you call it, make-up. It’s possible. She was very thin.’ He ran his fingers down his face as if to illustrate. ‘Gaunt, you know?’
Grace sat silently for some moments. Then he pulled out the photograph he had been sent by Marcel Kullen, of the woman in the Intensive Care Unit. ‘How about this one?’
Barth studied it. ‘This is the same woman?’
‘Perhaps. This was taken a month ago.’
Barth stared down at it for a long while, before looking up. ‘You know, it is possible. But I cannot say yes for sure. She is a person of interest to you?’
‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘She’s a person of interest to me.’
108
Saturday 3 January
At 5 p.m. that afternoon, Roy Grace sat in the passenger seat of Marcel Kullen’s immaculate fifteen-year-old BMW, heading from the airport into Munich. Ahead of them, out of the falling darkness, blue road signs with white writing loomed up then shot past them. SALZBURG. MÜNCHEN. NÜRNBERG. ECHING.
His old friend had refused to countenance the idea of his spending a night in a hotel, and insisted he stayed with him and his family, which the German detective assured him would give them a good opportunity to sample some fine local beers, some even finer German wines and some even finer still German schnapps.
At 9 a.m. the following morning, with one of the
worst hangovers Grace could remember, in a long history of bad hangovers, compounded by his guilt at having lied to Cleo, Kullen drove down a wide, quiet street, through falling sleet, in the smart Schwabing district of Munich. Small, grubby patches of snow here and there lay on the pavement. They turned onto a circular driveway, passing a row of parked bicycles, and pulled up in front of an enormous, handsome beige building, with gabled windows in the roof and a sign over the arched entrance porch that said, KLINIKUM SCHWABING. It looked, to him, as if it might once have been a monastery.
‘Would you like me to come in, or wait for you?’ Kullen asked.
Grace’s mouth was parched, his head was pounding, and the last two paracetamol he had swallowed, an hour ago, had failed to kick in. He felt badly in need of a large glass of water and a multiple espresso. Why the hell had he drunk so much last night?
He knew the answer.
Staring at the facade of the building was scaring the hell out of him.
What?
What if?
What if it was really her, here? How would he feel? How would he react? What on earth would he say?
Part of him was tempted to turn to Marcel Kullen and tell him to drive on, back to the airport, to forget it. But he had come too far now, he knew. He was past the point of no return.
‘Whatever you’d prefer, Marcel.’
‘I stay. I think this is a journey you are needing to make alone.’
Fighting his reluctance, feeling like he had a dagger sticking into his head, Grace opened the door, and stepped out, limping, into the bitterly cold air. As he did so he heard the thwock-thwock-thwock of an approaching helicopter, and looked up. The machine was coming down out of the sky straight towards the building. Moments later it disappeared over the rooftop, and he could hear it descending.