by Peter James
But now, on a day like this, he realized that being a police officer was less about doing things to the best of your abilities and more about conforming to some preordained level of mediocrity. In this modern politically correct world you could be a law enforcement officer at the peak of your career one moment and a political pawn the next.
His latest promotion, making him the second-youngest Detective Superintendent ever in the Sussex Police Force, and which just three months ago had so thrilled him, was fast turning out to be a poisoned chalice.
It had meant moving from the buzz of Brighton police station in the heart of the town, where most of his friends were, out to the relative quiet of the former factory on an industrial estate on the edge of the city, which had recently been refurbished to house the headquarters of Sussex CID.
You could retire from the force on a full pension after thirty years. No matter how tough it got, if he just stuck it out he would be financially set up for life. That was not how he wanted to view his job, his career. At least, not normally.
But today was different. Today was a real downer. A reality-check day. Circumstances changed, he was thinking, as he sat hunched over his desk, ignoring the pinging of incoming emails on his computer screen, munching an egg and cress brown sandwich, and staring at court transcripts of the Suresh Hossain trial in front of him. Life never stands still. Sometimes the changes were good, sometimes less than good. In little over a year's time he would be forty. His hair was going grey.
And his new office was too small.
The three dozen vintage cigarette lighters that were his prize collection hunched together on the ledge between the front of his desk and the window which, unlike the fine view from Alison Vosper's office, looked down onto the parking lot and the cell block beyond. Dominating the wall behind him was the large, round wooden clock that had been a prop in the fictitious police station in The Bill. Sandy had bought him it for his twenty-sixth birthday.
Beneath it was a stuffed seven-pound, six-ounce brown trout he had caught on a visit to Ireland some years ago. He kept it beneath the clock to give him a joke he could crack to detectives working under him, about patience and big fish.
Lined up on either side and slightly cramping it were several framed certificates, and a group photograph captioned 'Police Staff College Bramshill. Management of Serious and Series Crimes. 1997', and two cartoons of him in the police ops room, drawn by a colleague who had missed his true vocation. The opposite wall was taken up by bookshelves bulging with part of his collection of books on the occult, and filing cabinets.
His L-shaped desk was cluttered by his computer, overflowing in and out-trays, Blackberry, separate piles of correspondence, some orderly, most less so, and the latest edition of the magazine with a bad pun of a title, Fingerprint Whorld. Rising from the mess was a
framed quotation: 'We don't rise to the level of our abilities, we fall to the level of our excuses.'
The rest of the floor space was occupied by a television and video player, a circular table, four chairs and piles of files and loose paperwork, and his leather go-bag, containing his crime-scene kit. His briefcase sat open on the table, his mobile, dictating machine and a bunch of transcripts he had taken home with him last night all lay beside it.
He dropped half his sandwich in the bin. No appetite. He sipped his mug of coffee, checked the latest emails, then logged back on to the Sussex Police site and stared at the list of files he had inherited as part of his promotion.
Each file contained the details of an unsolved murder. It represented a pile of about twenty boxes of files, maybe even more, stacked on an office floor, or bulging out of cupboards, or locked up, gatherIng mould in a damp police garage in a station in the area where the murder happened. The files contained scene-of-crime photographs, forensic reports, bagged evidence, witness statements, court transcripts, separated into orderly bundles and secured with coloured ribbon. This was part of his new brief, to dig back into the county's unsolved murders, liaise with the CID division where the crime happened, looking for anything that might have changed in the intervening years that could justify reopening the case.
He knew most of their contents by heart - the benefit of his near photographic memory which had propelled him through exams both at school and in the Force. To him each stack represented more than just a human life that had been taken - and a killer who was still free - it symbolized something very close to his own heart. It meant that a family had been unable to lay its past to rest, because a mystery had never been solved, justice had never been done. And he knew that with some of these files being more than thirty years old, he was the last hope the victims and their relatives probably had.
Richard Ventnor, a gay vet battered to death in his surgery twelve years ago. Susan Downey, a beautiful girl raped and strangled and left in a churchyard fifteen years back. Pamela Chisholm, a rich widow found dead in her wrecked car - but with the wrong kind of injuries for a car accident. The skeletal remains of Pratap Gokhale, a nine-year-old Indian boy found under floorboards at the flat of a suspected paedophile - long vanished. These were just a few of the many cases Grace remembered.
Although they were interred, or their ashes had been scattered a long time ago, circumstances changed for them too. Technology had brought in DNA testing, which threw up new evidence and new suspects. The internet had brought new means of communication. Loyalties had changed. New witnesses had emerged from the woodwork. People had divorced. Fallen out with their friends. Someone who wouldn't testify against a mate twenty years ago now hated him. Murder files never closed. Slow time, they called it.
The phone rang. It was the management support assistant he shared with his immediate boss, the Assistant Chief Constable, asking if he wanted to take a call from a detective. The whole political correctness thing irritated him more and more, and it was particularly strong in the Police Force. It hadn't been so long ago when they called them secretaries, not bloody management support assistants.
He told her to put him through, and moments later heard a familiar voice. Glenn Branson, a bright Detective Sergeant he'd worked with several times in the past, fiercely ambitious and razor sharp as well as being a walking encyclopedia on movies. He liked Glenn Branson a lot. He was probably the closest friend he had.
'Roy? How you doing? Seen you in the papers today.'
'Yup, well you can fuck off. What do you want?'
'Are you OK?'
'No, I'm not OK.'
'Are you busy right now?'
'How do you define busy.'
'Ever given an answer in your life that isn't a question?'
Grace smiled. 'Have you?'
'Listen, I'm being pestered by a woman - about her fiance". Seems like some stag-night prank has gone seriously wrong, and he's been missing since Tuesday night.'
Grace had to do a mental check on the date. It was Thursday afternoon now. 'Tell me?'
'Thought you'd be in court today. Tried your mobile, but it's off.'
'I'm having lunch. Got a break from court - Judge Driscoll's having a day in chambers dealing with submissions from the defence.'
One of the major drawbacks of bringing a prosecution to trial was the time it consumed. Grace, as the senior officer, had to be either in court or in close touch during the whole trial. This one was likely to last a good three months - and much of that time was just hanging around.
'I don't feel this is a normal missing persons enquiry - I'd like to pick your brains. You free this afternoon by any chance?' Glenn Branson asked.
To anyone else, Grace would have said no, but he knew Glenn Branson wasn't a time waster - and hell, right now he was pleased to have an excuse to get out of the office, even into this shitty weather. 'Sure, I can make some time.'
'Cool.' There was a moment's pause, then Glenn Branson said, 'Look, could we meet at this guy's flat - I think it would be helpful if you saw it for yourself - I can get the key and meet you there.' Branson gave him the address.
Grace glanced at his watch, then at the diary on his Blackberry. 'How about meeting there at half five? We could go on for a drink.'
'It won't take you three hours to get - oh -1 guess a man of your age has to start taking it slowly. See you later.'
Grace winced. He didn't like reminders of his looming big four-0 birthday. He didn't like the idea of being forty - it was an age when people took stock of their lives. He'd read somewhere that when you reached forty you'd reached the shape your life was going to be for good. Somehow, being thirty-eight was OK. But thirty-nine meant you were very definitely nudging forty. And it wasn't so long ago that he'd considered people who were forty to be old. Shit.
He looked again at the list of files on the screen. Sometimes he felt closer to these people than to anyone else. Twenty murder victims who were dependent on him to bring their killers to justice. Twenty ghosts who haunted most of his waking thoughts - and sometimes his dreams, as well.
14
He had the use of a pool car, but he chose to drive his own Alfa Romeo 147 saloon. Grace liked the car; he liked the hard seats, the firm ride, the almost spartan functionality of the interior, the fruity noise the exhaust made, the feeling of precision, the bright, sporty dials on the dash. There was a sense of exactness about the vehicle that suited his nature.
The big, meaty wipers swung across the screen, clopping the rain from the glass, the tyres hissing on the wet tarmac, a wild Elvis Costello song playing on the stereo. The bypass swept up over a ridge and down into the valley. Through the mist of rain he could see the buildings of the coastal resort of Brighton and Have sprawling ahead, and beyond the single remaining landmark chimney from the old Shoreham power station, the shimmering strip of grey, barely distinguishable from the sky, that was the English Channel.
He'd grown up here among its streets and its villains. His dad used to reel off their names to him, the families that ran the drugs, the massage parlours, the posh crooked antique dealers who fenced stolen jewels, furniture, the fences who handled televisions and CD players.
It had been a smugglers' village, once. Then George IV had built a palace just a few hundred yards from his mistress's house. Brighton had somehow never managed to shake off its criminal antecedents nor its reputation as a place for dirty weekends. But these gave the city of Brighton and Have its edge over any other provincial resort in England, he thought, flicking his indicator and turning off the bypass.
Grassmere Court was a red-brick block of flats about thirty years old, in an upmarket area of Have, the city's genteel district. It fronted onto a main road and overlooked a tennis club at the rear. The residents were a mixture of ages, mostly twenty- and thirty-something career singles and comfortably off elderly people. On an estate agent's brochure it would probably have rated highly des res.
Glenn Branson was waiting in the porch, wrapped in a bulky rka, tall, black, and bald as a meteorite, talking into his mobile.
looked more like a drug dealer than a copper at this moment, race smiled - his colleague's massive, muscular frame from years of serious body-building reminded him of the broadcaster Clive James's description of Arnie Schwarzenegger: that he looked like a Condom filled with walnuts.
'Yo, old wise man!' Branson greeted him.
'Cut it out, I'm only seven years older than you. One day you'll get to this age too and you won't find it funny' He grinned.
They slapped high fives, then Branson, frowning, said, 'You look like shit. Really, I mean it.'
'Not all publicity agrees with me.'
'Yup, well I couldn't help noticing you grabbed yourself a few column inches in the rags this morning...'
'You and just about everyone else on the planet.'
'Man, you know, for an old-timer you're pretty dumb.'
'Dumb?'
'You don't wise up, Grace. Keep sticking your head above the parapet and one day someone's going to shoot it clean off. There are some days when I think you are just about the biggest dickhead I know.'
He unlocked the front door of the block and pushed it open.
Following him in, Grace said, 'Thanks, you really know how to cheer someone up.' Then he wrinkled his nose. Blindfolded you would always know if you were in an ageing apartment building. The universal smell of worn carpets, tired paint, vegetables boiling behind one of the closed doors. 'How's the missus?' he asked as they waited for the lift.
'Great.'
'And your kids?'
'Sammy's brilliant. Remi's turning into a terror.' He pressed the button for the lift.
After a few moments, Grace said, 'It wasn't how the press made it seem, Glenn.'
'Man, I know that because I know you. The press don't know you, and even if they did, they don't give Jack Shit. They want stories and you were stupid enough to give them one.'
They emerged from the lift on the sixth floor. The flat was at the end of the corridor. Branson unlocked the door and they went in.
The place was small, with a lounge/diner, a narrow kitchen with a granite worktop and a circular steel sink, and two bedrooms, one of which was used as a study, with an iMac computer and work-desk. The rest of this room/office was filled with bookshelves crammed mostly with paperbacks.
In contrast with the dull exterior and drab common parts of the building, the flat felt fresh and modern. The walls were painted in white, very lightly tinged with grey, and the furnishings were modernistic, with a distinct Japanese influence. There were low sofas, simple prints on the walls, a flat-screen television, with a DVD player beneath, and a sophisticated hi-fi system with tall, slender speakers. In the master bedroom there was an unmade futon bed, with handsome louvred doors on the wardrobe, another flat-screen television, and low bedside tables with starkly modern lamps. A pair of Nike trainers sat on the floor.
Grace and Branson exchanged a glance. 'Nice pad,' Grace said.
'Uh huh,' Branson said. 'Life is Beautiful'
Grace looked at him.
'I missed it in the cinema. Caught it on Sky. Incredible film - have you ever seen it?'
Grace shook his head.
'All set in a concentration camp. About a dad who convinces his kid that they're playing a game. If they win the game, they get a real tank. I tell you, it moved me more than Schindler's List and The Pianist.'
'I've never heard of it.'
'I wonder what planet you're on sometimes.'
Grace stared at a framed photograph by the bed. It showed a good-looking man, in his late twenties, with fair hair, black Tshirt and jeans, arm around a seriously attractive woman also in her late twenties, with long, dark hair.
'This him?'
'And her. Michael Harrison and Ashley Harper. Nice-looking couple, right?'
Continuing to stare at them, Grace nodded.
'Getting married on Saturday. At least, that's the plan.'
'Meaning?'
'Meaning, if he shows up. Doesn't look too good right now.'
'You said he hasn't been seen since Tuesday night?' Grace looked out of the window. The view down was across a wide, rain-lashed Street backed up with traffic. A bus have into view. 'What do you know about him?'
'Local boy made good. Property developer. Serious player. Double-M Properties. Has a partner called Mark Warren. Recently built a fuck-off development - an old warehouse on Shoreham Harbour. Thirty-two flats, all sold before they were finished. They've been in business for seven years, done a bunch of stuff in the area, some conversions, some new builds. The chick's Michael's secretary, smart bird, seriously gorgeous.'
'You think he's done a runner?'
Branson shook his head. 'Nope.'
Grace picked up the photograph and stared more closely at it. 'Bloody hell, I'd marry her.'
'That's my point.'
Grace frowned. 'Sorry, I'm slow, had a long day.'
'You'd marry her! If I was a single man, I'd marry her. Anyone in their right mind would marry her, right?'
'She's seriously gorgeous.'
'She is, serio
usly gorgeous.'
Grace stared at him blankly.
In mock exasperation, Branson said, 'Jesus, old timer, you losing your touch or something?'
'Maybe I am,' Grace said, blankly. 'What is your point?'
Branson shook his head. 'My point is exactly that. If you were going to marry this babe on Saturday, would you do a runner?'
'Not unless I was nuts.'
'So if he hasn't done a runner, where is he?'
Grace thought for a moment. 'You said on the phone something about a stag-night prank that might have gone wrong?'
'That's what his fiancee said to me. That was my first thought. Stag nights can be brutal. Even when he didn't show up all of yesterday, that's what I still thought then. But to stay out two nights?'
'Cold feet? Another bird?'
'All possible. But I'd like to show you something.'
Grace followed him into the living area. Branson sat down in front of the computer and tapped the keyboard. He was a wizard on computers. Grace had a good technical mind and was pretty well up to speed with most modern technology, but Branson was light years ahead of him.
A password command came up on the screen. Branson tapped furiously, and within a few seconds, the screen filled with data.
'How did you do that?' Grace asked. 'How did you know the password?' Branson gave him a sideways look. 'There was no password. Most people see a password request and try to put one in. Why would he need one if he wasn't sharing his computer with anyone else?'
'I'm impressed. You really are a closet geek.'
Ignoring the remark, Branson said, 'I want you to take a close look at this.'
Grace did what he was told, and sat down in front of the screen.
15
Just a couple of miles away, Mark Warren was also hunched in front of his computer. The clock on the flat screen showed 6.10 p.m. His shirt sleeves were rolled up, a neglected Starbucks cappuccino beside him, the froth sunken into a wrinkled skin. His normally tidy desk, in the office he'd shared with Michael for the past seven years, was swamped with piles of documents.