by Peter James
'I thought we had great sex - normally.'
She checked her lipstick in her compact mirror, as if she was about to go out on a date. 'Yes, well, I did, too.'
Mark walked over and put an arm around her. 'Ashley, darling, come on, I apologized - I'm so damned stressed. We should go away for a few days.'
'Sure, that would look good, wouldn't it.'
'I mean when this is all over.'
She gave him a sharp look. 'When exactly will it all be over?'
'I don't know.'
She put her mirror away in her handbag. 'Mark, darling, it can never be over while Michael is alive. We both know that. We burnt our bridges on Thursday night when you took out the breathing tube.' She gave him a peck on the cheek. 'See you in the morning.'
'Are you going?'
'Yes, I'm going. I always go at the end of the day; something wrong with that? I thought we were supposed to be keeping up appearances?'
'I guess, yes -1 mean ..."
She looked at him for a couple of seconds. 'Pull yourself together, for Christ's sake. Understand?'
He nodded lamely. Then she was gone.
He stayed on for another hour, working on his emails, then, with the noise of the cleaners driving him to distraction, he decided to quit for the day and take the rest of his work home.
On his way to the door, he picked up the package he had signed for earlier and tore it open. There was something inside, a small object, tightly wrapped in cellophane then bound with tape.
Frowning, he wondered what it was. A replacement sim card for a mobile? A computer part?
He pulled a pair of scissors out of the desk drawer and snipped one end open, squeezed it, and peered inside.
At first he thought it was a joke, one of those plastic fake fingers you can buy in novelty shops. Then he saw the blood.
'No,' he said, feeling giddy suddenly. 'No. NO.'
The severed fingertip fell from the pack and landed noiselessly on the carpet.
Stepping back away from it in horror, Mark saw there was an envelope inside the packet.
69
Grace turned off the main road and onto a country lane, barely beyond the outskirts of Lewes. He passed a farm-shop sign, a telephone booth, then saw a tall mesh fence topped with barbed wire, some of it erect, some in a state of collapse, ahead on his left. There were two gates, wide open, that didn't look as if they had been closed in a decade. Fixed to one of them was a faded, cracked painted sign which read 'WHEELER'S AUTO RECOVERY'. Beside it was another, much smaller warning sign, reading 'guard dogs.''
The appearance of the place was about as near to a hillbilly homestead as Grace had ever experienced. It was beyond ramshackle; it was beyond the most untidy place he had ever seen in his life.
The yard was dominated by a large blue tow-truck, parked amidst a dozen or so partially or totally cannibalized carcasses of vehicles, some smashed, some badly rusted, and one, a small Toyota, just looking as if it had been parked and someone had nicked everything it was possible to nick from it.
There were piles of sawn and unsawn logs, a wooden trestle, a rusting bandsaw, a decrepit Portakabin, against which was a faded chalked sign which read 'xmas trees sale', and a wood-framed bungalow that looked as if it could collapse at any moment.
As he drove in and switched the engine off, he heard the fierce, deep barking of a guard dog shattering the quiet stillness of the warm evening, and remained prudently in the car for some moments, waiting for a hound to appear. Instead, the front door of the bungalow opened, and a hulk of a man came out. In his fifties, he had thinning, greasy hair, a heavy five-o'clock shadow and a massive beer belly barely restrained by a string vest and bulging over the buckle of his brown dungarees like an overhang of snow about to avalanche.
'Mr Wheeler?' Grace said, approaching, still wary of the sound of the barking dog, which was getting even louder and deeper.
'Yes?' The man had a gentle face with big sad eyes, and massive, grimy hands. He smelled of rope and engine grease.
Grace pulled out his warrant card and held it up for him to see. 'Detective Superintendent Grace from Sussex CID. I'm very sorry to hear about your son.'
The man stood still, impassively, then Grace saw he was starting to tremble. His hands clenched tight, and a tear rolled down from the corner of each eye. 'You want to come in?' Phil Wheeler said, in a faltering voice.
'If you have a few minutes, I'd appreciate it.'
The inside of the house was pretty much like the outside and the reek of the place indicated a heavy smoker. Grace followed the man into a dingy sitting room with a three-piece suite and a large old television. Almost every inch of the floor and furniture was covered in motorbiking magazines, country and western magazines and vinyl record sleeves. There was a photograph of a fair-haired woman resting her hands on the shoulders of a small boy on a scooter, on the sideboard, and a few cheap-looking china ornaments, but nothing at all on the walls. A clock on the mantelpiece, set into the belly of a chipped porcelain racehorse, indicated the time at ten minutes past seven. Grace was surprised, checking it against his own watch, that it was more or less accurate.
Scooping several record sleeves off an armchair, Phil Wheeler said, by way of an explanation, 'Davey liked this stuff, used to play it all the time, liked to collect--'
He broke off and walked out of the room. 'Tea?' he called.
'I'm fine,' Grace said, unsure what kind of hygiene went on in the kitchen.
This level of interview would have been delegated to someone junior by most SIOs, but Grace had always been a firm believer in getting out in the field himself. It was his style of operating - and it was one of the aspects of police work that he found most interesting and rewarding if sometimes, like now, challenging.
After a couple of minutes, Phil Wheeler lumbered back into the room, swept a pile of magazines and some more record sleeves off
the settee and eased himself down, then pulled a tobacco tin out of his pocket. He prised open the tin with his thumbnail, removed a packet of cigarette papers, then proceeded, one-handed, to roll himself a cigarette. Grace couldn't help watching; it had always fascinated him how people could do this.
'Mr Wheeler, I understand your son told you he had some conversations on a walkie-talkie radio with a missing person, Michael Harrison.'
Phil Wheeler ran his tongue along the paper and sealed the cigarette. 'I can't understand why anyone would want to hurt my boy. He was the friendliest person you could meet.' Holding his unlit cigarette, he bicycled his hand in the air. 'Poor kid had - you know water on the brain, encephalitis. He was slow, but everyone liked him.'
Grace smiled in sympathy. 'He had a lot of friends in the traffic police.'
'He was a good lad.'
'So I understand.'
'He was my life.'
Grace waited. Wheeler lit the cigarette from a box of Swan Vesta matches and moments later the sweet smoke wafted across to Grace. He breathed in deeply, enjoying the smell, but not enjoying this task. Talking to the newly bereaved had always been, in his view, the single worst aspect of police work.
'Can you tell me a bit about the conversations he had? About this walkietalkie?'
The man inhaled, smoke spurting from his mouth and nostrils as he spoke. 'I got pretty angry with him on -1 don't know - Friday or Saturday. 'I didn't know he had the damned thing. He finally told me he'd found it near that terrible wreck on Tuesday night with the four lads.'
Grace nodded.
'He kept talking about his new friend. To be honest I didn't take much notice. Davey lived in - how do you put it - his own little world most of the time - always off having conversations with people inside his head.' He put the cigarette down in a tin ashtray, then blotted his eyes with a scrunched up handkerchief and sniffed. 'He was
always chatting. I sometimes had to switch off, otherwise he could drive me nuts.'
'Can you remember what he said about Michael Harrison?'
'He was very
excited - I think it was Friday - he'd been told he could be a hero. You see, he loved American cop shows on the telly he always wanted to be a hero. He was going on about knowing where someone was, and that he was the only person in the world who knew, you see, and this was his chance to be a hero. But I didn't take much notice; had a busy day with two wrecks we had to bring in -1 didn't make the connection.'
'Do you have the radio?'
He shook his head. 'Davey must have taken it with him.'
'Did Davey drive?'
He shook his head. 'No. He liked to steer the truck sometimes, I let him do that on a quiet road - you know - like one hand on the wheel? But no, he could never drive, didn't have the ability. He had a mountain bike, that was all.'
'He was found about six miles away from here - do you think he went off to find Michael Harrison? To try to be a hero?'
'I had to pick up a car on Saturday afternoon. He didn't want to come with me, told me he had important business.'
'Important business?'
Philip Wheeler gave a sad shrug. 'He liked to believe he mattered.' Grace smiled, thinking privately, we all do. Then he asked, 'Did you glean anything from Davey about where Michael Harrison might be?'
'No, it didn't occur to me to make any connection - so I didn't take much notice of what he said.'
'Would it be possible to see your son's room, Mr Wheeler?'
Phil Wheeler jabbed a finger, pointing past Grace. 'In the Portakabin. Davey liked it there. You can go across - please don't mind if I don't -1--' He pulled his handkerchief out.
'That's fine, I understand.'
'It's not locked.'
Grace crossed the yard and walked up to the Portakabin. The dog which he had still not yet seen, which he thought had to be on the
far side of the bungalow, began barking again, even more aggressively. Fixed to the wall beside the front door was a warning sign to Intruders reading 'armed response!'
He tested the door handle, then pulled the door open and stepped inside onto carpet tiles, several of which were curling at the edges, but most of which were covered in either socks, underpants, T-shirts, sweet wrappers, a Macdonalds burger container lying open, the lid smeared with congealed ketchup, car instruments, hub caps, old American licence plates and several baseball caps. The room was even more untidy than the bungalow, and had a rank odour of cheesy feet, which reminded him of a school locker room.
Much of the space in the room was taken up by a bed and an unstable television flickering between colour and black and white, on which he saw the credits running for Law and Order. Grace never liked watching British cop shows - they always managed to irritate him by showing wrong procedures or stupid decisions by the investigating officers. US cop shows seemed more exciting, more together. But maybe that was because he didn't know US police procedures well enough to be critical.
Glancing around, he saw adverts which looked like they had been torn from magazines plastered all over the walls. Looking more closely, he identifed all of them as being for things American - cars, guns, food, drink, vacations.
Stepping past the burger container, he looked down at a very old Dell computer, with a floppy disk protruding from the front of the processor, sharing a work surface that sufficed for a desk with a carton of Twinkie bars, a six-inch-tall plastic Bart Simpson and a large scrap of lined notepaper on which there were ballpoint jottings in child-like handwriting.
Grace looked carefully at the jottings and realized it was a crude diagram. Beside two sets of parallel lines was scrawled: 'A 26. NORTH KROWBURG. DUBBLE KATTLE GRYD. 2 MYLES. WITE COTIDGE.'
It was a map.
Below it, he saw a sequence of numbers: 0771 52136. It looked like a mobile number, and he tried dialling it, but nothing happened.
He spent another twenty minutes rummaging through everything in the room, opening every drawer, but he found nothing else
of interest. Then he took the sheet of paper back to the bungalow and showed it to Phil Wheeler.
'Did Davey talk to you about this?'
Phil Wheeler shook his head. 'No.'
'Do the directions mean anything to you?'
'Double cattle grid, two miles, white cottage? No, don't mean anything.'
'The number? Do you recognize this?'
He looked at the number, reading out each digit aloud. 'No, not any number I know'
Grace decided he had got about as much out of the man as he was going to get tonight. He stood up, thanked him, and told him again how sorry he was about his son.
'Just catch the bastard who did it, Detective Superintendent. Do that at least, for me and Davey, will you?'
Grace promised to do his best.
70
Mark Warren, dripping with perspiration, jigged the key in the front door lock of his apartment, panicking for a moment that the lock was Jammed. Then he pushed the door open fearfully, stepped inside, closed it, locked it and engaged the safety chain.
Ignoring the bundle of post awaiting him, he set down his briefcase, ripped off his tie, unbuttoned his shirt collar, then slung both his jacket and the tie on the sofa. He poured himself four fingers of Balvenie, chinked some ice cubes out of the fridge straight into the glass, then gulped down some of the whisky.
He opened his leather laptop bag and removed the Jiffy bag that had arrived earlier, holding it at arm's length, hardly daring to look at it. He put it on a black lacquered table on the far side of the room, took out the note which he had already looked at earlier, in the office, then walked over to the coffee table, took another deep gulp of his whisky and sat down.
The note was short, printed off a computer on blank A4 paper. It said: 'Have the police check the fingerprints out and you'll find it is your friend and business partner. Every 24 hours I will cut an increasingly bigger bit off him. Until you do exactly what I tell you.'
There was no signature.
Mark drank some more whisky, draining the glass. He refilled it another four fat fingers but the same ice cubes, and read the note again. Then again. He heard a siren somewhere outside and flinched. Then the door intercom buzzed, throwing him into a flat spin of panic. Marching across to the CCTV panel, he desperately hoped it was Ashley. Her phone had been off when he tried to call her from the office and it had still been off when he had called her again minutes ago coming up in the lift.
But it wasn't Ashley; it was the face of a man he was starting to see too much of, for his liking, Detective Superintendent Grace.
For some moments he wondered whether to ignore him, let him go away, come back some other time. But maybe he had news.
He picked up the receiver and told Grace to come in, then pressed the button for the electronic door catch.
It seemed only seconds later that Grace was knocking on his door, and he'd barely had time to scoop up the note and the Jiffy bag and stuff them in a cupboard.
'Good evening, officer,' Mark said as he opened the door, conscious suddenly that he was feeling a tad muzzy from the drink and that his voice was affected, too. He kept a full arm's length as he shook Grace's hand, so that the policeman wouldn't notice the alcohol on his breath.
'Mind if I come in for a few minutes, or are you busy?'
'Never too busy for you, officer - I'm around to help you seventwofour. What news do you have? Can I get you a drink?'
'A glass of water, please,' Grace said, feeling parched.
They sat down opposite each other on the deep leather sofas, and Grace watched him for a little while. The man looked in a bad state of nerves; he seemed a little uncoordinated and smelled strongly of alcohol. Watching his eyes carefully, Grace asked him, 'What did you have for lunch today?'
Mark's eyes shot to the left momentarily and then back to the centre. 'I had a turkey and cranberry sandwich, from a deli just around the corner. Why?'
'It's important to eat,' Grace said. 'Particularly when you are stressed.' He gave Mark a smile of encouragement then sipped some water from the tall, expensive-feeling glass
he had been given. 'Got a bit of a mystery, Mark, which I wonder if you could help me with?'
'Of course-I'll try.'
'A couple of CCTV cameras picked up a BMW X5 registered in your name, late Thursday night, heading into Brighton from the direction of Lewes ...' Grace paused to pull his Blackberry out of his pocket. 'Yes, at 12.29 a.m. and again at 12.40 a.m.' Grace decided for the moment to say nothing about the results of the soil analysis that he'd been given at the briefing meeting, earlier. Like a lion closing in on a kill, he leaned forward. 'You went for a late-night drive in Ash down Forest, perhaps?'
Now he watched Mark's eyes rigidly. Instead of going back to the left, to the same side as when Mark answered his question about the andwich, to the memory side, they swung wildly, right, then left, then right again, very definitely settling right now. Construct mode. He was intending to lie his way out of this one.
'I may have done,' he replied.
'You may have done? Isn't driving in a forest at midnight a little bit of an unusual thing to do? Wouldn't you remember a bit more clearly?'
'It's not unusual for me,' Mark responded, seizing his drink, his entire body language changing suddenly. It was Grace's turn to feel uneasy now, wondering what was going on. Mark leaned back, swirled the whisky around in his glass, the ice cubes chinking. 'You see, that's where we are doing our new big property development. We got outline planning permission a couple of months back for twenty new houses on a five-acre site in the heart of the forest, and now we're working on the details - because we're getting a lot of hostility from the environmental groups. I go back and forward to the forest all the time, day and night - I have to check out the environmental factors, and a big part of that is the impact on the wildlife at night time. I'm working up a whole report to support our application.'
Grace's heart sank; he felt as if a rug had just been pulled away, quickly and very smartly, from beneath him. He'd just wasted the best part of a thousand pounds of his budget on the soil analysis, and he felt an idiot. Why hadn't he known this? Why hadn't Glenn or anyone on the team known it?
His brain was spinning and he tried to slow it down and get some traction on this thoughts. Mark Warren still looked a wreck and he just did not get the impression it was from worrying about his business partner. The aggression he had shown at the wedding indicated something else altogether, but he didn't know what.