Dead Simple

by Peter James

  'Urrrr,' Michael mumbled again, shimmying in terror. He could see eyes glinting through the hood above him, inches from his face, bright green eyes like a feral cat.

  'You want me to hurt you again? Is that what you'd like, Mikey? Let's see who you were calling, shall we?' Moments later Michael heard the police officer's faint voice through the phone's speaker again. 'Well, fancy that,' the Australian said. 'How sweet. Calling your fiancee. Sweet, but naughty. I think it's time for a punishment. Would you like me to cut off another finger - or clip the callipers back on your bollocks?'

  'Noorrrrrrr.'

  'Sorry, mate, you'll need to articulate better. Talk me through what you'd like best. It's all the same to me - and by the way, your mate Mark is a rude bastard. Thought you'd like to know he never said goodbye.'

  Michael blinked against the light. He didn't know what the man was talking about. Mark? Dimly he wondered where it was that Mark had gone. 'Here's something for you to think about, Mikey. That one million, two hundred thousand pounds you have salted away in the Cayman Islands. That's one hell of a nest egg, wouldn't you say?' How much did this man know about him and his life, Michael wondered. Was that what he was after? He could have it, every damned penny, if he would just let him go. He tried to tell him.

  'Urrrrrrr. Ymmmgghvwwit.'

  'That's sweet of you, Mikey, whatever it is you're trying to tell me. I really appreciate all the efforts you are making. But here's the thing, you see. Your problem is, I already have it. And that means I don't need you any more.'

  Shortly before midnight, Grace drove back into the car park of Sussex House, giving a weary nod to the security guard. They had said little on the drive back from the Van Allen building; Grace and Branson were both wrapped in their thoughts. As Grace pulled the car up, Branson yawned noisily.

  'Think we can go home, go to bed, get some sleep?' 'No stamina, youth?' Grace chided. 'And you're wide awake, full of beans? Firing on all cylinders, yeah? I've heard when you get past a certain age you start needing less sleep; which apparently is just as well, since you spend half the night getting up to piss.' Grace smiled. 'I don't look forward to old age much,' Branson said. 'Do you?' 'To be honest, I don't think about it. I see a guy like Mark Warren, lying all broken, leaking his brains out on the pavement, and I remember he and I were talking just a few hours before; things like that make me believe in just living one day at a time.' Branson yawned again.

  'I'm going back to work,' Grace said. 'You can fuck off home if you want.'

  'You know, you can be such a bitch at times,' Branson said, reluctantly following him to the main entrance, through the doors and up the staircase past the displays of truncheons. Emma-Jane Boutwood, wearing a white cardigan tied around her neck and a pink blouse, was the only person still in the Incident Room. Grace walked over to her, then gestured at the empty work stations. 'Where's everyone, EJ?' She leaned forward as if to read some small print on her computer screen and said distractedly, 'I think they've all gone home.' Grace stared at her tired face, and gave her a light pat on her shoulder, his hand touching the soft wool of the cardigan.

  'I think you should go home too; it's been a long day.'

  'Can you just give me one minute, Roy? I have something I think is going to interest you - both of you.'

  'Anyone like a coffee?' Grace asked. 'Water? Coke?'

  'You buying?' Branson said.

  'No, the ratepayers of Sussex are buying this time. They want us working at midnight, they can buy us coffee. This one's going on expenses.'

  'I'll have a Diet Coke,' Branson said. 'Actually, no, change that. Make it a full-strength Coke; I need the sugar hit.'

  'I'd love a coffee,' Emma-Jane said. Grace walked out, along the empty corridor to the rest area with its kitchenette and vending machines. Fumbling in his pocket he pulled out some change, bought a double espresso for himself, a cappuccino for Emma-Jane and a Coke for Branson, then carried them back to the Incident Room on a plastic tray. As he walked in, the young detective constable was pointing at something on her computer screen, and Branson, leaning over her shoulder, seemed engrossed.

  Without turning his head, he said, 'Roy, come and take a look at this!'

  Emma-Jane turned to Grace. 'You asked me to check up on Ashley Harper's background--' 'Uh huh. What have you found?' Almost swelling with pride she said, 'Actually, quite a lot.'

  'Tell me.'

  She flipped a couple of pages on a notepad covered in her neat handwriting, checking her notes as she spoke. 'The information you gave me was that Ashley Harper was born in England, and her parents were killed in a car crash in Scotland when she was three; that she was subsequently brought up by foster parents, in London first, then they moved to Australia. When she was sixteen she went to Canada and stayed with her uncle and aunt - and that her aunt died recently. Her uncle's name was Bradley Cunningham - I don't have her aunt's first name.'

  Still reading from her pad she went on: Ashley Harper returned to England - to her roots - about nine months ago. You said that previously she had worked in real estate in Toronto, Canada and that her employers were a subsidiary of the Bay group.' Then she looked up to Grace and Branson as if for confirmation.

  Grace replied. 'Yes, that's right.'

  'OK,' she said. 'Earlier today I spoke to the head of Human Resources for the Bay group in Toronto - as you may know they are one of the largest department store chains in Canada. They do not have a real estate subsidiary, nor have they ever had an Ashley Harper work for them. I did some further checking and found there are no real estate firms anywhere in Canada with the name "The Bay" in them.' 'Interesting,' Branson said, flipping the ring-pull of his Coke. There was a sharp hiss. 'It gets even more interesting,' she said. 'There is no Bradley Cunningham listed in any phone directory for Toronto, nor for anywhere else in the whole of Ontario. I haven't had time to check out the rest of Canada yet. But. . .' she paused to sip some chocolate-covered froth off the top of her cappuccino, 'I have a journalist friend on the Glasgow Herald in Scotland. She's checked back in the archives of all the principal Scottish papers. If a three-year-old girl was orphaned in a car crash, it would have made the news, right?'

  'Usually,' Grace said.

  'Ashley claims to be twenty-eight. I've had her go back twenty five years, and then five years either side of that. The name Harper has not come up.'

  'She could have taken the name of her foster parents,' Branson said.

  'She could,' agreed Emma-Jane Boutwood. 'But what I'm about to show you reduces that possibility.' Grace looked admiringly at the young DC. She seemed to be growing in confidence in front of his eyes. She was exactly the kind of new blood the police force so badly needed. Smart, hardworking youngsters with determination. 'I had the name Ashley Harper run through the Holmes network, as you requested,' she said, addressing Grace. Holmes-2 was the second phase in a computerized database of crimes, linking all police forces throughout the UK and Interpol and, more recently, other police networks overseas.

  'Nothing showed up under the name Ashley Harper' she said. 'But this is where it gets interesting. Taking the initials "AH", and linking them to a broad category heading of "property", Holmes came up with the following. Eighteen months ago a young lady called Abigail Harrington married a wealthy property developer in Lymm, Cheshire, called Richard Wonnash. He was big into free-fall parachuting. Three months after their wedding, he died when his parachute failed to open during a jump. Four years ago, in Toronto, Canada, a woman called Alexandra Huron married a real estate developer called Joe Kerwin. Five months after their wedding he drowned in a sailing accident on Lake Ontario. Seven years ago, a woman called Ann Hampson married a property developer in London called Julian Warner. He was a high-profile society bachelor, with big holdings in London docklands around the time of the early 1990s property crash. Six months and two days after their wedding, he gassed himself in an underground car park in Wapping.'

  She took another sip of her froth.

  'Same i
nitials,' Branson said.

  'But what does that prove?'

  'A lot of con artists keep the same initials when they change their names,' she said. 'I read about this at police training college. In itself it proves nothing. But here's where it gets better.' She tapped her keyboard and a black and white newspaper photograph of a young woman with close-cropped dark hair appeared. The face belonged to Ashley Harper - or her double. 'This is from the Evening Standard article on the death of Julian Warner,' she said.

  There was a long silence while Grace and Branson studied the photograph. 'Shit,' Branson said. 'Certainly looks like her.' Saying nothing, she tapped the keyboard again. Another photograph, also in black and white, appeared. This showed a woman with shoulder-length fair hair. Her face looked even more like Ashley Harper. 'This is from the Toronto Star, four years ago, reporting on the death of Joe Kerwin.' Grace and Branson said nothing. Both were stunned. 'This next one is from the Cheshire Evening Post, eighteen months ago, in an article about the death of Richard Wonnash. Abigail Harrington was the beautiful grieving widow.' She tapped her screen and a new photograph appeared, in colour. The hair was red, styled in an elegantly short razor cut. The face yet again was, almost beyond doubt, Ashley Harper's. 'Bloody hell!' Branson exclaimed. Grace stared at the face, pensively, for a long time.

  Then he said, 'Emma-Jane, well done.'

  'Thank you Roy.' Grace turned to Glenn Branson.

  'So,' he said. 'It's twenty minutes to one. Which magistrate do you feel brave enough to wake up?'

  'For a search warrant?'

  'You worked that all out by yourself did you?'

  Ignoring Branson's grimace, Grace stood up. 'Emma-Jane, go home; get some sleep.'

  Branson yawned. 'How about me? Do I get some sleep?'

  Grace clapped a hand on his shoulder. 'I'm afraid, my friend, your day's only just begun.'

  81

  A few minutes later, Grace was on the phone to a very sleepy sounding magistrates' clerk, who asked if this couldn't wait until the morning. 'We're investigating a possible abduction, and it's a potential lifeordeath situation,' Grace informed her.

  'I need an evidential warrant and I'm afraid it absolutely cannot wait.'

  'OK,' she said reluctantly. 'The duty magistrate is Mrs Quentin.'

  Grace smiled to himself. Hermione Quentin was one magistrate he particularly disliked, having had a run-in with her some months back in court over a suspect he had wanted to hold in custody; she had refused. She was the worst kind of magistrate in his view, married to a wealthy stockbroker, living in a vulgar ostentatious house, a middle-aged glamour queen with no experience of the real world and some kind of zealous personal agenda to change the way the police in general viewed criminals. It would give him the sweetest pleasure to get her out of bed to sign the warrant in the small hours of the morning. Grace and Branson then spent a further ten minutes on the phone, organizing a team to assemble at Sussex House at 5 a.m. Then, taking pity on Branson, Grace sent him home to get a couple of hours' kip. Next he rang DC Nicholl, and apologized for disturbing him, then instructed him to head for Ashley Harper's house and keep watch on it for any movement. At 2 a.m., with the signed warrant in his hand, Grace arrived back at his home, set his alarm for 4.15, and crashed out.

  When he hit the alarm button and jumped automatically out of bed in the dark room, he could hear the first twitterings of the dawn chorus, reminding him as he stepped into the shower that, although summer had not yet begun, they were less than a month shy of the longest day, 21 June. At 5 a.m. he was back at Sussex House, feeling remarkably perky on his two and a bit hours' sleep. Bella and Emma-Jane were already there, as was Ben Farr, a round-faced, bearded Sergeant in his late forties who was to be the Exhibits Officer, and Joe Tindall. Glenn Branson arrived a few minutes later. Over cups of coffee, Grace briefed them. Then, shortly after half past five, all wearing protective waistcoats, they set off in a police Transit van and a marked car, which Branson drove, Grace in the passenger seat. Reaching Ashley's street, Grace told Branson to pull up alongside Nick's unmarked Astra, and wound his window down. 'All quiet,' Nicholl reported. 'Good boy,' Grace said, noting that Ashley Harper's Audi TT was in its usual place outside her house. He told Nicholl to cover the street behind, then they drove on. There were no free spaces in the street, so they double parked beside the Audi. Grace gave Nick Nicholl a couple of minutes to get in place, then, leading the posse, marched up to the front door, in full daylight now, and rang the bell. There was no response. He rang again, then, after a minute, rang yet again. Then he nodded to Ben Farr, who went over to the Transit and removed a heavy-duty ram, the size of a large fire extinguisher. He hefted it up to the front door, swung it hard and the door flew open.

  Grace went in first. 'Police!' he shouted. 'Hello? Police!'

  The silent, winking lights of the hi-fi system greeted him. Followed by the rest of his team, he walked up the stairs and paused on the first-floor landing. 'Hello!' he called out again.

  'Miss Harper?'

  Silence. He opened one door, onto a small bathroom. The next door was to a small, bland spare bedroom that didn't look as if it had ever been used. He hesitated, then pushed the remaining door, which opened onto a master bedroom, with a double bed that had clearly not been slept in. The curtains were drawn shut. He found the light switch and turned it on, and several ceiling spots lit up the room.

  The place had a deserted feel, like a hotel room waiting for its next occupant. He saw an immaculate duvet over a queen-size bed, a flat-screen television, a clock radio plus a couple of Hockney swimming pool prints on the wall. No Ashley Harper. So where the hell was she? Feeling a stab of panic, Grace exchanged glances with Glenn Branson. They both knew that somewhere along the line they had been outsmarted, but where and how? For a moment all he could think of was the bollocking he would get from Alison Vosper if it turned out he had woken a JP in the middle of the night to get a search warrant for no good reason. And there could be all kinds of good reasons why Ashley Harper wasn't here tonight. For a moment he felt angry at his friend. This was all Glenn's fault. He'd suckered him into this damned case. It wasn't anything to do with him, not his problem. Now he owned the fucking problem and it was getting deeper. He tried to recap, to think how he would cover his arse if No. 27 hauled him in. There was Mark Warren's death. The note. The finger in the fridge. Emma-Jane's findings. There was a whole ton of things that were not right. Mark Warren, so belligerent at the wedding reception. Bradley Cunningham, so smooth, so upmarket at the wedding. Actually the pants are killing me . . . rented this lot from your wonderful Moss Bros, but I think I got given the wrong pants!' From the time he had spent in the United States and in Canada, and the conversations Grace had had about the differences in their language, he knew that classy Americans and Canadians might call ordinary trousers 'pants', but they would called dressier trousers 'trousers'. It had been an instant giveaway that Bradley Cunningham might not be who he made himself out to be. Not that that slender hypothesis would satisfy Alison Vosper.

  'Take this place apart,' he told his team wearily. 'Look under every bloody stone. Find out who owns this place. Who owns the televisions, the hi-fi, the Audi outside, the carpets, the wall sockets. I want to know every damned detail about Ashley Harper. I want to know more about her than she knows herself. Everybody understand?'

  After two hours of searching, so far no one had found anything. It was as if Ashley Harper had been through the place with some kind of super-Hoover. There was nothing other than the furniture, a bio yoghurt pot in the fridge together with some soya milk, a bunch of radishes and a half-drunk bottle of Sainsbury's own-label Scottish mineral water. Glenn Branson came up to Grace, who was busy lifting the mattress off the spare bed.

  'Man, this is so weird - it's as if she knew we were coming, know what I mean?'

  'So why didn't we know she was leaving?' Grace asked.

  'There you go again. Another question.'

  'Yes,' said Grace, tired
ness making him snappy now. 'Maybe that's because you're always giving me questions instead of fucking answers.'

  Branson raised a hand in the air. 'No offence, man.'

  'None taken.'

  'So where the fuck is she?'

  'Not here.'

  'I figured that one.'

  'Roy! Take a look at this - I don't know if it's of any use?' DC Nicholl came into the room holding a small piece of paper, which he showed to Grace. It was a receipt from a company called Century Radio on Tottenham Court Road. On the receipt was printed: 'AR5000 Cyber Scan, 2,437 pounds 25 pence.

  'Where was this?' Grace asked.

  'In the dustbin in the back yard,' Nick replied, with pride.

  'Two thousand, four hundred and thirty-seven pounds for a scanner?' Grace asked. 'What kind of scanner costs that much? Some kind of computer scanner?' After a few moments thought, he added, 'Why would anyone throw away the receipt? Even if you couldn't charge the scanner to your business, sure as hell you would keep the receipt in case it went wrong. Wouldn't you?'

  'I sure as hell would,' Branson agreed.

  Grace looked at the date on the receipt. Last Wednesday. Time of purchase showed as 14.25. On Tuesday night, her fiance1 disappears. On Wednesday afternoon she goes out and buys a two-and-a-halfthousandquid scanner. This didn't make sense - yet. His watch showed that two hours had elapsed so far, it was now just past 8 a.m. 'I don't know what time Century Radio opens - but we need to find out about that scanner,' he said.

  'You have some thoughts about it?' Branson asked.

  'Plenty,' Grace replied. 'Too many. Far too many.' Then he added. 'I have to be at Lewes Crown Court by quarter to ten.'