by Peter James
‘Glenn, wouldn’t different batches of the cloth have variations?’ Norman Potting asked. ‘Might we be able to narrow the search down if they could identify the batch?’
Branson nodded thoughtfully. ‘Good point. I’ll ask them.’ He made a note, then went on, turning to Emma Reeves. ‘DC Reeves has been in contact with Dormeuil and is working with them on identifying all possible tailors and clothing retailers in Sussex – and further afield if we need – who may have used this cloth in recent years. But I do have one significant development to report on this, I’m pleased to say, which may give us significant help. Crimewatch have agreed to feature it on their monthly show, which by chance is next on tomorrow night. They will be interviewing Detective Superintendent Grace tomorrow shortly before the show is broadcast.’
‘No,’ Grace corrected him. ‘They’ll be interviewing you.’ He sipped his coffee.
Branson’s sudden look of panic provoked a titter in the room. ‘Um – ’ he mumbled, frowning at Grace. ‘Me?’
‘You.’
‘Right.’ Thrown, Branson took a moment to recover.
‘A bit of advice, Glenn,’ Norman Potting said. ‘Don’t wear that tie.’
‘You’re a great one to give sartorial advice,’ Bella Moy snapped at him, huffily.
As if he hadn’t heard her, Potting pointed at Branson’s multicoloured op-art design. ‘I mean it Glenn, it will distract people, and it’ll make you look less serious.’
Branson looked down at his tie, a little hurt. ‘I like it, it’s cheerful.’
Grace nodded. ‘I have to agree with Norman; that won’t look good on television.’
Nodding reluctant assent, Branson continued. ‘We have some more information about “Unknown Berwick Male” from the forensic archaeologist.’ Reading from a document in front of him he said, ‘His age is estimated at between forty-five and fifty. From his femur and tibia measurements, I calculate his height at five foot, six or seven inches. The overall appearance of the bones implies a slight build. He has suffered two broken ribs, either from an accident or being in a fight. From the healing in the bones I estimate this to have been at least ten years ago.’ He looked at Potting. ‘Norman, that should help with your mispers. What do you have for us so far?’
Potting read out a list of missing persons that fell into the approximate range, which came to twenty-three people. ‘So far we’ve been focusing on Sussex and Surrey/Kent borders, and I have the outside enquiry team looking into each of these, collecting toothbrushes and hairbrushes to take DNA from. With your permission, chief – ’ he looked at Branson, then at Roy Grace – ‘I’d like to widen the parameters to the whole of Sussex, Surrey and Kent.’ He turned to the indexer Annalise Vineer, who nodded, making a note on her terminal.
Good indexers were vital to a major enquiry. Grace knew from his experience at working on cold cases just how many of them might have been solved very much sooner – and in the case of serial killers, preventing the deaths of some of the victims – if more methodical referencing and cross-referencing across both the county and other police forces had taken place.
Missing person enquiries were like peeling off layers of an onion skin in reverse. With each layer you removed, you widened the search parameters further. Firstly to cover your entire county, then the neighbouring counties, and then the entire country. If that produced nothing, you started looking at continental Europe. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Let’s hope Crimewatch tomorrow throws up something. That material is distinctive, people will remember it.’
‘Not as distinctive as Glenn’s tie!’ Potting chuckled.
Branson looked down at his notes. ‘The proprietor of Stonery Farm, Keith Winter, has been very co-operative as have all members of his family. Nothing in any background checks done so far gives me any cause for suspicion. His finances are in good order, he is a respected man in his community and he has no apparent enemies. We are not at this stage regarding him as a suspect. But having said that, in my view, with the elaborate security system at Stonery Farm, it’s unlikely that a stranger could have entered to dump – or plant – this body. Which makes me feel either we are looking for an employee of Stonery Farm, or someone who had access to the place and good knowledge of it.’ He turned to the Crime Scene Manager. ‘Any progress to report, David?’
‘I’ve had the Specialist Search Unit, as well as a large number of uniform and Specials from East Downs Division covering the area since Friday afternoon, boss, looking for the head and limbs,’ Green said. Like Potting, he looked first at Branson then Grace. ‘We’ve covered the entire area of Stonery Farm, as well as the immediate surrounding areas with human cadaver dogs and archaeologists doing a visual search for soil disturbances, and the SSU have covered all ditches, streams and ponds.’
DC Jon Exton raised a hand. ‘Chief,’ he said, ‘I’m trying to work out what the perpetrator might have been trying to achieve by removing the head and limbs. I don’t understand why he wouldn’t simply have cut the torso up, as well. It can’t have been easy to have put the body in the chicken shed, unless he worked at Stonery Farm. So why did he?’
‘Do you have a hypothesis you’d like to share with us?’ Grace asked.
‘Well, something keeps going around in my head.’
‘Unlike the victim who doesn’t have that luxury,’ Potting interjected with a smug grin.
Ignoring him, Exton said, ‘I’m putting myself in the perp’s shoes. If I’m going to dismember my victim, why would I stop at cutting off his head and limbs, and leave his torso intact? Why not cut everything into little pieces? Much easier to dispose of.’
‘What about someone who has a grudge against the farmer?’ Nick Nicholl said. ‘He doesn’t want to get caught, so he removes the head and hands, but puts the body there to try to frame the farmer?’
A possibility, Grace thought, but that didn’t strike him as likely. There were many kinds of murders, he knew from experience, but most of them fell into one of two categories: those cold psychopaths who planned carefully, and others who killed in the heat of the moment. The psychopaths who planned were the ones who often got away with murder. He remembered a conversation he’d once had with a Chief Constable some years back, when he had asked the Chief if in his experience he believed there was such a thing as the ‘perfect murder’. The Chief had replied that there was. ‘It’s the one we never hear about,’ he said.
Grace had never forgotten that. If someone devoid of all human emotion were to plan an execution killing, with the disposal of the body carefully thought out, he or she had a good chance of getting away with it. When you found a body, or body parts, that usually indicated carelessness by the killer. Carelessness tended to be caused by panic. Someone who had killed in the heat of the moment and had not thought it through.
This headless, limbless torso smelled of the latter to him. It was a hurried, amateurish body dump. When killers panicked, they made mistakes. And the kind of mistake a killer usually made was to leave a trail, however tiny. His job was to find it. Invariably, it involved getting his enquiry team doing painstaking work, turning every stone – and hoping, at some point, for that one small piece of luck.
He turned to the analyst, Carol Morgan. ‘I want you to look back through the serials covering the winter months – let’s set an initial parameter of February the twenty-eighth going back to November the first of last year – for any incident reported in the Berwick area. Someone behaving strangely, someone driving recklessly or just speeding; attempted break-ins; trespass. Take a three-mile radius around Stonery Farm as your starting point.’
‘Yes, sir,’ she said.
He let Glenn Branson run the rest of the briefing by himself. Although Grace kept track of all that was said, he was multi-tasking, running through the security strategy he had agreed with Chief Superintendent Graham Barrington, and which the Chief Constable had signed off. Gaia was arriving in this city the day after tomorrow. But he was also running through something that was happening to
morrow. Something he could not stop thinking about. The old rogue Tommy Fincher’s funeral. And one particular mourner who would be attending.
Amis Smallbone.
Just the thought of the creep caused Grace to clench his fists.
36
To those few people acquainted with Eric Whiteley, he seemed a creature of habit. A small, balding, mild-mannered man, with a wardrobe of inoffensive suits and dull ties, who was always unfailingly polite and punctual. During the twenty-two years since he had joined the Brighton firm of chartered accountants Feline Bradley-Hamilton, he had never taken a day off sick and had never arrived late. He was always the first in the office.
He would dismount his sit-up-and-beg bicycle at the New Road offices, directly opposite the Pavilion gardens, at precisely 7.45 a.m., rain or shine, with a tick-tick-tick sound as he scooted the last few yards balanced on one pedal. He would chain the machine to a lamp post which he had come to regard as his own, remove his bicycle clips, let himself into the premises and enter the alarm code. Then he would make his way up the staircase and along to his small back office on the second floor, with its frosted-glass borrowed-light window that was partially obscured by a row of brown filing cabinets and stacks of boxes. In winter he would switch on the heater, in summer, the fan, before sitting at his tidy desk, booting up his computer terminal, and settling into his tasks.
One thing his colleagues had learned about him was that he was something of a self-taught computer expert. He was normally able to fix most software problems that occurred in the company.
Eric Whiteley liked computers, because he was happier interacting with machines than people. Machines didn’t bully you or make fun of you. And he liked figures, because there was no ambiguity about numbers; there was always a satisfying precision. His job was to audit the accounts for clients of his firm, from the figures supplied to him, to do the company payroll, and occasionally to visit the firms to assist one of the accountants going through the books. He had been doing this job for twenty-two years, and expected to continue for at least another thirteen years until he reached the retirement age of sixty-five. Beyond that he had no plans. ‘We’ll see where the wind blows,’ he replied to work colleagues, on the rare occasions, such as the Christmas party, when someone asked him that question.
He did not like the Christmas party, always stayed the minimum amount of time he needed in order not to appear rude, and avoided conversations with his colleagues. After two decades of working with many of the same people, none of the other employees or partners of Feline Bradley-Hamilton knew any more about Eric Whiteley’s private life than they had on the day he first joined the firm.
He bought his lunch from the same sandwich shop in Brighton’s Bond Street every day of the week, and his menu never varied. Tuna mayo with sliced tomato on wholegrain, two twists of the pepper grinder, one shake of salt, a Twix bar, an apple and a bottle of sparkling water. Then he would buy a copy of the Argus from a newsagent and scurry back to the sanctuary of his office, where he would spend the remainder of his lunch hour eating and reading the paper all the way through – except for the sports pages, which did not interest him – and ignoring the phone if it rang.
Today, his eyes were suddenly drawn to the top-right column on the third page. It was an advertisement.
FILM EXTRAS WANTED!
EARN UP TO £65 PER DAY TO APPEAR IN
“THE KING’S LOVER”,
STARRING GAIA & JUDD HALPERN.
PRODUCTION STARTS IN BRIGHTON NEXT WEEK.
There was a phone number, an email address and a website.
He carefully cut out the advertisement and placed it in the middle drawer of his desk. Then he returned to his lunch.
*
The advertisement caught the eye of a number of other people in the city at the same time as Eric Whiteley. One was Glenn Branson, who was sitting on a train with Bella Moy, heading to the Crimewatch studio in Cardiff. He was eating a banana and scanning through the newspaper. He wrote down the details excitedly. Sammy and Remi were nuts about Gaia! His estranged wife Ari was doing her best to poison his kids against him. Maybe he could get them roles as extras on the set – how cool would that be? And it would have to be worth a lot of brownie points in his relationship with them.
*
Another person reading the advertisement with interest was the occupant of room 608 in The Grand Hotel in Brighton, who had been going through the newspaper’s small ads in search of a hooker.
He was feeling tired and jet-lagged, and was hyper with too much caffeine, but he didn’t care, he poured himself another cup now, then reached for the phone, checked how to make a local call, and dialled the number given in the advertisement. Moments later he heard the tell-tale delay, after the call was picked up, that he was through to a voicemail recording.
His anger surged. He hated that system, that whole culture of voicemail. That was how people fobbed you off, how they screwed you.
‘If you’re phoning to register interest in being an extra in The King’s Lover, please leave your name, age and a number we can call you right back on. Alternatively you can email us your details, together with a recent photograph and a contact number. Thank you for calling Brooker Brody Productions!’
For an instant, gripping the receiver hard, he felt the urge to tear it free of its cord, and half the guts of the phone out with it. But then he calmed a little. He hadn’t come all this way to trash a hotel telephone.
Not that he knew, at this moment, precisely what he had come to do. Something, that was for sure. Something a lot of people were going to regret.
He left his name and number and hung up.
37
Roy Grace liked the design and location of Brighton’s Woodvale Crematorium. In his experience, the typical urban crematorium was a soulless and charmless place, because it existed for one grim function only. Unlike a church, no one got married there, or christened there, or worshipped there, or simply popped in when they were feeling low. But Woodvale, nestling in lush, well-tended grounds on a hill to the north of the city, had a sense of history and a good deal of charm. The central building of twin chapels with a bell tower between them, in Gothic Revival style, had the appearance of a village parish church.
Although his work revolved almost entirely around the deaths of other people, he tended to avoid dwelling excessively on his own mortality. He still had not come to any decision about what he believed in, and kept a totally open mind. On a few occasions, working with psychics in the past, he’d had astonishing results – but many failures too. When he used to discuss it with Sandy, and more recently with Cleo, he would say what he truly felt – that there was a spiritual dimension to existence, and he believed there was something beyond this world, but not in a Biblical sense. In his heart, he profoundly hoped there would be something else. But then he would see some terrible atrocity on the news – or get called out to one himself – and on those occasions he’d think gloomily that maybe it was better for the human race to restrict all its evil to this planet and the mercifully short lives of its inhabitants.
One decision he had not yet made was his own funeral. Sandy had said she wanted a woodland burial, in an environmentally friendly coffin, but he had always shied away from dwelling on the subject: it disturbed him too much to think about it. Although, after a case he had been on some months back involving the trafficking of human organs, he had finally taken the plunge and done something that Sandy had urged him to do years ago. He’d signed up as an organ donor. But that was as far as he’d got with confronting his own mortality.
He looked out at the scene through the driving rain that conveniently turned his windscreen opaque, concealing him. A black hearse and a cortège of limousines waited some distance from one chapel, like planes stacked on a runway.
A sudden chill rippled through him, making him jump. Someone walking over your grave, his mother used to tell him. He smiled, sadly and fondly for a moment at her memory, and felt a guilty twi
nge that he had not been to either of his parents’ graves for a long time.
People were coming out of the chapel from the previous service. The usual mix of ages. No one hung around in the late afternoon rain. One group climbed into the back of an undertaker’s limousine, the rest all hurried off to their cars.
The waiting hearse, followed by the cortège, moved to the chapel door. The doors of the first limousine were opening. People stepping out, ducking under umbrellas that the undertakers held for them. He gave the wipers a quick flick to clear the screen – and saw him almost immediately. Stepping out of the first limousine.
Amis Smallbone was here, just as Terry Biglow had predicted.
He would have recognized the runt from a hundred miles away, he reckoned. Smallbone’s ramrod straight posture and his elevator heels made him seem a bit taller than his five feet, one inch. Although masked a little by the rain, he didn’t seem to have changed much in the past twelve and a bit years since Grace had last seen him, across a courtroom, where he had given the evidence that had played a crucial role in putting him away.
Evil was too big a word to use for Amis Smallbone. To have called him evil would have been to flatter him. He wasn’t smart enough to be truly evil. He was just nasty. A very nasty little man.
After a few minutes, the pall-bearers opened the rear door of the hearse and slid out the coffin containing, Grace presumed, the body of the dead fence Tommy Fincher. He grinned irreverently at the thought that the old rogue might have some last stolen item with him, that he planned to offer to God at a knockdown price.
He saw Terry Biglow emerge from the second limousine, a frail-looking figure, heavily reliant on a stick, and couldn’t help feeling sad for the man. It wouldn’t be long before the former racketeer’s funeral would be taking place, and he must be thinking about that now, very acutely, Grace thought. At least Biglow had something endearing about him, despite being a total scumbag, which was more than he could say about Smallbone. Biglow was a man he had always been able to do business with when he wanted information, and he would miss him.