Dead Man's Grip

by Peter James

  ‘I’m afraid that Tony has been involved in a road traffic accident on his bicycle.’

  She stared at him, suddenly fixated.

  ‘I’m sorry to say, Susan, that following the injuries he received he didn’t survive.’

  He fell silent deliberately. It had long been his policy to let the recipient of the message come out with the words themselves. That way, he found, it sank in better and more immediately.

  ‘You mean Tony’s dead?’ she said.

  ‘I’m very sorry, yes.’

  She started reeling. PC Upperton caught her arm and guided her down, on to the large brown sofa opposite a glass coffee table. She sat there in silence for some moments, while the two officers stood awkwardly. There was never an easy way. Each time the reaction was different. Susan Caplan’s was to fall silent and then start to shake, little tremors rippling through her body.

  They remained standing. She was shaking her head from side to side now. ‘Oh shit!’ she said suddenly. ‘Oh shit.’ Then she seemed to collapse in on herself, burying her face in her hands. ‘Oh shit, please tell me it’s not true.’

  The two officers glanced at each other. Tony Omotoso said, ‘Do you have someone who could come round and be with you today? A girlfriend? Any member of your family you’d like us to call?’

  She closed her eyes tight. ‘What happened?’

  ‘He was in a collision with a lorry, but we don’t have all the details.’

  There was a long silence. She hugged herself and began sobbing.

  ‘Susan, do you have a neighbour who could come round?’ Omotoso asked.

  ‘No. I – I don’t – I – we – I – oh shit, shit, shit.’

  ‘Would you like a drink?’ Ian Upperton asked. ‘Can we make you a cup of tea or coffee?’

  ‘I don’t want a sodding drink, I want my Tony,’ she sobbed. ‘Please tell me what happened?’

  Omotoso’s radio crackled. He turned the volume right down. There was another long silence before eventually he said, ‘We’re going to need to make sure it is Tony Revere. Would you be willing to identify the body later today? Just in case there’s been a mistake?’

  ‘His mother’s a control freak,’ she blurted. ‘She’s the one you’re going to have to speak to.’

  ‘I’ll speak to anyone you’d like me to, Susan. Do you have her number?’

  ‘She’s in New York – in the Hamptons. She hates my guts.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘She’ll be on the first plane over, I can tell you that.’

  ‘Would you prefer her to identify Tony?’

  She fell silent again, sobbing. Then she said, ‘You’d better get her to do that. She’d never believe me anyway.’

  18

  Tooth was small. It was an issue he’d had to deal with since childhood. He used to be picked on by other kids because of his size. But not many of them had ever picked on him twice.

  He was one of the tiniest babies Brooklyn obstetrician Harvey Shannon had ever delivered, although he wasn’t premature. His mother, who was so off her face with junk she hadn’t figured out she was pregnant for six months, had gone to full term. Dr Shannon wasn’t even sure that she realized she had actually given birth, and staff at the hospital told him she kept looking at the infant in bewilderment, as if trying to figure out where it had come from.

  But the obstetrician was worried about a bigger problem. The boy had a central nervous system that seemed to be wired all wrong. He appeared to have no pain receptors. You could stick a needle in the tiny mite’s arm and get no reaction, while all normal babies would bawl their lungs out. There were any number of possible causes, but the most likely, he figured, was the mother’s substance abuse.

  Tooth’s mother died from a rogue batch of heroin when he was three, and he spent most of his childhood being shunted around America from one foster home to the next. He never stayed long because no one liked him. He scared people.

  At the age of eleven, when other kids began taunting him about his size, he learned to defend himself by studying martial arts and soon responded by hurting anyone who angered him, badly. So badly he never stayed in any school for more than a few months, because other kids were too frightened of him and the teachers requested he be moved.

  At his final school he learned how to make a buck out of his abnormality. Using his martial arts skills of self-control, he could hold his breath for up to five minutes, beating anyone who tried to challenge him. His other trick was to let kids punch him in the stomach as hard as they liked, for a dollar a go. For five bucks they could stick a ballpoint pen into his arm or leg. Letting them do this was the closest he ever came to any of his fellow pupils. He’d never had an actual friend in his life. At the age of forty-one he still didn’t. Just his dog, Yossarian.

  But Tooth and his dog weren’t so much friends as associates. Same as the people he worked for. The dog was an ugly thing. It had different-colour eyes, one bright red, the other grey, and looked like the progeny of a Dalmatian that had been screwed by a pug. He’d named it after a character in one of the few books he’d read all the way through, Catch-22. The book started with a character called Yossarian irrationally falling in love, at first sight, with his chaplain. This dog had fallen irrationally in love with him at first sight, too. It had just started following him, in a street in Beverly Hills four years ago, when he was casing a house for a hit.

  It was one of those wide, quiet, swanky streets with bleached-looking elm trunks, big detached houses and gleaming metal in the driveway. All the houses had lawns that looked like they’d been trimmed with nail scissors, the sprinklers thwack-thwacking away, looked after by armies of Hispanic gardeners.

  The dog was wrong for the street. It was mangy and one eye was infected. Tooth didn’t know a thing about dogs, but this one didn’t look much like any recognizable breed and it didn’t look designer enough to have come from this area. Maybe it had jumped out of a Hispanic’s truck. Maybe someone had thrown it out of a car here in the hope of some rich person taking pity on it.

  Instead it had found him.

  Tooth gave it food, but no sympathy.

  He didn’t do sympathy.

  19

  ‘What – what happens now?’ Carly asked the police officer.

  ‘I’d like you to sign your name here,’ Dan Pattenden said, handing her a long thin strip of white paper, which was headed SUBJECT TEST. Halfway down it had her name, date of birth and the words SUBJECT SIGNATURE. Below was a box containing the words Specimen 1: – 10.42 a.m. – 55 and Specimen 2: 10.45 a.m. – 55.

  With her hand shaking so much she could barely hold the pen he gave her, she signed her name.

  ‘I’m going to take you to a cell where you’ll wait for your solicitor to arrive,’ he said, signing the same form along the bottom. ‘You will be interviewed with your solicitor.’

  ‘I have a really important meeting with a client,’ she said. ‘I have to get to the office.’

  He gave her a sympathetic smile. ‘I’m afraid that everyone involved in the incident has something important to do today, but it’s not up to me.’ He pointed to the door and gently, holding her right arm, escorted her towards it. Then he stopped and answered his radio phone as it crackled into life.

  ‘Dan Pattenden,’ he said. There was a brief silence. ‘I see. Thank you, guv. I’m up at Custody now with my prisoner.’

  Prisoner. The word made her shudder.

  ‘Yes, sir, thank you.’ He clipped the phone back in its holder on his chest and turned to her. His expression was blank, unreadable. ‘I’m sorry, but I’m now going to repeat the caution I gave you earlier at the collision scene. Mrs Chase, I’m rearresting you now on suspicion of causing death by driving while under the influence of alcohol. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you may later rely on in court. Anything you say may be given in evidence.’

  She felt her throat constricting, as if
a ligature was being tightened. Her mouth was suddenly parched.

  ‘The cyclist has died?’ Her words came out almost as a whisper.

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid so.’

  ‘It wasn’t me,’ she said. ‘I didn’t hit him. I crashed because I was – because I avoided him. I swerved to avoid him because he was on the wrong side of the road. I would have hit him if I hadn’t.’

  ‘You’d best save all that for your interview.’

  As he propelled her across the custody reception floor, past the large, round central station, she turned to him in sudden panic and said, ‘My car – I need to get the RAC to collect it – I need to get it repaired – I—’

  ‘We’ll take care of it. I’m afraid it’s going to have to be impounded.’

  They began walking down a narrow corridor. They stopped at a green door with a small glass panel. He opened it and, to her horror, ushered her into a cell.

  ‘You’re not putting me in here?’

  His phone crackled into life again and he answered it. As he did so, she stared at the cell in bewilderment. A small, narrow room with an open toilet and a hand basin set into the wall. At the far end was a hard bench, with a blue cushion behind it propped up against the wall. There was a sanitized reek of disinfectant.

  PC Pattenden ended the call and turned back to her. ‘This is where you will have to wait until your solicitor gets here.’

  ‘But – but what about my car? When will it go to be repaired?’

  ‘That will depend on what the Senior Investigating Officer decides, but it could be months before your car gets released.’

  ‘Months?’

  ‘Yes, I’m sorry. It will be the same for all the vehicles today.’

  ‘What – what about my stuff in it?’

  ‘You’ll be able to collect personal belongings from the car pound it’s taken to. You’ll be notified where that is. I have to get back now, so I’m leaving you. OK?’

  It was not OK. It was so totally not OK. But she was too shocked to argue. Instead she just nodded lamely.

  Then he shut the door.

  Carly stared up at a CCTV camera staring down at her. Then she turned towards the bench and looked at the frosted, panelled window set high above it. She sat down, not bothering with the cushion, trying to think straight.

  But all she could focus on was the accident, replaying over and over in her mind. The white van behind her. The image of the cyclist underneath the lorry.

  Dead.

  There was a knock on the door and it opened. She saw a short, plump woman in a white shirt with black lapels and the word Reliance Security embroidered across her chest. The woman had a trolley laden with tired-looking paperback books.

  ‘Something from the library?’ she asked.

  Carly shook her head. Her thoughts suddenly flashed to Tyler. He was staying late after school, having a cornet lesson.

  Moments later the door shut again.

  She suddenly felt badly in need of a pee, but there was no way she was going to squat here with a camera watching her. Then she felt a sudden surge of rage.

  Sodding Preston Dave! If he hadn’t been such a tosser she wouldn’t have drunk so much. She hardly ever got smashed. Sure, she liked a glass of wine or two in the evening. But she never normally drank the way she had last night.

  If only she had said no to him.

  If only she had dropped Tyler at school just a few minutes earlier.

  So many damned if onlys.

  Dead.

  The cyclist was dead.

  One instant he had been riding straight at her. He’d come out of nowhere. Now he was dead.

  But she had not hit him, she was sure of that.

  He was on the wrong fucking side of the road, for God’s sake! And now she was being blamed.

  Suddenly her door opened. She saw a tall, thin man in a white shirt with black epaulettes. Standing next to him was the suave figure of one of the senior partners at her firm, Ken Acott.

  Several of her colleagues said that the criminal lawyer reminded them of a younger Dustin Hoffman and at this moment he certainly looked like a movie star hero. With his short dark hair, sharp grey pinstripe suit and small black attaché case, he exuded an air of authority and confidence as he strode forward into the cell, the buckles of his Gucci loafers sparkling.

  Acott had a well-deserved reputation as one of the best in the business. If anyone could sort out this mess she was in, he could.

  Then the look of reassurance on his face cracked her up and, losing all her composure, she stumbled forward, towards him, her eyes welling with tears.

  20

  Shortly before 5 p.m., Roy Grace sat in his first-floor office in the Major Crime Branch of Sussex CID, sipping his mug of tea. It was almost stone cold, because he had been concentrating on searching on the Internet for anything he could find about Cleo’s condition.

  He didn’t mind the tea, he was used to cold food and tepid drinks. Ever since he had joined the police force in his late teens, over twenty years ago, he had learned that getting anything to eat or drink at all was a luxury. If you were the kind of person who insisted on freshly ground coffee beans and healthy home cooking, you were in the wrong profession.

  His mountain of paperwork seemed to grow of its own accord, as if it was some fast-breeding organism, and it seemed today that emails were pouring in faster than he could read them. But he was finding it hard to focus on anything other than Cleo. Since leaving the hospital this morning, he had made repeated calls to check. The ward sister was probably starting to think he was some kind of obsessive compulsive, but he didn’t care.

  He looked down at a thick file that was open on his desk. In his current role as Head of Major Crime, in addition to being an active Senior Investigating Officer, Grace was familiar with all the current cases in the entire Major Crime Branch. For some police officers, the work ended with the arrest of the suspect, but for him, that was merely the first stage. Securing convictions was in many ways far harder and more time-consuming than catching the villains in the first place.

  The world he inhabited was filled with an endless succession of nasty people, but few came nastier than the overweight creep whose custody face-on and side profile photographs currently lay in front of him. Carl Venner, a former US Army officer, now residing in the remand wing at Sussex’s Category-B prison, Lewes, had made himself a lucrative business out of snuff movies – films of real people being tortured and killed – which he sold on a subscription basis, via the Internet, to wealthy, extremely warped people. Glenn Branson had been shot during the arrest of this creep, which made it even more personal than usual. The trial was looming.

  Taking a momentary break, Roy Grace leaned back in his chair and stared out of his window towards the south. The CID headquarters, Sussex House, was in an industrial estate on the outskirts of the city of Brighton and Hove. Directly below him he could see a skeletal tree, planted in the earth and surrounded by an oval-shaped brick wall, and the cracked concrete paving of the building’s narrow car park. Beyond was a busy road with a steel barrier, on the far side of which, thinly masked by a row of trees, was the grey slab of an ASDA supermarket, which served as the unofficial canteen for this place. And beyond that, on a clear day, he could see the distant rooftops of Brighton and sometimes the blue of the English Channel. But today there was just a grey haze.

  He watched a green ASDA articulated lorry pull out on to the road and begin to crawl up the hill, then he turned back to his screen, tapped the keyboard and brought up the serials, as he did every half-hour or so. This was the log of all reported incidents with their constant updates. Scanning through, he saw nothing new, other than the Portland Road accident, to interest him. Just the usual daily stuff. Road traffic collisions, a noisy-neighbour incident, a missing dog, assaults, burglaries, a van break-in, a stolen car, signings for bail, a broken shop window, a domestic, two bike thefts, suspicious youths spotted by a car, some chocolates stolen from a Tesco garage, a G
5 (sudden death) of an elderly lady that was not suspicious – at this stage, anyway.

  With the exception of a major rape case, on which Grace had been the Senior Investigating Officer, the first two months of the year had been relatively quiet. But since the start of spring, the whole city seemed to be kicking off. Three of the average twenty murders that Sussex could expect annually had taken place during the past six weeks. In addition there had been an armed robbery on a jewellery shop, resulting in an officer who had given chase being shot in the leg, and four days ago there had been a brutal stranger rape of a nurse walking along Brighton’s seafront.

  As a consequence, most of the four Major Incident Suites around the county had been in full use, including both the Major Incident Rooms here. Rather than relocate from Sussex House to the Major Crime Suite in Eastbourne, some thirty minutes’ drive away, which had available space, Roy Grace had borrowed Jack Skerritt’s office, next door to his, for the first briefing of Operation Violin – the name the computer had given to the hit-and-run fatality involving the cyclist in Portland Road this morning. The head of HQ CID was away on a course and had a much larger conference table than the small round one in Grace’s office.

  He planned to keep the inquiry team small and tight. From his study of the evidence so far, and the initial eyewitness reports, it seemed a straightforward case. The van driver could have had any number of reasons for doing what he did – possibly he had stolen the vehicle, or had no insurance, or was worried about being breathalysed, or was carrying something illegal. Grace did not think it would be a hard job to find him. His favoured Deputy Senior Investigating Officer, Lizzie Mantle, was away on leave, so he was using the opportunity to make Glenn his Deputy SIO for this case. It would be a good test of the Detective Sergeant’s abilities, he thought – and it would help to distract him from his current marital problems. Further, it would give him an opportunity to really shine before his all-important boards for promotion to inspector, which would be coming up later this year, by showing his ability to manage real-life inquiries.