Dead Man's Grip

by Peter James

  Her iPhone pinged with an incoming text. She took it out of her handbag and checked the display. It was Ken Acott, saying he’d be there in two minutes.

  Then she flicked across the phone’s apps screen to Friend Mapper, to check that her friend Clair May had safely delivered Tyler to school. His mood was upsetting her. She’d always been close to him – and Kes’s death had created a special bond between them – but now he’d put a wall around himself and was even resenting putting Friend Mapper on each day.

  ‘Don’t you want to be able to see where I am?’ she had asked him yesterday.

  ‘Why?’ He’d shrugged.

  For the past two years they had used this GPS app daily. A small blue dot marked her precise position on a street map and a purple one – his choice of colour – marked his. Each time either of them logged on they could see where the other was. It was like a game to Tyler and he’d always enjoyed following her, sending her the occasional text when she was away from the office, saying: I can c u ☺

  To her relief the purple dot was where it should be, near the corner of New Church Road and Westbourne Gardens, where St Christopher’s School was located. She put the phone back in her bag.

  At that moment Ken Acott came around the corner, looking sharp in a dark grey suit and a green tie, swinging his massive attaché case. He was smiling.

  ‘Sorry I’m late, Carly. Had to deal with an urgent custody hearing, but I’ve got some good news!’

  From the expression in his face it looked as if he was going to tell her that the case had been dropped.

  ‘I’ve just had a quick conversation with the clerk of the court. We’ve got Juliet Smith in the chair. She’s very experienced and very fair.’

  ‘Great,’ Carly said, greeting the news with the same level of enthusiasm someone under a death sentence might have shown on being told that the execution chamber had recently been redecorated.

  63

  Tooth was tired but he had to keep going, keep up the pace. Speed was vital. Cut the police some slack and they could catch up with you very fast. He needed to keep two jumps ahead of them. Equally, it was when you were tired that you risked making a mistake.

  He was running on adrenalin and catnaps, the way he used to in the military, when he was behind enemy lines. Five minutes’ shut-eye and he was good to go again. That had been part of his sniper school training. He could function for days like that. Weeks if he had to. But those catnaps were vital. Deprive a cat of sleep and it would die in two weeks. Deprive a human and he would become psychotic.

  He would sleep later, when the job was complete, then he could do so for as long as he wanted, until that day the Russian roulette finally came good. Not that he had ever slept for more than four hours at a stretch in his life. He wasn’t comfortable sleeping – didn’t like the idea that stuff could happen around you while you weren’t aware of it.

  He peered out at the neighbourhood as he drove. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that people had to be well off to live around here. Detached houses, nice lawns, smart cars. Money bought you isolation. Better air to breathe. Privacy. These houses had big gardens. Gardens were urban jungles. He was good at urban jungles.

  There was a big park on his left as he drove around the wide, curved road. Tennis courts. An enclosed playground with kids in it and their mothers watching. Tooth scowled. He didn’t like children. He saw a woman picking up her dog’s shit in a plastic bag. Saw a game going on between soccer posts. This was the kind of safe neighbourhood that five centuries of winning wars against invaders bought you. Here you didn’t have to worry any more about marauding soldiers killing the menfolk and raping the women and children – unlike some places in the world that he had seen, where that went on.

  The comfort zone of civilization.

  The comfort zone Carly Chase inhabited, or so she thought.

  He turned into her street. Hove Park Avenue. He’d already paid a visit here earlier on his way back from Springs Smoked Salmon.

  This was going to be easy. His client would like it, a lot. He was certain.

  64

  Grace was still seething at the thought of his conversation with Kevin Spinella as he entered Peter Rigg’s office punctually at 3.30 p.m. The ACC, looking dapper in a chalk-striped blue suit and brightly coloured polka-dot tie, offered him tea as he sat down, which he accepted gratefully. He hoped some biscuits might come along with it, as he’d had no lunch. He’d been working through the day, trying to gather some positive scraps of information to give his boss about Operation Violin, but he had precious little. In his hand he held a brown envelope containing the latest exhibits list, which he had taken away from the exhibits meeting an hour earlier.

  ‘So how are we doing, Roy?’ Rigg asked chirpily.

  Grace brought him up to speed on his team’s three current lines of enquiry, as well as their growing involvement in the investigation into the murder of Warren Tulley at Ford Prison. Then he handed him a copy of the exhibits list and ran through the key points of that with him.

  ‘I don’t like the camera, Roy,’ the ACC said. ‘It doesn’t chime.’

  ‘With what, sir?’

  Rigg’s MSA brought in a china cup and saucer on a tray, with a separate bowl of sugar and, to Grace’s delight, a plate of assorted biscuits. A bonus he never had in the days of the previous ACC. Rigg gestured for him to help himself and he gulped down a round one with jam in the centre, then eyed a chocolate bourbon. To his dismay his boss leaned across the table and grabbed that one himself.

  Speaking as he munched it, Rigg said, ‘We’ve seen plenty of instances of low-life filming their violent acts on mobile phone cameras, happy slapping, all that. But this is too sophisticated. Why would someone go to that trouble – and, more significantly, that expense?’

  ‘Those are my thoughts too, sir.’

  ‘So what are your conclusions?’

  ‘I’m keeping an open mind. But I think it has to have been done by someone after that reward. Which brings me on to something I want to raise. We have a real problem with the crime reporter from the Argus, Kevin Spinella.’

  ‘Oh?’

  Rigg reached forward and grabbed another biscuit Grace had been eyeing, a custard cream.

  ‘I had a call from him earlier. Despite all our efforts at keeping from the press, at this time, that Ewan Preece’s hands were glued to the steering wheel of the van, Spinella has found out.’

  Grace filled him in on the history of leaks to the reporter during the past year.

  ‘Do you have any view on who it might be?’

  ‘No, I don’t at this stage.’

  ‘So is the Argus going to print with the superglue story?’

  ‘No. I’ve managed to persuade him to hold it.’

  ‘Good man.’

  Grace’s phone rang. Apologizing, he answered.

  It was Tracy Stocker, the Crime Scene Manager, and what she had to say was not good news.

  Grace asked her a few brief questions, then ended the call and looked back at his boss, who was studying the exhibits list intently. He eyed once more a chocolate digestive on the plate, but all of a sudden he’d lost his appetite. Rigg put down the list and looked back at him quizzically.

  ‘I’m afraid we have another body, sir,’ Grace said.

  He left the office, then hurried across the Police HQ complex to his car.

  65

  One of the many things Roy Grace loved about Brighton was the clear delineation to its north between the city limits and stunning open countryside. There was no urban sprawl, just a clean dividing line made by the sweep of the A27 dual carriageway between the city and the start of the Downs.

  The part of that countryside he was driving towards now, the Devil’s Dyke, was an area that never ceased to awe him, no matter how often he came here and no matter his purpose, even this afternoon, when he knew it was going to be grim.

  The Devil’s Dyke was the beauty spot where he used to bring Sandy in their court
ing days and they often hiked here at weekends after they were married. They would drive up to the car park at the top and walk across the fields, with their spectacular views across the rolling hills in one direction and towards the sea in another. They would take the path past the old, derelict and slightly creepy fort that he used to love coming to as a child with his parents. He and his sister would play games of cowboys and Indians, and cops and robbers in and around its crumbling walls – always being careful to avoid treading in one of the numerous cowpats that were its major hazard.

  If it was too blustery on the top, he and Sandy used to walk down the steep banks into the valley below. Legend had it that the Devil had dug out a vast trench – in reality a beautiful, natural valley – to allow the sea to come inland and flood all the churches in Sussex. It was one of the least true of the myths about his city’s dark heritage.

  In those first few years after Sandy had vanished, he often came up here alone and either just sat in his car, staring through the windscreen, or got out and walked around. There was always the dim hope in his mind that she might just turn up here. It was one of the beliefs he had clung to that she might have lost her memory. A neurologist he had consulted told him that sometimes people with this condition regain fragments of their memory and might go to places familiar to them.

  But sometimes in those lonely years he came here just to feel close to her, to feel her spirit in the wind.

  He had never done any of these walks with Cleo. He didn’t want the memories casting clouds over their relationship. Didn’t want Cleo meeting his ghosts. They’d made other parts of the city and its environs their own special places.

  He drove as fast as he dared along the high top road, on blue lights and wailing siren. Open land stretched away on both sides, shimmering beneath the almost cloudless afternoon sky. A mile or so to the south, the fields gave way to the houses of the residential area of Hangleton and, even further to the south, Shoreham and its harbour. Taking his eyes off the empty road ahead for a fleeting second, he caught a glimpse of the tall smokestack of the power station, a landmark for the city and for sailors.

  As he swept the silver Ford Focus around a long right-hander, he saw a car some distance off about to pull out of the car park of the Waterhall Golf Club into his path and he jabbed the button on the panel in the centre of the dash to change the pitch of the siren to a stentorian honk-whup-honk-whup bellow. It did the trick and the car, to his relief, halted sharply.

  Each time he headed towards a crime scene, Roy Grace went through a series of mental checks. Reminding himself of all the key elements in the detective’s bible, the Murder Investigation Manual. A summary sheet, with its headings and flow-chart diagrams, was prominently pinned to the wall in the main corridor of the Major Crime Branch. Every detective who worked there would walk past it several times a week. No matter how many times you ran an investigation, you had to remind yourself to start with the basics. Never get complacent. One of the qualities of a good detective was to be methodical and painstakingly anal.

  Grace felt the burden of responsibility just as strongly every time. He’d felt it last week on the quay, with Ewan Preece, and he was feeling it now. The first stage was always the crime scene assessment. Five big headings were ingrained in his mind: LOCATION. VICTIM. OFFENDER. SCENE FORENSICS. POST-MORTEM.

  This first, crucial stage of an investigation, literally the hour immediately following the discovery of a murder victim, was known as the golden hour. It was the best chance of getting forensic evidence before the crime scene became contaminated by increasing numbers of people, albeit in protective clothing, and before weather, such as rain or strong wind, might change things.

  He drove flat out through the picture-postcard village of Poynings, then the even prettier village of Fulking, taking the sharp right-hand bend past the Shepherd and Dog pub, where he had brought Sandy for a drink and a meal on one of their first dates. Then he accelerated along the road at the bottom of the Downs.

  Springs Smoked Salmon was a Sussex institution with a worldwide reputation. He’d eaten in many restaurants which boasted their smoked fish as a hallmark of quality, and he’d always wondered about their choice of location, here in the middle of, effectively, nowhere. Maybe they had selected this place originally because there were no neighbours to offend with the fishy smells.

  He passed a cluster of farm buildings and dwellings, then slowed as he went down a sharp dip. Rounding the next bend he saw the flashing lights of a halted police car. Several more vehicles, some marked police cars, the Crime Scene Investigator’s estate car and a SOCO van were pulled tightly into the bushy side of the road.

  He drew up behind the last car, switched off his engine, pressed the button on the dash-mounted panel marked STATIONARY LIGHTS and climbed out. As he wormed himself into his paper oversuit, he could smell wood smoke and the sharper, heavier tang of fish mixed with the fresh, grassy countryside smells.

  There was a line of blue and white police tape across the entrance to the smokery and a young constable, acting as a scene guard, whom he did not recognize.

  Grace showed his ID.

  ‘Good afternoon, sir,’ he said, a little nervously.

  Grace pulled on a pair of gloves and ducked under the tape. The constable directed him to walk up a steep incline, between two rows of sheds. Grace only had to go a short distance before he saw a cluster of people similarly attired in oversuits. One of them was Tracy Stocker.

  ‘We can’t go on meeting like this, Roy!’ she said chirpily.

  He grinned. He liked Tracy a lot. She was brilliant at her work, a true professional, but – compared to some of her colleagues, or at least one in particular – she had managed to avoid becoming cynical. As an SIO you soon learned that an efficient Crime Scene Manager could make a big difference to the start of your investigation.

  ‘So what do we have?’

  ‘Not the prettiest picture I’ve ever seen.’

  She turned and led the way. Grace nodded at a couple of detectives he knew. They would have been called here immediately by the response officers to assess the situation. He followed her across to the first of a row of grey, single-storey sheds, each of which had a thick asphalt roof and sliding white door. The door of the building was open.

  He suddenly caught a whiff of vomit. Never a good sign. Then Tracy stepped aside, gesturing with her arm for him to enter. He felt a blast of icy air on his face and became aware of a very strong, almost overpowering, reek of smoked fish. Straight ahead he saw a solid wall of large, headless, dark pink fish, hanging in rows, suspended by sturdy hooks to a ceiling rack. There were four rows of them, with narrow aisles between them, hardly wide enough for a person to walk through.

  Almost instantly his eyes were drawn to the front of the third row. He saw what at first looked like a huge, plump animal, its flesh all blackened, hanging among the fish. A pig, he thought, fleetingly.

  Then, as his brain began to make sense of the image, he realized what it actually was.

  66

  She loved her view of the Isar, the pretty river that bisected Munich, running almost entirely through parkland. She liked to sit up here at the window, in her fourth-floor apartment above the busy main road of Widenmayerstrasse, and watch people walking their dogs, or jogging, or pushing infants in their strollers along the banks. But most of all she liked to look at the water.

  It was for the same reason she liked to go to the Englischer Garten and sit near the lake. Being close to water was like a drug to her. She missed the sea so much. That was what she missed most of all about Brighton. She loved everything else about this city but some days she pined for the sea. And there were other days when she pined for something else, too – the solitude she used to have. Sure, she had resented it at times, that enforced solitude, when work would summon her husband and their plans would be cancelled at the drop of a hat, and she’d find herself alone for an entire weekend, and the following weekends too.

  The Italian au
thor Gian Vincenzo Gravina wrote that a bore is a person who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company.

  This was how it was starting to feel now in her new life. He was so damned demanding. Her new life totally revolved around him. She checked her watch. He would be back soon. This was what it was like now. Every hour of her new life accounted for.

  On the screen of her computer on her desk was the online edition of the Sussex newspaper the Argus. Since seeing the announcement in the local Munich paper that Roy Grace had placed, about having her declared legally dead, she now scanned the pages of the Argus daily.

  If he wanted to have her declared dead, after all this time, there had to be a reason. And there was only one reason that she could think of.

  She took a deep breath, then she reminded herself of the mantra to control her anger. Life is not about waiting for the storms to pass. It is about learning to dance in the rain.

  She said it aloud. Then again. And again.

  Finally she felt calm enough to turn to the Forthcoming Marriages section of the newspaper. She scanned the column. His name was not there.

  She logged off with the same feeling of relief she had every day.

  67

  Over the years Roy Grace had seen a lot of horrific sights. Mostly, as he had grown more experienced, he was able to leave them behind, but every now and then, like most police officers, he would come across something that he took home with him. When that happened he would lie in bed, unable to sleep, unpacking it over and over again in his mind. Or wake up screaming from the nightmare it was giving him.

  One of his worst experiences was as a young uniformed officer, when a five-year-old boy had been crushed under the wheels of a skip lorry. He’d been first on the scene. The boy’s head had been distorted and, with his spiky blonde hair, the poor little mite reminded Grace absurdly and horrifically of Bart Simpson. He’d had a nightmare about the boy two or three times a month for several years. Even today he had difficulty watching Bart Simpson on television because of the memory the character triggered.