Looking Good Dead (4 page)

Then doubts started. What if she wasn’t up to it?

What if she froze or corpsed in front of such a big audience? That would be the end, completely the end!

She would be OK; she would somehow get through. After all she came from a theatrical family. It was in her blood; her mother’s parents had been music hall artistes before they’d retired and bought a bed and breakfast business near the sea in Brighton.

As she crested the brow and saw the next hill unfurling for a mile ahead of her, and wide open farmland to either side broken by just a few solitary trees and mesh fences, she could see no sign of Nero. A strong breeze was blowing, bending the rape and the long green wheat sheaves. She cupped her hands over her mouth and shouted, ‘NERO! Come on, boy. NERO!’

After a few moments she saw a wide ripple in the rape, something zigzagging through it – Nero seemed incapable of ever running in a straight line. Then he broke cover, and came bounding towards her, holding something white and dangly in his mouth.

A rabbit, she thought at first, and hoped at least the poor thing was dead. She couldn’t bear it when he brought a live, wounded one and plopped it proudly at her feet, wriggling and screeching in fright, which he was fond of doing.

‘Come on, boy, what’s that you’ve got there? Drop! Drop!’

Then her own mouth dropped.

A shiver rippled all the way through her as she took one nervous step forward, staring down at the motionless white object.

Then she began to scream.

6

Roy Grace did not enjoy holding press conferences. But he was well aware the police were paid public servants, and therefore the public had a right to be kept informed. It was the spin that journalists put on everything that he hated. It seemed to him that journalists weren’t interested in informing the public; that their job was to sell newspapers or attract viewers or listeners. They wanted to take news and slant it into stories, the more sensational the better.

And if there wasn’t anything sensational in the story, then why not have a pop at the police themselves? Few things grabbed the public’s attention better than a whiff of police negligence, racism or heavy-handedness. Car chases going wrong had been a particular hobby horse in recent years, especially if members of the public were injured or killed by reckless police driving.

Like yesterday, when two suspects being chased in a stolen car had crashed off a bridge and drowned in a river.

Which was why he was here now, standing in the Briefing Room, facing a open-centred rectangular table with not enough chairs for all the press present, his back to a large, smart, curved board bearing an artistic display of five police badges on a blue background, with the www.crimestoppers.co.uk number printed prominently beneath each of them.

He guessed there were about forty media people crammed in here – newspaper, radio and television reporters, photographers, cameramen and sound recordists – most of them familiar, among them some young fresh-faced ones working for the local press and stringing for the nationals, hoping for their big break, and some old, weary ones just waiting to get out of here and into a pub.

Flanking him, more to show that the police were taking this seriously than to actually contribute much to the conference, was the Assistant Chief Constable, Alison Vosper, a handsome but hard-looking woman of forty-four with blonde hair cropped short, standing in for the Chief, Jim Bowen – away at a conference – and Grace’s immediate superior, Gary Weston, the Chief Superintendent.

Weston was a relaxed-looking thirty-nine-year-old Manchester man with charismatic charm, with whom Grace had been mates when they were both beat coppers, and they remained good friends now. Although almost the same age as Grace, Weston had played the politics, cultivated influential friends, his eyes firmly set on a chief constable career path – and with his abilities, maybe even the top job at the Met, Grace thought frequently with a tinge of admiration but no envy.

Being politically astute, Gary Weston was keeping quiet today, letting Roy Grace do all the talking, seeing whether the Detective Superintendent was going to dig himself even deeper into the murky brown stuff.

An acidic young female reporter whom none of the police officers had seen before got her question in: ‘DS Grace, I understand that a woman was injured in a car accident in Newhaven, then an elderly gentleman was injured in an accident on the Brighton bypass, and a few minutes later a police officer was knocked off his motorbike. Can you explain your reasons for permitting the chase to continue?’

‘The accident in Newhaven took place before the police began pursuit,’ Grace responded, choosing his words carefully. ‘The accused persons hijacked a Land Rover immediately following this accident. They then rammed a Toyota saloon driven by an elderly gentleman in a tunnel and hijacked his vehicle. We knew that at least one of the accused was armed and dangerous, and that an innocent member of the public’s life depended on us apprehending them, and I took the view that the public were more endangered by letting them go, which is why I made the decision to keep them in sight.’

‘Even though that ended in their deaths?’ she went on.

Her tone infuriated him, and he had to hold back the very strong urge to swear at her, to tell her the two who had died were monsters, that drowning in a muddy river was better justice for all the people they’d wronged and harmed and killed than being given some pathetic jail sentence by a bleeding-heart liberal judge. But he also had to be very careful not to give the assembled company something they could twist into a sensational headline.

‘The cause of their deaths will be established in due course by an inquest,’ he said, far more calmly than he felt.

His response provoked an angry murmur, a flurry of hands in the air and about thirty questions all at once. Glancing at the clock, relieved to see the minute hand had clicked forward, he stood firm. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘that’s all we have time for today.’

Back in his small, almost brand new office, in the huge, recently refurbished two-storey art deco building which had originally been built in the 1950s as a hospital for contagious diseases and which now housed the headquarters of Sussex CID, Grace sat down in his swivel chair. Like almost every item of furniture in the room it was almost fresh out of its box, and didn’t yet feel familiar or comfortable.

He wriggled around in the chair for a moment, played with the toggle levers, but it still wasn’t great. He had liked his old office down at Brighton police station much better. The room had been bigger, the furniture beat-up, but the place was in the centre of town and had a buzz. These new premises were on an industrial estate on the edge of the city and felt soulless. Miles of long, silent, freshly carpeted and painted corridors, office after office filled with new furniture, and no canteen! Nowhere to get a cuppa apart from a do-it-yourself or a bloody vending machine. Nowhere to even get a sandwich – you had to walk across the road to the Asda hypermarket. So much for design committees.

He stared fondly for a moment at his prized collection of three dozen vintage cigarette lighters hunched together on the ledge between the front of his desk and the window, and reflected that for weeks his work schedule had prevented him from pursuing one of his favourite pastimes – something he used to share with his wife, Sandy, and in which he now found great solace – trawling antique markets and car boot sales in search of old gadgets.

Dominating the wall behind him was the large, round wooden clock that had been a prop in the fictitious police station in The Bill, which Sandy had bought in happier times at an auction, for his twenty-sixth birthday.

Mounted in glass beneath it was a seven-pound, six-ounce brown trout he’d picked up at a stall in the Portobello Road. Its location beneath the clock was no accident – it enabled him to use a tired old joke when briefing new detectives about patience and big fish.

The rest of the floor space was occupied by a television and video player, a circular table, four chairs and piles of loose paperwork, his holdall containing his crime-scene kit, and small towers of files.

Each file on the floor stood for an unsolved murder. He stared at one green envelope, its corner obscured by a whorl of carpet fluff. It represented a pile of about twenty boxes of files either stacked on an office floor, or bulging out of a cupboard, or locked up, gathering mould in a damp police garage in a station in the area where the murder had happened. It was the open file on a gay vet called Richard Ventnor, battered to death in his surgery twelve years ago.

It contained scene-of-crime photographs, forensic reports, bagged evidence, witness statements, transcripts – all separated into orderly bundles and secured with coloured ribbon. This was part of his current brief, to dig back into the county’s unsolved murders, liaise with the CID division where the crime had happened, looking for anything that might have changed in the intervening years that could justify reopening the case.

He knew most of each file’s contents by heart – a benefit of the memory that had propelled him through exams both at school and in the force. To him, each stack represented more than just a human life that had been taken – and a killer who was still free – it symbolized something very close to his own heart. It meant that a family had been unable to lay its past to rest because a mystery had never been solved, justice had never been done. And he knew that with some of these files being more than thirty years old, he was the last hope the victims and their relatives probably had. There was just one case where he was currently making some real progress. Tommy Lytle’s.

Tommy Lytle was Grace’s oldest cold case. At the age of eleven, twenty-seven years ago, Tommy had set out from school on a February afternoon, to walk home. He’d never been seen again. The only lead at the time had been a Morris van, seen by a witness who had had the presence of mind to write down the number. But no link between the owner, a weirdo loner with a history of sex offences on minors, had ever been established. And then, two months ago, by complete coincidence, the van had showed up on Grace’s radar when the classic car enthusiast who now owned it got stopped for drunken driving.

The advances in forensics from twenty-seven years back were beyond quantum. With modern DNA testing police forensic scientists boasted, not without substance, that if a human being had ever been in a room, no matter how long ago, that given time they could find evidence to prove it. Just one skin cell that had escaped the vacuum cleaner, or a hair, or a clothing fibre. Maybe something one hundred times smaller than a pinhead. There would be a trace.

And now they had the van.

And the original suspect was still alive.

Forensics had been through that van with microscopes, but so far, as a disappointing lab report Grace had read last night at home informed him, they had found nothing to link the van to the suspect. The forensic Scenes of Crime team had found a human hair, but the DNA was not a match.

But they would find something in that damned van, Grace was determined, if he had to pull the vehicle apart millimetre by millimetre himself with a pair of tweezers.

He took a swig from his bottle of mineral water, grimacing at the taste – or lack of taste – the sheer, faintly metallic nothingness of the stuff he was drinking in an effort to wean himself off his usual gallon of coffee a day. Then, replacing the cap, he stared at the gathering rain clouds, heavy as suet, suspended low above the grey slab of the Asda roof across the road that was most of his view, thinking about tomorrow.

It was Thursday tomorrow and he had a date – not like the last, disastrous bunny boiler of a blind date from an internet agency – but a real one with a beautiful woman. He was both looking forward to it and nervous at the same time. He was fretting about what to wear, about where to take her, whether he’d have enough to say to her.

And he was concerned about Sandy. About what she would think about him dating another woman. Absurd, he knew, to be thinking these thoughts after almost nine years, but he couldn’t help it. Just as he could not help wondering, almost every moment of his waking life, where she was, what had happened to her. Whether she was alive or dead.

Clutching the plastic Evian bottle he took another long swig, then stared over the top of the piles of out-of-control paperwork on his desk at his computer screen, then down at a stack of this morning’s papers. The headlines of the top one, the local paper the Argus, screamed out at him: Two Dead in Sussex Police Chase.

He dumped the newspapers on the floor and scanned the latest deluge of emails. He was still just getting the hang of the new Vantage software for the force’s system, which was a lot easier to use than the GreenScreen it replaced. Grace checked the incident reports log to see what had happened during the night, which normally he would have done first thing, but today he’d had to prepare for the press conference.

There was nothing out of the ordinary, just the usual detritus of a Brighton midweek night and morning. A handful of muggings, break-ins, car thefts, a hold-up at an all-night grocery store, a pub fight, a domestic, a bunch of RTAs – no fatalities – a call-out to farmland near Peacehaven to investigate a suspicious object. No major incidents, no serious crimes, nothing to grab his interest.

Good. He’d been out of the office most of the past week, apart from some hours he had had to spend in preparation and in court on the ongoing trial of a local villain, and needed a few days to catch up on his paperwork.

He synced his Blackberry with the computer and checked his diary. It was still clear. His secretary, Eleanor Hodgson – or Management Support Assistant as the political correctness Politburo now dictated she be called – had wiped all his appointments to let him concentrate on his case and the trial. But his diary would fill up soon enough, he rued.

Almost immediately there was a rap, then his door opened and Eleanor came in. Prim and nervy, fifty-something, she looked the kind of backbone-of-England woman Grace imagined one would meet at a vicar’s tea party – not that he had ever actually been to one. And after three years of working for him, Eleanor was still unfailingly polite and a tad formal, as if she was nervous of upsetting him, although he could not imagine why.