Dead Like You (3 page)

6

Thursday 1 January

Today was New Year’s Day. And the tide was in!

Yac liked it best when the tide was in. He knew the tide was in because he could feel his home moving, rising, gently rocking. Home was a Humber keel coaler called
Tom Newbound
, painted blue and white. He did not know why the boat had been given that name, but it was owned by a woman called Jo, who was a district nurse, and her husband, Howard, who was a carpenter. Yac had driven them home one night in his taxi and they had been kind to him. Subsequently they’d become his best friends. He adored the boat, loved to hang about on it and to help Joe with painting, or varnishing, or generally cleaning her up.

Then one day they told him they were going to live in Goa in India for a while, they did not know how long. Yac was upset at losing his friends and his visits to the boat. But they told him they wanted someone to look after their houseboat, and their cat, for them.

Yac had been here for two years now. Just before Christmas he’d had a phone call from them, telling him they were going to stay for another year at least.

Which meant he could stay here for another year at least, which made him very happy. And he had a prize from last night, a new pair of shoes, which also made him very happy …

Red leather shoes. Beautifully curved with six straps and a buckle and six-inch stilettos.

They lay on the floor beside his
bunk
. He had learned nautical terms. It was a bed, really, but on a ship it was called a bunk. Just like the way the toilet wasn’t called a toilet, but the
heads
.

He could navigate from here to any port in the UK – he had memorized all the Admiralty charts. Except the boat had no engine. One day he would like to have a boat of his own, with an engine, and then he would sail to all those places that he had stored inside his head. Uh-huh.

Bosun nuzzled his hand, which was hanging over the side of his bunk. Bosun, the big, slinky ginger tom, was the boss here. The true master of this boat. Yac knew that the cat regarded him as its servant. Yac didn’t mind. The cat had never thrown up in his taxi, like some people had.

The smell of expensive new shoe leather filled Yac’s nostrils. Oh yes. Paradise! To wake up with a new pair of shoes.

On a rising tide!

That was the best thing of all about living on the water. You never heard footsteps. Yac had tried to live in the city, but it had not worked for him. He could not stand the tantalizing sound of all those shoes clacking all around him when he was trying to sleep. There were no shoes here, out on the moorings on the River Adur at Shoreham Beach. Just the slap of water, or the silence of the mudflats. The cry of gulls. Sometimes the cry of the eight-month-old baby on the boat next door.

One day, hopefully, the infant would fall into the mud and drown.

But for now, Yac looked forward to the day ahead. To getting out of bed. To examining his new shoes. Then to cataloguing them. Then perhaps to looking through his collection, which he stored in the secret places he had found and made his own on the boat. It was where he kept, among other things, his collection of electrical wiring diagrams. Then he would go into his little office up in the bow and spend time on his laptop computer, online.

What better way could there be to start a New Year?

But first he had to remember to feed the cat.

But before doing that he had to brush his teeth.

And before that he had to use the
heads
.

Then he would have to run through all the checks on the boat, ticking them off from the list the owners had given him. First on the list was to check his fishing lines. Then he had to check for leaks. Leaks were not good. Then he needed to check the mooring ropes. It was a long list and working through it made him feel good. It was good to be needed.

He was needed by Mr Raj Dibdoon, who owned the taxi.

He was needed by the nurse and the carpenter, who owned his home.

He was needed by the cat.

And this morning he had a new pair of shoes!

This was a good start to a New Year.

Uh-huh.

7

Thursday 1 January

Carlo Diomei was tired. And when he was tired he felt low, as he did right now. He did not like these long, damp English winters. He missed the crisp, dry cold of his native Courmayeur, high up in the Italian Alps. He missed the winter snow and the summer sunshine. He missed putting on his skis on his days off and spending a few precious hours alone, away from the holidaying crowds on the busy pistes, making his own silent tracks down parts of the mountains that only he and a few local guides knew.

He had just one more year of his contract to run and then, he hoped, he would return to the mountains and, with luck, to a job managing a hotel there, back among his friends.

But for now the money was good here and the experience in this famous hotel would give him a great step up his career ladder. But, shit, what a lousy start to the New Year this was!

Normally as Duty Manager of the Brighton Metropole Hotel he worked a day shift, which enabled him to spend his precious evenings at home in his rented sea-view apartment with his wife and children, a two-year-old son and a four-year-old daughter. But the Night Manager had picked yesterday, New Year’s Eve of all nights, to go down with flu. So he’d had to come back and take over, with just a two-hour break in which to dash home, put his kids to bed, toast his wife a Happy New Year with mineral water, instead of the champagne night at home they had planned, and hurry back to work to supervise all the New Year celebrations the hotel had been hosting.

He’d now been on duty for eighteen hours straight and was exhausted. In half an hour he would hand over to his deputy and would finally go home, and celebrate by smoking a badly needed cigarette, then falling into bed and getting some even more badly needed sleep.

The phone rang in his tiny, narrow office on the other side of the wall to the front desk.

‘Carlo,’ he answered.

It was Daniela de Rosa, the Housekeeping Manager, another Italian, from Milano. A room maid was concerned about room 547. It was 12.30, half an hour past check-out time, and there was a
Do Not Disturb
sign still hanging on the room door. There had been no response when she knocked repeatedly, nor when she phoned the room.

He yawned. Probably someone sleeping off a night of overindulgence. Lucky them. He tapped his keyboard to check on the room’s occupant. The name was Mrs Marsha Morris. He dialled the room number himself and listened to it ringing, without answer. He called Daniela de Rosa back.

‘OK,’ he said wearily, ‘I am coming up.’

Five minutes later, he stepped out of the lift on the fifth floor and walked along the corridor, to where the Housekeeping Manager was standing, and knocked hard on the door. There was no response. He knocked again. Waited. Then, using his pass key, he opened the door slowly and stepped in.

‘Hello!’ he said quietly.

The heavy curtains were still drawn, but in the semi-darkness he could make out the shape of someone lying on the wide bed.

‘Hello!’ he said again. ‘Good morning!’

He detected the faintest movement on the bed. ‘Hello!’ he said again. ‘Good morning, Mrs Morris. Hello! Happy New Year!’

There was no response. Just a little more movement.

He felt on the wall for the light switches and pressed one. Several lights came on at once. They revealed a slender, naked woman with large breasts, long red hair and a dense triangle of brown pubic hair, spread-eagled on the bed. Her arms and legs were outstretched in a crucifix position and held in place with white cords. The reason there was no response from her was instantly clear as he stepped closer, feeling a growing spike of unease in his gullet. Part of a face towel protruded either side of duct tape pulled tight across her mouth.

‘Oh, my God!’ the Housekeeping Manager cried out.

Carlo Diomei hurried over to the bed, his tired brain trying to make sense of what he was looking at and not entirely succeeding. Was this some strange sex game? Was her husband, or boyfriend or whoever, lurking in the bathroom? The woman’s eyes looked at him in desperation.

He ran to the bathroom and flung open the door, but it was empty. He’d seen some strange things going on in hotel rooms and had to deal with some weird shit in his time, but for a moment, for the first time in his career to date, he was uncertain what he should do next. Had they interrupted some kinky sex game? Or was something else going on?

The woman looked at him with small, frightened eyes. He felt embarrassed looking down at her nakedness. Overcoming it, he tried to remove the duct tape, but as he gave the first tentative pull the woman’s head thrashed violently. Clearly it was hurting her. But he had to get it off, he was certain. Had to speak to her. So he pulled it away from her skin as gently as he could, until he was able to pluck the towel out of her mouth.

Instantly the woman began burbling and sobbing incoherently.

8

Thursday 1 January

It had been a long time, Roy Grace reflected, since he had felt this good on a New Year’s Day. For as far back as he could remember, except for the times when he had been on duty, the New Year always began with a blinding headache and the same overwhelming sensation of doom that accompanied his hangovers.

He had drunk even more heavily on those first New Year’s Eves since Sandy’s disappearance, when their close friends Dick and Leslie Pope would not hear of him being on his own and insisted he join in their celebrations. And, almost as if it was a legacy from Sandy, he had started to intensely dislike the festivity too.

But now, this particular New Year’s Eve had been totally different. Last night’s had been the most sober – and the most enjoyable – he could remember in his entire life.

For a start, Cleo passionately loved the whole idea of celebrating the New Year. Which made it all the more ironic that she was pregnant and therefore could not really drink very much. But he hadn’t minded; he was just happy to be with her, celebrating not just the coming year, but their future together.

And, quietly, he celebrated the fact that his irascible boss, Alison Vosper, would no longer be there to dampen his spirits on an almost daily basis. He looked forward to his first meeting with his new boss, Assistant Chief Constable Peter Rigg, on Monday.

All he had managed to glean about the man so far was that he was a stickler for detail, liked to be hands-on involved and had a short fuse with fools.

To his relief, it had been a quiet morning in the CID HQ at Sussex House, so he’d spent the time steadily working through his paperwork and making brisk progress, while keeping a regular eye on the serials – the log of all reported incidents in the city of Brighton and Hove – on the computer.

As expected, there had been a few incidents in the bars, pubs and clubs, mostly fights and a few handbag thefts. He noted a couple of minor road traffic collisions, a
domestic
– a couple fighting – a complaint about noise from a party, a lost dog, a stolen moped and a naked man reported running down Western Road. But now a serious entry had appeared. It was a reported rape, at Brighton’s smart Metropole Hotel, which had popped on to the screen a few minutes ago, at 12.55 p.m.

There were four principal categories of rape:
stranger, acquaintance, date
and
partner
. At this moment there was no mention on the serial of which this might be. New Year’s Eve was the kind of time when some men got blind drunk and forced themselves on their dates or partners, and in all likelihood this incident would be in one of those categories. Serious enough, but not something likely to involve Major Crime.

Twenty minutes later he was about to head across the road to the ASDA supermarket, which doubled as the CID HQ canteen, to buy himself a sandwich for lunch, when his internal phone rang.

It was David Alcorn, a detective inspector he knew and liked a lot. Alcorn was based at the city’s busy main police station in John Street, where Grace himself had spent much of his early career as a detective, before moving to the CID HQ at Sussex House.

‘Happy New Year, Roy,’ Alcorn said in his usual blunt, sardonic voice. From the tone of his voice,
happy
had just fallen off a cliff.

‘You too, David. Did you have a good night?’

‘Yeah. Well, it was all right. Had to keep off the booze a bit to be here for seven this morning. You?’

‘Quiet, but nice – thanks.’

‘Thought I’d better give you a heads-up, Roy. Looks like we might have a stranger rape at the Metropole.’

He filled him in on the sketchy details. A Uniform Response Team had attended the hotel and called in CID. A Sexual Offences Liaison Officer or SOLO was now on her way over to accompany the victim to the recently opened specialist rape unit, the Sexual

Assault Referral Centre or SARC, in Crawley, a post-war town located in the geographical centre of Sussex.

Grace jotted down the details, such as Alcorn could give him, on a notepad. ‘Thanks, David,’ he said. ‘Keep me updated on this. Let me know if you need any help from my team.’

There was a slight pause and he sensed the hesitation in the DI’s voice. ‘Roy, there’s something that could make this a bit politically sensitive.’

‘Oh?’

‘The victim had been at a do last night at the Metropole. I’m informed that a number of police brass were at a table at this same function.’

‘Any names?’

‘The Chief Constable and his wife, for starters.’

Shit, Grace thought, but did not say.

‘Who else?’

‘The Deputy CC. And one assistant chief constable. You get my drift?’

Grace got his drift.

‘Maybe I should send someone from Major Crime up to accompany the SOLO. What do you think? As a formality.’

‘I think that would be a good plan.’

Grace quickly ran through his options. In particular he was concerned about his new boss. If ACC Peter Rigg was truly a stickler for detail, then he damned well had to start off on the right footing – and to cover himself as best he could.

‘OK. Thanks, David. I’ll send someone up there right away. In the meantime, can you get me a list of all attendees of that event?’

‘That’s already in hand.’

‘And all the guests staying there, plus all the staff – I would imagine there might have been extra staff drafted in for last night.’

‘I’m on to all of that.’ Alcorn sounded just slightly miffed, as if Grace was doubting his abilities.

‘Of course. Sorry.’

Immediately after he ended the call, he rang DC Emma-Jane Boutwood, one of the few members of his team who was in today.

She was also one of the detectives he had tasked with working through the mountains of bureaucracy required by the Crown Prosecution Service for
Operation Neptune
, a large and harrowing human-trafficking investigation he had been running in the weeks before Christmas.

It took her only a few moments to reach him from her desk in the large, open-plan Detectives’ Room just beyond his door. He noticed she was limping a little as she came into his office – still not fully recovered from the horrific injuries she had sustained in a pursuit last summer, when she had been crushed against a wall by a van. Despite multiple fractures and losing her spleen, she had insisted on cutting short her advised convalescence period to get back to work as quickly as possible.

‘Hi, E-J,’ he said. ‘Have a seat.’

Grace had just begun to run through the sketchy details David Alcorn had given him and to explain the delicate political situation when his internal phone suddenly rang again.

‘Roy Grace,’ he answered, raising a finger to E-J to ask her to wait.

‘Detective Superintendent Grace,’ said a chirpy, friendly voice with a posh, public-school accent. ‘How do you do? This is Peter Rigg here.’

Shit, Grace thought again.

‘Sir,’ he replied. ‘Very nice to – er – um – hear from you. I thought you weren’t actually starting until Monday, sir.’

‘Do you have a problem with that?’

Oh boy, Roy Grace thought, his heart sinking. The New Year was barely twelve hours old and they had their first serious crime. And the new ACC hadn’t even officially started and he’d managed to piss him off already.

He was conscious of E-J’s eyes on him, and her ears scooping this all up.

‘No, sir, absolutely not. This is actually fortuitous timing. It would seem we have our first critical incident of the year. It’s too early to tell at this moment, but it has potential for a lot of unwelcome media coverage.’

Grace then signalled to E-J that he needed privacy and she left the room, closing the door.

For the next couple of minutes he ran through what was happening. Fortunately, the new Assistant Chief Constable continued in a friendly vein.

When Grace had finished, Rigg said, ‘You’re going up there yourself, I take it?’

Roy hesitated. With the highly specialized and skilled team at Crawley, there was no actual need for him to be there at this stage, and his time would be far better employed here in the office, dealing with paperwork and keeping up to speed on the incident via the phone. But he decided that was not what the new ACC wanted to hear.

‘Yes, sir. I’m on my way shortly,’ he replied.

‘Good. Keep me informed.’

Grace assured him he would.

As he hung up, thinking hard, his door opened and the morose face and shaven dome of Detective Sergeant Glenn Branson appeared. His eyes, against his black skin, looked tired and dulled. They reminded Grace of the eyes of fish that had been dead too long, the kind Cleo had told him he should avoid on a fishmonger’s slab.

‘Yo, old-timer,’ Branson said. ‘Reckon this year’s going to be any less shitty than last?’

‘Nope!’ Grace said. ‘The years never get less shitty. All we can do is try to learn to cope with that fact.’

‘Well, you’re a sack-load of goodwill this morning,’ Branson said, slumping his huge frame down into the chair E-J had just vacated.

Even his brown suit, garish tie and cream shirt looked tired and rumpled, as if they’d also been on a slab too long, which worried Grace about his friend. Glenn Branson was normally always sharply dressed, but in recent months his marriage breakup had sent him on a downward spiral.

‘Wasn’t the best year for me last year, was it? Halfway through I got shot and three-quarters of the way through my wife threw me out.’

‘Look on the bright side. You didn’t die and you got to trash my collection of vinyls.’

‘Thanks a bunch.’

‘Want to take a drive with me?’ Grace asked.

Branson shrugged. ‘A drive? Yeah, sure. Where?’

Grace was interrupted by his radio phone ringing. It was David Alcorn calling again to give him an update.

‘Something that might be significant, Roy. Apparently some of the victim’s clothes are missing. Sounds like the offender might have taken them. In particular her shoes.’ He hesitated a moment. ‘I seem to remember there was someone doing that a few years back, wasn’t there?’

‘Yes, but he took just one shoe and the underwear,’ Grace replied, his voice quiet all of a sudden. ‘What else has been taken?’

‘We haven’t got much out of her. I understand she’s in total shock.’

No surprise there, he thought grimly. His eyes went down to one of the blue boxes on the floor – the one containing the cold-case file on the Shoe Man. He pondered for a moment.

That was twelve years ago. Hopefully it was just a coincidence.

But even as he thought that a wintry gust rippled through his veins.