Dead Like You (42 page)

110

Sunday 18 January

Jessie turned and stared straight into the beam, her brain racing. He didn’t have a gun, she was pretty sure of that, otherwise he’d have pulled that on her, not the knife. He was wounded. He was not big. She had the knife. She knew some self-defence. But he still frightened her.

There must be another exit.

Then the torch went off.

She blinked at the darkness, as if that might make it go away, or somehow lighten it. She was shaking. She could hear herself panting. She struggled to quieten her breathing down.

Now they were equal, but he had an advantage. He presumably knew the layout in here.

Was he creeping up on her now?

In the torch beam, she’d seen to her left a vast space with what looked like some kind of silo at the end of it. She took a few steps and almost instantly stumbled. There was a loud metal
pingggggg
as something rolled away from under her feet and fell with a swoosh, splashing into water below seconds later.

Shit.

She stood still. Then she remembered her phone!

If she could get back to the van, she could call for help. Then with panic rising, she thought again,
Call who?
Where was she? Trapped inside some fucking great disused factory building somewhere. How great would that sound if she told the 999 operator?

*

He was already back at the camper van. His face was throbbing in agony and he couldn’t see out of his right eye, but he didn’t care, not at this moment. He did not care about anything except getting that bitch. She’d seen his face.

He had to find her. Had to stop her getting away.

Had to, because she could bring him down.

And he knew how.

He did not want to reveal his position by switching on the torch, so he moved as slowly as he could, feeling his way around the interior of the van until he found what he was looking for. His night-vision binoculars.

It took him only seconds to spot her. A green figure through the night-vision lens, moving slowly, inching her way left, walking like someone in slow motion.

Think you are so smart, don’t you?

He looked around for an implement. Something heavy and solid that would bring her down. He opened the cupboard beneath the sink, but it was too dark to see in, even with his night-vision. So he briefly switched on the torch. The night-vision flared, shooting searing light into his right eye, startling him so much he dropped the torch and stumbled back, falling over.

*

Jessie heard the crash. She looked over in its direction and instantly saw light inside the camper. She hurried further away towards the silo she had seen, fumbling her way, tripping over something, then banging her head into a sharp protruding object. She stifled a groan. Then carried on, feeling with her hands in the darkness until they reached an upright steel stanchion.

One of the pillars supporting the silo?

She crept forward, feeling the downward curve of the base of the silo, and crawled under it, then, still inching her way with her hands, she stood up, breathing in a dry dusty smell. Then she touched something that felt like the rung of a ladder.

*

He carried on searching with the torch, frantically opening each of the drawers. In the last one he found a bunch of tools. Among them was a big, heavy spanner. He picked it up, feeling the pain in his eye worsening with every second, feeling the blood streaming down his face. He retrieved the binoculars and moved to the door, staring out through them.

The bitch had vanished.

He didn’t care. He would find her. He knew the whole of this cement works like the back of his hand. He’d supervised the installation of all the surveillance cameras in here. This building housed the giant kilns that heated the combined limestone, clay, sand and bottom ash to 1,500 degrees Celsius, then fed it into twin giant cooling turbines, forward to the grinding mills and, when processed, into a series of storage silos to feed into waiting empty goods trucks. If the bitch wanted to hide, there were plenty of places.

But there was only one exit.

And he had the keys to the padlock in his pocket.

111

Sunday 18 January

Roy Grace delayed the Sunday evening briefing to 7.30 p.m., to give him time to report on the findings from the exhumation.

He left Glenn Branson in the mortuary, to cover any new developments that might occur, as the post-mortem was still not completed and was not likely to be for some while yet. The corpse had a broken jawbone and fractured skull, and it was the blow to the skull that had almost certainly killed her.

His best hopes, both of identifying the dead woman and of achieving his aim in having this exhumation, lay in the hair follicles and skin samples taken from the corpse, along with the condom which contained, in the views of Nadiuska De Sancha and Joan Major, what might be intact traces of semen. The forensic archaeologist thought that although it was twelve years old there was a good chance of DNA being extracted intact from that.

These items had been couriered in an icebox to the DNA laboratory he favoured for fast turnarounds and with whom he had a good working relationship, Orchid Cellmark Forensics. They had promised to start work the moment the items arrived. But there was a slow sequencing process and even if the lab worked around the clock, the earliest they could expect any results would be mid-afternoon tomorrow, Monday. Grace was assured he would be notified instantly by phone.

He took his place and addressed his team, bringing them up to date, then asked for progress reports.

Bella Moy went first, handing out photographs of a young woman with wild hair. ‘Sir, this is a photograph up in Brighton nick of one of the wanted persons in the city. Her current name – she’s used several aliases – is Donna Aspinall. She’s a known user, with a string of previous for fare dodging, both on trains and in taxis. She’s got an ASBO and she’s currently wanted on three separate counts of violent assault, GBH and actual assault. She’s been identified by two covert officers in the operation last night – one of whom she bit on the arm – as the person John Kerridge, the taxi driver, was chasing.’

Grace stared at the photograph, realizing the implication. ‘You’re saying that Kerridge is telling the truth?’

‘This would imply that he might be telling the truth about this passenger, sir.’

He thought for a moment. Kerridge had now been held for twenty-four hours. The maximum period for detaining a suspect without charge and without obtaining a court extension was thirty-six hours. They would have to release the taxi driver at 9.30 tomorrow, unless they had enough reason to convince a magistrate to hold him longer. They didn’t yet have evidence that Jessie Sheldon’s disappearance was the work of the Shoe Man. But if Kerridge’s solicitor, Acott, got hold of this – and he undoubtedly would and probably already had – they’d have a fight on their hands to get an extension. He needed to think about this, and getting an emergency magistrates’ court appearance tonight to request a further extension.

‘OK, thanks. Good work, Bella.’

Then Norman Potting raised his hand. ‘Boss, I’ve had a lot of help today from the mobile phone company, O2. I spoke to Jessie Sheldon’s fiancé early this morning, who told me that’s the supplier her iPhone’s registered with. They provided me half an hour ago with the tracking report on her phone. We may have a result here.’

‘Go on,’ Grace said.

‘The last call she made on it was logged at 6.32 p.m. last night, to a number I’ve identified as belonging to her fiancé, Benedict Greene. He confirms he received a call from her at approximately that time, telling him she was heading home from her kick-boxing lesson. He told her to hurry, because he was picking her up at 7.15 p.m. The phone then remained in standby mode. No further calls were made, but it was plotted, from contact with base stations in the city, moving steadily west from approximately 6.45 p.m. – the time of the abduction. At 7.15 p.m. it stopped moving and has remained static since then.’

‘Where?’ Grace asked.

‘Well,’ the DS said, ‘let me show you.’

He stood up and pointed to an Ordnance Survey map stuck to a whiteboard on the wall. A squiggly blue line ran the entire length of it. There was a red oval drawn on the map, with two red Xs at the top and bottom.

‘The two crosses mark the O2 base stations that Jessie Sheldon’s phone is currently communicating with,’ Potting said. ‘It’s a pretty big area and unfortunately there’s no third base station within range to give us the triangulation which would enable us to pinpoint her position more accurately.’

He pointed at the squiggly blue line. ‘This is the River Adur, which runs up from Shoreham.’

‘Shoreham’s where John Kerridge lives,’ Bella Moy said.

‘Yes, but that’s not helpful to us, since he’s in custody,’ Potting replied in a patronizing tone. Then he continued: ‘There’s open countryside on both sides of the river and Combes Road, a busy main road which runs between these two base stations. There are a few detached private houses, a row of cottages that used to belong to the old cement works, and the cement works itself. It would seem that Jessie Sheldon, or at least her mobile phone, is somewhere inside this circle. But it’s a big area.’

‘We can rule out the cement works,’ said DC Nick Nicholl. ‘I attended there a couple of years ago when I was on Response. It’s got extremely high security – round-the-clock monitoring. If a bird shits, it pings an alarm.’

‘Excellent, Nick,’ Grace said. ‘Thank you. OK. Immediate action. We need to get a ground search of the entire area at first light. A POLSA and as many Uniform, Specials and PCSOs as we can muster. I want the river searched – we’ll put the Specialist Search Unit in there. And we’ll get the helicopter up right away. They can do a floodlight search.’

Grace made some notes, then looked up at his team.

‘According to the Land Registry records, the lock-up is owned by a property company, sir,’ Emma-Jane Boutwood said. ‘I’ll go to their offices first thing in the morning.’

He nodded. Despite round-the-clock surveillance, no one had shown up there. He was not hopeful that anyone would now.

He wasn’t sure what to think.

He turned to the forensic psychologist. ‘Julius, anything?’

Proudfoot nodded. ‘The man who has taken Jessie Sheldon, he’s your man,’ he said emphatically. ‘Not the chap you have in custody.’

‘You sound very certain.’

‘Mark my words. The right location, the right time, the right person,’ he said, so smugly that Grace wished desperately, for an instant, that he could prove the man wrong.

*

When he returned to his office after the briefing had ended, Grace found a small FedEx package awaiting him.

Curious, he sat down and tore it open. And his evening just got a whole worse.

There was a handwritten note inside, on Police Training College, Bramshill headed paper, and attached to it was a photocopy of an email dated October last year.

The email was addressed to him, from Detective Superintendent Cassian Pewe. It informed him that there were some pages missing from the file on the Shoe Man that Grace had asked him to look through. The same crucial pages on the witness who had seen the van in which Rachael Ryan might have been abducted back in 1997.

The handwritten note said breezily.
Found this in my Sent box, Roy! Hope it’s helpful. Perhaps your memory’s not what it was – but hey, don’t worry – happens to all of us! Cheers. Cassian.

After ten minutes of searching through his email system, Grace found the original sitting among hundreds of others that were unread. It had been chaos around that time and Pewe seemed to have taken delight in bombarding him with dozens of e-missives daily. If he had read them all, he’d never have got anything done.

Nonetheless, it was going to leave him with a red face, and one less suspect.

112

Sunday 18 January

Jessie had always been petrified of heights and for that reason at least she was grateful for the darkness. She had no idea where she was, but she had just climbed, one rung at a time, what she figured might be an inspection ladder inside the silo chute.

She had climbed for so long it felt like the ladder reached up to the skies, and she was glad she could not see down. She looked, every few rungs, scared he might already be climbing up after her, but there was no sign – or sound – of him.

Finally at the top she’d felt a railing and a gridded metal floor, and had hauled herself up on to this. Then she had gone head first into a stack of what felt and smelt like old cement bags, and had crawled on top them. It was where she crouched now, peering into the blackness all around her and listening, trying to keep still to stop the bags rustling.

But she could hear nothing beyond the regular sounds of her prison. The regular clangings, clatterings, squeakings and bangings that were all much louder up here than they’d been when she was in the van, as the wind battered broken metal sheeting all around her.

She was thinking hard. What was his plan? Why wasn’t he using the torch?

Was there another way up here?

The only thing that she could see was the luminous dial of her watch. It was just coming up to 9.30 p.m. Sunday night, she figured, it had to be. Over twenty-four hours since she’d been kidnapped. What was happening at home and with Benedict? He’d be isolated from her parents, she thought, wishing desperately now she had introduced them sooner, so they could all be doing something together.

Were the police involved? They must be. She knew her father. He would get every emergency service in the country involved.

How were they? What was her mother thinking? Her father? Benedict?

She heard the distant clatter of a helicopter. That was the second time in the past half-hour she had heard one.

Maybe it was looking for her.

*

He heard the sound of the helicopter again too. A powerful machine, not one of the smaller training ones from the school at nearby Shoreham Airport. And not many helicopters flew at night either. Mainly military, rescue services, air ambulances – and police.

The Sussex Police helicopter was based at Shoreham. If it was theirs that he was hearing, there was no reason to panic. It could be up for all kinds of reasons. The clatter was fading now; it was heading away to the east.

Then he heard a new sound that worried him much more.

A sharp, insistent buzzing. It was coming from the front of the camper. He lowered the binoculars and saw a weak, pulsing light that was also coming from the same place.

‘Oh, shit. No, no, no!’

It was the bitch’s mobile phone, which he had taken from her pocket. He thought he had switched the fucking thing off.

He stumbled up to the front, able to see the light from the phone’s flashing display, seized it, then threw it on the floor in fury and stamped on it, crushing it like a massive beetle.

He stamped on it again. Then again. Then again.

Maddened with pain from his eye, anger at the bitch and anger at himself, he stood shaking.
Christ! Oh, Christ! Oh, Christ!
How could he have been so stupid?

Mobile phones gave away your location, even when they were only on standby. It would be one of the first things any intelligent police officer would be looking for.

Perhaps the phone companies were not able to access detailed stuff like that on Sundays?

But he knew he could not take the risk. He had to move Jessie Sheldon away from here as quickly as possible. Tonight. During darkness.

Which made it even more imperative to find her and quickly.

She’d made no sound for over an hour. Playing some clever hiding game. She might think she was clever that she had the knife. But he had two far more valuable tools at this moment. The torch and the binoculars.

He’d never had much truck with literature and shit. But there was one line he remembered from somewhere, through his pain:
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

That’s what he was now.

He stepped down out of the van on to the concrete floor and raised his binoculars to his face. Hunting.