Dead Simple (15 page)

He shuddered. The vehicles that ended up in this place, under secure lock and key, were the ones in the region that had been involved in serious or fatal accidents. They were kept here until the Crash Investigation Unit and sometimes Crime Scene Investigators had obtained all the information they required, before going to a breaker’s yard.

The fat man in the boiler suit pointed at a twisted mass of white, with part of its roof cut away, the cab, with the windscreen gone, sheared jaggedly away from the rest of the van, and much of the interior was covered in white plastic sheeting. ‘That’s the one.’

Both Grace and Branson stared at it in silence. Grace couldn’t help his mind dwelling for several uncomfortable moments on the sheer horror of the image. The two of them walked around the van. Grace noticed mud caked on the wheel hubs, and more, heavy mud on the sills and splashes of it up the paintwork, slowly dissolving in the rain.

Handing the umbrella to his colleague, he wrenched open the buckled driver’s door, and immediately was hit by the cloying, heavy stench of putrefying blood. It didn’t matter how many times he experienced it, each new occasion was just as bad. It was the smell of death itself.

Holding his breath to try to block it out he pulled back the sheeting. The steering wheel had been hacked off and the driver’s part of the front bench seat was bent right back. There were blood stains all over the front seat, the floor and the dash.

Covering them with the sheeting, he climbed in. It felt dark and unnaturally silent. It gave him the creeps. Part of the engine had come through the flooring and the pedals were raised in an unnatural position. Reaching across, he opened the glove compartment, then pulled out an owner’s manual, a pack of parking vouchers, some fuel receipts and a couple of unlabelled tape cassettes. He handed the cassettes to Glenn.

‘Better have a listen to these.’

Branson pocketed them.

Ducking under the jagged cut in the roof, Grace climbed into the back of the van, his shoes echoing on the buckled floor. Branson pulled open the rear doors, letting more light in. Roy stared down at a plastic fuel can, a spare tyre, a wheel-wrench and a parking ticket in a plastic bag. He took the ticket out, and saw it was dated several days before the accident. He handed it to Branson for bagging. There was a solitary, left-foot Adidas trainer which he also passed to Branson, and a nylon bomber jacket. He felt in the pockets, pulling out a pack of cigarettes, a plastic lighter and a dry-cleaning ticket stub with an address in Brighton. Branson bagged each item.

Grace scanned the interior carefully, checking he had missed nothing, thinking hard. Then climbing back out and sheltering under the umbrella, he asked Branson, ‘So who owns this vehicle?’

‘Houlihan’s — the undertakers in Brighton. One of the boys who died worked there — it was his uncle’s firm.’

‘Four funerals. Should get a nice quantity discount,’ Grace said grimly.

‘You’re a real sick bastard sometimes, you know that?’

Ignoring him, Grace was pensive for a moment. ‘Have you spoken to anyone at Houlihan’s?’

‘Interviewed Mr Sean Houlihan, the owner, himself yesterday afternoon. He’s pretty upset as you can imagine. Told me his nephew was a hard-working lad, eager to please.’

‘Aren’t they all? And he gave him permission to take the van?’

Branson shook his head. ‘No. But says it was out of character.’

Roy Grace thought for a moment. ‘What’s the van ordinarily used for?’

‘Collecting cadavers. Hospitals, hospices, old folk’s homes, places like that where they’d be spooked to see a hearse. You hungry?’

‘I was before I came here.’

Ten minutes later they sat at a wobbly corner table in an almost deserted country pub, Grace cradling a pint of Guinness and Branson a Diet Coke, while they waited for their food to come. There was a cavernous inglenook fireplace beside them piled with unlit logs, and a collection of ancient agricultural artefacts hung from the walls. It was the kind of pub Grace liked, a genuine old country pub. He loathed the theme pubs with their phoney names that were insidiously becoming part of every town’s increasingly characterless landscape.

‘You’ve checked his mobile?’

‘Should have the records back this afternoon,’ Branson said.

‘Number twelve?’

Grace looked up to see a barmaid holding a tray with their food. Steak and kidney pudding for him, swordfish steak and salad for Glenn Branson.

Grace pierced the soft suet with his knife and instantly steam and gravy erupted from it.

‘Instant heart attack on a plate that is,’ Branson chided. ‘You know what suet is? Beef fat. Yuk.’

Spooning some mustard onto his plate, Grace said, ‘It’s not what you eat, it’s worrying about what you eat. Worry is the killer.’

Branson forked some fish into his mouth. As he started chewing, Grace continued. ‘I read that the levels of mercury in sea fish, from pollution, are at danger level. You shouldn’t eat fish more than once a week.’

Branson’s chewing slowed down and he looked uncomfortable. ‘Where did you read that?’

‘It was a report from
Nature
, I think. It’s about the most respected scientific journal in the world.’ Grace smiled, enjoying the expression on his friend’s face.

‘Shit, we eat fish like — almost every night.
Mercury
?’

‘You’ll end up as a thermometer.’

‘That’s not funny — I mean—’ Two sharp beeps in succession silenced him.

Grace tugged his mobile from his pocket and stared at the screen.

Why no reply to my text, Big Boy? Claudine XX

‘God, this is all I need,’ he said. ‘A frigging bunny boiler.’

Branson raised his eyebrows. ‘Healthy meat, rabbit. Free range.’

‘This one isn’t healthy and she doesn’t eat meat. I mean bunny boiler as in that old movie with Glenn Close.’

‘
Fatal Attraction?
Michael Douglas and Anne Archer, 1987. Great movie — it was on Sky on Sunday.’

Grace showed him the text.

Branson grinned. ‘
Big Boy,
eh?’

‘It never got that far and it’s never going to.’

Then Branson’s mobile rang. He pulled it from his jacket pocket and answered. ‘Glenn Branson. Yeah? OK, great, I’ll be there in an hour.’ He ended the call and left his phone on the table. Looking at Grace, he said, ‘The Vodafone log from Michael Harrison’s phone just came in. Want to come to the office and help me with it?’

Grace thought for a moment, then checked his diary on his Blackberry. He’d kept the afternoon clear, intending to clear up some paperwork relating to the Suresh Hossain trial that Alison Vosper had requested at their 12.30 meeting, then read the report on the Tommy Lytle case. But that had waited twenty-seven years, and another day would not make much difference either way. Whereas Michael Harrison’s disappearance was urgent. Although he did not know the characters, he felt for them. Particularly for the fiancée; he knew just how wrenching it was when a loved one went missing. At this moment, if there was any way he could be of help, he should do it.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Sure.’

Branson ate his salad, and left the rest of his fish untouched, while Grace tucked into his steak and kidney pudding with relish. ‘I read a while ago,’ he told Branson, ‘that the French drink more red wine than the English but live longer. The Japanese eat more fish than the English, but drink less wine and live longer. The Germans eat more red meat than the English, and drink more beer, and they live longer, too. You know the moral of this story?’

‘No.’

‘It’s not what you eat or drink — it’s speaking English that kills you.’

Branson grinned. ‘I don’t know why I like you. You always manage to make me feel guilty about something.’

‘So let’s go find Michael Harrison. Then you can enjoy your weekend.’

Branson pushed his fish to the side of his plate and drained his Diet Coke.

‘Filled with Aspartame, that stuff,’ Grace said, looking disapprovingly at his glass. ‘I read a theory on the web that it can give you Lupus.’

‘What’s Lupus?’

‘It’s far worse than mercury.’

‘Thanks, Big Boy.’

‘Now you’re just jealous.’

As they entered the tired-looking, six-storey building that housed Brighton police station from the parking lot at the rear, Grace felt a pang of nostalgia. This building had a reputation as being the busiest police station in Britain. The place hummed and buzzed and he had loved his time — almost fifteen years — working here. It was the buzz that he missed most about his recent posting to the relatively quiet backwater of the CID headquarters building on the outskirts.

As they climbed up the cement stairs, blue walls on either side of them, the familiar noticeboards with events and procedures pinned to them, he could smell that he was still in a busy police station. It wasn’t the smell of hospitals, or schools, or a civil service building, it was the smell of energy.

They went on up past the third floor, where his old office had been, and then along a corridor on the fourth floor, past a large sign dominating an entire noticeboard, with the wording ‘OVERALL CRIME DETECTION RATE. APRIL. 27.8%’. Then he followed Branson into the long, narrow office his colleague was setting up as the incident room for Michael Harrison. Six desks, each with a computer terminal. Two of them were occupied, both by detectives he knew and liked — DC Nick Nicholl and DS Bella Moy. There was a SASCO flip chart on an easel and a blank whiteboard on the wall, next to a large-scale map of Sussex, on which was a pattern of coloured pins.

‘Coffee?’ Branson offered.

‘I’m fine for the moment.’

They stopped at Bella’s desk, which was covered in neat wodges of paper, among which stood an open box of Maltesers. Pointing at the papers, she said, ‘I have Michael Harrison’s Vodafone log from Tuesday morning up until nine o’clock this morning. I also thought it would be a good idea to get the ones of the other four with him.’

‘Good thinking,’ Branson said, impressed with her initiative.

She pointed at her computer screen, on which there was a map: ‘I’ve plotted here all the masts of the mobile networks the five of them used, Orange, Vodaphone and T-Mobile. Orange and T-Mobile operate on a higher frequency than Vodafone — which Michael Harrison is on. The last signal from his mobile came from the base station at the Pippingford Park mast on the A22. But I’ve found out we cannot rely on the fact that this is the nearest, because if the network is busy it will hand off signals to the next available mast.’

She was going to go far, this young lady, Grace thought. Studying the map for a moment, he asked, ‘What’s the distance between the masts?’

‘In cities it is about five hundred metres. But out in the country, it is several miles.’

From previous experience, Grace knew that the mobile phone companies used a network of radio masts that acted as beacons. Mobiles, whether on
standby
or
talk
mode, sent constant signals out to the nearest beacon. It was a simple task to plot the movements of any phone user from this information. But this was obviously a lot easier in cities than in the countryside.

Bella stood up and walked across to the map of Sussex on the wall. She pointed at a blue pin in the centre of Brighton, surrounded by green, purple, yellow and white pins. ‘I’ve marked Michael Harrison’s phone with blue pins. The other four with him have different colours.’

Grace followed her finger as she talked. ‘We can see all five pins remained together from seven in the evening until nine.’ She pointed to three different locations. ‘There is a pub in each of these places,’ she said. ‘But this is where it gets interesting.’ She pointed to a location some miles north of Brighton. ‘All five pins close together here. Then we only have four. Here.’

Branson said, ‘Green, purple, yellow and white. No blue.’

‘Exactly,’ she said.

‘What movement on the blue pin after that?’

‘None,’ she said, emphatically.

‘So they parted company,’ Grace said, ‘at — about — eight forty-five?’

‘Unless he dropped his phone somewhere.’

‘Of course.’

‘So we’re talking about a radius of five miles, about fifteen miles north of Brighton?’ Glenn Branson said.

‘Is his phone still giving off signals?’ Grace said, distracted by Bella’s combination of smart mind and good looks. He’d met her before but had never really
noticed
her before. She had a really pretty face, and unless she was wearing rocks inside her bra, she had seriously large breasts — something that had always turned him on. He switched his mind off her and back to business. Then he shot a glance at her hand to see if she was wearing any rings. One sapphire band, but not on the marriage finger. He filed it away.

‘The last signal was at eight forty-five Tuesday night. Nothing since.’

‘So what’s your view, Bella?’ Grace asked.

Bella thought for a moment, fixing him with alert blue eyes. But her expression bore nothing more than businesslike deference to a superior. ‘I spoke to a technician at the phone company. He says his mobile is either switched off, and has been since Tuesday night, or it is in an area of no signal.’

Grace nodded. ‘This Michael Harrison is an ambitious and busy businessman. He’s due to get married tomorrow morning to a very beautiful woman, by all accounts. Twenty minutes before a fatal car smash that killed four of his best friends, his phone went dead. During the past year he has been stealthily transferring money from his company to a Cayman Islands bank account — at least one million pounds that we know about. And his business partner, who should have been on that fatal stag night, for some reason was not there. Are my facts right so far?’

‘Yes,’ Glenn Branson said.

‘So he could be dead. Or he could have pulled a smart vanishing act.’

‘We need to check out the area Bella has ring-fenced. Go to all the pubs he might have visited. Talk to everyone who knows him.’

‘And then?’

‘Facts, Glenn. Let’s get all the facts first. If they don’t lead us to him, then we can start to speculate.’