Not Dead Enough (30 page)

64

The woman behind the wooden counter and glass window handed him a buff-coloured rectangular form. ‘Please put your name and address and other details on this,’ she asked him in a weary voice. She looked as if she had been sitting there for too long, reminding him of an exhibit in a museum showcase that someone had neglected to dust. Her face had an indoors pallor and her shapeless brown hair hung around her face and shoulders like curtains that had become detached from some of their rings.

Above the reception desk of the Accident and Emergency Unit of the Royal Sussex County Hospital was a large LCD display of yellow letters on a black background, currently reading WAITING TIME 3 HOURS.

He considered the form carefully. A name, address, date of birth and next of kin were required. There was also a space for allergies.

‘Everything all right?’ the woman asked.

He raised his swollen right hand. ‘Difficult to write,’ he said.

‘Would you like me to fill it in for you?’

‘I can manage.’

Then, leaning on the counter, he stared at the form for some moments, his brain, muzzed by the pain, really not functioning that well at all. He was trying to think quickly, but the thoughts that he wanted didn’t come in the right sequence. He felt a little dizzy suddenly.

‘You can sit down and fill it in,’ she said.

Snapping back at her, he shouted, ‘I SAID I CAN MANAGE!’

People all around looked up from their hard grey plastic seats, startled. Not smart, he thought. Not smart to draw attention. Hastily he filled out the form and then, as if to make amends, beside Allergies he wrote, wittily, he thought, ‘Pain.’

But she didn’t appear to notice as she took the form back. ‘Please take a seat and a nurse will come and see you shortly.’

‘Three hours?’ he said.

‘I’ll tell them it’s urgent,’ she said flatly, then watched warily as the strange man with long, straggly brown hair, a heavy moustache and beard, and large, tinted glasses, wearing a baggy white shirt over a string vest, grey slacks and sandals, walked over to an empty seat, between a man with a bleeding arm and an elderly woman with a bandaged head, and sat down. Then she picked up her phone.

The Time Billionaire unclipped the BlackBerry from its holster, which was attached to his belt, but before he had time to do anything, a shadow fell in front of him. A pleasant-looking, dark-haired woman in her late forties, in nursing uniform, was standing over him. The badge on her lapel read Barbara Leach – A&E Nurse.

‘Hello!’ she said breezily. ‘Would you come with me?’

She led him into a small booth and asked him to sit down.

‘What seems to be the problem?’

He raised his hand. ‘I hurt it working on a car.’

‘How long ago?’

Thinking for a moment, he said, ‘Thursday afternoon.’

She examined it carefully, turning it over, then comparing it to his left hand. ‘It looks infected,’ she said. ‘Have you had a tetanus injection recently?’

‘I don’t remember.’

She studied it again for a while thoughtfully. ‘Working on a car?’ she said.

‘An old car. I’m restoring it.’

‘I’ll get the doctor to see you as soon as possible.’

He went back to his chair in the waiting room and turned his attention back to his BlackBerry. He logged on to the web and then clicked on his bookmark for Google.

When that came up, he entered a search command for MG TF.

That was the car Cleo Morey drove.

Despite his pain, despite his muzzy thoughts, a plan was forming. Really quite a good plan.

‘Fucking brilliant!’ he said out loud, unable to control his excitement. Then immediately he shrank back into his shell.

He was shaking.

Always a sign that the Lord approved.

65

Reluctantly cutting short his precious hours in Munich, Grace managed to board an earlier flight. The weather in England had changed dramatically during the day, and shortly after six o’clock in the evening, as he went to get his car from the short-stay multi-storey car park at Heathrow, the sky was an ominous grey and a cold wind was blowing, flecking the windscreen with rain.

It was the kind of wind that you forgot even existed during the long, summer days they’d had recently, he reflected. It was like a stern reminder from Mother Nature that summer was not going to last much longer. The days were already getting shorter. In little over a month it would be autumn. Then winter. Another year.

Feeling flat and tired, he wondered what he had achieved today, apart from earning another black mark in Alison Vosper’s book. Anything at all?

He pushed his ticket into the machine and the barrier rose. Even the rorty sound of the engine as he accelerated, which ordinarily he liked listening to, seemed off-key tonight. Definitely not firing on all cylinders. Like its owner.

Sort yourself out in Munich. Call me when you get back home.

As he headed towards the roundabout, taking the direction for the M25, he stuck his phone in the hands-free cradle and dialled Cleo’s mobile. It started ringing. Then he heard her voice, a little slurred, and hard to decipher above a raucous din of jazz music in the background.

‘Yo! Detective Shhuperintendent Roy Grace! Where are you?’

‘Just left Heathrow. You?’

‘I’m getting smashed with my little sister, we’re on our third Sea Breezes – no – sorry – correct that! We’re on our fifth Sea Breezes, down by the Arches. It’s blowing a hooley, but there’s a great band. Come and join us!’

‘I have to go to a crime scene. Later?’

‘Don’t think we’ll be conscious much longer!’

‘So you’re not on call today?’

‘Day off!’

‘Can I swing by later?’

‘Can’t guarantee I’ll be awake. But you can try!’

When he was a kid, Church Road, Hove, was the dull backwater that Brighton’s busy, buzzy, shopping street, Western Road, morphed into, somewhere west of the Waitrose supermarket. It had perked up considerably in recent years, with trendy restaurants, delis and shops displaying stuff that people under ninety might actually want to buy.

Like most of this city, many of the familiar names from his past along Church Road, such as the grocer’s Cullens, the chemist’s Paris and Greening, the department stores Hills of Hove and Plummer Roddis, had now gone. Just a few still remained. One was Forfars the baker’s. He turned right shortly past them, drove up a one-way street, made a right at the top, then another right into Newman Villas.

As with most lower-rent residential areas of this transient city, the street was a riot of letting-agency boards. Number 17 was no exception. A Rand & Co. sign, prominently displayed, advertised a two-bedroom flat to let. Just inches below it, a burly uniformed police constable, holding a clipboard, stood in front of a barrier of blue and white crime-scene tape that was cordoning off some of the pavement. Parked along the street were a number of familiar vehicles. Grace saw the square hulk of a Major Incident Vehicle, several other police vehicles double-parked, making the narrow street even narrower, and a cluster of media reporters, with good old Kevin Spinella, he noted, among them.

Anonymous in his private Alfa, he drove past them all and found a space on double yellow lines around the corner, back in Church Road. Switching the engine off, he sat still for a moment.

Sandy.

Where did he go from here? Wait to see if Kullen came up with anything? Go back to Munich and spend more time there? He had over a fortnight’s leave owing – Cleo and he had discussed going away somewhere together, with her perhaps accompanying him to a police symposium in New Orleans at the end of this month. But at this moment a big part of him was torn.

If Sandy was in Munich, given time he knew he could find her. Today had been stupid, really. He was never going to be able to achieve much in just a few hours. But at least he had started the ball rolling, done what he could. Marcel Kullen was reliable, would do his best for him. If he went back for a week, maybe that would be sufficient. He could have one week there and another in New Orleans with Cleo. That would work – if he could get her to buy it. A big if.

Switching his mind to the task immediately in front of him, he hefted his go-bag out of the boot and walked back to number 17. Several reporters shouted at him, an eager-looking girl shoved a foam-padded microphone in his face and flash bulbs popped.

‘No comment at this stage,’ he said firmly.

Suddenly, Spinella was blocking his path. ‘Is this another, Detective Superintendent?’ he asked quietly.

‘Another what?’

Spinella dropped his voice even more, giving him a knowing look. ‘You know what I mean. Right?’

‘I’ll tell you when I’ve seen myself.’

‘Don’t worry, Detective Superintendent. If you don’t, someone else will.’ Spinella tapped the side of his nose. ‘Sources!’

Harbouring the pleasant thought of punching the reporter’s lights out, almost hearing the crunching sound of Spinella’s nasal bones already, Grace pushed past him and signed his name on the clipboard. The constable told him to go up to the top floor.

He ducked under the tape, then removed a fresh white paper suit from his bag and began struggling clumsily into it. To his embarrassment, he almost fell over in front of the entire Sussex media as he jammed both feet into one leg. Red-faced, he sorted himself out, pulled on disposable overshoes and a pair of latex gloves and went inside.

Closing the front door behind him, he stopped in the hallway and sniffed. Just the usual musty smell of old carpet and boiled vegetables that was typical of a thousand tired buildings like this he’d been into in his career. No stench of a decaying cadaver, which meant the victim hadn’t been dead long – it wouldn’t take many days of a summer heatwave for the stench of a putrefying corpse to start becoming noticeable. A small relief, he thought, noticing the strip of tape that had been laid all the way up the stairs, marking the entry and exit route – which he was pleased to see. At least the police team that had arrived here knew what they were doing, avoiding contamination at the scene.

Which was what he needed to do himself. It would not be smart for him to go upstairs, because of the risk of giving the defence team a cross-contamination situation they could crawl all over. Instead, he pulled out his mobile phone and called Kim Murphy, telling her he was downstairs.

Up on the first floor above him, he suddenly saw a white-suited and hooded SOCO officer called Eddie Gribble come into view. He was kneeling on the floor, taking a scraping. He nodded in acknowledgement. A second, identically clad SOCO, Tony Monnington, also came into view, dusting the wall for fingerprints.

‘Evening, Roy!’ he called down cheerily.

Grace raised a hand.‘Having a nice Sunday?’

‘Gets me out of the house. And Belinda’s able to watch what she wants on the telly.’

‘There’s always a silver lining!’ Grace replied grimly.

Moments later two further suited and hooded figures appeared and came down the stairs towards him. One was Kim Murphy, holding a video camera, the other was Detective Chief Inspector Brendan Duigan, a tall, large-framed, genial officer with a gentle, ruddy face and prematurely white hair that was cropped into a buzz-cut. Duigan was the duty SIO called to this scene earlier, Grace had learned on his way here. Duigan had subsequently called Kim Murphy over, because of similarities with the Katie Bishop murder.

After exchanging brief pleasantries, Murphy played Grace the video that had been taken of the scene. He watched it on the small screen on the back of the camera.

After you had done this job for a number of years, you started thinking that you were immune to horrors, that you had seen it all, that nothing could surprise or shock you any more. But the footage that confronted him now sent a black chill worming deep through him.

Staring at the slightly jerky footage of the white-suited and hooded figures of two more SOCO officers on their hands and knees and another standing, and Nadiuska De Sancha on her knees at the end of the bed, he saw the alabaster-coloured naked body of a young woman with long brown hair lying on the bed, with a gas mask over her face.

It was as near as possible a carbon copy of the way Katie Bishop had been found.

Except that Katie did not appear to have put up a fight. The camera now started to show that this young woman certainly had. There was a smashed plate on the floor, with a mark gouged out of the wall above it. A shattered dressing-table mirror, bottles of perfume and jars of make-up lying all over the place, along with a smear of blood on the wall, just above the white headboard. Then a lingering shot of a framed, abstract print of a row of deckchairs, lying on the floor, the glass shattered.

Brighton had had its share of murders over the years, but one thing, mercifully, it had never been clouded by before was the spectre of a serial killer. It wasn’t even an area Grace had needed to know much about – before now.

Nearby, a car alarm beep-beep-beeped loudly. He blanked it out as he stared at the freeze-frame of the dead young woman. He had regularly attended lectures given by SIOs on serial-killer cases at the International Homicide Investigators Association annual symposium, which was mostly held in the USA. He was trying to recall the common features. So far, Spinella had kept his word and there had been no mention in the press about the gas mask, so a copycat killing was unlikely.

One thing he did remember clearly from a lecture was a discussion of the fear that could be created in a community when it was announced that a serial killer was out there. But equally, the community had a right to know, a need to know.

Grace then turned to DCI Duigan. ‘What do we have so far?’ he asked.

‘Nadiuska’s best guess is the young woman has been dead for about two days, give or take.

‘Any idea of how she died?’

‘Yes.’ Kim Murphy started the camera running and zoomed in, pointing to the young woman’s throat. A dark red ligature mark was visible, then even more clearly for an instant as the burst of flash from a police photographer’s camera strobed across it.