Want You Dead (16 page)

Grace grinned. Despite them being the most unlikely couple imaginable, he was pleased for both of them. Bella, who was in her mid-thirties, had been stuck at home for years looking after her ailing mother, and leading what seemed to him to be a totally joyless life beyond her work. And Norman, despite being his own worst enemy at times, had been ruthlessly conned and exploited by his scheming Thai bride and had recently been dealt a shitty blow by Mother Nature. ‘So she will become Mrs Norman Potting the fifth?’

‘Fifth and last, I hope!’ Potting said.

Then both men fell silent as the darkness behind the possible truth of that comment, Norman’s prostate cancer, sat between them like an elephant in the room.

‘Well, she’s a lovely lady. Let’s hope you have a long and happy marriage,’ Grace said. ‘You both deserve a break in life. I’ll make sure you sit together. And congratulations!’

‘Thank you, I appreciate it.’ Potting gave a sad, wintry smile. ‘Right, business.’ He shook out the contents of the envelope, several printed pages clipped together, and passed them across the desk to Grace. ‘You asked me to have the suicide note of Dr Karl Murphy checked out by a graphologist? To have it compared against samples of his normal handwriting?’

Grace nodded. ‘Yes. And?’

‘This is the full report. It’s pretty detailed. In summary, there is little doubt Dr Karl Murphy wrote the note. I was able to get the work fast-tracked as the guy owed me a favour.’

‘Good work, Norman, thanks.’

‘But there is one slightly odd thing,’ Potting said. ‘The graphologist said that Murphy’s normal handwriting has a right – forward – slant. This note has been written in a left slant – rearward.’

Grace frowned. ‘Do doctors use handwriting much these days or do they type everything on keyboards?’

Potting thought for some moments. ‘Well, I’ve been seeing more of doctors just recently than I really want. A few write prescriptions by hand, but pretty much everything is done on computers now.’

‘You need to talk to his secretary, get her to go through all his files, see if there are any other examples of left-slant handwriting. If not, it could mean something.’

‘That he was trying to send us a signal? A message, chief?’

‘Possibly.’ Then Grace thought for a moment. ‘You’re a bit of a crossword puzzle man, aren’t you, Norman?’

‘Done the
Telegraph
every day for years – well, tried to do it anyway. Why?’

‘Well, I’m speculating wildly here, but I’ve found out Dr Murphy was a keen crossword man. If he wrote this in a backward slant, perhaps to signal he was writing under coercion, then possibly, just possibly, he left something cryptic in these words. Maybe you could analyse it word by word from a crossword perspective?’

Potting frowned. ‘I’ll try.’

‘This is probably not going to go anywhere, but I want to make sure. So far every bit of forensic evidence, and the graphologist’s findings, point towards suicide. But . . .’ Grace shrugged.

A few minutes later, as Norman Potting left his office, closing the door behind him, Roy Grace’s phone rang. It was his new Lead Management Secretary.

‘Roy,’ she said, ‘I’ve just had a call from the Chief Constable’s staff officer. Tom Martinson’s asked if you can come over to see him late afternoon. I have you booked in for a cold cases review meeting, but you are free after then. Would 6 p.m. suit you?’

Instantly, the sky outside seemed to cloud over. He had hoped to get home early tonight, to help Cleo put Noah to bed. It didn’t matter that Roy was both a grown man and a highly experienced police officer. A call from the Chief Constable could still set his nerves jangling. His first thought was what he might have done wrong to merit a reprimand. But he couldn’t think of anything. It might be for some transgression he had not even realized he had committed. Or to brief him on some forthcoming event. Or a change in policy on some aspect of policing in Sussex.

Whatever.

‘Did he give a clue what it’s about?’ he asked.

‘None, I’m afraid.’

Grace had a feeling it was not going to be good news.

He was right.

37

Monday, 28 October

The headline on page six of the
Argus
newspaper online read:
Top copper to wed on Saturday
.

Sandy Lohmann, seated in front of the computer screen in her Munich apartment in the little room she had made her study, with its view down onto the turbulent water of the River Isar just beyond the waterfall, stared transfixed at the screen.

The wedding of Detective Superintendent Roy Grace, of Surrey and Sussex Major Crime Team, and Cleo Morey, Senior Anatomical Pathology Technician of Brighton and Hove Mortuary, will take place at St Margaret’s Church in Rottingdean at 2.30 p.m. on Saturday, 2 November. Many senior police officers, including Chief Constable Tom Martinson, are expected to attend. The marriage will bring to a close the detective’s years of sadness following the unexplained disappearance of his former wife, Sandra (Sandy) Christina Grace, over ten years ago, who was formally declared dead in August of this year.

‘Mama?’

She turned to her son, Bruno, trying to hide her irritation at being distracted. ‘Ja, mein Lieber?’

He was hungry. She would make him supper in a few minutes, she promised. ‘I just need to finish this,’ she said, in her fluent German.

He padded off, disgruntled, returning to his computer game in which he was killing futuristic warriors on an intergalactic battlefield.

Sandy logged on first to Lufthansa, and then to British Airways. Then she went onto expedia.com. This was good timing. It was a holiday for German schools next week, so it would be no problem to take her son – their son. Within five minutes she had booked flights to London and a bed and breakfast hotel in Brighton, called Strawberry Fields, for the two of them.

How very convenient to have had me declared dead
, she thought, with anger rising by the second.
Getting married, are you, Roy Grace? I don’t think so.

38

Monday, 28 October

Mondays had never been Red’s favourite day of the week, and this particular one had proved no exception. On Saturday she had shown fourteen different clients around properties the agency had up for sale, and seven of them had contacted her today to say they weren’t interested. Then, to add to her despondency, the couple she had shown around the Portland Avenue house on Thursday, for whom she had had such high hopes, had called to say they had found somewhere that they liked better with another agency, and they had withdrawn their earlier offer.

She left the office at 5 p.m., although ordinarily she would have stayed at her desk for at least another half hour. Raquel Evans was taking her to a hot yoga class this evening, which her friend thought would do her some good. And she was quite looking forward to doing something different.

As was her normal daily routine, she stopped at the convenience store on her way home to buy herself something to bung in the microwave for her evening meal. She looked along the chilled cabinet section and pulled out a fish pie, then grabbed a pack of frozen beans and dropped them into her basket. As she did so, she was dazzled by a brilliant flash of light.

She heard a scream.

A boom that popped her ears.

Suddenly she was enveloped in a cloud of noxious black smoke that stung her eyes, almost blinding her with tears. Her instant thought was,
Shit, is this a terrorist attack?
More and more smoke billowed around.

She turned to run down the aisle towards where she thought the door was. But crashing into someone, she stumbled away, backing into a stack of tins which clattered down around her. She turned, totally disoriented, holding her breath, trying to work out which way the door was. An alarm was screeching above her. She stumbled forward and her legs bashed painfully into something. A shelf? She breathed out, then breathed in the vile smoke.

In a wild panic, coughing and choking, her throat feeling like it had been stuffed with burning cotton wool, she fell to her knees. She had read somewhere that in a fire, the closer to the ground you got the better off you would be. There were screams all around her. Her eyes were watering so much she could see nothing. There was another explosion. Then another. The alarm continued like a banshee. Suddenly she felt cold water spraying on her head. The banshee continued, mixed with terrified cries, shouts, screams.

Oh shit
, Red thought. She dropped her basket, thinking only of survival. Where the hell was the exit? Somewhere close to her, a mobile phone rang.

She felt the heat of flames on her face. Burning. She spun around, keeping as low as she could. Crawling. Collided with something hard that smacked her cheek. A trolley.

Then a hand grabbed hers. Pulled. Pulled.

‘Help me!’ she said.

The hand pulled her up, silently, and she scrabbled along on her knees, gripping the hand, feeling – knowing – that her life depended on it. The siren and screams continued in the choking darkness all around her.

Then suddenly she felt a blast of cold. Heard the swoosh of electric doors. She was outside. Still on her knees. Gulping down fresh air. A cacophony of wailing sirens. She turned to look at the chaos behind her. Fire engines were arriving. People were staggering out, falling over. Slivers of blue light slid past her along the pavement, like ghosts.

I’m outside
, she thought, coughing again.
Thank God, I’m outside!

In terrorist attacks they set off one bomb to get you outside and then another to hit all the rescue workers, she remembered from news reports.
Got to get away. Fast.

As police cars and ambulances arrived, followed by more fire engines, in a cacophony of screaming sounds, Red staggered to her feet, retrieved her bike and stumbled away in panic and terror, gulping down air.

Get away from here!

She hurried along New Church Road, pushing her bike, her chest hurting, then turned left into her street, Westbourne Terrace. The thick, choking smoke was in her lungs and her nostrils. She coughed with every step until finally the steady, cooling sea breeze had replaced most of it.

She was shaking.

Shit.

What happened?

What the hell happened?

Terrorists?

It was all she could think of.

Her hand was shaking so much, she struggled for some moments to get the key in the lock of her front door. Then she went inside, pushed her bike along the hallway, and secured it with the padlock. Popping the timer switch for the stair lights, she climbed up to her second-floor apartment.

Again she struggled with her keys, finally inserting them. She went in, snapped on the hall light, slammed the door shut behind her and, exhausted, leaned against it, thinking, gathering her thoughts.

Something did not feel right.

It took her some moments before she realized, and stared down, frozen in sudden fear. At her left hand.

At her third finger.

At the vulgar, diamond-encrusted engagement ring which she had returned to Bryce Laurent when she had thrown him out.

The ring that was now back on her finger.

39

Monday, 28 October

Red stood, shivering in fear, beneath the bare, feeble glow of the long-life bulb hanging from a flex that looked like a fire-hazard-in-waiting above her head. She stood, rooted to the spot. Staring at the ring on her finger, staring down the hallway, one hand on the door, ready to jerk it open and run back out onto the landing.

Was Bryce in here?

Her eyes darted nervously down the corridor at each of the doors. One was closed, the other slightly ajar.

Was he behind one of them?

Or in the living room beyond the end of the hallway?

In the bathroom?

There were two deadlocks on the front door, which the woman from the Sanctuary Scheme assured her could not be picked. The windows were all double glazed with toughened glass and locked. No one could get in from the outside, certainly not easily.

How the hell had the ring been put back on her finger? Was it the silent person who had held her hand and guided her out of the convenience store and then vanished? Had that been Bryce?

Had he set fire to the store deliberately? In order to create a diversion to put the ring back on her finger? He had once told her, in happier times, that pickpockets worked by creating a diversion by confusion.

If it had been Bryce, there was no way he could be here already, ahead of her. Was there? She pulled her phone out of her handbag, found PC Spofford’s mobile number in her ‘Favourites’ and hovered her finger above it, ready to press it and set it dialling in an instant. But she held off, concerned that she had already called him out so many times in the past months on false alarms. Instead, she slipped off one of her heeled shoes and brandished it in her right hand. Holding the phone in her left hand, with a finger poised, she took a few paces as quietly as she could along the corridor, then turned the handle of her den door and pushed it open so hard it banged back against the wall.

Her laptop sat on her desk, lid closed as she had left it. The den was empty. ‘Hello Constable Spofford,’ she said loudly, but without having dialled him. It was for the benefit of her unseen visitor – if by chance he was here. ‘I have an intruder. Could you come right away? Five minutes? Thanks, I’ll stay on the line.’

She pushed open the louvred door to the little toilet at the rear until she could see in. Nothing.

She crept further along the corridor, then, with a shiver of fear, kicked open her bedroom door. The room was also empty, undisturbed, the bed neatly made with the white candlewick counterpane on top, and her two ragged teddy bears from her childhood, Moppet and Edward, lying back against the nest of cushions, holding paws.

Next she checked the bathroom, entering and sliding back the privacy door for the toilet. Nothing.