Dead Man's Grip (35 page)

‘What about Revere’s family in New York, chief?’ said Nick Nicholl. ‘Is anyone speaking to them?’

‘I updated our NYPD contact on the situation and they’re on the case. He told me that the killings sound similar to the style of a former Mafia hitman, a charmer called Richard Kuklinski who was known as the Iceman. He used cold stores, and one of his specialities was tying up victims and putting them in a cave, then leaving a camera in there to record them steadily being eaten alive by rats.’

Bella, who had been about to pluck a Malteser from the box in front of her, withdrew her hand, wrinkling her face in disgust.

‘He sounds our man, chief!’ Norman Potting said animatedly.

‘He does, Norman,’ Grace replied. ‘There’s just one problem with Kuklinski.’

Potting waited apprehensively.

‘He died in prison four years ago.’

‘Yes, well, I suppose that might rather tend to eliminate him,’ Potting retorted. He looked around with a grin, but no one smiled back. ‘Fishy business, this cold store, yesterday,’ he added, and again looked around, without success, for any smiles. All he got was a withering glare from Bella Moy.

‘Thank you Norman,’ Grace said curtly. ‘Detective Investigator Lanigan was going to go and see Mr and Mrs Revere last night and report back to me. But frankly I’m not expecting anything from them. And one thing Lanigan told me, which is not good news for us, is that their intelligence on contract killers is very limited.’

‘Chief, did this Kuklinski character paralyse his victims first?’

‘Not from what I’ve learned so far from the postmortem, Nick, no. Our man didn’t paralyse Preece – only Ferguson.’

‘Why do you think he did that?’

Grace shrugged. ‘Maybe sadism. Or perhaps to make him easier to handle. Hopefully,’ he said, raising his eyebrows, ‘we’ll get the chance to ask him that.’

‘Boss, what information are you releasing to the press about the death of the lorry driver?’ DC Emma-Jane Boutwood asked.

‘For now, no more than a man was found dead in a cold store at Springs Smoked Salmon,’ Grace said. ‘I don’t want speculation. Let people think for the moment that it might have been an industrial accident.’

He glanced down at his mobile phone, which was lying next to his printed notes on the work surface in front of him, as if waiting for the inevitable call from Spinella. But it remained, for the moment, silent. ‘I haven’t yet decided what we should release beyond that. But I’ve no doubt someone will make that decision for me.’

He gave a challenging stare to his team, without looking at any specific individual. Then he glanced down at his notes again. ‘OK, according to his employers, Stuart Ferguson left the depot in the fridge-box lorry shortly after 2 p.m. on Tuesday. We need to find this lorry.’ He looked at DC Horobin. ‘Stacey, I’m giving you an action which is to try to plot the lorry’s route and sightings from the time it left the depot in Aberdeen to wherever it currently is. We need to find it. You should be able to plot much of its journey fairly easily from an ANPR search.’

Automatic Number Plate Recognition cameras were positioned along many of the UK’s motorways and key arterial roads. They filmed the registration plates of all passing vehicles and fed them into a database.

‘Yes, sir,’ she said.

Grace then read out a summary of the postmortem findings so far. After he dealt with several questions on that, he drained the last of his coffee and moved on to the next item on his list.

‘OK, an update on lines of enquiry. The murder of Preece’s friend Warren Tulley at Ford Prison is still ongoing.’ He looked at DS Crocker. ‘Duncan, do you have anything there for us?’

‘Nothing new, chief. Still the same wall of silence from the other inmates. The interviewing team is talking to each of the prisoners, but so far we have no breakthrough.’

Grace thanked him, then turned to DC Nick Nicholl. ‘The superglue on Ewan Preece’s hands. Nick, anything to report?’

‘The Outside Inquiry Team are continuing to visit every retail outlet in the Brighton and Hove area that sells superglue. It’s a massive task, chief, and we’re really understaffed for it. Every newsagent, every DIY and hardware shop, every supermarket.’

‘Keep them on it,’ Grace said. Then he turned to Norman Potting. ‘Anything to report with the camera?’

‘We’ve covered every retailer that sells this equipment, chief, including the Cash Converters stores that sell ’em secondhand. One of them was good enough to check the serial number on the one in the van. He reckons it’s not a model sold in the UK – it can only be bought in the USA. I haven’t had a chance to start checking the one found in the cold store at Springs yet, but it looks identical.’

As the meeting ended, Glenn Branson received a call on his radio. It was from one of the security officers, Duncan Steele, on the front desk.

He thanked him, then turned to Roy Grace. ‘Mrs Chase is downstairs.’

Grace frowned. ‘Here, in this building?’

‘Yep. She says she needs to see me urgently.’

‘Maybe she’s come to her senses.’

Tooth sat at the desk in his room at the Premier Inn, with his laptop open in front of him. Through the window he kept an eye on the parking area. He could see the North Terminal building of Gatwick Airport in the distance beyond it and the blue sky above it. It would not be long before he was on an airplane in that blue sky, heading home, to the almost constant blue sky of the Turks and Caicos. He liked heat. Liked it when he had been in the military in hot places. From his experience of English weather, it rained most of the time.

He didn’t do rain.

A Lucky Strike dangled between his lips. He stared at the screen, doing some blue-sky thinking, clicking through the images. Photographs of Hove Park Avenue, where Carly Chase lived. Photographs of the front, back and sides of her house.

Early in the morning after he had finished at Springs smokery he had driven down this street, memorizing the cars. Then he’d paid a brief visit to her property. A dog had started barking inside the house and an upstairs interior light came on as he was leaving. Last night he’d taken another drive down there and had spotted the parked dark-coloured Audi, with a shadowy figure behind the wheel. The Audi had not been there previously.

The police weren’t stupid. He’d learned over the years never to underestimate the enemy. You stayed alive that way. Out of jail that way. In the US, police surveillance operated in teams of eight, on eight-hour shifts, twenty-four officers covering a twenty-four-hour watch. He had little doubt there were others out there in that area he hadn’t spotted. Some on foot, probably in the back garden or down the sides of the house.

He had already listened to the conversation inside the house that the minute directional microphones he had concealed in her garden, pointed at her windows, had picked up when the police had visited her yesterday evening. When she had told them she did not want to leave.

He looked down at his notes. The kid had been picked up in his school uniform at 8.25 a.m. today by a woman in a black Range Rover, with two other kids in it. At 8.35 Carly Chase had left home in the back of a marked police car.

At 9.05 he made a phone call to her office, masquerading as a client, saying he needed to speak to her urgently. He was told she had not yet arrived. A second phone call told him she had still not arrived at 9.30.

Where was she?

Carly Chase sat down beside Glenn Branson at the small round conference table in Roy Grace’s office. Grace joined them.

‘Nice to meet you, Mrs Chase,’ he said, sitting down. ‘I’m sorry it’s not under better circumstances. Would you like something to drink?’

She felt too sick with fear to swallow anything. ‘I’m – I’m OK, thank you.’

She was conscious of her right foot jigging and she couldn’t stop it. Both the policemen were staring at her intently and that was making her even more nervous.

‘I wanted to talk to you,’ she stammered, glancing at Glenn Branson, then looking back at the Detective Superintendent. ‘Detective Sergeant Branson and his colleague explained the situation to me yesterday evening. I’ve been thinking about it overnight. I’m not sure if you know, but I’m a solicitor specializing in divorce.’

Grace nodded. ‘I know a fair bit about you.’

She wrung her hands, then swallowed to try to stop her ears popping. Her eyes darted from a collection of old cigarette lighters on a shelf to framed certificates on the wall, then to a stuffed trout in a display case and back to Grace.

‘I’m a great believer in compromise rather than confrontation,’ she said. ‘I try to save marriages, rather than destroy them – that’s always been my philosophy.’

Grace nodded again. ‘A very noble sentiment.’

She gave him a sideways look, unsure if he was taking the mickey, then realized she knew nothing about his own private life.

‘In my experience, dialogue is so often missing,’ she said, and shrugged, her foot jigging even harder.

Grace stared at her. He had no idea what point she was leading up to.

‘I lost my husband five years ago in a skiing accident. He was buried in an avalanche in Canada. My first reaction was that I wanted to get on a plane to Canada, find the guide who had taken him on that mountain – and who survived – and kill him with my bare hands. OK?’

Grace glanced at Branson, who gave him a helpless shrug back. ‘Everyone has to deal with grief in their own way,’ he replied.

‘Exactly,’ Carly replied. ‘That’s why I’m here.’ She turned to Glenn Branson. ‘You told me last night that my life is in danger from a revenge killing arranged by the parents of the poor boy who died on his bike. But I wasn’t a guilty part of that. OK, I know I’ve been prosecuted for drink driving, but it wouldn’t have made a damned bit of difference if I’d been stone cold sober – your traffic police have confirmed that. It wasn’t the van driver’s fault either, even if he did do a hit-and-run, and it sure as hell wasn’t the lorry driver’s fault. The whole thing was caused by the poor kid himself, cycling on the wrong side of the road!’

Branson was about to reply, but Grace cut in on him. ‘Mrs Chase, we’re aware of that. But, as my colleague has explained, we are not dealing with normal, rational people. The Reveres, from what we understand, come from a culture where differences are settled not in court, but by physical brutality. They have been informed that you did not collide with their son, and it may be that they’ve now finished with their terrible revenge – if that’s what these two killings are about. But I’m responsible for your safety and I have a duty of care to you.’

‘I can’t live my life in fear, Mr Grace – sorry – Detective Superintendent. There’s always a way through a problem and I think I have found a way through this one.’

Both police officers looked hard at her.

‘You do?’ Glenn Branson said.

‘Yes. I – I didn’t sleep a wink last night, trying to figure out what to do. I’ve decided I’m going to go and see them. I’m going to New York to talk woman to woman to Mrs Revere. She’s lost her son. I lost my husband. Both of us would like to try to blame other people to try to find some sense in our losses. I think constantly about that stupid ski guide who should never have taken my husband on that slope in those weather conditions. But nothing vengeful is going to bring Kes back or ease the pain of my loss. I have to find ways to move forward in life. She and her husband are going to have to do the same.’

‘I know a little bit about loss too,’ Roy Grace said gently. ‘I’ve been there. I have a sense of where you are coming from. But from what I know about this family, I don’t think going to see them is a good idea – and it’s certainly not something Sussex Police could sanction.’

‘Why not?’ She glared at Grace with a sudden ferocity that startled him.

‘Because we’re responsible for your safety. I can protect you here in Brighton, but I couldn’t look after you in New York.’

She turned to Glenn Branson. ‘You told me last night that you could only guard me for a fortnight. Right?’

Branson nodded, then said, ‘Well, we would review the situation before the end of that period.’

‘But you can’t protect me for the rest of my life. And that’s what I would be scared of. I can’t spend the next fifty years looking over my shoulder. I have to deal with this now.’ She was silent for a moment, then she spoke again. ‘Are you saying you’d stop me from going?’

Grace opened his arms expansively. ‘I have no powers to stop you. But I cannot guarantee your safety if you go. I could send an officer with you, but frankly he wouldn’t be able to do a lot out of his jurisdiction-’

‘I’m going alone,’ she said determinedly. ‘I can look after myself. I can deal with it. I deal with difficult people all the time.’

Glenn Branson admired her determination, secretly wishing he’d hired this terrified but feisty woman to act for him in his divorce, instead of the rather wishy-washy solicitor he had.

‘Mrs Chase,’ Roy Grace said, ‘we have some intelligence on the Revere family. Do you want to hear it before you make your final decision?’

‘Anything you can tell me would be helpful.’

‘OK. Until recently they owned a club in Brooklyn called the Concubine. They would invite their enemies there for a drink and when they arrived, as special guests of honour, these unfortunates would be invited downstairs to the VIP lounge. When they entered they would be greeted by three men, one of whom was a tall American-Italian charmer nicknamed Dracula, because he looked like Bella Lugosi. A fourth man, whom they would never see, would shoot them in the back of the head with a silenced handgun. Dracula would drain their blood into a bathtub. Another guy, who had started out as a butcher, would dismember their cadavers into six pieces. The fourth guy would package up each limb, the torso and the head, and dispose of them in various waste dumps around New York and in the Hudson River. It is estimated they murdered over one hundred people. Sal Giordino, Tony Revere’s grandfather, is currently serving eleven consecutive life sentences for this, with a minimum of eighty-seven years in jail. Do you understand the people you would be dealing with?’