Dead Man's Grip (42 page)

‘We are going to find him, I promise you. The whole nation’s looking for him.’

Tears were stinging her eyes and everything was a blur. The detective’s kind voice was making her weepy.

‘The Revere family,’ she sobbed. ‘They can do anything they want to me. I don’t care. Tell them that. Tell them they can kill me. Tell them to give me my son back and then kill me.’

He promised to call her back the moment he had any news. As she hung up, she crossed back over to the window and stared out at the drab landscape. Christ, the world was a big place. How could you find someone? Where did you start looking? Way down below her on the ground she watched a man walking along, phone to his ear. And suddenly she had a thought.

Wiping away tears, she stared down at the screen of her iPhone, fingered through the apps, sliding them across, until she reached the one she was looking for. Then she tapped it hard.

Moments later she felt a sudden flicker of hope. She stared at it harder, brought it closer to her face.

‘Oh yes! Oh, you good boy, Tyler! Oh, you clever boy!’

Grace came out of the press conference at 12.50 p.m., pleased with the solid performance ACC Rigg had delivered, and very relieved. He found all press conferences to be minefields. One wrong answer and you could be made to look a total idiot. Rigg had been sensible, keeping it tight and focused, and brief.

He was tailed by Kevin Spinella, as ever wanting one more question answered. But the Detective Superintendent was in no mood to talk to him. As he reached the security door at the start of the corridor, he turned to face the reporter.

‘I don’t have anything to add. If you want more information you need to speak to ACC Rigg, who is now responsible for press liaison on
Operation Violin
.’

‘I know you’re still angry with me over writing about the reward,’ Spinella said. ‘But you seem to forget sometimes, Detective Superintendent, that you and I both have a job to do and it’s not the same job. You solve crimes, I have to help sell newspapers. You need to understand that.’

Grace stared at him incredulously. A child’s life was at stake, he was right in the middle of the fast-time stage of one of the most serious critical incidents of his career, and this young reporter had decided now was the moment to start lecturing him about the newspaper business.

‘What part of that do you think I don’t understand, Kevin?’ Grace said, turning back to the door and holding up his security card to the pad.

‘You have to realize that I’m not your puppet. I want to help you, but my first loyalty will always be to my editor.’

‘Why don’t you save your breath right now, hurry back to your office and file a story that might help save Tyler Chase’s life?’

‘Coz I don’t need to. I can use this,’ Spinella said. Then he fished out his BlackBerry and held it up, with a smug grin.

Grace slammed the door behind him. He was about to call the Gold Commander for an update, when his phone rang. It was Glenn Branson.

‘You out of the conference, boss?’

‘Yes.’

‘We’re cooking with gas! We have a development with Tyler.’

‘Where are you?’

‘MIR-1.’

‘I’ll be right there.’

Grace threw himself down a few steps, sprinted along the corridor and entered the packed Incident Room. In contrast to the corridor, which had a permanent smell of fresh paint, MIR-1 at lunchtime always smelled like a canteen. Today an aroma of hot soup and microwaved Veg Pots was mixed with a tinge of curry.

There was that quiet buzz of energy in here that Grace loved so much. A sense of purpose. Some members of the team at their workstations – on the phone or reading or typing – and some standing, making adjustments to the family tree or photograph displays on the whiteboards. There was a constant muted ringing of landline phones, plus the louder cacophony of mobile phones and the rattle of keyboards.

Some of the team were eating as they worked. Norman Potting was hunched over a printout, munching a huge Cornish pasty, oblivious to the crumbs falling like sleet down his tie and bulging shirt.

Glenn Branson was seated in the far corner of the room, close to a water dispenser. Grace hurried across to him, ignoring Nick Nicholl and David Howes, who both tried to get his attention. He glanced at his watch, then at the clock on the wall, as if to double-check. It was something he often did and could not help. Every second of every minute in this current situation was crucial.

‘Boss, have you used an iPhone?’

‘No. Why?’ Grace frowned.

‘There’s an app called Friend Mapper. It operates on GPS, just like a satnav. You and someone you know with an iPhone can both be permanently logged on to it. So, for instance, if you and I are logged on to it, provided you’ve got the app running, I’d be able to see where you are, anywhere in the world, and ditto you’d be able to see me, to within about fifty yards.’

Grace suddenly had a feeling he knew where this was going.

‘Carly Chase and her son?’

‘Yes!’

‘And? Tell me.’

‘That apparently was the deal when Carly Chase got her son an iPhone, that he had to keep Friend Mapper on all the time he was out of her sight.’

‘And it’s on now?’

We had a call from her twenty minutes ago. ‘It’s not moving, but there was a signal coming from Regency Square. We don’t know whether it’s been switched off or the battery’s dead – or he could, as I suspect, just be in a bad reception area.’

‘How old is this signal?’

‘She can’t tell, because she’s only just checked. But she doesn’t understand why it’s where it is. Regency Square’s a couple of miles east of the school and nowhere near where his dental appointment is. She says Tyler would not have had any reason to be there. She’s magnified the map as much as she can. She says it looks like it’s very near the entrance to the underground car park.’

Grace suddenly felt himself sharing Branson’s excitement. ‘If he’s in the car park that could explain the lack of a signal!’

Branson smiled. ‘Gold’s got every unit in Brighton down there now. They’re ring-fencing it, covering every exit, searching the place and any vehicle that leaves.’

‘Let’s go!’ Grace said.

With his memory of Glenn Branson’s driving still too close for comfort, Grace took the wheel. As they blitzed through Brighton’s lunchtime traffic, the Detective Sergeant said, ‘Carly Chase is booked on a BA flight that leaves at 8.40 a.m. New York time – 1.40 p.m. UK time – less than an hour. She’ll get back to Heathrow at 8.35 p.m.’

‘OK.’

Grace’s phone rang. ‘Could you answer it, Glenn?’

Branson took the call while Grace overtook a line of traffic waiting at a red light at the junction of Dyke Road and the Old Shoreham Road, blazing down the wrong side of the road. He checked that everyone had seen him, changed the tone of his siren, then accelerated over the junction.

When Branson ended the call he turned to Grace. ‘That was E-J, reporting back from Avis. That Toyota Yaris was rented Monday morning of last week to a man called James John Robertson, according to his licence. The address he had given was fictitious and the information received back from the High-Tech Crime Unit was that the Visa credit card he had paid with was a sophisticated clone. Avis gave a description of the renter, but it wasn’t much to go on. A short, thin man with an English accent, wearing a baseball cap and dark glasses. He’d been offered an upgrade which he had declined.’

‘Interesting to decline an upgrade,’ Grace said. ‘Wonder why?’

Branson nodded. ‘You know, it would be brilliant if we could take Carly Chase’s son to the airport to greet her,’ he said.

‘It would.’

‘And with a bit of luck, that’s going to happen.’

Roy Grace shared his friend’s hope, but not his optimism. After enough years in this job, your optimism gradually got eroded by experience. So much so that if you weren’t careful, one day you’d wake up the cynical bastard you’d always promised yourself you would never become.

Driving normally, the journey to Regency Square from Sussex House would have taken around twenty minutes. Grace did it in eight. He turned off the seafront, ignoring the No Entry sign, and pulled up behind two marked cars and two police transit vans that were halted either side of the car park entry ramp. They were both out of the Ford almost before the wheels had stopped turning.

The entire historic, but in parts dilapidated, square was teeming with uniformed police officers, and the statuesque figure of the Brighton and Hove Duty Inspector, Sue Carpenter, was heading over to greet them. In her early forties, she stood a good six feet tall and the hat riding high on her head, with her long dark hair pushed up inside it, made her look even taller. Grace remembered her from some years back, when she was a sergeant, and had been impressed by her competence.

‘Good afternoon, sir,’ she said, greeting him with nervous formality, and then giving Glenn Branson a quick smile.

‘How are you doing?’ Grace asked.

‘We’ve just found a taxi parked on the third level – the lowest. The vehicle is locked, sir. It’s a bit unusual to find a taxi in a city multi-storey car park. We’ve radioed Streamline, which it’s registered with, to see if we can get any information.’

‘Let’s take a look,’ Grace said.

As a precaution, never knowing when he might need them, he took out a pair of blue gloves from his go-bag in the boot of the car, and a couple of small, plastic evidence bags. Then he glanced quickly around the grassy centre of the square. Across the far side, where the exit was, he saw a halted Jaguar surrounded by police, with its boot open.

‘Presumably there’s CCTV on the entrance and exit?’

‘There are cameras, sir, and some inside. Every single one of them was vandalized last night.’

‘All of them?’

‘Yes, they’re being replaced later today, but that doesn’t help us, I’m afraid.’

‘Shit, shit, shit,’ he said, banging his knuckles together. He shook his head. ‘Seems a little coincidental, the timing.’

‘This car park is quite a hot spot for trouble, sir – in fact this whole area is,’ she reminded him, and pointed across the road at the ruin of the West Pier – one of Brighton’s biggest landmarks, which had been burned down some years before in one of the city’s biggest ever acts of vandalism.

Grace and Branson followed Inspector Carpenter past a PCSO who was guarding the entrance and down a smelly concrete stairwell. Then they walked along the bottom level of the car park, which was almost deserted and smelled of dry dust and engine oil. The old, tired-looking concrete floor, white stanchions and red piping stretched away into the distance, gridded by parking-bay markings.

Over to the right, partially obscured by a concrete abutment, he saw a Skoda saloon taxi that had been reversed into a bay and backed up tight against the rear wall. Two young officers stood beside it.

As they approached, Grace noticed a few fragments of black plastic on the ground close to the car. He fished the gloves from his pocket and snapped them on. Then he knelt, picked the fragments up and put them in an evidence bag, just in case.

At that moment a controller’s voice came through Inspector Carpenter’s radio. Grace and Branson could both hear it clearly. Apparently the Streamline operator was concerned, as she’d not been able to get a response from the driver since just after midnight last night.

‘Do we have a name?’ Carpenter asked.

‘Mike Howard,’ the voice crackled back.

‘Ask if she has a mobile phone number for him,’ Grace said.

He peered into the front, then the rear of the car before trying each of the doors in turn, but they were all locked.

Sue Carpenter radioed the request. A few moments later the operator came back with the number. Grace scribbled it down on his notebook, then immediately dialled it.

A few moments later they heard a muted ringtone from inside the rear of the taxi. Grace ended the call, turned to one of the PCs and asked him for his baton. Looking apprehensive, the young officer produced it and handed it to him.

‘Stand back!’ Grace said, as he swung the baton hard at the driver’s door window.

It cracked, with a loud bang, but remained intact. He hit it again, harder, and this time the glass broke. He smashed away some of the jagged edges with the baton, then slipped his arm in, found the handle and tugged it. He pulled the door open, leaned in and released the handbrake.

‘Give me a hand,’ he said to the officers, and began trying to push the car.

For an instant it resisted, then slowly, silently, it inched forward. Grace kept going until it was a few feet out from the wall, then jerked the brake back on. He leaned in, staring at the unfamiliar controls, saw the driver’s ID on the windscreen, which showed a photograph of a burly-looking man in his forties with thinning brown hair and a startled expression. The name
Mike Howard
was printed beneath. Grace looked around hard, wondering if there was an internal boot release. Moments later he found it and the boot lid popped open.

Glenn Branson reached the rear of the car first.

Then, as he stared in, his face dropped.

‘Oh shit,’ he said.

Carly, seated in the busy waiting area by boarding gate 47, looked at her watch. Then she stared for a moment at the two British Airways women standing and chatting behind the desk. Occasionally there was a
bong
, then a brief announcement. Final call for boarding for some other flight. She looked at her watch again. Twenty-two minutes past eight. The flight was due to depart in less than twenty minutes and they hadn’t even started boarding yet. What was going on?

She gripped her handbag and kept her holdall right in front of her. No checked luggage, she did not want any risk of delay at the other end. Her legs kept knocking together. She badly needed a cup of tea and something to eat, but she did not feel able to swallow anything.