Dead Man's Grip (45 page)

He turned back to the bank of monitors and looked at the car that had been photographed heading east along the seafront, owned, according to its registration document, by Barry Simons. Just as a precaution, he phoned the Incident Room. Nick Nicholl answered. Grace tasked him with finding Barry Simons and establishing for certain that he had been driving his car along Brighton seafront this morning.

From the suspect’s current position on the A23, it would take him about twenty-five minutes, Grace estimated, to ping that next ANPR camera at Gatwick. On the radio he could follow the developments. This was a true fast-time operation. The helicopter, which was also fitted with ANPR, would be over the M23 in ninety seconds. One unmarked car was already on the motorway, approximately two miles behind the target, and two more were only minutes away. It was policy in kidnap pursuits to use unmarked cars wherever possible. That way, the perpetrator would not panic as he might at the sight of a marked car passing him, with the risk of involving his victim in a high-speed chase. If they could get unmarked cars in front of and behind the suspect, a minimum of three vehicles, and preferably four, they could box him in – TPAC him – before he realized what was happening.

‘I need to get back to Sussex House,’ Glenn said.

‘Me too.’

‘I can patch any images you want through to you in the Incident Room,’ Pumfrey said.

Grace thanked him and the two detectives left. As they walked out of the rear of the building into the car park, Grace’s phone rang. It was Inspector Sue Carpenter at the Regency Square car park.

‘Sir,’ she said, ‘I don’t know if this is significant, but I understand that the Regency Square car park was identified by an application on the missing boy’s iPhone.’

‘Yes,’ Grace replied, his hopes rising. ‘An application called Friend Mapper. We’re hoping he keeps it on – that it could lead us to him if we can’t find him before.’

‘I’m afraid, sir, one of the search team has found a smashed iPhone in a bin in the car park – close to the taxi.’

As he climbed into his car, Grace instructed Sue Carpenter to get the phone checked immediately for finger-and footprints, then get it straight to the High-Tech Crime Unit. He told her he wanted it in their hands, having been dusted for prints, within the next thirty minutes. Getting the contents of the phone analysed was more important to him at this stage than getting forensic evidence from it.

Then, as he drove out and turned left down the steep hill, he said to Branson, who was listening to the Ops-1 instructions on his radio, ‘I’m still struggling to get my head around the motive here. Did the perp take this boy as a substitute because his mother was unavailable?’

‘Because she’d unexpectedly gone to New York, so the boy was the next best thing? Is that what you’re saying?’

‘Yes,’ Grace replied. ‘Or was taking the boy his plan all along?’

‘What’s your sense?’

‘I think he plans everything. He’s not someone who takes chance opportunities. My view is that probably, by going to the States, Carly Chase made seizing the boy a little easier for him.’

Branson nodded and looked at his watch. ‘Just over six hours until she lands.’

‘Maybe we’ll be able to greet her with good news.’

‘I promised I’d get a message to her on the plane as soon as we have any.’

‘With a bit of luck, that could be any minute now.’

Grace gave Branson a wistful smile, then glanced at the car clock. It was half past two. He should eat something, he knew, but he didn’t have any appetite, and he didn’t want to waste valuable time stopping anywhere. He fished in his suit jacket pocket and produced a Mars bar in a very crumpled wrapper that had been there for some days.

‘Haven’t had any lunch. You hungry?’ he said to Branson. ‘Want to share this?’

‘Boy, you know how to give someone a good time!’ Branson said, peeling off the wrapper. ‘A slap-up, no-expenses-spared lunch with Roy Grace. Half an old Mars bar. This been in your pocket since you were at school?’

‘Sod off!’

Branson tore the chocolate bar in two and held out the slightly larger portion to Grace, who popped it in his mouth. ‘You ever see that film about-’

Grace’s phone rang. As he wasn’t driving at high speed, he stuck it into the hands-free cradle and answered. Both of them heard the voice of Chief Inspector Trevor Barnes, the newly appointed Silver Commander. An experienced and methodical Senior Investigating Officer, Barnes, like Roy Grace, had handled many major crime investigations.

‘Roy,’ he said, ‘we’ve just stopped the Toyota Yaris on the M23, four miles south of the Crawley interchange.’

Grace, his mouth full of chewy chocolate and toffee, thumped the steering wheel with glee.

‘Brilliant!’ Branson replied.

‘That you, Glenn?’ Barnes asked.

‘Yeah, we’re in the car. What’s the situation?’

‘Well,’ Barnes said, his voice somewhat lacking in enthusiasm, although he always spoke in a considered, deadpan tone, ‘I’m not sure that we have the right person.’

‘What description can you give us, Trevor?’ Grace asked, the Silver’s words now making him uneasy.

He halted the car at a traffic light.

‘Well, I’m assuming your hit man is not eighty-four years old.’

‘What do you mean?’ Grace had a sinking feeling.

‘Toyota Yaris, index Yankee Delta Five Eight Victor Juliet Kilo? Is that the correct one?’

Grace pulled out his notebook and flipped to the right page. ‘Yes. Those are the plates that were taken from a car at Newport Pagnell that we believe our suspect is using.’

‘The driver of this Yaris is eighty-four years old and has his wife who is eighty-three with him. It’s their car, but it’s not their registration number.’

‘Not their registration?’ Grace echoed.

The lights changed and he drove on.

‘The licence plates on the car aren’t theirs, Roy. The driver may be old, but he has all his marbles, I’m told. Knew his registration number off by heart. Sounds like someone’s nicked his plates and replaced them with different ones.’

‘Where’s he come from?’ Grace asked, but he had a feeling he already knew the answer.

‘They’ve been in Brighton. They enjoy the sea air, apparently. Like to take their dog for a walk between the piers. It’s their regular constitutional. They have fish and chips at some place on the front.’

‘Yep, and let me guess where they parked. The Regency Square car park?’

‘Very good, Roy. Ever thought of going on
Mastermind
?’

‘Once, when I had a brain that worked. So, give us their index that’s been stolen.’

Branson wrote it down.

Grace drove in silence for some moments, thinking about the killer with grudging admiration.
Whoever you are, you are a smart bastard. What’s more, you clearly have a sense of humour. And just in case you don’t know, right at this moment I have a major sense-of-humour failure.

His phone rang again. This time it was Nick Nicholl in MIR-1, sounding perplexed.

‘Chief, I’m coming back to you on the vehicle owner check you asked me to do, on Barry Simons.’

‘Thanks. What do you have, Nick?’

‘I’ve just spoken to him. I sent someone round to his house and they asked a neighbour who knew where he worked – and I got his mobile phone number from his company.’

‘Well done.’

The Detective Constable sounded hesitant. ‘You asked me to check if it was him driving his car first east on King’s Road, then west past the junction between Kingsway and Boundary Road this morning? Index Golf Victor Zero Eight Whisky Delta X-Ray?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, he’s a bit baffled, chief. He and his wife are lying on a beach in Limassol in Cyprus at the moment. They’ve been there for nearly two weeks.’

‘Could anyone they know be driving this car while they’re away?’

‘No,’ Nick Nicholl said. ‘They left it at the long-term car park at Gatwick Airport.’

Grace pulled over to the side of the road and stopped sharply.

‘Nick, put a high-act marker on that index. Get on to the Divisional Intelligence Unit – I want to know every ANPR sighting from the day Barry Simons’s car arrived at Gatwick to now.’

‘To double-check, chief, index Golf Victor Zero Eight Whisky Delta X-Ray.’

‘Correct.’

Grace switched on the car’s lights and siren, then turned to Glenn Branson.

‘We’re taking a ride to Shoreham.’

‘Want me to drive?’ Branson asked.

Grace shook his head. ‘Thanks for the offer, but I think I’ll be of more help to Tyler Chase alive.’

Tooth sat in the Yaris in the parking lot behind the apartment block. The same cars were still here that had been here when he left to do his reconnaissance an hour ago. It was still the middle of the afternoon and maybe the lot would fill up when people came back from work. But it hadn’t filled up last time, six years ago. The windows of the apartment block didn’t look like they had been cleaned since then either. Maybe it was full of old people. Maybe they were all dead.

He stared at the text that had come in and which had prompted his early return to the car. It said just one word:
call.

He removed the SIM card and, as he always did, burned it with his lighter until it was melted. He would throw it away later. Then he took one of the phones he had not yet used from his bag and dialled the number.

Ricky Giordino answered on the first ring. ‘Yeah?’

‘You texted me to call.’

‘What the fuck took you so long, Mr Tooth?’

Tooth did not reply.

‘You still there? Hello, Mr Tooth?’

‘Yes.’

‘Listen to me. We’ve had another tragedy in our family and that woman, Mrs Chase, she’s the cause of it. My sister’s dead. I’m your client now, understand me? You’re doing this for me now. I want that woman’s pain to be so bad. I want pain she’s never going to forget, you with me?’

‘I’m doing what I can,’ Tooth replied.

‘Listen up, I didn’t pay you a million bucks to do what you can do. Understand? I paid you that money to do something more than that. Something different, right? Creative. Give me a big surprise. Blow me away. Show me you got balls!’

‘Balls,’ Tooth commented.

‘Yeah, you heard, balls. You’re going to bring those videos to me, right? Soon as you’re done?’

‘Tomorrow,’ Tooth said.

He ended the call, again burned the SIM card, then lit a cigarette. He did not like this man.

He didn’t do rudeness.

Roy Grace turned the siren and lights off as they passed Hove Lagoon, two shallow man-made recreational lakes beside a children’s playground. Up on the promenade beyond there was a long row of beach huts facing the beach and the sea.

The Lagoon ended at Aldrington Basin, the eastern extremity of Shoreham Harbour, and from this point onwards, until Shoreham town, a few miles further on, the buildings and landscape along this road became mostly industrial and docklands. He slowed as they approached the junction with Boundary Road and pointed up through the windscreen.

‘There’s the ANPR camera that Barry Simons pinged this morning.’

Then Nick Nicholl radioed through. ‘Chief, I’ve got the information you requested on the Toyota Yaris index Golf Victor Zero Eight Whisky Delta X-Ray. It’s rather strange, so I went back an extra two weeks and I now have all sightings for the past month. For the first two weeks it pinged cameras during weekdays that are consistent with a regular morning and evening commute from Worthing to central Brighton and back. Then on Sunday morning, just under two weeks ago, it travelled from Worthing to Gatwick.’

‘Consistent with what Simons told you,’ Branson said, butting in, ‘that they drove to Gatwick Airport long-term parking before their flight to Cyprus.’

‘Yes,’ Nicholl said. ‘Now here’s the bit that doesn’t make sense. The next sighting was the one this morning, when it pinged the CCTV camera on the seafront at the bottom of West Street, travelling east. There’s nothing to show how the car got from Gatwick Airport down to Kingsway. Even if it drove directly from the airport down to Brighton, with the marker on the vehicle it should have been picked up by the A23 camera at Gatwick, and by another on the approach to Brighton, and I would have thought by others in Brighton.’

‘Unless it commenced its journey from the Regency Square car park,’ Grace said thoughtfully. ‘Then it would have exited the car park on King’s Road and had to make a left turn along the seafront, which would explain why it passed the CCTV camera at the bottom of West Street twice – first going east and then, a few minutes later, west. Followed by the one on Brunswick Lawns, a mile further west, and then this one.’

‘You’ve lost me, sir,’ Nicholl said. ‘That doesn’t explain how the car got from Gatwick Airport to that car park in the first place.’

‘It didn’t, Nick,’ Grace said. ‘Our suspect has already demonstrated he is rather cute with number plates. We believe he rented this Toyota from Avis at Gatwick. I’m prepared to put money on Mr and Mrs Simons returning from their Cyprus holiday to find their number plates are missing. Good work. What about subsequent sightings since Boundary Road?’

‘None, sir.’

Which would indicate, Grace thought, that either the car was parked up somewhere or the killer had changed number plates yet again.

He ended the conversation and immediately called Graham Barrington to update him.

‘My hunch is that he’s in the Shoreham area,’ Grace said. ‘But we can’t rely on that. I think you need to get every dark-coloured Toyota Yaris within a three-hour drive of Brighton stopped and searched.’

‘That’s already happening.’

‘And we need to throw everything we have at Shoreham Harbour and its immediate vicinity.’

‘The problem is, Roy, it’s a massive area.’