Looking Good Dead (24 page)

‘Are you good with insects?’ Grace asked.

E-J grimaced. ‘Actually, no. How about you?’

‘Not crazy about them,’ he admitted.

He took the left turning she indicated, into a road of 1930s semi-detached houses – not unlike his own street, he thought. At the far end he saw a small industrial estate, beyond which the road went under a railway bridge. On the far side, on their left, were more semi-detached houses, then a busy parade of shops.

‘It’s here,’ the Detective Constable said.

Grace slowed, looking for a parking space outside the shops. He saw a bakery, a chemist’s, and a bric-a-brac shop with old chairs, a toy car, a pine table and some other artefacts spread out on the pavement; there was a medical centre next to it, and a sports trophy shop next to that, and then he saw what looked like a pet shop, its window full of small, empty cages. The sign above the window read: erridge and robinson – importers and suppliers.

They parked the car in a bay a short distance further along, then ran back through the rain, Emma-Jane holding the large brown envelope over her head, and in through the front door of the premises – which set off a bell with a loud ping.

The smell hit Grace instantly: a sharp, intensely sour reek, toned down just a fraction with sawdust. They were in a dimly lit area, completely surrounded, floor to ceiling, by cages with ultraviolet back-lighting, inside some of which he could see insects crawling around. He peered into one cage, only inches from where he was standing, and saw a pair of brown antlers twitching. A very large beetle, too large and too close for his comfort. He took a couple of steps back, wiped away some rainwater from his brow and gave the DC a What the hell is this place? frown.

Then he saw the spider, or rather its yellow and black hairy leg, followed by another leg, then another; it moved across its cage in three fast darts. It was enormous; with its legs outstretched and plainly visible now, the thing would not have fitted on a dinner plate.

Emma-Jane was watching it also; she looked very uncomfortable. Which was how he felt. The more he looked around, the more tiny eyes and twitching antennae he saw. And the stink was nearly making him retch.

Then an internal door opened, and a short, thin man in his late forties emerged, wearing brown overalls and a white shirt done up to the top button, but with no tie. He had small, wary eyes beneath massive, bushy brows that looked like two warring caterpillars. ‘Can I help you?’ he asked in a reedy voice with a tone that was distinctly aggressive.

‘Are you George Erridge?’

His response was very hesitant and drawn out. ‘Ye-es.’

‘I’m Detective Constable Boutwood,’ E-J said. ‘We spoke yesterday. This is Detective Superintendent Grace from Brighton CID.’

Grace held up his warrant card. The man peered at it, seeming to read every word, his face twitching, his eyebrows going hammer and tongs at each other. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Right.’ Then he looked at the two police officers in expectant silence.

E-J removed a colour photograph from the envelope and handed it to the man. ‘We’re looking for someone who might have supplied this creature to a customer in England.’

George Erridge gave the photograph just a brief glance and said almost instantly, ‘Copris lunaris.’

‘You import tropical insects?’ Grace asked.

The man looked quite offended. ‘Not just tropical; European, pan-Asian, Australian; from all over the world, really.’

‘You might have imported this one?’

‘I usually keep some stock. Would you like to see?’

Grace was tempted to say, No, I really would not, but instead said dutifully, ‘Yes, I would.’

The man led them through the internal door he had emerged from, into a shed a good hundred feet long. Like the shopfront, it was lined floor to ceiling with cages; the smell was even worse in here, much more sour and pungent, and the lighting just as dim.

‘This is the roach room,’ Erridge explained with a tinge of pride. ‘We supply a lot of these to the pharmaceutical industry for tests.’

Grace, who had always had a loathing for cockroaches, stopped and peered into one cage in which there were about twenty of the brown creatures. He shuddered.

‘One of the most resilient animals on the planet,’ the man said. ‘Did you know that if you cut off a cockroach’s head, it can live for up to fifteen days? It will still keep going back to its original source of food. Won’t be able to eat it, of course.’

‘Yech!’ Emma-Jane gulped.

‘I didn’t know that,’ Grace said. Thanks for sharing it with me, he nearly added.

‘They would survive a nuclear holocaust. They finished evolving hundreds of thousands of years ago. Doesn’t say much about the human race, does it?’

Grace looked at him, uncertain how to reply. Then he and E-J followed him through another internal door into an even longer shed. Halfway down, George Erridge stopped and pointed at one small cage. ‘There you go,’ he said. ‘Copris lunaris.’

Roy Grace looked for some moments before he saw one of the beetles with its distinctive markings, motionless.

‘So, if I might ask, what exactly is your interest in these beetles?’ Erridge said.

It was so tempting to tell him, and watch his expression, that Grace had to fight hard to restrain himself. ‘I can’t tell you the circumstances, but one of these beetles was found at a crime scene. What we would like from you is a list of any of your customers who have bought one of these from you recently.’

George Erridge went quiet, but his eyebrows jigged furiously at each other. ‘I’ve only had one customer in recent months. Not much call for them, really; just the occasional collector and new museums – don’t get many of those.’

‘Who was the customer?’ Grace asked.

Erridge dug his hands into his overall pockets, then pushed his tongue hard against his lower lip. ‘Hmmn. Funny bloke, sort of eastern European accent. He rang me ’bout two weeks ago, asking very specifically if I had any Copris lunaris in stock. Said he wanted six of them.’

‘Six?’ Grace said, horrified. His immediate thought was Six murders like this one? ‘Yes.’

‘Alive or dead?’

Erridge looked at him strangely. ‘Alive, of course.’

‘Who do you normally supply to?’

‘Like I said, the pharmaceutical industry, natural history museums, private collectors, film companies sometimes; supplied a tarantula recently for a BBC production. I’ll tell you a trade secret: insects are a lot easier to control than other animals. You want a docile cockroach, just put him in the fridge for four hours. You want an aggressive cockroach, put him in a frying pan on low heat for a few minutes.’

‘I’ll remember that,’ Grace said.

‘Yes,’ Erridge replied intensely seriously. ‘That’s what you need to do. They don’t suffer, you see. They don’t feel pain the same way we do.’

‘Lucky them.’

‘Indeed.’

‘What details do you have of this man who bought six of these?’ Emma-Jane asked.

Looking a little defensive, Erridge said, ‘I don’t have any details. I only keep records on my regulars.’

‘So you hadn’t dealt with this man before?’ she asked.

‘No.’

‘But you met him?’ Grace asked.

‘No. He phoned up, asked if I had them, and told me he would send someone to collect them. He sent a minicab and the driver paid cash.’

‘A local firm?’

‘I wouldn’t know. I don’t use minicabs; can’t afford ’em.’

Grace’s mobile phone suddenly beeped then vibrated. Excusing himself, he turned away from the insect expert and answered it.

‘DS Grace,’ he said.

It was Branson. ‘Yo, old man,’ he said. ‘How you doing?’

‘I’m shopping,’ Grace said. ‘Buying your birthday present. What’s up?’

‘The bloke who rang me during the briefing – the paranoid one I had to speak to in the phone booth who said he thinks he witnessed information about Janie Stretton’s murder?’

‘Uh huh,’ Grace said.

‘He said he saw it on his computer after inserting a CD he found on a train.’

‘Is he letting us have a look at it?’

‘I’m working on that now.’

37

Looking into someone’s computer was like looking into their soul, Detective Sergeant Jon Rye believed, and he had had more than enough experience to make that observation. He had lost track of the number of computers he had examined in the past seven years – probably quite a few hundred, he had recently estimated. And today he had another one, a Mac laptop, fifteen-inch screen, about a year old.

He had never yet come across a computer that could hide its secrets from him and his team. Villains of every type – burglars, fraudsters, car-ringers, phishers, paedophiles – all thought they could wipe their hard disks and be safe. But there was no such thing as erasing a disk. The software that Jon Rye had at his disposal could recover just about every bit of deleted data from a disk, and could prise every digital footprint out of every nook and cranny of a computer’s system, however complex, however well concealed.

At this moment, seated at his desk in the High Tech Crime Unit, which he ran, he was about to stare into the soul of a man called Tom Bryce. And there was no option but to spend the weekend at work because this man, who was a potential witness not a suspect, needed his machine back for work on Monday morning.

It was Jon Rye’s boast, and it was no idle boast, that within an hour of looking at any man’s computer, he would know more about him than his wife did. And invariably the computers which arrived in his bailiwick belonged to men rather than women.

The High Tech Crime Unit occupied a substantial space on the ground floor of Sussex House. To the casual observer, most of it didn’t look any different to many of the other departments in the building. It consisted of an open-plan area densely packed with workstations; on the desks of several of these stood large server towers, and on some the entrails of dismembered computers as well. On one of the untidy shelves, between rows of tilted files, sat a bag of Tate and Lyle sugar. There was a Bart Simpson clock on the wall above one desk, at which Joe Moody, a large, ponytailed man in a T-shirt and jeans, sat intently at his keyboard, logging the images of a bunch of dumber than usual young vandals, who had photographed themselves torching a car they had stolen.

One section of the room was caged off from the rest – this housed Operation Glasgow, a major child pornography investigation which had been going on for two years and was on the verge of cracking one of the largest rings in Europe. The caging was to prevent cross-contamination of evidence with the rest of the department. Four people were at work in the cage today, and Rye did not envy them. Day in, day out, for the past twenty-four months they had had to spend their working hours looking at sickening pictures of sex acts involving children. Much of Jon Rye’s work involved suspected paedophiles and nothing lessened the anger he felt every time he saw one of those pictures. God, there were some sick people out there in the world. Too damned many.

The Venetian blinds were drawn shut against the gloomy view of the cell block, made even more depressing by the pelting rain. But at least it was a tolerable temperature in his office today; most days in summer it was far too hot and stuffy, and the damned windows did not open.

A tough, wiry-framed man of thirty-eight with a boyish, pugnacious face and thinning, brush-cut fair hair, Jon Rye was dressed in a short-sleeved white shirt, navy suit trousers and black shoes, the kind of plain, near-uniform clothing he wore to work every day, and it made no odds to him that this was Saturday. These days it had become the exception for him not to work on Saturdays.

Jon had always been interested in technology and in gadgets, and when the use of computers had started to explode a decade back, he had seen the massive new opportunities for criminals they would bring, and how ill-equipped the police were at that time to deal with computer crime. He decided the best job security in the force would be in computer crime, and that after he retired from the police, with his background in the field, getting a well-paid job in the civilian world would be easy.

He had given up trying to convince his wife Nadine that this crazy job was only temporary and would not go on for ever; or maybe she had given up listening when he told her. He glanced around at some of the other members of his team who were also in today, and wondered how many of them had domestic grief over being here.

The simple fact was that they were overrun. They currently had a nine-month backlog of seized computers waiting to be forensically examined; as usual, it came down to resources. He suspected that the chiefs preferred to spend their money on making the police more visible – putting them out on the streets, nicking burglars, muggers, drug dealers, making the crime statistics look good – and that they regarded the High Tech Crime Unit as necessary but not something which won Sussex Police many brownie points.

Quite a few of his team were real geeks, recruited from outside the police – a couple straight from university, others from IT departments in industry and local government. At the workstation right behind him he watched the geekiest of all, Andy Gidney.

Gidney, who was twenty-eight, was just plain weird. Almost pitifully thin, with a complexion that did not look as if it had ever seen fresh air, hair that he surely cut himself, clothes and glasses that looked like they had come from a closing-down sale at a charity shop and a generally antisocial demeanour, the man was nonetheless utterly brilliant at his work – by far the cleverest member of his team. He spoke seven languages fluently, including Russian, and had never yet been defeated by a password.

They did not need passwords to actually get into a computer, because the software they used took them in through a back door, but some password-protected zipped files gave them grief. Andy had been working for most of the past week on a particularly intransigent file seized from a suspect in a massive phishing scam in which online banking websites were being cloned. He was refusing to give up and allow the machine to be sent to a specialist decryption facility.

Jon did not care for Gidney, but he admired his tenacity and respected his abilities. He had long come to accept that the people in this unit were very different to the petrol-head cops he used to work with on Traffic, where he had spent nearly ten of his twenty years to date with the force. In Traffic you saw mostly grim sights, and sometimes heart-rending tragedy. But here in High Tech Crime, you saw the true dark side of human nature.