Not Dead Yet (Roy Grace 8) (9 page)

There was a muted cheer. Glenn grinned. ‘I’m calling a second press conference for five-thirty this afternoon, by which time I hope to be able to give out information that may generate some response from the public. I will of course keep enough back to enable us to weed out crank calls.’

It was normal in any major crime enquiry to withhold key information that would be known only to the perpetrator. That way time wasters could be quickly eliminated.

At that moment, Grace’s new phone, which he had switched to silent, vibrated. He glanced at the display, fully expecting it to be Spinella. But the display said
BLOCKED NUMBER
. He answered it, as quietly as he could, and heard the voice of the Chief Constable’s Staff Officer, DCI Trevor Bowles.

‘Roy,’ he said. ‘The Chief needs to see you as soon as possible. Are you free this morning?’

Grace frowned. The Chief Constable, and the other brass, tended to keep to office hours and their weekends free. For Tom Martinson to want to see him on a Saturday, there had to be an important reason.

‘I could be with him in half an hour.’

‘Perfect.’

Grace ended the call, worried. As soon as the briefing finished, he agreed to meet Glenn Branson at the tailor at 11 a.m., then hurried out to his car, in his precious reserved space at the front of the CID HQ building.

It was love at first sight. The first time Eric Whiteley saw Brighton’s Royal Pavilion, he was smitten. He was fifteen, on a day trip to Brighton with his parents, and he had never seen anything like it before in his life. It was a place that belonged in someone’s imagination, someone who tried to escape from the nastiness of the world into the labyrinth of beauty inside his head. It was not a place that belonged in the middle of an English seaside resort.

Yet there it was.

He was mesmerized by the mad splendour of its sprawling design, by its part-Indian, part-Chinese influences and its curious domes. And even more by its totally extravagant interior. From then on during his school holidays he spent all his pocket money on the train fare from Guildford, where he lived, to Brighton, and on the entrance fee, going there when it first opened every morning, and staying until it closed. It was a world away from his boarding school which was full of bullies who told him constantly he was ugly, boring, useless, Ubu.

He felt safe inside its ornately decorated walls, surrounded by the richness of its art treasures. This royal palace, built by King George IV, and used by him for secret – and not too secret – seaside love trysts with his mistress. He doubted that George, nicknamed Prinny, vain and increasingly rich, had ever been bullied by anyone, nor been told he was no good or ugly. No one would have ever called him Ugly Boring Useless. Even though he actually was.

One of the things he liked most to imagine was himself wearing the costumes of the time. He particularly fantasized about dressing up as the king, in those fine robes. He could picture himself sweeping into class, sword hanging to his side, king. No one would call him Ubu then.

One summer, when he was eighteen, he applied for a holiday job as a guide and to his joy he was accepted. He would escort parties of tourists around, telling them of the love the king had for his mistress and how frustrated he was by the protocols of his age. But what he loved most of all about this job was the access it gave him. The freedom to wander around the Pavilion’s interior when there were no tours for him to guide, without the security guards taking any notice of him.

He liked best of all its hidden parts. The secret corridors that ran behind the kitchens to the grand rooms, where servants could move around with drinks and food, slipping in and out of secret doorways. There was a hidden spiral staircase, that the public never saw, because the banisters were dangerously rickety, up which he could climb to an area, beneath one of the domes, to which the king invited his guests to see the spectacular views, and later where occasional senior household staff were rumoured to have lived.

It was now derelict, the floorboards were in poor condition, and there was a very large trapdoor secured with just two bolts, and carrying a warning sign, below which was a forty-foot drop down into a store room above the kitchens. There was a rope-and-pulley system from the 1800s, which Eric imagined to have been a very primitive kind of dumb waiter. And from this rooftop eyrie he had the finest view of Brighton he had ever seen.

He’d sneaked a sleeping bag up here and made it his private place. Sometimes, if he could avoid the security guards when they closed up the building in the evening, he would bring a picnic here and hole up for the night. Safe. No bullies up here. He would close his eyes and imagine himself living here, a king, worshipped and adored.

Then one night he got caught by a bully security guard.

They fired him as a guide. He was told he could never come back here again.

Cleo loved her little town house in the trendy North Laine district of Brighton; she felt secure here and she liked the convenience and the buzz of living in the centre of the city. It was great to walk across the courtyard and out of the gates, and be able to stroll through the maze of cafés and small independent shops, and down to the beach on a fine day. But there were some drawbacks. One was that Humphrey needed a garden to be out in when she was at work – and she planned to return to the mortuary as soon as practicable after the baby was born. A bigger problem still was that she only had one tiny spare room and needed that for her studies – she was doing an Open University degree course in Philosophy – and for Roy to have a workplace at home. The baby would be born in a matter of weeks, perhaps even sooner, and they would be short of space. As soon as Roy sold his house they could start looking for a bigger place together. Another less serious, but constant, irritant was having to park on the street, and it was getting harder and harder to find spaces when she came back from work in the evenings.

Throughout her life, Cleo’s favourite time of the week had always been Saturday mornings – even though in this job she frequently had to work part of her weekends. People who died suddenly were rarely obliging enough to do so only during office hours, which meant that when she was on call, which was most of the time as they were short-handed in the mortuary, she frequently had to go out on weekends and holidays to help recover a body.

The one last night had been particularly unsavoury, and today she had to attend and assist at the post-mortem, which had now moved from the deposition site to the mortuary. But she wasn’t daunted. The torso lying in a tank of chicken droppings was grim work, but mangled and sometimes disembowelled bodies in car crashes were far worse and more harrowing. So were charred corpses in fires. And it always made her sad to see lonely, elderly people who had died in their homes and not been discovered for months. But by far the worst of all were children. A couple of weeks previously she’d had to recover a six-month-old baby who’d died of suspected sudden infant death syndrome.

Removing that tiny girl from the little cot in the house had been traumatic for her, thinking all the time of how she might feel if that had happened to her and Roy. And the frightening prospect that it could.

But she wasn’t thinking of any of that now as she stepped out of her front door into the early June sunshine. Above her was a cloudless sky, and she smelled the tang of salt in the air from the English Channel, a short distance to the south. The forecast was good, and although she was destined to spend much of the day in the mortuary, she hoped to get away by late afternoon, and meet her sister for a coffee and catch-up in a café on the seafront. Afterwards she planned to get prawns and avocado and some nice Dover sole and cook Roy one of his favourite meals this evening – after which they could watch a DVD, if she could stay awake that long!

She strode across the courtyard, dressed in a long lycra T-shirt, with her bump out loud and proud, her Crocs – which Roy didn’t care for – slapping on the cobbles. She ignored her almost constant backache from the weight of the baby, feeling so blissfully happy she was almost high. She was carrying the child of the man she truly, deeply loved. A wonderfully kind, caring and strong person. And she genuinely believed he loved her just as much.

Two seagulls swirled overhead, shrieking, and she glanced up at them for a moment, then carried on towards the wrought iron gates. She clicked the lock and stepped out into the narrow street. This part of the city was always teeming with people on a Saturday morning, spilling out of the rammed Gardner Street bric-a-brac market a couple of streets away. It was 9.30 and the antique dealer across the road, who specialized in fireplaces, already had some of his goods out on display, propped against the shop front.

She walked up the hill, taking the first right turn, and strode along the even narrower street, lined on both sides with small terraced Victorian houses, past the nose-to-tail parked cars. She saw her black Audi TT halfway along, where she had parked it last night – relieved as ever that it had not been stolen.

As she neared it, she witnessed the standard hazard of parking out in the open in this city – thanks to all the gulls, half of the vehicles looked like Jackson Pollock paintings. Even from a hundred feet away, she saw the streaky, swirly white and mustard-yellow splodges all over her beloved convertible.

But then as she got closer, her mood suddenly changed. With a tightening in her gullet, she broke into an anxious run, ignoring the fact she wasn’t supposed to run. Then she stopped beside the car.

‘Shit,’ she said. ‘Shit.’

The fabric roof had been ripped open, both lengthways and sideways.

Feeling a flash of fury, her sunny mood totally gone, she peered inside, looking for the damage. But to her surprise the CD and radio player were intact. ‘Bastards,’ she mouthed. ‘Scumbags.’

Then she saw the marks on the bonnet. At first she thought it had been someone tracing in the dust with their fingers, until she looked closer. And froze.

Someone had used a sharp instrument, a screwdriver or a chisel, and had engraved the words in the paintwork, gouging right down to the bare metal.

COPPERS TART. UR BABY IS NEXT.

Malling House, the headquarters of Sussex Police, was on the outskirts of Lewes, the historic county town of East Sussex, eight miles north-east of Brighton.

The sprawling, ragged complex of Police HQ buildings, from where the administration and key management for the force’s 5,000 officers and civilian employees was handled, was fronted by a handsome red-brick Queen Anne house, once a private stately home, and faithfully restored after it had been gutted by fire over a decade ago. It housed the offices of the Chief Constable, the Deputy Chief Constable, the Assistant Chief Constables and other chief officers together with their support staff.

When Roy Grace halted at the security barrier, he felt the same kind of butterflies he always had when he came here, as if he were still a schoolboy and had been summoned to the headmaster’s study. He had only met the recently appointed Chief Constable, Tom Martinson, very fleetingly at a social event, and had not had the opportunity to talk at any length with him. He would need Martinson’s confidence and backing if he were to rise any further from his current rank of Detective Superintendent.

The rank of Chief Superintendent was the next goal on his career ladder, but he had no ambition to rise beyond that into the Assistant Chief Constable realm, partly because he didn’t think he could play the required politics, but more importantly because it would make it almost impossible to do any frontline police work, which was what he loved. In those elevated roles you were predominantly deskbound managers. True, in his current role he was deskbound to a large extent, but he always had the option to get out into the field – and took every opportunity to do so.

In any event he was very content with his current position, as Head of Major Crime. It was a position he could only have dreamed of when he had first joined the police, and it was a job that gave him so much satisfaction he would happily stay in this position for the rest of his career.

If he had one regret in life, it was that his father, also a police officer, and his mother, had not lived to see his success.

But at the moment he was preoccupied by a big concern, which was that nothing stayed still in life. As a result of recent government budget cuts, police forces were required to amalgamate divisions and share resources, and some had to implement compulsory retirement after thirty years’ service. Sussex Police was now having to share its Major Crime Branch with Surrey. Which meant he could no longer be sure of remaining in this job. And his fear at this moment was that this summons to see the Chief meant bad news. Police officers could not be made redundant before retirement age, but many were currently being shunted sideways.

The security guard gave him a cheery wave and he drove through the open barrier, then turned right, passing the police driving school and parked in front of the modern glass and brick Comms building. As he switched off the engine his phone rang.

The display showed
BLOCKED NUMBER
.

He answered, and to his dismay he heard an all too familiar voice down a crackly line, accompanied by what sounded suspiciously like the roar of waves.