Looking Good Dead

  ‘Yes, I was intending to. Briefly, in ancient Egyptian mythology, the scarab beetle was worshipped under the name Khepri – which translates literally as ‘‘he who has come into being’’ or, ‘‘he who came forth from the earth’’. Those Egyptians were great worshippers of the sun. In the same way that the scarab beetle pushed a ball of dung in front of it, the Egyptians imagined that Khepri rolled the sun – visualize it as a solar ball – across the sky from east to west each day – so they regarded Khepri as a form of the sun god, Ra. As a result the scarab became an important symbol of creation, resurrection and everlasting life in the religious mythology of ancient Egypt.’

  ‘They were clever buggers, those Egyptians,’ Norman Potting said. ‘I mean how the heck did they build those pyramids? Mind you, I’d never trust one – have to watch those darkies.’

  Grace, wincing, shot a sideways glance at Glenn Branson, then glared at Potting, wondering how on earth the man was still in the force and hadn’t ended up in front of a sexual harassment or race relations tribunal. ‘Norman, that language is totally unacceptable and I won’t have it used in my briefings.’

  Potting looked as if he was about to say something, then appeared to think better of it and sheepishly looked down at his papers.

  ‘Have you figured out if the symbolism has any bearing yet, Roy?’ Nick Nicholl asked.

  ‘Not so far, no. I hope one of you geniuses will.’ Grace grinned at him, then continued, telling the team of their discovery this afternoon of Janie Stretton’s secret life. And, crucially, that they had the first name of a possible suspect. Anton.

  It had already been established that the phone number for this Anton, which Claire at the agency had written down, belonged to an untraceable pay-as-you-go phone.

  Grace paused to drink some water. ‘Right. Resourcing. East Downs Division has been very positive in offering manpower. We instigated a search of the vicinity of the area where the torso and limbs were discovered on Wednesday morning, and have been widening and upgrading this further over the past forty-eight hours. I’ve brought in the Sussex Police Underwater Search Unit, and we are in the process of having the USU team drag all local rivers, lakes and reservoirs. I have also requested a further helicopter sweep.’

  He went on through the headings. Meeting Cycles: Grace announced there would be daily 8.30 a.m. and 6.30 p.m. briefings. He reported that the Holmes computer team had been up and running since Wednesday. He read out the list under Investigative Strategies, which included Communications/Media, emphasizing the need to keep the discovery of the beetle out of the press, and that they were working on getting the murder featured on next week’s Crimewatch.

  Then Emma-Jane raised a hand. ‘Are we going to release the information that Janie Stretton had a secret life on the game?’

  Grace had been wondering exactly the same thing. He thought about Derek Stretton, already distraught, his life in ruins. What effect would that information have on the poor man? But would there be any value to releasing it? Would it prompt someone who had hired her services to come forward with some vital clue? Unlikely but possible. It was a tough call. Releasing it would greatly increase the press interest. Broader coverage might just mean that someone would come forward. Maybe a waiter or a barman might have seen Janie and this Anton together?

  ‘Two family liaison officers are with Janie’s father at the moment, DCs Donnington and Ritchie. I will discuss it with them first but my inclination is yes,’ he replied to Emma-Jane. ‘Unless they have very strong feelings that it would be too distressing to Mr Stretton at this stage, we will go ahead and release it.’

  Next was Forensics. Grace reported that, apart from the beetle, there were no surprises from the post-mortem so far, apart from one: there was no sign of sexual assault on the victim. He had the report from Dr Frazer Theobald in front of him, but there was no need to read out the pages and pages of technical details. Janie had died from multiple stab wounds from a long, thin blade. Having her head removed hadn’t exactly helped her survival chances either, he thought.

  ‘At the moment, this scarab beetle is my main concern,’ he said. ‘Has anyone discovered any other murder where a beetle was found at the scene?’

  ‘There was a woman found on Wimbledon Common in April,’ Nick said. ‘The victim was a twenty-six-year-old woman, also missing her head. She was wearing a silver charm bracelet that none of her family recognized. I had a jpeg emailed through. This is a printout.’ He handed it to Grace. ‘There was no sign of sexual assault in this murder either. And it is unsolved.’

  Grace stared at the tiny silver beetle hanging on the bracelet. He recognized the markings instantly. It was a scarab. ‘Good work,’ he said. ‘No others?’

  ‘The Met are the only force to have responded so far,’ Nick said.

  Grace stared at the photograph. ‘My hunch is there are going to be others. Can we get the file on this?’

  Nick looked at his notes. ‘The SIO is a Detective Inspector Dickinson; he’s offered to meet me – or any of us.’

  ‘He sounds unusually cooperative for a Met,’ Grace said cynically. The Metropolitan Police tended to be a law unto themselves – arrogant, considering themselves the best, and not that cooperative with provincial forces. ‘Can you arrange to meet him mid-morning tomorrow?’

  ‘I was meant to be playing for Sussex CID in a police football friendly, but yes.’

  ‘It’s June now; this is the cricket season, not football,’ Grace said in a chiding tone. ‘We have a father I’ve just spent time with today, telling him his daughter has been butchered; I’m not sure he’d be that impressed to know the murder investigation had to be delayed because of a sodding football match.’

  The Detective Constable blushed. ‘No, sir – Roy.’

  When he reached the end of his report, Grace summed up. ‘We have now established a crime scene where the murder of Janie Stretton took place. Bella and Nick have conducted questioning of all Janie Stretton’s neighbours, and this is ongoing. The alternative scenarios as I see them are as follows.

  ‘One, this is a one-off killing by some very sick person.

  ‘Two, we may be looking at a serial killer leaving a signature. We are waiting for more information from the Met on the other killing where a beetle was found to see if they may be connected. Our killer may therefore have killed at least twice, each time a young woman, and we can assume he is going to kill again.’

  Then he asked his team if they had anything to report.

  Potting said he had spent much of the afternoon at the firm of solicitors where Janie Stretton had been doing her training. He had interviewed her boss, a Martin Broom – who Grace had encountered in court once, over an assault during a particularly nasty divorce case – and several of her colleagues. Janie had checked out as a popular, hard-working and conscientious young woman.

  Do we all have a hidden dark side? Grace wondered privately to himself. ‘I’ve requested an additional team member,’ he said. ‘And I want someone from the High-Tech Crime Department to go through her laptop with a fine-tooth comb,’ he said. Then he turned to DC Boutwood. ‘Emma-Jane, sorry to dump this on you, but I want you to organize a trawl through all the CCTV camera footage in the Brighton area on Tuesday night. You can draft in some help on this. What you are looking for is this young lady.’ He tapped the photograph of Janie Stretton that had been circulated to the press. ‘She went out on a fourth date with a man called Anton, or whatever his real name was, that evening. Someone must have seen them.’ Then he turned to DC Nicholl.

  ‘Nick, I want you to organize a team of Specials and PCSOs to take this photo to every restaurant, bar and pub in Brighton and Hove, and see if anyone saw her. OK?’

  The beanpole nodded.

  ‘Bella,’ Grace said. ‘Janie Stretton’s father told me her last boyfriend was called Justin Remington – a property developer in London. Go find him and see what he has to say.’

  She nodded.

  ‘Emma-Jane, how did y
ou get on with the tropical insect breeders?’

  ‘I’ve located sixteen throughout the UK. Some are internet only, but I’ve found seven breeders. One, in Bromley, south London, sounds very interesting. He had a request to supply a scarab beetle just over ten days ago. To a man with an eastern European accent.’

  ‘Magic!’ Grace said. ‘And?’

  ‘I’ve arranged to see him tomorrow.’

  ‘I’ll come with you.’

  Grace then looked down at his notes. ‘Norman, we’ve removed the answering machine from the victim’s flat. I’m having it examined by the Technical Support Unit. Whatever information they can extract I’d like you to check up on.’

  ‘Any good-looking birds?’

  ‘I’ll find someone to help you if you find any.’

  ‘I quite like the sound of this agency, if it’s got birds of the calibre of Janie Stretton on its books.’

  Grace ignored the man. His remark didn’t even warrant an answer. ‘I’ll see you all here at eight thirty in the morning,’ he said. ‘Sorry to muck up your weekends.’

  In particular he avoided eye contact with Glenn Branson. Glenn’s wife was getting increasingly fed up with the hours that police work consumed. But that was his choice, Grace thought. When you signed up to Her Majesty’s police, you took the Queen’s shilling. And in return you dedicated your life.

  OK, so maybe it wasn’t actually spelled out in the contract. But that was the reality. If you wanted a life, you were in the wrong career.

  31

  It was windier down in Brighton than in London, but the air was plenty warm enough to be outside.

  Girls Aloud were pounding out of the CD player built into the barbecue, and a digital light show flashed with the music. Jessica, dressed in baggy jeans, a black top and sparkly shoes, her long fair hair flailing, and Kellie, barefoot in white calf-length trousers and a striped man’s shirt, were dancing on the lawn, gyrating wildly, laughing, having just the greatest time.

  Max, in grubby grey shorts and an even grubbier Dumbledore sweatshirt, his blond hair hanging like a tousled mop over his forehead, had not yet finished inspecting the barbecue. He treated it with the reverence with which he might have treated a spaceship that had landed in their backyard. Which indeed was what it looked like.

  It was vast, taking up a good chunk of the garden, eight feet from end to end, curved, with a futuristic design fashioned from stainless steel, brushed aluminium and some black, marbled material, complete with extremely comfortable fold-out stools. It looked more like the bar from one of those hyper-hip London hotels where Tom sometimes met clients for a drink than a device for grilling sausages.

  The Giraffe must have walked past twenty times this evening. Tom saw Len Wainwright’s head, craned forward way above the top of the close-boarded fence, bobbing steadily along, up and down, up and down, dying to catch Tom’s eye and get into a natter about the machine. But Tom was in no mood for small talk tonight.

  ‘What does that do, Daddy?’ Max, pointing at a digital display, shouted above the sound of the music.

  Tom set down his glass of rosé wine, then thumbed through the English section of an instruction manual the size of a London phone directory. ‘I think it measures the temperature of the inside of the meat – or whatever you are cooking.’

  Max’s mouth opened and shut, as it always did when he was impressed by something. Then he frowned. ‘How does it know that?’

  Tom opened a compartment and pointed at a spike. ‘There’s a sensor in the spike; it reads the internal temperature. It’s like a thermometer.’

  ‘Wow!’ Max’s eyes lit up for a moment, then he was pensive again, and took a few steps back. ‘It is a bit big, isn’t it?’

  ‘A little,’ Tom said.

  ‘Mummy said we might be moving, then we’d have a bigger garden, so then it won’t be so big.’

  ‘Did she?’ Tom said.

  ‘She said that ’xactly. Will you come and play Truck Racing with me?’

  ‘I have to start cooking – we’re going to eat soon. Aren’t you hungry?’

  Max puckered up his mouth. He always considered any question carefully, even one as basic as this. Tom liked that quality about him; he took it as a sign of his son’s intelligence. So far he didn’t seem to have inherited his mother’s recklessness.

  ‘Umm. Well, I could be hungry soon, I think.’

  ‘Do you?’ Tom smiled and stroked the top of his son’s head fondly.

  Max ducked away. ‘You’ll muck my hair up!’

  ‘You reckon?’

  He nodded solemnly.

  ‘Well it looks to me like you have a bird nesting in it.’

  Max stared at him even more solemnly. ‘I think you’re drunk!’

  Tom looked at him in shock. ‘Drunk? Me?’

  ‘That’s your third glass of wine.’

  ‘You’re counting, are you?’

  ‘They said in school about drinking too much wine.’

  Now Tom was even more shocked. Was the nanny state now sending kids home from school to spy on their parents’ drinking habits? ‘Who said that, Max?’

  ‘It was a woman.’

  ‘One of your teachers?’

  He shook his head. ‘A nothingist.’

  Tom smelled sweet barbecue smoke coming from one of his neighbours’ gardens. He was still poring through the manual, trying to find out how to fire up the gas grill. ‘A nothingist?’

  ‘She was telling us what was good to eat,’ Max replied.

  Now Tom got it, or thought he had. ‘You mean a nutritionist?’

  After some moments of deep thought, Max nodded. ‘Can’t we have one game of Truck Racing before you cook? Just one teeny game?’

  Tom finally located the on–off switch. The instruction manual said to switch the grill on, then leave for twenty minutes. Kellie and Jessica looked well away, dancing to yet another track.

  ‘One game.’

  ‘Promise you won’t beat me?’ Max asked.

  ‘That wouldn’t be a fair game, would it?’ Tom said, following him into the house. ‘Anyhow, I never beat you; you always win.’

  Max burst into giggles, and scampered on ahead of his father upstairs to his bedroom. Tom paused in the kitchen to glance at the television, in case the news was on, and to fill his wine glass up – finishing the bottle in the process. Unless Kellie had been helping herself, Max was wrong, he realized. It hadn’t been his third glass, it had been his fourth. And on Monday he intended phoning Max’s headmaster and asking what the hell he thought he was playing at, indoctrinating kids into monitoring their parents’ drinking habits.

  But as he climbed the stairs, being careful not to spill any wine, he had something infinitely more important on his mind. He stopped at the top, thinking.

  Max called out, ‘You can have any colour you want except green, Daddy. I’m having green. OK?’

  ‘OK,’ he called back. ‘You’re having green!’

  Max won the first race easily. Squatting on the carpet in his son’s bedroom, holding the remote control, Tom could not get his brain to focus on the track. He crashed on the first bend in the second race, then went off again at the next opportunity, scattering tyres and bales of straw. Then he somersaulted into a grandstand.

  For the past two hours, since he had seen the photograph of Janie Stretton in the Evening Standard, then seen her again on the Six O’Clock News when he’d got home, his brain had been mush.

  He could not just ignore any more what had happened. Yet that email which had trashed his computer showed him this person or these people – whoever – were serious.

  Which meant the threat was serious.

  Was there really any useful information he could give to the police? All he had seen was a couple of minutes of the young woman being stabbed by a hooded figure. Was there really anything there which could help the police?

  Anything worth risking the safety of his family for?

  He played the argument over and ov
er. And each time he came to the inescapable conclusion that yes, there might be something that could help the police. Otherwise why would the threats have been made against him?

  He needed to discuss it with Kellie, he realized. Would she believe him, that he had innocently stuck the CD into his computer?

  And if she was against him going to the police, what then? What would his conscience say to him?

  The people he had always admired in his life, the true heroes, past and present, were those men and women who were prepared to confront things that were wrong. To stand up and be counted.

  Tom watched Max for some moments, eyes alert, fingers expertly dancing around the controls, his truck hurtling around the track. Outside there was a lull in the music and he heard Jessica laughing gleefully.

  Didn’t they also have a say in the matter?

  Did he have a right to put their lives in jeopardy over what he believed in? What would his own father have done in this situation?

  God, it was at a time like this that he missed his parents so much. If he could have gone to them and asked their advice, how much easier that would have been.

  He thought about his father, a decent man who had worked as a sales manager for a German company that manufactured industrial cleaning brushes. A tall, gentle man, and a verger at the local Anglican church, he worshipped every Sunday of his life, and was rewarded by God by having his head chopped off by the tailgate of a milk lorry on the M1 motorway at the age of forty-four.

  His father would have given him a Christian perspective, no doubt the responsible citizen view, that Tom should report what he had seen and also the threat. But he had never been able to share his father’s faith in God.

  He would ask Kellie, he decided. She had a lot of wisdom. Whatever she said, he would abide by.

  32

  The clumsily handwritten poster Sellotaped to the glass pane of the door said: brent mackenzie. world-famous clairvoyant. here tonight only! A large fluorescent yellow strip across it read: sorry, sold out!

  Outwardly the building did not look that promising. Grace had been expecting a fairly spacious hall, but the Brighton Holistic Centre appeared to occupy nothing grander than a small corner shop, with its exterior painted a rather garish pink.