Looking Good Dead

  ‘And you, my friend. Sorry I’m so late.’ It was just over a week since Grace had last called on his services – when Frame had undoubtedly helped save an innocent man’s life.

  Harry Frame gripped his hand with a strength that belied both his years and his size, and stared up at him with piercing green eyes. ‘So, to what do I owe the pleasure this time? Come in!’

  Grace followed him into a narrow hallway lit by a low-wattage bulb in a hanging lantern, and decorated in a nautical theme, the centrepiece of which was a large brass porthole on the wall, and through into a sitting room, the shelves crammed with ships in bottles. There was a drab three-piece suite, the backs draped with antimacassars, a television that was switched off, and a round oak table with four wooden chairs by the window, to which Frame ushered him. On the wall, Grace clocked, as he did on each visit here, a naff print of Anne Hathaway’s cottage and a framed motto which read, ‘A mind once expanded can never return to its original dimensions.’

  ‘Tea?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ Grace said, although he could have murdered a cup. ‘I’m in a mega-rush.’

  ‘Life’s not a race, Detective Superintendent Grace, it’s a dance,’ Harry Frame said in a gently chiding voice.

  Grace grinned. ‘I’ll bear that in mind. I’ll put you on my card for a slow waltz at the summer ball.’ He sat down at the table.

  ‘So?’ Harry said, seating himself opposite. ‘Would you be here by any chance in connection with that poor young woman who was found dead here in Peacehaven last week?’

  Harry Frame was a medium and clairvoyant, as well as a pendulum dowser. Grace had been to see the man many times. He could be uncannily accurate – and on other occasions totally useless.

  Grace dug his hand in his pocket, pulled out three small plastic evidence bags and laid them on the table in front of Frame. He pointed, first, to the signet ring he had taken from Janie Stretton’s bedroom. ‘What can you tell me about the owner of this?’

  Frame removed the ring, clasped it in his hand and closed his eyes. He sat still for a good minute, his wizened face screwed up in concentration.

  The room had a musty smell – of old furniture, old carpet, old people.

  Finally, Harry Frame shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, Roy. Nothing. Not a good day for me today. No connection with the spirits.’

  ‘Nothing at all from the ring?’

  ‘I’m sorry. Could you come back tomorrow? We could try again.’

  Grace took the ring back, put it in the plastic bag and pocketed it. Next he pointed in turn to the silver cufflinks he had taken from a drawer in the Bryces’ bedroom and a silver bracelet he had taken from Kellie Bryce’s jewellery box. ‘I need to find the owners of these. I need to find them today. I don’t know where they are but I suspect they are somewhere in the vicinity of Brighton and Hove.’

  The medium left the room, and returned quickly holding an Ordnance Survey map of the Brighton and Hove area. Moving a candle in a glass holder out of the way, he spread it out on the table and pulled a length of string, with a small lead weight attached, from his trouser pocket.

  ‘Let’s see what we can find,’ he said. ‘Yes, indeed, let’s see.’ He held the bracelet and the cufflinks in his left hand, then, resting his elbows on the table, he inclined his face towards the map and began to chant.

  ‘Yarummm,’ Frame said to himself. ‘Yarummmm. Brnnnn. Yarummm.’

  Then he sat bolt upright, held the string over the map between his forefinger and thumb, and let the lead weight swing backwards and forwards, like a pendulum. After that, pursing his lips in concentration, he swung it vigorously in a tight circle, steadily covering the map inch by inch.

  ‘Telscombe?’ he said. ‘Piddinghoe? Ovingdean? Kemp Town? Brighton? Hove? Portslade? Southwick? Shoreham?’ He shook his head. ‘No, I’m not being shown anything in this area, sorry.’

  ‘Can we try a larger scale?’ Grace asked.

  Frame went out again and returned with a map covering the whole of East and West Sussex. But again, after several minutes of swinging the weight with fierce concentration, he produced no result.

  Grace wanted to pick the man up and shake him. He felt so damned frustrated. ‘Nothing at all, Harry?’

  The medium shook his head.

  ‘They’re going to die if I don’t find them.’

  Harry Frame handed him back the links and the bracelet. ‘I could try again later. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘This afternoon some time?’

  Frame nodded. ‘If you want to leave them with me? I’ll spend all day; I’ll keep working on it.’

  ‘Thank you, I’d appreciate it,’ Grace replied. He was clutching at straws, he knew, as he left with a heavy heart.

  76

  After the eight thirty briefing, Jon Rye had spent two and three-quarter hours working on the laptop that had been taken from the wrecked Ford Transit. But it was defeating him.

  At twenty past eleven, feeling drained and frustrated, he went out of the department to get himself a coffee from the vending machine, then returned, deep in thought. With any computer he could normally find a way around any password protection by using forensic software to go in via a back door and then through the computer’s entire internet history. But on this machine he was drawing a blank.

  He held his security card to the door panel of the High Tech Crime Unit, then entered and crossed what he had jokingly christened the hamster’s cage, the caged area housing the child pornography investigation, Operation Glasgow, nodding to a couple of the six people poring over their screens who glanced up at him, and walked through into the main part of his department.

  Andy Gidney and the rest of his team were at their desks, well stuck into their day’s work. He sat back down at his desk, the laptop itself secure in the Evidence Room, its cloned hard disk loaded into his computer.

  Although he had been head of this unit for the past three years, Rye was smart enough to know his own limitations. He had been retrained from Traffic. Several of the younger members of his team were techies from the ground up, university graduates who had lived and breathed computers from their cradles. Andy Gidney was the best of the lot. If there was one person in here who could persuade this laptop to yield its secrets, it was Gidney.

  He ejected the cloned hard drive from his processor tower, stood up and walked across to Gidney’s workstation. Gidney was still working on cracking the pass code on an online banking scam. ‘Andy, I need you to drop everything for the next few hours and help me out on this. We have two lives at stake.’

  ‘Ummm,’ Gidney said. ‘The thing is, I’m quite close now.’

  ‘Andy, I don’t care how close you are.’

  ‘But if I stop, I could lose this whole sequence! Here’s the thing!’ Gidney swivelled his chair to face Rye, his eyes burning with excitement. ‘I think I’m just one digit away!’

  ‘How long will it take you?’

  ‘Ummm, right, ummm,’ he said pensively. Then he closed his eyes and nodded furiously. ‘Ummm. Ummm.’ He opened his eyes again and looked down at the floor. ‘I would hope by the end of this week.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Jon Rye said. ‘You’re going to have to park it. I need you on this right now.’

  ‘Ummm, the thing is, there’s nine of us in this department, Jon, right?’

  Hesitantly Rye said, ‘Yes?’

  Concentrating hard on the carpet, Gidney asked, ‘Why exactly me?’

  Rye wondered if flattery would help. ‘Because you’re the best. OK?’

  Gidney petulantly swivelled his chair, and, with his back now to DS Rye, raised his hand, sounding supremely irritated. ‘All right, gimme.’

  ‘The forensic image files are on the server under job number 340.’

  ‘So what exactly am I looking for?’

  Rye did not like talking to his junior’s back, but he had learned from experience that there was no point trying to change this weirdo; it was best to humour him, if he wanted the be
st out of him. ‘Postal addresses, phone numbers, email addresses. Anything that could give us a clue where a couple called Mr and Mrs Bryce might be – Tom and Kellie Bryce.’ He spelled out their names.

  ‘Do what I can.’

  ‘Thanks, Andy.’

  Rye returned to his desk, then was almost immediately called over to the far end of the room by another colleague, DC John Shaw, a tall, good-looking young man of thirty who he liked a lot. Shaw was extremely bright, also from a university background like Gidney, but the complete opposite of the other man in every way.

  Shaw was working on a particularly harrowing photograph album on a hard drive seized in a raid on a suspected paedophile’s house. He had noticed a pattern in the man’s taste – bashing small children around before photographing himself having sex with them. It seemed similar to another case they’d handled recently and he wanted Rye’s view.

  Ten minutes later Jon Rye returned to his desk, deep in thought. He had become hardened to most kinds of vile stuff that he saw on computers, but hurting kids still got to him. Every time. He barely noticed, as he passed Gidney’s workstation, that he wasn’t there.

  A short while later, taking a brief respite from his emails, Rye looked over his shoulder and was surprised – and irritated, considering the urgency – to see that Gidney still had not returned.

  He stood up and walked over to the geek’s workstation. On the screen he saw:

  THE SHIPPING FORECAST ISSUED BY THE MET OFFICE, ON BEHALF OF THE MARITIME AND COASTGUARD AGENCY, AT 0555 ON MONDAY 6 JUNE 2005 THE GENERAL SYNOPSIS AT 0000

  LOW WESTERN FRANCE 1014 EXPECTED SOUTHEAST ENGLAND 1010 BY 1300. LOW ROCKALL 1010 MOVING STEADILY SOUTHEAST. HIGH FASTNET 1010. DISSIPATING.

  What on earth was the man doing looking at the shipping forecast when they were in the middle of an emergency? And where the hell was he? He’d been gone a good twenty minutes – if not more.

  After a further twenty minutes had passed, it became evident to Rye that Andy Gidney had vanished.

  And, he was about to discover, Gidney had securely deleted everything from the server and taken the laptop and the cloned hard drive with him.

  77

  Roy Grace drove away from Harry Frame’s house suddenly feeling very low and very tired, despite the latest can of Red Bull and the caffeine tablets he had swallowed less than half an hour ago. It was too soon to take any more. He hoped to hell that the clairvoyant would suddenly get one of his sparks of inspiration.

  Then his phone rang. He answered it hopefully. It was Branson, cheery as ever.

  ‘Bearing up, old timer?’

  ‘I’m bagged,’ Grace said. ‘What news?’

  ‘Someone from DS Gaylor’s lot has been going through Reggie D’Eath’s paperwork. They’ve found a monthly standing order on his Barclaycard to a company called Scarab Entertainment. The amount is one thousand pounds.’

  ‘A thousand quid? A month?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘Where does someone like D’Eath get that kind of money?’

  ‘By supplying small children to rich men as a sideline.’

  ‘Where’s the company based?’ Grace asked.

  ‘That’s the bad news. Panama.’

  Grace thought for a moment. There were certain countries in the world where the law guaranteed a company total privacy from investigation. He recalled from a previous case that Panama was one of them. ‘That’s not going to help us much in the short term. A thousand quid a month?’

  ‘That’s big business,’ Branson said. ‘Couldn’t we get a court order to force all the credit card companies to tell us who else is paying a grand a month to Scarab Entertainment?’

  ‘Yes, in these circumstances with lives at stake we could, but it won’t help us. We’ll get a list of nominee directors from some law firm in Panama that’ll tell us to fuck off when we approach it.’ How many subscribers did they have? It would not need many to make a very substantial business. One that they would go to great lengths to protect.

  DEARLY VALUED CUSTOMER, we hope you enjoyed our little bonus show. Remember to log in at 21.15 on Tuesday for our next Big Attraction – a man and his wife together. Our first ever DOUBLE KILLING!

  For a thousand a month you would want to give the odd little freebie, wouldn’t you? Just toss the occasional paedophile into an acid bath.

  ‘You still there, old timer?’

  ‘Yes. Anything else your end?’

  ‘We’ve got one sighting of Mr Bryce in his Espace, just after midnight, filling up with petrol at a Texaco garage at Pyecombe – from the CCTV camera.’

  ‘Other vehicles on the camera?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And nothing of use in the Espace?’

  ‘Forensics are crawling all over it. Nothing so far.’

  ‘I’m coming back to the Incident Room,’ Grace said. ‘I’ll be about twenty minutes.’

  ‘I’ll have some coffee waiting.’

  ‘I need a quadruple espresso.’

  ‘Me too.’

  Grace drove on, turning off the coast road and driving inland on the upper road through Kemp Town, past the posh girls’ school, St Mary’s Hall, the Royal Sussex County Hospital, then the Victorian Gothic facade of the mixed public school, Brighton College. On his left, a short distance ahead, he saw a muscular-looking man with a strutting gait walking into a newsagent’s. Something about him looked familiar, but he couldn’t immediately think what.

  But it was enough to make him do a U-turn. He pulled over on the opposite side of the road, switched off the engine and watched.

  After no more than a minute, the man emerged from the shop, a cigarette in his lips, carrying a plastic bag with a bunch of newspapers sticking out of the top, and walked towards a black Volkswagen Golf parked with two wheels on the kerb, its hazard flashers on.

  Grace stared hard through his windscreen. The gait was distinctly odd, a curious rolling swagger that reminded him of the way some hard nuts from the armed forces walked. As if they owned the pavement.

  Dressed in a singlet, white jeans and white loafers, the man had gelled spikes of short hair and sported a heavy gold chain around his neck. Where the hell had he seen him before? And then his – sometimes – near-photographic memory kicked in, and he knew exactly where and when he had seen this man before. Last night. On the CCTV footage in the Karma Bar.

  He had been Janie Stretton’s date!

  Grace’s heart was pounding. The Volkswagen drove off. Memorizing the number, he gave it a few seconds, let a taxi followed by a British Telecom van pass, then pulled back out onto the road, made another U-turn and followed, dialling the Incident Room on his mobile. It was answered on the first ring by Denise Woods, one of the indexers, a very serious, very efficient young woman.

  ‘Hi, it’s Grace. I need a PNC check very quickly. I’m following the vehicle now. It’s a Volkswagen Golf, registration Papa Lima Zero Three Foxtrot Delta Oscar.’

  Denise said she would call him right back.

  A short distance on, the Volkswagen, still in front of the taxi and British Telecom van, stopped at a red traffic light.

  When the lights went green, the Golf turned left into Lower Rock Gardens, heading down to the seafront. The other two vehicles went straight on. Grace paused for a second, then turned left, keeping as far back as he dared.

  Come on, Denise!

  The lights at the bottom, at the junction with Marine Parade, were green, and the Golf turned right onto the coast road. Grace went over on amber, keeping as far behind the Golf as he dared, letting a Ford Focus and then an elderly Porsche overtake him, but keeping the Golf in sight.

  As the Golf negotiated the roundabout in front of the Palace Pier, his phone rang. It was Denise. The registered owner of the car was a company called Bourneholt International Ltd, with a PO box number in Brighton. The car had not been reported lost or stolen and there were no police interest markers from anybody.

  ‘Bourneholt International Ltd,’ Grace said. ‘I kno
w that name.’ Then he remembered why. ‘Denise, quickly take a look at the registration of the van that crashed last night; I’ll hold.’

  The Golf continued heading west along the seafront, past the recently repainted facade of the Royal Albion Hotel. Then, as they approached the Old Ship Hotel, the Golf moved into the outside lane, its right turn indicator signalling.

  To his relief, a blue S-class Mercedes in front of him was signalling right, also. Grace tucked in behind its substantial bulk. He saw the Golf head up, past the hotel, and make a right, down into the huge, Civic Square underground car park. So did the S-class. Grace was right on its tail, waiting behind it on the ramp.

  Denise came back on the phone. ‘It’s the same, Roy. Bourneholt International Ltd.’

  He clenched his fists in excitement. ‘Brilliant!’

  The automatic barrier swung up and he moved forward, waited for the ticket to emerge from the machine and grabbed it. ‘Well done!’ he said.

  But there was no signal.

  The barrier swung up again, and he drove the Alfa through. Just as he did so, a BMW 3 series reversed out of a space, blocking Grace’s path.

  It reversed slowly, a nervous man inching back, inch by sodding inch.

  Come on! Grace screamed silently.

  After what seemed an eternity, the BMW drove forward, then turned off onto the exit ramp. Grace accelerated. All the spaces on this level were taken. He took the ramp down to the next level. That was full too. So was the next level. But as he raced through it, a Ford Galaxy people carrier filled with children, a nervous mother at the wheel, reversed across his path.

  Jesus, woman, get out of my way.

  He had no option but to wait. And wait. And wait.

  Finally he got down to Level 4, and saw several free spaces. He accelerated, looking for the Golf, and then he saw it. Parked in a bay.

  The driver had vanished.