Looking Good Dead

  ‘SOMEONE ANSWER THE FUCKING PHONE!’ Tom shouted.

  His secretary raised an apologetic arm and strode over to her desk.

  ‘So talk me through exactly what happened again,’ Chris Webb said, sounding exasperated as if he were addressing the class imbecile.

  Both salesmen looked at Tom.

  ‘I opened my computer on the train this morning and it wouldn’t boot up. It was dead,’ he said.

  ‘It’s booting up fine,’ the techie said. ‘But there’s no data, is there? That’s why you’re not getting anything up on the screen.’

  Lowering his voice in an attempt to lose his audience, Tom said, ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘There isn’t much to understand, mate. Your database is wiped clean.’

  ‘Not possible,’ Tom said. ‘I mean – I haven’t done anything.’

  ‘You’ve either had a virus or you’ve been hacked.’

  ‘I thought Macs don’t get viruses.’

  ‘You did what I told you, didn’t you – please tell me you did. You didn’t hook this up to the office server?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Lucky for that – it would have trashed your entire database.’

  ‘So there’s a virus.’

  ‘You’ve got something in there. Nothing’s wrong with your hardware. I just can’t believe you were so stupid – putting in a CD you found on a train. Jesus, Tom!’

  Tom glanced past him. The rest of his team seemed to have lost interest. ‘What do you mean, stupid? It’s a computer, right? That’s what it does. It’s got all the anti-virus software – which you installed. It plays CDs. It ought to be able to play any CD.’

  Webb held up the CD. ‘I’ve had a read of this, away from any machine it could harm. It’s spyware – it will reconfigure your software and plant God knows what kind of stuff in your system. You found it on a train?’

  ‘Last night.’

  ‘Serves you right for not handing it in to Lost Property right away.’

  Sometimes Tom couldn’t believe he actually paid this guy to help him. ‘Thanks a lot. I was trying to be helpful – thought I might find an address on it I could send it to.’

  ‘Yeah, well next time it happens send it to me and I’ll look at it for you. So, apart from this, have you opened up any attachments you didn’t recognize?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I never do – you warned me not to, years ago. Only the ones that come from people I know.’

  ‘Porn?’

  ‘Jokes, porn, the usual stuff.’

  ‘I suggest you wear a condom next time you surf the net.’

  ‘That’s not even funny.’

  ‘That wasn’t a joke. You’ve picked up a very nasty virus; it’s extremely aggressive. If you’d logged on to your office server this morning, you’d have wiped that clean, and all your colleagues’ computers as well. And the backup.’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘Good word,’ Chris Webb said. ‘Couldn’t have put it better myself.’

  ‘So how do I get rid of it?’

  ‘By paying me a lot of money.’

  ‘Great.’

  ‘Or you can buy a new computer.’

  ‘You really know how to cheer someone up, don’t you?’

  ‘You want the facts, I’m giving them to you.’

  ‘I don’t understand. I thought Macs didn’t get viruses.’

  ‘They don’t very often. But there are some floating around. You might have just been unlucky. But most likely it’s from this CD. Of course there is another possibility.’ He looked around, found the mug of tea he had put down a while ago, and swigged some down.

  ‘And what’s that?’ Tom asked.

  ‘It might be someone who is pissed off with you.’ After a few moments, Webb added, ‘Flash tie you’re wearing.’

  Tom glanced down; it was lavender with silver horses. Hermès. Kellie had recently bought it on the internet in some closing-down offer – her idea of economizing.

  ‘It’s for sale,’ he said.

  11

  Shortly after half past four in the afternoon, at the end of three hours of painstaking scrutiny, the dismembered remains of the young woman beneath the awning in the rain-lashed field of rape had come close to yielding as much as they were going to out here, the Home Office pathologist decided.

  He completed the primitive but effective technique of pressing Sellotape against every inch of her flesh in the hope of trapping more fibres, tweezered off a few fibres that had lodged in her pubic hair, carefully bagging each of them, then ran his eye once more over the body parts and the ground immediately around them, concentrating fiercely, checking just one more time for anything he might have missed.

  Grace would have preferred the pathologist to go straight to the mortuary and perform the post-mortem this evening, which was normal practice, but Theobald informed him apologetically that he was already committed to a PM in Hampshire on a suspicious yachting death.

  In an ideal world all post-mortems on murder victims would be carried out in situ, as there was such a risk in moving them of losing some vital clue, perhaps invisible to the naked eye. But a muddy, wind-blown, rain-swept field did not constitute an ideal world. Bodies were seldom found in places that were post-mortem friendly. Some pathologists preferred to spend a minimal amount of time at the crime scene and return to the relatively pleasant working environment of the mortuary. But Dr Frazer Theobald was not one of them. He could be at a scene late into the night, indeed all through the night, if necessary, before declaring himself satisfied that the remains were ready to be removed to the mortuary.

  Grace looked at his watch. His mind was partly on his date tomorrow night. It would be good to get off before the shops shut today. He knew it was wrong to be thinking this way, but for years his sister, and everyone else, had been telling him to get a life. For the first time since Sandy had gone he had met a woman that he really was interested in. But he was worried that his wardrobe was crap, and he needed some new summer clothes. Then he tried to put his date out of his mind and concentrate on his work.

  The young woman’s head had still not yet been found. Roy Grace had called in a POLSA, a Police Search Adviser, and several police vans had already arrived filled with constables, many of them Specials, and begun a line search of the area. The driving rain was hampering visibility, and a helicopter droned low overhead, covering a slightly wider area. Only the police Alsatians, bounding away in the distance, seemed unfazed by the elements. To the farmer’s chagrin, a sixty-deep line of policemen, wearing fluorescent jackets in an even brighter yellow than the crop, was systematically trampling every square inch of his field.

  Grace had spent much of the time on his phone, organizing the search, arranging a workspace for the team he would be assembling in the Major Incident Suite, obtaining an incident code name from the Sussex Police computer, and listening to the profiles of the handful of young women who had been reported missing in the past few days. There was only one missing person report within a five-mile radius that was a major cause for concern, a further three within the whole of Sussex, and another six in the entire south-east of England.

  So far the taciturn Dr Theobald had been unable to give him much of a description, beyond light brown hair, gleaned from her pubic hair colouring, and a guess that she was either in her twenties or her early thirties.

  Four women fitted that description.

  Grace was well aware of the grim statistic that 230,000 people went missing in England every year. And that 90 per cent of those who turned up would do so within thirty days. More than 30 per cent of those 230,000 would never be seen again. Normally, only children and elderly people prompted immediate action. For all other missing person reports the police ordinarily waited a minimum of twenty-four hours, and usually more, depending on the circumstances.

  Every missing person enquiry touched a nerve deep in Roy Grace’s soul. Each time he heard the words he gave a silent sh
udder.

  Sandy was a missing person. She had disappeared off the face of the earth on his thirtieth birthday, just under nine years ago, and had never been seen since.

  There was no evidence that the majority of those 70,000 people who vanished had died. People went missing for a raft of reasons. Mostly it was a breakdown in family relationships – husband or wife walking out, kids running away from home. Psychiatric problems. But some – and Roy Grace always hated to acknowledge this to himself – went on that list for an altogether more sinister reason. Either they were murdered, or, in rarer instances, held captive against their will. Grisly cases came to light from time to time, in the UK and in just about every other country in the world, of people being held for years, sometimes decades. Sometimes in his worst, darkest moments of despair he imagined Sandy being held chained in a cellar somewhere by a maniac.

  He still believed she was alive, whatever the reason for her disappearance. Over the past nine years he had consulted almost more mediums than he could remember. Every time he heard about a medium with a good reputation he would go and see them. Whenever one came to Brighton and performed in public, he would be there in the audience.

  And in all this time none of them, not one, had claimed to be in touch with his dead wife, or to have a message from her.

  Grace had no unswerving belief in mediums, any more than he had in doctors, or scientists. He possessed an open mind. He believed the dictum of one of his favourite characters in fiction, Sherlock Holmes. ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’

  His thoughts were interrupted by the chirrup of his mobile phone. He looked at the display but the number was withheld – most likely it was a colleague, standard practice among police officers. Answering it he said, ‘Roy Grace.’

  ‘Yo, old wise man!’ said a familiar voice.

  ‘Fuck off, I’m busy,’ Grace said with a grin. After three hours trying to make conversation with the miserably silent Dr Frazer Theobald, it was good to hear a friendly voice. Glenn Branson was a Detective Sergeant with whom he was close mates. They had worked together on and off for several years, and he was the first person Grace had recruited onto his Major Incident Team for this murder.

  ‘Well you can fuck off too, old timer. While you’re lounging around on your second brandy after a long lunch, I’m working my butt off doing your job for you.’

  The unpleasant taste of a sardine and tomato sandwich, Grace’s lunch which seemed like an aeon ago, still lingered in his memory. ‘Chance would be a fine thing,’ he said.

  ‘Saw a well brilliant film last night. Serpico. Al Pacino playing this “tec” routing out bent cops in the New York Police Department. Ever see it?’ Branson was a total movie buff.

  ‘I saw it about thirty years ago, when I was in my cradle.’

  ‘It was made in 1973.’

  ‘Films take a long time to reach your local picture house, do they?’

  ‘Very witty. You should see it again – it’s so good. Al Pacino, he’s the man.’

  ‘Thanks for this valuable piece of information, Glenn,’ he said, stepping out of the awning and out of earshot of the pathologist, a police photographer named Martin Pile, and Dennis Ponds, the senior Sussex Police Public Relations Officer, who had just arrived and was waiting to be briefed by Grace for the press. From his experience, at this stage in a major incident it was best to say very little. The less information the press printed about what had actually been found, the state of the body or body parts and the location, the easier it would be to weed out crank phone calls and time wasters – and to tell when there was a caller with genuine information.

  At the same time the police had to recognize the wisdom of maintaining a good working relationship with the media – although in Grace’s case that had been souring fast over the past couple of weeks. He’d been pilloried in today’s news over the death of two suspects, and he’d been savaged last week for admitting in court, during a murder trial, that he had consulted a medium.

  ‘I’m standing on a hill in the pissing rain. How exactly does this help our enquiry?’

  ‘It doesn’t; it’s for your education. All you ever watch is crap.’

  ‘Nothing wrong with Desperate Housewives.’

  ‘Tell me about it, I live with one. But I have some information for you.’

  ‘Uh huh?’

  ‘A trainee solicitor – an articled clerk. Just come in.’

  ‘Well that would be a loss,’ Grace said sarcastically.

  ‘You know, man, you’re sick.’

  ‘No, just honest.’

  Like most of his police colleagues, Roy Grace disliked the legal profession, criminal lawyers in particular, for whom the law was just a game. Every day police officers risked their lives trying to catch criminals; their lawyers made good livings trying to outwit the law and free them. Sure, Grace knew, innocent people who were arrested had to be protected. But it was still early days in Glenn’s career – he wasn’t long enough in the tooth as a cop yet. He hadn’t experienced enough human scum escaping justice thanks to smart lawyers.

  ‘Yeah, whatever. She didn’t turn up for work today. One of her friends checked her flat. She’s not there; they’re well worried.’

  ‘So? When was she last seen?’

  ‘At work yesterday afternoon. She had an important client meeting this morning and she never showed. Never phoned. Her boss said this isn’t in character. Her name’s Janie Stretton.’

  ‘I’ve got a list of four other names, Glenn. What makes this one special?’

  ‘Just a hunch.’

  ‘Janie Stretton?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘I’ll add her to the list.’

  ‘Put her at the top.’

  The rain was permeating his suit, and dripping down his face. Grace stepped back into the shelter of the tented awning. ‘We still don’t have a head,’ he said. ‘And I have a feeling we’re not going to find it for a very good reason. We’ve already run a fingerprint test, which is negative. We’re sending off for a priority DNA to Huntingdon labs, but that will be a couple of days.’

  ‘I’ve found her,’ Glenn Branson said. ‘I’ll put money on it.’

  ‘Janie Stretton?’ Grace said.

  ‘Janie Stretton.’

  ‘She’s probably in bed, shagging some three-grand-an-hour brief.’

  ‘No, Roy,’ the Detective Sergeant insisted. ‘I think you’re looking at her.’

  12

  Tom spent the afternoon at the offices of a major new client, Polstar Vodka, shaving his prices – and profit margin – down to the bone to avoid a competitor getting the business. Further handicapped by not having his laptop with him, he left glumly with an order for 50,000 engraved martini glasses and overprinted silver coasters which he had originally been banking on to give him a good profit. Now he would be lucky to even cover his costs. At least it was turnover to show the bank, but he was painfully aware of the old adage, ‘Turnover is vanity, profit is sense.’

  With luck it would lead to more profitable business in time, he hoped.

  Arriving back at the office shortly before five o’clock, he was relieved to see his laptop up and running again. But at a cost of seven hours of the techie’s expensive time that he could ill afford. Peter Chard’s desk was empty and Simon Wong was on the phone; Maggie was also busy on the phone. Olivia brought him over a pile of letters to sign.

  He dealt with them then turned his attention to Chris Webb, who had managed to retrieve some data. He talked him through the system upgrade he had done and the new anti-virus software he had installed – at further expense, of course. But he was still unable to explain where the virus that had wiped the database had come from other than from the disc Tom had found on the train, which he was going to take away to analyse further.

  After Chris had left, Tom spent half an hour catching up on his emails. Then out of curiosity he opened his Explorer Web browser, and went to the r
ecent history section, which showed him all the websites he had looked at in the past twenty-four hours. There were a couple of visits to Google, several to ask.co.uk and one to Railtrack when he had looked up train times yesterday. There was also one to the Polstar Vodka site he had visited yesterday, in order to brief himself for this afternoon’s meeting. Then there was one he did not recognize at all.

  It was a long, complex string of letters and slashes. Chris Webb’s parting words as he had left were that he should not log on to any unfamiliar website, but Tom had been using the internet for years and years now and had a good understanding of it. He knew that you could pick up a virus from opening an attachment, but he just did not accept you could get one from a website. Cookies, yes. He knew that many retailers used the unscrupulous trick of sending a cookie when you logged on to their site. The cookie would sit in your system and report back to them everything you subsequently looked at on the net. That way they could build individual customer profiles on their database and learn what products people were interested in. But viruses? No way.

  He clicked on the address.

  Almost instantly the message came up on his screen:

  Access denied. Unauthorized login attempt.

  ‘Anything else you need tonight, Tom?’

  He looked up. Olivia, holding her handbag, was standing by his desk.

  ‘No, that’s fine, thanks.’

  She was beaming. ‘Got a hot date. Have to go to the hairdresser!’

  ‘Good luck!’

  ‘He’s the marketing director for a magazine group. Could be some business there.’

  ‘Go kill!’

  ‘I will!’

  He looked back at the screen and clicked on the address again.

  Within moments the same message appeared.

  Access denied. Unauthorized login attempt.

  Later that evening – after a larger martini than usual, dinner and almost an entire bottle of a particularly yummy Australian Margaret River Chardonnay, instead of his usual couple of glasses – Tom sat down in his den, opened his laptop, went to his email in-box and started working. More emails came in every few minutes.