When Skerritt had finally calmed down, Grace summarized the situation, then allowed Glenn Branson to explain in depth the reasons for his concerns that Dr Karl Murphy’s death might not have been suicide.
Skerritt shook his head. ‘I hear what you’re saying, but I’m not convinced, I’m afraid. I’ve had my balls chewed off by ACC Rigg over this department’s expenses recently, and I can’t support you stepping this up to a murder enquiry, with all the costs that entails, from what I’m hearing from you both. If you go ahead, Roy, it’ll have to be your decision, with clear justification for it.’
‘So what the hell do I need, Jack?’ Roy Grace asked fractiously. He seldom lost his temper, but his lack of sleep, combined with Skerritt’s intransigence, were taking him perilously close to losing it now.
‘You’re experienced enough, Roy,’ Skerritt replied. ‘You have good instincts about when something’s a murder. But I don’t think you’re there with this one. I’m not convinced.’
Grace tapped the side of his nose. ‘My copper’s nose. That’s telling me this is a murder investigation, sir.’
‘Despite there being a suicide note, checked out by a graphologist, and despite the pathologist’s report?’
‘I’m still not convinced about the suicide note. But I haven’t got anything to substantiate this.’
‘Separately, Roy, has any forensic link between the fires been established?’
‘I’m on that at the moment. I’m discussing everything that’s happened with the Chief Fire Investigator.’
Skerritt nodded. ‘Look, one thing is for sure, no one knows the state of mind of someone in the moments before they commit suicide, Roy. But Dr Murphy was hardly likely to be in a rational state. You don’t kill yourself when you have two small children if you’re in a rational state.’
Grace looked at Branson, then back at the Detective Chief Superintendent. ‘What would it take to change your mind, sir? To support my upgrading this to a murder enquiry?’
‘If you can cast doubt on the note, that would change things. If you can convince me it was written under duress, then we’d be getting somewhere.’
Roy Grace smiled grimly. Skerritt wasn’t an idiot; he was probably seeing the overview more clearly than he himself was right now. And perhaps it was the right decision for him to make this call based on what he had been told. But in his heart, Grace was still convinced there was more to it.
Skerritt raised both his hands in the air. ‘I have to leave it with you. I’m sorry – but feel free to talk to me about it again.’
53
Wednesday, 30 October
Roy Grace and Glenn Branson returned to Grace’s office shortly before 10 a.m. in silence. The pair of them perched, pensively, at the small round meeting table.
‘Want a coffee?’ Grace asked.
Glenn nodded gloomily. ‘I’ll get them.’
‘No, I’ll go—’
Branson silenced him with his hand. ‘You need to keep up your strength for your wedding night, old timer.’
‘Haha!’ Then Grace pursed his lips, balled his right fist and thumped his left palm. ‘Convince him it was written under duress? So where the hell do we start with that one?’
There was a sharp rap on the door, and Norman Potting barged in without waiting for an answer, holding a sheet of paper in a plastic folder and looking pleased with himself. Then he stopped as he saw the grim expressions on the faces of his two superiors. ‘Sorry, am I interrupting something?’
‘It’s okay, Norman,’ Grace said. ‘Something urgent?’
‘Well, it might be, chief. The suicide note from Dr Murphy that you asked me to look at? I think I may have found something.’
Suddenly he had their rapt attention.
‘Tell us,’ Grace said.
Potting removed the sheet of paper from the folder and placed it on the table. It was a copy of the suicide note, with several words circled and annotations in blue ink above them and in the margins. He sat down. Grace and Branson followed, moving their chairs closely either side of him.
I am so sorry. My will is with my executor, solicitor Maud Opfer of Opfer Dexter Associates. Life since Ingrid’s death is meaningless. I want to be united with her again. Please tell Dane and Ben I love them and will love them for ever and that their Daddy’s gone to take care of Mummy. Love you both so much. One day, when you are older, I hope you will find it in your hearts to forgive me. XX
Potting pointed at the name of the solicitor. ‘I decided to start by contacting the law firm to have a word with this Maud Opfer, to see if there was anything I could glean from her. That’s when I learned there is no such law firm as Opfer Dexter Associates.’
Grace frowned. ‘I didn’t recognize the firm as being a local one, but I supposed it was either a London firm or one somewhere else in the UK.’
Potting shook his head. ‘That obviously alerted me that something was not right. I did wonder about the name Dexter, the character on television who is a serial killer – know the programme I mean?’
Grace nodded. ‘Cleo watches it.’
‘I’ve watched a few episodes too,’ Glenn Branson said.
‘Opfer is a strange name,’ Potting continued. ‘I wondered what the significance might be, so I tried it in Google Translate – that detects the most likely language of any word or phrase you type in. It came back that it means “victim” in German.’
‘Shit!’ Branson exclaimed.
‘Karl Murphy spoke fluent German,’ Potting went on. ‘His mother was from Munich – hence his Germanic first name. Now, in crossword parlance Maud is not a big jump to mord, the German word for “death”. As a keen crossworder, Karl Murphy would probably have known that. Put those two together into Google and up pops “murder victim”.’
Grace and Branson were silent for some moments, looking at the circled words and the writing above them.
‘I’m speculating, of course,’ Norman Potting said. ‘But what do you think?’
Grace barely heard him. He had his phone out and was dialling Jack Skerritt’s number with a shaking hand.
54
Wednesday, 30 October
Although he was trained both in cognitive witness and suspect interviewing techniques, Roy Grace rarely conducted interviews himself, preferring to leave the lengthy and carefully structured process to other trusted members of his team while he concentrated on the overview of a case, ensuring he had missed nothing. Later he could study relevant sections of the interviews.
He was acutely aware that although twenty years of service in the police had given him a great deal of experience, there was a large red flag that came with all experience, and that was the danger of complacency. It was often the most experienced people who had the hardest falls for that very reason.
He’d read that in many tragic air disasters, the airline’s senior captain had been at the helm – including the worst ever in Tenerife, in 1977, when a KLM and Pan Am 747 collided. There was a long history of the wrong limbs being amputated in hospitals by senior consultants being careless through complacency. And then there was the tragic fact that all the world’s top avalanche experts had died in avalanches.
It was for this reason that, at the start of every murder enquiry, and continually throughout it, Roy Grace would assiduously write down all his decisions, and reasons for them, in his policy book, and would check his own procedures off against the structured list laid out in fine detail in the Murder Manual.
But in this instance he felt it important to see and talk to Red Westwood himself. So at a few minutes before 5 p.m. he entered the tiny witness interview room, a short distance along the corridor of the first floor of Sussex House from the conference room where he held his murder enquiry briefings.
It was a square, bland, windowless box, with three crimson chairs, a small round coffee table, with water, glasses and three coffee mugs on it, a CCTV camera mounted high up, and built-in recording equipment. Glenn Branson was already seated there, next
to a nervous-looking woman aged about thirty, who was sitting upright on the edge of her chair. Grace winced at his colleague’s tie, and had already chided Glenn about it earlier in the day. Interviewers learned early in their training to dress in the plainest possible clothes, so as to be wearing nothing that might distract the witness. But it was too late to say anything again, so he turned his attention to studying the young woman, and focusing his mind on what he wanted to achieve from the next hour or so.
She had an attractive face, slightly narrow, the narrowness accentuated by long, elegantly cut dark red hair, centre parted, that hung either side of it. She was wearing a thin black roll-neck sweater, a short tweed skirt, black leggings and black knee-length boots. As he entered, she gave him a wan smile, revealing quite beautiful white teeth. But she was looking on edge.
‘Red Westwood, Detective Superintendent Roy Grace,’ Glenn said. Then he turned to Red. ‘Detective Superintendent Grace is going to be the Senior Investigating Officer on this case. You’re in good hands, he’s the best.’
She smiled, and as she did so her whole face lit up, before sinking back behind the dark cloud that seemed to envelop her. Grace saw, in that moment, a huge warmth in her. He liked her instantly.
He closed the door and sat down. ‘Are you happy for this interview to be recorded, Ms Westwood?’
‘Absolutely,’ she said. She had a strong, confident, slightly gravelly voice, and smiled as she spoke. But he could see the anxiety in her brown eyes, and it was there in the way she twisted a silver bracelet she was wearing with her fingers. She also wore one ring, a silver band on her right thumb, and a thin silver necklace with a crucifix and several silver charms.
Glenn reached across and activated the video equipment.
‘Seventeen-o-five hours, Wednesday, 30 October,’ Roy Grace said, for the benefit of the recording. ‘Interview of Ms Red Westwood carried out by Detective Superintendent Roy Grace and Detective Inspector Glenn Branson.’ He looked at Red. ‘It’s good of you to leave work early to come and talk to us, Ms Westwood.’
‘Thank you. I’m going through hell. I’m really grateful to you for seeing me.’ She looked at each officer, giving them a nervous smile. She felt safe in this room, in this building. At this moment she would have liked to stay here for ever.
‘I know you gave DI Branson a very full statement on Monday night, but would it be an imposition to ask you to go through it all again?’ Grace asked.
‘Not at all, no. Where would you like me to start?’
‘Can you tell me how you met Bryce Laurent?’ Roy Grace asked.
She grimaced, and he saw her small, pretty nose crinkle. ‘Well, it’s a bit embarrassing really. I’d been in a long-term relationship with my then ex – his name’s Dominic Chandler. I realized I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life with him. We were on different journeys. He wanted to have children, and although I did too, I just knew I didn’t want to have them with him. We split up – not too happily, but that’s another story.’
‘Were there any other issues in that relationship?’ Grace asked.
‘Issues?’ she replied.
‘Did Dominic Chandler, for instance, have any history of violence?’
She shook her head resolutely. ‘No, not at all. Absolutely not. He was very gentle, in that sense. And he had nothing to fear – I was totally faithful to him in the time we were together.’
‘Do you have any reason to feel he might be bitter towards you now?’
‘Dominic? No. I bumped into him a few months ago at Hove station. He was very cheerful, told me he was getting married. No, anyhow, he absolutely isn’t a violent person.’
Grace and Branson exchanged a glance. Then Grace went on. ‘Okay, tell us what happened after you and Dominic Chandler split up?’
‘I moved out of his flat and got my own place. It felt good to be out of the relationship but at the same time, I guess . . . you know . . . I was acutely aware of my biological clock ticking. If I was going to have children, then I’d have to meet someone fairly soon. Some of my friends fitted me up with a handful of blind dates, all of them disastrous. My closest friend, Raquel Evans, thought I ought to try some online dating sites. So I put an ad on a couple of them.’
‘What did you say?’ Grace asked.
Glenn opened his notebook, searching for the page where he had written the words down on Monday night. Red blushed, and dug into her handbag. ‘Actually, I’ve brought it, because it might be relevant.’ She unfolded a sheet of paper and read from it: ‘Single girl, 29, redhead and smouldering, love life that’s crashed and burned. Seeks new flame to rekindle her fire. Fun, friendship and – who knows – maybe more?’
She looked at the two detectives. ‘A bit cheesy?’
But she could not read either of their faces.
Roy Grace reached out for it and read it himself, then handed it back to her. ‘DI Branson told me that you said Bryce Laurent was something of a magician. Did he ever use fire in any of his tricks?’ Grace asked.
She nodded. ‘Yes. Actually, somewhere in his tangled past he worked as a firefighter. It’s possible he still does.’
Both men frowned. ‘You think he might be working for the fire brigade – the Fire and Rescue Service?’ Glenn Branson said.
‘Apparently you are allowed to do other work as a firefighter. Especially if you work as a retained officer near an unmanned station. I think you have to work and live within four minutes of it.’ She raised her eyebrows. ‘But to be honest, he could be doing anything right now – and be anyone. When I first met him he spun me a story of how he’d been an airline pilot in the US and then moved to Air Traffic Control, so as not to be away from home because his wife was sick. That was all a pack of lies. His name wasn’t his real name – he’s had a whole ton of aliases.’
‘Do you know them?’ Roy Grace asked.
‘Some,’ she said. ‘Bryce Laurent is one for starters. I’ve no idea what his real name is – and he’s told so many lies about his past, I’m not even sure if he does any more. And I know about some of his previous jobs because of the detective agency my mother employed – behind my back, but I’m grateful she did now. He was in the Territorial Army as a sapper for a while; but as with everything else, he got kicked out. He worked for a security company installing alarm systems, and got the sack from that. He’s a talented conjuror – a close magician I think they call it. He started making a name for himself in Brighton, but lost the plot with that, too.’
Grace frowned. ‘He seems to have a handy lot of skill sets for everything we’re thinking might be connected to him.’
‘He’s a brilliant artist, too – very good at cartoons.’
‘Which of his conjuring tricks involve fire, Red?’ Roy Grace asked.
‘Quite a few. He used something called Flash String, something else called Flash Paper, and then there was Flash Wool. He was quite into pyrotechnics. He told me he had a sideline business making bespoke fireworks.’
‘Oh?’ said Glenn Branson. ‘How much did he tell you about this?’
‘Very little. He said he had an interest in a factory, but I’ve no idea where. Somewhere in Sussex, I think.’
‘You were together for how long?’
‘Just under two years.’
‘And he never took you to this factory, or told you where it was?’ Glenn Branson said, sounding puzzled.
‘You need to remember that during that whole time he was living the lie that he worked in Air Traffic Control at Gatwick. He’d come home from his shifts and tell me about his day, and the occasional incidents. He was so convincing I never had any reason to doubt it. Until my mother showed me the report from the detective agency.’
‘Okay. It would be helpful if you could think back, and try to tell us as much as you can remember about how you felt when you first met Bryce,’ Roy Grace said.
‘I was very vulnerable at that point, I suppose. After several years of being with Dominic, Bryce was like a breath of fresh
air, at first. He seemed genuinely interested in me. He showered me with gifts. I totally believed everything he told me about his background – I mean, why wouldn’t I? I had no reason not to. I got really angry with my mother for being suspicious about him. I guess that’s what love does to you. It’s so true what they say – that love is blind. I was blind. Totally and utterly blind for months. I should have sussed, because none of my friends were comfortable with him.’
‘Do you know where he is living now?’ Grace asked.
‘No, I don’t.’
‘There’s a court exclusion order on him coming or living within half a mile of you,’ Branson said. ‘You said you thought you might have seen him outside your office last Thursday. But you couldn’t be sure?’
‘No.’
‘Could anyone have drawn the queen of hearts on your bathroom mirror other than Bryce Laurent?’ Grace asked.
‘No one,’ she said. ‘No one comes in my place – not unless I’m there with them, like a plumber. But how could he have got in?’
‘He seems a pretty resourceful guy,’ Roy Grace answered.
‘Oh yes, he’s that.’
‘One of our first tasks is to see if we can establish a forensic link between Mr Laurent and the death of Dr Murphy, the Cuba Libre restaurant fire, your car and the minimart,’ he continued. ‘But based on the fact that he seems to have been in your flat yesterday, and he put the engagement ring back on your finger, you are not safe. We can arrest him – if we can find him. But you need to move. I don’t think you can consider your flat secure any more.’
‘There is a proper panic room in place now, boss,’ Glenn Branson said. ‘It can only be locked and unlocked from inside – it’s impenetrable. That would give Red an hour’s protection – enough time for us to reach her.’
‘I’m in the process of moving,’ Red said to them. ‘I should be exchanging contracts soon.’
‘Where to?’ Grace asked.
‘Along the seafront, in Kemp Town.’