Dead Man's Footsteps

  Franks paused and Pewe heard a slurp, as if he was swigging some coffee, before he resumed.

  ‘The woman has silicone breast implants. I understand these are all printed with the manufacturer’s batch number and each of them has a serial number that’s kept in the hospital register under the recipient’s name. This particular batch of implants was supplied to a hospital called the Nuffield in Woodingdean, in the city of Brighton and Hove, back in 1997.’

  Pewe took his feet off the table and looked around hopelessly for a notebook, before using the back of an envelope to scribble down a few details. He then asked Franks to fax through the information on the implants and the DNA analysis of both the mother and the foetus, promising that he would start making enquiries right away. He then pointed out rather crisply that his name was Cassian, not Cashon, and hung up.

  He really did need a junior officer to assist him. He had far more important things to deal with than a floater in an Australian river. One of them much more important.

  63

  OCTOBER 2007

  Abby was laughing. Her father was laughing too.

  ‘You stupid girl, you did that deliberately, didn’t you?’

  ‘No I didn’t, Daddy!’

  Both of them stood back, staring at the partially tiled bathroom wall. White tiles with a navy-blue dado rail and a scattering of navy tiles as relief, one of which she had just put on backwards, so that the coarse grey underside was now visible, looking like a square of cement.

  ‘You’re meant to be helping me, young lady, not hindering me!’ her dad admonished.

  She burst into loud giggles. ‘I didn’t do it deliberately, Daddy, honestly.’

  For an answer, he patted her squarely on the forehead with his trowel, depositing a small lump of grout.

  ‘Hey!’ she cried. ‘I’m not a bathroom wall, so you can’t tile me.’

  ‘Oh yes, I can.’

  Her father’s face darkened and the smile faded. Suddenly it wasn’t him any more. It was Ricky.

  He was holding a power drill in his hand. Smiling, he squeezed the trigger. The drill whined.

  ‘Right knee or left knee first, Abby?’

  She began shaking, her body still held rigid by her bonds, her insides twisting, shrinking back, screaming silently.

  She could see the spinning drill bit. Corkscrewing towards her knee. Inches from it. She was screaming. Her cheeks popping. Nothing coming out. Just an endless, trapped moan.

  Trapped in her throat and in her mouth.

  He lunged forward with the drill.

  And as she screamed again, the light changed suddenly. She smelled the sharp, dry smell of fresh grout, saw cream wall tiles. Hyperventilating. There was no Ricky. She could see the carrier bag lying where he had left it, untouched, just beyond the doorway. She felt slippery with perspiration. Heard the steady whirr of the extractor fan, felt the cold draught from it. The insides of her mouth were feeling stuck together. She was so parched, so terribly parched. Just one drop. One small glass of water. Please.

  She stared at the tiles again.

  God, the irony of being imprisoned in here. Facing these tiles. So near. So damned near! Her mind was all over the place. Somehow she had to get to Ricky. Had to get him to remove the tape from her face. And if he was rational, when he returned, that’s exactly what he would have to do.

  But he wasn’t rational.

  And thinking about that now chilled every cell in her body.

  64

  12 SEPTEMBER 2001

  Wide awake and feeling mentally alert, despite his tired eyes, Ronnie stepped out of the front door of the rooming house shortly after 7.30. Immediately, he noticed the smell. There was a hazy, metallic blue sky and there should have been a dewy freshness in the morning air. But instead a pungent, sour reek filled his nostrils.

  At first he thought it must be coming from the garbage cans, but as he walked down the steps and along the street it stayed with him. A suggestion of something that was damp and smouldering, something chemical, sour and cloying. His eyes hurt too, as if there were tiny pellets of sandpaper in the haze.

  On the main drag, there was a strange atmosphere. It was Wednesday morning, midweek, yet there were hardly any cars about. People were walking slowly, with drawn, haggard expressions, as if they too had not slept well. The whole city seemed to be in a state of deepening shock. The numbing events of yesterday had now had time to work through everyone’s psyche and were bring to a new, dark reality this morning.

  He found a diner, displaying, among all its Russian signs in the window, the English words stencilled in red letters on illuminated plastic, ALL DAY BREAKFAST. Inside, he could see a handful of people, including two cops, were eating in silence, watching the news on the television high on one wall.

  He sat in a booth towards the rear. A subdued waitress poured him coffee and a glass of iced water, while he looked blankly at the Russian menu, before realizing there was an English version on the reverse. He ordered fresh orange juice and a pancake stack with bacon, then watched the television while he waited for his food to arrive. It was hard to believe that it was only twenty-four hours since his breakfast yesterday. It felt like twenty-four years.

  After leaving the diner, he walked the short distance down the street to Mail Box City. The same young man was seated at one of the internet terminals, pecking at the keys, and a thin, dark-haired young woman in her early twenties, who seemed on the verge of crying, was staring at a website on another. A nervous-looking bald man in dungarees, who had the shakes, was removing items from a holdall and inserting them into a deposit box, looking furtively over his shoulder every few moments. Ronnie wondered what he had in that bag, but knew better than to stare.

  He was now part of the world of transient people, the dispossessed, the poor and the fugitives. Their lives centred around places like Mail Box City, where they could store or hide their meagre stashes and collect their post. People didn’t come here to make friends, but to remain anonymous. Which was exactly what he needed.

  He looked at his watch. It was 8.30. A half-hour or so before the people he wanted to speak to would be at their offices – assuming they were in today. He paid for an hour of internet time and sat down at a terminal.

  *

  At 9.30 Ronnie entered one of the hooded phone booths against the end wall, put a quarter in the slot and dialled the first of the numbers on the list he had just made from his internet search. As he waited, he stared at the perforations in the sound-deadening lining of the booth. It reminded him of a prison phone.

  The voice at the other end startled him out of his reverie: ‘Abe Miller Associates, Abe Miller speaking.’

  The man was not discourteous, but Ronnie didn’t feel any depth to his interest or any hunger for a deal. It was as if, he thought, Abe Miller figured that the world might very well end one day soon, so what did making a buck mean any more? In fact, what was the point of anything? That was how Abe Miller sounded to him.

  ‘An Edward, one pound, unmounted, mint,’ Ronnie said, after introducing himself. ‘Perfect gum, no hinge.’

  ‘OK, what are you looking for?’

  ‘I have four of them. I’d take four thousand each.’

  ‘Whee, that’s a little steep.’

  ‘Not for their condition. Catalogue’s over double that.’

  ‘Thing is, I don’t know how all this that’s going on right now will play out on the market. Stocks are on the floor – know what I’m saying.’

  ‘Yeah, well, these are better than stocks. Less volatile.’

  ‘I’m not sure about buying anything right now. Guess I’d prefer to wait a few days, see how the wind blows. If they’re in as good condition as you say they are, right now I could maybe go two. No more than that. Two.’

  ‘Two thousand bucks each?’

  ‘Couldn’t manage any more, not now. If you want to wait a week and see, maybe I can improve a little. Maybe not.’

  Ronnie understood the man’s r
eticence. He knew he had probably picked the worst morning since the day after the Wall Street Crash of 1929 to try to do business anywhere in the world, and worst of all in New York, but he didn’t have any choice. He did not have the luxury of time. It seemed to him that this was the story of his life. Buy at the top of the market, sell at the bottom. Why was the world always fucking dumping on him?

  ‘I’ll get back to you,’ Ronnie said.

  ‘Sure, no worries. What did you say your name was?’

  Ronnie’s brain raced, momentarily forgetting the name he’d used for his hotmail account. ‘Nelson,’ he said.

  The man perked up a little. ‘You any relation to Mike Nelson? From Birmingham? You’re English, right?’

  ‘Mike Nelson?’ Ronnie cursed silently. Not good to have another person in this game with a similar name. People would remember – and at this moment what he needed was for people to forget him. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No relation.’

  He thanked Abe Miller and hung up. Then, thinking about the name, he decided maybe it was OK to keep it. If there was another trader with a similar name, people might think he was related and treat him more respectfully from the start. This was a business that relied heavily on reputation.

  He tried six more dealers. None of them were inclined to better his first offer, and two of them said they weren’t going to buy anything at the moment, which panicked him. He wondered whether the market might go even flatter, and if it would be wise to take the offer he’d had from Abe Miller while it was still on the table. If, twenty-five minutes on in this uncertain new world, it was still on the table.

  Eight thousand dollars. They were worth twenty, at least. He had a few others with him, including two Plate 11 and unmounted mint Penny Blacks, with gum on the back. In a normal market he’d be looking for twenty-five thousand dollars a plate, but God knows what they were worth now. No point even trying to sell them. They were all he now had in the world. They were going to have to tide him over for a long time.

  Possibly a very long time.

  65

  OCTOBER 2007

  When Roy Grace had started his career he worked as a beat copper in central Brighton, then for a brief time in the CID with the drugs surveillance unit. He knew most of the faces and names of the street dealers, and some of the major users, and had busted most of them at one time or another.

  It was normally only the smaller people who got caught – the low-hanging fruit. Frequently the police ignored them, watching them instead, even making friends with some of them in the hope that they would lead to the bigger fish, the middlemen, the suppliers and, very occasionally, a major consignment. But every time the police achieved a result and took out a handful of players, there were always new ones waiting in the wings.

  At this moment, though, as he parked his Alfa Romeo in the Church Street NCP and switched off the engine, killing the Marla Glen song that was playing, the Brighton drugs underworld might suit his immediate purposes well.

  Wearing a light mackintosh over his suit, he walked down through the lunchtime crowds starting to emerge from their offices, past cafés and sandwich bars and the Corn Exchange, and made a left turn into Marlborough Place, where he stopped, pretending to make a phone call. The area immediately to the north of here, and across the London Road to the east, had long been the downtown domain of the street dealers.

  It took him less than five minutes to spot two shabbily dressed men in a hurry, walking faster than everyone else, easy targets. He set off after them, but kept a good distance back. One was tall and thin, with rounded shoulders, and was wearing a windcheater over grey trousers and trainers. The shorter, stockier man, who was wearing a tracksuit top over shell-suit bottoms and black shoes, walked in a strange strutting motion, arms out wide, and was shooting a worried glance over his shoulder every few moments, as if to check he wasn’t being followed.

  The taller one carried a plastic bag, almost certainly with a can of lager inside it. Street drinking was illegal in the city, so most street people kept an open can in a plastic bag. They were walking really fast, either in a hurry to get money, in which case they were about to commit an offence – maybe a bag snatch, or some shoplifting – or on their way to meet a dealer and buy their day’s supply, Grace supposed. Or they could be dealers going to meet a customer.

  Two single-decker red and yellow buses thundered past, followed by a Streamline taxi and then a line of private cars. Somewhere a siren wailed and both men’s heads twitched. The stocky one only ever seemed to look over his right shoulder, so Grace kept to the left, close to the shop fronts, shielding himself behind people as much as he could.

  The two men turned left into Trafalgar Street and now Grace was starting to feel even more certain about his hunch. Sure enough, in a couple of hundred yards they turned left and entered their destination.

  Pelham Square was a small, elegant square of Regency terraced houses, with a railed park in the centre. The benches near the Trafalgar Street entrance had always been a popular lunch spot for local office workers on fine days. Now, with the workplace smoking ban, they seemed even more popular. Few of the people eating their sandwiches or having a lunchtime cigarette took any notice of – or indeed even noticed – the ragbag assortment of people clustered around another bench at the far end of the park.

  Grace leaned against a lamppost and observed them for some moments. Niall Foster was one of three people sitting on the bench, drinking beer like all the others from a concealed can in his carrier bag. A man in his early forties with a sullen, mean face beneath a strange haircut that looked like a monk’s tonsure gone wrong, he was wearing a singlet, despite the chill breeze, over blue dungarees and workman’s boots.

  Grace knew him well enough. He was a burglar and a small-time drugs dealer. He’d be the one serving up now, for sure, to the sad group of people around him. Next to him on the bench was a grimy, strung-out-looking woman with matted brown hair. Beside her sat an equally grubby man in his thirties, who kept putting his head between his knees.

  The two men he had been following walked up to Foster. It was a textbook migration. Foster would have told each of the users to meet him here, in this park, at this exact time. If he then became nervous that he was being watched, he would abort, leave the park, select a new location and phone each of his customers to come there instead. Sometimes there could be several such migrations before dealers felt comfortable. And often they would have a young assistant to do the serving up for them. But Foster was cheap, he probably didn’t want to pay anyone. And besides, he knew the system. He was fully aware that he was small fry and would simply swallow the packets of whatever drug he was dealing, if challenged, and retrieve them from the lavatory later.

  Niall Foster looked over in his direction and as Grace moved up the pavement, not wanting to be spotted, he found himself almost colliding head on with the man he had come to find.

  It had been a few years, but even so Grace was shocked by how much the old villain had aged. Terry Biglow was a scion of one of Brighton’s bottom-feeder crime families. The Biglows’ history reached back to the razor gangs, who fought turf wars over protection rackets in the 1940s and 1950s, and there were plenty of people in Brighton and Hove who would once have been scared by the mere mention of the name. But now most of the older members of the family were dead, while the younger ones were either serving long prison sentences or were fugitives in Spain. The remnants still in the city, like Terry, were busted flushes.

  Terry Biglow had started life as a knocker boy, then he had become a fence and some-time drugs dealer. He used to cut a mean, dapper figure, with a slick haircut brushed up in a quiff and cheap, sharp shoes. He must be in his mid to late sixties now, Grace thought, but he could have passed for a decade more.

  The old rogue’s hair was still tidily coiffed, but it looked greasy and threadbare, and had turned a listless grey. His rodent-like face was sallow and thin to the point of being emaciated, while his sharp little teeth were the colour of rus
t. He wore a shabby grey suit with the trousers fastened by a cheap belt far too high up his chest. He seemed to have shrunk several inches too and he smelled musty. The only signs of the original Terry Biglow were the big gold watch and a massive emerald ring.

  ‘Mr Grace, Detective Sergeant Grace, nice to see yer! What a surprise!’

  Actually not that much of a surprise, Roy Grace nearly said. But he was pleased at the ease with which it all seemed to be dropping into his lap on this visit downtown.

  ‘It’s Detective Superintendent now,’ he corrected.

  ‘Yeah, course it is! I was forgetting.’ Biglow’s voice was small and reedy. ‘Promoted. I heard you was, yeah. You deserve it, Mr Grace. Sorry, sir, Detective – Detective Superintendent. I’m clean now. I found God in prison.’

  ‘He was doing time too, was he?’ Grace retorted.

  ‘Don’t do none of that stuff no more, sir,’ Biglow said, deadly serious, completely missing – or ignoring – Grace’s jape.

  ‘So it’s just coincidence you’re standing outside the park while Niall Foster serves up inside, is it, Terry?’

  ‘Total coincidence,’ Biglow said, his eyes shiftier than ever. ‘Yeah, coincidence, sir. Me and my friend – we’re just on our way to lunch, just passing.’

  Biglow turned to his companion, who was as shabbily dressed. Grace knew the man: Jimmy Bardolph, who used to be a henchman for the Biglows. But not any more, he imagined. The man stank of alcohol, his face was covered in scabs and his hair was awry. He didn’t look as if he’d had a bath since his afterbirth had been washed off.

  ‘This is my friend, Detective Superintendent Grace, Jimmy. He’s a good man, always fair to me. He’s a cop you can trust is Mr Grace.’