Dead Man's Footsteps

  Lorraine was not a flawless, striking beauty, but she had always been, in Ronnie’s parlance, a looker. She owed her blonde hair to her Norwegian grandmother. Not that many years back, like a trillion other blondes around the globe, she had copied the now classic hairstyle of Diana, Princess of Wales, and on a couple of occasions she’d actually been asked if she was the Princess of Wales.

  Now, she thought gloomily, I’m going to have to do something about the rest of my body.

  Lying back in the chair, her stomach resembled a kangaroo’s pouch. It was like the stomach of women who had had several children, where the muscles had gone or the skin had been permanently stretched. And there were cellulite dimples all over the tops of her thighs.

  All that disaster happening to her body despite (and to Ronnie’s chagrin at the cost) going to her personal trainer three times a week.

  The wasp returned, buzzing around her head. ‘Fuck off,’ she said, flapping her hand at it again. ‘Go away.’

  Then her phone rang. She leaned down and picked up the cordless handset. It was her sister, Mo, and her normally calm, cheerful voice sounded strangely agitated. ‘Have you got your telly on?’

  ‘No, I’m out in the garden,’ Lorraine replied.

  ‘Ronnie’s in New York, isn’t he?’

  ‘Yes – I just spoke to him. Why?’

  ‘Something terrible’s happened. It’s all over the news. A plane’s just crashed into the World Trade Center.’

  8

  OCTOBER 2007

  The rain worsened, rattling down on the steel roof of the SOCO Scientific Support Branch van, sounding as hard as hailstones. The windows were opaque, to allow in light but keep out prying eyes. There was little light outside now, however, just the bleakness of wet dusk, stained the colour of rust from ten thousand city street lights.

  Despite the large external dimensions of the long-wheelbase Transit, the seating area inside was cramped. Roy Grace, finishing a call on his mobile, chaired the meeting, the policy book he had retrieved from his go-bag open in front of him.

  Squeezed around the table with him, in addition to Glenn Branson, were the Crime Scene Manager, a Police Search Adviser, an experienced SOCO, one of the two uniform scene guards and Joan Major, the forensic archaeologist Sussex Police regularly called in to help with identification of skeletons – and also to tell them whether the occasional bone found on building sites, or by children in woods, or dug up by gardeners, was human or animal.

  It was chilly and damp inside the van and the air smelled strongly of synthetic vapours. Reels of plastic crime-scene tape were packed in one section of the fitted metal shelving, body bags in another, plus tenting materials and ground sheets, rope, flexes, hammers, saws, axes and plastic bottles of chemicals. There was something grim about these vehicles, Grace always felt. They were like caravans, but they never went to campsites, only to scenes of death or violent crimes.

  It was 6.30 p.m.

  ‘Nadiuska isn’t available,’ he informed the newly assembled team, putting his mobile down.

  ‘Does that mean we’ve got Frazer?’ Glenn responded glumly.

  ‘Yes.’

  Grace saw everyone’s faces fall. Nadiuska De Sancha was the Home Office pathologist everyone in Sussex CID preferred to work with. She was quick, interesting and fun – and good-looking, as an added bonus. By contrast, Frazer Theobald was dour and slow, although his work was meticulous.

  ‘But the real problem is that Frazer is finishing a PM up in Esher at the moment. The earliest he could get here is about 9 p.m.’

  He caught Glenn’s eye. They both knew what that meant – an all-nighter.

  Grace headed the first page of his policy book: PRE-SCENE BRIEFING. Friday 19 October. 6.30 p.m. On site. New England Quarter development.

  ‘Can I make a suggestion?’ Joan Major said.

  The forensic archaeologist was a pleasant-looking woman in her early forties, with long brown hair and square, modern glasses, dressed in a roll-neck black pullover, brown trousers and sturdy boots.

  Grace gestured with his hand.

  ‘I suggest we go and do a brief assessment now, but it may not be necessary to start work tonight – especially as it’s dark. These things are always a lot easier in daylight. It sounds as if the skeleton has been there a while, so another day won’t make much difference.’

  ‘It’s a good thought,’ Grace said. ‘One thing we need to consider, though, is the construction work going on here.’ He looked directly at the Police Search Adviser, a tall, bearded man with an outdoors complexion, whose name was Ned Morgan. ‘You’ll need to liaise with the foreman, Ned. We’ll have to stop the work directly around the storm drain.’

  ‘I spoke to him on my way in. He’s worried because they’re on a time penalty,’ Morgan explained. ‘He nearly had a fit when I told him we could be here a week.’

  ‘It’s a big site,’ Grace said. ‘We don’t need to shut the whole of it down. You’d better decide where you want work stopped as part of your search plan.’ Then he turned back to the forensic archaeologist. ‘But you are right, Joan, tomorrow would be better, in daylight.’

  He put a call through to Steve Curry, the District Inspector responsible for coordinating uniform police in this area of the city, and advised him that a scene guard would need to be kept on until further notice, which didn’t thrill the inspector. Scene guards were an expensive drain on resources.

  Grace turned next to the Crime Scene Manager, Joe Tindall, who had earlier this year been promoted to the post. Tindall gave a self-satisfied smile. ‘All the same to me, Roy,’ he said in his Midlands accent. ‘Now I’m a manager I get to go home at a decent hour. Gone are the days when you and your fellow SIOs can screw up my weekends. I ruin other people’s weekends for you now.’

  Secretly, Grace envied him. What’s more, in reality the remains could easily wait until Monday – but now, as he again regretted, they had been discovered and reported, that was not an option.

  *

  Ten minutes later, clad in their protective clothing, they entered the storm drain. Grace led the way, followed by Joan Major and Ned Morgan. The Police Search Adviser had advised the other team members to stay in the vehicle, wanting to keep contamination of the scene to a minimum.

  All three stopped a short distance from the skeleton, shining their beams on it. Joan Major played hers up and down, then stepped forward until she was close enough to touch it.

  Roy Grace, feeling a tight knot in his gullet, stared again at the face. He knew the likelihood of this being Sandy was extremely small. And yet. The teeth were all intact; good teeth. Sandy had good teeth – they had been one of the many things that had attracted him to her. Beautiful, white, even teeth, and a smile that melted him every time.

  His voice came out sounding lame, as if it was someone else speaking. ‘Is it male or female, Joan?’

  She was peering at the skull. ‘The slope of the forehead is quite upright – men tend to have a much more sloped forehead,’ she said, her voice echoing eerily. Then, holding the torch in her left hand and pointing at the rear of the skull with the forefinger of her gloved right hand, she went on, ‘The nuchal crest is very rounded.’ She tapped it. ‘If you feel the back of your skull, Roy, it’ll be much more pronounced – it normally is in males.’ Then she looked at the left ear cavity. ‘Again, the mastoid process would indicate female – it’s more pronounced in the male.’ Next, she traced the air in front of the eyes. ‘See the skull brow ridges – I’d expect them to be more prominent if this was a male.’

  ‘So you’re reasonably sure she’s female?’ Grace asked.

  ‘Yes, I am. When we expose the pelvis I will be able to say one hundred per cent, but I’m pretty sure. I’ll also take some measurements – the male skeleton is generally more robust, the proportions are different.’ She hesitated a moment. ‘There is something of immediate interest – I’d like to know what Frazer thinks.’

  ‘What’s that?’

 
She pointed at the base of the skull. ‘The hyoid bone is broken.’

  ‘Hyoid?’

  She pointed again, to a bone suspended from a tiny strip of desiccated skin. ‘Do you see that U-shaped bone? It’s the one that keeps the tongue in place. It’s a possible indicator of the cause of death – the hyoid often gets broken during strangulation.’

  Grace absorbed this. He stared at the bone for some moments, then back at those perfect teeth again, trying to remember everything from the last examination of skeletal remains he had attended, at least a couple of years ago.

  ‘What about her age?’

  ‘I’ll be able to tell you better tomorrow,’ she replied. ‘On a quick assessment, she looks as if she was in her prime – twenty-five to forty.’

  Sandy was twenty-eight when she disappeared, he reflected, continuing to stare at the skull. At the teeth. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Ned Morgan shining his torch beam one direction along the drain, then the other.

  ‘We ought to get an engineer from the council along, Roy,’ the Police Search Adviser said. ‘An expert on the city’s drainage system. Find out what other drains connect with this. Some of her clothing or belongings might have been washed along them.’

  ‘Do you think this drain floods?’ Grace asked him.

  Morgan shone the beam up and down again pensively. ‘Well, it’s raining pretty hard and has been all day – not much water at the moment, but it’s quite possible. This drain would probably have been built to stop water flooding the rail track, so yes. But …’ He hesitated.

  Joan cut in. ‘It looks as if she’s been here some years. If the drain flooded, it’s likely she would have been moved up and down and would have broken up. She’s intact. Also, the presence of the desiccated skin would indicate that it has been dry here for some while. But we can’t rule out flooding from time to time altogether.’

  Grace stared at the skull, all kinds of emotions raging through him. Suddenly, he did not want to wait until tomorrow – he wanted the team to start now, right away.

  It was only with great reluctance that he told the scene guard to seal up the entrance and secure the whole site.

  9

  OCTOBER 2007

  Abby could not believe it – she needed to pee. She looked at her watch. One hour and ten minutes had passed since she had stepped into this bloody lift. Why? Why? Why had she been so bloody stupid?

  Because of the fucking builders downstairs, that’s why.

  Christ. It took thirty seconds to go down via the staircase, and that was good exercise. Why? Why? Why?

  And now this sharp, biting urgency in her bladder. She had gone only minutes before leaving the flat, but it felt as if she had drunk ten pints of coffee and a gallon of water since.

  No way, I am not peeing. I am not having the fire brigade turn up to find me lying in a puddle of urine. Not that indignity, thank you.

  She clenched her insides, pressing her knees together, shaking, waiting for the moment to pass, then looked up at the roof of the lift again, at the gridded, opaque lighting panel. Listening. Listening for that footstep she was certain she had heard.

  Or her imagination had heard …

  In movies, people pulled the lift doors open or climbed out through the roof hatches. But in movies lifts did not sway like this.

  The desire to urinate passed – it would be back, but for the moment she felt OK. She tried to get to her feet, but the lift swung wildly again, banging into one of the shaft walls and then another with that deep, echoing boooommmmmm. She held her breath, waiting for it to stop moving. Praying the cable was still holding. Then she knelt, picked her mobile phone off the floor and dialled again. Same sharp beep, same no-signal message.

  She placed her hands on the doors, tried to force her fingers into the gap down the centre between them but they were not moving. She opened her handbag, rummaging inside for something she could ease into the tiny crack. There was nothing there other than a metal nail file. She slid it in, but after a couple of inches it hit something solid and would go no further. She tried moving it to the right, then sharply to the left. The file bent.

  She pressed every button on the panel in turn, then slapped the wall of the lift in frustration with the flat of her hand.

  This was just great.

  How long did she have?

  There was another ominous creak above her. She imagined the cable of twisted wires steadily uncoiling, getting thinner and thinner. The bolts fixed to the roof shearing, bit by bit. She remembered a conversation at a party some years ago about what to do if a lift cable snapped and the lift plunged downwards. Several people said to jump just before you hit the bottom. But how would you know when you were going to hit the bottom? And if the lift was plunging at maybe a hundred miles an hour, you would be plunging at the same speed. Other people suggested lying flat, then some wit said your best chance of survival was not to be in the lift in the first place.

  She was with that wit right now.

  Oh, Jesus, this was so ironic. Thinking back to all she had gone through to be here in Brighton. The risks she had taken, the precautions to leave no trail.

  Now this had to happen.

  She thought suddenly of the way it would be reported. Unidentified woman killed in freak lift accident.

  No. No way.

  She stared up at the glass panel, stretched, prodded it with her finger. It did not move.

  She pushed harder.

  Nothing.

  It had to move. She stretched as much as she could, just getting the fingertips of both hands against it, and pushed with all her strength. But her exertions only made the lift sway again. It bounced off the side of the shaft once more with the same dull booommmmmmmm.

  And then she heard a scrape above her. A very distinct, long scrape, as if someone was up there and had come to rescue her.

  She listened again. Trying to tune out the hissing roar of her breathing and the drumbeat thump of her heart. She listened for what must have been a full two minutes, her ears popping like they did sometimes on an aeroplane, although then it was altitude pressure and now it was fear.

  All she could hear was the steady creaking of the cable and the occasional cracking, rending sound of metal tearing.

  10

  11 SEPTEMBER 2001

  Clutching the cordless handset and feeling a terrible swirl of darkness deep inside her, Lorraine threw herself out of the deck-chair. She ran across the decking, almost tripping over Alfie, and in through the patio doors, her feet sinking deep into the soft pile of the white carpet, her boobs and her gold ankle chain flapping.

  ‘That’s where he is,’ she said into the phone to her sister, her voice a trembling whisper. ‘That’s where Ronnie is right now.’

  She grabbed the remote and hit the button. BBC One came on. She saw, through a jerky, hand-held camera, the instantly recognizable image of the tall silver twin towers of the World Trade Center. Thick black smoke belched from the top section of one tower, almost obliterating it, the black and white mast standing erect above it, rising into the cloudless cobalt sky.

  Oh, Christ. Oh, Christ. Ronnie is there. Which tower is his meeting in? Which floor?

  She barely heard the agitated voice of an American newscaster saying, ‘This is not a light aircraft, this was a large plane. Oh, God! Oh, my God!’

  ‘I’ll call you back, Mo,’ she said. ‘I’ll call you right back.’ She stabbed out Ronnie’s mobile phone number. Seconds later she got the busy tone. She tried again. Then again. And again.

  Oh, God, Ronnie, please be OK. Please, my darling, please be OK.

  She heard the wail of sirens on the TV. Saw people staring upwards. Everywhere, scores of people, men and women in smart clothes and in work clothes, all standing still, frozen in a bizarre tableau, some with their hand in front of their faces, some holding cameras. Then the Twin Towers again. One belching that black smoke, soiling that beautiful blue of the sky.

  A shiver ripped through her. She st
ood still.

  Sirens getting louder.

  Almost nobody moving. Just a few people now sprinting towards the building. She saw a fire truck with a long ladder, heard sirens howling, whupping, grinding the air.

  She tried Ronnie’s number again. The busy signal. Again. The busy signal. Always the busy signal.

  She called her sister back. ‘I can’t reach him,’ she said, crying.

  ‘He’ll be OK, Lori. Ronnie’s a survivor, he’ll be OK.’

  ‘How – how could this happen?’ Lorraine asked. ‘How could a plane do this? I mean—’

  ‘I’m sure he’s OK. This is horrible, unbelievable. It’s like one of those – you know – those disasters – like a disaster movie.’

  ‘I’m going to hang up. He might be trying to get through. I’ll try him again.’

  ‘Call me when you get through to him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Promise?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He’s OK, sweetie, I promise you.’

  Lorraine hung up again, transfixed by the images on the television screen. She started punching out Ronnie’s number again. But she only got halfway.

  11

  OCTOBER 2007

  ‘Am I the love of your life?’ she asked him. ‘Am I, Grace? Am I?’

  ‘You are.’

  Grinning. ‘You’re not lying to me, are you, Grace?’

  They’d had a boozy lunch at La Coupole in St Germain, then ambled along the Seine on that glorious June afternoon before returning to their hotel.

  It seemed that the weather was always fine when they were together. Like it was now. Sandy stood over him, in their pretty bedroom, blocking the sunlight that was streaming in through the shuttered windows. Her blonde tresses swung down on either side of her freckled face, brushing his cheeks. Then she flicked her hair across his face, as if dusting it.