Dead Man's Footsteps

  ‘Slow.’

  ‘Still much damage from the flood?’

  ‘A lot.’

  ‘Many people playing the clarinet?’

  ‘The clarinet? Yes. Went to a few concerts. Saw Ellis Marsalis.’

  Theobald gave him a rare beam of pleasure. ‘The father!’ he said approvingly. ‘Yes, indeed. You were lucky to hear him!’ Then he turned back to the skeleton. ‘So what do we have?’

  Grace brought him up to speed. Then Theobald and Joan Major entered into a debate about whether the body should be removed intact, a lengthy and elaborate process, or taken away in segments. They decided that, because it had been found intact, it would be better to keep it that way.

  For a moment, Grace watched the rain teeming steadily in through the broken section of the drain, a short distance away. The individual drops looked like elongated dust motes in the shaft of light. New Orleans, he thought, blowing steam from his coffee and sipping it tentatively, trying to avoid frizzing his tongue on the hot liquid. Cleo had come with him and they’d taken a week’s holiday straight after the conference, staying on, enjoying the city and each other.

  It seemed that everything had been much easier between them then, away from Brighton. From Sandy. They just chilled, enjoyed the heat, took a tour around the areas devastated by the flooding that had not yet been restored. They ate gumbo, jambalaya, crab cakes and oysters Rockefeller, drank margaritas, mojitos and Cali-fornian and Oregon wines, and listened to jazz in Snug Harbor and other clubs each night. And Grace fell even more in love with her.

  He was proud of the way Cleo coped at the conference. As a beautiful woman who did a very unglamorous job, she was on the receiving end of a fair bit of ribbing, curiosity and some truly appalling chat-up lines from five hundred of the world’s top, toughest and mostly male detectives in party mode. Always, she gave back as good as she got, and she made eyeballs pop out by dressing her five-feet eleven-inch leggy frame in her usual eccentric, sexy way.

  ‘You asked me about her age last night, Roy,’ the forensic archaeologist said, interrupting his thoughts.

  ‘Yes?’ Instantly, he was fully focused as he stared at the skull.

  Pointing at the jaw, she said, ‘The presence of the wisdom teeth tells us she is over seventeen. There is evidence of some dental work, white fillings – which tend to have been more common during the past two decades, and more expensive. Could be she went to a private dentist, which might narrow it down. And there’s a cap on one maxillary incisor.’ She pointed to a top-left tooth.

  Grace’s nerves began jangling. Sandy had chipped a front left tooth on one of their first dates, biting into a fragment of bone in a steak tartare, and had later had it capped.

  ‘What else?’ he asked.

  ‘I would say from the general condition and colouring that the teeth indicate her age to be consistent with my estimated range yesterday – somewhere between twenty-five and forty.’ She looked at Frazer Theobald, who gave her a deadpan nod, as if he was sympathetic to her findings but not necessarily in wholehearted agreement.

  Then she pointed at the arm. ‘The long bone grows in three parts – two epiphyses and the shaft. The process by which they join together is called epiphyseal fusion and it is usually complete by the mid-thirties. This is not quite complete yet.’ She pointed at the collar bone. ‘The same applies with the clavicle – you can see the fusion line on the medial clavicle. It fuses at around thirty. I should be able to give you a more accurate estimate when we get to the PM room.’

  ‘So she was about thirty, you are fairly sure?’ Grace said.

  ‘Yes. And my hunch is not much more than that. Could even be younger.’

  Roy remained silent. Sandy was two years younger than him. She had disappeared on his thirtieth birthday, when she was just twenty-eight. The same hair. A capped tooth.

  ‘Are you OK, Roy?’ Joan Major asked him suddenly.

  At first, lost in thought, he heard her voice only as a distant, disembodied echo.

  ‘Roy? Are you OK?’

  He snapped his focus back to her. ‘Yes, yes. Fine, thanks.’

  ‘You look as if you’ve just seen a ghost.’

  15

  11 SEPTEMBER 2001

  Ronnie hurried down West Broadway, crossing Murray Street, Park Place, then Barclay Street. The World Trade Center was right in front of him now, on the far side of Vesey Street, the two silver monoliths rising sheer into the sky. The smells from the fire were much stronger and sheets of curled, burning paper were floating in the air, while debris tumbled down and smashed to the ground.

  Through the dense black smoke he could see crimson, as if the tower was bleeding. Then flashes of bright orange. Flames. Jesus, he thought, feeling a terrible dark fear in his gut. This cannot be happening.

  People were staggering out of the entrance, looking dazed, staring upwards, men in sharp shirts and ties without jackets, some on their mobiles. For a second he watched an attractive young brunette in a power suit stumbling along with only one shoe on. She suddenly clamped her hands to her head, looking pained, as if a falling object had just struck her, and he saw a trickle of blood run down her cheek.

  He hesitated. It didn’t look safe to go any further. But he needed that meeting, needed it so desperately badly. Just have to chance it, he thought. Run like hell. He coughed, the smoke pricking his throat, and stepped off the sidewalk. The kerb was higher than he realized and, as the wheels of his case bumped down, the handle twisted in his hand and his briefcase fell off.

  Shit! Don’t do this to me.

  Then, just as he ducked down and grabbed the handle of his briefcase, he heard the scream of a jet aircraft.

  He looked up again. And could not believe his eyes. A split second later, before he had time to register intelligibly what he was seeing, came an explosion. A metallic thunderclap boom, like two cosmic dustbins colliding. A sound that seemed to echo in his brain and to go on echoing, rumbling around out of control inside his skull until he wanted to stick his fingers in his ears to stop it, to choke it. Then he felt the shockwave. Felt it shuffling every single atom in his body.

  A massive ball of orange flames, showering diamanté sparks and black smoke, erupted from near the top of the South Tower. For one fleeting instant he was struck dumb by the sheer beauty of that sight: the contrast of colours – the orange, the black – stark against the rich blue of the sky.

  It seemed as if a million, billion feathers were floating in the air around the flames, drifting unhurriedly towards the ground. All in slow motion.

  Then the reality slammed into him.

  Slabs of wood, glass, chairs, desks, phones, filing cabinets were bouncing, shattering, on the ground in front of him. A police car pulled up, just past him, doors opening before it had even stopped. A mere hundred yards or so to his right, along Vesey Street, what at first looked like a burning flying saucer dropped with a massive clanging sound, smashing a deep crater, then bounced, shedding parts of its covering and innards, spraying out flames. When it finally lay still it continued to burn fiercely.

  To his utter numb horror, Ronnie realized that it was a jet aircraft engine.

  That this was the South Tower.

  Donald Hatcook’s office was here. The eighty-seventh floor. He tried to count upwards.

  Two planes.

  Donald’s office. By his quick estimate, Donald’s office was right where it hit.

  What the hell is happening? Oh, Jesus Christ, what the hell is going on?

  He stared at the burning engine. Could feel the heat. Saw the cops run forward from their car.

  Ronnie’s brain was telling him there wasn’t going to be any meeting. But he tried to ignore it. His brain was wrong. His eyes were wrong. Somehow he would still make that meeting. He needed to keep going. Keep going. You can make the meeting. You can still make the meeting. YOU NEED THAT FUCKING MEETING!

  And another part of his brain was telling him that while one plane hitting the Twin Towers was an acc
ident, two was something else. Two was badly not right.

  Propelled by absolute desperation, he gripped his bag handle and walked forward determinedly.

  Seconds later he heard a dull thud, like a sack of potatoes falling. He felt a wet slap on his face. Then he saw something white and ragged roll across the ground towards him and stop inches from his feet. It was a human arm. Something wet was sliding down his cheek. He shot his hand up to his face and his fingers touched liquid. He looked at them and saw they were smeared in blood.

  His stomach heaved liked wet cement in a mixer. He turned away and threw up his breakfast where he stood, almost oblivious to another thud only a few feet away. Sirens wailed, sirens from the pit of hell. Sirens from all around. Everywhere. Then another thud, another spatter on his face and hands.

  He looked up. Flames and smoke and ant-like figures and sheet glass and a man, in shirtsleeves and trousers, tumbling in free fall from the sky. One shoe came away, flipping over and over. He watched it all the way down, end-over-end-over-end-over-end. People the size of toy soldiers and debris, indistinguishable from each other at first, were raining from the sky.

  He just stood and stared. A set of postage stamps he had once traded, commemorating the Dutch painter Bosch’s vision of death and hell, came into his mind. That’s what this was. Hell.

  The foul choking air was thick with noise now. Screams, sirens, cries, the overhead chop of helicopter blades. Police and fire officers were running towards the buildings. A fire truck bearing the words ‘Ladder 12’ pulled up in front of him, blocking his view. He moved around the far side of it as helmeted firemen poured out and broke into a run.

  There was another thud. Ronnie saw a plump man in a suit land on his back and explode.

  He threw up again, swaying giddily, then dropped to one knee, covering his face with his hands, and stayed there for some moments, shaking. He closed his eyes, as if somehow that would make everything go away. Then he turned in a sudden panic that someone had taken his bag and his briefcase. But they were there, right behind him. His smart fake Louis Vuitton briefcase. Not that anyone was going to care at this moment who the hell had made it. Or whether it was fake or real.

  After some minutes, Ronnie pulled himself together and stood up. He spat several times, trying to get the taste of vomit out of his mouth. Then a flash of anger turned in seconds to a burning rage inside him. Why today? Why not some other fucking day? Why did this have to happen today?

  He saw a stream of people, some of them covered in white dust, some bleeding, walking slowly, as if in a trance, out of the entrance of the North Tower. Then he heard the distant honk-honk-honk of another fire engine. Then another. And another. Someone in front of him was holding a video camera.

  News, he thought. Television. Stupid bloody Lorraine would be panicking if she saw this. She panicked over everything. If there was a pile-up on a motorway she would instantly call to make sure he was all right, even when she must have known, if she’d only thought about it, that he couldn’t have been within a hundred miles of it.

  He pulled his mobile phone out of his pocket and dialled her number. There was a sharp beep, then the message on the display:

  Network busy.

  He tried again, twice more, then put the phone back in his pocket.

  He would come to realize just a little while later, when he reflected on it, how lucky he was that his call did not get through.

  16

  OCTOBER 2007

  You are meant to be bloody luminous! In the pitch, bitumen-black darkness, Abby brought her watch right up to her face, until she felt the cold steel and glass against her nose, and still she could not see a damned thing.

  I paid money for a luminous watch, damn you!

  Curled up on the hard floor, she had a feeling she might have slept, but she had no idea for how long. Was it day or night?

  Her muscles felt as if they had seized and her arm was dead. She swung it through the air, trying to shake circulation back into it. It was like a lead weight. She crawled a couple of feet and swung it again, then winced in pain as it struck the side of the lift with a dull boom.

  ‘Hello!’ she croaked.

  She banged again, then again and again.

  Felt the lift swaying at her exertion.

  Banged again. Again. Again.

  Felt the urge to pee once more. One boot was already full. The reek of stale urine was growing stronger. Her mouth was parched. She closed her eyes, then opened them again, brought the watch up close until she could feel the coldness on her nose. But still she couldn’t see it.

  Squirming in sudden panic, she wondered if she could have gone blind.

  What the hell time was it? When she had last looked, before the lights went out, it had been 3.08 a.m. Some time after then she had peed into her boot. Or at least as best she could in the darkness.

  She had felt better then and had been able to think clearly. Now the need to pee was muzzing her thoughts again. She tried to push the desire from her mind. Some years ago she had watched a documentary on television about people who had survived disasters. A young woman her own age had been one of the few survivors from an aircraft that had crash-landed and caught fire. The woman reckoned she had lived because she kept calm when everyone else was panicking, had thought logically, figured out through the smoke and darkness which way the exit was.

  The same theme had been echoed by all the other survivors. Keeping calm, thinking clearly. That was what you had to do.

  Easier said than done.

  They had exit doors on planes. And stewardesses with Stepford Wives expressions who pointed out the exits and held up orange life jackets and tugged at oxygen masks, as if they were addressing a convention of mentally retarded deaf mutes on every flight. England was a bloody nanny state now, so why hadn’t they passed a law ensuring that every lift had a stewardess on board? Why didn’t you find a robotic blonde standing inside each time you entered, handing you a laminated card that told you where the doors were? Giving you an orange life jacket in case the lift got flooded while you were in it? Waving oxygen masks in your face?

  Suddenly she heard a sharp beep-beep.

  Her phone!

  She fumbled for her handbag. Light spilled out of it. Her phone was working! There was a signal! And, of course, there was a clock on the phone – she had totally forgotten about in her panic!

  She pulled it out and stared at it. On the display were the words:

  New message.

  Barely able to contain her excitement, she clicked it open.

  She did not recognize the number. The message read:

  I know where you are.

  17

  OCTOBER 2007

  Roy Grace shivered. Although he had on thick jeans, a heavy-knit pullover and lined boots under his paper suit, the damp inside the storm drain and the rain outside were getting into his bones.

  The SOCOs and search officers, who had the unpleasant task of checking every inch of the drain, mostly on their hands and knees, had so far found a few rodent skeletons, but nothing of interest. Either the dead woman’s clothing had been removed before she was deposited here, or it had been washed away, rotted or even taken for animals’ nests. Working painstakingly slowly with trowels, Joan Major and Frazer Theobald were scraping away the silt around the pelvis, bagging and tagging each layer of dirt separately in neat cellophane bags. They would be another two or three hours at this rate, Grace estimated.

  And all the time he was drawn back to the grinning skull. The sensation that Sandy’s spirit was here with him. Could it really be you? he wondered, staring hard. Every medium he had been to in the past nine years had told him that his wife was not in the spirit world. Which meant she was still alive – if he believed them. But none had been able to say where she was.

  A chill fluttered through him. This time it was not the cold, but something else. He had determined a while ago to find closure and move forward with his life. But each time he tried, something happ
ened that sowed doubt in him, and it was happening again now.

  The crackle of his radio phone startled him out of his reverie. He held it to his ear with a curt, ‘Roy Grace?’

  ‘Morning, Roy. Your career going down the drain, is it?’ Then he heard Norman Potting’s throaty chuckle.

  ‘Very funny, Norman. Where are you?’

  ‘With the scene guard. Want me to get togged up and come down?’

  ‘No, I’ll come to you – meet me in the SOCO van.’

  Grace welcomed the excuse to get away for a bit. He wasn’t strictly needed here and could easily have gone back to his office, but he liked his team to see him leading from the front. If they were having to spend their Saturday inside a dank, horrible drain, at least they could see his day wasn’t any better.

  It was a relief to shut the door on the elements and sit down on the soft upholstery at the work table in the van. Even if it meant being confined in a small area with Norman Potting – never an experience he relished. He could smell the stale pipe smoke coming off the man’s clothes, mixed with a strong reminder of last night’s garlic.

  Detective Sergeant Norman Potting had a narrow, rather rubbery face criss-crossed with broken veins, protruding lips and a thinning comb-over, part of which, at this moment was sticking bolt upright, having been blasted by the elements. He was fifty-three, although those who particularly disliked him spread rumours that he had knocked several years off his age so he could stay in the force longer, because he was terrified of retirement.

  Grace had never seen Potting without a tie and this morning was no exception. The man was wearing a long, wet anorak with duffel tags over a tweed jacket, Viyella shirt and a fraying green knitted tie, grey flannel trousers and stout brogues. With a wheezing sound, he eased himself behind the table, on to the bench seat opposite Grace, then plonked down a large, dripping-wet cellophane folder, looking triumphant.

  ‘Why do people always pick such bleedin’ awful places to get murdered or dumped in?’ he said, leaning forward and exhaling directly into Roy’s face.