‘Marsha Morris?’ said Michael Foreman.
‘You can always tell them shemale poofs by their Adam’s apples,’ Potting said. ‘That’s the giveaway.’
‘Actually, Norman,’ said Bella Moy, ‘I’ve read that they can have them surgically removed now – or at least reduced. And I’m not quite sure why you’re calling them poofs?’
‘This person was wearing a roll neck,’ Nick Nicholl said, ignoring them. ‘Whether he – or she – had an Adam’s apple or not, it couldn’t be seen.’
‘Is that the enhanced image, Ellen?’ Grace said.
‘I’m afraid so, sir,’ she replied. ‘It’s the clearest I could get from the lab. Not great, but it tells us a couple of important things. The first is that the Shoe Man might stalk his victims in drag. The second is that Mrs Burchmore bought an expensive pair of shoes that day. Take a look at this next sequence. I’m afraid the image quality is also poor, it was taken from the shop’s own CCTV.’
She pressed the remote control and on the screen appeared the interior of a shoe shop, again in a sequence of frames from a static camera.
‘This is one of the Profile shops in Duke’s Lane,’ Ellen said.
A blonde woman was sitting on a chair, hunched over what looked like her iPhone or BlackBerry, pecking at the keys. Ellen pointed the red laser dot on her face.
‘This is Dee Burchmore, five minutes on from the footage you just saw in East Street.’
An assistant jerked into frame, holding a pair of high-heeled shoes.
In the background, the camera showed a woman with bouffant hair, in a long coat, dark glasses and a shawl covering much of the lower part of her face, entering the shop. It was the same person they had just seen fall over.
Ellen pointed the laser dot on her.
‘It’s good old Marsha Morris again!’ DC Foreman said. ‘With her wig back on the right way around!’
They watched the transvestite jerk left and right across the frame in the background, while Dee Burchmore purchased her shoes. She then appeared to chat to the assistant at the counter as the young woman entered details on her computer keypad. Marsha Morris stood close by, appearing to examine some shoes, but clearly listening.
Then Dee Burchmore left with her purchase in a carrier bag.
After only a few seconds, Marsha Morris also left. Then Ellen halted the tape.
‘Do we know,’ asked Norman Potting, ‘if the person who attacked Dee Burchmore yesterday was in drag?’
‘He was wearing a dark hood with eye slits,’ Claire Westmore said. ‘It’s the only description she’s been able to give so far. But historically the only two attacks in which the Shoe Man wore drag were at the Grand Hotel, in 1997, and early on New Year’s Day, at the Metropole. None of the subsequent victims has mentioned drag.’
‘I think he’s wearing it as a disguise,’ Proudfoot said. ‘Not for sexual gratification. It’s gets him into ladies’ shoe shops without suspicion and it’s a good disguise at the hotels.’
Grace nodded in agreement.
Proudfoot went on: ‘Looking at the case file from 1997, the victim who was attacked in the Churchill Square car park was a creature of habit. She always parked in the same car park, on the top floor, because it was the emptiest. There’s a parallel with Dee Burchmore, who always parked on Level 2 of the car park behind the Grand Hotel. They both made it very easy for someone stalking them.’
The SOLO added, ‘Dee has told me that she regularly posts her movements on the social networking sites Facebook and Twitter. I’ve had a look at some of her posts over this past week and it wouldn’t have taken a rocket scientist to plot her whereabouts on an almost hourly basis. All three previous victims have had a Facebook presence for a while also, and Mandy Thorpe Tweeted regularly as well.’
‘So,’ Nick Nicholl said, ‘we’ve narrowed the Shoe Man’s next victim down to someone who’s bought an expensive pair of shoes in the past week and has a presence on either Facebook or Twitter, or both.’ He grinned.
‘We might be able to be more specific than that,’ Ellen Zoratti said. ‘The age of the victims could be significant. Nicola Taylor is thirty-eight, Roxy Pearce is thirty-six, Mandy Thorpe is twenty, and Dee Burchmore is forty-two. These four ages correspond closely to the age range of the Shoe Man’s victims back in 1997.’
The Crime Analyst paused to let this sink in, then went on: ‘If Detective Superintendent Grace is correct that Rachael Ryan was the Shoe Man’s fifth victim back in 1997, maybe it can help us narrow down who his next will be now – assuming there will be another one.’
‘There will be,’ Proudfoot said confidently.
‘Rachael Ryan was twenty-two years old,’ Ellen said. She turned to the forensic psychologist. ‘Dr Proudfoot, you’ve already told us you think the Shoe Man could be repeating his pattern because that’s his comfort zone. Might that comfort zone extend to the age of his next victim? Someone of corresponding age to his fifth victim in 1997? A twenty-two-year-old?’
Proudfoot nodded pensively. ‘We can’t be sure about Rachael Ryan, of course,’ he said pompously, and gave Roy Grace a pointed look. ‘But if we assume for the moment that Mandy Thorpe was a victim of the Shoe Man and that Roy is right about Rachael Ryan, then yes, Ellen, your assumption is one we shouldn’t rule out. It’s very possible he’ll go for someone of that age. If he attacked poor Rachael Ryan, and she’s never been found, and he’s never been caught for whatever he did to her, then it’s quite likely, after yesterday’s shock, that he’ll go for the familiar. Someone more vulnerable than an experienced middle-aged woman. Someone who’ll be a soft touch. Yes, I think that’s who we should be focusing on. Young women in high heels and with a Facebook presence.’
‘Which means just about every young woman in Brighton and Hove. And everywhere else in this country,’ E-J said.
‘There can’t be that many who can afford the prices of the shoes that attract the Shoe Man,’ Bella Moy said. ‘I would think we could get a list of recent customers in that age bracket from the local shops.’
‘Good thinking, Bella, but we haven’t got the time,’ Grace said.
‘It could be narrowed down, sir,’ Ellen Zoratti said. ‘The connection could be this person in the bouffant wig. If we could find footage of a woman in her early twenties in a shop and footage of this person close to her, we might have something.’
‘We’ve had the Outside Inquiry team viewing all the footage they can from cameras inside shoe shops, but it’s a nightmare, because of the January sales,’ Bella Moy said. ‘I’ve been in the CCTV room at Brighton nick, looking at footage from cameras close to some of the city’s shoe shops. There are hundreds of people of that age out and about shopping. And the problem is there’s hundreds and hundreds of hours of CCTV footage.’
Grace nodded.
‘Sir,’ Claire Westmore said, ‘a lot of shoe shops these days take down customer details for their mailing lists. The chances are that the shop that has sold – or has yet to sell – the shoes of the next potential victim will have her name and address on its system.’
Grace considered this. ‘Yes, worth a try. We have a list of all the shops in the city that sell expensive designer shoes.’ He looked down at his notes. ‘Twenty-one of them. The victim is likely to have bought her shoes within the past week – if she has bought them yet. We could try a trawl of all the shops, and get the names and addresses of all the customers who fit this profile who’ve bought shoes, but with the resources we have this is going to take days. Our problem is we don’t have the luxury of that time.’
‘How about putting out some decoys, sir?’ DC Boutwood said.
‘Decoys?’
‘Send some of us out shopping.’
‘You mean send you out to buy expensive shoes?’
She nodded, beaming. ‘I’d volunteer!’
Grace grimaced. ‘Women and nice shoes in the January sales. It’s like looking for a bloody needle in a haystack! We’d need dozens of decoys to hit the ri
ght shops at the right times. Dr Proudfoot thinks the Shoe Man will attack again tonight or tomorrow.’ He shook his head. ‘It’s an interesting idea, E-J, but it’s too much of a long shot – and we just don’t have the time. We need to get the Eastern Road area under observation by 3 p.m. today.’
He looked at his watch. It was coming up to 9 a.m. He had just six hours.
The CCTV surveillance camera was a clever invention, Roy Grace thought. But there was a big issue with them. There were currently hundreds of cameras running 24/7 in this city. But there simply wasn’t the manpower to physically examine all the footage – and half of it was crap quality anyway. He needed some kind of super computer program to check it automatically – and he didn’t have one. All he had was a limited number of human beings with limited concentration spans.
‘Sir, you were involved yourself with the Rachael Ryan disappearance, weren’t you?’ Ellen Zoratti said.
Grace smiled. ‘I still am. The file’s still open. But yes, I was, very involved. I interviewed the two friends she had been out with on that Christmas Eve several times. Rachael was into shoes, big time, which was why I’ve always suspected the Shoe Man’s involvement. She’d bought a very expensive pair of shoes a week before, from Russell and Bromley in East Street, I think.’ He shrugged. ‘That’s another reason I’m not sure we’d gain anything by sending people out shopping today. I think he plans ahead.’
‘Unless he’s feeling frustrated by yesterday, chief,’ Glenn Branson said. ‘And just decides to go for someone at random.’
‘Our best hope at the moment,’ Proudfoot said, ‘is that after yesterday afternoon he’s feeling rattled, and that maybe he’ll rush into something unprepared. Perhaps you succeeded in rattling his cage by insulting his manhood in the Argus – which is how he came to make his mistake.’
‘Then I think we’d better find a way of rattling his cage again, and this time even harder,’ Grace said.
87
Friday 16 January
The job at the Grand Hotel was not working out the way Darren Spicer had hoped. There were security systems in place to prevent him creating his own room keys on the system, and a supervisor who kept watch on him and his co-workers from the minute he started in the morning to the minute he signed off each evening.
Sure, he was getting paid for his work, renovating the hotel’s antiquated electrical system, replacing miles of wiring along its labyrinth of basement corridors, where the laundry, kitchens, boilers, emergency generators and stores were housed. But in taking this particular job, he’d had hopes of being able to do a little more than spend his days unspooling lengths of new electric cables from huge reels and hunt for wires chewed by mice.
He’d imagined he would be getting access to the 201 bedrooms, and the contents left in their safes by their well-off occupants, but so far this first week he had not found a way. He needed to be patient, he knew. He could do patience all right. He was very patient when he fished, or when he waited outside a house he planned to burgle for the occupants to go out.
But there was such temptation here, he was keen to get started.
Because 201 bedrooms meant 201 bedroom safes! And the hotel was busy, 80 per cent occupancy all year round.
A mate in prison had told him the way to do hotel safes. Not how to break into them – he didn’t need that, he had all the kit he needed for the safes in the Grand. No, this was how to steal from safes without getting found out.
It was simple: you stole only a little. You mustn’t get greedy. If someone left 200 quid in cash or some foreign currency, you took just a small amount. Always cash, never jewellery; people missed jewellery, but they weren’t going to miss twenty quid out of 200. Do that ten times a day and you were on to a nice little earner. A grand a week. Fifty Gs in a year. Yeah. Nice.
He had made his decision that he was going to keep out this time. Stay free. Sure, Lewes Prison had more comforts than St Patrick’s night shelter, but soon he’d get his MiPod, then hopefully, a couple of months after he’d have enough cash together for a deposit on his own place. Something modest to start with. Then find himself a woman. Save, maybe get enough cash together to rent a flat. And maybe one day buy one. Ha! That was his dream.
But at this moment, trudging back along Western Road towards St Patrick’s, at 6.30 on this freezing, dry Friday night, shoulders stooped, hands in the pockets of his donkey jacket, the dream was a long way off.
He stopped in a pub, the Norfolk Arms by Norfolk Square, and had a pint with a whisky chaser. Both tasted good. This was something he missed when doing bird. The freedom to have a drink in a pub. Simple things like that. Life’s little pleasures. He bought a second pint, took it on to the pavement and smoked a cigarette. An old man, who was also holding a pint and was puffing on a pipe, tried to strike up a conversation, but Spicer ignored him. He was thinking. He couldn’t just rely on the hotel, he was going to have to do other stuff. Emboldened by his drinks, he was thinking, Why not start now?
Between 4 and 5 on winter afternoons was a good time for burgling homes. It was dark but people were still out at work. Now was a bad time, for homes. But there was a place he’d seen on his walk around his neighbourhood in Hove last Sunday, when he’d been looking for opportunities. A place that, around 6.30 on a Friday evening, was almost certain to be unoccupied. A place that had intrigued him.
A place, he was sure, that had possibilities.
He finished his drink and his cigarette without hurrying. He had plenty of time to go to St Patrick’s and get the bag containing all the specialist kit he’d acquired or made himself over the years. He could do this job and still be back at the night shelter by lock-in time. Yeah, for sure.
Lock-in, he thought, the drink definitely getting to him a little. Lock-in, lock-up.
That made him grin.
‘Want to share the joke?’ the old man with the pipe said.
Spicer shook his head. ‘Not really,’ he said. ‘Nah.’
88
Friday 16 January
At 6.45 p.m., Roy Grace, running on adrenalin and caffeine, sat in a small office at the end of the Ops Room, on the third floor of Brighton Central police station. The John Street location of the huge, six-storey building, right on the edge of Kemp Town and just a couple of hundred yards from Edward Street – part of the area where Julius Proudfoot was predicting the Shoe Man’s next attack would take place – made it ideal for this current operation.
In the short space of time since this morning’s briefing, with the aid of some helpful pressure in the right places from ACC Rigg, the Detective Superintendent had assembled a Covert Team of twenty officers, and was busily working on increasing that to his target of thirty-five for tomorrow.
He currently had a surveillance team of eight out on the streets, on foot and in vehicles, and another twelve, including some members of his own inquiry team, together with several constables, Specials and PCSOs he had commandeered, who were located in buildings at strategic intervals along Edward Street and Eastern Road – as it became – and some of the nearby side streets. Most of them, as was common in surveillance, were in upstairs rooms of private houses or flats, with the consent of their owners.
A bank of CCTV monitors covered most of the wall in front of his desk. Grace could instantly call up on them views from any of the 350 cameras situated around the city’s downtown area, as well as zooming, panning and tilting them. The room was used for the officer in charge, the Gold Commander, at all major public order events, such as party political conferences or for monitoring major demonstrations, and for major operations in the city, as this had now become.
His number two on this, his Silver Commander, was the Crime and Ops Superintendent at John Street, who was currently in the Ops Room, liaising by secure radio with the two Bronze commanders. One, a female detective inspector who ran the Force Surveillance Teams from CID headquarters, was out in an unmarked car, coordinating the street surveillance team. The other, Roy Apps, a senior uniform i
nspector at John Street, was running the static team, who radioed in anything of potential interest from their observation points.
So far all had been quiet. To Grace’s relief it was not raining – many police officers jokingly referred to foul weather as policeman rain. Crime levels always dropped during heavy rain. It seemed that villains didn’t like getting wet any more than anyone else did. Although the Shoe Man appeared, on past form, to have a penchant for light drizzle.
The rush hour was drawing to an end and Eastern Road was quietening down. Grace flicked through all the screens showing views close to his observation points. He stopped as he saw one unmarked surveillance car slow down and park.
Taking a quick break, he phoned Cleo, telling her he was likely to be late and not to wait up. She was exhausted after last night, she said, and was going to bed early.
‘I’ll try not to wake you,’ he said.
‘I want you to wake me,’ she replied. ‘I want to know you’re home safe.’
He blew her a kiss and turned back to his task.
Suddenly his internal command phone rang. It was the Silver Commander.
‘Boss,’ he said. ‘Just had an alert from an RPU car – it’s picked up the index of the taxi driven by John Kerridge on its ANPR and just clocked it turning left into Old Steine from the seafront.’
Grace tensed, feeling the hollow sensation he often got in the pit of his stomach when things were starting.
‘OK, alert the Bronzes.’
‘I’m on to it.’
Grace switched his radio to pick up all comms from the Bronzes to any members of their team. He was just in time to hear the excited voice of one of the surveillance team, through a radio crackling with interference, ‘Target turning right-right, into Edward Street!’
Moments later there was a response from an observation post just to the east of John Street. ‘Target passing, continuing east-east. Hang on – he’s stopping. Picking up one male passenger.’
Bugger! Grace thought. Bugger! Bugger!