He looked down again at Venner’s face. What did your father think about you, in those months before you were born? Was he around? Did he even know your mother was pregnant? Is he alive? If he is, do you think he’s proud of you? Proud of having fathered a revolting monster who traded in pornography and murder for profit?
How would he feel if he had a son who did that? Would he be angry? Would he feel he had failed as a parent? Would he write him off as evil, beyond redemption?
‘Evil’ was a word that always bothered him. It was an easy word to apply to terrible things human beings did to one other. Roy had no doubt in his mind that there were some people, like Venner, who did things that were totally and utterly evil for financial gain, just to line his pockets and his fat gut and to put a Breitling watch on his fat wrist. But many others who did bad things were victims of poor parenting or fractured society or religious zeal. That wasn’t to say you could forgive them for their crimes, but if you could understand what led them to commit them, then you were at least doing something to try to make the world a better place.
That was Roy Grace’s own personal philosophy. He believed that everyone who was born into a decent life had one price to pay for that. No one person was ever going to change the world, but all of us should try to ensure we leave the world a slightly better place than when we came into it. That, above all else, was what he strove to do with his life.
63
‘The time is 6.30 p.m., Thursday, the ninth of June. This is the twelfth briefing of Operation Icon,’ Roy Grace announced. ‘I’m pleased to welcome Haydn Kelly to our team.’ He indicated to the smiling man seated opposite him in the Conference Room of the Major Incident Suite. Kelly was in his mid-forties, sturdily built, with brown hair cropped short, and a tanned, amiable face. He was conservatively but elegantly dressed in a smart navy suit, cream shirt and a red patterned tie.
Grace looked around his assembled team, which had now grown to twenty-six people, including the MIR-1 Office Manager – Detective Sergeant Lance Skelton – two indexers and two crime analysts. ‘Okay, a bit of housekeeping before we start.’ He broke out into a broad smile. ‘I’m very happy to tell you all that the mole who has been blighting our major enquiries for most of the past year has been outed.’
He instantly had the rapt attention of the entire room, broken only for a moment by a sudden burst of ringtone from a mobile phone. A blushing DC Emma Reeves hastily silenced it.
‘I’m very pleased and relieved to tell you that it is not anyone within the police service. It is none other than our good friend, Kevin Spinella from the Argus.’
‘Spinella?’ DS Guy Batchelor said, astonished. ‘How, chief – I mean – I thought the mole was feeding him? What did he do?’
‘He hacked my phone.’ Grace held his BlackBerry up for all to see. ‘He did it electronically. He installed some form of data logger software. It made a recording of every single phone call I received or made, and all texts, and immediately sent them electronically to his own phone.’
Several of the team were frowning. ‘But how did he get access to your BlackBerry, to install it, boss?’ Nick Nicholl asked.
‘He didn’t need to,’ Grace replied. ‘Ray Packham at the High Tech Crime Unit said that all he would have needed to do was to stand within a few feet of me. I keep the Bluetooth option switched on all the time. He could have simply uploaded it from his phone to mine in a matter of seconds.’
‘But that little toerag’s a newspaper reporter, not a tekkie boffin, boss,’ DC Exton said.
‘He would have needed a tekkie friend,’ Grace said. ‘I imagine we’ll find whoever that is. At this moment Spinella’s in custody and his phone’s being taken apart. But I need the High Tech Crime Unit to check all your phones – and my strong advice is to keep your Bluetooth switched off all the time you don’t need it.’
‘So, do we know how far this goes up the chain of command at the Argus, sir?’ Dave Green asked.
‘I spoke to the editor, Michael Beard, earlier. He sounded very genuinely shocked, and said if that were the case, the reporter was totally out of line and acting in a rogue manner, completely alien to the paper’s policy. I subsequently received an email from him a few minutes before I came in here, telling me that Spinella has been suspended with immediate effect. I get the sense Spinella was acting alone – the editor wouldn’t do that to him if he were acting on official policy.’
‘So what happens to Spinella’s career now?’ Norman Potting asked.
Bella Moy rounded on him. ‘What? You care?’
Glenn Branson watched the exchange, intrigued. Until last night he thought that Bella couldn’t stand the man. Now, he realized, it was more like the bickering of an old married couple. He was still in shock from seeing them together, and had not told Roy yet. He looked at the two of them now. Surely she was capable of attracting someone a lot better than Norman?
Such as himself.
Then again, he knew, his collapsed relationship with Ari showed just how little he understood women.
‘I think I’d be lying,’ Roy Grace went on, ‘if I said I was going to be losing any sleep over harming Kevin Spinella’s future career prospects.’
There was a ripple of laughter.
‘Has he been charged yet?’ Jon Exton asked.
‘What, like his phone?’ Potting riposted and chortled, oblivious to the raised eyebrows around him.
Grace ignored him. ‘Yes, he has. With a bit of luck he could be looking at three to five years.’
‘Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy,’ Nick Nicholl said sarcastically.
‘He’ll like being inside,’ Potting said, on a roll now. ‘He thrives on inside information!’ He chortled again.
‘Very witty, Norman,’ Grace said. Then he turned to the press officer, Sue Fleet. ‘You’ll need to liaise with the Argus and find out who will be our new principal contact there.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Okay, let’s move on, down to business.’ He looked at his prepared notes. ‘Glenn, what do you have for us from the postmortem today?’
‘We hope to have the DNA results on the four limbs back tomorrow, boss. But from their well-preserved condition the pathologist Nadiuska De Sancha was able to match them up pretty well to the torso. She was unable to find anything under the nails, skin scrapings or anything else which might indicate a struggle and perhaps give us the perp’s DNA.’
‘What about fingerprints?’
‘Yes, boss, we got a complete dead set.’
‘Good.’
‘We also got good plantars, too.’ Plantars were toe prints. ‘The fingerprints indicate the hands – therefore the arms – are probably from the same body, but there are no hits from the database, so we’re no further forward with identification.’ He turned to the forensic podiatrist. ‘Do you have anything to add on the legs, Haydn?’
‘At this stage,’ Kelly said, ‘the right and left leg appear to belong to the same body – I’m as near to one hundred per cent certain as I can be. I fully expect the DNA analysis will confirm this for us.’
‘So all we need is the head, and we’ll have a complete assemble-it-yourself human cadaver in kit form,’ Potting said.
There were several sniggers. Bella Moy gave him a reproachful look.
‘What do you have for us on mispers, Norman?’ Grace asked.
‘We now have thirty-seven male mispers from the three counties, chief, who fit the age and build profile of the victim. The families that we have been able to contact have been asked to provide items we might be able to obtain DNA from. There are five mispers where we have been unable to find any relatives, and another six with relatives who can’t provide us with anything at all.’
Grace thanked him, and turned to DC Nick Nicholl. ‘Nick, how are you getting on with the list of people who’ve had access to Stonery Farm?’
‘We’re pretty much complete, sir.’ He turned to the indexer Annalise Vineer. ‘Annalise has been making up a databa
se for us to cross-reference against.’
‘We have everyone in it who has been to the farm in the last twelve months – at least the names that the Winter family have given us,’ she said, with a slight toss of her head which sent her fringe flicking left, then right, over her forehead. ‘Tradesmen, friends, professionals. I’m also cross-referencing them against the Police National Database to see if there are any matches with known criminals.’
‘Good work,’ Grace said. He looked down at his notes. ‘Right, I understand we have some development regarding the suit fabric.’ He looked at Glenn.
‘I had a long conversation with a very helpful woman at Dormeuil, the cloth manufacturer. They’ve confirmed it is their fabric, and, no surprise, that it is not one of their major sellers. One problem we have – but it could be much worse – is that a relatively new specialist manufacturer of men’s fashion suits, called Savile Style, bought a large quantity of the material three years ago, making over nine hundred suits from it, which they’ve supplied mostly to individual men’s clothing stores around the country – as well as some overseas. They’re putting together a list of all stockists – definitely one or two in Brighton – who bought the suits. Dormeuil are also letting me have a list of all tailors who’ve bought bolts of this cloth too, which would have been for made-to-measure suits – tailors like Gresham Blake.’
‘What we need to do,’ Grace said, ‘is to get the names of every individual we can who bought a suit in this fabric and then, Annalise, check against the visitor list to Stonery Farm and see if that throws up anything.’ He turned to Bella Moy. ‘Did we get any more leads from Crimewatch?’
‘No, sir,’ she said. ‘A steady volume of calls – forty-eight in the last two days – but nothing else of significance, so far.’
‘Right, the footprint.’ He turned to the Crime Scene Manager. ‘David, what have you got for us so far?’
‘We have actually got five matching footprints from the scene, boss. Three of them correspond to the sections of the lake where limbs were recovered, which is a good indication they might be the perp’s. The tread is over an inch deep, which means almost certainly a boot of some kind. Hard to be precise about the size – often shoe and boot manufacturers use the same sole over several sizes and the fit is in the uppers. But this appears to be smallish – probably a man’s size eight.’
‘Can you give us an indication of the perpetrator’s height from that, Haydn?’ Grace said. He looked quizzically at the forensic podiatrist.
‘Not really, there are too many variables. Some leading experts say the normal height range for this size would be from five foot five inches to five foot nine. But that is making a number of assumptions, including that he was wearing footwear correctly sized for him. People often wear gum boots a size larger than their normal shoe size – and if he’s a smart crim, it’s possible he wore padded-out boots to deceive us about his true size. If he’s really forensically aware, he may have even bought a new insole, to wear a bigger size boot in an attempt to also mask his footprint.’
‘So,’ Glenn said, ‘assuming the scrote’s not a size nine or ten squeezed into these boots, which would be pretty difficult to walk with, would it be a reasonable assumption we are looking at someone no taller than five-eight?’
‘Reasonable but not certain,’ Kelly replied. ‘I would not be comfortable telling you that you could eliminate taller people than that from this enquiry.’
‘Haydn,’ Grace said, ‘I’d like you to explain one of your particular skills, which could become relevant at a later stage in this enquiry. Am I correct that you would be able to recognize whoever left these footprints, from watching him walk and studying his gait?’
‘A human gait is as distinctive as a fingerprint,’ Kelly said. ‘Gait is a person’s style or manner of walking and divided into two phases: Stance and Swing. In the stance phase, the person’s heel contacts the ground, body weight is transferred through the foot to when the toes leave the ground – technically this is called heel contact, mid-stance and propulsion. The swing phase begins immediately after the toes leave the ground, the whole of the lower limb swings forward, and ends at the point when the heel re-strikes the ground. This is unquestionable. How the foot, lower limb and the rest of the body behave in achieving this is distinctive to each individual. Equally that same lower limb can have a posture – or shape – that contributes to its individuality. In some cases this is quite pronounced.’
Grace’s phone, on silent, vibrated. On the display it read, INTERNATIONAL.
Excusing himself he stepped away from the table and out of the room into the corridor, answering it as he walked, ‘Detective Superintendent Grace.’
From the other end he heard an American voice he recognized from their conversation on Monday. The man had been serious and to the point then, and was the same now. ‘Sir, it’s Detective Myman, from the LAPD.’
‘Good to hear from you, how are you?’
‘We’re doing fine,’ the American said. ‘We got a piece of good news for you. We have a suspect in custody for the murder of Marla Henson, assistant to Gaia Lafayette.’
Grace’s spirits soared. ‘You do? Fantastic!’
‘I thought you should know right away, so you can maybe lighten up on your protection of her.’
‘How certain are you this is the right person?’
‘Oh, he’s the perp, no question about that. Got the gun in his house that matches up with the ballistics, got his computer with the two emails he sent on it, and there’s a whole stack of newspaper cuttings about Gaia in his den with some damned strange wording and symbols written all over them. He’s a screwball, but he’s pretty much admitted it.’
‘What was his motive? He just hated her?’
‘He’s got a woman he lives with, she was kind of a bit part actress some years back. Plenty of them in this city. She waits tables in a small place in Santa Monica. Seems like he thought it was unfair Gaia got the part and she didn’t, so he kind of figured in his dumbass mashed-up brain that if he eliminated Gaia, his girl would get the part instead.’
‘This is very good news that you’ve got him,’ Grace said.
‘I’ll let you have any more information as the situation develops.’
‘I’d appreciate that.’
‘You got it.’
64
‘Who’s your fat friend?’
Crouched at the bottom of the steps, staring warily around him, as well as constantly looking up, Drayton Wheeler heard the woman’s voice with relief. The first guided tour of the day. It was his cue.
He had spent much of the night prowling around, avoiding the guards, exploring up in the roof spaces. When he had tried to sleep in one, it had been impossible, with images of being caught invading his mind and the sound of pelting rain drumming on the copper roof above him.
He had found the perfect hideout at the top of the building. Well, so long as you didn’t mind an icy draught and the constant patter and scratching sounds of rats. The creaking of floorboards, like the whole place was haunted with a thousand ghosts. Not that that mattered. He just hoped to hell there were ghosts, because in that case he’d be one soon and, boy, did he have a few scores to settle when he came back. Before dawn, he’d returned to the quiet of his basement lair.
He scrambled silently up the stairs and listened.
‘He did indeed say that to the king. You see, Beau Brummell was a very well known figure – a real Regency dandy.’
Drayton watched the attentive audience who were facing away from him, blocking the guide from view, their anoraks and mackintoshes dripping water. He slid the bolt, opened the gate, slipped through, and closed it behind him, securing it again.
‘Well, they had a bit of a falling out. Beau Brummell, Lord Alvanley, Henry Mildmay and Henry Pierrepoint were considered the prime movers . . .’
He eased his way around the back of them, moving so slowly he was barely noticed. On the far side was a uniformed guard, but he was l
ooking down at his phone, texting. Pulling his baseball cap low over his face, Drayton Wheeler followed the exit signs, which took him through the gift shop. But there was nothing in here for him. One of the many liberating things about dying, he thought, was that you didn’t need to waste money buying souvenirs.
He stepped outside into the pelting rain. Smelled the aroma of wet, recently mown grass, breathed in the salty tang of the air. It was 10.20 a.m., Friday, 10 June. He felt great. He’d never felt better or happier in his life! Maybe it was the drugs he was on, or maybe it was just the fact that in six months, give or take, he’d be out of here. He didn’t care, he felt liberated.
And he had a shopping list!
65
It didn’t take much persuasion for Roy Grace to accept an invitation to morning coffee with Gaia in her suite at The Grand, to discuss the latest development. He actually had butterflies in his stomach when he arrived, a few minutes before 10.30. He was never normally nervous in his work – even in the most dangerous situations his brain was always focused on the task ahead. But he had to admit to himself he had the collywobbles now.
He had encountered a few famous people in the course of his work, inevitably, because Brighton was home to a huge and diverse number of celebrities, but Gaia was in a different league to all of them. Standing dwarfed by the two bodyguards, he was expecting the door to be opened by one of her assistants, and was surprised that it was Gaia herself who greeted him. She was wearing a denim shirt, white jeans, high-heeled espadrilles and a dazzling smile. ‘Detective Superintendent Grace – thank you so much for coming!’ She sounded genuinely grateful, as if most people might kowtow instantly to her every whim, but not police officers.
He did a double-take, looking at her again, then entered the room, which smelled of freshly brewed coffee and a dense perfume. Her hair was completely different from a few days earlier – it had now been cropped short in a boyish cut. Pointing her fingers at her head she asked, ‘What do you think?’