‘It’s not a problem, sir.’ The Detective Superintendent tried not to show his excitement at the challenge. This was really going to give him the chance to shine in front of the Chief Constable. But equally, he knew, a massive burden of responsibility had just been dumped on his shoulders. Keeping Gaia alive while she was in Brighton was now interlinked with keeping his chosen career path alive. And the most recent case he had worked on, Operation Violin, showed that Brighton was easily within the reaches of a professional US hitman.
Martinson unfolded his arms, took a biscuit from the plate, then held it without taking a bite. He frowned, as if searching for the right way to say what was on his mind next. ‘Changing the subject totally, I also wanted to tip you off about something, Roy.’
‘Oh?’
‘I believe you had a bit of an unpleasant experience some time back, with a certain Brighton villain, name of Amis Smallbone?’
The creep’s name made Grace squirm. ‘I put him away on a life sentence, and he didn’t like it. Not that many of them do.’
Tom Martinson grinned, fleetingly. ‘That was twelve years ago?’
Grace did a quick calculation. ‘It would be, yes, sir.’
Amis Smallbone was, in Grace’s opinion, the nastiest and most malevolent piece of vermin he had ever dealt with. Five foot one inch tall, with his hair greasily coiffed, dressed summer and winter in natty suits too tight for him, Smallbone exuded arrogance. Whether he had modelled himself on some screen mobster, or had some kind of Marlon Brando Godfather fixation, Grace neither knew nor cared. Smallbone, who must now be in his early sixties, was the last living relic of one of Brighton’s historic crime families. At one time, three generations of Smallbones controlled protection rackets across Kemp Town, several amusement arcades, the drugs going into half the nightclubs, as well as much of the city’s prostitution. It had long been rumoured – a rumour circulated with much enthusiasm throughout the police – that Smallbone’s obsession with prostitution came out of his own sexual inadequacy.
When Grace had personally arrested Smallbone on a charge of murdering a rival drug dealer in the city, by dropping an electric heater into his bathtub, the villain had threatened retribution against him personally, and against his wife Sandy. Three weeks later, with Smallbone banged up in the remand wing of Lewes prison, someone had sprayed every plant in the garden of Grace’s home – Sandy’s biggest passion – with weedkiller, turning all the borders into an arid wasteland.
In the centre of the lawn had been burned two words.
UR DEAD.
Grace had been present in court when the jury had returned their guilty verdict. Amis Smallbone, in the dock, had curled his fingers around an imaginary gun, pointed it at Grace and mouthed the word bang!
‘I’ve got possibly worrying news for you, Roy,’ Tom Martinson said. He looked at his biscuit, but still did not touch it. ‘I thought I should warn you, as I doubt anyone from the prison service will bother. I’m an old university friend of the Governor of Belmarsh Prison, who kindly tipped me off. Amis Smallbone was freed from there, on licence, three days ago.’
A chill rippled through Grace, thinking of the phone conversation he’d just had with a very distressed Cleo. ‘Does he have a release address, sir?’
Grace knew that a prisoner serving a life sentence would have his release address set by his probation officer, with numerous reporting conditions attached.
‘He does, Roy, a hostel on Brighton seafront. But he’s in breach. I’m afraid he hasn’t been seen for two days.’
23
You needed to know the right time and wrong time to buy in the icon’s cycle. Like all the fervent Gaia memorabilia collectors, Anna Galicia knew this only too well.
She sat in the gilded, white velour upholstered armchair that was an exact copy of one she had seen Gaia lounging back in, in a Hello! magazine feature on her Central Park West apartment. Anna had had the replica made by a firm in Brighton, so that she could lounge back exactly the same way Gaia did, unlit cigarette gripped louchely between her forefinger and middle finger. Sometimes, sitting in this chair, she could imagine she was in the Dakota building, and that her view was over Central Park. The same building where John Lennon had been shot dead.
Something had always excited her about stars who met violent deaths.
She took an imaginary drag on her cigarette then tapped the end in the ashtray enamelled with Gaia’s face. Saturday morning was her favourite time of the week, with the whole weekend stretched out in front of her. A whole two days to spend indulgently immersed in her idol! And next week, oh God, she could barely contain her excitement. Next week, Gaia would be here, in Brighton!
In the local paper, the Argus, open in front of her, was a photograph of the tiny house in Whitehawk where Gaia was born. Of course she wasn’t called Gaia Lafayette then. She was Anna Mumby. But hey, Anna thought with a wry smile, who didn’t change their name?
She carefully lifted her computer from her lap and set it on the floor, took a sip of her Gaia Save Exploited Lives medium roast coffee, stood up and walked over to the silver balloon, with the pink words GAIA INNER SECRETS TOUR, which had cost her sixty pounds, and which was floating on its string, just below the ceiling. It was starting to look a little wrinkled, and sagging. She tugged it down and lovingly gave it a long, steady top-up burst of helium from the cylinder she kept here for that purpose, and released it.
Then she sat down, breathing in the smells of this room. The scents of cardboard, paper, vinyl and polish and the faint trace of Gaia Noon Romance fragrance that she sprayed daily. She picked up her laptop and returned to the eBay auction page she was on.
It was for a bottle of Gaia organic Pinot Noir, from her own Napa Valley vineyard, the label bearing her tiny Secret Fox logo, like all her merchandise, and personally signed. All proceeds of the original sale of this bottle, auctioned at a charity, had gone to support a school in Kenya called Stahere. Yet another example of what a wonderfully kind and human person Gaia was. It was being sold by a Gaia fan in the UK, who had outbid Anna three years ago when it had originally been auctioned on eBay. Another Gaia collector had told her, confidentially, on a Gaia chatroom site, that this collector had lost his job and needed to raise cash.
Anna didn’t have any of the Gaia Special Cuvée Pinot Noir wine. It was one of the glaring gaps in her collection. There were known to be only twelve bottles with signed labels in the whole world. At this moment her pockets were feeling deep. She would bid high on this. Oh yes! No one out there was going to beat her today. Let them try, she thought, darkly.
When she met Gaia next week it would be good to tell her about this bottle. Maybe she’d even take it with her and get her to initial the date on it!
Twenty-eight minutes remaining on the auction time. She saw another bid pop up: £375! That was £100 more than the last one. The activity was hotting up.
But regardless, whoever it was stood no chance against her. Not in the mood she was in today. Her very deep pockets mood. Not many people beat her at auctions when she was in one of these moods. Only one in the last year. Ha.
There was a lot of anticipation about this new film the icon would be starring in, The King’s Lover. All the Gaia fan sites were buzzing with it. If the film became as big a hit as everyone was anticipating, the value of all her memorabilia would soar even higher.
Not that Anna would ever sell. She was a buyer, always a buyer. Always would be. She hated it when people started bidding stupidly against her. It was like people were trying to take something away that was rightfully hers. A coil of anger spiralled through her as she stared at this new bid, again.
You don’t know who you are messing with.
24
Roy Grace drove straight from Tom Martinson’s office into Lewes, to his favourite flower shop, the Riverside Florist, and was pleased to see the proprietor Nicola Hughes there, cutting a display of blooms for a client. He waited until she had finished, then asked her for a massive bouque
t for Cleo, wanting to cheer her up when he eventually got home.
While she was putting it together, he noticed she was limping. ‘I hope the other fellow came off worse!’ he joked.
‘Ha bloody ha!’ she replied. ‘Just had an ankle fusion. Ruddy well hurts but hey, you didn’t come here to listen to me complain!’
He carried the flowers out and put them in the boot of his car. Then before driving off to his appointment with Glenn Branson in Brighton, he stared at the photograph on his BlackBerry that Cleo had texted through to him. At the words carved on her car.
COPPERS TART. UR BABY IS NEXT.
There was no mistaking its provenance. Amis Smallbone’s signature was all over it. No doubt, as before when the words had been carved on their lawn while Smallbone was securely banged up in a remand cell, he hadn’t carved them himself. A man like Smallbone would rarely get his hands dirty – except when he was having fun torturing someone, by cutting off their fingers or their ears or their genitals. But he was thinking hard about the significance.
In his view, if Smallbone had genuinely intended Cleo to be harmed, he would have had her attacked, not simply left a message on her car like that. He needed to think hard about her security, but at this moment, he did not believe she was under any direct threat. It was more a message of defiance. Amis Smallbone wanting to worry him. Letting him know he was out of prison and had not forgotten. And it was typical of the creep to breach his release conditions, taunting the authorities, seeing how far he could push them.
He was going to be very sorry, Grace vowed.
*
The premises of Gresham Blake occupied a modest corner frontage on Church and Bond Streets, not far from Cleo’s house. Grace had passed the place many times, glancing with curiosity at the flamboyant displays of men’s clothes, but had never gone inside. It always looked way beyond his price range – and lifestyle. It wasn’t until Glenn Branson had started nagging him to try to look younger and more cool, that he’d ever taken any interest in clothes at all. Like most detectives, he tended to wear the same functional, sober business suits, because you never knew where you were going, or who you might meet, in the course of a day.
At a few minutes to 11 a.m., he walked down from the Church Street multi-storey car park, the cost of which always made him wince, to see Glenn Branson standing outside the shop like he owned it, phone clamped to his ear. In the blazing sunshine, hordes of people were milling along the pavement. A marked police car screeched up the hill, siren howling, lights flashing, the sound so familiar in the city that few heads turned to look.
‘Any developments?’ Grace greeted him when he had ended the call and the din of the siren had faded.
Branson pocketed his phone. ‘Nothing so far.’ Then he glanced at his watch. ‘The post-mortem’s starting in the mortuary at midday. Are you coming along?’
‘Thought I’d leave that treat to you, if it’s all the same. I’m chickening out.’
Branson groaned. ‘That’s truly terrible.’
Grace grinned, although he was not in a humorous mood. The news about Amis Smallbone’s release and the vandalism of Cleo’s car preyed heavily on his mind.
‘Oh, there is one thing, chief, Bella’s mum had a stroke this morning, apparently. She’s been rushed to hospital, and I’ve let Bella go and see her.’
Grace nodded. Normally he never let anything personal interfere with work on an investigation, and particularly not during the crucial first days. But Bella Moy’s mother, he knew, was everything to the highly competent Detective Sergeant. The virtually bedridden woman was the reason why, in her mid-thirties, Bella was still living at home, caring for her, without any life of her own, so far as he was aware. ‘Sorry to hear that,’ he said.
‘She’s very upset.’
Grace followed Branson into the shop, which had a sumptuous, if higgledy-piggledy, feel. Clearly business premises that had been outgrown by success, he thought. There were shelves of shirts; racks of shoes crammed in a corner; a display of cufflinks. Their feet sunk into the deep carpet, and the air was filled with the scent of a dense, masculine cologne. Branson gave their names to a young man with topiaried hair, behind the counter, then fondled a bunch of ties hanging from a rack and turned to Grace. ‘You need a few of these, old timer. All your ties are rubbish. And we’ll definitely have to sort you out a new suit here.’ He pointed at a loud, chalk-striped blue jacket on a mannequin. ‘That would well give you an air of authority. Would make you look like a proper chief.’
Grace looked at it doubtfully; it was far too showy for his taste. The last time Glenn had taken him clothes shopping he’d managed to spend over £2,500. He wasn’t about to be suckered into that again, especially with the looming costs of a baby.
Glenn then pointed at a white jacket. ‘You’d look good in that, too. Remember that Alec Guinness film, The Man In The White Suit?’
Before he could reply, a pleasant but harassed-looking man in his mid-thirties, with brown hair that gave the impression of being perpetually untidy, came down a short flight of steps from an adjoining room. He wore a tweed suit that looked too warm for this early summer day, a soft shirt, a tie at half mast, and was perspiring slightly.
‘Hello, gentlemen, I’m Ryan Farrier.’
‘Glenn Branson, we spoke earlier.’ The DS stretched out his hand and shook the tailor’s, then said, ‘This is my guvnor, Detective Superintendent Grace.’
Grace also shook his hand. Then they were ushered up two flights of narrow, uneven stairs, into a room lined with rows of suits on racks, some of them only partly completed, with stitching visible on them, and an antique full-length mirror. There was a rich smell of new fabrics and polish. Then Farrier led them through into a smaller room, containing more suits on rails, another mirror and a curtained-off changing area. Roy Grace suddenly felt decidedly shabby in his navy blue Marks and Spencer suit that he’d bought in a sale more years ago than he could remember.
‘So, gentlemen, tell me how I can help you?’ the tailor said, turning to face them, and clasping his hands in front of him. To his embarrassment, Grace saw Farrier give his clothes a disapproving once-over. He himself had no idea how you could tell a cheap suit from an expensive one, but no doubt a man like Farrier could spot the tell-tale signs in two seconds.
Branson removed the plastic evidence bag from his pocket and held it up for Farrier to see. ‘These pieces of fabric were found yesterday in the vicinity of a body we need to identify. We’re wondering if you might be able to tell us something from them.’
‘Can I take them out of the bag?’ Farrier asked.
‘I’m afraid not,’ Branson said. He handed the bag over. ‘Sorry, we didn’t get a chance to take them to the dry cleaners.’
Farrier grinned awkwardly, as if uncertain whether Branson was joking, then studied the contents carefully. ‘It’s a suit fabric,’ he said. ‘A tweed of some kind.’
‘Would it be possible to tell which tailor made it from what you have?’ Grace asked.
Ryan Farrier studied the material again, with a frown, for some seconds. ‘These samples are really too small. If you are trying to find out who made the jacket or suit these pieces originated from, I think you’d have a better chance from the cloth itself. It’s very high quality, heavy tweed.’
‘A winter fabric?’ Grace said.
‘Very definitely. Quite a bit heavier than the material I’m wearing myself. It’s the sort of fabric you might have a suit made in for wearing for outdoors pursuits in the countryside – perhaps for going on a formal shoot – except, not in this colour! It really is a bit bold, you’d have to be a bit of a show-off to wear this.’
Heavy fabric meant it was likely the victim was killed during the winter months, Grace thought.
‘I think it’s a Dormeuil cloth,’ Farrier added. ‘I can check with them on Monday. Are you able to leave me the tiniest cutting?’
‘I’m sorry,’ Grace said. ‘We can’t risk contaminating the evidence –
we’ve brought you photographs we can leave with you.’
‘How many tailors would a company like Dormeuil supply cloth to?’ Branson asked him.
Farrier thought for a moment. ‘Gosh, hundreds, maybe thousands. Any good tailor will have swatches of their material – they are top quality – but also top prices. But this is quite flamboyant material – I can’t imagine too many people having a suit made out of this. Dormeuil should be able to give you the names of all the tailors they’ve supplied bolts of this cloth to in recent years.’
‘This is very helpful,’ Branson said, then turned to Grace. ‘Although of course the victim’s not necessarily the person this was originally made for. He could have bought it second-hand,’ he said, mindful of the number of second-hand clothes shops in Brighton.
Farrier looked pained. ‘I don’t think many people go to the expense of buying a suit made from Dormeuil cloth and then give it away or sell it. A quality suit tends to be for life.’
And in this case, death, Grace nearly added.
25
He sat in semi-darkness, in his cramped seat in coach, with the constant faint thrashing roar of air in his ears, feeling the occasional judder as the plane bumped through a patch of turbulence. Most people were asleep. Like the shithead beside him who’d drunk four disgusting Coke and whisky mixes and now had fits of snoring loudly every few minutes.
People shouldn’t snore on planes. It was like people who let babies cry on planes. Those babies should be flushed down the toilets. He was tempted, very tempted, to pull a plastic bag down over the man’s head. No one would see in the darkness.