Dead Man's Grip

work as a warehouse man, then as a fitter in a Grumman fighter aircraft factory on Long Island. When George Bush Senior invaded Iraq, Tooth enlisted in the US Army. There he discovered that his natural calm gave him one particular talent. He was a very accurate long-range rifle shot.

After two tours in that particular theatre, his commanding lieutenant recommended he apply for the Sniper School. That was the place where Tooth discovered his metier. A range of medals testifying to that hung on one wall of his apartment. Every now and then he would look at them in a detached way, as if he was in a museum looking at the life of some long-dead stranger.

One of the items was a framed certificate for bravery he’d received for pulling a wounded colleague out of the line of fire. Part of the wording read, A Great American Patriot.

That drunk English lawyer, in the Shark Bite Sports Bar, who had shot dead the two Haitians, had once insisted on buying him a drink a few years ago. The lawyer had sat there, knocking back a gin, nodding his head, then had asked him if he was a patriot.

Tooth had told him no, he wasn’t a patriot, and had moved on.

The lawyer had called out after him, ‘Good man. Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel!’

Tooth remembered those words now, as he took one last look at those medals and those framed words, on the night of his forty-second birthday. Then, as he did each year on his birthday, he went out on to his balcony with his associate, and a glass of Maker’s Mark.

He sat smoking another cigarette, drinking another whiskey, mentally calculating his finances. He had enough to last him for another five years, at his current cash burn, he figured. He could do with another good contract. He’d accumulated about $2.5 million in his Swiss bank account, which gave him a comfort zone, but hey, he didn’t know how much longer he had to live. He had to feed his boat with fuel, his thirty-five-foot motor yacht, Long Shot, with its twin Mercedes engines that took him out hunting for his food most days.

His days out on Long Shot were his life.

And he never knew how they were numbered.

Each year, his birthday ritual was to play Russian roulette. He would thumb the bullet into one of the six barrels, spin it, listening to the metallic click-click-click, then point the gun at his temple and squeeze the trigger, just once. If the hammer clicked on an empty chamber, that was meant to be.

He went back inside, unlocked the cabinet and removed the gun. The same single.38 bullet had been in the chamber for the past ten years. He broke the gun open and tipped it out into the palm of his hand.

Ten years ago he had dum-dummed it himself. Two deep vertical slits in the nose. It meant the bullet would rip open on impact, punching a hole the size of a tennis ball in whatever it hit. He would have no possible chance of survival.

Tooth carefully slid the bullet back into the barrel. Then he spun it, listening to the steady click- click-click. Maybe it would end up in the firing chamber, maybe not.

Then he pressed the barrel of the revolver to the side of his head. To the exact part of his temple he knew would have maximum destructive effect.

He pulled the trigger.

27

Grace changed the venue of the morning briefing from Jack Skerritt’s office to the conference room, to accommodate the extra people now attending. These included Tracy Stocker, the Crime Scene Manager, James Gartrell, the SOCO photographer, Paul Wood, the sergeant from the Collision Investigation Unit who had attended at the scene yesterday, and his own Crime Scene Manager as well.

Grace had brought in two additions to his own inquiry team. The first was a young PC, Alec Davies, twenty- two, who had previously impressed him when in uniform and whom he had fast-tracked into CID by requesting him for his team now. A quiet, shy-looking man, Davies was to be in charge of the outside inquiry team of PCSOs, who were trawling every business premise within a mile of the accident in the hope of finding more CCTV footage.

The second member was David Howes, a tall, suave DC in his mid-forties. Dressed in a pinstriped grey suit and checked shirt, with neatly brushed ginger hair, he could have passed muster as a stockbroker or a corporate executive. One of his particular skills in the CID was as a trained negotiator. He was also a former Prison Liaison Officer.

This room could hold twenty-five people seated on the hard, red chairs around the open-centred rectangular table and another thirty, if necessary, standing. One of its uses was for press conferences, and it was for these that there stood, at the far end opposite the video screen, a concave, two-tone blue board, six feet high and ten feet wide, boldly carrying the Sussex Police website address and the Crimestoppers legend and phone number. All press and media statements were given by officers against this backdrop. Vertical venetian blinds screened off the dismal view of the custody block towering above them.

On the wall beside the video screen was a whiteboard on which James Biggs had drawn a diagram of the position of the vehicles involved, immediately following the impact with the cyclist.

The white Transit van which had subsequently disappeared was labelled VEHICLE 1. The bicycle was labelled VEHICLE 2, the lorry VEHICLE 3 and the Audi car VEHICLE 4.

Reading from his prepared notes, Roy Grace said, ‘The time is 8.30 a.m., Thursday 22 April. This is the second briefing of Operation Violin, the investigation into the death of Brighton University student Anthony Vincent Revere, conducted on day two, following his collision in Portland Road, Hove, with an unidentified van, then a lorry belonging to Aberdeen Ocean Fisheries. Absent from this meeting are DS Branson, PC Pattenden and DS Moy, who are currently attending the viewing of his body with his parents, who have flown over from the United States.’

He turned to Sergeant Wood. ‘Paul, I think it would be helpful to start with you.’

Wood stood up. ‘We’ve fed all the information from the initial witness statements, skid marks and debris pattern into the CAD program we are currently using for accident simulation. We have created two perspectives of the accident. The first being from the point of view of the Audi car.’

He picked up a digital remote and pressed it. On the video screen appeared a grey road, approximating the width of Portland Road, but with the pavement and all beyond on either side blanked out in a paler grey. The screen showed the white van tailgating the Audi, the cyclist emerging from a side street ahead and the articulated lorry some way ahead, on the other side of the road, approaching in the distance.

He pressed a button and the animation came to life. On the far side of the road, the lorry began to approach. Suddenly the cyclist began to move, swinging out of the side street, on the wrong side, heading straight for the Audi. At the last minute, the cyclist swerved to the left, towards the centre of the road, and the Audi swerved left on to the pavement. An instant later, the van clipped the cyclist, sending him hurtling across the far side of the road and straight underneath the lorry, between its front wheels and rear wheels. The cyclist spun around the rear wheel arch as the lorry braked to a halt, his right leg then flying out from underneath it.

When the animation stopped, there was a long silence.

Grace finally broke it, turning to the RPU Inspector. ‘James, from this simulation it doesn’t look as if the Audi driver, Mrs Carly Chase, had any contact with Revere.’

‘I would agree with that based on what we have heard so far. But I’m not yet convinced we’ve heard the full story. It might be that she was unlucky to be breathalysed on a morning-after offence. But it’s too early to rule out her culpability at this stage.’

Grace turned to the Major Crime Branch Crime Scene Manager. ‘Tracy, do you have anything for us?’

Tracy Stocker, a senior SOCO, a little over five feet tall, was a diminutive power house and one of the most respected Crime Scene Managers in the force. She had a strong, good-looking face framed with straight brown hair and was dressed today in civvies, a navy trouser suit with a grey blouse. A standard police ID card hung from a lanyard around her neck, printed with the words SERVING SUSSEX in blue and white.

‘Yes, chief, we have something that may be significant. We have sent the serial number on the part of the wing mirror that was recovered at the scene to Ford. They will be able to tell us if it’s from a Ford Transit and the year of manufacture.’