‘Garage is empty!’ another voice called out.
Grace ran upstairs very quickly, glanced into the two bedrooms and the bathroom, then went back down and knelt beside the woman, as Vicky Jones and another member of the team worked away the tape over her mouth, then the rest of the bindings.
The woman, in her mid-twenties, had a shock of short, fair hair and a hard face with a flinty complexion. She spoke the moment her mouth was freed.
‘Fuckers!’ she said. ‘What took you so fucking long? What’s the fucking time?’
‘Five past ten,’ Vicky Jones said. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Evie Preece.’
‘Are you injured, Evie?’ She turned to another officer and said, ‘Call an ambulance.’
‘I don’t need no fucking ambulance. I need a bleedin’ drink and a fag.’
Grace looked at her. He had no idea at this stage how long she had been there, but she looked remarkably composed for someone who had been tied and gagged. He wondered if it was a set-up. This was not a woman you could trust with any story.
‘Where’s your brother?’ Roy Grace asked her.
‘Which bruvver?’
‘Ewan.’
‘In prison. Where you pigs put him.’
‘So he hasn’t been staying here?’ he pressed.
‘I didn’t have no one staying.’
‘Someone’s been sleeping in your spare bed,’ Grace said.
‘Must have been the Man in the Moon.’
‘Was that who tied you up? The Man in the Moon is into bondage, is he?’
‘I want a solicitor.’
‘You’re not under arrest, Evie. You only get a solicitor if you are charged with something.’
‘So charge me.’
‘I will do in a minute,’ Grace said. ‘I’ll charge you with obstructing a police officer. Now tell me who slept in your spare room?’
She said nothing.
‘The same person who tied you up?’
‘No.’
Good, he thought. That was a big step forward.
‘We’re concerned about your brother,’ he said.
‘That’s bleedin’ touching, that is. You been nicking him since he was a kid, but you’re suddenly concerned about him? That’s rich!’
49
At the evening briefing, Grace brought his team up to speed on the raid. Evie Preece was unable to give any information about her assailant, but the fact that she consented, albeit reluctantly, to a medical examination was an indication to Grace that the attack on her had been real and not a put-up job by herself and her brother, as he had first suspected. The house was such a tip it was hard to gauge whether it had been rifled through, which could have given robbery as a possible motive for the attack.
The police doctor’s opinion was that the severe bruising to her neck was indicative of a sharp blow. She added that the side of the neck, just above the collarbone, was the place where someone experienced in martial arts would strike, if they wanted to render their victim instantly unconscious.
This was consistent with Evie’s story that around eleven the previous night she had gone out into the garden to let her cat out, and the next thing she had found herself lying, trussed up, on her living-room floor. She was continuing to refute the allegation that her brother had been in the house and she denied vehemently that any vehicle had been in her garage recently, despite evidence to the contrary. The first piece of which was a pool of engine oil on the surface of the garage floor, which looked recent. The second and even more significant was the discovery of male clothing in the spare bedroom. A pair of trainers and jeans that were consistent with Ewan Preece’s size, and a T-shirt, also his size, found in her washing machine.
Grace had ordered her to be arrested on suspicion of harbouring a fugitive and obstructing the police, and assigned a trained interview adviser, Bella Moy, to come up with an interview strategy for her while she was being held in police custody.
In addition, he had put a highly experienced POLSA – Police Search Advisor – and a search team under him into the property to see if they could find anything else in the house or garden. So far, in addition to the oil and the clothes, they had come up with what they believed to be signs of a forced entry through kitchen patio doors at the rear of the house. It was very subtly done, with an instrument such as a screwdriver handled by someone with a good knowledge of locks.
To Grace’s mind that ruled out the kind of low-life Ewan Preece and his sister dealt with, who might have been after money or drugs. Their scumbag associates would have broken a window or jemmied a lock. Whoever had come in here was skilled. Not just in breaking and entering, but in assault and in bindings. They had found no fingerprints so far, nothing that might yield DNA and no other clues. It was still early days, but it wasn’t looking good.
50
Dressed in a heavy fleece jacket, thick jeans, a lined cap and rubber boots, David Harris began his workday at 7.00 a.m. sharp, as he had every day for the past forty-one years, by checking the rows of smokehouses, where the fish had been curing overnight. He was in a cheery frame of mind: business was booming despite the recession and he genuinely loved his work.
He especially loved the sweet scents of the burning wood and the rich, oily tang of the fish. It was a fine, sunny morning, but there was still a crisp chill in the air. The kind of mornings he liked best. He looked at the dew sparkling on the grassy slopes of the South Downs, which towered up behind the smokery, a view which still, after a lifetime of working here, he never tired of looking at.
He might have been less cheery had he known he was being watched and had been since the moment he arrived here this morning.
Springs Smoked Salmon was a household name throughout Europe and the family were proud of the quality. Harris was second-generation, running the company that had been started by his parents. The location, tucked away in a valley in the South Downs, close to Brighton, was an improbable one for a fish company, and the place had an unprepossessing air – the ramshackle collection of single-storey buildings could have belonged to a tumbledown farm rather than containing a business that had become an international legend.
He walked up an incline, past a fork-lift truck and a line of parked delivery vans, between the identical cold- storage sheds. Inside them the rows of headless Scottish salmon and trout, his company’s speciality, were being smoked, hung on hooks suspended from overhead racks that stretched back the full hundred-foot length of the shed, or lay packed in white Styrofoam boxes, ready for dispatch to gourmet stores, restaurants and catering companies around the globe. Also stacked on pallets were other fish and seafood products they supplied to their customers, in particular langoustines and scampi, most of which came from Scotland as well as scallops, lobsters and crabs.
He unlocked the padlock on the first door and pulled it open, checking that the temperature was fine. Then he checked each of the next three sheds as well, before moving on to the smokery ovens. These were nearly fifty years old, but still going strong. Huge, grimy, brick and steel walk-in boxes, each with a wood-fired kiln in the base, and the ceiling covered with racks and hooks, on which hung rows of pink and golden-brown fillets of smoking fish.
