Dead Man's Grip

‘Is it locked at night?’

‘Padlocked with a chain, yes,’ Wadey said. ‘But it was open when we got here. Either someone unlocked it or picked the lock.’

Grace walked across to the driver’s side of the van.

‘How long has he been in the water?’

‘My guess would be a maximum of three or four days,’ the engineer replied. ‘You can see the bloating, which starts to happen within twenty-four hours, but he’s intact – the fish and crustaceans like to wait for a week or so, until the flesh has started to break down, before they set to work.’

‘Thanks.’

Grace peered in through the driver’s window, which was down, as was the passenger’s, he noted. To help the vehicle sink more quickly, he wondered? The rear doors were open, too. The immediate question in his mind was whether this was an accident, suicide or murder. His experience had taught him never to jump to conclusions.

Even though the body was bloated from gases, the face was still thin, streaked with mud, eyes wide open, staring ahead with a look of shock. In the flesh, he looked even paler than in the photographs, and the gelled hair of the picture was now lifelessly matted to the scalp. But his identity was still clear. Just to double-check, Roy Grace pulled the photograph of Ewan Preece from his pocket and held it up.

And now he was certain. From the knife scar below his right eye, the thin gold chain around his neck and the leather wrist bracelet. Even so, it would take a fingerprint or DNA sample to confirm it beyond doubt. Grace was not inclined to trust a next-of-kin identification by any member of Preece’s crooked family. He looked at the dead man’s hands.

Preece was gripping the steering wheel as if with grim determination. As if he had thought that somehow, if he kept hold of it, he could steer himself out of trouble.

And that did not make sense.

‘Dead man’s grip,’ said a female voice beside him.

He turned to see the sergeant in charge of the Specialist Search Unit, Lorna Dennison-Wilkins.

‘Lorna!’ he said. ‘How are you?’

She grinned. ‘Understaffed, underappreciated and busy as heck. How about you?’

‘Couldn’t have put it better myself!’ He nodded at the dead man and, at the same time, heard a curious metallic scuttling sound from inside the van. ‘Dead man’s grip?’

‘Rigor mortis,’ she said. ‘It’s the suddenness of immersion that brings it on very fast. If someone drowns and they’re holding on to something at that moment, it’s really hard to prise their fingers off it.’

He stared at Preece’s fingers. They were wrapped tightly around the large steering wheel.

‘We haven’t tried to remove them,’ she said. ‘In case we damage any forensic evidence.’

As in his past dealing with this woman and her team, Roy Grace was impressed by her understanding of the importance of not contaminating a potential crime scene. But why was Preece holding on to the steering wheel? Had he frozen in stark terror? Grace knew that if he’d just driven off a harbour quay into water, he’d be doing everything he could to get out – not trying to steer.

Had he been knocked unconscious by the impact? That was one possibility. There was no apparent mark on his head, and he was wearing a seat belt, but that was something the pathologist would be able to determine at the post-mortem. What other reason did he have for clinging to the wheel? Trying deliberately to drown? But Ewan Preece seemed an unlikely suicide candidate. From the intelligence he had read about him, and his own prior experience with the man, Preece didn’t give a shit about anything in life. He was hardly going to be driven into a state of suicidal grief over the death of a cyclist. And in a short time he would have been out of prison.

Grace snapped on a pair of disposible gloves which he kept in his oversuit pocket, then leaned in through the window and attempted to prise the dead man’s right index finger away from the wheel. But it would not move. A tiny crab the size of a fingernail scuttled across the top of the dashboard.

Once more from somewhere in the back of the van he heard the metallic scuttling sound. He tried again to prise the finger off the wheel, conscious of not wanting to risk tearing the flesh and lose the potential for a print, but it would not move.

‘Bloody hell!’ Keith Wadey said suddenly.

The port engineer ducked in through the rear doors. Moments later he stood up again, holding a large black lobster. It was a good two feet long, with claws the size of a man’s hand, and was wriggling furiously.

‘This is a nice specimen!’ Wadey called out at a group of the SSU, showing them his find.

Immediately he had the attention of everyone on the quay.

‘Anyone fancy treating their loved one to lobster thermidor tonight?’

There were no takers. Only looks of disgust and a few exclamations.

He tossed the creature back out into the canal and it disappeared beneath the choppy surface.

53

After a phone discussion with Roy Grace and the Crime Scene Manager, the Home Office pathologist agreed with them that she should definitely see the body in situ, prior to its being taken to the mortuary. But she was finishing a job at a lab in London at the moment, which meant a long wait for the team on the cold harbour front.

The good news was that of the two regular Home Office pathologists for this area, they had been allocated Nadiuska De Sancha, the one whom Grace and everyone else preferred to work with. As an added bonus to the fact that the statuesque, red-haired Spaniard was both good and swift at her job, and extremely helpful with it, she also happened to be very easy on the eye.

In her late forties, Nadiuska De Sancha could easily pass for a decade younger. If people wanted to be bitchy, they might comment that perhaps her plastic-surgeon husband’s skills had something to do with her continuing to look so youthful. But because of her warm and open nature, few people were bitchy about her. Far more were envious of her appearance, and half of the males in the Major Crime Branch lusted after her – as well as lusting after Cleo Morey.

A body found in the sea, on its own, would have been taken to the mortuary, where the post-mortem would be carried out the following day by one of the team of local pathologists. But when there were any grounds to give the Coroner suspicion, a full forensic post-mortem would need to be carried out by a trained specialist, of which there were thirty in the UK. A standard post-mortem usually took less than an hour. A Home Office one, depending on the condition of the body and the circumstances, and very much on who was performing it, could take from three to six hours, and sometimes even longer.

As the Senior Investigating Officer, Roy Grace had a duty to attend. And that meant, he realized with dismay, that he did not have a snowball’s chance in hell of making it to Jersey Boys in London tonight with Cleo. He’d booked a hotel up there, and tomorrow, the start of the May Day holiday weekend, they had tickets to the Army and Navy rugby match at Twickenham – at the invitation of Nobby Hall and his wife, Helen. Nobby was an old friend who had been running the Maritime Police in Cyprus.

At least Cleo would understand – unlike Sandy, he thought, with a sudden twinge of sadness. Although Sandy was fading further from his mind by the week, whenever he did think of her it was like a dark cloud engulfing him and leaving him disoriented. Sandy used to go off at the deep end, regardless of the fact he had carefully explained to her that a murder inquiry meant dropping everything, and the reasons why.

She would tell him she disliked it that she came second to his work. No matter how much he tried to refute this, she was adamant about it, to the point of fixation.

Who would you pick? she had once asked him. If you had to choose between me and your work, Grace?

She always called him ‘Grace’.

You, he had replied.

Liar! She had grinned.

It’s the truth!

I watched your eyes. That movement trick you taught me – if they move one way you are lying,