Grace always remembered those words, and the burden on him as the Senior Investigating Officer, on every case. Yet at the same time as feeling that weight of responsibility, he would feel other emotions in this room, too. Always a tinge of sadness for the loss of a life – even the life of a scumbag like Ewan Preece. Who knew what kind of a person Preece might have been under different circumstances, if life had dealt him a less hopeless hand?
In spite of his sense of responsibility, Grace also at times felt like an intruder in this room. To be a corpse, opened up and splayed out here was the ultimate loss of privacy. Yet neither the dead nor their loved ones had any say in the matter. If you died under suspicious circumstances, the Coroner would require a post-mortem.
At this moment, Ewan Preece was a surreal sight, lying on his back, in his jeans and T-shirt, on the stainless- steel PM table, his hands still gripping the black steering wheel, which Nadiuska De Sancha had requested be detached from the vehicle and brought with him to the mortuary. He looked, in death, as if he was driving some spectral vehicle.
At a PM table on the other side of the archway, the bloody internal organs of another corpse were laid out for a student, who was receiving instructions from one of Brighton’s consultant pathologists, and Grace’s stomach was heaving, as ever, from the stench of disinfectant, blood and decaying human innards. He glanced over, clocked the brains, liver, heart and kidneys sitting there, and the electronic weighing scales on a shelf just beyond. Beside them, on another table, lay the corpse from which they had been removed – an elderly woman the colour of alabaster, her mouth gaping, her midriff wide open, the yellow fatty tissue of the insides of her breasts facing upwards, her sternum laid across her pubis as if in some attempt by the pathologist to protect her modesty.
He shuddered and took a few steps closer to Preece, his green gown rustling as he walked. Nadiuska was plucking delicately at the skin of one of the fingers with tweezers. James Gartrell, the SOCO photographer, was steadily working his way around the body. Glenn Branson was in a corner, surreptitiously talking on his phone. To his wife, Ari? Grace wondered. Or his solicitor? The Coroner’s Officer, Philip Keay, was standing in a green gown, blue mask hanging from its tapes just below his chin, dictating into a machine with a worried frown.
Cleo and her assistant, Darren, stood by, ready to assist the pathologist, but at the moment they had nothing to do but watch. Occasionally she would look in Grace’s direction and give him a surreptitious smile.
The Detective Superintendent was thinking hard. Preece’s hands glued to the wheel confirmed, beyond any doubt in his mind, that the man had been murdered. And the presence of that camera in the vehicle was bothering him a lot. Put there by the killer? Some sadistic bounty-hunter associate of Preece who had known where he had been hiding?
Or was there an even darker aspect to this? The Mafia connection was weighing heavily on his mind. Could this have been a sadistic revenge hit?
The body had not yet been formally identified. That would be done later by his mother or sister. Nadiuska said she would be able to dissolve the glue with acetone, leaving Grace’s team able to get fingerprints which would further confirm his identity, and as backup they would be able to get a DNA sample. But from the tattoos on his body and the scar on his face, Ford Prison had already confirmed his identity beyond much doubt.
With Kevin Spinella from the
He stepped out of the PM room and made a call to MIR-1, instructing Norman Potting to organize a group within the inquiry team to find out all they could about the camera, in particular where such a device was available for sale, in Brighton or beyond, and any recent purchases that had been made.
Next he made a phone call to Detective Investigator Pat Lanigan, who was their liaison officer with the Revere family in America, to ask him whether in his experience the dead boy’s parents were the kind of people who might be sufficiently aggrieved to go for a revenge killing.
Lanigan informed him that they had the money, the power and the connections – and that with people like this a whole different set of rules applied. He said that he would see what intelligence he could come up with. Sometimes, when a contract was put out, they would get to hear of it. He promised to come back to Grace as soon he found out anything.
Grace hung up with a heavy heart. Suddenly he found himself hoping that whoever had killed Preece was just a local chancer. The notion of a Mafia-backed killing in the heart of Brighton was not something that would sit well with anyone – not the council, not the tourist board, not his boss, ACC Rigg, and not with himself, either.
He sat on a sofa in the small front office of the mortuary, poured himself a stewed coffee from the jug that was sitting on the hotplate and felt a sudden grim determination. Lanigan had said
Well, not in his beloved city, they didn’t.
57
‘The time is 8.30 a.m. Saturday 1 May,’ Roy Grace announced to his team in MIR-1. ‘This is the eighteenth briefing of
‘Shame to have lost such an upstanding member of Brighton society, chief,’ said Norman Potting. ‘And such a tacky way to die.’
There was a titter of laughter. Grace gave him a reproachful look.
‘Thank you, Norman. Let’s hold the humour. We have some serious issues on our hands.’
Bella Moy rattled her Malteser box, extracted a chocolate and popped it into her mouth, biting into it with a crunch. Grace looked back down at his notes.
‘It will be some days before we get the toxicology reports, but I have significant findings from the PM. The first is that there was bruising to the side of Preece’s neck very similar to the bruising that was found on his sister, Evie, who is claiming to have remembered nothing after going outside on Monday night to let her cat out. According to Nadiuska De Sancha, this is consistent with a martial arts blow with the side of a hand to cause instant loss of consciousness. This could be the way Preece was overpowered by his assailant.’
Grace looked down again. ‘The seawater present in Preece’s lungs indicates that he was alive at the time the van went into the water and he died from drowning. The fact that his hands were glued to the steering wheel makes this extremely unlikely to have been suicide. Does anyone have a different view?’
‘If he was unconscious, sir,’ said Nick Nicholl, ‘how did the van actually get into the water? It would have been difficult for someone to physically push it, because when the front wheels went over the edge of the quay, surely the bottom of the chassis would have grounded on it. Wouldn’t it have needed to be driven at some speed?’
‘That’s a good point,’ Grace said. ‘Dudman, who own that particular section of the wharf, say that their fork-lift truck had been moved. It could have been used to push the van in.’
‘Wouldn’t that have required someone with an ignition key?’ asked Bella Moy.
‘I’m told that particular kind of fork-lift has a universal ignition key,’ Grace replied. ‘One key operates all of those vehicles in the UK. And anyone with a basic knowledge could have started it with a screwdriver.’
‘Has the kind of glue been established?’ asked DS Duncan Crocker.
‘It has been sent for lab analysis. We don’t have that information yet.’
‘There was no tube of glue found in the vehicle?’ Crocker asked.
‘No,’ Grace replied. ‘The Specialist Search Unit did an extensive dive search around the area where the van was recovered, but so far they have found nothing. There is almost zero visibility down there, which is not helpful. They are continuing searching today and doing a fingertip search of the quay areas. But my sense is that they are not going to find anything helpful.’
‘Why do you think that, chief?’ Glenn Branson asked.
‘Because this smells to me like the work of a professional. It has all the hallmarks,’ Grace said. Then he looked around at his team. ‘I did not like the mention of the hundred-thousand-dollar reward from the get-go. It wasn’t put up, as is usual, for information leading to the arrest and conviction, but just for the driver’s identity. I think we could be looking at an underworld hit here.’
‘Does that change anything in this inquiry, sir?’ Emma-Jane Boutwood asked.
