Dead Man's Grip

and open.

Shit!

He strode over and yanked the heavy, sealed sliding door open, fully expecting to find the entire contents of the shed missing. Instead he stared, in momentary disbelief, as the blast of refrigerated air greeted him. Everything looked normal, fine, undisturbed. Rows of smoked salmon hung from hooks from ceiling rails on the motorized pulley system. Six rows, with not enough space to walk between them, forming an almost solid wall. He slid the door shut again, relieved.

It wasn’t until much later in the day, when his staff began to package the fish for dispatch to customers, that they would discover what he had missed in this shed.

61

‘The time is 8.30 a.m. Wednesday 5 May,’ Roy Grace read from his notes to his team in MIR-1. ‘This is the twenty-sixth briefing of Operation Violin.’ And we’re not making any sodding progress, he felt like adding, but he refrained. There were flat spots like this in almost every inquiry.

He was in a bad and worried mood. His biggest worry was Cleo. She had almost fainted stepping out of the shower this morning. She insisted it was purely because the water had been too hot, but he had wanted to take her straight to hospital. She’d refused, saying that she felt fine, right as rain; they were short-handed at the mortuary and she needed to be there.

He was worried about this case, too. This was a full-on murder inquiry, yet he sensed a spark was missing. Although he had most of his trusted regulars in his team, there didn’t seem to be the air of commitment and focus that he was used to feeling. He knew the reason. It was the wrong reason, but it was human nature. It was because the murder victim was Ewan Preece.

Despite the horrific nature of his death, no one from Sussex Police was going to be shedding a tear at Preece’s funeral – although he would send a couple of undercover officers along, to keep an eye on who turned up, or lurked nearby.

But regardless of however undesirable a character Preece was, he had been murdered. And Grace’s job was not to be judgemental, but to find the killer and lock him up. To do that, he needed to get his team better motivated.

‘Before we go through your individual reports,’ he said, ‘I want to recap on our lines of enquiry.’ He stood up and pointed to the whiteboard, on which there were three numbered headings, each written in caps in red. ‘In the first, we look into the possibility that there is no link between Preece’s killing and the death of cyclist Tony Revere, clear? Preece was a man who made enemies naturally. We could be looking at a drugs turf war or something like a double-crossing. He could have just screwed the wrong person.’

Duncan Crocker put up his hand. ‘The camera’s the thing that bothers me with that line of enquiry, chief. Why wouldn’t they just kill him? Why chuck away an expensive camera like that?’

‘There are plenty of sadists out there,’ Grace replied. ‘But I agree with your point about the camera. We’ll come back to that. OK, right, the second line of enquiry is that Preece was killed by someone who was after the reward money.’

‘Doesn’t the same apply with the camera, boss?’ asked Bella Moy. ‘If they’re after the reward, why chuck away a camera of that value?’

‘It would be a good idea to remind ourselves of the wording of the reward, Bella,’ Grace replied. ‘It’s not the usual, for information leading to the arrest and conviction.’ He looked down at his notes for a moment and searched through a few pages. Then he read, ‘This reward is for information leading to the identity of the van driver responsible for the death of her son.’ He looked up. ‘That’s a big difference.’

‘Do you think something might have gone wrong, Roy?’ Nick Nicholl asked. ‘Perhaps the killer was planning to get Preece to fess up into the camera and it didn’t happen.’

‘Maybe it did happen,’ Glenn Branson said. ‘The camera transmits – we don’t know what was said or transmitted to whom.’

‘He probably didn’t say too much underwater,’ Norman Potting butted in, and chortled.

Several of the others stifled grins.

‘I can’t speculate on whether anything went wrong, Nick,’ Grace replied to DC Nicholl. Then he pointed at the whiteboard again. ‘Our third line of enquiry is whether, bearing in mind Revere’s family’s connection with organized crime, this was a professional revenge killing – a hit. So far, from initial enquiries I’ve made to connections I have in the US, there is no intelligence of any contract of any kind that’s been put out regarding this, but we need to look at the US more closely.’ He turned to Crocker. ‘Duncan, I’m tasking you with getting further and better information on the Revere family and their connections.’

‘Yes, boss,’ the DS said, and made a note.

‘I have a 3.30 p.m. meeting with the ACC. I need to take him something to show that we’re not all sodding asleep here.’

At that moment his phone rang. Raising a hand apologetically, Roy Grace answered it. Kevin Spinella was on the other end and what the reporter from the Argus told him suddenly made his bad mood a whole lot worse.

62

This Wednesday was not promising to be one of the best days of Carly’s life. She was due to meet her solicitor and colleague, Ken Acott, outside Brighton Magistrates’ Court at 9.15 a.m., and have a coffee with him before her scheduled court appearance.

Quite unnecessarily in her view, Ken had warned her not to drive, as she was certain to lose her licence and the ban would be effective instantly. As her smashed Audi was still currently in the police pound, driving had not been an option in any event and she had come by taxi.

She was wearing a simple navy two-piece, a white blouse and a conservative Cornelia James silk square, with plain navy court shoes. Ken had advised her to look neat and respectable, not to power-dress and not to be dripping with bling.

As if she ever was!

Then, as she stepped out of the taxi, her right heel broke, shearing almost clean off.

No, no, no! Don’t do this to me!

There was no sign of Acott. A couple of teenagers and an angry-looking, scrawny middle-aged woman were standing nearby. One youth, in a tracksuit and baseball cap, had a pathetic, stooping posture, while the other, in a hoodie, was more assertive-looking. All three of them were smoking and not talking. The woman was the mother of one or both of them, she presumed. The boys looked rough and hard, as if they were already seasoned offenders.

Carly felt the warmth of the sun, but the promise of a fine day did little to relieve the dark chill inside her. She was nervous as hell. Acott had already warned her that a lot depended on which trio of magistrates she came in front of this morning. In the best-case scenario she would get a one-year driving ban – the minimum possible for drink-driving in the UK – and a hefty fine. But if she got a bad call, it could be a lot worse. The magistrates might decide that even if the police were not going to prosecute her for death by careless or dangerous driving, they would come up with a punishment to fit the circumstances and throw the book at her. That could mean a three-year ban, or even longer, and a fine running into thousands.

Fortunately, money had not been a problem for her so far, since Kes’s death, but provincial law firms did not pay highly and next year Tyler would move on to his public school, where the fees would be treble what she was currently paying at St Christopher’s. She was going to be stretched. So the prospect of a three-year driving ban and