Eight days in which there had been no proof of life.
Roy Grace had worked doggedly on the case since Christmas Day, increasingly certain something was very wrong, until Chief Inspector Jack Skerritt had insisted that the Detective Sergeant take New Year’s Eve off to spend with his wife.
Grace had done so reluctantly, torn between his concern to find Rachael and his need to keep the peace at home with Sandy. Now, after a two-day absence, he returned on this Friday morning to a briefing update by Skerritt. The Chief Inspector told his small team of detectives of his decision, made in consultation with his ACC, to upgrade Operation Sundown to an Incident Room. A HOLMES – Home Office Large Major Enquiry System team – had been requisitioned, and six additional detectives from other parts of the county were being drafted in.
The Incident Room was set up on the fourth floor of John Street police station, next to the CCTV department and across the corridor from the busy Operation Houdini Incident Room, where the investigation into the Shoe Man continued.
Grace, who was convinced that the two operations should be merged, was allocated his present desk, where he was to be based for the duration of the inquiry. It was by the draughty window, giving him a bleak view across the car park and the grey, rain-soaked rooftops towards Brighton Station and the viaduct.
Seated at the next desk along was DC Tingley, a bright, boyish-looking twenty-six-year-old police officer whom he liked. In particular, he liked the man’s energy. Jason Tingley, sleeves rolled up, was on the phone, pen in hand, dealing with one of the dozens of calls that had come in following their reconstruction, three days earlier, of Rachael’s journey from the East Street taxi rank back home.
Grace had a thick file on Rachael Ryan on his desk. Already, despite the holidays, he had her bank and her credit-card details. There had been no transactions during the past week, which meant he could effectively rule out that she had been mugged for the contents of her handbag. There had been no calls from her mobile phone since 2.35 on Christmas morning.
However, there was something useful he had gleaned from the mobile phone company. There were mobile phone base stations, or mini masts, located around Brighton and Hove, and every fifteen minutes, even in standby mode, the phone would send a signal to the nearest mast, like a plane radioing its current position, and receive one back.
Although no further calls had been made from Rachael Ryan’s phone, it had remained switched on for three more days, until the battery died, he guessed. According to information he’d received from the phone company, shortly after her last phone call, she had suddenly moved two miles east of her home – in a vehicle of some kind, judging from the speed at which it had happened.
She had remained there for the rest of the night, until 10 a.m. on Christmas Day. Then she had travelled approximately four miles west, into Hove. Again the speed of the journey indicated that she was travelling in a vehicle. Then she had stopped and remained static until the last signal received, shortly after 11 p.m. on Saturday.
On a large-scale map of Brighton and Hove on the Incident Room wall, Grace had drawn a red circle around the maximum area that would be covered by this particular beacon’s range. It included most of Hove as well as part of Brighton, Southwick and Portslade. Over 120,000 people lived within its radius – an almost impossible number for house-to-house enquiries.
Besides, the information was only of limited value, he realized. Rachael could have been separated from her phone. It was just an indicator of where she might be, but no more. But so far it was all they had. One line he would try, he decided, was to see if anything had been picked up on CCTV cameras on the routes matching the signal information. But there was only coverage on major routes and that was limited.
Rachael did not own a computer and there was nothing on the one in her office at American Express to give any clue as to why she might have disappeared.
At the moment it was if she had fallen through a crack in the earth.
Tingley put down the phone and drew a line through the name he had written a couple of minutes earlier on his pad. ‘Tosser!’ he said. ‘Time waster.’ Then he turned to Roy. ‘Good New Year’s Eve, mate?’
‘Yeah, it was all right. Went with Dick and Leslie Pope to Donatello’s. You?’
‘Went up to London with the missus. Trafalgar Square. It was brilliant – until it started pissing with rain.’ He shrugged. ‘So what do you think? She still alive?’
‘Not looking good,’ he replied. ‘She’s a homebody. Still sore about the bust-up with her ex. Into shoes, big time.’ He looked at his colleague and shrugged. ‘That’s the bit I keep coming back to.’
Grace had spent an hour earlier in the day with Dr Julius Proudfoot, the behavioural analyst Operation Houdini had drafted into their team. Proudfoot told him that, in his view, Rachael Ryan’s disappearance could not be connected to the Shoe Man. He still did not understand how the arrogant psychologist had arrived at that conclusion, since he had so little evidence.
‘Proudfoot insists this isn’t the Shoe Man’s style. He says the Shoe Man attacks his victims and then leaves them. Because he’s used the same MO for five victims, Proudfoot doesn’t accept that he would suddenly have changed and kept one.’
‘Similar MO, Roy,’ Jason Tingley said. ‘But he takes them in different places, right? He tried that first one in an alley. One in a hotel room. One in her home. One under the pier. One in a multi-storey car park. Clever if you want to look at it that way – makes it hard for anyone to second-guess him.’
Grace looked down at his notes, thinking hard. There was one common denominator with each of the Shoe Man’s victims. All of them were into designer shoes. Each one had bought a new pair of shoes, from different shops in Brighton, shortly before they were attacked. But so far interviews with staff in the shops had revealed nothing helpful.
Rachael Ryan had bought a new pair of shoes too. Three days before Christmas. Expensive for a girl of her means – ?170. She had been wearing them the night she vanished.
But Proudfoot had dismissed that.
Grace turned to Tingley and told him this.
Tingley nodded, looking pensive suddenly. ‘So if it isn’t the Shoe Man, who’s taken her? Where has she gone? If she’s OK, why isn’t she contacting her parents? She must have seen the appeal in the Argus or heard it on the radio.’
‘Doesn’t make any sense. She normally phones her parents every day and chats to them. Eight days of silence? And at this time of year – Christmas and New Year? No call to wish them Happy Christmas or Happy New Year? Something’s happened to her, for sure.’
Tingley nodded. ‘Abducted by aliens?’
Grace looked back down at his notes. ‘The Shoe Man took his victims in a different place each time, but what he did to them was consistent. And even more important was what he did to his victims’ lives. He didn’t need to kill them. They were already dead inside by the time he had finished with them.’
Are you a victim of the Shoe Man, Rachael? Or has some other monster got you?
37
Friday 9 January
MIR-1, the larger of the two Major Incident Rooms at Sussex House, had an atmosphere that Roy Grace always found energizing.
Located in the heart of the Major Crime Suite at the CID headquarters, it would have looked to a casual observer like any other large administrative office. It had cream walls, functional grey carpeting, red chairs, modern wooden workstations, filing cabinets, a water dispenser and several large whiteboards on the walls. The windows were high up, with permanently closed blinds across them, as if to discourage anyone from wasting one second of their time looking out of them.
But to Roy Grace this was much more than an office. MIR-1 was the very nerve centre of his current investigation, as it had been with the previous ones he had run from here, and to him it had an almost hallowed atmosphere. Many of the worst crimes committed in Sussex in the past decade had been solved, and the offenders locked up, thanks to the detective work that had been carried out in this room.
