56
Wearing expensive high heels makes you feel sexy, doesn’t it? You think spending money on these things is an investment, don’t you? All part of your trap. Do you know what you are like? All of you? Venus fly traps! That’s what you are like.
Have you ever looked closely at the leaves of a Venus fly trap? They are all pink inside. Do they remind you of something? I’ll tell you what they remind me of: vaginas with teeth. Which is of course exactly what they are. Nasty incisors all the way around, like prison cell bars.
The moment an insect enters and touches one of the tiny hairs in those inviting, sensual pink lips, the trap snaps shut. It seals out all the air. Just like you all do. Then the digestive juices set to work, slowly killing the prey if it hasn’t been lucky enough to have suffocated first. Just like you all do! The soft, inner parts of the insect are dissolved, but not the tough outer part, the exoskeleton. At the end of the digestive process, after several days, sometimes a couple of weeks, the trap reabsorbs the digestive fluid and then reopens. The remains of the insect are blown away in the wind or washed away by the rain.
That’s why you put those shoes on, isn’t it? To trap us, suck all the fluids out of us, then excrete our remains.
Well, I’ve got news for you.
57
Monday 12 January
MIR-1 was capable of housing up to three Major Incident investigations at the same time. But with Roy Grace’s rapidly expanding team, Operation Swordfish needed the entire room. Fortunately he’d always kept on the right side of the Senior Support Officer, Tony Case, who controlled all four Major Incident Suites in the county.
Case obligingly moved the only other major investigation currently taking place in Sussex House at the moment – the late-night street murder of an as yet unidentified man – to the smaller MIR-2 along the corridor.
Although Grace had held two briefings yesterday, several of his team had been absent on outside inquiries, for a number of important reasons. He had ordered full attendance this morning.
He sat down at a free space at one of the workstations, placing his agenda and Policy Book in front of him. Beside them sat his third coffee of the day, so far. Cleo was constantly reproaching him for the amount he consumed, but after his early pleasant but testy meeting with ACC Rigg, he felt in need of another strong caffeine hit.
Although MIR-1 had not been redecorated or refurbished for some years, the room always had a sterile, faintly anodyne modern-office smell. A big contrast to police offices before the smoking ban had been imposed, he thought. Almost all of them reeked of tobacco and had a permanently fuggy haze. But it gave them atmosphere and in some ways he missed that. Everything in life was becoming too sterile.
He nodded greetings to various members of his team as they filed into the room, most of them, including Glenn Branson, who appeared to be having yet another of his endless arguments with his wife, talking on their phones.
‘Morning, old-timer,’ Branson greeted him when he ended his call. He pocketed his phone, then tapped the top of his own shaven dome and frowned.
Grace frowned back. ‘What?’
‘No gel. Did you forget?’
‘I was seeing the new ACC first thing, so thought I ought to be a little conservative.’
Branson, who had given Roy Grace a major fashion makeover some months ago, shook his head. ‘You know what? Sometimes you’re just plain sad. If I was the new ACC, I’d want officers with a bit of zing – not ones who looked like my grandfather.’
‘Sod you!’ Grace said with a grin. Then he yawned.
‘See!’ Branson said gleefully. ‘It’s your age. You can’t take the pace.’
‘Very funny. Look, I have to concentrate for a few minutes, OK?’
‘You know who you remind me of?’ Branson said, ignoring him.
‘George Clooney? Daniel Craig?’
‘Nah. Brad Pitt.’
For a moment Grace looked quite pleased. Then the Detective Sergeant added, ‘Yeah, in Benjamin Button – like at the point where he looks a hundred and hasn’t started getting younger yet.’
Grace shook his head, stifling a grin, then another yawn. Monday was a day most normal people dreaded. But most normal people at least started the week feeling rested and fresh. He had spent the whole of his Sunday at work, first going to the pier, to the maintenance room of the ghost train, where Mandy Thorpe had been raped and seriously injured, and then visiting her at the Royal Sussex County Hospital, where she was under police guard. Despite a bad head injury, the young woman had managed to give a detailed initial statement to the SOLO allocated to her, who had in turn relayed this information to him.
Quite apart from the trauma to these poor victims, Roy Grace was feeling a different kind of trauma of his own, from the pressure to solve this and make an arrest. To compound matters, the head crime reporter of the Argus, Kevin Spinella, had now left three messages on his mobile phone asking him to call back urgently. Grace knew if he wanted the cooperation of his main local paper in this inquiry, rather than just a sensational headline in tomorrow’s edition, he was going to have to manage Spinella carefully. That would mean giving him an exclusive extra titbit to the information he would release at the midday press conference – and at the moment he didn’t have anything for the man. At least, nothing he wanted the public to know.
He gave the reporter a quick call back and got connected straight through to his voicemail. He left Spinella a message asking him to come to his office ten minutes before the press conference. He’d think of something for him.
And one day soon he was going to think of a suitable trap. Someone inside the police regularly leaked information to Spinella. The same person, Grace was sure, who had leaked every major crime story this past year to the sharp young crime reporter within minutes of the police being called to the scene. It had to be someone in either the Call Handling Centre or the IT department who had access to the minute-by-minute updated serials. It could be a detective, but he doubted that, because the leaked information was on every serious crime, and no one detective got early information on anything other than his own cases.
The only positive was that Kevin Spinella was savvy, a newspaper reporter with whom the police could do business. So far they had been lucky, but one day he might not be there, and a lot of damage could be done by someone less cooperative in his shoes.
‘Bloody Albion – what is going on with them?’ Michael Foreman strutted in, smartly suited as ever, with gleaming black Oxford shoes.
In the early stages of an inquiry, most detectives wore suits because they never knew when they might have to rush out to interview someone – particularly close relatives of a major crime victim, to whom they needed to show respect. Some, like Foreman, dressed sharply all the time.
‘That second goal!’ DC Nick Nicholl, who was normally quietly spoken, was talking animatedly, shaking his balled fists in the air. ‘Like, what was all that about? Hello!’
‘Yeah, well, Chelsea’s my team,’ said the HOLMES analyst, John Black. ‘Gave up on the Albion a long time ago. The day they left the Goldstone Ground.’
‘But when they move – the new stadium – that’ll be something, right!’ Michael Foreman said. ‘Give them a chance to settle into that – they’ll get their pride back.’
‘Gay Pride, that’s all they’re good for,’ grumbled Norman Potting, who shambled in last, shaking his head, reeking of pipe smoke.
He sat down heavily in a chair opposite Grace. ‘Sorry I’m late, Roy. Women! I tell you, I’ve had it. I’m not getting married again. That’s it. Four and out!’
