‘So all we’d have to do, Bella,’ Norman Potting said, ‘is get every bloke in Brighton and Hove to say the same words. There’s only a hundred and forty thousand or so males in the city. Shouldn’t take us more than about ten years.’
‘Could you play it again, boss, please,’ said Glenn Branson, who’d been very quiet. ‘Wasn’t it that movie, The Conversation, with Gene Hackman, where they worked out where someone was from the traffic noise in the background on the tape?’
He played the tape again.
‘Have we been able to trace the call, sir?’ Ellen Zoratti asked.
‘The number was withheld. But it’s being worked on. It’s a big task with the amount coming through the Call Centre every hour.’ Grace played the tape again.
When it finished, Glenn Branson said, ‘Sounds like somewhere in the centre of Brighton. If they can’t trace the number we’ve still got the siren and the time of day – that vehicle sounds like it went right past very close to him. We need to check what emergency vehicle was on its blues and twos at exactly 1.55 p.m., and we’ll get its route and know he was somewhere along it. A CCTV might have picked up someone on their mobile – and possibly bingo.’
‘Good thinking,’ Grace said. ‘Although it sounded more like a landline than a mobile from the way he hung up.’
‘Yes,’ Michael Foreman said. ‘That clunking sound – that’s like an old-fashioned handset being replaced.’
‘He might have just dropped his phone, if he was as nervous as Dr Proudfoot suggests,’ said DC Boutwood. ‘I don’t think we should rule out a mobile.’
‘Or it could be a public phone booth,’ Foreman said. ‘In which case there may be fingerprints.’
‘If he’s angry,’ Proudfoot said, ‘then I think it’s even more likely he’ll strike again quickly. And a racing certainty is that he’ll copy his pattern from last time. He’ll know that worked. He’ll be fine if he sticks to the same again. Which means he’s going to strike in a car park next – as I’ve said before.’
Grace walked over to a map of central Brighton and stared at it, looking at each of the main car parks. The station, London Road, New Road, Churchill Square, North Road. There were dozens of them, big and small, some run by the council, some by NCP, some part of supermarkets or hotels. He turned back to Proudfoot.
‘It would be impossible to cover every damned car park in the city – and even more impossible to cover every level of every multi-storey,’ he said. ‘We just don’t have the number of patrols. And we can hardly close them down.’
He was feeling anxious suddenly. Maybe it had been a mistake telling Spinella that yesterday. What if it pushed the Shoe Man over the edge into killing again? It would be his own stupid fault.
‘The best thing we can do is get plain-clothes officers into the CCTV control rooms of those car parks that have it, step up patrols and have as many undercover vehicles drive around the car parks as we can,’ Grace said.
‘The one thing I’d tell your team to watch out for, Detective Superintendent, is someone on edge tonight. Someone driving erratically on the streets. I think our man is going to be in a highly wired state.’
65
You think you’ve been clever, don’t you, Detective Superintendent Roy Grace? You think you’re going to make me angry by insulting me, don’t you? I can see through all that shit.
You should accept you are just a lame duck. Your colleagues didn’t catch me before and you won’t catch me now. I’m so much smarter than you could ever dream of being. You see, you don’t realize I’m doing you a favour!
I’m getting rid of the poison in your manor! I’m your new best friend! One day you’ll come to realize that! One day you and I will walk along under the cliffs at Rottingdean and talk about all of this. That walk you like to take with your beloved Cleo on Sundays! She likes shoes too. I’ve seen her in some of the shops I go in. She’s quite into shoes, isn’t she? You are going to need saving from her, but you don’t realize that yet. You will do one day.
They’re all poison, you see. All women. They seduce you with their Venus fly trap vaginas. You can’t bear to be apart from them. You phone them and text them every few minutes of your waking day, because you need to know how much they still love you.
Let me tell you a secret.
No woman ever loves you. All she wants to do is control you. You might sneer at me. You might question the size of my manhood. But I will tell you something, Detective Superintendent. You’ll be grateful to me, one day. You’ll walk with me arm in arm along the Undercliff Walk at Rottingdean and thank me for saving you from yourself.
66
Tuesday 13 January
Jessie felt a deep and constant yearning all the time she was away from Benedict. It must be an hour now since she had texted him, she thought. Tuesdays were their one night apart. She played squash with a recently married friend, Jax, then after would pick up a takeaway Chinese and go round to Roz’s and watch a DVD – something they had done almost every Tuesday night for as long as she could remember. Benedict, who liked to compose guitar music, had a similar long-standing Tuesday evening commitment – working late into the night with his co-writing partner, coming up with new songs. At the moment they were putting together an album they hoped might be their breakthrough.
Some weekends Benedict played gigs in a band in a variety of Sussex pubs. She loved watching him on stage. He was like a drug she just could not get enough of. Still, after eight months of dating, she could make love to him virtually all day and all night – on the rare opportunities they had such a length of time together. He was the best kisser, the best lover by a million, million miles – not that she’d had that many for comparison. Four, to be precise, and none of them memorable.
Benedict was kind, thoughtful, considerate, generous, and he made her laugh. She loved his humour. She loved the smell of his skin, his hair, his breath and his perspiration. But the thing she loved most of all about him was his mind.
And of course she loved that he really, truly, genuinely did seem to like her nose.
‘You don’t really like it, do you?’ she’d asked him in bed, a few months ago.
‘I do!’
‘You can’t!’
‘I think you’re beautiful.’
‘I’m not. I’ve got a hooter like Concorde.’
‘You’re beautiful to me.’
‘Have you been to an optician lately?’
‘Do you want to hear something I read that made me think of you?’ he asked.
‘OK, tell me.’
‘It’s beauty that captures your attention, personality that captures your heart.’
She smiled now at the memory as she sat in the traffic jam in the sodium-lit darkness, the heater of her little Ford Ka whirring noisily, toasting her feet. She was half listening to the news on the radio, tuned to Radio 4, Gordon Brown being harangued over Afghanistan. She didn’t like him, even though she was a Labour supporter, and she switched over to Juice. Air were playing, ‘Sexy Boy’.
‘Yayyyy!’ She grinned, nodding her head and drumming the steering wheel for a few moments, in tune to the music. Sexy Boy, that’s what you are, my gorgeous!
She loved him with all her heart and soul, of that she was sure. She wanted to spend the rest of her life with him – she had never ever been so certain of anything. It was going to hurt her parents that she wasn’t marrying a Jewish boy, but she couldn’t help that. She respected her family’s traditions, but she was not a believer in any
