The second plastic strip was the rear plate.
Had they found the Shoe Man’s lair?
Grace walked across to the end wall. On one shelf was a row of grey duct-tape rolls. The rest of the shelves were bare.
Glenn Branson started walking across to the left wall. Grace stopped him. ‘Don’t trample everywhere, mate. Let’s try to retrace our steps, leave it as clean as we can for SOCO – I want to get them in here right away.’
He looked around carefully, thinking. ‘Do you think that’s what Spicer saw? These licence plates?’
‘I don’t think he’s smart enough to have put two and two together from just licence plates. I think he saw something else.’
‘Such as?’
‘He won’t talk unless we give him immunity. I have to say, at least he was smart relocking the door.’
‘I’ll speak to the ACC,’ Grace said, stepping as lightly as he could on the way back out. ‘We need to know what he saw in here. We need to know what might have been here that isn’t here now.’
‘You mean he could have nicked something?’
‘No,’ he replied. ‘I don’t think Spicer nicked what was in here. I think what he probably saw in here was a white van. An engine’s been running in here within the last few hours. If the van’s gone, then where the hell is it? And, more to the point, why’s it gone? Go and talk to him. Twist his arm. Tell him if he wants a crack at that reward, he has to tell us what he saw, otherwise no deal.’
‘He’s scared he’ll get banged up again for breaking and entering.’
Grace looked at his mate. ‘Tell him to lie, to say that the door was open, unlocked. I’m not interested in nicking him for breaking and entering.’
Branson nodded. ‘OK, I’ll go and talk to him. Just had a thought – if you put SOCO in and the Shoe Man returns and sees them, he’ll do a runner. Aren’t we smarter having someone covert watching it? Get Tunks to lock it up again so he doesn’t know we’ve been here?’
‘Assuming he’s not watching us now,’ Grace said.
Branson glanced around, then up, warily. ‘Yeah, assuming that.’
Grace’s first action when he arrived at the Ops Control Room at John Street, twenty minutes later, was to inform his Silver and Bronze Commanders that any white Ford Transit van sighted in the vicinity of Eastern Road, for the rest of the day and night, was to be kept under close observation. Then he put out a broader request to all patrols in the city to keep a vigilant eye on all current model white Ford Transit vans.
Twelve years ago, if he was right, the Shoe Man had used a white van in his attack. It would fit Proudfoot’s theory on his symmetry if he did the same thing again tonight.
Was that the reason those particular pages had been taken from the file, he wondered? The ones relating to an eyewitness report about a woman abducted in a white van? Did they contain vital clues about his behaviour? His MO? The identity of the van?
Something that had been bothering him about the lock-up garage was bothering him even more now. If the Shoe Man had driven the van out of the garage, why had he bothered to lock all four locks? There was nothing in there to steal except two useless licence plates.
That really did not make sense to him.
93
Saturday 17 January
The only passengers Yac disliked more than drunks were the ones who were high on drugs. This girl on the back seat was almost bouncing off the roof.
She talked and she talked and she talked. She had spewed words non-stop since he had collected her from an address close to the beach in Lancing. Her hair was long and spiky, the colour of tomato ketchup and pea soup. She talked rubbish and she was wearing rubbish shoes. She reeked of cigarettes and Dolce & Gabbana Femme, and she was a mess. She looked like a Barbie doll that had been retrieved from a dustbin.
She was so out of it, he doubted she would notice if he drove her to the moon, except he didn’t know how to get to the moon. He hadn’t worked that one out yet.
‘Thing is, you see,’ she went on, ‘there’s a lot of people going to rip you off in this city. You want quality stuff. You tell them you want brown and they just give you shit, yep, shit. You had that problem?’
Yac wasn’t sure whether she was talking into her mobile phone, which she had been for much of the journey, or to him. So he continued driving in silence and looking at the clock and fretting. After he dropped her off in Kemp Town he would park up and ignore any calls on his data unit from the dispatcher, wait for 7 p.m. and then drink his tea.
‘Have you?’ she asked more loudly. ‘Have you?’
He felt a prod in his back. He didn’t like that. He did not like passengers touching him. Last week he had a drunk man who kept laughing and thumping him on the shoulder. He had begun to find himself wondering what the man’s reaction would be if he hit him in the face with the heavy, four-way steel brace for removing wheel nuts that was stored in the boot.
He was starting to wonder how this girl would react if he did that now. He could easily stop and get it out of the boot. She’d probably still be sitting in the back, talking away, even after he had hit her. He’d seen someone do that in a film on television.
She prodded him again. ‘Hey? So? Have you?’
‘Have I what?’
‘Oh shit, you weren’t listening. Like, right, OK. Shit. Haven’t you got any music in this thing?’
‘Size four?’ he asked.
‘Size four? Size four what?’
‘Shoes. That’s what you are.’
‘You a shoemaker when you’re not driving or something?’
Her shoes were really horrible. Fake leopard skin, flat and all frayed around the edges. He could kill this woman, he decided. He could. It would be easy. He had lots of passengers he did not like. But this was the first one he actually thought he might like to kill.
But it was probably better not to. You could get into trouble for killing people if you got caught. He watched CSI and Waking the Dead and other shows about forensic scientists. You could learn a lot from those. You could learn to kill a stupid person like this woman, with her stupid hair and her stupid black nail paint and her breasts almost popping free of their scarlet cups.
As he turned left at the roundabout in front of Brighton Pier and headed up around the Old Steine, she suddenly fell silent.
He wondered if she could read his mind.
94
Saturday 17 January
Roy Grace, seated in the office at the end of the Ops Room, was working his way through a horrible slimy and almost stone-cold mound of chicken and shrimp chow mein that some well-meaning officer had brought him. If he hadn’t been ravenous, he would have binned it. But he’d eaten nothing since an early-morning bowl of cereal and needed the fuel.
All had been quiet at the garage behind Mandalay Court. But the number and quality of the locks on the door continued to bother him. ACC Rigg had agreed readily to allowing Darren Spicer to tell them what he saw without
