PCSOs, and maybe the Specials. Contact the local MP and the Police Authority member. Tell them it looks neat and tidy to you, at the moment, and that you feel there is minimal community impact.’
‘Anything else, boss?’
‘Think of a holding statement for the media. Start planning about your communications strategy for public reassurance. Get the names of everyone who has access to this place – who delivers the mail, the milk, the newspapers, the animal feed, the heating oil or Calor gas – everyone who could have been here in recent months – every visitor. I’d suggest setting a parameter of one year back. Find out if there is any CCTV.’
As with every major crime investigation that he ran, Grace needed to establish a range of parameters for all aspects, and to plan out the immediate steps in his Policy Book. One of the first problems he needed to address was the business of this farm. The owner, Keith Winter, would want the minimum disruption to his livelihood.
His immediate impression was that, unlike some farms he had visited, everything here looked clean and modern. The long, single-storey shed. The shiny silos. The handsome farmhouse that looked newly built. The gleaming Range Rover, its registration plate indicating it was less than a year old. The Subaru Impreza, two years old according to its index, signalling someone who liked fast cars. The good things in life.
Someone who would kill for such things?
There was a smart electric gate at the start of the mile-long driveway up here. Okay, people were security conscious these days, but how many farmers had security gates? Hiding something? Or a precaution against travellers?
Going through his mind right now were potential suspects, or those he needed to know more about. The first notes he made on his pad were to get intelligence on the owner of this place. Who was Keith Winter? What was his background? How long had he owned Stonery Farm? What was his financial situation? Did he have partners? When had that grid last been cleared? Who did he employ here? Each of his employees, current and past, would need to be identified and questioned. Would Winter really have put a murder victim in his chicken shed? Perhaps he thought it would be completely dissolved. Certainly it was a known fact that the Italian Mafia used pig farms as an effective means of disposing of bodies, and there had been a case in the UK a few years back. But pigs were omnivores.
He shared his thoughts with Glenn Branson.
‘Ever see that Pasolini film,
‘No, never heard of it.’
‘It’s a classic. A bloke gets eaten by a pig in that.’
‘Think I’ll give it a miss,’ Grace said.
‘You already have missed it, it came out in 1969.’ Then Branson frowned. ‘I know someone who might be able to tell us a bit about the cloth, if we’re right about it being suit fabric.’
‘Oh?’
‘A tailor in Brighton, works at Gresham Blake.’
Gresham Blake was Brighton’s society tailor. ‘That where you get your clothes made these days?’ Grace looked at him quizzically.
‘I wish. I met him a few years ago when his flat was burgled. Gresham Blake’s where you should go though, on your Big Cheese salary.’
There was no certainty, Grace thought, that the clothing fabric was even connected to the victim, but it was an important line of enquiry. Most murder investigations began with a missing person and until that person was identified, it was hard to make real progress. One of the key things he needed to establish at this moment was the age of the body, and how long it had been here. He pulled out his phone and called forensic archaeologist Joan Major, asking her if she could come here as soon as she was finished at the mortuary. She told him her work on the skeletal remains was almost completed.
It was possible they could get DNA from the victim, which might help identification. Failing that, if the age, or at least the age range, of the victim could be established, they could make a start by looking at the county and region’s missing persons list.
He stared around again. There were some farm buildings beyond the shed, and another, smaller dwelling. One immediate decision he needed to make was whether to treat just the chicken shed as the crime scene, or the entire farm including the farmhouse. He did not feel he had enough to justify that draconian measure, which would have meant Winter and his family having to move out into temporary accommodation. His view was to treat the farmer as a person of interest to his enquiry for now, but not a suspect.
Despite his wariness of the danger in making assumptions, Roy Grace always made hypotheses at every crime scene. And the first one he made here was that money might be involved. A dead man in expensive clothes. A business partner? A blackmailer? Winter’s wife’s lover? Winter’s own lover? A creditor? A business rival? Or was it someone totally unconnected with Winter, who had merely used this place as a dump site?
‘Glenn,’ he said. ‘Early in my career I had a very wise Super in Major Crime. He said to me,
Sending Branson back inside with his head spinning, Grace walked over to the car, sat in the driver’s seat and closed the door for some privacy. He started to jot down the names of the enquiry team he wanted to put together, hoping that some of his regulars, recently stood down from
He stared through the windscreen at the expensive Range Rover and the Impreza – a rich man’s toys – and the architect-designed farmhouse. Maybe there was money to be made in farming chickens?
But, as experience had long taught him, wherever there was money to be made, there was killing to be done, too.
15
‘We’re fucked!’ Maxim Brody’s gloomy voice said.
Larry Brooker, in his First Class seat, held the cellphone to his ear. ‘Why? What do you mean, Max?’
‘I just came off the phone with Gaia’s agent. She’s walking.’
‘Whaddya mean she’s walking?’
‘The insurance company won’t let her go to England,’ said Brody, sounding even more defeatist than ever.
‘So, okay, worst case scenario, we shoot everything here in LA!’
‘Sir,’ the stewardess insisted, ‘you have to turn that off.’
‘Yeah, right, Larry,’ Brody replied. ‘We’re gonna build a replica of the Brighton Royal Pavilion here on the Universal lot? On our budget? Rebuild the whole goddamn city of Brighton, England, here?’
‘I’m flying to New York right now to meet with our broker, Peter Marshall, at DeWitt Stern – he’s gonna-’
The grumpy stewardess reached out her hand, imperiously.
‘Sir, I’m sorry, I’m going to have to take your cellphone for the duration of the flight if you don’t switch it off.’
‘Do you know who I am?’ he shouted at her.
She frowned. ‘Having memory problems are you, sir?’ She glanced down at the list she was holding in her free hand. ‘Seat 2B? You’re Mr Larry Brooker! Does that help you, sir?’
He balled his fists in frustration. ‘Jesus!’
‘God delusions. I’m sure we can find a chaplain to assist you.’
Larry Brooker drained the remains of his glass of champagne before the bitch seized that, too.
Then he sat, in silent fury, as the plane jerked and bumped along its taxi path, his thoughts veering between ritually disembowelling the harridan, and the prospects of salvaging his rapidly collapsing film production. They had Gaia, one of the world’s most bankable stars. They now had their leading man, Judd Halpern, a senior B-lister to replace that coked-up shithead A-lister, Matt Duke, who’d trashed himself in a car wreck. They had their director, ageing Jack Jordan, a two-times Academy Award nominee, a prima donna who had a reputation for being impossible, but who was hungry for this project because he saw it as possibly his last chance to bag an Oscar.
