think more likely,
‘Or maybe that’s the one trophy he can’t bear to part with?’ Potting said.
Grace nodded. ‘Yes, that’s possible.’ He looked at his notes. ‘For the moment we have no option but to work with what we have. Right, the suit fabric.’ He looked up at Glenn Branson. ‘What is the situation with that?’
‘DS Batchelor’s been on to this, boss.’
Batchelor nodded. ‘I’ve got the outside enquiry team going through the list that Dormeuil supplied us. All men’s clothing stores and tailors within our three counties’ parameter who bought sufficient quantities of this cloth to make suits from, including Savile Style. I gave a list of eighty-two people who bought one of the suits – or had one made – to Annalise Vineer at midday today.’ He turned to the indexer. ‘What do you have for us, Annalise?’
‘There is something interesting,’ she said, flushing a little, as if not used to being in the limelight. ‘There’s a men’s clothing store in Gardner Street, Brighton, called Luigi, which sold a suit in this material to a man called Myles Royce two years ago. It wasn’t bespoke, but the proprietor, Luigi, remembers making a number of tailoring alterations to make a better fit. Myles Royce is on our mispers list. DS Potting is following up.’
Grace turned to Potting. ‘Have you progressed this?’
‘Yes, chief. Luigi had an address for his customer in Ash Grove, Haywards Heath, which I went to this afternoon – a pleasant detached house in a decent neighbourhood. There was no answer and the place looked in a state of neglect. I come from a farming background and I know a little about grass. In my view the lawn hasn’t been cut this year. The garden’s overgrown with weeds. I found one helpful neighbour at home, an elderly lady opposite, who told me he lived alone. She’s been looking after his cat for several months. Apparently he had some investments – some kind of family trust that he lived on – and he’d told her he was going off to do a bit of travelling for a few weeks, and never returned.’ Potting paused and shuffled through the mess of papers in front of him.
‘Now here’s the interesting thing – well – maybe not that interesting.’
Grace stared at him, waiting patiently, wishing he could get to the point. But that wasn’t Norman Potting’s style and never would be.
‘I got the name and phone number of his mother from this lady,’ Potting said. ‘So I went round to see her, in a care home in Burgess Hill. She told me her son used to call her at seven every Sunday evening without fail. She hasn’t heard from him since January. She’s very distressed – apparently they were extremely close.’
‘Did she report him as a misper?’ Bella Moy said.
‘In April.’
‘Why did she wait so long?’ Nick Nicholl asked.
‘She told me he was often travelling,’ Norman Potting replied. ‘She said he was a very big fan of Gaia, obsessed by her. He’d a small trust fund, and made a bit of money, apparently, dabbling in the property market, and that enabled him to travel the world following her.’
Grace frowned. ‘A wealthy, grown man, travelling the world for Gaia? What was all that about?’
‘I’m told she’s a huge gay icon,’ Potting replied.
‘Is – was – Myles Royce gay?’ Branson interjected.
‘The neighbour said she saw a few young men turn up at his house, but never any ladies,’ Potting said.
Grace thought hard. Something didn’t quite add up. A Gaia fan butchered. Gaia in town. A recent murder attempt on her in Los Angeles. Coincidences?
He didn’t like coincidences much. They were too convenient. Easy to explain something away as
Much harder to drill down beneath the surface to see what was really there.
‘Has his mother got anything we might get his DNA from, Norman?’ he asked.
Potting shook his head. ‘No, but I got the neighbour to let me into his house. I removed one of his suits. He fits our size profile exactly. And I brought back a hairbrush and toothbrush – I’ve already had them sent to the lab.’
‘Well done,’ Grace said. Then he lapsed into thought.
Was there a connection?
Why should there be?
He’d been a detective for too long to dismiss anything. A Gaia fan had possibly been murdered. Gaia was in town. But if he had been murdered, that had been long before anyone knew she was coming to town.
He continued thinking for some moments. Deposition sites tended to be ditches beside quiet roads, or woodlands alongside them. He turned to Glenn Branson. ‘We need to get a list of all the members of the trout- fishing club and have them interviewed – see if any of them saw anything – or react suspiciously to being interviewed. It’s a pretty remote place – I’m not sure any member of the general public would find it by accident. Whoever used this as a deposition site must have had prior knowledge of it. We should also work on a list of anyone who might have had reason to visit it – like maintenance workers clearing the weeds, or working on repairs-’
‘I’m there, boss!’ Glenn Branson interjected, and looked at the indexer. ‘Annalise is already liaising with the trout club secretary.’
‘He’s being very helpful,’ Annalise Vineer said. ‘He’s given me the full membership list, and he’s working on a wider list of names of all people the club has dealings with who might have reason to have visited, or at least know its location. Such as people from the Environment Agency who handle fishing licences, their fencing contractor, the company they use for weed control, their driveway maintenance people, their printers and their solicitors. I hope to have the full list by tomorrow.’
Grace thanked her. Then he turned to another of the detectives on his team, Jon Exton. ‘Anything to report from the National Footwear Reference Collection, Jon?’
‘Yes, boss!’ Exton said. Glenn liked the young man because he was always brimming with enthusiasm.
‘I’ve found an exact match,’ Exton continued. ‘It’s good news and – er – not such good news.’
Grace frowned. This wasn’t the time or place to start talking in riddles. ‘What do you mean?’ he said, a tad snappily.
‘Well the good news, boss, is that the print is from a wellington boot, rather than a trainer.’
Many prisons issued prisoners with trainers when they left, if they had no other shoes. Partly as a result of that, there were more trainer footprints at crime scenes than any other kind of footwear; the vast numbers of stockists and quantity of trainer manufacturers made it hard to trace the source.
‘The footprint is from a Hunter wellington boot,’ Exton went on. ‘The style is one of “The Original” range. I’m afraid the bad news is that this brand is one of the most popular manufactured in this country. There are sixty-four stockists in Sussex, Kent and Surrey. And of course you can get them online.’
Roy Grace absorbed the information, thinking hard. How many of these were self-service stores like garden centres? What was the possibility of the staff remembering who bought these boots? In every murder enquiry he had to balance the costs of deployment of officers against the probabilities of achieving any result. Sixty-four stockists would consume a lot of the outside enquiry team manpower, if he wanted to get a result quickly. How many a day could any individual cover? In his experience, having to wait for staff they needed to interview to come back from breaks, and the like, was time consuming. Six retail outlets a day would be good going. It would take two officers a good week to cover every shop and store.
DC Reeves put her hand in the air. ‘Sir, Hunter is a very expensive brand – I know because I recently went shopping for some wellies. Do you think there is some significance in this? That it tallies with the expensive suit material from the victim? What I mean by this is it tells us the perpetrator might be financially well off.’
Grace nodded. ‘Good point, Emma.’ He made a note. Then he instructed Jon Exton to proceed and have all stockists interviewed. Although, in his heart, he knew there was a slim likelihood of a result from that effort. At least it would cover his backside when he wrote it up in his Policy Book, should his investigation get questioned at a later date.
He turned to the forensic podiatrist Haydn Kelly. ‘Anything to add at this stage, Haydn?’
Kelly shook his head.
‘Okay. I don’t think we are going to achieve a lot more overnight. The next meeting will be at 6.30 p.m. tomorrow,’ Grace said. ‘Glenn and I will be holding a press conference at eleven o’clock, so if there are any significant developments that come in before then, let me know.’
As he stood up, Emma Reeves asked, ‘Any chance of Gaia’s autograph, chief?’
