Looking Good Dead

‘I thought Macs don’t get viruses.’

‘You did what I told you, didn’t you – please tell me you did. You didn’t hook this up to the office server?’

‘No.’

‘Lucky for that – it would have trashed your entire database.’

‘So there’s a virus.’

‘You’ve got something in there. Nothing’s wrong with your hardware. I just can’t believe you were so stupid – putting in a CD you found on a train. Jesus, Tom!’

Tom glanced past him. The rest of his team seemed to have lost interest. ‘What do you mean, stupid? It’s a computer, right? That’s what it does. It’s got all the anti-virus software – which you installed. It plays CDs. It ought to be able to play any CD.’

Webb held up the CD. ‘I’ve had a read of this, away from any machine it could harm. It’s spyware – it will reconfigure your software and plant God knows what kind of stuff in your system. You found it on a train?’

‘Last night.’

‘Serves you right for not handing it in to Lost Property right away.’

Sometimes Tom couldn’t believe he actually paid this guy to help him. ‘Thanks a lot. I was trying to be helpful – thought I might find an address on it I could send it to.’

‘Yeah, well next time it happens send it to me and I’ll look at it for you. So, apart from this, have you opened up any attachments you didn’t recognize?’

‘No.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘I never do – you warned me not to, years ago. Only the ones that come from people I know.’

‘Porn?’

‘Jokes, porn, the usual stuff.’

‘I suggest you wear a condom next time you surf the net.’

‘That’s not even funny.’

‘That wasn’t a joke. You’ve picked up a very nasty virus; it’s extremely aggressive. If you’d logged on to your office server this morning, you’d have wiped that clean, and all your colleagues’ computers as well. And the backup.’

‘Shit.’

‘Good word,’ Chris Webb said. ‘Couldn’t have put it better myself.’

‘So how do I get rid of it?’

‘By paying me a lot of money.’

‘Great.’

‘Or you can buy a new computer.’

‘You really know how to cheer someone up, don’t you?’

‘You want the facts, I’m giving them to you.’

‘I don’t understand. I thought Macs didn’t get viruses.’

‘They don’t very often. But there are some floating around. You might have just been unlucky. But most likely it’s from this CD. Of course there is another possibility.’ He looked around, found the mug of tea he had put down a while ago, and swigged some down.

‘And what’s that?’ Tom asked.

‘It might be someone who is pissed off with you.’ After a few moments, Webb added, ‘Flash tie you’re wearing.’

Tom glanced down; it was lavender with silver horses. Hermes. Kellie had recently bought it on the internet in some closing-down offer – her idea of economizing.

‘It’s for sale,’ he said.

11

Shortly after half past four in the afternoon, at the end of three hours of painstaking scrutiny, the dismembered remains of the young woman beneath the awning in the rain-lashed field of rape had come close to yielding as much as they were going to out here, the Home Office pathologist decided.

He completed the primitive but effective technique of pressing Sellotape against every inch of her flesh in the hope of trapping more fibres, tweezered off a few fibres that had lodged in her pubic hair, carefully bagging each of them, then ran his eye once more over the body parts and the ground immediately around them, concentrating fiercely, checking just one more time for anything he might have missed.

Grace would have preferred the pathologist to go straight to the mortuary and perform the post-mortem this evening, which was normal practice, but Theobald informed him apologetically that he was already committed to a PM in Hampshire on a suspicious yachting death.

In an ideal world all post-mortems on murder victims would be carried out in situ, as there was such a risk in moving them of losing some vital clue, perhaps invisible to the naked eye. But a muddy, wind-blown, rain-swept field did not constitute an ideal world. Bodies were seldom found in places that were post-mortem friendly. Some pathologists preferred to spend a minimal amount of time at the crime scene and return to the relatively pleasant working environment of the mortuary. But Dr Frazer Theobald was not one of them. He could be at a scene late into the night, indeed all through the night, if necessary, before declaring himself satisfied that the remains were ready to be removed to the mortuary.

Grace looked at his watch. His mind was partly on his date tomorrow night. It would be good to get off before the shops shut today. He knew it was wrong to be thinking this way, but for years his sister, and everyone else, had been telling him to get a life. For the first time since Sandy had gone he had met a woman that he really was interested in. But he was worried that his wardrobe was crap, and he needed some new summer clothes. Then he tried to put his date out of his mind and concentrate on his work.

The young woman’s head had still not yet been found. Roy Grace had called in a POLSA, a Police Search Adviser, and several police vans had already arrived filled with constables, many of them Specials, and begun a line search of the area. The driving rain was hampering visibility, and a helicopter droned low overhead, covering a slightly wider area. Only the police Alsatians, bounding away in the distance, seemed unfazed by the elements. To the farmer’s chagrin, a sixty-deep line of policemen, wearing fluorescent jackets in an even brighter yellow than the crop, was systematically trampling every square inch of his field.

Grace had spent much of the time on his phone, organizing the search, arranging a workspace for the team he would be assembling in the Major Incident Suite, obtaining an incident code name from the Sussex Police computer, and listening to the profiles of the handful of young women who had been reported missing in the past few days. There was only one missing person report within a five-mile radius that was a major cause for concern, a further three within the whole of Sussex, and another six in the entire south-east of England.

So far the taciturn Dr Theobald had been unable to give him much of a description, beyond light brown hair, gleaned from her pubic hair colouring, and a guess that she was either in her twenties or her early thirties.

Four women fitted that description.

Grace was well aware of the grim statistic that 230,000 people went missing in England every year. And that 90 per cent of those who turned up would do so within thirty days. More than 30 per cent of those 230,000 would never be seen again. Normally, only children and elderly people prompted immediate action. For all other missing person reports the police ordinarily waited a minimum of twenty-four hours, and usually more, depending on the circumstances.

Every missing person enquiry touched a nerve deep in Roy Grace’s soul. Each time he heard the words he gave a silent shudder.

Sandy was a missing person. She had disappeared off the face of the earth on his thirtieth birthday, just under nine years ago, and had never been seen since.

There was no evidence that the majority of those 70,000 people who vanished had died. People went missing for a raft of reasons. Mostly it was a breakdown in family relationships – husband or wife walking out, kids running away from home. Psychiatric problems. But some – and Roy Grace always hated to acknowledge this to himself –