come across.
Next to her sat Detective Constable Nick Nicholl, in his late twenties, short-haired and tall as a beanpole, a zealous detective and a fast football forward who Grace was encouraging to take up rugby, thinking he would be perfect to play in the police team he had been asked to be president of this coming autumn.
Opposite him, reading her way through a thick wodge of computer printout, was rookie DC Emma-Jane Boutwood. A pretty young woman with long blonde hair and a perfect figure, Grace had initially thought her a lightweight when she had first joined his team on the last case. But she had rapidly proved herself a feisty officer, and he had a feeling she had a brilliant future in the force, if she stayed.
‘So?’ Glenn Branson said. ‘I’ve changed my hunch. How do I convince you my new hunch is right? Teresa Wallington.’
‘Who she?’ Grace asked.
‘A Peacehaven girl. Engaged. Never turned up to her engagement party last night.’
The words twisted something cold deep inside Grace. ‘Tell me.’
‘I spoke to her fiance. He’s real.’
‘I don’t know,’ Grace said. His instincts told him it was too soon, but he did not want to dampen Glenn Branson’s enthusiasm. He studied the photographs of the crime scene on the wall, which had been rushed through at his request. He looked at a close-up of the severed hand, then the grisly shots of the butchered torso in the black bag.
‘Trust me, Roy.’
Still looking at the photographs, Grace said, ‘Trust you?’
‘There you go doing it again!’ Branson said.
‘Doing what?’ Grace asked, puzzled.
‘Doing what you always do to me, man. Answering with a question.’
‘That’s because I never understand what the hell you are on about!’
‘Bulllllll-shit!’
‘How many missing women do we have who are not yet eliminated?’
‘No change from yesterday. Still five. From a reasonable radius of our area. More if we include nationwide.’
‘No word from the lab on the DNA yet?’ Grace asked.
‘Tonight, by six o’clock, they hope they’ll know whether the victim is on their database,’ DC Boutwood interjected.
Grace glanced at his watch. Fifteen minutes then he needed to go straight on to the mortuary. He did some quick mental arithmetic. According to Frazer Theobald’s best guess in the field yesterday, the woman had been dead for less than twenty-four hours. It was not uncommon for someone to go AWOL for one day. But two days would start causing real concern among friends, relatives and work colleagues. Today was likely to be productive in at least establishing a shortlist of who the victim might be.
Addressing DC Nicholl he said, ‘Have we got a cast of the footprints?’
‘It’s being done.’
‘Being done is not good enough,’ Grace said a little testily. ‘I said at this morning’s briefing I wanted two officers out with casts, going round outdoor clothing stores in the area seeing if there’s a match. Chances are someone bought boots for the occasion. If they did, they may be on a CCTV camera. There can’t be that many stores that sell heavy-duty boots in the area – make sure I have a report for our sixty thirty p.m. briefing.’
DC Nicholl nodded and immediately picked up his phone.
‘It’s the second day she hasn’t contacted him,’ Branson pressed.
‘Who?’ Grace said distractedly.
‘Teresa Wallington. She’s living with her fiance. There doesn’t sound like any reason why she failed to turn up.’
‘And the other four on our list?’
‘None of those have been seen today either,’ he admitted grudgingly.
Although thirty-one, Branson had only been a cop for six years, after a somewhat false start in life as a nightclub bouncer.
Grace liked him a lot; he was smart and caring, and he had great hunches. Hunches were important in police work but they had a downside – they could lead officers to jump to conclusions too quickly, without properly analysing other possibilities, and then subconsciously select evidence to fit their hunch. Sometimes Grace had to curb Branson’s enthusiasm for his own good.
But at this moment it wasn’t just Branson’s hunch on the case that Grace needed him for. It was on something distinctly extracurricular.
‘Want to take a drive to the mortuary with me?’
Branson stared at him with raised eyebrows. ‘Shit, man, is that where you take all your dates?’
Grace grinned. Branson was closer to the mark than he realized.
15
Tom Bryce was seated in a long, narrow ground-floor boardroom in a small office block on an industrial estate close to Heathrow airport – so close that the jumbo he could see out of the window seemed to be on a flight path that would land it slap in the middle of this room. It screamed overhead, flaps lowered, wheels down, passing over the roof like the shadow of a giant fish, with what seemed like inches to spare.
The room was tacky. It had brown suede walls decorated with framed posters of horror and science fiction films, a twenty-seater bronze meeting table that looked as if it had been looted from a Tibetan temple, and extremely uncomfortable high-back chairs, no doubt designed to keep meetings short.
His customer, Ron Spacks, was a former rock promoter, wheezy and nudging sixty. Sporting a toupee that looked as if it hadn’t been put on properly and teeth that were far too immaculate for his age and his substance- ravaged face, Spacks sat opposite Tom, dressed in a very faded and threadbare Grateful Dead T-shirt, jeans and sandals, sifting through the BryceRight catalogue and muttering ‘Yeah’ to himself every few moments when he alighted on something of interest.
Tom sipped his beaker of coffee and waited patiently. Gravytrain Distributing was one of the largest DVD distributors in the country. The gold medallion around Ron Spacks’s neck, the rhinestone rings on his fingers, the black Ferrari in the lot outside, all testified to his success.
Spacks, as he had proudly told Tom on previous occasions, had started with a stall off the Portobello Road, flogging second-hand DVDs when no one even knew what DVDs were. Tom had little doubt that much of the man’s empire had been founded on pirated merchandise, but he was in no state to make moral choices about his customers. In the past Spacks had ordered large, and always paid on the nail.
‘Yeah,’ Spacks said. ‘You see, Tom, my customers don’t want nothing fancy. What you got new this year?’
‘CD beer mats – on page forty-two, I think. You can have them overprinted.’
Spacks turned to the page. ‘Yeah,’ he said, in a tone of voice that said quite the reverse. ‘Yeah,’ he repeated. ‘So how much would a hundred thousand cost – get ’em down to a quid, could yer?’
Tom felt lost without his computer. It was at the office, once more being resuscitated by Chris Webb. All the costings for his products were on that machine, and without them he daren’t start discounting – particularly on a potential order of this size.
‘I’ll have to get back to you. I can email you later today.’
‘Have to be a quid max, yeah,’ Spacks said, and popped open a can of Coke. ‘I’m really looking for close to seventy pence.’
Tom’s mobile rang. Glancing at the display he saw it was Kellie and pressed to terminate the call.
Seventy pence was no go, he knew that for sure – they cost him more than that – but he decided not to tell Spacks for the moment. ‘I think that would be tight,’ he said tactfully.
‘Yeah. Tell you something else I’m interested in. About twenty-five gold Rolexes, yeah.’
