that beneath her hard carapace Alison Vosper was still human.
‘So we have three possibles among the women reported missing in the past few days?’ she said. Her accent was a flat Midlands Brummie, which made her sound even harder.
‘Yes, and we’ve couriered material collected from their homes up to Huntingdon for DNA analysis – I’ve called in a favour there. We’ll get a match sometime today.’
‘And if there is no match?’
‘We’ll have to go wider.’
Her phone rang. She pressed a button, held it down and snapped, ‘I’m busy.’ Then she looked up at the Detective Superintendent again. ‘You know there’s a lot riding on this for you, Roy?’
He shrugged. ‘More than any other case?’
She gave him a long, hard, silent look. ‘I think we both know that.’
Grace frowned, unsure what was coming next and uncomfortable at her words.
She twisted her gold wedding band around on her finger for a moment, and it seemed to soften her. ‘You’ve been lucky, spending your career so far in one area, Roy. A lot of police officers have to move around, constantly, if they want to get promotion. Like me. Birmingham’s my home, but I’ve spent just three years in my whole career in Brum. I’ve been all over the place – Northumberland, Ipswich, Bristol, Southampton. It’s different to your dad’s day. He spent all his career with the force in Brighton, didn’t he?’
‘If you include Worthing as well.’
She gave a thin smile. Worthing was only a few miles down the coast. Then her demeanour hardened again. ‘Your father was a well-loved and respected man, so I am told. But it doesn’t seem to many people that you are your father’s son.’
She left the words hanging in the air. Roy felt them like a sting in his heart. It was as if he had been lanced and his energy was now leaking out. He stared back at her, confused and suddenly feeling very vulnerable indeed. ‘I – I know I have my critics,’ he said, and he was aware, too late, how lame that sounded.
She shook her head, then this time pulled her wedding band right off, holding it out in front of her, as if symbolizing that nothing was permanent, that she could flick him out of her life as easily as she could flick the gold band into a bin. ‘It’s not your critics I’m worried about, Roy. The Chief is worried about the damage you’ve done to Sussex Police. You nearly caused a mistrial a couple of weeks ago by taking a piece of evidence to a medium – and you got splashed all over the nation’s headlines as a result, making you and us a laughing stock. You’ve lost a lot of respect among colleagues for dabbling in the supernatural. Then you allowed two suspects to get killed during a pursuit.’
Grace tried to interrupt, thinking she was being totally unreasonable, but she raised a hand, blocking him.
‘Now we’re forty-eight hours into a murder enquiry, you can’t name the victim, you don’t have a suspect; all you have is the life history of a damned beetle found at the scene.’
Now he was getting angry. ‘I’m sorry; this is just not fair, and you know it.’
‘This is not about what’s fair, Roy; this is about the police being seen to be competent, protecting the public.’
‘Those two who died in the car – they were guilty as hell, and they were dangerous. They’d driven through roadblocks, they hijacked two cars, they knocked an officer off his motorcycle. Would you rather we had just let them go?’ He shook his head in exasperation.
‘What I’m saying to you, Roy, is that it might be better to move you to an area where you aren’t known. Up north somewhere, perhaps. Somewhere busy that can use your skills. Somewhere like Newcastle. I’ve been asked by one of my colleagues there for the services of an experienced SIO for a sensitive investigation that could take several months, maybe a year. And I think you are the right person for that.’
‘You’ve got to be joking. This is my home. I don’t want to be transferred anywhere. I’m not even sure I’d want to stay in the force if that happened.’
‘Then pull yourself together and make sure it doesn’t. I’m drafting in another officer to share your cold-case workload as I don’t think you are making as much progress there as you should. He’s a former Detective Inspector from the Met, and we’ve promoted him to the same rank as you.’
‘Do I know him?’
‘His name is Cassian Pewe.’
Grace thought for a moment, then groaned inwardly. Detective Inspector Cassian Pewe, now to be Detective Superintendent Cassian Pewe. Grace had had a run-in with him a couple of years ago, when the Met had sent in reinforcements to help police Brighton during the Labour Party conference. He remembered him as deeply arrogant. ‘He’s coming here?’
‘He starts on Monday. He’ll be working out of an office here. Do you have a problem with that?’
Yes, he wanted to say, his brain spinning. Of course, teacher’s pet. Where else would she station him? Here was perfect, so that she and Pewe could have regular cosy chats – about how and where to undermine pain-in- the-arse Roy Grace.
But he had no choice but to say, ‘No.’
‘Your card is marked, Roy. OK?’
He felt so choked he could only nod his reply. Then his phone rang. She signalled for him to answer it.
He stepped away from her desk and looked at the display. It was from the Major Incident Suite. ‘Roy Grace,’ he answered.
It was DC Nicholl, calling him excitedly to tell him they had heard back from the lab at Huntingdon. They had a positive DNA match for the body.
24
‘I can’t believe your music, man,’ Branson said. ‘It’s crap, it’s just total crap. There’s no other word for it.’
They were on a long stretch of downhill dual carriageway heading west, past the grassy expanse of the old World War II fighter base, down to their left, that had now become Shoreham Airport, a busy base for private aircraft and commercial flights to the Channel Islands, and in the direction of Southampton.
Shoreham was the extreme western suburb of Brighton, and Grace always felt a strange mixture of relief and loss when he left it behind him. Loss, because Brighton was where he really felt at home, and anywhere else felt like uncharted waters where he was out of his depth, a little insecure. And relief, because all the time he was in the Brighton and Hove City conurbation he felt a sense of responsibility, and away from it he could relax.
After his years in the force it was his second nature to subconsciously assess every pedestrian and the occupants of every car on the street. He knew most of the local villains, certainly all of the street drug dealers, and some of the muggers and burglars; knew when they were in the right place and when in the wrong place. That was one of the things so ridiculous about Alison Vosper’s threat to transfer him. A lifetime of knowledge and contacts down the pan.
Roy Grace had decided to drive, because his nerves wouldn’t take another journey with Branson showing off his high-speed pursuit skills. Now he wasn’t sure his nerves could take any more of the Detective Sergeant’s poking about with the CD player. But Branson wasn’t finished with him yet.
‘The
‘Me, I like them,’ Grace said defensively. ‘Your problem is you can’t differentiate between loud noise and good music.’ He brought the Alfa Romeo to a stop at a red light, the junction with the Lancing College road. He had decided to take his own car because it hadn’t had a long run in a while and the battery needed a good charge. More importantly, if he had taken a pool car, Branson would probably have insisted on driving and been hurt if he hadn’t let him.
‘That’s well funny, coming from you,’ Branson said. ‘You just don’t get music!’ Then suddenly changing the subject, he pointed at a pub across the road. ‘The Sussex Pad. Do good fish there, went there with Ari. Yeah, it was good.’ Then he turned his attention back to the CD player. ‘Dido!’
‘What’s wrong with Dido?’
Branson shrugged. ‘Well, if you like that kind of thing, I suppose. I hadn’t realized how sad you were.’
‘Yeah, well I do like that kind of thing.’
