27
A community support officer, barely distinguishable from a uniformed constable, stood outside the front door of the building in Kemp Town where Janie Stretton had rented her flat, with a clipboard, logging all the people who entered and left the building. By contrast with the – albeit faded – grandeur of her father’s house, this street with its run-down terraced houses, kaleidoscope of estate agents’ boards, overstuffed rubbish bins, modest cars and vans, was real student bedsit land.
In the nineteenth century, Kemp Town had been aloof from Brighton, a posh Regency enclave of grand houses, built on a hill crested by the racecourse, with fine views out across the Channel. But gradually, during the latter half of the following century, with the construction of council estates and tower blocks and an increasing blurring of the boundary, Kemp Town became infected by the same seedy, tatty aura that had long corroded Brighton.
Parked at the far end of the street and sticking out much too much, Grace could see the tall, square, truck- sized hulk of the Major Incident Vehicle. He squeezed his Alfa Romeo into a space between two cars just past it, then walked back along the street with Branson, both men carrying their holdalls.
It was just before three o’clock, and Grace had stomach ache from having gobbled down two prawn sandwiches, a Mars bar and a Coke in the car on the way back from Janie’s father. He’d been surprised he’d had any appetite at all after delivering the grim news, and even more so that he had actually felt ravenous – as if somehow in eating he was reaffirming life. Now the food was biting back.
A blustery, salty wind was blowing and the sky was clouding over. Gulls circled overhead, cawing and wailing; a Mishon Mackay
The city had changed so much, even in his brief lifetime. He could remember, as a child, when streets like this were the domain of Brighton’s seaside landladies. Now, after a couple of decades in the hands of property speculators, they were all chopped up into bedsits and low-rent student flats – cash paid, heavies sent round to collect the rent. And if anything went wrong, maybe you’d get it fixed, eventually, if you were lucky.
Sometimes, on a wet Sunday, Grace loved to go into the local museum and look at the prints and watercolours of Brighton in a bygone age, in the days of the old chain pier and hansom cabs, when men walked along in silk top hats wielding silver-handled canes. He used to wonder for some moments what life must have been like in those days, and then he would remember his father telling him how his dentist used to pedal the drill by foot. And suddenly he was glad he lived in the twenty-first century, despite all modern society’s ills.
‘Penny for your thoughts,’ Glenn Branson said.
‘I like this part of Brighton,’ Grace said.
Branson looked at him, surprised. ‘You do? I think it’s skanky.’
‘You’ve got no appreciation of beauty.’
‘This part of town reminds me of that movie
‘Yes, I remember. And I read the novel,’ Grace said, for once trumping him.
‘It was a
‘Christ, what stone did you crawl out from under?’ Grace said. ‘Graham Greene. It was one of his most famous novels. Published in the 1940s.’
‘Yeah, well that explains it, old timer. Your generation!’
‘Yeah, yeah! You give me all this crap about knowing so much about movies, but you’re just a philistine at heart.’
Branson stopped for a moment and pointed at a boarded-up window, then at the salt-burned paintwork above and below it, and then at the crumbling plasterwork. ‘What’s to love about that?’
‘The architecture. The
‘Yeah, well I used to work at a nightclub around the corner, and I never found any soul here. Just an endless line of fuckwits out of their trees on E.’
They reached the bespectacled community support officer outside the front door and showed him their warrant cards. He dutifully wrote their names down on his log in the slowest handwriting Grace had ever seen. CSOs had been introduced to ease the workload of officers. They had been nicknamed plastic policemen and were perfect for duties such as this.
‘You go up to the second floor,’ he said helpfully. ‘The stairwell and access have been checked – they haven’t found anything forensically appropriate.’ He talked as if he were running the show, Grace thought, privately amused.
Entering the front, the place reminded Grace of every low-rent building he had ever been in: the balding carpet on the floor, junk mail spilling out of the pigeonholes, the tired paintwork and peeling wallpaper, the smell of boiled cabbage, the padlocked bicycle in the hallway, the steep, narrow staircase.
A strip of blue, yellow and white Sussex Police crime scene tape was fixed across the door of the flat. Grace and Branson pulled their white protective suits out of their holdalls, put them on, then their gloves, overshoes and hoods. Then Branson rapped on the door.
It was opened after some moments by Joe Tindall, clad in the same protective attire as themselves. It didn’t matter how many times Grace saw SOCOs at work, their hooded white outfits always reminded him of secret government officials cleaning up after an alien invasion. And no matter how many times he had seen Joe Tindall in recent days, he could not get over his colleague’s recent makeover.
‘God, we really get to meet in the best of places, don’t we, Roy?’ Tindall said by way of a greeting.
‘I like to spoil my team,’ Grace replied with a grin.
‘So we’ve noticed.’
They went into a small hallway, and Tindall closed the door behind them. Another figure in white was on his hands and knees, inspecting the skirting board. Grace noticed that a radiator had been unbolted from the wall. By the time they had finished in here, every radiator would be off, half the floorboards would be prised up, and even parts of the wallpaper would have been removed.
A band of sticky police tape had been laid in a straight line down the centre of the hall, as the path for everyone to keep to. Tindall was meticulous at preserving crime scenes.
‘Anything of interest?’ Grace asked, glancing down at a ginger and white cat which had wandered out to look at him.
Tindall gave him a slightly strange look. ‘Depends what you call of interest? Bloodstains on a bedroom carpet that someone’s tried to scrub off. Spots of blood on the wall and ceiling. Car keys to a Mini outside. We’ve taken that in on a transporter – I don’t want anyone driving it and contaminating it.’
‘Good thinking.’ Immediately Grace logged that Janie Stretton clearly had not driven to meet her killer. At least that eliminated one enquiry line. He knelt and stroked the cat for a moment. ‘We’ll get someone to take you to your granddad,’ he said.
Tindall gave him that strange look again. ‘Follow me.’
‘You must be Bins,’ Grace said to the cat, remembering Derek Stretton mentioning the cat.
It miaowed at him.
‘Anyone fed this?’
‘There’s one of those automatic feeder things in the kitchen,’ Tindall said.
Roy Grace followed the SOCO officer. In contrast to the exterior of the building and the shabbiness of the common parts, Janie Stretton’s flat was spacious, in very good order and tastefully if cheaply decorated. The hall and the living room off it had polished wood floors thrown with white rugs, and all the curtains and soft furnishing covers were also white, with the hard furniture a shiny lacquered black, except for six perspex chairs around the dining table. On the walls were black and white photographs, a couple of them quite erotic nudes, Grace
