westerly accompanied by punishing rain that would drum on the empty tables and lash the windows of boutiques filled with mannequins in beachwear, as if mocking anyone who dared to pretend that England ever actually had a summer.
The beating downtown heart of the city, through which they were travelling now, was concentrated in a square mile or so either side of the Palace Pier. There were the tightly packed Regency terraces of Kemp Town, in one of which Janie Stretton had lived; the Lanes, where the antique dealers were centred; and the North Laines district filled with small, trendy shops and tiny town houses, among which was the converted factory building where Cleo Morey had her flat.
Nick Nicholl drove the unmarked Ford Mondeo. Grace sat in the front passenger seat, busily making notes on his Blackberry. Norman Potting was in the back. They were driving down the London Road in the centre of Brighton. At most times of the day or night they would have been crawling along in dense traffic, but early on this Sunday morning, apart from a couple of buses, they virtually had the road to themselves.
Grace checked his watch. Hopefully this interview with Reggie D’Eath would not take long, and he could squeeze a couple of hours out of the day for his god-daughter. Enough to take her to lunch, if not to the giraffes today.
They were passing the Royal Pavilion, the city’s most distinctive landmark, on their right. None of the three men looked at it – it was one of those places that was so familiar it had become all but invisible to them.
The turreted and minareted building in the style of an Indian palace was commissioned by George IV when Prince of Wales, as a seaside shag-palace for his mistress, Maria Fitzherbert, in the late eighteenth century. And as seaside shag-palaces go, nothing quite so grand had probably been built anywhere in the world, ever since.
They stopped at the roundabout at the intersection with the seafront, with the Palace Pier, garish even early on a Sunday morning, opposite them. A leggy blonde in a skirt that barely covered her buttocks crossed in front of them unhurriedly, throwing them a flirty glance and jauntily swinging a bag.
Potting, who had been quiet for some minutes, murmured, ‘Come on, doll. Bend over; show us your growler!’
There was a gap in the traffic, and Nick Nicholl turned left.
‘She’s all right, she is!’ Potting said, turning to watch her out of the rear window.
‘Except
‘Bollocks!’ Potting said.
‘Yes, exactly!’ the DS retorted.
They drove along Marine Parade, past the debris of broken glass and food cartons outside a nightclub, the uber-trendy Van Alen apartment building, then the black and white flinted Regency facades that fronted the imposing crescent of Sussex Square, where, Glenn Branson had told Grace a thousand times, Laurence Olivier had once had a home.
‘You’re talking through your arsehole,’ Potting replied. ‘She was gorgeous!’
‘Big Adam’s apple,’ the DS said. ‘That’s how you tell.’
‘Fuck me,’ Potting said.
‘I’m sure he would have done, if you’d asked nicely.’
‘Shouldn’t be allowed out on the streets looking like that, bloody fudge-packer.’
‘You are so gross, Norman,’ Grace said, turning round. ‘You are quite offensive, you know.’
‘Well I’m sorry, Roy, but I find poofs offensive,’ Potting said. ‘Never understood ’em, never will.’
‘Yes, well, Brighton happens to be the gay capital of the UK,’ Grace said, really irritated with the man. ‘If you have a problem with that you’re either in the wrong job or the wrong city.’ And you’re a complete fucking prat, and I wish you weren’t in my car or in my life, he would have liked to have added, digging in his pocket for some more paracetamol.
On their left they passed terrace after terrace of imposing white Regency houses. On their right were the sails of a dozen yachts, fresh out of the Marina on a Sunday race.
‘So this bloke we’re going to have a chat with,’ Potting said. ‘Reginald D’Eath, is he one of
‘No,’ Nick Nicholl said. ‘He isn’t – he just likes girls – as long as they’re not older than about four.’
‘That’s something I really can’t understand,’ Norman Potting said.
Popping a pill from the foil pack, Grace thought grimly, Great, at last we’ve found something in common.
They drove up a steep hill at the back of Rottingdean, alongside a prep school playing field with a cricket pitch marked out in the centre and two large white screens on rollers, with pleasant detached houses opposite. Then they turned into a street with bungalows on either side. It was the kind of quiet area where anything out of the ordinary would stand out – as the bright yellow Neighbourhood Watch stickers, prominently displayed in each front window, warned.
A good choice of location for a safe house, Grace thought, except for one minor detail that appeared to have been overlooked. Who in their right bloody mind would put a paedophile in a house a few hundred yards away from a school playing field? He shook his head. Didn’t anybody ever think?
‘Is Mr D’Eath expecting us?’ Nicholl asked.
‘With morning coffee and a box of Under Eights, I expect,’ Norman Potting said, following this with a throaty chuckle.
Ignoring the terrible joke, Grace replied, ‘The woman I spoke to from the Witness Protection Agency said they’d left a message for him.’
They pulled up outside Number 29. The 1950s bungalow looked a little more tired than the others in the street, its brown pebbledash rendering in need of repair, and repainting considerably overdue. The small front garden was in poor shape also, reminding Grace that he needed to mow his own lawn some time this weekend – and today was a perfect day for it. But when would he get the chance?
He told Norman Potting to wait in the street, in case Reginald D’Eath hadn’t got the message they were coming and tried to do a runner, then, accompanied by DC Nicholl, he walked up to the front door. It bothered him that the curtains of the front room were still drawn at a quarter to eleven on a Sunday morning. But maybe Mr D’Eath was a late riser? He pressed the plastic bell-push. Dinky chimes rang out inside the house. Then silence.
He waited some moments, then rang again.
Still no response.
Pushing open the letterbox he knelt and called out through it, ‘Hello, Mr D’Eath, it’s Detective Superintendent Grace of Brighton CID!’
Still no response.
Followed by Nicholl, he walked around the side of the house, edging through the narrow gap past the dustbins, and pushed open a high wooden gate. The rear garden was in a much worse state than the front, the lawn weedy and badly overgrown, and the borders a sad riot of bindweed and nettles. He stepped over an upturned plastic watering can, then reached a kitchen door with frosted glass panels, one of which was smashed. Shards of glass lay on the brick path.
He shot a glance at Nick Nicholl, whose dubious frown echoed his own concern. He tried the handle and it opened without resistance.
They entered a time-warp kitchen, with an ancient Lec fridge, drab fake-wood units and Formica work surfaces on which sat a clapped-out-looking toaster and a plastic jug kettle. The remains of a meal sat on a dreary little table – a plate of half-eaten and very congealed eggs and beans and a half-drunk mug of tea – and a magazine, opened at a double-page spread of naked children, was propped against a serving bowl.
‘Jesus,’ Grace commented, disgusted by the magazine. Then he dunked a finger into the tea; it was stone cold. He wiped it on a kitchen towel hanging on a rack, then called out, ‘HELLO! REGINALD D’EATH! THIS IS SUSSEX POLICE! YOU ARE SAFE TO COME OUT! WE ARE JUST HERE TO TALK TO YOU! WE NEED YOU TO HELP US IN AN ENQUIRY!’
Silence.
It was a silence Grace did not like, a silence that crawled all over his skin. There was also a smell he did not like. Not the smell of the stale, tired old kitchen, but a more astringent smell which he knew but could not place – except something in his memory was telling him it definitely did not belong in a house.
He needed D’Eath so badly. He was desperate to talk to him about what he had been looking at on his
