new secret weapon, Detective
Sitting at her immaculate desk, exuding a pungent but unsexy perfume, she was dressed in a black jacket that made her shoulders look massive and an ivory-coloured blouse with a lace collar. Expecting a face of thunder, the Assistant Chief Constable surprised Grace by greeting him with a smile. Unscrewing the cap from a bottle of mineral water, she took a rather dainty sip. ‘Good morning, Roy,’ she said, her voice even more cordial than her smile. She gestured him to take one of the handsome Georgian carver chairs in front of her desk. ‘Have a seat.’
Another good sign? he wondered. She rarely asked him to sit at these meetings. Or was this a very bad sign?
Still smiling, very definitely in sweet rather than sour mode today, she said, ‘So, Operation Nightingale seems to be a bit of a fiasco, so far.’
‘I – I wouldn’t go so-’
She raised a hand to silence his defence. ‘You still have no suspect. You haven’t located the victim’s head. One potential witness has been murdered and two others are missing. And last night, again, your team engaged in a high-speed pursuit which resulted in a serious accident.’ Miraculously she was still smiling, but the warmth had gone and was replaced with apparent bemusement.
Grace nodded. ‘It’s not going our way,’ he said. ‘We need a lucky break.’
She replaced the cap on the bottle. It was a fine morning outside but the room felt dark and oppressive. ‘You are tying up a massive amount of resources. It would be one thing if you could give me a result but all I seem to get is aggravation. Where are we at?’
Grace brought her up to speed. When he had finished, he waited for what he knew was coming: at best she was going to stick Cassian Pewe on this case with him, at worst she was removing him and replacing him with Pewe. To his surprise she did neither.
She pulled a slim black pen from the ammonite holder on her desk and tapped it thoughtfully on her blotter. ‘You haven’t got until nine fifteen tomorrow night, realistically, have you? If these people are going to kill Mr and Mrs Bryce and broadcast it to whoever their
‘I know.’
There was a brief silence. Grace looked down, feeling Vosper’s eyes fixed on him. When he looked up he saw understanding in them. Despite her antipathy to him, she was at least professional enough to recognize – and accept – that the problems he was facing with this case were not necessarily of his making. But he was puzzled that she had not yet mentioned Cassian Pewe. Why was she holding back?
Very hesitantly, he asked, ‘Is… ah… is this meeting with Cassian on? You wanted me to see him this morning.’
‘Actually no, it isn’t,’ she said. Then she began tapping the pen harder and faster on the blotter, without seeming to be aware she was doing this.
‘OK,’ he said, feeling a little relieved, but wondering what had changed her mind. Then he found out.
‘Detective Superintendent Pewe was involved in a road traffic accident last night. He’s in hospital with a fractured leg.’
Not only could Grace barely believe his ears, he could barely believe his eyes, either. She was smiling again. Just the very faintest of smiles, to be fair, but a smile nonetheless. Smiling as she conveyed the information that her protege was in a bad way after a car crash.
‘I’m sorry,’ Grace said. ‘What happened?’
‘He was a passenger in a taxi in the centre of Brighton, late last night. It was in collision with a van being pursued by a police car.’
And the next moment Grace was smiling too; he couldn’t help it. Gallows humour. It got to everyone in this job, eventually.
As he drove away from Alison Vosper’s office, Grace phoned the Royal Sussex County Hospital to find out if the van driver from last night had come round yet. Right now that man was their best hope of getting to the Bryces’ captors.
Just about their only damned hope.
Except for one long shot.
He drove to the Bryces’ house, where DC Linda Buckley had just taken over from DC Willingham. She asked Grace if there was much point in her staying on in the house. After all, there was nothing to do except feed the dog. He suggested she wait a few more hours in case Tom Bryce turned up – which, he thought grimly, was unlikely.
He went upstairs and into the Bryces’ bedroom, then hurried back downstairs. The Alsatian was standing in the hallway giving him a strange look, as if she knew he was the man who could bring her master and mistress home.
Despite his rush, Grace paused for a moment, knelt beside the dog and stroked her forehead. ‘Hi,’ he said. ‘Don’t you worry; I’ll bring them back. Somehow. OK?’ He stared into the dog’s large, brown eyes and felt for an instant, just a fleeting instant, that the fine-looking creature had actually understood what he’d said.
Maybe it was his tiredness, or the stress, or whatever, addling his brain, but as he left the house and drove quickly away, heading for the eastern extremity of the city, the expression on that dog’s face stayed with him, haunting him. She had looked so sad, so full of trust. And for a moment he wasn’t doing any of this just for Mr and Mrs Bryce, and for their children. He was also doing it for their dog.
74
Tom woke with a start, with a blinding headache, badly in need of a pee, thinking there must have been a power cut. It was never this dark, normally; there was always the neon glow of the street lights, tinging the bedroom orange.
And what the hell was he lying on? Rock hard…
And then, as if a sluice had released cold water into his belly, he remembered something indistinct but bad.
Oh shit, bad.
His right arm hurt. He tried to raise it but it would not move. Must have been lying on it, he thought, made it go to sleep. He tried again. Then he realized he couldn’t move his left arm either.
Nor his legs.
Something was digging into his right thigh. His jaw ached and his mouth was parched. He tried to speak and found to his shock he couldn’t. All he could hear was a muffled hum, as he felt the roof of his mouth vibrate. Something was clamped over his mouth, bound tight around his face, pulling his cheeks in. Then a shiver ripped through him as he remembered the words last night. On his computer screen:… get out of the house, take Kellie’s car, head north on the A23 London Road and wait for her to call you…
That’s exactly what he had done. It was coming back now. Driving up the A23. The phone call telling him to pull over into the lay-by.
Now here.
Oh Christ, oh God, oh sweet Jesus Christ, where was he? Where was Kellie? What the hell had he done? Who the hell had-
Light suddenly appeared, an upright rectangle of yellow some distance away. A doorway. A figure coming through it, holding a powerful torch, the beam glinting like a mirror.
Tom held his breath, watching as the figure moved nearer. In the swinging beam of the torch he could see he was in some kind of storeroom stacked with massive plastic and metal drums that looked as if they contained fuel or chemicals.
As the figure came closer, Tom made out a very fat man in a loose-fitting open-necked shirt, his hair gelled back and squeezed into a short pigtail. A large medallion swung on a chain from his neck. There wasn’t enough light to see his face clearly but Tom put him in his late fifties to early sixties.
