by another rise, past the higgledy-piggledy post-war suburban sprawl of Saltdean, then to Peacehaven, near where Glenn Branson lived and where Janie Stretton had died.
He turned off the coast road into a maze of hilly streets crammed with bungalows and small detached houses, and pulled up outside a small, rather neglected bungalow with a decrepit camper van parked outside.
He ended a call to Norman Potting, who seemed well advanced with his search for sulphuric acid suppliers, downed another Red Bull and two more ProPlus, walked up a short path lined with garden gnomes and stepped into a porch, past motionless wind chimes, and rang the doorbell.
A diminutive, wiry man well into his seventies, bearing more than a passing resemblance to several of the gnomes he had just passed, opened the door. He had a goatee beard, long grey hair tied back in a ponytail, wore a kaftan and dungarees, and was sporting an ankh medallion on a gold chain. He greeted Grace effusively in a high-pitched voice, a bundle of energy, taking his hand and staring at him with the joy of a long-lost friend. ‘Detective Superintendent Grace! So good to see you again so soon!’
‘And you, my friend. Sorry I’m so late.’ It was just over a week since Grace had last called on his services – when Frame had undoubtedly helped save an innocent man’s life.
Harry Frame gripped his hand with a strength that belied both his years and his size, and stared up at him with piercing green eyes. ‘So, to what do I owe the pleasure this time? Come in!’
Grace followed him into a narrow hallway lit by a low-wattage bulb in a hanging lantern, and decorated in a nautical theme, the centrepiece of which was a large brass porthole on the wall, and through into a sitting room, the shelves crammed with ships in bottles. There was a drab three-piece suite, the backs draped with antimacassars, a television that was switched off, and a round oak table with four wooden chairs by the window, to which Frame ushered him. On the wall, Grace clocked, as he did on each visit here, a naff print of Anne Hathaway’s cottage and a framed motto which read, ‘A mind once expanded can never return to its original dimensions.’
‘Tea?’
‘I’m fine,’ Grace said, although he could have murdered a cup. ‘I’m in a mega-rush.’
‘Life’s not a race, Detective Superintendent Grace, it’s a dance,’ Harry Frame said in a gently chiding voice.
Grace grinned. ‘I’ll bear that in mind. I’ll put you on my card for a slow waltz at the summer ball.’ He sat down at the table.
‘So?’ Harry said, seating himself opposite. ‘Would you be here by any chance in connection with that poor young woman who was found dead here in Peacehaven last week?’
Harry Frame was a medium and clairvoyant, as well as a pendulum dowser. Grace had been to see the man many times. He could be uncannily accurate – and on other occasions totally useless.
Grace dug his hand in his pocket, pulled out three small plastic evidence bags and laid them on the table in front of Frame. He pointed, first, to the signet ring he had taken from Janie Stretton’s bedroom. ‘What can you tell me about the owner of this?’
Frame removed the ring, clasped it in his hand and closed his eyes. He sat still for a good minute, his wizened face screwed up in concentration.
The room had a musty smell – of old furniture, old carpet, old people.
Finally, Harry Frame shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, Roy. Nothing. Not a good day for me today. No connection with the spirits.’
‘Nothing at all from the ring?’
‘I’m sorry. Could you come back tomorrow? We could try again.’
Grace took the ring back, put it in the plastic bag and pocketed it. Next he pointed in turn to the silver cufflinks he had taken from a drawer in the Bryces’ bedroom and a silver bracelet he had taken from Kellie Bryce’s jewellery box. ‘I need to find the owners of these. I need to find them
The medium left the room, and returned quickly holding an Ordnance Survey map of the Brighton and Hove area. Moving a candle in a glass holder out of the way, he spread it out on the table and pulled a length of string, with a small lead weight attached, from his trouser pocket.
‘Let’s see what we can find,’ he said. ‘Yes, indeed, let’s see.’ He held the bracelet and the cufflinks in his left hand, then, resting his elbows on the table, he inclined his face towards the map and began to chant.
‘Yarummm,’ Frame said to himself. ‘Yarummmm. Brnnnn. Yarummm.’
Then he sat bolt upright, held the string over the map between his forefinger and thumb, and let the lead weight swing backwards and forwards, like a pendulum. After that, pursing his lips in concentration, he swung it vigorously in a tight circle, steadily covering the map inch by inch.
‘Telscombe?’ he said. ‘Piddinghoe? Ovingdean? Kemp Town? Brighton? Hove? Portslade? Southwick? Shoreham?’ He shook his head. ‘No, I’m not being shown anything in this area, sorry.’
‘Can we try a larger scale?’ Grace asked.
Frame went out again and returned with a map covering the whole of East and West Sussex. But again, after several minutes of swinging the weight with fierce concentration, he produced no result.
Grace wanted to pick the man up and shake him. He felt so damned frustrated. ‘Nothing at
The medium shook his head.
‘They’re going to die if I don’t find them.’
Harry Frame handed him back the links and the bracelet. ‘I could try again later. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’
‘This afternoon some time?’
Frame nodded. ‘If you want to leave them with me? I’ll spend all day; I’ll keep working on it.’
‘Thank you, I’d appreciate it,’ Grace replied. He was clutching at straws, he knew, as he left with a heavy heart.
76
After the eight thirty briefing, Jon Rye had spent two and three-quarter hours working on the laptop that had been taken from the wrecked Ford Transit. But it was defeating him.
At twenty past eleven, feeling drained and frustrated, he went out of the department to get himself a coffee from the vending machine, then returned, deep in thought. With any computer he could normally find a way around any password protection by using forensic software to go in via a back door and then through the computer’s entire internet history. But on this machine he was drawing a blank.
He held his security card to the door panel of the High Tech Crime Unit, then entered and crossed what he had jokingly christened the hamster’s cage, the caged area housing the child pornography investigation, Operation Glasgow, nodding to a couple of the six people poring over their screens who glanced up at him, and walked through into the main part of his department.
Andy Gidney and the rest of his team were at their desks, well stuck into their day’s work. He sat back down at his desk, the laptop itself secure in the Evidence Room, its cloned hard disk loaded into his computer.
Although he had been head of this unit for the past three years, Rye was smart enough to know his own limitations. He had been retrained from Traffic. Several of the younger members of his team were techies from the ground up, university graduates who had lived and breathed computers from their cradles. Andy Gidney was the best of the lot. If there was one person in here who could persuade this laptop to yield its secrets, it was Gidney.
He ejected the cloned hard drive from his processor tower, stood up and walked across to Gidney’s workstation. Gidney was still working on cracking the pass code on an online banking scam. ‘Andy, I need you to drop everything for the next few hours and help me out on this. We have two lives at stake.’
‘Ummm,’ Gidney said. ‘The thing is, I’m quite close now.’
‘Andy, I don’t care how close you are.’
‘But if I stop, I could lose this whole sequence! Here’s the thing!’ Gidney swivelled his chair to face Rye, his eyes burning with excitement. ‘I think I’m just one digit away!’
