running from the centre of his lower lip down to the centre of his chin and hip rectangular glasses with blue- tinged lenses. He looked more like a media trendy than a scientific boffin.
'New woman in your life?' Grace asked, by way of a greeting.
Tindall looked up at him in surprise. 'Roy, good to see you! Yes, as a matter of fact - who told you that?'
Grace grinned, looking at him more closely, almost expecting to spot an earring as well. 'Young, is she?'
'Actually - yes - how do you know?'
Grace grinned again, staring at his newly shaven pate, his trendy glasses. 'Keeping you young, isn't she?'
Then Tindall understood and grinned sheepishly. 'She's going to kill me, Roy. Three times a night every night.'
'You try three times a night or succeed?'
'Oh, fuck off!' He stared Grace up and down. 'You're looking sharp, for a Saturday. Hot date yourself?'
'A wedding, actually.'
'Congratulations - who's the lucky girl?'
'I have a feeling she's not that lucky,' Grace retorted, placing a small plastic bag containing the earth he had retrieved from Mark Warren's BMW down on the table, next to the shirt. 'I need you to pull out some stops.'
'You always need me to pull out some stops. Everyone does.'
'Not true, Joe. I gave you the Tommy Lytle material and told you there was all the time you need. This is different. I have a missing person - how fast you get this analysed might determine whether he lives or dies.'
Joe Tindall held the bag up and peered at it. He shook it gently, peering at it all the time. 'Quite sandy/ he said.
'What does that tell you?'
'You mentioned Ashdown Forest on the phone?'
'Uhhuh.'
'This might be the kind of soil you'd find there.'
'Might?'
'The UK is knee-deep in sandy soil, Roy. There's sandy soil in Ashdown Forest - but there's sandy soil in a million other places, too.'
'I need an area that's about seven foot long and three foot wide.'
'Sounds like a grave.'
'It is a grave.'
Joe Tindall nodded, peering closely at the earth again. 'You want me to locate a grave in the middle of Ashdown Forest from this little bag of earth?'
'You're catching on.'
The SOCO officer removed his glasses for some moments, as if that would give him clarity of vision, then put them on again. 'Here's the deal, Roy. You locate the grave and I'll get you an analysis on whether this soil matches or doesn't.'
'Actually, I need it to be the other way around.'
Tindall held up the plastic bag. 'I see. Who do you think I am? David Blaine? Derren Brown? I swing this in the air and somehow magic up a grave in the middle of a ten-thousand-hectare forest?'
'You have a problem with that?'
'Actually, yes, I do have a problem with that.'
45
A few hours later, Grace cruised slowly up a steep hill past All Saints' church in Patcham Village, where a certain wedding had been scheduled to happen at two o'clock this afternoon - in exactly three-quarters of an hour.
This was his own personal favourite church in the area. A classic Early English parish church, intimate, simple, with unadorned grey stonework, a small tower, a fine stained-glass window behind the altar and tombstones going back centuries in the overgrown graveyard out the front and along the sides.
The heavy rain had eased to a light drizzle as he sat in his Alfa, parked close to the entrance, on a grass bank opposite the church, giving him a commanding view of all the arrivals. No sign of anyone yet. Just a few pieces of sodden confetti on the wet tarmac, from an earlier wedding, probably this morning.
He watched an elderly woman in a hooded PVC raincoat wheel a shopping basket down the pavement and pause to exchange a few words with a huge man in an anorak with a tiny dog on a leash, who was walking up in the opposite direction. The dog cocked its leg on a lamppost.
A blue Ford Focus pulled up and a man with a couple of cameras slung around his neck climbed out. Grace observed him, wondering whether he was the official wedding photographer, or press. Moments later a small brown Vauxhall pulled up behind it, and a young man in an anorak emerged, carrying a distinctive reporter's notebook. The two men greeted each other and began chatting, both looking around, waiting.
After ten minutes he saw a silver BMW off-roader pull up. Because of its tinted glass windows and the rain, he could not make out who was inside, but he recognized immediately Mark Warren's number plate. Moments later,
