Grace smiled at her. ‘We’re done, thanks.’ He put an arm around Branson, feeling the soft suede of his bomber jacket.
‘You know the irony?’ the Detective Sergeant said. ‘I told you, didn’t I? I joined the force so my kids could be proud of me. Now I’m not even allowed to kiss them goodnight.’
Grace drank some more whisky and took another drag on his cigarette. It still tasted good, but not so good as before. ‘Matey, you know the law. She can’t stop you.’
He stared at the long wooden counter of the bar. At the upturned bottles and the optics beyond; at the empty bar stools and the empty tables around them. It had been a long day. Hard to believe he’d had lunch beside a lake in Munich.
‘You,’ Glenn Branson said suddenly. ‘I didn’t even ask you how it went. What happened?’
‘Nothing,’ he replied. ‘Nothing.’
‘Don’t do what I did, Roy. Don’t screw it all up. You’ve got a good thing going with Cleo. Cherish her. She’s well lovely.’
Cleo was smashed when he got to the wrought-iron gates of her townhouse, shortly after half past eleven.
‘Need your help,’ she said through the intercom. ‘God, I’m pisshed!’
The electronic lock opened with a sharp click, like a pistol being cocked. Grace went in, walking across stone slabs that were lit by a faint neon glow, towards Cleo’s house. As he neared the front door, it opened. Cleo was standing there, beside what looked like the upturned shell of a giant, mutant blue crab.
She turned her cheek towards him as he attempted to kiss her on the lips, signalling through her inebriated state that she was still angry with him. ‘The hard top for my MG. Some bastard slashed my roof open today. Can you help me put the hard top on?’
He could not remember ever lifting anything so heavy in his life. ‘You OK?’ he asked, grunting repeatedly as they staggered out into the street with it. He was disappointed by her frostiness.
‘Much lighter than a body!’ she replied breezily, then nearly fell over sideways.
They walked down the dark, silent street, past his Alfa Romeo, until they reached her MG, then they put it down. Grace looked at the clean slit in her roof.
‘Bastards!’ he said. ‘Where was it done?’
‘At the mortuary this afternoon. No point getting it repaired. It will just happen again.’
With an unsteady hand she fumbled with the key fob, then unlocked the car, climbed inside and lowered the soft roof. Struggling, sweating, cursing, they proceeded to manoeuvre the hard top into place.
All their concentration was taken up by the task in hand. Neither Roy Grace nor Cleo Morey noticed the figure standing in the shadow of an alley a short distance away, watching them with a smile of satisfaction.
69
Roy Grace began his Monday morning with a seven-thirty meeting in his office with DI Kim Murphy, DCI Brendan Duigan, Crime Scene Manager Joe Tindall and Glenn Branson. He was heaping as much responsibility on his friend as possible to take his mind off his domestic problems. Eleanor, his Management Support Assistant, was also there. Duigan agreed to schedule his morning and evening briefing meetings half an hour apart from Murphy’s, so that Grace could preside over both, but for this morning they would combine them, to give both teams a complete overview of events to date.
Shortly before eight Grace went to get his second coffee of the morning. Returning to his office, he downloaded from his mobile phone the three photographs he had taken yesterday of the blonde German woman in the Englischer Garten, then typed an email to Dick Pope, who would be back at work today.
Then he checked the photographs. A full-on shot of her face and one of each profile. All in reasonable close- up. He sent them.
Next he fired off a quick email, with the same photographs, to Marcel Kullen. He had already shown them to him on the tiny screen of his mobile, but they would be clearer on his computer screen. Then he opened the incident serials and ran his eye down the overnight incidents log. Sunday nights tended to be quiet, apart from the roads in summer, with day trippers tired, and some boozed up, heading home. There were a number of minor RTAs, some street crimes, car crimes, a domestic in Patcham, a hit-and-run involving an elderly pedestrian, a break-in at an angling club and a fight in a restaurant among the dozens of incidents he scanned. Nothing immediately apparent that was relevant to Katie Bishop’s death or Sophie Harrington’s.
He sent another couple of emails, then collected the agenda for the eight-thirty briefing from Eleanor, and headed along the corridors to the conference room, where the combined team numbered over forty.
He began by welcoming everybody and explaining, particularly for the benefit of the new team, the structure of the investigation. He told them
