cellophane folder, looking triumphant.
‘Why do people always pick such bleedin’ awful places to get murdered or dumped in?’ he said, leaning forward and exhaling directly into Roy’s face.
Trying not to wince as a blast furnace of hot and rancid smells enveloped him, Roy decided that this was probably what being breathed on by a dragon would be like. ‘Maybe you should draw up some guidelines,’ he said testily. ‘A fifty-point code of practice for murder victims to abide by.’
Subtlety had never been Norman Potting’s strong point and it took him a moment now to realize that the Detective Superintendent was being sarcastic. Then he broke into a grin, showing a mouthful of stained, crooked teeth, like tombstones on subsiding ground.
He raised a finger. ‘I’m rather slow this morning, Roy. Had a bit of a night last night. Li was like a bloody tiger!’
Potting had recently ‘acquired’ a Thai bride and constantly regaled anyone in earshot with details of his new-found prowess in bed with her.
Heading off the subject rapidly, Grace pointed at the cellophane folder. ‘You got the plans?’
‘Four times last night, Roy! And she’s a dirty cow – do anything! Phoawwww! She makes me a very happy man!’
‘Good.’
For a brief moment, Grace actually felt pleased for him. Potting had never had a lot of luck in his love life. He was a veteran of three marriages, with several children he had once admitted, ruefully, that he rarely saw. The youngest was a girl with Down’s syndrome whom he had tried and failed to get custody of. He wasn’t a bad or a stupid person, Roy knew – he was a very competent detective – but he lacked the social skills essential to rising any higher in the force, should he want to. Still, Norman Potting was a solid and dependable workhorse, with sometimes surprising initiative, and those aspects of him were far more important in any major inquiry, in his view.
‘You should consider it yourself, Roy.’
‘Consider what?’
‘Getting a Thai bride. Hundreds of them gagging for an English husband. I’ll give you the website – they are bloody wonderful, I tell you. They cook, clean, do all your ironing, give you the best sex of your life – lovely little bodies-’
‘The plans?’ Grace said, ignoring the last remark.
‘Ah, yes.’
Potting shook several large photocopies of street maps, grids and section drawings out of the folder and spread them over the table. Some of them dated back to the nineteenth century.
Wind rocked the van. Outside, somewhere in the distance, an emergency service siren sounded and then faded away. The rain drummed steadily on the roof.
Plans had never been something that Roy found easy to follow, so he let Potting talk him through the complexities of Brighton and Hove’s drainage system, using the paperwork and briefing which had been given to him by a corporation engineer earlier this morning. The DS ran a grimy-nailed finger across, down, then up each of the drawings in turn, showing how the water ran, always downhill, eventually out into the sea.
Roy tried hard to keep up with him, but half an hour on he was little wiser than he had been before he started. It seemed to him that it all added up to the fact that the weight of the dead woman’s body had jammed her in the silt, while anything else would have been washed down the drain, into the trap and out to sea.
Potting concurred with him.
Grace’s phone rang again. Excusing himself, he answered it, and his heart immediately sank as he heard the dentist’s-drill voice of freshly appointed Detective Superintendent Cassian Pewe. The slimeball from the Met his boss had brought in to eat his lunch.
‘Hello, Roy,’ Pewe said. Even distanced by a phone connection, Grace had the impression that Pewe’s smug, pretty-boy face was pressed claustrophobically up against his own. ‘Alison Vosper suggested I give you a call – to see if you needed a hand.’
‘Well, that’s very kind of you, Cassian,’ he replied. ‘But no, actually, the body’s intact – I’ve got both of her hands here.’
There was a silence. Pewe made a sound like a man who has started to urinate against an electric fence. A kind of stilted laughter. ‘Oh, very funny, Roy,’ he patronized. Then, after an awkward silence, he added, ‘You’ve got all the SOCOs and search officers you need?’
Grace felt a band tighten inside him. Somehow he restrained himself from telling the man to go and find something else to do with his Saturday. ‘Thank you,’ he said instead.
‘Good. Alison will be pleased. I’ll let her know.’
‘Actually, I’ll let her know,’ Grace said. ‘If I need your help I will ask her, but at the moment we are all managing very well. And – I thought you weren’t actually starting until Monday.’
‘Oh, absolutely, Roy, that’s correct. Alison just felt that helping you out over the weekend might be a good way to get my eye in.’
‘I appreciate her concern,’ Grace managed to say before he hung up, boiling with rage.
‘Detective Superintendent Pewe?’ Potting asked him, with raised eyebrows.
‘You’ve met him?’
‘Aye, met him. Know his type. Give a pompous ass like him enough rope and he’ll hang himself. Never fails.’
‘Got any rope on you?’ Grace asked.
18
Ronnie Wilson had lost all track of time. He just stood still, transfixed, holding the handle of his bag as if it was his crutch, watching something he could not comprehend unfolding before his eyes.
Stuff was tumbling out of the sky on to the plaza and the surrounding streets. Raining from the sky. A never-ending downpour of masonry, office partitions, desks, chairs, glass, pictures, framed photographs, sofas, computer screens, keyboards, filing cabinets, waste bins, lavatory seats, washbasins, paper like letter-sized white confetti. And bodies. Bodies falling. Men and women who were alive in the air one moment, exploding and disintegrating as they landed. He wanted to turn away, to scream, to run, but it was as if a massive leaden finger was pressing down on his head, forcing him to stand still, to observe in numb silence.
He felt that he was watching the end of the world.
It seemed that every fireman and every police officer in New York was running into the Twin Towers. An endless stream entering, barging past the endless stream of bewildered men and women leaving at half-speed, staggering out as if from some other world, covered in dust, dishevelled, some with their arms or faces tracked with blood, contorted by shock. Many of them had mobiles pressed to their ears.
Then came the earthquake. Just a gentle vibration beneath his feet to start with, then more vigorous, so that he really had to grip the handle of his bag hard for support. And suddenly the zombies emerging from the South Tower seemed to wake up and quicken their pace.
They started running.
Ronnie looked up and saw the reason why. But for a moment he thought it must be a mistake. This was not possible! It was an optical illusion. It had to be.
The entire building was collapsing in on itself, like a house of cards, except-
A police car a short distance in front of him was suddenly flattened.
Then a fire engine was flattened too.
A cloud of dust like a desert sandstorm rolled towards him. He heard thunder. Rolling, rumbling, surround-sound thunder.
A whole stream of people disappeared under masonry.
The dark grey cloud was rising in the air like a storm of furious insects.
The thunder was numbing his ears.
This was not possible.
The fucking tower was coming down.
People sprinting for their lives. A woman lost a shoe, continued limping along on one foot, then shed the other shoe. A terrible tearing sound in the air, drowning out the sirens, as if some giant monster was ripping the world in half with its claws.
They were running past him. One person, then another, and another, their faces etched into masks of panic. Some were sheet-white masks, some were dripping water from sprinkler systems, some dripping blood or showering slivers of glass. Bit-part players in a weird early-morning carnival.
A BMW suddenly jumped in the air, yards from where he stood, and came down on its roof minus its front end. Then he saw the black cloud rising, tumbling straight towards him like a tidal wave.
Gripping the handle of his bag, he turned and followed them. Not knowing where he was going, he just ran, putting one foot in front of the other, towing his bag, not sure, not even caring, whether his briefcase was still on top. Running to keep ahead of the black cloud, of the falling tower that he could hear, thundering, rumbling in his ears, in his heart, in his soul.
Running for his life.
19
By now the lift seemed alive, like some preternatural creature. When Abby breathed, it sighed, creaked, moaned. When she moved, it swayed, twisted, rocked. Her mouth and throat were parched; her tongue and the inside of her mouth felt like blotting paper, instantly absorbing any tiny drop of saliva she produced.
A cold, persistent draught was blowing on her face. She fumbled in the darkness for the cursor button on her phone, then pressed it to activate the light on the display. She did this every few minutes, to check whether there was any signal and to bring a small but desperately welcome ray of light into her unstable, swaying prison cell.
No signal.
The time on the display read 1.32 p.m.
She tried dialling 999 yet again. But the feeble signal had gone.
With a shiver, she again read the text that had come through:
