‘Your fame as a seafarer goes before you.’
‘Did you ever see that film,
Grace frowned.
‘Russell Crowe.’
He nodded. ‘Yep. Saw it.’
‘That’s how I feel. Like I’m one of his crew who took a cannonball in the stomach.’
‘Listen, mate. Ari may be hacked off with you, but that doesn’t give her automatic rights to screw your life up.’
‘You’re wrong. Shit, do you remember
‘Meryl Streep?’
Glenn Branson smiled for a fleeting instant. ‘Fuck, I’m impressed. Two films in a row I’ve mentioned that you’ve actually seen! Yeah, Meryl Streep and Dustin Hoffman. Well, that’s about my situation.’
‘Except you’re not as good-looking as Dustin Hoffman.’
‘You know how to kick a man when he’s down, don’t you?’
‘In the nuts. It’s the only place.’
Branson peeled off his mac. ‘So, right, the other letter is the divorce petition from the court. You can’t believe this, man, you can’t fucking believe what she is saying!’
The Detective Sergeant slung his mac over his arm, held out his fingers and began counting them off. ‘She says there is an irretrievable breakdown, OK? She’s alleging unreasonable behaviour by me. That I’m not interested in sex any more. That I’m drinking excessively – yeah, well, that’s true, she’s driving me to fucking drink, right? She’s citing
He dug his hand inside his mackintosh and pulled out several sheets of folded paper, clipped together. Reading from the top one, he said, ‘Apparently I refuse to join in with the family. I shout at her when we are in a car together. I keep her short of money – shit, I bought her a fucking horse! And get this – apparently I don’t appreciate how Ari looks after our children.’ He shook his head. ‘That’s rich, that is! What am I supposed to do? Tell everyone, Sorry, I know this is a murder inquiry, but I have to get home and bath Remi?’
The words gave Roy Grace a sudden chill. He suddenly realized that’s exactly where he was going to be when his child was born. It was normal for him to be in his office by seven in the morning, if not even earlier. And not to get home until eight, or even later. When his child was born, could he change those hours?
Not without harming his career.
He looked at Glenn, stared into his questioning eyes. And he knew the answer was one that the DS was not going to like. To be a good police officer was to be married to the force. For those thirty years until you collected your pension – and longer now, if you wanted – your work would come first. You were a lucky person if your spouse or partner accepted that. A tragically large number, like Glenn’s wife, Ari, did not.
‘You know the problem?’ Grace said.
Branson shook his head.
‘She’s probably right. A little insensitive, sure, but fundamentally right. You have to decide if you want a successful career or a successful marriage. It is possible to combine both, but you need a very tolerant and understanding partner.’
‘Yeah, well, the irony is I joined the police so that my kids could be proud of their dad.’
‘So they should be.’
‘So how proud of me would they be if I quit?’
‘And went back to being a bouncer? Or a security guard at Gatwick? It’s not what job you do,’ Grace said, ‘it’s the person you are. You can be a good, very human bouncer. You can be a vigilant security guard. You can be a crap cop. It’s what you are inside, not what it says on your badge or your ID card.’
‘Yeah, yeah. Sure. But you know what I mean.’
‘Look, I’ve told you before, with the mess I’ve made of my life, I’m not the right person to give marital advice. But you know what I really think? If Ari loved you, really loved you, she’d stick with it. I’m not sure she does really love you at all – all this legal process and stuff she’s throwing at you. I think if you did quit the force to appease her, at some point she’d want something else. Whatever you do is ultimately going to be wrong for her. I think she’s that kind of restless person. Appeasing her will never be more than a short-term solution. So, if I were you, I’d stay with your career.’
Branson nodded gloomily.
‘Know what Winston Churchill said about appeasement?’ said Roy.
‘Tell me?’
‘An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.’
36
The two bodies had been dumped in the sea in an identical way to Unknown Male, trussed up in plastic sheeting tied with blue cord and weighed down with breeze blocks.
They arrived at the mortuary parcelled in two further layers, the white plastic forensic bags in which they had been brought to the surface by the police divers, and the heavier-duty black plastic body bags in which they had been hauled up on to the dive boat, and in which they had remained until arriving at the mortuary.
The first to be unwrapped, in a tediously slow process, was a young teenage boy, perhaps a year or two older than the previous body, Nadiuska estimated. Less good-looking, with a beaky nose and a face badly pockmarked from acne, Unknown Male 2 was also missing his heart, lungs, kidneys and liver. They had been surgically removed in the same meticulous way.
Nadiuska was now working on the layers around the body of a young girl, also in her mid-teens, she estimated. Death took away the personality from a face, Grace always thought, leaving it a blank, which made it difficult to tell what people had
The pathologist was of the opinion that these two bodies had been in the water for the same length of time as Unknown Male. It wouldn’t take a rocket scientist, Grace figured, to work out the probability that all three of them had gone into the sea together.
Which raised the stakes from the initial discovery of a single body considerably. In his mind, he had now dismissed any possibility that these were formal burials at sea that had drifted from the official seabed grave area. So who were these three teenagers? Where had they come from? Who were their parents? Who was missing them? Had they been dumped overboard from one of the dozens of foreign-registered merchant ships that travelled down the English Channel around the clock, from just about every country in the world?
There were no marks on Unknown Male 2’s body to suggest death from an accident or a blow to the head. There were puncture marks on his skin, just like the earlier body, consistent, as Nadiuska had just repeated, with organ removal for transplant.
A dark shadow was moving across Grace’s mind. For most of the time, he stood in the corridor that led into the now very crowded post-mortem room, mobile phone to his ear, making one call after another. His first had been to his MSA, Eleanor Hodgson, getting her to clear his diary for the immediate days ahead. There were just two dates he hoped to be able to keep. One, tonight, was his promise to a colleague to visit a football game at the Crew Club in White-hawk. He might be able to make that if DI Mantle took the 6.30 briefing meeting instead of him.
The second, was the CID dinner dance tomorrow night, which, with over 450 attending, was going to be quite a bash. It had been a tough year and he was looking forward to taking Cleo, now that their relationship was out in the open, and relaxing with his colleagues. And maybe getting an opportunity to improve on the poor impression he reckoned he had made with the new Chief Constable on Wednesday night.
Cleo, who had spent weeks fretting about what she was going to wear, and an amount equal to the GDP of an emerging African nation buying a dress, would be deeply disappointed if they now did not make it.
After going through his diary, Grace had then made a series of calls expanding his Outside Inquiry Team from the original six, to twenty-two. Now, as he stood talking to Tony Case, the Senior Support Officer at Sussex House, organizing space for his new team in one of the building’s two Major Incident Rooms, he watched Nadiuska at work, carefully taping the high-tensile cords around the breeze blocks, in the hope of finding a tell-tale skin cell or glove fibre from whoever had tied them. When each strip lost its tackiness, she bagged it for microscopic inspection later.
Michael Forman, the Coroner’s Officer, stood beside her, observing carefully and occasionally making notes, or checking his BlackBerry. David Browne, the Crime Scene Manager, was in attendance, along with two of his SOCOs. One of them, the forensic photographer, James Gartrell, was once more taking photographs of every stage of the post-mortem, while the other was dealing with the packaging in which the two corpses had arrived. At the next table along, Cleo and Darren were tidying up Unknown Male 2, suturing the incision once more.
Every time you thought you had seen it all, Roy Grace mused, some new horror would surprise you. He had read about people in Turkey and South America who got talking to beautiful women in bars and then woke up hours later in bathtubs full of ice, with sutured incisions down one side of their body and missing a kidney. But until now he had dismissed such stories as urban myths. And he knew the importance of never jumping to conclusions.
But three young people at the bottom of the sea with their vital organs professionally removed…
The press would have a field day. The citizens of Brighton and Hove would be worried when this news came out, and he already had two – as yet unreturned – urgent messages on his mobile phone to call the
Press conferences were not popular at weekends, so he could buy himself some time until Monday. But he was going to have to throw a few titbits to Spinella – and as a starting point the
So what was he going to tell him? And, equally importantly, what was he going to conceal? He had long learned that in any murder inquiry you always tried to hold back some information that would be known only to the killer. That helped you eliminate time-waster phone calls.
For the moment, he put the press out of his mind, concentrating on what he could learn from the three bodies recovered so far. In his notebook, he jotted down Ritual killings? and ringed the words.
Yes, a very definite possibility.
Could they possibly have been organ donors who had all wanted to be buried at sea? Too unlikely to be considered seriously at this stage.
A serial killer? But why would he – or she – bother with the careful suturing after removal of the organs? To put the police off the scent? Possible. Not to be dismissed at this stage.
Organ trafficking?
Occam’s razor he wrote next, as the thought suddenly came into his mind. Occam was a fourteenth-century philosopher monk who used the analogy of taking a razor-sharp knife to cut away everything but the most obvious explanation. That, Brother Occam believed, was where the truth usually lay. Grace was inclined to agree with him.
Grace’s favourite fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes, held to the dictum: When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
He looked at Glenn Branson, who was standing in a corner of the room with a worried expression on his face, talking on his mobile phone. It would do him good to have a challenge, Grace thought. Something to get his teeth into and distract him from all his nightmarish legal problems with Ari, who, privately, Grace had never liked.
