Питер Джеймс - Find Them Dead

Both of them hesitated, glanced at each other, then sprinted off, shouting abuse as they did so.

On the second and third floors of a shabby terraced building above a Chinese takeaway on a main road close to Brighton’s Magistrates’ Court, a stone’s throw from the police station, was the law firm of TG Law, Solicitors and Commissioners for Oaths. For over twenty-five years its eponymous proprietor Terence Gready and his associates had practised criminal law, specializing mostly in legal aid cases.

Occasionally the firm took on a rape case, or a GBH, or murder, but its bread and butter was an endless procession of impaired drivers, small-time drug dealers, shoplifters, sex workers, muggers, burglars, domestic abusers, sex offenders, pub brawlers and the rest of the flotsam of low-life criminals that plagued the city and endlessly stretched police resources.

Terence Gready was a short, neatly presented and scrupulously polite fifty-five-year-old who had a sympathetic ear for every client. He always put them at ease, however hopeless he considered their case might be. With his conservative suits, club ties, immaculately polished shoes and beady eyes behind small, round tortoiseshell glasses — which had been in and out of fashion during his thirty years of practising law and were now back in again — a client had once described him as looking like the twin brother of the late comedian Ronnie Corbett — but with smaller glasses and flappier hands.

Gready presented to the world a family man of seemingly modest ambition, for whom the pinnacle of success was to avoid a custodial sentence for a drug addict accused of shoplifting thirty pounds’ worth of toiletries from an all-night chemist. A good husband and devoted father, a school governor and a generous charitable benefactor, Terence Gready was the kind of person you would never notice in a busy room — and not just because of his lack of height. He exuded all the presence of a man standing in his own shadow, perfectly fitting Winston Churchill’s description of ‘a modest man with much to be modest about’.

‘Gready by name but not by nature,’ the solicitor would never tire of telling his occasional private clients, when informing them of his fees. On the wall behind his desk was a framed motto: NO ONE EVER GOT RICH BY GOING TO JAIL.

Terence Gready could have added to it that no one ever got rich by defending clients on legal aid. But he seemed to make a decent-enough living from it. A nice four-bedroomed house in a des-res area of Hove, with a well-tended garden — mainly due to his wife’s green fingers — and a holiday timeshare in Devon. They always had nice cars, recent models, although never anything remotely showy. The only thing about him that could in any way be called flashy was his proudest possession, his vintage Rolex Submariner watch. But, at over sixty years old, it did not look anything special to anyone other than real watch collectors.

His wife, Barbara, had sold her small orchid nursery and was much in demand as an orchid competition judge, which frequently took her abroad. Any free time she had, she spent choreographing for the local amateur dramatics society. They had privately educated their three children, who were all doing well on their chosen career paths, the eldest of whom, their son, Dean, was a successful accountant with a firm in the City of London and married to a colleague, who was soon to produce their first grandchild. Their two daughters were both working more locally, one as a mortgage broker and the other for a domestic abuse charity.

After her husband’s arrest, Barbara Gready would tell everyone that she had absolutely no idea, none at all, about all the offences he was accused of, and simply would not — could not — believe it. There’d been a big mistake, they had the wrong man. Completely. They must have.

‘ The French Connection , yeah?’ DI Glenn Branson said into the phone, seated at his workstation in the empty Major Incident Room at Sussex Police HQ.

‘French Connection?’ Roy Grace replied, mildly irritated by the early-morning phone call interrupting his routine of stretches. He was standing in the field next to his cottage, at the end of his five-mile run. Humphrey, his rescue Labrador-cross, was running around sniffing the ground hard, on the scent of something — probably a rabbit, he guessed.

Grace was taking a rare weekday off, because he would be at work most of the weekend, overseeing a major stop-and-search operation in South East London on Friday and Saturday night. He was happy to enjoy this unusual time at home with no commitments whatsoever.

Glenn Branson and some of the team from Major Crime were working with the Regional Serious and Organized Crime Unit on the investigation of a Ferrari busted for drugs at Newhaven earlier that week. Glenn had been appointed SIO, heading up a multi-agency team as the RSOCU had a number of high-profile jobs running simultaneously.

‘I’m not with you, Glenn — you mean because the Ferrari came in from Dieppe?’

‘Duh! Surely you remember that movie? It was about your vintage!’

‘It’s ringing a faint bell.’

‘Nah, that’s the sound of the dinner bell in your old people’s home! Off you run, you don’t want to let your soup go cold — isn’t that what they give you, cos you can’t really chew any more?’

‘Cheeky bugger! The French Connection ?’

‘Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider.’

‘Wasn’t he the cop — the Chief of Police — in Jaws ?’

‘Now you’re getting there.’

‘Yep, I remember now, vaguely. The French Connection — didn’t it start with Gene Hackman in bed with some bird in handcuffs?’

‘Trust you to remember that bit. What I’m talking about is the car, the Lincoln Continental that the villain, Fernando Rey, shipped over to New York from Marseilles.’

Branson paused to nod greetings to some of his team, who’d entered the room for the morning briefing which was due to start in a few minutes. ‘Gene Hackman had it weighed and realized it was wrong — it weighed more than a proper Lincoln should have.’

‘Got it, yes! I remember now, good movie!’

‘It was well brilliant. Yeah, so that’s how the Border Force officer rumbled the Ferrari, because it weighed more than it should have.’

‘Not surprised, with six million quid’s worth of Class-A stashed inside it.’

‘Top-quality cocaine.’

‘Don’t I get any credit for the tip-off?’

‘I suppose so, since you asked so sweetly.’

‘Sod you! How’s the investigation going?’

‘Slowly, thanks to the silence of our courier.’

‘The one who’s been potted?’

‘Yep. Michael Starr. Went no comment in all interviews. So far, the Ferrari’s a ghost car that was en route to a suspect company. LH Classics appears to have no formal management structure. The staff there, one full-time and two part-time mechanics, have all been interviewed. The company computers and phones have been seized. The company’s owned by a Panama shell with nominee directors and a CEO listed as a Swiss citizen, Hermann Perren — but so far the only person of that name we’ve been able to trace was killed in a climbing accident on the Matterhorn nearly thirty years ago.’

‘I presume you’re following the money?’ Grace said. ‘Any progress on the info we’ve given you on Mr Big — the Diamond ?’

‘I think we’re getting close to an arrest. We’re all over it, like a rash. Emily Denyer from the Financial Investigation Unit has been seconded to the team.’

‘Smart lady — that’s great.’