Peter James - Need You Dead

Oh Jesus.

There are blue flashing lights in my mirror.

Eight forty-five on a Saturday night; the car park was thinning out. Grace watched a rotund woman, stuffing her face with a doughnut as she pushed a laden trolley towards her car, parked opposite him. Packham had been almost forty minutes, and had texted to apologize, saying he was in stationary traffic on the A27 because of an accident.

Surprised that Weatherley had still not called him back, Grace was about to dial his number again when he saw a dark-coloured Audi turn left towards him and flash its lights. It was Packham.

Grace slipped out of his car, glancing around carefully, then walked across to the Audi and climbed in the passenger door; the interior had a strong new-car smell.

‘Sorry it took so long, Roy,’ he said. ‘Something on its roof on the other side of the carriageway, and my side was all jammed up with rubberneckers.’

‘That’s the problem with that stretch of road,’ Grace replied. ‘Accidents on it constantly. So, what do you have?’

Packham reached behind him, and pulled a laptop off the rear seat. Then he looked around, cautiously, before raising the lid.

‘I’ve copied Lorna Belling’s data onto my laptop.’

‘Amazing you’ve been able to recover it, Ray, and so quickly.’

‘The rice cure can work magic, Roy. If you ever drop your phone down the toilet, rice will dry it out.’

Grace grimaced. ‘Thanks, I’ll remember that.’

Packham tapped the keyboard and the screen came to life. On it was a photograph of a bar on a sandy beach, shaded by the overhang of tropical-looking trees. In the background was calm, turquoise ocean. A couple were seated at the bar, with their arms round each other, staring into each other’s eyes. The man was wearing dark glasses and a panama hat at a rakish angle, and the woman a white baseball cap with sunglasses perched on the peak.

Grace gave Packham a quizzical look. ‘Why are you showing me this?’

‘Take a closer look, Roy — it’s Guy Batchelor and his wife, Lena.’

‘I can see that. What’s their photograph doing on Lorna Belling’s computer? I mean — if they knew each other, he’d have told me.’

‘I think from what I’ve found on here, Roy, they did know each other, and he didn’t tell you.’

‘Meaning?’

But he didn’t need the question answering. The uncomfortable truth was dawning on him almost faster than he could process it.

‘Shit,’ he said, suddenly feeling very shaky. ‘I–I don’t — I don’t believe it. Shit.’

Confirmation came moments later in a phone call from Ops-1.

‘Sir, I thought you should know immediately, a vehicle allocated to your Major Crime team has just been involved in a hit and run accident,’ Inspector Kim Sherwood said.

‘One of our vehicles?’ Grace replied, taking a moment to absorb it. ‘Hit and run? What vehicle — what exactly’s happened, Kim?’

‘One of our fleet cars — a Ford Mondeo estate, sir. About forty-five minutes ago on the westbound carriageway of the A27, outside Lewes,’ the Ops-1 inspector said.

‘What details do you have?’

‘An eyewitness in the vehicle behind — a Brighton Streamline taxi driver — told officers at the scene that a silver Ford Mondeo had apparently undertaken him recklessly at high speed, then pulled over into the outside lane in front of him, causing him to brake hard. It then started to overtake a Volvo saloon on the inside lane, when it suddenly swerved — apparently deliberately — into the rear offside. Sounds like a classic tap — the one Traffic often use in a pursuit to stop a vehicle. The Ford knocked it sideways, sending it into a massive slide, then drove off, fast. The Volvo driver lost control, his vehicle struck the central barrier, veered away, then barrel-rolled, finishing upside down. The driver is injured but alive.’

‘Jesus,’ Grace said. Could it be road rage, he was wondering?

‘Fortunately the taxi has a dashboard camera and the driver has the whole incident recorded, with the Ford’s registration. He stopped at the scene.’

‘What do we know about the Ford — who’s logged it out?’

‘The car has been assigned to DI Batchelor for the past ten days, for his SIO role on Op Bantam.’

‘Guy Batchelor?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘ Guy Batchelor? ’ he repeated. ‘DI Batchelor?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Are you absolutely certain?’

‘He has exclusive use of the vehicle at the moment, sir.’

Grace felt physically sick.

The tumblers of a huge lock, opening a door to an unwelcome place, were falling, relentlessly, one after another.

‘We don’t have any sighting of the driver, it’s possible the vehicle might be stolen, sir.’

For a moment, Grace clung to that thought. Or another possibility — he had seen how stressed Batchelor seemed today. Had he lost his rag over an incident on the road?

But he knew he was clutching at straws, trying to delay the horrific truth.

‘Has anyone checked the vehicle log, Kim?’

‘It needs someone your end to do that on the paper sign-out. We don’t have anything electronic.’

‘Yes, yes, of course. I— I’ll—’

His mind flashed again to the attempts he had made in the past half-hour to contact Weatherley, and his surprise that he hadn’t yet returned his call or text.

‘What information do you have on the condition of the driver of the Volvo?’

‘He’s being attended to by paramedics in an ambulance at the scene. He’s conscious and the report I have is that his injuries don’t appear to be life-threatening. Coincidentally — he’s identified himself as a police officer.’

‘A police officer? One of ours?’

‘No, he’s a DS with Scotland Yard. His name is—’

Grace didn’t need to be told the name. He knew it.

‘Weatherley, Kim?’ he said. ‘Detective Sergeant Tim Weatherley?’

He shot Packham a horrified look.

Despite the high speed at which they were travelling along the winding country lane, the two Road Policing Unit officers, cocooned inside the comfortable cabin of the black Audi A6, were calm.

Saturday night. Road deaths in the county of Sussex were at their highest level in years and the Chief Constable had instructed all officers to be extra vigilant, which was why PCs Pip Edwards and Richard Trundle of the Road Policing Unit had taken this unmarked car for their night shift. They were on the prowl for drink-drivers, speeders, people on their mobile phones, those not wearing their seat belts and dangerous drivers in general. Both officers were tired, they were working extra-long hours recently to make up for the reduction in crews. In addition, they had lost more members of their already depleted team to the Firearms Unit, which was recruiting hard — a reflection on escalating concerns about terrorism.

Edwards, a taciturn man, drove, whilst his more gung-ho long-time work colleague in the passenger seat stared through the windscreen into the darkness ahead. Trundle was hoping for a sighting of the car which had shot across their bows, nearly wiping them out, just a few minutes earlier. It had to be somewhere ahead of them along this road — which was little more than a lane — as there was no junction for several miles. It wouldn’t have had the time to turn off somewhere and hide.

The Audi’s strobing lights cast an eerie, flickering blue glow along the hedgerows on either side of them. Trundle glanced across at the speedometer, feeling a little out of his comfort zone, despite his faith in his colleague’s abilities at the wheel. 80 mph. It was dark now and slightly misty, not the best conditions for a pursuit along country roads, but the idiot in front of them was a massive danger to any road user and needed to be stopped.