Peter James - Not Dead Yet

Roy Grace woke up at 2 a.m. in front of the television, to see Jack Nicholson on the screen, in a hard hat, standing in flat, open land in front of the nodding-dog arm of an oil derrick. He yawned and hit the off-button. Humphrey was fast asleep beside him, the half-destroyed stuffed elephant lying on the floor below him.

He hauled himself upstairs, brushed his teeth and fell into bed. But for the next three hours he barely slept a wink, a jumble of disturbed thoughts playing, like a video, inside his head. Gaia was in all of them. So was the Chief Constable Tom Martinson, repeatedly berating him for missing a vital clue.

Completely wide awake at 5 a.m., he slipped out of bed, careful not to disturb Cleo, padded through into the bathroom and closed the door. He showered, shaved and brushed his teeth, then dressed and went downstairs. Humphrey was still curled up on the sofa, asleep. He picked up his briefcase and stepped out into the courtyard. It was now almost full daylight and raining lightly.

Fifteen minutes later, using his security card, he let himself in through the front door of Sussex House, climbed the stairs, walked through the deserted offices of the Major Crime Branch and entered his office. He put his briefcase down, went into the kitchenette area and made himself a strong coffee, which he carried back to his office.

Then he logged on to the internet and entered a Google search for Gaia and auctions .

There were thousands of results, but it didn’t take him long, narrowing down the criteria he entered, to find what he was looking for. The auction for the yellow check suit had taken place over two weeks last November. The suit had been sold for £27,200.

Although he didn’t know much about these things, that struck him as a lot of money, however good the provenance might have been that it really had belonged to Gaia. To pay that amount it needed someone either very rich, or seriously fanatical.

Or both.

On a whiteboard in the Conference Room of the Major Crime Suite was a blow-up of Drayton Wheeler’s passport photograph.

‘The time is 8.30 a.m., Wednesday, June the fifteenth. This is the twenty-first briefing of Operation Icon ,’ Roy Grace said to his team, which this morning included DI Tingley, Haydn Kelly, and Ray Packham from the High Tech Crime Unit. ‘We have developments that are leading me to believe Operation Icon may have links to the real-life icon who is currently here in Brighton shooting a movie – Gaia.’

He registered the immediate highly focused attention he had from every single member of his team. Then he relayed the events of last night, his viewing of the Gaia video, and his search on the internet this morning. He looked at DC Reeves. ‘Emma, I found the winning bid amount that was paid for the suit from the eBay site, but it would not give me any details about the bidders. We need to find that out very urgently. I’m tasking you to contact eBay and find out the names of all the people involved in that auction. As soon as you have them I want them checked against all databases. In particular, we need to find the underbidder who didn’t get it.’

‘Yes, sir,’ she said.

He turned to Ray Packham. No one could look less like a computer geek than the High Tech Crime Unit analyst, but his mastery of technology was better than anyone Grace had ever met. ‘You’ve looked yourself, Ray, and not been able to find it either?’

‘No, chief – but eBay should be able to come up with the information pretty quickly.’

‘Good. And you have a result for us on the email sent on Monday night?’

‘I do,’ he said proudly. ‘We’ve looked at the IP address on it, and I’ve got some good news. It’s a fixed IP registered at the internet café – Café Conneckted in Trafalgar Street. It was sent from there at 8.46 p.m. Monday night.’

‘You’re a genius!’

‘I know,’ Packham said, with a tongue-in-cheek grin.

Grace pointed at Drayton Wheeler’s passport photograph on the whiteboard. ‘The man’s body has not yet been formally identified, but we are satisfied that this is the man crushed to death by the chandelier last night.’ Grace then listed the receipts found in his hotel room. ‘The Café Conneckted receipt puts Wheeler in that café on Monday, the day the email was sent – we need to find out what time he was there. Norman, I want you to be there at 10 a.m. when it opens.’

Potting nodded. ‘Yes, chief.’

‘If we can establish Wheeler was there at 8.46 p.m. on Monday, that could be good news. If he wasn’t there at that time, we need to know who was. Hopefully you can get a result from the CCTV.’

‘Leave it with me.’

Grace glanced at his notes. ‘SOCO, who have been working through the night, reported their findings to me a short while ago. Mercuric chloride is an acid that apparently can be synthesized very easily from mercury, obtained from thermometers, sulphuric acid, from car batteries, and hydrochloric acid found in paint stripper. Receipts for all these items were present in Wheeler’s room at The Grand. SOCO tell me that mercuric chloride is particularly efficient at dissolving aluminium – which is what the shaft supporting the chandelier was made from.’

‘Chief,’ DS Guy Batchelor said, ‘I’m having problems connecting the dots between the suit fabric and the chandelier.’

‘Join the club,’ Grace said. ‘The connection is Gaia, and I can’t guarantee we can connect the dots, Guy. But I’m treating it as a line of enquiry, okay?’

The DS nodded.

‘The most urgent thing we need to do at this moment is establish whether or not Drayton Wheeler sent that email,’ Grace continued. ‘I’m hoping he did. Because if he didn’t, we have a big problem.’

This was not Norman Potting’s idea of a café. This was just another instance of how the world was changing in ways he didn’t like and didn’t understand. Fancy leather sofas and computer terminals. Couldn’t people even have a cuppa without needing to be online, for God’s sake? He liked traditional greasy spoons, with Formica table tops, plastic chairs, the odour of fried food, a menu chalked up on the wall, and a good, honest mug of strong tea.

Why, he wondered, looking up at the menu, printed in some barely decipherable fancy lettering, was there no such thing as an ordinary cup of coffee any more? Why did everyone have to dress the menu up in an incomprehensible bloody arcane language of its own ?

Although he did eye the range of cupcakes greedily.

‘Can I help you?’ said a solidly built Goth woman behind the bar, wearing blue dungarees, tattoos running down both her arms, and so many rings through her nostrils he wondered how she managed to breathe or blow her nose. He noticed a tongue stud, too. And her forehead piercings which made him wince. Apart from the two of them, at a few minutes past 10 a.m. the place was deserted.

Potting produced his warrant card.

‘Ah, yes, Zoe said to expect you.’

He showed her a copy of the receipt found in Drayton Wheeler’s hotel room. ‘We are anxious to establish what time this person was here on Monday.’ Then he placed a blow-up of Wheeler’s passport photo in front of her. ‘Do you remember this man?’

She studied it for a moment. ‘Yes, absolutely I do. He was, frankly, very rude, American, really quite unpleasant.’

‘Can you remember what time he was in here? Was it Monday evening?’

She studied the photograph again. ‘No, I think it was lunchtime. I remember we were very busy, and he got angry because he was having problems getting online – we had a server crash. He started shouting abuse at one of my staff. My husband gave him his money back and told him to leave.’