Peter James - Dead Man's Grip

He turned back to Tracy. ‘Have you run a check on the van’s index?’

‘Yes, chief. False plates. The serial number’s been filed off the chassis and engine block, so it’s almost certainly nicked, but that’s about all we know.’

Grace thanked her, then spoke to Wadey. ‘What do we have?’ he asked, looking at the figure in the van again.

‘Well, sir,’ Wadey said, addressing Grace but including Branson. ‘We carry out regular side-scan sonar sweeps of the canal, checking for silt levels and for any obstructions. Yesterday afternoon at around 4.30 p.m. we identified what looked like a vehicle about a hundred and twenty feet off the edge of this quay, in twenty-five feet of water. It was upside down, wheels in the air. That tends to happen with motor vehicles that go into deep water – the engine in the front pulls them down and they flip over as they sink.’

Grace nodded.

‘There’s zero visibility down there. The current caused by the opening and closing of the lock gates churns up the deep layer of mud. I found the vehicle with the aid of a shot line and jackstay, sunk into four feet of mud. I then contacted the police dive team – the Specialist Search Unit – our standard procedure, and we assisted them recovering the vehicle from the water this morning, approximately one hour ago. I’m afraid we found a poor sod in there. Dunno if he’s a suicide – we get quite a few of them – because he doesn’t seem to have made any effort to get out.’

Grace glanced at their surroundings. A large, rusting warehouse that looked derelict, although the presence of the skip indicated some work was going on.

‘What is this place?’ he asked.

‘It now belongs to Dudman, the aggregates company. They bought it a couple of months ago. It had been empty for several years – a bankruptcy.’

‘Anyone working here? Any security guards?’

‘No security guards or cameras, sir. There were some workmen here last week, but they’ve been diverted to do some maintenance on another of the company’s buildings.’

This was a secluded spot, Grace thought. Carefully chosen? It wasn’t the kind of place you find by accident.

‘Is it locked at night?’

‘Padlocked with a chain, yes,’ Wadey said. ‘But it was open when we got here. Either someone unlocked it or picked the lock.’

Grace walked across to the driver’s side of the van.

‘How long has he been in the water?’

‘My guess would be a maximum of three or four days,’ the engineer replied. ‘You can see the bloating, which starts to happen within twenty-four hours, but he’s intact – the fish and crustaceans like to wait for a week or so, until the flesh has started to break down, before they set to work.’

‘Thanks.’

Grace peered in through the driver’s window, which was down, as was the passenger’s, he noted. To help the vehicle sink more quickly, he wondered? The rear doors were open, too. The immediate question in his mind was whether this was an accident, suicide or murder. His experience had taught him never to jump to conclusions.

Even though the body was bloated from gases, the face was still thin, streaked with mud, eyes wide open, staring ahead with a look of shock. In the flesh, he looked even paler than in the photographs, and the gelled hair of the picture was now lifelessly matted to the scalp. But his identity was still clear. Just to double-check, Roy Grace pulled the photograph of Ewan Preece from his pocket and held it up.

And now he was certain. From the knife scar below his right eye, the thin gold chain around his neck and the leather wrist bracelet. Even so, it would take a fingerprint or DNA sample to confirm it beyond doubt. Grace was not inclined to trust a next-of-kin identification by any member of Preece’s crooked family. He looked at the dead man’s hands.

Preece was gripping the steering wheel as if with grim determination. As if he had thought that somehow, if he kept hold of it, he could steer himself out of trouble.

And that did not make sense.

‘Dead man’s grip,’ said a female voice beside him.

He turned to see the sergeant in charge of the Specialist Search Unit, Lorna Dennison-Wilkins.

‘Lorna!’ he said. ‘How are you?’

She grinned. ‘Understaffed, underappreciated and busy as heck. How about you?’

‘Couldn’t have put it better myself!’ He nodded at the dead man and, at the same time, heard a curious metallic scuttling sound from inside the van. ‘Dead man’s grip?’

‘Rigor mortis,’ she said. ‘It’s the suddenness of immersion that brings it on very fast. If someone drowns and they’re holding on to something at that moment, it’s really hard to prise their fingers off it.’

He stared at Preece’s fingers. They were wrapped tightly around the large steering wheel.

‘We haven’t tried to remove them,’ she said. ‘In case we damage any forensic evidence.’

As in his past dealing with this woman and her team, Roy Grace was impressed by her understanding of the importance of not contaminating a potential crime scene. But why was Preece holding on to the steering wheel? Had he frozen in stark terror? Grace knew that if he’d just driven off a harbour quay into water, he’d be doing everything he could to get out – not trying to steer.

Had he been knocked unconscious by the impact? That was one possibility. There was no apparent mark on his head, and he was wearing a seat belt, but that was something the pathologist would be able to determine at the post-mortem. What other reason did he have for clinging to the wheel? Trying deliberately to drown? But Ewan Preece seemed an unlikely suicide candidate. From the intelligence he had read about him, and his own prior experience with the man, Preece didn’t give a shit about anything in life. He was hardly going to be driven into a state of suicidal grief over the death of a cyclist. And in a short time he would have been out of prison.

Grace snapped on a pair of disposible gloves which he kept in his oversuit pocket, then leaned in through the window and attempted to prise the dead man’s right index finger away from the wheel. But it would not move. A tiny crab the size of a fingernail scuttled across the top of the dashboard.

Once more from somewhere in the back of the van he heard the metallic scuttling sound. He tried again to prise the finger off the wheel, conscious of not wanting to risk tearing the flesh and lose the potential for a print, but it would not move.

‘Bloody hell!’ Keith Wadey said suddenly.

The port engineer ducked in through the rear doors. Moments later he stood up again, holding a large black lobster. It was a good two feet long, with claws the size of a man’s hand, and was wriggling furiously.

‘This is a nice specimen!’ Wadey called out at a group of the SSU, showing them his find.

Immediately he had the attention of everyone on the quay.

‘Anyone fancy treating their loved one to lobster thermidor tonight?’

There were no takers. Only looks of disgust and a few exclamations.

He tossed the creature back out into the canal and it disappeared beneath the choppy surface.

After a phone discussion with Roy Grace and the Crime Scene Manager, the Home Office pathologist agreed with them that she should definitely see the body in situ, prior to its being taken to the mortuary. But she was finishing a job at a lab in London at the moment, which meant a long wait for the team on the cold harbour front.

The good news was that of the two regular Home Office pathologists for this area, they had been allocated Nadiuska De Sancha, the one whom Grace and everyone else preferred to work with. As an added bonus to the fact that the statuesque, red-haired Spaniard was both good and swift at her job, and extremely helpful with it, she also happened to be very easy on the eye.