Peter James - Dead Man's Grip

There was now a long exterior shot, with the van conveniently rotated broadside on to the quay. Preece could be seen gyrating like a contortionist through the open window as the nose sank lower, the whole van now starting to tip forward, water pouring over the sills of the open windows.

The viewpoint returned to the interior again. There was a loud, muffled roaring sound. Dark water with white, foaming bubbles was flooding in. The level was rising rapidly, increasingly covering more of Preece’s thrashing chest. He was rocking himself backwards and forwards, sharp, violent jerks of desperation, trying to free himself, whimpering now, a steady low ‘No… No… No… No…’

The water now covered his neck to just below his chin, then the bottom of his earring, and it was rising rapidly. In seconds it was over his chin. Some went into his mouth and he spat it out. Then his mouth was submerged. In desperation he threw his head back, his chin breaking free from the water. He was crying pitifully now: ‘Help me, please. Someone help me.’

The water rose relentlessly, swallowing up his exposed neck until it reached his chin again. He thrashed his head from side to side.

Tooth took a sip of his coffee, then lit a fresh cigarette, watching dispassionately. He listened to the man breathing, taking deep gulps of air, as if frantically trying to stock up with the stuff.

Then the water reached the ceiling of the van. Preece’s head was twitching, his eyes still wide open. The image became very blurred. A stream of bubbles jetted from his mouth. The twitching slowed, then stopped, and his head moved more gently now, rocking with the current.

The last shot in the sequence was another exterior one. It showed the rear section of the van now, the doors open, slipping beneath the surface of the choppy, inky water. There were some bubbles, then the waves closed over it, like curtains.

The post-mortem room at the Brighton and Hove City Mortuary had recently been doubled in size. The work had been necessary both to increase the number of bodies that could be prepared for post-mortem at the same time and to replace the existing fridges with a new, wider generation able to cope with the growing trend for obesity in society.

Roy Grace had always found the previous room claustrophobic, especially when it was occupied by the considerable numbers required for a Home Office post-mortem. Now at least there was more space for them. Although this place, with its tiled walls and stark, cold lighting, still gave him the creeps just as much as ever.

When he had been at the police training college, learning to be a detective, an instructor had read out the FBI moral code on murder investigation, written by its first director, J. Edgar Hoover:

No greater honor will ever be bestowed on an officer or a more profound duty imposed on him than when he is entrusted with the investigation of the death of a human being.

Grace always remembered those words, and the burden on him as the Senior Investigating Officer, on every case. Yet at the same time as feeling that weight of responsibility, he would feel other emotions in this room, too. Always a tinge of sadness for the loss of a life – even the life of a scumbag like Ewan Preece. Who knew what kind of a person Preece might have been under different circumstances, if life had dealt him a less hopeless hand?

In spite of his sense of responsibility, Grace also at times felt like an intruder in this room. To be a corpse, opened up and splayed out here was the ultimate loss of privacy. Yet neither the dead nor their loved ones had any say in the matter. If you died under suspicious circumstances, the Coroner would require a post-mortem.

At this moment, Ewan Preece was a surreal sight, lying on his back, in his jeans and T-shirt, on the stainless-steel PM table, his hands still gripping the black steering wheel, which Nadiuska De Sancha had requested be detached from the vehicle and brought with him to the mortuary. He looked, in death, as if he was driving some spectral vehicle.

At a PM table on the other side of the archway, the bloody internal organs of another corpse were laid out for a student, who was receiving instructions from one of Brighton’s consultant pathologists, and Grace’s stomach was heaving, as ever, from the stench of disinfectant, blood and decaying human innards. He glanced over, clocked the brains, liver, heart and kidneys sitting there, and the electronic weighing scales on a shelf just beyond. Beside them, on another table, lay the corpse from which they had been removed – an elderly woman the colour of alabaster, her mouth gaping, her midriff wide open, the yellow fatty tissue of the insides of her breasts facing upwards, her sternum laid across her pubis as if in some attempt by the pathologist to protect her modesty.

He shuddered and took a few steps closer to Preece, his green gown rustling as he walked. Nadiuska was plucking delicately at the skin of one of the fingers with tweezers. James Gartrell, the SOCO photographer, was steadily working his way around the body. Glenn Branson was in a corner, surreptitiously talking on his phone. To his wife, Ari? Grace wondered. Or his solicitor? The Coroner’s Officer, Philip Keay, was standing in a green gown, blue mask hanging from its tapes just below his chin, dictating into a machine with a worried frown.

Cleo and her assistant, Darren, stood by, ready to assist the pathologist, but at the moment they had nothing to do but watch. Occasionally she would look in Grace’s direction and give him a surreptitious smile.

The Detective Superintendent was thinking hard. Preece’s hands glued to the wheel confirmed, beyond any doubt in his mind, that the man had been murdered. And the presence of that camera in the vehicle was bothering him a lot. Put there by the killer? Some sadistic bounty-hunter associate of Preece who had known where he had been hiding?

Or was there an even darker aspect to this? The Mafia connection was weighing heavily on his mind. Could this have been a sadistic revenge hit?

The body had not yet been formally identified. That would be done later by his mother or sister. Nadiuska said she would be able to dissolve the glue with acetone, leaving Grace’s team able to get fingerprints which would further confirm his identity, and as backup they would be able to get a DNA sample. But from the tattoos on his body and the scar on his face, Ford Prison had already confirmed his identity beyond much doubt.

With Kevin Spinella from the Argus and the rest of the press having been kept well away from the crime scene, only the immediate team at the quay, and those here in the mortuary, knew that the man’s hands had been glued to the steering wheel. Grace intended to keep this information quiet for the moment. If it made the press during the next few hours, he would know where to look for the leak.

He stepped out of the PM room and made a call to MIR-1, instructing Norman Potting to organize a group within the inquiry team to find out all they could about the camera, in particular where such a device was available for sale, in Brighton or beyond, and any recent purchases that had been made.

Next he made a phone call to Detective Investigator Pat Lanigan, who was their liaison officer with the Revere family in America, to ask him whether in his experience the dead boy’s parents were the kind of people who might be sufficiently aggrieved to go for a revenge killing.

Lanigan informed him that they had the money, the power and the connections – and that with people like this a whole different set of rules applied. He said that he would see what intelligence he could come up with. Sometimes, when a contract was put out, they would get to hear of it. He promised to come back to Grace as soon he found out anything.