Peter James - Dead Man's Grip

‘He does, Norman,’ Grace replied. ‘There’s just one problem with Kuklinski.’

Potting waited apprehensively.

‘He died in prison four years ago.’

‘Yes, well, I suppose that might rather tend to eliminate him,’ Potting retorted. He looked around with a grin, but no one smiled back. ‘Fishy business, this cold store, yesterday,’ he added, and again looked around, without success, for any smiles. All he got was a withering glare from Bella Moy.

‘Thank you Norman,’ Grace said curtly. ‘Detective Investigator Lanigan was going to go and see Mr and Mrs Revere last night and report back to me. But frankly I’m not expecting anything from them. And one thing Lanigan told me, which is not good news for us, is that their intelligence on contract killers is very limited.’

‘Chief, did this Kuklinski character paralyse his victims first?’

‘Not from what I’ve learned so far from the post-mortem, Nick, no. Our man didn’t paralyse Preece – only Ferguson.’

‘Why do you think he did that?’

Grace shrugged. ‘Maybe sadism. Or perhaps to make him easier to handle. Hopefully,’ he said, raising his eyebrows, ‘we’ll get the chance to ask him that.’

‘Boss, what information are you releasing to the press about the death of the lorry driver?’ DC Emma-Jane Boutwood asked.

‘For now, no more than a man was found dead in a cold store at Springs Smoked Salmon,’ Grace said. ‘I don’t want speculation. Let people think for the moment that it might have been an industrial accident.’

He glanced down at his mobile phone, which was lying next to his printed notes on the work surface in front of him, as if waiting for the inevitable call from Spinella. But it remained, for the moment, silent. ‘I haven’t yet decided what we should release beyond that. But I’ve no doubt someone will make that decision for me.’

He gave a challenging stare to his team, without looking at any specific individual. Then he glanced down at his notes again. ‘OK, according to his employers, Stuart Ferguson left the depot in the fridge-box lorry shortly after 2 p.m. on Tuesday. We need to find this lorry.’ He looked at DC Horobin. ‘Stacey, I’m giving you an action which is to try to plot the lorry’s route and sightings from the time it left the depot in Aberdeen to wherever it currently is. We need to find it. You should be able to plot much of its journey fairly easily from an ANPR search.’

Automatic Number Plate Recognition cameras were positioned along many of the UK’s motorways and key arterial roads. They filmed the registration plates of all passing vehicles and fed them into a database.

‘Yes, sir,’ she said.

Grace then read out a summary of the post-mortem findings so far. After he dealt with several questions on that, he drained the last of his coffee and moved on to the next item on his list.

‘OK, an update on lines of enquiry. The murder of Preece’s friend Warren Tulley at Ford Prison is still ongoing.’ He looked at DS Crocker. ‘Duncan, do you have anything there for us?’

‘Nothing new, chief. Still the same wall of silence from the other inmates. The interviewing team is talking to each of the prisoners, but so far we have no breakthrough.’

Grace thanked him, then turned to DC Nick Nicholl. ‘The superglue on Ewan Preece’s hands. Nick, anything to report?’

‘The Outside Inquiry Team are continuing to visit every retail outlet in the Brighton and Hove area that sells superglue. It’s a massive task, chief, and we’re really understaffed for it. Every newsagent, every DIY and hardware shop, every supermarket.’

‘Keep them on it,’ Grace said. Then he turned to Norman Potting. ‘Anything to report with the camera?’

‘We’ve covered every retailer that sells this equipment, chief, including the Cash Converters stores that sell ’em second-hand. One of them was good enough to check the serial number on the one in the van. He reckons it’s not a model sold in the UK – it can only be bought in the USA. I haven’t had a chance to start checking the one found in the cold store at Springs yet, but it looks identical.’

As the meeting ended, Glenn Branson received a call on his radio. It was from one of the security officers, Duncan Steele, on the front desk.

He thanked him, then turned to Roy Grace. ‘Mrs Chase is downstairs.’

Grace frowned. ‘Here, in this building?’

‘Yep. She says she needs to see me urgently.’

‘Maybe she’s come to her senses.’

Tooth sat at the desk in his room at the Premier Inn, with his laptop open in front of him. Through the window he kept an eye on the parking area. He could see the North Terminal building of Gatwick Airport in the distance beyond it and the blue sky above it. It would not be long before he was on an airplane in that blue sky, heading home, to the almost constant blue sky of the Turks and Caicos. He liked heat. Liked it when he had been in the military in hot places. From his experience of English weather, it rained most of the time.

He didn’t do rain.

A Lucky Strike dangled between his lips. He stared at the screen, doing some blue-sky thinking, clicking through the images. Photographs of Hove Park Avenue, where Carly Chase lived. Photographs of the front, back and sides of her house.

Early in the morning after he had finished at Springs smokery he had driven down this street, memorizing the cars. Then he’d paid a brief visit to her property. A dog had started barking inside the house and an upstairs interior light came on as he was leaving. Last night he’d taken another drive down there and had spotted the parked dark-coloured Audi, with a shadowy figure behind the wheel. The Audi had not been there previously.

The police weren’t stupid. He’d learned over the years never to underestimate the enemy. You stayed alive that way. Out of jail that way. In the US, police surveillance operated in teams of eight, on eight-hour shifts, twenty-four officers covering a twenty-four-hour watch. He had little doubt there were others out there in that area he hadn’t spotted. Some on foot, probably in the back garden or down the sides of the house.

He had already listened to the conversation inside the house that the minute directional microphones he had concealed in her garden, pointed at her windows, had picked up when the police had visited her yesterday evening. When she had told them she did not want to leave.

He looked down at his notes. The kid had been picked up in his school uniform at 8.25 a.m. today by a woman in a black Range Rover, with two other kids in it. At 8.35 Carly Chase had left home in the back of a marked police car.

At 9.05 he made a phone call to her office, masquerading as a client, saying he needed to speak to her urgently. He was told she had not yet arrived. A second phone call told him she had still not arrived at 9.30.

Where was she?

Carly Chase sat down beside Glenn Branson at the small round conference table in Roy Grace’s office. Grace joined them.

‘Nice to meet you, Mrs Chase,’ he said, sitting down. ‘I’m sorry it’s not under better circumstances. Would you like something to drink?’

She felt too sick with fear to swallow anything. ‘I’m – I’m OK, thank you.’

She was conscious of her right foot jigging and she couldn’t stop it. Both the policemen were staring at her intently and that was making her even more nervous.

‘I wanted to talk to you,’ she stammered, glancing at Glenn Branson, then looking back at the Detective Superintendent. ‘Detective Sergeant Branson and his colleague explained the situation to me yesterday evening. I’ve been thinking about it overnight. I’m not sure if you know, but I’m a solicitor specializing in divorce.’