Peter James - Dead Man's Grip

‘Yep, and let me guess where they parked. The Regency Square car park?’

‘Very good, Roy. Ever thought of going on Mastermind ?’

‘Once, when I had a brain that worked. So, give us their index that’s been stolen.’

Branson wrote it down.

Grace drove in silence for some moments, thinking about the killer with grudging admiration. Whoever you are, you are a smart bastard. What’s more, you clearly have a sense of humour. And just in case you don’t know, right at this moment I have a major sense-of-humour failure.

His phone rang again. This time it was Nick Nicholl in MIR-1, sounding perplexed.

‘Chief, I’m coming back to you on the vehicle owner check you asked me to do, on Barry Simons.’

‘Thanks. What do you have, Nick?’

‘I’ve just spoken to him. I sent someone round to his house and they asked a neighbour who knew where he worked – and I got his mobile phone number from his company.’

‘Well done.’

The Detective Constable sounded hesitant. ‘You asked me to check if it was him driving his car first east on King’s Road, then west past the junction between Kingsway and Boundary Road this morning? Index Golf Victor Zero Eight Whisky Delta X-Ray?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, he’s a bit baffled, chief. He and his wife are lying on a beach in Limassol in Cyprus at the moment. They’ve been there for nearly two weeks.’

‘Could anyone they know be driving this car while they’re away?’

‘No,’ Nick Nicholl said. ‘They left it at the long-term car park at Gatwick Airport.’

Grace pulled over to the side of the road and stopped sharply.

‘Nick, put a high-act marker on that index. Get on to the Divisional Intelligence Unit – I want to know every ANPR sighting from the day Barry Simons’s car arrived at Gatwick to now.’

‘To double-check, chief, index Golf Victor Zero Eight Whisky Delta X-Ray.’

‘Correct.’

Grace switched on the car’s lights and siren, then turned to Glenn Branson.

‘We’re taking a ride to Shoreham.’

‘Want me to drive?’ Branson asked.

Grace shook his head. ‘Thanks for the offer, but I think I’ll be of more help to Tyler Chase alive.’

Tooth sat in the Yaris in the parking lot behind the apartment block. The same cars were still here that had been here when he left to do his reconnaissance an hour ago. It was still the middle of the afternoon and maybe the lot would fill up when people came back from work. But it hadn’t filled up last time, six years ago. The windows of the apartment block didn’t look like they had been cleaned since then either. Maybe it was full of old people. Maybe they were all dead.

He stared at the text that had come in and which had prompted his early return to the car. It said just one word: call.

He removed the SIM card and, as he always did, burned it with his lighter until it was melted. He would throw it away later. Then he took one of the phones he had not yet used from his bag and dialled the number.

Ricky Giordino answered on the first ring. ‘Yeah?’

‘You texted me to call.’

‘What the fuck took you so long, Mr Tooth?’

Tooth did not reply.

‘You still there? Hello, Mr Tooth?’

‘Yes.’

‘Listen to me. We’ve had another tragedy in our family and that woman, Mrs Chase, she’s the cause of it. My sister’s dead. I’m your client now, understand me? You’re doing this for me now. I want that woman’s pain to be so bad. I want pain she’s never going to forget, you with me?’

‘I’m doing what I can,’ Tooth replied.

‘Listen up, I didn’t pay you a million bucks to do what you can do. Understand? I paid you that money to do something more than that. Something different, right? Creative. Give me a big surprise. Blow me away. Show me you got balls!’

‘Balls,’ Tooth commented.

‘Yeah, you heard, balls. You’re going to bring those videos to me, right? Soon as you’re done?’

‘Tomorrow,’ Tooth said.

He ended the call, again burned the SIM card, then lit a cigarette. He did not like this man.

He didn’t do rudeness.

Roy Grace turned the siren and lights off as they passed Hove Lagoon, two shallow man-made recreational lakes beside a children’s playground. Up on the promenade beyond there was a long row of beach huts facing the beach and the sea.

The Lagoon ended at Aldrington Basin, the eastern extremity of Shoreham Harbour, and from this point onwards, until Shoreham town, a few miles further on, the buildings and landscape along this road became mostly industrial and docklands. He slowed as they approached the junction with Boundary Road and pointed up through the windscreen.

‘There’s the ANPR camera that Barry Simons pinged this morning.’

Then Nick Nicholl radioed through. ‘Chief, I’ve got the information you requested on the Toyota Yaris index Golf Victor Zero Eight Whisky Delta X-Ray. It’s rather strange, so I went back an extra two weeks and I now have all sightings for the past month. For the first two weeks it pinged cameras during weekdays that are consistent with a regular morning and evening commute from Worthing to central Brighton and back. Then on Sunday morning, just under two weeks ago, it travelled from Worthing to Gatwick.’

‘Consistent with what Simons told you,’ Branson said, butting in, ‘that they drove to Gatwick Airport long-term parking before their flight to Cyprus.’

‘Yes,’ Nicholl said. ‘Now here’s the bit that doesn’t make sense. The next sighting was the one this morning, when it pinged the CCTV camera on the seafront at the bottom of West Street, travelling east. There’s nothing to show how the car got from Gatwick Airport down to Kingsway. Even if it drove directly from the airport down to Brighton, with the marker on the vehicle it should have been picked up by the A23 camera at Gatwick, and by another on the approach to Brighton, and I would have thought by others in Brighton.’

‘Unless it commenced its journey from the Regency Square car park,’ Grace said thoughtfully. ‘Then it would have exited the car park on King’s Road and had to make a left turn along the seafront, which would explain why it passed the CCTV camera at the bottom of West Street twice – first going east and then, a few minutes later, west. Followed by the one on Brunswick Lawns, a mile further west, and then this one.’

‘You’ve lost me, sir,’ Nicholl said. ‘That doesn’t explain how the car got from Gatwick Airport to that car park in the first place.’

‘It didn’t, Nick,’ Grace said. ‘Our suspect has already demonstrated he is rather cute with number plates. We believe he rented this Toyota from Avis at Gatwick. I’m prepared to put money on Mr and Mrs Simons returning from their Cyprus holiday to find their number plates are missing. Good work. What about subsequent sightings since Boundary Road?’

‘None, sir.’

Which would indicate, Grace thought, that either the car was parked up somewhere or the killer had changed number plates yet again.

He ended the conversation and immediately called Graham Barrington to update him.

‘My hunch is that he’s in the Shoreham area,’ Grace said. ‘But we can’t rely on that. I think you need to get every dark-coloured Toyota Yaris within a three-hour drive of Brighton stopped and searched.’

‘That’s already happening.’

‘And we need to throw everything we have at Shoreham Harbour and its immediate vicinity.’

‘The problem is, Roy, it’s a massive area.’

‘I know. We also need to search every ship leaving and every plane at Shoreham Airport. We need to check the tides. The harbour has a shallow entrance, so there’s a lot of shipping can’t come in or leave for a period of time either side of low water, from what I remember as a sailor.’