Peter James - Dead Like You

But, it seemed, the county of Sussex was knee deep in little old ladies who were terminally ill. Some of its towns, like Worthing, Eastbourne and Bexhill, with their high elderly populations, were jokily known as God’s waiting rooms. To contact every undertaker and every mortuary was a massive task. Because of the pathologist’s findings, the case was regarded as bizarre rather than as a major crime, so resources allocated to it were limited. It was virtually down to Roy Grace alone.

She had been someone’s child, he thought. Someone’s daughter. She’d had children herself, so she had been someone’s wife or lover. Someone’s mother. Probably someone’s grandmother. Probably a caring, loving, decent person.

So how come her last journey had been buckled into the driver’s seat of a stolen van?

Was it a sick prank by a bunch of youths?

But if so, where had they taken her from? If an undertaker’s premises had been broken into and a corpse stolen, surely it would have been reported as a matter of urgency? But there was nothing on the serials. He’d checked them all, for three weeks back.

It just did not make sense.

He expanded his enquiries to undertakers and mortuaries beyond Sussex and into all the bordering counties, without success. The woman must have had family. Perhaps they were all dead, but he hoped not. The thought made him sad. It also saddened him to think that no undertaker had noticed her absence.

The indignity of what had happened to her made matters worse too.

If she wasn’t the helpless victim in some sick prank, was there something he was missing?

He replayed the scenario over and over in his mind. For what possible reason would someone steal a van and then put a dead old lady into it?

How stupid would you have to be not to know there were tests that would prove the old woman had not been driving, and that her age would be worked out?

A prank was the most likely. But where had they got the body from? Every day he was broadening his search of undertakers and mortuaries. There had to be one, somewhere in this country, that had a body that was missing. Surely?

It was a mystery that was to remain with him for the next twelve years.

Thursday 15 January

Norman Potting sat on the green chair in the interview room in the Custody Suite adjoining the CID headquarters. There was a window, high up, a CCTV camera and a microphone. The heavy green door, with its small viewing window, was closed and locked.

Opposite the DS, across a small table the colour of granite, sat John Kerridge, dressed in a regulation-issue, ill-fitting blue paper jump suit and plimsolls. Beside him sat a Legal Aid solicitor who had been allocated to him, Ken Acott.

Unlike many of his duty solicitor colleagues, who tended not to fuss too much about their clothing as they weren’t needing to impress their clients, Acott, who was forty-four, was always impeccably dressed. Today he wore a well-cut navy suit, with a freshly laundered white shirt and a sharp tie. With his short, dark hair and genial good looks, he reminded many people of the actor Dustin Hoffman, and he had plenty of the theatrical about him, whether protesting his client’s rights in an interview room or addressing the bench in a courtroom. Of all the criminal practice solicitors in the city, Ken Acott was the one that arresting officers disliked coming up against the most.

Kerridge seemed to be having problems sitting still. A man of about forty, with short hair brushed forward, he was squirming, writhing, as if attempting to free himself from imaginary bonds, and repeatedly looking at his watch.

‘They haven’t brought my tea,’ he said anxiously.

‘It’s on its way,’ Potting assured him.

‘Yes, but it’s ten past,’ Yac said nervously.

On the table sat a tape recorder with slots for three cassettes, one for the police, one for the defence and one file copy. Potting inserted a cassette into each slot. He was about to press the Play button when the solicitor spoke.

‘DS Potting, before you waste too much of my client’s time, and my own, I think you should take a look at these, which were recovered from my client’s home on the Tom Newbound houseboat during the night.’

He pushed a large brown envelope across the table to the Detective Sergeant.

Hesitantly, Potting opened it and pulled out the contents.

‘Take your time,’ Acott said with an assurance that made Potting feel uneasy.

The first item was an A4 printout, which he stared at. It was a receipt from an eBay transaction for a pair of Gucci high-heeled shoes.

During the next twenty minutes, Norman Potting read, with increasing gloom, the receipts from second-hand clothes shops and eBay auctions for eighty-three of the eighty-seven pairs of shoes they had seized from the houseboat.

‘Can your client account for the last four pairs?’ Potting asked, sensing he was clutching at straws.

‘I am told that they were left in his taxi,’ Ken Acott said. ‘But as none of these, or any of the others, fit the descriptions of the ones in the recent series of attacks, I would respectfully ask that my client be released from custody immediately, so he does not suffer further loss of earnings.’

Potting insisted on proceeding with the interview. But Acott made his client reply No comment to every question. After an hour and a half, Potting left to speak to Roy Grace. Then he returned and conceded defeat.

‘I’ll accept bailing him 47(3), to come back in two months while our enquiries are continuing,’ Potting suggested as a compromise.

‘He also wants his property returned to him,’ Ken Acott said. ‘Any reason why he shouldn’t have back the shoes and newspaper cuttings that were seized, his computer and his mobile phone?’

Despite a tantrum from Kerridge, Potting insisted on retaining the shoes and the cuttings. The phone and the laptop were not a problem, as the High-Tech Crime Unit had extracted all they needed from the phone, and they had cloned the hard drive of the computer, which they would continue to analyse.

Acott gave in on the shoes and cuttings, and twenty minutes later Yac was released. The solicitor drove him home with his computer and phone.

Thursday 15 January

It was a rush to get here and he had misjudged how heavy the seafront traffic would be. Unless he was imagining it, there seemed to be more police out than usual.

He drove into the car park behind the Grand Hotel shortly after 3 p.m., worried she might have already left. In her new blue satin Manolos. Then, to his relief, he saw her black VW Touareg.

It was in such a good place for his purposes. She could not have picked a better bay. Bless. It was one of the few areas on this level that was out of sight of any of the CCTV cameras in here.

Even better, the space beside her was empty.

And he had her car keys in his pocket. The spare set that he had found where he hoped he would, in a drawer in her hall table.

Reversing the van in, he left enough space behind him to be able to open the rear doors. Then he hurriedly climbed out to check, aware he did not have much time, then looked around carefully. The car park was deserted.

Dee Burchmore would be coming soon from her ladies’ luncheon, because she had to get home – she was hosting a meeting of the West Pier Trust there at 4 p.m. Then she was due back into the city centre for drinks in the Mayor’s Parlour at Brighton Town Hall at 7 p.m., where she was attending a Crimestoppers fund-raising event at the Police Museum. She was a model citizen, supporting lots of different causes in Brighton. And its shops.

And she was such a good girl, posting all her schedules up on Facebook.