Peter James - Dead Like You

‘I’ve told you, my client is not making any comment.’

‘I have to have my tea,’ Yac said suddenly.

Grace looked at him. ‘You’ll have it when I decide.’

‘I have to have it at nine o’clock.’

Grace stared at him. There was a brief silence, then Yac eye-balled Grace back and said, ‘Do you have a high-flush or low-flush toilet in your home?’

There was a vulnerability in the taxi driver’s voice, something that touched a chord in Grace. Since the news of the reported abduction in Kemp Town two hours ago, and the discovery of a shoe on the pavement where it had allegedly taken place, there had been a development. A young man had arrived to collect his fiancée for an evening out at a black-tie function, thirty minutes after the time of the abduction and she had not answered the door. There was no response from her mobile phone, which rang unanswered, then went to voicemail.

It had already been established that the last person to have seen her was her kick-boxing instructor, at a local gym. She’d been in high spirits, looking forward to her evening out, although, the instructor had said, she was nervous at the prospect of introducing her fiancé to her parents for the first time.

So she could have funked out, Grace considered. But she didn’t sound the type of girl to stand up her boyfriend and let down her family. The more he heard, the less he liked the way the whole scenario was developing. Which made him even angrier here.

Angry at the smugness of Ken Acott.

Angry at this creepy suspect hiding behind no comment and behind his condition. Grace knew a child with Asperger’s. A police officer colleague and his wife, with whom he and Sandy had been friends, had a teenage son with the condition. He was a strange but very sweet boy who was obsessed with batteries. A boy who was not good at reading people, lacking normal social skills. A boy who had difficulty distinguishing between right and wrong in certain aspects of behaviour. But someone, in his view, who was capable of understanding the line between right and wrong when it came to things as major as rape or murder.

‘Why are you interested in toilets?’ Grace asked Kerridge.

‘Toilet chains! I have a collection. I could show you them some time.’

‘Yes, I’d be very interested.’

Acott was glaring daggers at him.

‘You didn’t tell me,’ Kerridge went on. ‘Do you have high flush or low flush in your home?’

Grace thought for a moment. ‘Low flush.’

‘Why?’

‘Why do you like ladies’ shoes, John?’ he replied suddenly.

‘I’m sorry,’ Acott said, his voice tight with anger. ‘I’m not having any questioning.’

Ignoring him, Grace persisted. ‘Do you find them sexy?’

‘Sexy people are bad,’ Yac replied.

Saturday 17 January

Roy Grace left the interview room feeling even more uneasy than when he had gone in. John Kerridge was a strange man and he sensed a violent streak in him. Yet he did not feel Kerridge possessed the cunning or sophistication that the Shoe Man would have needed to get away undetected with his crimes of twelve years ago and those in the past few weeks.

Of particular concern to him at the moment was the latest news of the possible abduction of Jessie Sheldon this evening. It was the shoe on the pavement that really worried him. Jessie Sheldon had been in her tracksuit and trainers. So whose was the shoe? A brand-new ladies’ shoe with a high heel. The Shoe Man’s kind of shoe.

But there was something else gnawing at him even more than John Kerridge and Jessie Sheldon at this moment. He couldn’t remember exactly when the thought had first struck him – some time between leaving the garage behind Mandalay Court this afternoon and arriving at the Ops Room at the police station. It was bugging him even more now.

He walked out of Sussex House and over to his car. The drizzle had almost stopped and now the wind was getting up. He climbed in and started the engine. As he did so, his radio crackled. It was an update from one of the officers attending the burning van at the farm north of Patcham. The vehicle was still too hot to enter and search.

A short while later, coming up to 10.15 p.m., he parked the unmarked Ford Focus in the main road, The Drive, some way south of his destination. Then, with his torch jammed out of sight into his mackintosh pocket, he walked a couple of hundred yards up to Mandalay Court, trying to look like a casual evening stroller, not wanting to risk putting off the Shoe Man, or whoever used the garage, should he decide to return.

He’d already spoken to the on-site surveillance officer, to warn him he was coming, and the tall figure of DC Jon Exton, from the Covert Team, stepped out of the shadows to greet Grace as he walked down the ramp.

‘All quiet, sir,’ Exton reported.

Grace told him to stay on lookout and to radio him if he saw anyone approaching, then walked around the rear of the block of flats and along past the lock-ups to the one at the far end, no. 17.

Using his torch now, he strode along the length of it, counting his paces. The garage was approximately twenty-eight feet long. He double-checked as he retraced his steps, then walked back around to the front and pulled on a pair of latex gloves.

Jack Tunks, the locksmith, had left the garage unlocked for them. Grace lifted the up-and-over door, closed it behind him and shone his torch beam around the inside. Then he counted his paces to the end wall.

Twenty feet.

His pulse quickened.

Eight feet difference.

He rapped on the wall with his knuckles. It sounded hollow. False. He turned to the floor-to-ceiling wooden shelves on the right-hand side of the wall. The finishing on them was poor and uneven, as if they were home-made. Then he looked at the row of rolls of grey duct tape. The stuff was a favoured tool of kidnappers. Then, in the beam of the torch, he saw something he had not noticed on his visit here earlier today. The shelves had a wooden backing to them, bringing them out a good inch from the wall.

Grace had never been into DIY, but he knew enough to question why the lousy handyman who had made these shelves had put a backing on them. Surely you only put a backing to shelves to hide an ugly wall behind them? Why would someone bother in a crappy old garage?

Holding the torch in his mouth, he gripped one of the shelves and pulled hard, testing it. Nothing happened. He pulled even harder, still nothing. Then he gripped the next shelf up and instantly noticed some play in it. He jiggled it and suddenly it slid free. He pulled it out and saw, recessed into the groove where the shelf should have fitted, a sliding door bolt. He propped the shelf against the wall and unlatched the bolt. Then he tried first pulling, then pushing the shelving unit. It would not budge.

He checked each of the remaining shelves and found that the bottom one was loose too. He slid that out and discovered a second bolt, also recessed into the grove. He slid that open, then stood up, gripped two of the shelves that were still in place and pushed. Nothing happened.

Then he pulled, and nearly fell over backwards as the entire shelving unit swung backwards.

It was a door.

He grabbed the torch and shone the beam into the void behind. And his heart stopped in his chest.

His blood froze.

Icy fingers crawled down his spine as he stared around him.

There was a tea chest on the floor. Almost every inch of the walls was covered in old, yellowing newspaper cuttings. Most of them were from the Argus, but some were from national papers. He stepped forward and read the headlines of one. It was dated 14 December 1997:

SHOE MAN’S LATEST VICTIM CONFIRMED BY POLICE

Everywhere that he pointed his torch, more headlines shouted out at him from the walls. More articles, some showing photographs of the victims. There were photographs of Jack Skerritt, the Senior Investigating Officer. And then, prominently displayed, a large photograph of Rachael Ryan stared out from beneath a frontpage headline from the Argus from January 1998: