Peter James - Dead Man’s Footsteps

‘No one told me anything about two assistants.’

‘I need some space for them. They will have to sit somewhere fairly near me.’

‘I could get you a smaller desk,’ Tony Case said. ‘And put them both in here.’ He left the room.

Pewe couldn’t work out whether the man was being facetious or was for real, but his thoughts were interrupted by the phone ringing. He answered it with an important-sounding, ‘Detective Superintendent Pewe.’

It was a controller. ‘Sir, I have an officer at Interpol on the line. On behalf of the Victoria Police in Australia. He asked specifically for someone working on cold-case inquiries.’

‘OK, put him through.’ He sat down, taking his time about it, and put his feet up on his desk, in a space between bundles of documents. Then he brought the receiver to his ear. ‘Detective Superintendent Cassian Pewe,’ he said.

‘Ah, good morning, ah, Cashon, this is Detective Sergeant James Franks from the Interpol bureau in London.’

Franks had a clipped public school accent. Pewe didn’t like the way desk-jockey Interpol members tended to think they were superior and ride roughshod over other police officers.

‘Let me have your number and I’ll call you back,’ Pewe said.

‘That’s OK, you don’t need to do that.’

‘Security. It’s our policy here in Sussex,’ Pewe said importantly, getting pleasure out of exercising his little bit of power.

Franks repaid the compliment by making him listen to an endless loop of ‘Nessun dorma’ for a good four minutes before he finally came back on the line. He would have been even happier had he known it was a song that Pewe, a classical music and opera purist, particularly hated.

‘OK, Cashon, our bureau’s been contacted by police outside Melbourne in Australia. I understand they have the body of an unidentified pregnant woman recovered from the boot of car – been in a river for some two and a half years. They’ve obtained DNA samples from her and the foetus, but they have not been able to get any match off their Australian databases. But here’s the thing…’

Franks paused and Pewe heard a slurp, as if he was swigging some coffee, before he resumed.

‘The woman has silicone breast implants. I understand these are all printed with the manufacturer’s batch number and each of them has a serial number that’s kept in the hospital register under the recipient’s name. This particular batch of implants was supplied to a hospital called the Nuffield in Woodingdean, in the city of Brighton and Hove, back in 1997.’

Pewe took his feet off the table and looked around hopelessly for a notebook, before using the back of an envelope to scribble down a few details. He then asked Franks to fax through the information on the implants and the DNA analysis of both the mother and the foetus, promising that he would start making enquiries right away. He then pointed out rather crisply that his name was Cassian , not Cashon , and hung up.

He really did need a junior officer to assist him. He had far more important things to deal with than a floater in an Australian river. One of them much more important.

Abby was laughing. Her father was laughing too.

‘You stupid girl, you did that deliberately, didn’t you?’

‘No I didn’t, Daddy!’

Both of them stood back, staring at the partially tiled bathroom wall. White tiles with a navy-blue dado rail and a scattering of navy tiles as relief, one of which she had just put on backwards, so that the coarse grey underside was now visible, looking like a square of cement.

‘You’re meant to be helping me, young lady, not hindering me!’ her dad admonished.

She burst into loud giggles. ‘I didn’t do it deliberately, Daddy, honestly.’

For an answer, he patted her squarely on the forehead with his trowel, depositing a small lump of grout.

‘Hey!’ she cried. ‘I’m not a bathroom wall, so you can’t tile me.’

‘Oh yes, I can.’

Her father’s face darkened and the smile faded. Suddenly it wasn’t him any more. It was Ricky.

He was holding a power drill in his hand. Smiling, he squeezed the trigger. The drill whined.

‘Right knee or left knee first, Abby?’

She began shaking, her body still held rigid by her bonds, her insides twisting, shrinking back, screaming silently.

She could see the spinning drill bit. Corkscrewing towards her knee. Inches from it. She was screaming. Her cheeks popping. Nothing coming out. Just an endless, trapped moan.

Trapped in her throat and in her mouth.

He lunged forward with the drill.

And as she screamed again, the light changed suddenly. She smelled the sharp, dry smell of fresh grout, saw cream wall tiles. Hyperventilating. There was no Ricky. She could see the carrier bag lying where he had left it, untouched, just beyond the doorway. She felt slippery with perspiration. Heard the steady whirr of the extractor fan, felt the cold draught from it. The insides of her mouth were feeling stuck together. She was so parched, so terribly parched. Just one drop. One small glass of water. Please.

She stared at the tiles again.

God, the irony of being imprisoned in here. Facing these tiles. So near. So damned near! Her mind was all over the place. Somehow she had to get to Ricky. Had to get him to remove the tape from her face. And if he was rational, when he returned, that’s exactly what he would have to do.

But he wasn’t rational.

And thinking about that now chilled every cell in her body.

Wide awake and feeling mentally alert, despite his tired eyes, Ronnie stepped out of the front door of the rooming house shortly after 7.30. Immediately, he noticed the smell. There was a hazy, metallic blue sky and there should have been a dewy freshness in the morning air. But instead a pungent, sour reek filled his nostrils.

At first he thought it must be coming from the garbage cans, but as he walked down the steps and along the street it stayed with him. A suggestion of something that was damp and smouldering, something chemical, sour and cloying. His eyes hurt too, as if there were tiny pellets of sandpaper in the haze.

On the main drag, there was a strange atmosphere. It was Wednesday morning, midweek, yet there were hardly any cars about. People were walking slowly, with drawn, haggard expressions, as if they too had not slept well. The whole city seemed to be in a state of deepening shock. The numbing events of yesterday had now had time to work through everyone’s psyche and were bring to a new, dark reality this morning.

He found a diner, displaying, among all its Russian signs in the window, the English words stencilled in red letters on illuminated plastic, ALL DAY BREAKFAST. Inside, he could see a handful of people, including two cops, were eating in silence, watching the news on the television high on one wall.

He sat in a booth towards the rear. A subdued waitress poured him coffee and a glass of iced water, while he looked blankly at the Russian menu, before realizing there was an English version on the reverse. He ordered fresh orange juice and a pancake stack with bacon, then watched the television while he waited for his food to arrive. It was hard to believe that it was only twenty-four hours since his breakfast yesterday. It felt like twenty-four years.

After leaving the diner, he walked the short distance down the street to Mail Box City. The same young man was seated at one of the internet terminals, pecking at the keys, and a thin, dark-haired young woman in her early twenties, who seemed on the verge of crying, was staring at a website on another. A nervous-looking bald man in dungarees, who had the shakes, was removing items from a holdall and inserting them into a deposit box, looking furtively over his shoulder every few moments. Ronnie wondered what he had in that bag, but knew better than to stare.