Lee Child: MatchUp

“So why mess it up last night? Why set off the alarm and leave the coffin open so anyone could see what he’d done?” she asked.

“Maybe he didn’t,” Tony said. “Maybe it wasn’t down to him. Maybe Rodney did what half the world seems to do on the Internet these days.”

She frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Maybe he made a date online. He could have met someone in a chat room or a forum who shares his fetish. Not just lovely feet, but dead feet. Who knows? Maybe there’s a secret place on the darknet. A Grindr for fetishists. Footr. Archr.”

Carol groaned. “Make it stop. Okay, supposing you’re right, what do you think might have happened?”

“Tidy could have invited him back to the undertaker’s to show him round. Perhaps they’d made a pact to take a pair of feet together. Tidy insists they have to leave after they’ve done one. His new friend doesn’t agree and bursts back inside, setting off the alarm.” He shrugged one shoulder. “It does feel to me like somebody else’s presence precipitated a different set of behaviors from Tidy.” He raised his voice. “Stacey? That analysis you were doing of the chat rooms? Did you find anybody posting about embalmed feet?”

The sound of fingers whisking over keys could be heard. Then, from behind the bank of monitors, Stacey said, “About a dozen.”

“Can you find out if any of them is Rodney Tidy?” Carol asked.

Before Stacey could respond, Carol’s phone gave its text alert.

“Message from Roy Grace,” she muttered. “They can’t trace Rodney Tidy. The address he gave his employer doesn’t exist. He could be anywhere.”

“He uses the site you’re on right now,” Stacey said. “His handle is Cold Feet. He was last on two days ago, talking about a beautiful specimen who had walked into his world. He seems most friendly with Arch Lover, but I can’t track his ID. He comes on through a proxy server in Belarus.”

Carol paced back and forth across the incident room. “We know Leyton Gray goes to Brighton. And we know he’s been accused of behavior that amounts to foot fetishism. Am I reaching to think there might be a connection? Can we put them together? Do we know where Gray stays when he’s there?”

Stacey rolled her eyes. “We had him in here for three hours. What do you think?”

“I think you’ve already accessed his credit cards and his Internet history,” Tony said.

Stacey tutted. “You should know me better than that. A teenage boy could manage that. I’ve also mirrored his phone. So I can tell you there’s no record of credit card payments to any hotel or B&B in Brighton. But I can also tell you that three months ago he googled directions to an address in Kemptown. And he’s referenced it twice since.”

Carol’s phone pinged.

“There you go, boss. It might be worth Superintendent Grace getting his team round there.”

AN HOUR LATER, ROY GRACE and Glenn Branson drove their plain Ford Escape slowly past a row of four-story Regency terraced houses, with railed-off basements, just off the seafront, all of them badly in need of a lick of paint. In Victorian times each would have been a single dwelling, with servants quartered down in the basements and up on the attic floors. But now they’d been broken up into flats and bedsits.

“Number fourteen, boss,” Glenn Branson said, pointing through the side window.

Grace nodded and carried on a short distance, then pulled into an empty space behind a marked police car and climbed out in the blustery, salty wind.

Four uniformed officers in the marked car climbed out, also: the duty inspector at John Street police station, Ken “Panicking” Anakin, and three PCs, two male and one female.

One of the males was a man-mountain.

Anakin’s nickname was well deserved. He panicked about pretty much everything. He approached Roy and Glenn with a twitchy smile. “Good to see you both.”

“And you, Ken.”

Anakin unfolded a large-scale map of the area, struggling to hold it steady in the gusting wind, and the three of them peered at it.

“Roy, this is the street behind.” He ran a finger along. “Mews garages, but behind them are the rear gardens of these houses, so it could be an escape route. It’s the basement flat, right?”

“That’s the information I have; 14B sounds like a basement address,” Grace replied.

“I think we should cover the rear,” Anakin said.

Anakin dispatched two of the uniformed officers, then, accompanied by the man-mountain, followed the detectives up to the front and down the shabby basement steps, past the dustbins. In contrast to the rest of the building, the front door to the basement flat was well presented, recently painted a gloss white and with polished brass letters.

14B.

There was a modern Entryphone system with CCTV.

Grace pressed the bell.

They heard a buzz from the interior, but there was no response. After a brief pause, he tried again.

Still no response.

Ken Anakin radioed the officers he’d dispatched to the rear, asking if they could see into the flat. After a minute his radio crackled into life.

The woman PC spoke, “Sir, it’s hard to see in because there are no lights on and it’s dark. But it looks like there’s a man in an armchair. We’ve rapped on the window a couple of times, but he’s not reacted. I think he might be a G5.”

That was the police terminology in Brighton for a sudden death.

Anakin thanked her and relayed the information to Grace and Branson.

“Push the door in,” Grace said.

“I’ve got a bosher in the car,” the man-mountain said.

“May not need it.”

Branson braced himself, then kicked out hard with his size eleven boot, straight below the keyhole. With a splintering crack the door swung open, part of the frame going with it, the bottom of the door sweeping over a pile of mail that lay on the mat.

Grace breathed in a rank smell.

Not the smell of death that he’d been expecting; this was more a laboratory smell.

Preservatives. Formalin?

He entered first, followed by Glenn Branson, Anakin, and the man-mountain. They were in a narrow but smart hallway, with a red carpet, and recently painted cream walls, hung with professionally framed photographs of feet.

Ladies’ feet.

Extremely beautiful feet.

The toes of one were curled around a snake. A lighted cigarette was held between two toes of another. As they walked toward the far end of the hall, the rank smell grew stronger.

Grace walked through an open door at the far end, into a large, elegantly furnished living room, and froze.

Directly in front of him, seated in an armchair with his back to the window, sat a man, staring at him, a hand resting on each arm of the chair.

Motionless.

He was in his early fifties and had the air of a provincial bank manager. Short, neat, graying hair. A gray pin-striped suit, a pale gray shirt, and one of those rather naff matching tie and pocket handkerchiefs, both in purple. All that was missing were his shoes and there was a good reason for that.

His feet were missing too.

His legs ended just below the bottoms of his trousers, in two blackened, cauterized stumps. Darkened bloodstains lay on the carpet beneath them. In the man’s slowly blinking eyes, Grace could see a vision of hell.

He could see something else too, as his eyes became increasingly accustomed to the dimness in here. One entire wall of the room was full of rows of glassed-in shelving, like in a museum. Lined along each row of shelves were perfectly preserved human feet.

“Rodney Tidy?” Grace asked.

“Help . . . me.”

The voice was weak and parched, more a faint croak.