Dead at First Sight

39 Thursday 4 October

Roy Grace stood in front of Assistant Chief Constable Cassian Pewe’s absurdly large desk — which he was about to lose, Grace thought with some satisfaction, due to austerity forcing more and more senior officers to have to share office space. The ACC, still seated, was daintily sipping from a china cup of coffee. He offered Grace neither a seat nor a drink, pretty much par for the course. The time to be worried, Grace knew, was when he did.

Pewe, perfectly groomed as always, was, in Roy Grace’s opinion, sailing close to a nervous breakdown. The sooner the better, he thought. The man had been on a management training course earlier in the year, and ever since, at their twice-weekly morning meetings, had been spouting unintelligible gobbledygook.

Pewe gave him an unnaturally warm — near-dementedly warm — smile, staring at him intently. The look reminded Grace of an expression he had always liked: The eagle eye of the inefficient. Then, the ACC’s voice, half snide, half patronizing, asked, ‘So, Roy, are all your spreadsheets green?’

‘I actually wouldn’t know, sir.’ The sir came out with the reluctance of a dental extraction.

‘You are aware, are you not, Roy, that I’m an advocate of the multi-systems approach?’

‘Completely.’

‘Good. So may I enquire why, in midst of preparing for three important murder trials, you’ve decided to take time out to waste your valuable energies — doing nothing to move the needle on our homicide statistics and stretching police financial resources on what is clearly no more than an unfortunate suicide?’

‘I beg your pardon, sir?’

‘You know exactly what I’m referring to, Roy. You are allowing yourself to be distracted from your important trial work out of sheer hubris.’

‘Hubris?’

‘Yes, hubris. You always need to be at the forefront of any major investigation, don’t you, in order to see your name in the papers?’

‘In my role as Head of Major Crime for the county I’d be derelict in my duties if I wasn’t involved in an overseeing capacity in our major investigations, sir.’

‘Perhaps it would help you focus if I removed you from that role?’

Struggling to contain his anger, and thinking to himself, I once saved your life, more fool me, Grace replied, tersely, ‘That would be your prerogative. But I cannot agree with you that Suzy Driver’s death is suicide. You’ve seen the pathologist’s initial report, that she had suffered a blow to the back of her head from a blunt instrument prior to hanging — or rather, being hung.’

‘A blow to the back of her head that matched marks and hair found on her carpet by the CSIs which indicated she might have fallen over backwards sometime before her death. Old people do fall over sometimes.’

‘She was not an old lady, sir, she was only in her mid-fifties.’

‘I don’t care, Roy, I don’t see enough evidence here to launch a murder enquiry. You are aware of our tight budgets these days, aren’t you? The average cost of a murder enquiry currently stands at £3.2 million.’

‘What about the emotional cost to a victim’s loved ones? Have the bean-counters calculated that, too?’

‘Everything has a cost, Roy, unlike the dreamland where your head seems to spend most of its time.’

‘Fine, sir. So from now on you want me to tell the families of murder victims that we’re not going to be investigating them because we can’t afford to?’

‘That’s not what I’m saying at all. We just have to be absolutely certain before we launch any investigation and start incurring costs.’

Grace was struggling to keep his temper. ‘Is it really that you don’t want to spend the money on an investigation, or is the truth that you are mindful of massaging your crime statistics and we are already over our murder rate for the year?’

Pewe wagged a warning finger.

Ignoring it, Grace said, ‘Christ, you were once a detective yourself. Would you have looked at a body hanging from a cord around the neck with her feet six inches above anything she could have stood on and not wondered how she could possibly have done that by herself?’

‘No,’ Pewe replied, flatly.

‘Do you want to tell me she stood on a block of ice, like that old locked-room puzzle?’

‘I’m not playing puzzle games with you, Roy, I’m looking at the evidence, the facts. We have a bereaved and lonely woman. She’s looking for love online and all she finds is conmen. Then her sister dies, the final straw. Did she know? Maybe she got drunk, fell over, bashed her head. Had enough, ended it all. End of.’

‘Very few women hang themselves, sir, that’s a known fact. It’s extremely rare.’

‘Good, so you have an extremely rare situation. As you are into known facts and presumably statistics, too, let me throw a few at you. Last year in the UK we had a total of 585 homicides. We had 1,730 road traffic deaths. Those figures pale into insignificance when you look at the number of suicides: 6,188. How does that weight the odds, Roy?’

The Detective Superintendent shook his head in disbelief at his boss’s attitude.

‘Anything else I can help you with today?’ asked Pewe.

‘You’re really happy to leave it there?’ Grace stared at him with a mixture of frustration and anger.

‘Until I see better evidence to convince me she might have been murdered, I am, Roy. Perhaps you should be wondering to yourself, Roy, how come — when we were both the same rank less than two years ago — you are exactly where you were and I’m now an ACC? Maybe there’s a reason for it which is now becoming self-evident.’

It was all Grace could do not to punch his boss’s supercilious face. He stood, simmering. ‘And what about her dead sister in Germany?’

Pewe replied, ‘Is that information confirmed yet? It’s for them to investigate, not us.’

‘It’s not confirmed one hundred per cent, but it’s looking like the two sisters were killed and their deaths are linked.’

‘Not in my mind, they’re not. And while you’ve been out there garnering more newspaper column inches, you’ve been totally ignoring another directive I gave you, Roy.’

‘I have?’

‘You don’t think so?’

‘Which directive are you referring to, sir?’ Pewe threw so many at him, he had lost track.

‘I’m referring to one from the latest Home Office report, Roy. Can you tell me exactly how you have delivered, supported and inspired your team in a way that’s led to an increase in diversity?’

Grace stared back at him, almost incredulous. ‘Sir, at this moment we are facing a crime epidemic. Sussex citizens on dating agencies were scammed out of £30 million last year. Our murder rate in the last twelve months is at a fifty-year record high, as are burglaries and street crime. And you are worrying about diversity? I’m extremely proud of the diversity in my team, sir. I’m afraid I don’t have any field officer in a wheelchair because unfortunately, in my wide but admittedly limited experience, not many victims are considerate enough to always be murdered in access-friendly locations.’

‘You’re sailing very close to the wind, Roy,’ Pewe said.

All of it coming from your backside, with a very nasty smell, Grace would dearly love to have said.

As he left the ACC’s office a few minutes later, closing the grand door behind him, he was thinking about the words an embittered colleague had said to him recently, over a pint: ‘It’s not the down-and-outs and the criminals on the outside that you have to worry about, Roy, it’s the ones on the inside who’ll cut your throat and hang you out to bleed dry.’

His phone rang.

‘Roy Grace,’ he answered, standing in the corridor; Pewe’s assistant sat typing in her booth, opposite him.

It was DC Kevin Hall, a member of the small Major Enquiry Team he had assembled to investigate Susan Driver’s death.

‘Boss, we’ve just heard back from the Landeskriminalamt in Munich. Could be quite significant.’

‘Tell me?’

‘Lena Welch, the woman who went over her balcony in Munich, and Suzy Driver, are definitely confirmed as sisters. It took them a while to make the connection because both of them have married names. And there’s more, boss. Velvet’s just spoken to a close friend of Mrs Driver. She’d been telling her, very excitedly, about the dating agency she’d joined about a year ago. The friend told Velvet that recently the sisters had been concerned that a man Suzy had been talking with, who she found very attractive, had asked her for money and she was becoming suspicious about him.

‘And now both sisters are dead,’ Grace said.

‘It gets better. Munich police recovered from Lena’s flat a digital recording device, which shows images of her killer. There might be more to this than meets the eye, boss — in my humble opinion.’

Roy Grace was feeling a sudden burst of elation. ‘Humble is good, Kevin!’ Ending the call, he spun round and knocked on ACC Pewe’s door, a rat-a-tat-tat riff on the classic policeman’s knock, and loud enough to annoy him. He was more than a little pleased that he was about to ruin his boss’s morning — and, with a bit of luck, his entire day.