Dead Man’s Footsteps

3

Detective Superintendent Roy Grace, seated at the desk in his office, put down the phone and leaned back with his arms folded, tilting the chair until it was resting against the wall. Shit. At 4.45 on a Friday afternoon, his weekend had just gone down the toilet – more or less literally. Down a storm drain, at any rate.

On top of a lousy run of cards at his weekly boys’ poker game last night, when he’d lost nearly three hundred quid.

There was nothing like the idea of a field trip to a storm drain on a howling wet Friday afternoon, he thought, for putting you in a really foul mood. He could feel the icy draught of the wind blowing through the ill-fitting windowpanes of his small office and listened to the rattle of the rain. Not a day to be outside.

He cursed the Control Room operator who had just rung him with the news. It was shooting the messenger, he realized, but he had everything planned to spend tomorrow night in London with Cleo, as a treat for her. Now that would have to be cancelled, for a case he knew instinctively he was not going to enjoy, and all because he had stepped in as duty Senior Investigating Officer to cover for a colleague who had gone down sick.

Murders were what really floated his boat in this job. There were between fifteen and twenty every year in Sussex, with many of them in the City of Brighton and Hove and environs – more than enough to go round all the SIOs and give them a chance to show their abilities. It was a tad callous to think this way, he knew, but it was a fact that handling a brutal, high-profile murder inquiry well was a good career opportunity. You got noticed by the press and the public, by your peers and, most importantly, by your bosses. There was intense satisfaction to be had out of a successful arrest and conviction. More than just a job done, it allowed the family of the victim a chance of closure, to move on. To Grace, this was the most significant factor of all.

He liked to work on murders where there was a hot, live trail, where he could crack into action with an adrenaline rush, think on his feet, galvanize a team into working 24/7 and have a good chance of catching the perpetrator.

But from the sound of the operator’s report, the findings in the storm drain indicated anything but a fresh murder. Skeletal remains. Might not even be a murder at all, could be a suicide, maybe even a natural death. There was even the remote possibility it could be a shop-window dummy – that had happened before. Remains like this could have been there for decades, so another couple of days wouldn’t have made a sodding bit of difference.

Guilty at this sudden flash of anger, he looked down at the twenty or so blue boxes, stacked two and three deep, that were taking up most of the carpeted floor area of his office that wasn’t already filled by the small round conference table and four chairs.

Each box contained the key files of an unsolved murder, a cold case. The rest of the case files were bulging out of cupboards elsewhere in the CID headquarters, or were locked up, going mouldy, in a damp police garage in the area where the murder happened, or were archived away in a forgotten basement room, along with all the tagged and bagged items of evidence.

And he had a feeling, born from close on twenty years of investigating murders, that what awaited him now in the storm drain was more than likely to result in another blue box on his floor.

He was so saturated with paperwork at the moment that there was barely a square inch of his desk that wasn’t buried under mounds of documents. He was having to work through the time lines, evidence, statements and everything else needed by the Crown Prosecution Service for two separate murder trials next year. One concerned a scumbag internet sleaze merchant called Carl Venner, the other a psychopath called Norman Jecks.

Glancing through a document prepared by a young woman, Emily Gaylor from the Brighton Trials Unit, he picked up the phone and dialled an extension, taking only a small amount of satisfaction from the fact that he was about to ruin someone else’s weekend too.

He was answered almost instantly. ‘DS Branson.’

‘What are you doing at the moment?’

‘I’m about to go home, old-timer, thanks for asking,’ said Glenn Branson.

‘That’s the wrong answer.’

‘No, it’s the right answer,’ the Detective Sergeant insisted. ‘Ari has a dressage lesson and I’m looking after the kids.’

‘Dressage? What’s that?’

‘Something involving her horse that costs thirty quid an hour.’

‘She’ll have to take the kids with her. Meet me down in the car park in five minutes. We need to take a look at a dead body.’

‘I’d really prefer to go home.’

‘So would I. And I expect the body would prefer to be at home too,’ Grace replied. ‘At home in front of the telly with a nice cuppa instead of decomposing in a storm drain.’