Dead Man’s Footsteps

94

Roy Grace sat in the back of the unmarked grey Ford Crown Victoria. As they headed into the Lincoln Tunnel he wondered whether, if you were a seasoned enough traveller, you could identify any city in the world just from the sound of the traffic.

In London the constant petrol roar and diesel rattle of engines and the whine-swoosh of the new generation of Volvo buses dominated. New York was completely different, mostly the steady tramp-tramp-tramp of tyres on the ribbed or cracked and lumpy road surfaces, and the honking of horns.

A massive truck behind them was honking now.

Detective Investigator Dennis Baker, who was driving, raised a hand up to the interior mirror and flipped him the bird. ‘Go fuck yourself, asshole!’

Grace grinned. Dennis hadn’t changed.

‘I mean, for Chrissake, asshole, what you want me to do? Drive over the top of the dickhead in front or what? Jesus!’

Long used to his work buddy’s driving, Detective Investigator Pat Lynch, seated alongside him in the front passenger seat, turned without comment to face Roy. ‘It’s good to see you again, man. Long time. Wayyyyy too long!’

Roy felt that too. He’d liked these guys from the moment they first met. Back in November 2000 he had been sent to New York to question a gay American banker whose partner had been found strangled in a flat in Kemp Town. The banker was never charged, but died from a drugs overdose a couple of years later. Roy had worked with Dennis and Pat for some while on that case and they’d stayed in touch.

Pat wore jeans and a denim jacket over a beige shirt, with a white T-shirt beneath that. With his pockmarked face and lanky, boyish haircut, he had the rugged looks of a movie tough guy, but he had a surprisingly gentle and caring nature. He had started life as a stevedore in the docks and his tall, powerful physique had stood him in good stead for that work.

Dennis wore a heavy black anorak, embossed with the legend Cold Case Homicide Squad and the NYPD shield, over a blue shirt, and also had on jeans. Shorter than Pat, wirier and sharp-eyed, he was heavily into martial arts. Years ago he had achieved tenth dan in shotokan karate, the highest level, and was something of a legend in the NYPD for his street-fighting skills.

Both men had been at the Brooklyn Police Station on Williams-burg East at 8.46 on the morning of 9/11, when the first plane had struck. Being literally one mile away, across the Brooklyn Bridge, they headed over there immediately, with their chief, and arrived just as the second plane struck, crashing into the South Tower. They had spent the following weeks as part of the team sifting through the rubble at Ground Zero, in what they had described as the ‘Belly of the Beast’. Dennis had then transferred to the crime scene tent and Pat to the bereavement centre on Pier 92.

In the ensuing years both men, previously extremely fit, had developed asthma, as well as trauma-related mental health problems, and had transferred from the rough and tumble world of the NYPD to the calmer waters of the Special Investigations Unit at the District Attorney’s Office.

Pat brought Grace up to speed on their current work, which was mostly transporting and interrogating mobsters. They now knew the US underworld as well as anybody. Pat talked about how the Mafia no longer had the juice it used to have. Villains flipped easier today than they used to. Who wouldn’t try to cut a deal, Pat said, when looking at the wrong end of a twenty-year to life sentence?

Hopefully they’d find in the next twenty-four hours someone who’d known Ronnie Wilson, someone who had helped him. If anyone could help him to look for someone who, Grace was becoming increasingly certain, had deliberately disappeared during 9/11 and its aftermath, it was these two.

‘You’re looking younger than ever,’ Pat said, suddenly changing the subject. ‘You must be in love.’

‘That wife of yours, she still never turned up, right?’ Dennis asked.

‘No,’ was his short answer. He’d rather not talk about Sandy.

‘He’s just envious,’ Pat said. ‘Cost him a fortune to get rid of his!’

Grace laughed and at that moment his phone beeped with an incoming text. He looked down.

Glad u there safe. Miss u. Humphrey misses u

too. No one 2 throw up on. XXX

He grinned, instantly feeling a pang of longing for Cleo. Then he remembered something. ‘If we’ve got five minutes, could we go into one of those big Toys R Us places? I’ll get my god-daughter’s Christmas present. She’s into something called Bratz.’

‘Biggest one’s in Times Square, we can swing by there now, then go on to W, where we thought we’d start,’ Pat said.

‘Thanks.’ Grace stared out of the window. They were going up an incline, past precarious-looking scaffolding. Steam rose from a subway vent.

It was a crisp autumnal afternoon, with a clear blue sky. Some people were wearing coats or heavy jackets, and as they got further into the centre of Manhattan everyone looked as if they were in a hurry. Half the men scurrying past were dressed in suits with tieless shirts and wore worried frowns. Most of them had a mobile clamped to one ear and carried in their other hand a Starbucks coffee with a brown collar around it, as if that was a mandatory totem.

‘So, Pat and I, we worked out a pretty good programme for you,’ Dennis said.

‘Yeah,’ Pat confirmed. ‘Although we’re now working for the DA we’re happy to run you around as a favour for a friend and a fellow cop.’

‘I really appreciate it. I spoke to my FBI guy in London,’ Grace replied. ‘He knows I’m here and what I’m doing. If my hunches work out, we may well have to come back formally to the NYPD.’

Dennis hit the horn at a black Explorer in front of them that had put its flashers on and half pulled over, looking for something. ‘Fuck you! Come on, asshole!’

‘We’ve booked you into the Marriott Financial Center – that’s right down by Ground Zero, in Battery Park City. Figure that’ll be a good base, as we can get to most places you might want to check out easily enough from there.’

‘Give you some atmosphere too,’ Dennis said. ‘It was badly damaged. All brand new now. You’ll be able to see the work going on at Ground Zero.’

‘You know they’re still finding body parts,’ Pat said. ‘Six years on, right? Found some last month on the roof of the Deutsche Bank Building. People don’t realize. They got no fuckin’ idea the force of what happened when those planes hit.’

‘Right opposite the Medical Examiner’s Office they got a tented-off area with eight refrigerated trucks inside,’ Dennis said. ‘They’ve been there for – what – six years now. Twenty thousand unidentified body parts in there. Can you believe that? Twenty thousand?’ He shook his head.

‘My cousin died,’ Pat went on. ‘You knew that, right? He worked for Cantor Fitzgerald.’ He held up his wrist to reveal a silver bracelet. ‘See that, it has his initials. TJH. We all got one, wear it in his memory.’

‘Everyone in New York lost someone that day,’ Dennis said, swerving to avoid a jay-walking woman. ‘Shit, lady, you want to know what the fender of a Crown Victoria feels like? I can tell you, it don’t feel too good.’

‘Anyhow,’ Pat said, ‘we’ve been doing as much as we could before you got here. We checked out the hotel where your Ronnie Wilson stayed. Same manager’s still there, so that’s good. We’ve fixed for you to meet him. He’s happy to talk to you, but there’s no change from what we already know. Some of Wilson’s stuff was still in his room – his passport, tickets, a few underclothes. That’s all now in one of the 9/11 victim storage depots.’

Grace’s phone rang suddenly. Excusing himself, he answered it. ‘Roy Grace?’

‘Yo, old-timer, where are you now? Having an ice cream on top of the Empire State Building?’

‘Very droll. I’m actually in a traffic jam.’

‘OK, well, I have another development for you. We’re working our butts off here while you’re having fun. Does the name Kather-ine Jennings ring a bell?’

Grace thought for a moment, feeling a little weary, his brain less sharp than usual after the flight. Then he remembered. It was the name of the woman in Kemp Town that the Argus reporter, Kevin Spinella, had given him. The name he had passed on to Steve Curry.

‘What about her?’

‘She’s trying to sell a collection of stamps worth around four million pounds. The dealer she’s gone to is Hugo Hegarty and he recognizes them. He hasn’t seen them yet, only spoken to her over the phone, but he’s convinced, all bar a few that are missing, that these are the stamps he purchased for Lorraine Wilson back in 2002.’

‘Did he ask the woman where she got them from?’

Branson repeated what Hegarty had told him, then added, ‘There’s a serial on Katherine Jennings.’

‘Mine,’ Grace said. He fell silent for some moments, thinking back to his conversation on Monday with Spinella. The reporter had said Katherine Jennings seemed agitated. Would having four million pounds’ worth of stamps in your possession make you agitated? Grace reckoned he’d be feeling pretty relaxed, having that kind of loot, so long as it was in a safe place.

So what was she agitated about? Something definitely smelled wrong.

‘I think we should put surveillance on her, Glenn. And we have the advantage of knowing where she lives.’

‘She may have done a runner from there,’ Branson replied. ‘But she’s made an appointment to go to Hegarty’s house tomorrow morning. And she’s bringing him the stamps.’

‘Perfect,’ Grace said. ‘Get on to Lizzie. Tell her we’ve had this conversation and I’m suggesting trying to get a surveillance team to pick her up at Hegarty’s house.’ He looked at this watch. ‘There’s plenty of time to get that in place.’

Glenn Branson looked at his watch too. It wasn’t going to be a simple matter of a two-minute call to Lizzie Mantle. He was going to have to write out a report detailing the reasons for requesting a surveillance unit and its potential value to Operation Dingo. And he was going to have to prepare the briefing. He wasn’t going to make it home for hours yet. It would mean another bollocking from Ari.

Nothing new there.

When Roy Grace ended the call, he leaned forward. ‘Guys,’ he said, ‘do you have someone who can put together a list of stamp dealers here?’

‘Starting a new hobby, are you?’ quipped Dennis.

‘Just stamping out crime,’ Grace retorted.

‘Shit, man!’ Pat said, turning to face him. ‘Your jokes don’t get any better, do they?’

Grace smiled sardonically. ‘Sad, isn’t it?’