Dead Man's Grip

38

Tony Case, the Senior Support Officer at HQ CID, phoned Roy Grace early in the afternoon, to tell him one of the current inquiries at Sussex House had ended in a result sooner than expected and was now winding down, which meant MIR-1 – Major Incident Room One – had become free. Case, with whom Grace got on well, knew that was the place the Detective Superintendent favoured for conducting his inquiries.

As he made his way towards MIR-1 for the 6.30 p.m. briefing, his phone rang. He stopped in the corridor, in front of a diagram on the wall – a white sheet pinned to a red board which was headed CRIME SCENE ASSESSMENT.

It was Kevin Spinella on the line.

‘Detective Superintendent, do you have a second for me?’

‘Not even a nanosecond, I’m afraid. Nor a picosecond. I don’t even have a femtosecond.’

‘Ha-ha, very witty. One millionth of one billionth of a second. You can’t even spare that?’

‘You actually know what that is?’ Grace was a little astonished.

‘Well, I know that a nanosecond is one billionth of a second and a picosecond is one trillionth of a second. So, yeah, actually, I do know what a femtosecond is.’’

Grace could hear him chewing gum, as ever, over the phone. It sounded like a horse trotting through mud.

‘Didn’t know you were a physicist.’

‘Yeah, well, life’s full of surprises, isn’t it? So, do you have time to talk about Operation Violin?’

‘I’m just going into a meeting.’

‘Your 6.30 p.m. briefing?’

Grace held his temper with difficulty. Was there anything this little shit did not know?

‘Yes. You probably know the agenda better than me.’

Ignoring the barb, Spinella said, ‘Ewan Preece, your prime suspect…’

Grace said nothing for a while. His brain was whirring. How did Spinella know that? How?

But he realized there were dozens of potential sources that could have leaked this name to him, starting with Ford Prison. There was nothing to be gained from going there at this moment.

‘We don’t have a prime suspect at this stage,’ he told the reporter, thinking hard. About how he could make Spinella useful to the investigation. Stalling for time, he said, ‘We are interested in interviewing Ewan Preece to eliminate him from our enquiries.’

‘And have him back under lock and key at Ford? You must be wondering why someone with only three weeks of his sentence to run would go over the wall, right?’

Grace again thought carefully before replying. It was a question he had been considering in some depth himself. He had tried to put himself in Preece’s position. Difficult, because the mindset of a recidivist was unique to his – or her – circumstances. But only an idiot would escape three weeks before the end of a sentence unless there was a pressing reason. Jealousy could be one; a commercial opportunity another.

Perhaps being in the wrong place, at the wrong time was a third? Driving a van in Brighton, when you were meant to be labouring on a construction site in Arunde?

‘I’m sure that hundred-thousand-dollar reward is going to help find you the van driver,’ Spinella said. ‘Presume you’ve had some calls to the Incident Room?’

There had actually been remarkably few, which had surprised Grace. Normally rewards brought every nutter and chancer out of the woodwork. But this call was an opportunity for more publicity – and especially to put pressure on anyone out there who might know Preece’s whereabouts.

‘Yes,’ he lied. ‘We are delighted with the response of the general public and we are urgently following several leads which we believe have come to us directly as result of this massive reward.’

‘I can quote you on that?’

‘You can.’

Grace ended the call and entered MIR-1. As ever, with a major crime inquiry, some wag had put a humorous picture on the back of the door, making fun of the inquiry name. It was a particularly good one today – a cartoon of a man in a fedora and turned up mackintosh, clutching a violin case and smoking a huge stogie.

The two Major Incident Rooms at Sussex House, MIR-1 and MIR-2, were the nerve centres for major crime inquiries. Despite opaque windows too high to see out of, MIR-1 had an airy feel, good light, good energy. It was his favourite room in the entire headquarters building. While in other parts of Sussex House he missed the messy buzz of police station incident rooms that he had grown up with, this room felt like a powerhouse.

It was an L-shaped space, divided up by three large workstations, each comprising a long curved desk with room for up to eight people to sit, and several large whiteboards. One, headed OPERATION VIOLIN, had the diagram of the vehicles involved in the accident, which Inspector Biggs from the Road Policing Unit had produced earlier. Another had the start of a family tree of Tony Revere, including the name and immediate family of his girlfriend. On a third was a list of names and contact numbers of principal witnesses.

There was an air of intense concentration, punctuated by the constant warbling of phones, which the members of his expanding team answered haphazardly.

He saw Norman Potting on the phone, making notes as he spoke. He still had not spoken to him since the two attempted calls in his car. He sat down at an empty workstation and placed his notes in front of him.

‘Right!’ he said, as Potting ended his call, raising his voice to get everyone’s attention. ‘The time is 6.30 p.m., Saturday 24 April. This is the seventh briefing of Operation Violin, the investigation into the death of Tony Revere.’ He looked at the Crime Scene Manager. ‘Tracy, I understand you have a development?’

There was a sudden blast of house music. Embarrassed, PC Alec Davies quickly silenced his phone.

‘Yes, chief,’ Stocker replied. ‘We’ve had a positive ID of the van type back from Ford, from their analysis of the serial number on the wing mirror. They’ve confirmed it was fitted to the ’06 model. So, considering the time and location where the mirror-casing fragment was found, I think we can say with reasonable certainty it belonged to our suspect Ford Transit.’ She pointed up at the whiteboard. ‘Vehicle 1 on the diagram.’

‘Do we know how many of these vans were made in that year?’ Emma-Jane Boutwood asked.

‘Yes,’ Stocker answered. ‘Fifty-seven thousand, four hundred and thirty-four Ford Transit vans sold in the UK in 2006. Ninety-three per cent of them were white, which means fifty-three thousand, four hundred and thirteen vans fit our description.’ She smiled wryly.

Sergeant Paul Wood of the Collision Investigation Unit said, ‘One line that would be worth pursuing would be to contact all repair shops and see if anyone’s brought a Transit in for wing mirror repair. They get damaged frequently.’

Grace made a note, nodding. ‘Yes, I’ve thought of that. But he’d have to be pretty stupid to take the van in for repairs so quickly. More likely he’d tuck it away in a lock-up.’

‘Ewan Preece doesn’t sound like the sharpest tool in the shed,’ Glenn Branson chipped in. ‘I don’t think we should rule it out, boss.’

‘I’ll put it down as an action for the outside inquiry team. Perhaps we can put a couple of PCSOs on it.’ Then he turned to Potting. ‘Norman, do you have your update from Ford Prison?’

Potting pursed his lips, taking his time before answering. ‘I do, chief,’ he said finally, in his rich rural burr.

In another era, Grace could have envisaged him as a bloody-minded desk sergeant plod in some remote country town. Potting spoke slowly and methodically, partly from memory and partly referring to his notebook. Every few moments he would squint to decipher his handwriting.

‘I interviewed Senior Prison Officer Lisa Setterington, the one you spoke to, chief,’ Potting said.

Grace nodded.

‘She confirmed that Preece appeared to be a model prisoner, determined to go straight.’

Potting was interrupted by a couple of snorts from officers who’d had previous dealings with the man.

‘So if he was a model prisoner,’ asked Bella Moy sarcastically, ‘how come he was driving a van twenty-five miles away from where he was supposed to be on Wednesday morning?’

‘Exactly,’ Potting said.

‘Model prisoners don’t go over the wall either,’ she added tartly.

‘They don’t, Bella, no,’ he agreed condescendingly, as if talking to a child.

Grace eyed both of them warily, wondering if they were about to have another of their regular spats.

‘Now the good news is,’ Potting went on, ‘that word of this reward has spread around the prison, as you might imagine. Several inmates who’ve had contact with Preece have come forward to the Governor, offering suggestions where he might be, and I’ve got a list of six addresses and contact names for immediate follow-up.’

‘Good stuff, Norman,’ Grace said.

Potting allowed himself a brief, smug smile and took a swig from his mug of tea before continuing, ‘But there’s some bad news too. Ewan Preece had a friend in Ford Prison, another inmate – they go back years.’ He checked his notes. ‘Warren Tulley – had about the same amount of form as Preece. They were thick together inside. The officer had arranged for Tulley to talk to me. Someone went to fetch him to bring him over to the office – and found him dead in his cell. He’d hanged himself.’

There was a momentary silence while the team absorbed this. Grace’s first reaction was that this news had not yet reached Spinella.

DC David Howes asked, ‘What do we know about his circumstances?’

‘He had two months to serve,’ Potting said. ‘Married with three young kids – all fine with the marriage apparently. Lisa Setterington knew him too. She assured me he was looking forward to getting out and spending time with his kids.’

‘Not someone with any obvious reason to top himself?’ Howes, who was a former Prison Liaison Officer, probed.

‘Doesn’t sound like it, no,’ Potting replied.

‘I’m just speculating, but what it sounds like to me,’ Howes went on, ‘is that possibly Warren Tulley knew where to find Preece.’ He shrugged.

‘Which might be why he died?’ Grace said. ‘Not suicide at all?’

‘They’re launching a full investigation, working closely with the West Area Major Crime Branch Team,’ Potting said. ‘Seems a bit coincidental to them.’

‘How hard would it be to hang yourself in Ford?’ Glenn Branson asked.

‘Easier than in a lot of prisons. They’ve all got private rooms, like motel rooms,’ Potting said. ‘Being an open prison, they’ve got much more freedom and are left alone much more than in a higher-category place. If you wanted to hang yourself, you could do so easily.’

‘And equally easily hang someone else?’ Howes asked.

There was a long, uncomfortable silence.

‘One hundred thousand dollars is a lot of folding to someone inside,’ Glenn said.

‘It’s a lot of folding to anyone,’ Nick Nicholl replied.

‘More than enough to kill for,’ Howes said grimly.

PC Alec Davies put up a hand. He spoke quite shyly. ‘Sir, I might be stating the obvious, but if Warren Tulley did know where Preece was, then if someone did kill him, he possibly did it for one reason. Because he knows where Preece is too.’