Find Them Dead

44 Sunday 12 May

The rain had cleared overnight and it was now one of those rare, glorious, early-summer mornings, full of promise, with a cloudless sky and not a breath of wind. Roy Grace had worked in the incident room until late last night and was going back after lunch with Potting holding the fort this morning. He ran down the side of the steep field, exhilarated and excited.

Almost intoxicated by the sheer beauty of the rolling Sussex countryside in which he always felt he was lucky to live, he sprinted the last couple of hundred metres back down to the cottage as the ground levelled out. Humphrey, unusually, was dragging behind, to Grace’s surprise. Entering the gate into their garden, feeling pretty all-in after his run, he stopped to get his breath back and to do his stretches. Humphrey caught up with him, limping a little.

Grace stroked his head. ‘You’re not knackered, are you, boy? You’re just warmed up! The thing is, you’ve got four legs against my two, so it’s like you have four-wheel drive up those hills, right? Unfair advantage!’ Humphrey cocked his head and Grace stroked him again. He adored this creature, envying him, as he so often did, the apparent simplicity of his life.

When he went inside, he saw Bruno seated at the breakfast bar, glued to the television, on which a documentary was playing. The logo of the Discovery Channel was in one corner of the screen. Noah was sitting in his high chair, banging a spoon, a mess of food all over the tray and on the floor around him. Cleo, cracking eggs into a bowl, turned round with a smile.

‘How was your run?’

‘Eight miles!’ He kissed her.

Humphrey sat in front of her, head up, expectant.

She popped half an eggshell into his mouth, and he crunched on it contentedly for several seconds before it was gone, then looked up for another. ‘Eight miles — brilliant!’

‘How did you get on with the lots we’ve bid on at the auctioneers?’

‘Someone from Bellman’s left a message to say we’ve won three bids — two paintings and a runner for the hallway! I’ve arranged for Kaitlynn to collect them for us.’

‘Fantastic!’ He hesitated. ‘You’ve a PM tomorrow with Frazer, right?’

She nodded. ‘A woman in her thirties brought in yesterday. Looks like she fell from a balcony.’

He looked at the pile of mashed bananas on the wooden board beside her.

‘Are you making banana bread?’

‘Nope, a new recipe I saw in the paper. Banana pancakes! Less than 150 calories a serving. One banana and two eggs, with some berries on top.’

‘Sounds delicious,’ he said, a tad dubiously.

‘Well, as we’re having a blow-out fish and chips lunch on the pier, I thought a light breakfast made sense.’

‘Anything I can do?’

She touched his face tenderly with one hand. ‘Yes, have a shower and be prepared for a taste sensation!’

‘I’m ravenous!’

He was about to head upstairs when a face he recognized appeared on the television screen. A pensive, good-looking man in his thirties, with dark, wavy hair and a side parting, wearing a beige jacket and open-neck shirt. Chin resting on his hand. A clipped American accent.

He knew that face and not in a good way.

Born Theodore Robert Cowell, the man had at some point early in his life changed his last name to Bundy. A former law student, Ted Bundy had become America’s most notorious ever serial killer.

Why was his eleven-year-old son watching this, and looking so absorbed? And why was Cleo letting him, or had she not noticed?

He gave her a look and pointed at the screen. She gave him an I know shrug back.

‘Enjoying the programme, Bruno?’ he asked.

His son nodded. ‘This guy’s ace! I mean, a douche bag, but ace!’

‘Really?’ The boy’s enthusiasm worried him.

‘Sure, like he confessed to thirty victims on his deathbed, but the FBI detective, Bill Hagmaier, reckons his total could be loads more — isn’t that awesome?’

‘Awesome? Why do you think that, Bruno?’

‘It’s — like — sick!’

The more time he spent with his son, the more Roy Grace thought the boy’s moral compass was a little skewed. But at the same time, he was aware he needed to tread carefully to avoid further alienating the boy. ‘What about all the victims? And their families?’

Without taking his eyes from the screen, Bruno said, ‘You can choose to be a victim, or not. It’s Darwinian, yes?’

‘Darwinian?’ Grace frowned.

‘Ted Bundy was an innocent victim of natural selection. Don’t you agree?’

Grace was struggling to get his head around the boy’s logic. ‘Want to tell me how you arrive at that conclusion, Bruno?’

‘Aren’t we all prisoners of our genes?’ he said, again without turning from the screen. ‘Don’t you think so, Papa?’

‘No, I don’t, Bruno. We are all born with the capacity to do evil, but whether we do or not is a choice we make — a conscious choice.’

Bruno shook his head. ‘That’s not what Mama told me.’

Grace glanced at Cleo, who was listening with interest. ‘What did your mother tell you?’ he asked.

‘That sometimes the choices are already made for us.’

‘And have any choices already been made for you, Bruno?’

For some moments his son concentrated on the screen. Bundy was talking to the camera and he realized, uncomfortably, that Bruno was echoing what this monster was saying. He was tempted to grab the remote and switch the television off, but he held back. Let him continue and he would try to engage with him after the programme was over. He turned to Cleo again. ‘How long till breakfast?’

‘Ten minutes.’

‘I’ll go and jump into the shower.’

‘Yes, one choice has been made,’ Bruno said, suddenly. ‘What I can and cannot eat, apparently.’

‘What you can and cannot eat?’ Grace asked him.

‘Jah. I’m blood-type A positive, which Mama told me was a meat-eaters’ group. Now my new mother tells me she was wrong. I should be eating vegetarian — and vegan.’

‘Well, we’re all trying to eat more healthily, Bruno.’

‘You’re making a value judgement based on an unproven hypothesis,’ Bruno said.

Grace glanced at Cleo, who caught his eye with a silent what? Both of them were constantly startled by the very adult expressions and opinions Bruno regularly came up with. Was this the result of things he had picked up from his mother Sandy — Grace’s former and estranged wife — in first ten years of his life, or was it how kids his age were today, Grace wondered?

As he went upstairs, he was thinking back to a parents’ evening at Bruno’s school last autumn. To something the bemused headmaster had told them. He’d said that when asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, Bruno had replied, ‘Either a chemist or a dictator.’

They understood the peripatetic upbringing Bruno must have had with his erratic mother, before coming to live with them in England after her suicide.

Both he and Cleo hoped that by introducing him to a stable, loving family environment, they could, in time, change him. But so far there was little sign of that happening. It probably hadn’t helped that he’d been a largely absent father during these past six months, and he determined now that he was back down in Sussex to spend more time with him.

They had an ally in a forensic child psychologist called Orlando Trujillo, who had been giving them advice on how to handle Bruno. Trujillo had warned them against trying to intervene too much at this stage, but rather to simply observe and gradually try to instil in Bruno new values. They were doing their best, but God, it was hard. And to compound their difficulties, with one major trial running at Lewes Crown Court starting tomorrow, and a murder investigation he was leading, in addition to all the preparations he needed to do for the Chief Superintendent boards, he was going to be desperately squeezed for time.

He was about to step into the shower when his job phone rang. Although not on-call today, he glanced at the screen and saw it was Glenn Branson. ‘Hi,’ he answered. ‘What’s up?’

‘Not sure if you’re going to like this or not, boss. Your good buddy, Edward Crisp, has been attacked in Lewes Prison. Stabbed in one eye with a ballpoint pen by a fellow inmate who apparently doesn’t like men who hurt women.’

‘Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle. Was the pen damaged?’

‘I didn’t ask, boss!’

‘How badly injured is he?’

‘He’s being taken under guard to Moorfields Eye Hospital in London. The prison doctor thinks he may be permanently blinded in that eye. So, it doesn’t look like the trial’s going to be starting tomorrow after all.’

‘How many officers are with him?’

‘Dunno, boss.’

‘Make sure he’s properly guarded, it could be another of his ruses to escape.’

‘Not from what I hear — the pen’s still stuck in his eye.’

‘Too bad the bastard didn’t push it further, into his twisted brain, and spare us all a lot of wasted time in court,’ Grace said.

‘You really are sick, aren’t you?’

‘Just a realist, matey. You’ll get there one day, after you’ve dealt with as many shitbags as I have. Keep me posted. Want me to send him a get well soon note?’

‘What a lovely gesture, I’m sure he’d appreciate it.’

‘So long as he can read it.’