Need You Dead

85 Friday 29 April

As was his ritual each morning whatever time he arrived at work, Roy Grace checked his emails, Twitter, and had a quick glance through the overnight serials — the log of all reported crimes in the city of Brighton and Hove. Muggings, assaults, fights, break-ins, robberies, RTCs, vehicle thefts, drug arrests, missing persons. He was always curious to see what was going on in his beloved city, although few of these serials ever concerned him directly.

However, there was one particular item today that caught his eye. Made him freeze.

Made him swear out aloud.

An hour later, he sat in on the 8.30 a.m. briefing of Operation Bantam. He could have let Batchelor get on with it, but equally, he had too much riding on this himself, and he felt that Guy needed his steering hand. After all, he was the SIO.

But he was too distracted by the serial he had seen.

The team had now expanded to over twenty detectives and support staff, but there was one conspicuous absentee in the conference room today: DS Exton. Grace’s concerns about this detective he had long trusted were deepening. They were about to deepen further.

His phone rang. It was Chris Gargan from the Forensics Unit, sounding perplexed. ‘Sir?’ he said.

‘Hang on a sec, Chris.’

Grace stepped out of the room into the corridor. ‘OK, I’m with you.’

‘One of your team, Jon Exton, dropped us over a GoPro memory card last night, with an urgent request to see if we could enhance it.’

‘Yes. What have you managed to get?’

‘Well, I don’t know if someone’s made a mistake, but it’s blank, sir.’

Grace felt a sharp, sinking sensation. ‘Blank? The memory card?’

‘Yes, there’s nothing on it.’

Gargan had one of those voices that always sounded totally straight, with no hint of disingenuousness. In all his dealings with this CSI, Grace had found that what you saw or heard was what you got.

‘There couldn’t be any mistake, Chris?’ Even as he said the words, he knew they were futile. The Surrey and Sussex Forensics Department in Guildford was one of the most efficiently run units in both forces.

‘No, Roy, I’m sorry, not at this end — what we’ve been given is a blank memory card.’

‘Might it have been wiped?’

‘Well, yes, either wiped, or it’s a new card, never used, which I think is more likely.’

‘It couldn’t just be a dud?’

‘No, we’ve tested it and it records correctly.’

Grace thanked him and ended the call. Shit. The nightmare he didn’t want to believe really did seem to be coming true.

On the serials earlier, the one that had caught his eye was a theft from a motor vehicle. Not something he would ordinarily have paid any attention to, vehicle break-ins happened all the time. Mostly they were random chaotic crimes by drug users desperate to pay for their next fix, grabbing a TomTom or a handbag, or anything of value the owner had left on view.

The thief had gained access the usual way, by smashing one of the rear windows of the BMW, sometime during the night. The car had been ransacked. Among the items taken was the GoPro camera.

The car was parked in Vallance Street.

Its owner’s name was Christopher Diplock.

Instead of returning to the briefing, Roy Grace strode back to his office, called Ray Packham and updated him on the blank memory card and the stolen GoPro. ‘Ray, is there any way this man, Diplock, could have given you the wrong memory card in error?’

‘I doubt it very much, Roy. He doesn’t strike me as the kind of person who would make many mistakes.’

‘So how might it be blank? Could it have happened by accident — I don’t know — such as by being too close to a mobile phone — or some other electronic device?’

‘No, Roy, it would need to be something immensely powerful — such as an industrial-scale magnet. Even then there’s likely to be some trace — memory cards are extremely hard to erase completely.’

Grace thought for a moment. ‘OK. You took the card directly from Diplock and put it in the evidence bag yourself, didn’t you, Ray?’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘Did you see any of the playback yourself?’

‘No — Mr Diplock told me what he’d seen and that was enough for me.’ Then after a moment he added, ‘Are you thinking the theft of the GoPro might be related to this, Roy?’

‘It could be someone trying to wipe away the traces, perhaps? Thinking that if they’ve been recorded on the memory card, then the images would still be on the GoPro?’

‘Except the images wouldn’t still be on the GoPro, Roy, they would only be on the memory card.’

‘Of course,’ he said.

But what if that person wasn’t thinking straight? he wondered, privately. Someone in Exton’s state, clutching at straws, increasingly desperate to conceal any evidence?