Not Dead Enough

121

For the first time in what seemed a long, long week Grace was in bed before midnight. But he slept only fitfully, trying to move as little as possible as he lay awake in order not to disturb Cleo, who was naked and warm and sleeping like a baby in his arms.

Maybe when Norman Jecks was behind bars, he would start to relax. All the time he was at the Royal Sussex County Hospital, it was too easy for a man of his cunning to escape, despite the police guard. And every unfamiliar noise in the night was potentially a Norman Jecks footfall.

It was the Black & Decker power drill that Cleo had found in her broom cupboard that upset him – and her – the most. She had never owned an electric drill in her life and had had no workmen in the house recently. It was as if Jecks had left behind a souvenir of his visit, a little token, a reminder.

Because You Love Her.

The drill was now in an evidence bag, safely locked up in the crime scene evidence store at the Major Incident Suite. But the image of what it represented, and those words breathed at him earlier today by Jecks, from his hospital bed, would shadow him for a long time to come.

His mind returned to Sandy. To Dick Pope’s utter conviction that he and Lesley had seen her in Munich.

If it was true, and she had run away from them, what did that say? That she had started over again and wanted no connection with their previous life? But that made no sense. They had been so happy together – or so he had thought. Perhaps she had had a breakdown of some kind? In which case Kullen’s suggestion of trawling all the doctors, hospitals and clinics in the Munich area might produce a result. But then what?

Would he try to rebuild a life with her knowing she had left him once and might do it again? And destroy all he had with Cleo in the process?

There was of course the possibility that the Popes were mistaken. That it had been just another woman who resembled Sandy, like the one he had chased across the Englischer Garten. It was nine years now. People changed. Sometimes even he had difficulty remembering Sandy’s face.

And the truth was, in his heart, it was Cleo who now mattered most in life.

Just that one day in Munich had nearly caused a rift in his relationship with her. To engage in a full-scale search of the city and all the time that involved would be a major undertaking and who knew what repercussions that might have? He’d had nine years of chasing shadows on wild-goose chases. Perhaps it was time to stop now. Time to leave the past behind him.

He fell asleep resolved to try, at any rate.

And awoke two hours later, shaking and shivering from the recurring nightmare that visited him every few months or so. Sandy’s voice screaming out of the darkness. Screaming for help.

It was nearly an hour before he fell asleep again.

At six in the morning he drove home, changed into his jogging kit and went down to the seafront. Almost every muscle in his body was hurting and his ankle was too painful to run, so he hobbled down to the promenade and then back, the fresh morning air helping to clear his head.

As he stepped out of the shower afterwards and began drying himself, he heard Branson’s bedroom door open, then the toilet seat being lifted. Moments later, as he began lathering his face, he heard his friend urinating with a sound like a supertanker emptying its bilges.

Finally the cistern clanked and flushed. Then Branson called out, ‘Tea or coffee?’

‘Am I hearing right?’ Grace asked.

‘Yeah, I’ve decided I would make you a lovely wife.’

‘Just make me tea. Hold the nuptials, OK?’

‘Tea coming up!’

Branson was humming cheerily as he clumped down the stairs and Grace wondered what pills he was on this morning. Then he turned his mind back to the business of shaving, and the problem he had still not been able to solve. Although at some time during the small hours, he had realized what his starting point should be.

Shortly after ten he was back in the small, cubicle-like waiting room in the registrar’s offices at Brighton town hall, holding a file folder.

After only a couple of minutes, the tall, urbane figure of Clive Ravensbourne, the Superintendent Registrar, entered. He shook Grace’s hand, looking very much more at ease than on the previous occasion they had met, a couple of days ago – if a little curious.

‘Detective Superintendent, very nice to see you again. How can I help you?’

‘Thank you for coming in on a Saturday, I appreciate it.’

‘No problem. It’s a working day for me.’

‘It’s in connection with the same murder inquiry I came to see you about on Thursday,’ Grace said. ‘You kindly gave me some information about a twin. I need you to verify it for me – it’s very urgent and important to my inquiry. Certain things are just not adding up.’

‘Of course,’ Ravensbourne said. ‘Whatever I can do – I will try.’

Grace opened the folder and pointed at Brian Bishop’s birth certificate. ‘I gave you the name of this chap, Desmond Jones, and asked if you could establish if he had a twin, and the twin’s birth name. There were twenty-seven possible babies all with the same surname. You suggested you could bypass having to go through each one simply by looking up the records from the index number on the birth certificate.’

Ravensbourne nodded emphatically. ‘Yes, correct.’

‘Could I ask you to double-check for me?’

‘Of course.’

Ravensbourne took the birth certificate and went out of the room. A couple of minutes later he returned with the large dark red, leather-bound registry book, put it down with the birth certificate next to it and leafed through it anxiously. Then he stopped and checked the birth certificate again. ‘Desmond William Jones, mother Eleanor Jones, born at the Royal Sussex County Hospital, 7 September 1964 at three forty-seven a.m. And it says Adopted, right? This is the right chap?’

‘Yes, he checks out. It’s the one you gave me as his twin brother who doesn’t.’

The registrar returned to the tome and looked down the page. ‘Frederick Roger Jones?’ he read out. ‘Mother Eleanor Jones, born at the Royal Sussex County Hospital, 7 September 1964 at four o five a.m. Also subsequently adopted.’ He looked up. ‘That’s your twin. Frederick Roger Jones.’

‘Are you sure? You couldn’t be mistaken?’

The registrar turned the book around, so that Grace could see for himself. There were five entries.

‘That birth certificate you have, it’s actually a copy of the original – the original is this entry in here, in this book. Do you understand that?’ the registrar asked.

‘Yes,’ Grace replied.

‘It’s an exact copy. This is the original entry. Five entries to a page – see – the bottom two are your chaps, Desmond William Jones and Frederick Roger Jones.’

As if to demonstrate his veracity, Ravensbourne turned over the page. ‘You see, there are another five on this—’

He stopped in mid-sentence and turned back a page, then turned it forward again. And then he said, ‘Oh. Oh dear. Oh, my God, it never occurred to me! I was in a hurry when you came to see me, I remember. I saw the twin – you were looking for a twin. It never occurred to me—’

There on the next page, the top entry, in neat, slanted black handwriting, was: Norman John Jones, mother Eleanor Jones, born at the Royal Sussex County Hospital, 7 September 1964 at four twenty-four a.m.

Grace looked at the man. ‘Does this mean what I think it means?’

The registrar was nodding furiously, half out of embarrassment, half from excitement. ‘Yes. Born nineteen minutes later. The same mother. Absolutely!’