Picture You Dead

59

Sunday, 3 November

Thirty minutes later, following the satnav on his phone, in its cradle on the Alfa’s dash, Roy Grace passed the Lido then turned off the coast road, winding up through the network of Saltdean’s pleasant residential streets.

There had been no reply yet from Cleo.

Cresting the brow of a steep hill, a glorious, sunny view of the English Channel came into sight. Then a short distance ahead he saw a cluster of vehicles – two marked police cars, a white CSI van as well as an unmarked saloon. There was a small knot of members of the public standing well back down the road behind crime scene tape and he kicked, almost on autopilot, into full work mode.

A uniformed officer stood steadfast behind another line of blue and white crime scene tape. A motionless male human shape sprawled on the pavement behind her, between the grass verge and a low brick wall that protected the car port of the long, low house beyond that was sunk down below street level. A large off-roader was parked on the far side of the wall, obscuring the view of the front door area.

On the outside of the tape a bewildered-looking man, with gelled silver hair, was in conversation with a police officer. Three officers stood nearby. One he recognized as Detective Sergeant Sally Walker, the other two, a male and a female officer, he didn’t know.

No press, so far, but that wouldn’t last long. He wouldn’t be surprised to see Glenn’s fiancée, Siobhan, arrive any minute – as the Argus’s senior crime reporter, she was normally the first of the press pack at any scene. He parked and approached the group.

‘Good morning, sir,’ DS Walker said. She was tall, fair-haired and all smiles despite the seriousness of the situation.

‘What do we have?’ Grace asked.

She indicated the silver-haired man, who looked, in Grace’s view, very traumatized – and he wasn’t surprised. Finding a dead body on your doorstep was rarely going to be the best start to anyone’s day.

‘This is Mr Hegarty, who lives at the house, number 20, who called it in. He was about to walk his dogs when he came across the body.’

Hegarty, Grace thought. Interesting. Then out of the corner of his eye, he saw the youthful-looking figure of Crime Scene Manager Chris Gee, in full protective clothing, climb out of the CSI van.

Grace hurried back to his car, opened his go-bag in the boot and wormed into a hooded protective suit and then pulled on overshoes and gloves. He greeted Gee, then both of them signed the crime scene log, ducked under the tape and walked towards the body.

Grace could smell the reek of petrol while he was still yards away. He pulled on his mask, glad for the protection against the stench it gave him, and kneeled down a few inches away.

The dead man lay on his back with congealed blood behind his right ear. He was in his sixties, Grace estimated, lean and tall with thinning strands of grey hair. He was dressed in jeans, trainers and a jacket, with a white T-shirt beneath. His pasty face was craggy, tiny shrivel-creases in the skin indicating he had probably been a heavy smoker, this backed up by the ochre shade of his visible front teeth. The fingertips of both his hands looked crushed, the nails dark with congealed blood. Torture? he wondered.

He studied the injury behind the man’s right ear carefully, wondering if it could have been made from impact with the pavement, but it looked too deep, as if something had gouged it. And there were no blood spots on the pavement. It had been a dry night, so no rain could have washed it away.

From what he could see, other than the wound, there was no other injury. He touched the man’s arm with a gloved hand. The flesh was stiff.

It was currently just gone 9.30 a.m. From his observations, he probably died a good few hours earlier at the very least, and possibly longer. Which meant, if he had died here, he’d been lying in this residential street some time and no one had noticed. Pretty unlikely.

Not wanting to disturb the body’s position more than he needed, he asked Gee to help lift him up a little to check for any obvious injuries to his back. But they could see none – no visible wounds to the back of the head, or slash marks from a knife or visible gunshot holes in his clothes.

‘Clearly been dead a while,’ Gee said.

Nodding, Grace replied, ‘I know him. I once nicked him, around twenty years ago, when I was in uniform. He looked a bit prettier then. Archie Goff is – was –’ he corrected himself, ‘a career house burglar.’ He stood up, wanting to get away from the smell, but continued staring down at the body, trying to study it dispassionately, but at the same time unable to detach himself from it emotionally.

There was always something intrusive about being in the presence of a dead human being. All the time you were alive you had options about who you invited into your personal space. The moment you were dead, those ceased. You didn’t even own your body any more, it had become the property of the coroner.

It was coming back clearly now, when he had arrested this man, all those years ago. Archie Goff had broken into a mansion on the outskirts of the city, where the unfortunate man had subsequently been cornered in the garden, backed up against a tree after fleeing, by a particularly aggressive Rhodesian Ridgeback. The owners were out, and it had required two Sussex Police dog handlers to restrain the Ridgeback and cuff the man.

So what was Goff doing here? His normal MO, from memory, was large country houses. And he’d been nicked again back in September for just such a burglary. But he’d made bail. Goff had recently been of interest to Roy and his team as part of the Porteous investigation but was just one of many lines of enquiry. This was a comfortable middle-class area, but not somewhere that would generally house the kind of valuables Goff specialized in nicking. And why doused in petrol?

From the way Goff lay, it looked to Grace highly unlikely that he’d doused himself in petrol and then collapsed on this spot. He had died somewhere else and his body been deposited here. But how had he died, who had dumped him here and why had he been doused in petrol – and why this location? What was that about?

And how inflammable was he now?

‘We need a fire extinguisher,’ he said to Gee. ‘As a precaution.’

‘I’ll get one from the van.’ Gee hurried off.

Grace glanced around at the neighbouring houses, looking for any outward-facing CCTV camera that might provide a clue. There were none he could immediately see but they could be hidden anywhere. To get to this house, whoever had brought Goff here would have to have driven along a zigzag of residential streets. Hopefully one or more of the houses in this neighbourhood might have cameras that would have picked up the vehicle. Or at least someone might have seen an unfamiliar vehicle.

As the Crime Scene Manager returned with a small fire extinguisher, Grace said, ‘Chris, I’m treating this as a suspicious death.’

‘I agree, sir.’

Grace turned to DS Walker. ‘Sally, we need to liaise with the Coroner’s Officer and be authorized to contact the on-call Home Office pathologist. Once we know who it is, get their sanction to move the body.’

Home Office pathologists these days were paid by the job, not the hour, so it was rare for them to spend time at the crime scene itself, although occasionally they insisted on doing that.

‘I’ll get right on it, sir.’

Grace turned back to Gee. ‘We don’t yet know what we’re looking for, but we need a Police Search Adviser and a POLSA team doing a fingertip search in the area.’

Gee nodded. ‘I’ll organize it.’

Grace then thought hard and calmly about what Hegarty’s link might be to the body. A major league art forger. Charlie Porteous and the Fragonard. The Kiplings, who had taken a Fragonard to the Antiques Roadshow and had subsequently reported a break-in after the programme had aired. Was there a link with Archie Goff?

It could of course be a complete coincidence that the old lag’s body had been dumped here in this particular location, but, just as the petrol on his clothes didn’t smell right, the deposition site stank.

But what the hell could the connection be? Goff had been assaulted, doused in petrol. Now he was dead. It looked like he’d been murdered.

Hopefully the postmortem might provide the evidence.

Whatever had ended Archie Goff’s life, Grace was as certain as could be that natural causes was only a bit-part player in his demise. He pulled out his phone and called Glenn Branson.

When his sleepy friend, colleague and protégé answered, Grace asked, ‘How’s your Sunday, so far?’

‘It was pretty good until now,’ Branson retorted, with a yawn. ‘I’ve got plans – me and Siobhan are going to have a nice day and talk through all our issues. Don’t tell me you’re going to mess all that up?’

So the reporter wasn’t about to turn up here, Grace thought. And he was pleased to hear his friend sounding positive. Which made what he had to say next even harder. With his voice tinged with genuine apology, he replied, ‘Sorry, I am going to mess all that up.’