You Are Dead

36

Friday 12 December

After leaving the pub, Roy Grace returned to Sussex House, sat in his office and began to look again at the file Glenn Branson had brought him. He pulled out a yellowing, black and white A4 printed sheet, headed, ‘SUSSEX CRIME INFORMATION — MURDER’.

He looked again at the photograph of the pretty young woman, with poker-straight long brown hair, freckles and glasses, and wondered where the picture had been taken, because she was staring at the photographer with a warm, almost serene, expression of trust.

He read on down through the sheet.

The next sheet of paper looked like a blow-up of an Ordnance Survey map. Up in the top right-hand corner was a circle in red, marking the spot where the body had been found.

He turned to the next item, a faded orange book marked ‘MAJOR INCIDENT PROPERTY REGISTER’.

The next was a colour photograph showing a group of men in gumboots, sweaters and jeans, each holding a long pole, standing in a woodland clearing around a dark shadow. He shook his head.

God, what a difference! Today these same people would have been in oversuits to prevent them from contaminating the crime scene.

The next photograph showed a dark, human-shaped shadow in deep undergrowth.

In the next, he could make out a pair of blue jeans. Then, as he turned to the one after, he took a sharp intake of breath — as he always did when he saw a new dead body.

There was something so terribly sad about murder victims. He couldn’t help it, but for a few moments he always felt like a voyeur. As if he had gatecrashed some party that no one, ever, would have invited him to.

And always, he wondered, would he one day be turning up to the bones of his missing wife, Sandy?

The dead had no choice in who turned up at their deposition sites. It fell upon everyone present to be respectful. Even now, seated at his desk, with darkness pressing against the rain-spattered windowpanes, he felt just that, staring at the side-on photograph of the blotchy face, as if stage rouge had been applied, with the eyes missing, pecked away by birds, dark brown hair unkempt and straggly, in what looked like a home-knitted grey pullover.

Who had knitted it, he wondered? Her loving mother? Grandmother?

The sweater she had been murdered in.

Then another photograph, this time full-face, showing dark, marbled skin, and the empty eye sockets, like she was wearing a balaclava.

God, he thought. You were at Sussex University. Your dad had lent you his car for the night, because he trusted your driving and didn’t want some drunken student driving you home. But you never did come home.

He phoned a mobile number, thinking it unlikely that Tony Case, the Senior Support Officer, would still be here at this hour on a Friday night, but to his surprise he caught him just as he was leaving. Case said he had been working late, helping to reorganize the Major Incident rooms.

Five minutes later, he followed the stocky figure of Case down into the basement of Sussex House. Case had been a Traffic officer before retiring after thirty years’ service, and then rejoining the force as a civilian, as was common among many officers. He was holding a massive bunch of keys in his hand.

They walked along a corridor then stopped outside a steel-barred door. Case riffled through his keys, selected one and opened the door, then switched on the lights. Several dusty, bare bulbs, two of them with spiders’ webs, threw a weak light along the length of the vast storeroom, which was racked out on both sides and at the far end with floor-to-ceiling metal shelving, stacked tightly with green plastic crates filled with evidence bags, manila folders and piles of papers.

Roy Grace always felt a strange sensation when he entered this storeroom, as if it were filled with ghosts. He knew it well from the days when he had been put in charge of cold cases — reviewing all the unsolved murders in the county of Sussex, to see if advances in fingerprint technology and DNA could help solve any of them. Sussex Police never closed the file on any unsolved murder. All of these green crates contained material dating back as far as the Second World War, and a few even further back than that. Each of the cases filled as many as twenty or more crates, and he had felt the burden of responsibility for each case that he re-examined, knowing he might well be the last chance the victims had for justice.

He walked along past the hand-written labelled sections. OPERATION GALBY. OPERATION DULWICH. OPERATION CORMORANT. Several of them he knew well. He could even recall the stomach contents of some of the victims, from the last things they had ever eaten or drunk.

Ghosts.

They stopped when they reached the section, with forty-three crates, labelled OPERATION YORKER. The unsolved murder of Katy Westerham.

Tony Case looked at him. ‘Which ones do you want up in your office, Roy?’

Grace ran his eyes along the crates. Each of them was filled with dusty folders, with a blue and white label, the serial number written in black ink and sealed with a tamper-proof cable tie.

‘All of them, please.’

Finally, close to 11.30 p.m., having done all he could that evening on the disappearance of Logan Somerville, Roy Grace went home. Cleo had left a cold platter for him on the table. But she heard him come in and came downstairs to join him.

‘Sounds like it’s been quite a day,’ she said.

Roy Grace smiled thinly across the dining table at her. ‘You’re right, it has been. One hell of a day. Sorry if I’m not being good company. You’re stuck home all day with the baby, and then I arrive and you’re looking forward to some conversation, and all I do is sit in silence and brood.’

‘So share it with me.’

‘I have a very bad feeling about the case I’m on.’ He shrugged and reached for the bottle of sparkling water that Cleo had set in the cooler in the middle of the table, and poured some into his glass.

‘Operation Haywain?’ she prompted.

He nodded.

‘Are you worried about Cassian Pewe?’

‘Right now he’s the least of my problems.’ He could have done with a couple of really stiff drinks, but he needed a clear head more than ever at this moment and, of course, he was on call. ‘We’ve had almost every imaginable kind of crime in this city, but so far we’ve had precious few — if any — of what could be defined as serial killers.’

‘What defines one?’ Cleo asked.

‘Someone who commits three or more murders on separate occasions. We had a young man, back in 1985, who murdered his father, stepmother and stepbrother with a baseball bat, at the Lighthouse Club in Shoreham. But that was all on the same night. It was a multiple homicide but he wasn’t a serial killer.’

‘Do you think you have one now?’

He fell silent, picked up his glass, then set it down. ‘I don’t know, yet. But it looks like we might have found a murder from thirty years ago. It’s too early to tell for sure.’

‘Could he still be around?’

He said nothing, thinking.

‘Come on, you’ve got to eat something, darling.’

He looked at his bowl of avocado and prawn, nodded, and picked up his fork. ‘Yes, I’m ravenous, thanks.’ But he only swallowed one mouthful before lapsing back into his thoughts.

U R DEAD

Thirty years ago. A double killing? More? Was there a third branded victim out there? A fourth? A fifth? Somewhere else in the UK? From all he had studied in the past on serial killers, they tended to operate in big landscape countries, like the US, Australia, Russia, where they could move vast distances without arousing suspicion. But on occasions they didn’t follow that pattern.

Time could be a distance, too.

Catherine Westerham, found dead in 1985, was nineteen and had long brown hair with a centre parting. Emma Johnson, who had disappeared two weeks ago, was twenty-one and also had similar features, and long brown hair. Logan Somerville, who was now missing, had long brown hair. Was he just being fanciful?

Unknown Female, whose skeletal remains had been found in Hove Lagoon, and was as yet unidentified, appeared to have had long brown hair.

He realized more and more urgently that he needed to find the Lagoon Unknown Female’s identity. Fast.

Thirty years was a long time. But he knew from case histories of serial killers that he had seen presented at the grandly titled International Homicide Investigators Association’s Annual Symposium in the US, which he attended most years, that there could be long gaps sometimes. Twenty years was not uncommon. Dennis Rader in Wichita, Kansas, self-styled BTK — Bind, Torture, Kill — had a hiatus of around fifteen years and had been about to strike again when he was finally caught. The end of Rader’s first killing spree had started when his first child had been born. Grace had worked on a case in Brighton, a while ago, a serial rapist who took his victims’ shoes — he had stopped for many years before starting to offend again. The reason he had stopped was that he had got married.

Thirty years. Was that too long?