Dead Like You

111

Sunday 18 January

Roy Grace delayed the Sunday evening briefing to 7.30 p.m., to give him time to report on the findings from the exhumation.

He left Glenn Branson in the mortuary, to cover any new developments that might occur, as the post-mortem was still not completed and was not likely to be for some while yet. The corpse had a broken jawbone and fractured skull, and it was the blow to the skull that had almost certainly killed her.

His best hopes, both of identifying the dead woman and of achieving his aim in having this exhumation, lay in the hair follicles and skin samples taken from the corpse, along with the condom which contained, in the views of Nadiuska De Sancha and Joan Major, what might be intact traces of semen. The forensic archaeologist thought that although it was twelve years old there was a good chance of DNA being extracted intact from that.

These items had been couriered in an icebox to the DNA laboratory he favoured for fast turnarounds and with whom he had a good working relationship, Orchid Cellmark Forensics. They had promised to start work the moment the items arrived. But there was a slow sequencing process and even if the lab worked around the clock, the earliest they could expect any results would be mid-afternoon tomorrow, Monday. Grace was assured he would be notified instantly by phone.

He took his place and addressed his team, bringing them up to date, then asked for progress reports.

Bella Moy went first, handing out photographs of a young woman with wild hair. ‘Sir, this is a photograph up in Brighton nick of one of the wanted persons in the city. Her current name – she’s used several aliases – is Donna Aspinall. She’s a known user, with a string of previous for fare dodging, both on trains and in taxis. She’s got an ASBO and she’s currently wanted on three separate counts of violent assault, GBH and actual assault. She’s been identified by two covert officers in the operation last night – one of whom she bit on the arm – as the person John Kerridge, the taxi driver, was chasing.’

Grace stared at the photograph, realizing the implication. ‘You’re saying that Kerridge is telling the truth?’

‘This would imply that he might be telling the truth about this passenger, sir.’

He thought for a moment. Kerridge had now been held for twenty-four hours. The maximum period for detaining a suspect without charge and without obtaining a court extension was thirty-six hours. They would have to release the taxi driver at 9.30 tomorrow, unless they had enough reason to convince a magistrate to hold him longer. They didn’t yet have evidence that Jessie Sheldon’s disappearance was the work of the Shoe Man. But if Kerridge’s solicitor, Acott, got hold of this – and he undoubtedly would and probably already had – they’d have a fight on their hands to get an extension. He needed to think about this, and getting an emergency magistrates’ court appearance tonight to request a further extension.

‘OK, thanks. Good work, Bella.’

Then Norman Potting raised his hand. ‘Boss, I’ve had a lot of help today from the mobile phone company, O2. I spoke to Jessie Sheldon’s fiancé early this morning, who told me that’s the supplier her iPhone’s registered with. They provided me half an hour ago with the tracking report on her phone. We may have a result here.’

‘Go on,’ Grace said.

‘The last call she made on it was logged at 6.32 p.m. last night, to a number I’ve identified as belonging to her fiancé, Benedict Greene. He confirms he received a call from her at approximately that time, telling him she was heading home from her kick-boxing lesson. He told her to hurry, because he was picking her up at 7.15 p.m. The phone then remained in standby mode. No further calls were made, but it was plotted, from contact with base stations in the city, moving steadily west from approximately 6.45 p.m. – the time of the abduction. At 7.15 p.m. it stopped moving and has remained static since then.’

‘Where?’ Grace asked.

‘Well,’ the DS said, ‘let me show you.’

He stood up and pointed to an Ordnance Survey map stuck to a whiteboard on the wall. A squiggly blue line ran the entire length of it. There was a red oval drawn on the map, with two red Xs at the top and bottom.

‘The two crosses mark the O2 base stations that Jessie Sheldon’s phone is currently communicating with,’ Potting said. ‘It’s a pretty big area and unfortunately there’s no third base station within range to give us the triangulation which would enable us to pinpoint her position more accurately.’

He pointed at the squiggly blue line. ‘This is the River Adur, which runs up from Shoreham.’

‘Shoreham’s where John Kerridge lives,’ Bella Moy said.

‘Yes, but that’s not helpful to us, since he’s in custody,’ Potting replied in a patronizing tone. Then he continued: ‘There’s open countryside on both sides of the river and Combes Road, a busy main road which runs between these two base stations. There are a few detached private houses, a row of cottages that used to belong to the old cement works, and the cement works itself. It would seem that Jessie Sheldon, or at least her mobile phone, is somewhere inside this circle. But it’s a big area.’

‘We can rule out the cement works,’ said DC Nick Nicholl. ‘I attended there a couple of years ago when I was on Response. It’s got extremely high security – round-the-clock monitoring. If a bird shits, it pings an alarm.’

‘Excellent, Nick,’ Grace said. ‘Thank you. OK. Immediate action. We need to get a ground search of the entire area at first light. A POLSA and as many Uniform, Specials and PCSOs as we can muster. I want the river searched – we’ll put the Specialist Search Unit in there. And we’ll get the helicopter up right away. They can do a floodlight search.’

Grace made some notes, then looked up at his team.

‘According to the Land Registry records, the lock-up is owned by a property company, sir,’ Emma-Jane Boutwood said. ‘I’ll go to their offices first thing in the morning.’

He nodded. Despite round-the-clock surveillance, no one had shown up there. He was not hopeful that anyone would now.

He wasn’t sure what to think.

He turned to the forensic psychologist. ‘Julius, anything?’

Proudfoot nodded. ‘The man who has taken Jessie Sheldon, he’s your man,’ he said emphatically. ‘Not the chap you have in custody.’

‘You sound very certain.’

‘Mark my words. The right location, the right time, the right person,’ he said, so smugly that Grace wished desperately, for an instant, that he could prove the man wrong.

When he returned to his office after the briefing had ended, Grace found a small FedEx package awaiting him.

Curious, he sat down and tore it open. And his evening just got a whole worse.

There was a handwritten note inside, on Police Training College, Bramshill headed paper, and attached to it was a photocopy of an email dated October last year.

The email was addressed to him, from Detective Superintendent Cassian Pewe. It informed him that there were some pages missing from the file on the Shoe Man that Grace had asked him to look through. The same crucial pages on the witness who had seen the van in which Rachael Ryan might have been abducted back in 1997.

The handwritten note said breezily. Found this in my Sent box, Roy! Hope it’s helpful. Perhaps your memory’s not what it was – but hey, don’t worry – happens to all of us! Cheers. Cassian.

After ten minutes of searching through his email system, Grace found the original sitting among hundreds of others that were unread. It had been chaos around that time and Pewe seemed to have taken delight in bombarding him with dozens of e-missives daily. If he had read them all, he’d never have got anything done.

Nonetheless, it was going to leave him with a red face, and one less suspect.