Dead Man's Grip

52

Grace let Glenn Branson drive. Ever since gaining his green Response and Pursuit driving ticket, Branson was keen to show his friend his prowess. And every time he allowed Branson to take the wheel, Roy Grace quickly regretted it.

They headed down the sweeping dip in the A27, passing the slip road off to the A23 and up the far side, the speedometer needle the wrong side of the 120mph mark, with Glenn, in Grace’s view, having a totally misplaced confidence in the blue flashing lights and wailing siren. It didn’t take a normal, sane police officer many days of response driving to realize that most members of the public on the road were deaf, blind or stupid, and frequently a combination of all three.

Grace pressed his feet hard against the floor, willing his friend to slow down as they raced past a line of cars, any one of which could have pulled out and sent them hurtling into the central barrier and certain oblivion. It was more by sheer good luck than anything he would want to attribute to driving skill that they finally ended up on the approach road to Shoreham Port, passing Hove Lagoon – a short distance from Grace’s home – on their left, with their lives, if not his nerves, still intact.

‘What do you think of my driving, old-timer? Getting better, yeah? Think I’ve nailed that four-wheel-drift thing now!’

Grace was not sure where his vocal cords were. It felt like he had left them several miles back.

‘I think you need to be more aware about what other road users might do,’ he replied diplomatically. ‘You need to work on that.’

They drove straight over a mini-roundabout, narrowly missing a Nissan Micra being driven by a man in a pork-pie hat, and entered an industrial area. There was a tall, brick-walled warehouse to their right, double yellow lines and a blue corrugated metal warehouse to their left. They passed a gap between two buildings, through which Grace caught a glimpse of the choppy water of Aldrington Basin, the extreme eastern end of the Shoreham Port canal. They passed a van marked D & H Electrical Installations and saw ahead of them a sign above a building advertising pet foods. Then, immediately in front of them was a marked police car, its lights flashing in stationary mode.

As they approached, they saw several parked vehicles, including the Crime Scene Manager’s, and a second marked car, turned sideways, between two buildings. It was blocking the entrance to an open gate in the middle of a chain-link fence. Beyond was the quay. A line of crime scene tape ran between the walls of the two buildings and a PCSO scene guard stood in front of it.

They climbed out of the car into the blustery, damp wind, walked up to her and gave their names.

‘Need you both to suit up, please, sirs,’ she said to Grace, then nodded respectfully at Branson. ‘CSM’s request.’

The moment a Crime Scene Manager arrived at a potential crime scene, the site became his or her responsibility. One of the key elements was the number of people allowed access, and what they could wear, to minimize their chances of contaminating the scene with such minute items as clothing fibres that could lead to false trails.

They returned to the car and wormed their way into hooded blue paper oversuits. Although he had put one on hundreds of times, Grace found it never became any easier. Your shoes got jammed in them halfway down. Then they seemed to get stuck as you tugged them up over your hips.

When they were finally ready they ducked under the tape and walked down to the quay, passing a grimy sign which read ALL DRIVERS MUST REPORT TO RECEPTION. Grace looked around for CCTV cameras but couldn’t see any, to his disappointment. Directly ahead of them was the rear of the large yellow mobile operations truck of the Specialist Search Unit, the prow of a moored fishing boat, a rusty fork-lift truck, a skip piled with rubbish and, on the far side, across the water, the warehouses and piles of lumber of one of the port’s major timber depots.

He had always loved this part of the city. He took a deep breath, savouring the tangy smells of salt, oil, tar and rope that reminded him of his childhood, coming down here with his dad to fish off the end of the harbour mole. As a child, he had found Shoreham Harbour a mysterious, exciting place: the tankers and cargo ships along the quay with their international flags, the massive gantries, the trucks, the bollards, the warehouses and the huge power station.

As they rounded the corner, he saw a hive of activity. There were several police officers, all in protective oversuits, and he immediately picked out the short, sturdy figure of the Crime Scene Manager, Tracy Stocker, the tall figure of the SOCO photographer, James Gartrell, and the lean figure of the Coroner’s Officer, Philip Keay.

Members of the Specialist Search Unit stood around, dressed in dark blue fleeces, waterproof trousers, rubber boots and black baseball caps with the wording POLICE above the peaks. One of them was standing beside a coil of cable, coloured red, yellow and blue, that ran from a box of apparatus and down over the edge of the quay into the water. Grace realized there was a diver below.

Sitting centre stage on the quay was a dull white, beat-up-looking Ford Transit van, its roof and sides streaked with mud. A steady stream of water poured from its doorsills. Grace could see that the driver’s-side wing mirror was missing. Four steel hawsers ran vertically from its wheel arches high above to the pulley on the arm of a mobile crane parked beside it.

But Grace barely gave the crane a second glance. All his focus was on the man clearly visible in the driver’s seat, hunched motionless over the steering wheel.

Tracy Stocker walked up to greet Grace and Branson. She was accompanied by a burly, rugged-looking man in his fifties with a weather-beaten face, wind-blown salt and pepper hair and bare arms sporting nautical tattoos. He wore a fluorescent yellow jacket over a white, short-sleeved shirt, dark workman’s trousers and heavy-duty rubber boots and seemed impervious to the biting wind.

‘Hi, Roy and Glenn,’ she said cheerily. ‘This is Keith Wadey, the Assistant Chief Engineer of Shoreham Port. Keith, this is Detective Superintendent Grace, the Senior Investigating Officer, and Detective Sergeant Glenn Branson, the Deputy SIO.’

They shook hands. Grace took an instant liking to Wadey, who exuded a friendly air of confidence and experience.

He turned back to Tracy. ‘Have you run a check on the van’s index?’

‘Yes, chief. False plates. The serial number’s been filed off the chassis and engine block, so it’s almost certainly nicked, but that’s about all we know.’

Grace thanked her, then spoke to Wadey. ‘What do we have?’ he asked, looking at the figure in the van again.

‘Well, sir,’ Wadey said, addressing Grace but including Branson. ‘We carry out regular side-scan sonar sweeps of the canal, checking for silt levels and for any obstructions. Yesterday afternoon at around 4.30 p.m. we identified what looked like a vehicle about a hundred and twenty feet off the edge of this quay, in twenty-five feet of water. It was upside down, wheels in the air. That tends to happen with motor vehicles that go into deep water – the engine in the front pulls them down and they flip over as they sink.’

Grace nodded.

‘There’s zero visibility down there. The current caused by the opening and closing of the lock gates churns up the deep layer of mud. I found the vehicle with the aid of a shot line and jackstay, sunk into four feet of mud. I then contacted the police dive team – the Specialist Search Unit – our standard procedure, and we assisted them recovering the vehicle from the water this morning, approximately one hour ago. I’m afraid we found a poor sod in there. Dunno if he’s a suicide – we get quite a few of them – because he doesn’t seem to have made any effort to get out.’

Grace glanced at their surroundings. A large, rusting warehouse that looked derelict, although the presence of the skip indicated some work was going on.

‘What is this place?’ he asked.

‘It now belongs to Dudman, the aggregates company. They bought it a couple of months ago. It had been empty for several years – a bankruptcy.’

‘Anyone working here? Any security guards?’

‘No security guards or cameras, sir. There were some workmen here last week, but they’ve been diverted to do some maintenance on another of the company’s buildings.’

This was a secluded spot, Grace thought. Carefully chosen? It wasn’t the kind of place you find by accident.

‘Is it locked at night?’

‘Padlocked with a chain, yes,’ Wadey said. ‘But it was open when we got here. Either someone unlocked it or picked the lock.’

Grace walked across to the driver’s side of the van.

‘How long has he been in the water?’

‘My guess would be a maximum of three or four days,’ the engineer replied. ‘You can see the bloating, which starts to happen within twenty-four hours, but he’s intact – the fish and crustaceans like to wait for a week or so, until the flesh has started to break down, before they set to work.’

‘Thanks.’

Grace peered in through the driver’s window, which was down, as was the passenger’s, he noted. To help the vehicle sink more quickly, he wondered? The rear doors were open, too. The immediate question in his mind was whether this was an accident, suicide or murder. His experience had taught him never to jump to conclusions.

Even though the body was bloated from gases, the face was still thin, streaked with mud, eyes wide open, staring ahead with a look of shock. In the flesh, he looked even paler than in the photographs, and the gelled hair of the picture was now lifelessly matted to the scalp. But his identity was still clear. Just to double-check, Roy Grace pulled the photograph of Ewan Preece from his pocket and held it up.

And now he was certain. From the knife scar below his right eye, the thin gold chain around his neck and the leather wrist bracelet. Even so, it would take a fingerprint or DNA sample to confirm it beyond doubt. Grace was not inclined to trust a next-of-kin identification by any member of Preece’s crooked family. He looked at the dead man’s hands.

Preece was gripping the steering wheel as if with grim determination. As if he had thought that somehow, if he kept hold of it, he could steer himself out of trouble.

And that did not make sense.

‘Dead man’s grip,’ said a female voice beside him.

He turned to see the sergeant in charge of the Specialist Search Unit, Lorna Dennison-Wilkins.

‘Lorna!’ he said. ‘How are you?’

She grinned. ‘Understaffed, underappreciated and busy as heck. How about you?’

‘Couldn’t have put it better myself!’ He nodded at the dead man and, at the same time, heard a curious metallic scuttling sound from inside the van. ‘Dead man’s grip?’

‘Rigor mortis,’ she said. ‘It’s the suddenness of immersion that brings it on very fast. If someone drowns and they’re holding on to something at that moment, it’s really hard to prise their fingers off it.’

He stared at Preece’s fingers. They were wrapped tightly around the large steering wheel.

‘We haven’t tried to remove them,’ she said. ‘In case we damage any forensic evidence.’

As in his past dealing with this woman and her team, Roy Grace was impressed by her understanding of the importance of not contaminating a potential crime scene. But why was Preece holding on to the steering wheel? Had he frozen in stark terror? Grace knew that if he’d just driven off a harbour quay into water, he’d be doing everything he could to get out – not trying to steer.

Had he been knocked unconscious by the impact? That was one possibility. There was no apparent mark on his head, and he was wearing a seat belt, but that was something the pathologist would be able to determine at the post-mortem. What other reason did he have for clinging to the wheel? Trying deliberately to drown? But Ewan Preece seemed an unlikely suicide candidate. From the intelligence he had read about him, and his own prior experience with the man, Preece didn’t give a shit about anything in life. He was hardly going to be driven into a state of suicidal grief over the death of a cyclist. And in a short time he would have been out of prison.

Grace snapped on a pair of disposible gloves which he kept in his oversuit pocket, then leaned in through the window and attempted to prise the dead man’s right index finger away from the wheel. But it would not move. A tiny crab the size of a fingernail scuttled across the top of the dashboard.

Once more from somewhere in the back of the van he heard the metallic scuttling sound. He tried again to prise the finger off the wheel, conscious of not wanting to risk tearing the flesh and lose the potential for a print, but it would not move.

‘Bloody hell!’ Keith Wadey said suddenly.

The port engineer ducked in through the rear doors. Moments later he stood up again, holding a large black lobster. It was a good two feet long, with claws the size of a man’s hand, and was wriggling furiously.

‘This is a nice specimen!’ Wadey called out at a group of the SSU, showing them his find.

Immediately he had the attention of everyone on the quay.

‘Anyone fancy treating their loved one to lobster thermidor tonight?’

There were no takers. Only looks of disgust and a few exclamations.

He tossed the creature back out into the canal and it disappeared beneath the choppy surface.