Dead Man's Grip

54

Grace phoned the Incident Room to tell them to call off the search for Ewan Preece and the Ford Transit and instead to concentrate on the immediate neighbours of Preece’s sister, to see if anyone had seen or heard anything during the night of Monday 26 April or early morning of Tuesday the 27th. He also wondered whether the dead man’s sister might be sufficiently shocked into telling the truth about what had happened that night – if she genuinely knew.

An hour later, Grace completed a careful inspection of the surrounding area. He was looking in particular for any CCTV cameras that might have the approaches to this quay in view, but without success. Freezing cold, he gratefully accepted the offer of coffee inside the Specialist Search Unit truck, where there was a snug seating area around a table.

He clambered up the steps, followed by Branson, both of them rubbing some warmth back into their hands. A PCSO had been dispatched to a nearby supermarket to get some sandwiches. They were joined moments later by the tall figure of Philip Keay, the Coroner’s Officer, and Tracy Stocker, who announced that Nadiuska De Sancha had phoned to say she was only a few minutes away. Two members of the SSU, one a burly man nicknamed Juice by his colleagues and the other, slightly built with fair hair, who was nicknamed WAFI, which stood for Water Assisted Fucking Idiot, moved over to make room.

Grace tried to call Cleo, but both her mobile phone and the mortuary phone went to voicemail. He felt a prick of anxiety. What if she was alone in the place and had collapsed? Most of the time, when no post-mortems were being carried out, there were only three people – Cleo, Darren and Walter – in the building. If Darren and Walter went out to recover a body, she could have been left on her own. If anything happened to her, she could lie undiscovered for a couple of hours.

He had often worried in the past about her being in that place on her own, but now he felt it even more acutely. He rang her house, but there was no answer there either. He was seriously considering driving to the mortuary to make sure she was OK, when suddenly, to his surprise, he heard her voice.

‘Oi! Call this working?’ she called out cheekily, standing at the door of the truck.

Grace stood up. Not many people make blue paper oversuits look like a designer garment, he thought, but Cleo did. With the trousers tucked into her boots, her hair clipped up and the bump in her stomach, she looked like someone who had just arrived in a spaceship from a planet where everyone was much more beautiful than here on earth. A new world that he still could not totally believe he was now a part of. His heart flipped with joy, the same way it did each time he saw her.

Juice and WAFI both wolf-whistled at her.

With some colour back in her face now, Cleo looked more radiant than ever, he thought, going down the steps to greet her with a light peck on the cheek.

‘What are you doing here?’ he asked, wanting to hug her, but not in front of a bunch of cynical colleagues who would rib him at the slightest opportunity.

‘Well, I figured the musical was off, so I thought I’d take a trip to the seaside instead. Gather you’ve got a particularly interesting species of underwater creature.’

He grinned. ‘You are under strict doctor’s orders not to do any lifting, OK?’

She jerked her head, pointing. ‘It’s OK. I’ll use that fork-lift truck!’ Then she smiled. ‘Don’t worry, Darren’s here with me. Walter’s off sick today.’

A voice came through Grace’s radio. It was the scene guard at the entrance. ‘Sir, there’s someone here to see you – says you’re expecting him. Kevin Spinella?’

Grace was expecting him, the way he would expect to see blowflies around a decomposing cadaver. He walked around the corner and up to the barrier. Spinella stood there, short and thin, collar of his beige mackintosh turned up in the clichéd fashion of a movie gumshoe, chewing a piece of gum with his ratty teeth, his gelled spiky hair untouched by the wind.

‘Good morning, Detective Superintendent!’ he said.

Grace tapped his watch. ‘It’s afternoon, actually.’ He gave the reporter a reproachful glance. ‘Unlike you to be behind the times.’

‘Ha-ha,’ Spinella said.

Grace stared at him quizzically but said nothing.

‘Hear you’ve got a body in a van,’ the reporter said.

‘Surprised it took you so long,’ Grace replied. ‘I’ve been here for hours.’

Spinella looked nonplussed. ‘Yeah, right. So, what can you tell me about it?’

‘Probably not as much as you can tell me,’ he retorted.

‘Don’t suppose it could be Ewan Preece, could it?’

An educated guess, Grace wondered? Or had one of the team here phoned Spinella?

‘There is a body in a van, but the body has not been identified at this stage,’ Grace replied.

‘Could it be the van you are looking for?’

He saw Nadiuska De Sancha, gowned up in an oversuit and white boots, walking towards them, carrying her large black bag.

‘Too early to tell.’

Spinella made a note on his pad.

‘It’s ten days since the accident. Do you feel you are making progress with your enquiries regarding the van and its driver, Detective Superintendent?’

‘We are very pleased with the level of response from the public,’ Grace lied. ‘But we would like to appeal to anyone in the Southwick area who saw a white van between the hours of 6 p.m. Monday 26 April and 8 a.m. Tuesday 27 April to contact us on our Incident Room number, or to call Crimestoppers anonymously. Do you want the numbers?’

‘I’ve got them,’ Spinella said.

‘That’s all I have for now,’ Grace said, nodding a silent greeting at the pathologist and signalling he would be with her in a moment. ‘Perhaps you’ll be kind enough to let me know when you’ve identified the body and confirmed what the van is?’

‘Very funny.’

Nadiuska signed the scene guard’s log, then ducked under the tape which Grace lifted for her.

‘Home Office pathologist?’ Spinella said. ‘Looks to me like you could have a murder inquiry going on.’

Grace turned and eyeballed him. ‘Makes a change, does it, being the last to know?’

He turned, with great satisfaction, and escorted Nadiuska De Sancha towards the quay and across to the right, out of the reporter’s line of sight. Then, knowing that she liked to work alone, in her own time, he left the pathologist and went to join Cleo and the rest of the team inside the warmth of the SSU truck.

Half an hour later Nadiuska De Sancha came up the steps and said, ‘Roy, I need to show you something.’

Worming himself into his anorak, Grace followed her outside and around to the white van. The pathologist stopped by the driver’s door, which was open.

‘I think we can safely rule out accidental death, Roy, and I’m fairly confident we can rule out suicide, too,’ she said.

He looked at her quizzically.

She pointed up at a small cylindrical object Grace had not taken in before, clipped to the driver’s-side sun visor. ‘See that? It’s a digital underwater camera – and transmitter. And it’s switched on, although the battery’s dead.’

Grace frowned and at the same time felt annoyed that he had not spotted it. How the hell had he missed it? About an inch in diameter and three inches long, with a dark blue metal casing and a fish-eye lens. What was it there for? Had Preece been filming himself?

Then, interrupting his thoughts, she pointed at the man’s hands and gave him a bemused look.

‘Dead man’s grip is caused by rigor mortis, right?’

Grace nodded.

She reached in with a blue, latex-gloved hand and raised one of Preece’s fleshy, alabaster-white fingers. The skin of the tip remained adhered to the steering wheel. It looked like a blister with tendrils attached.

‘I’ll need to do some lab tests to confirm it, but there’s some kind of adhesive that’s been applied here. Looks to me, as an educated guess, that the poor man’s hands have been superglued to the steering wheel.’