Dead Simple

'It was given to me by his fiancee.'

'Then you need to ask her and yourself why. This absolutely does not belong to Michael Harrison.'

Grace wrapped the bracelet back in a tissue and carefully pocketed it. Max Candille was emotional - and not always accurate.

However, combining his comments on the bracelet with Harry Frame's, something did not feel right about it.

'So what can you tell me about Michael Harrison?' Grace asked.

The medium sprang up from his chair, went out of the room, pausing to blow kisses at the cats, then returned moments later holding a copy of the News of the World. 'My favourite paper,' he informed Grace. 'I like to know who's screwing who. Far more interesting than politics.'

Grace enjoyed reading it himself, sometimes, but wasn't about to admit that now. 'I'm sure,' he said.

The medium folded back a couple of pages then held the paper up so Grace could see the headline, with Michael Harrison's photograph beneath. 'MANHUNT FOR AWOL FIANCE'.

Then the medium looked at it himself for some moments. 'Well, see, you are even quoted in here. '"We are now regarding Michael Harrison's disappearance as a Major Incident,' said Detective Superintendent Roy Grace of Sussex Police, 'And are stepping up police manpower to comb the area he is believed to be in...""

Then he looked up at Grace again. 'Michael Harrison's alive,' he said. 'Definitely alive.'

'Really? Where? I need to find him - that's what I need your help for.'

'I see him somewhere small, dark.'

'Could it be a coffin?'

'I don't know, Roy. It's too blurred. I don't think he has much energy.' He closed his eyes for some moments and slowly swivelled his head from left to right. 'No, very little there. The battery's almost flat, poor thing.'

'What do you mean?'

The medium closed his eyes again. 'He's weak.'

'How weak?' Grace asked, concerned.

'He's fading, his pulse is low, much too low.'

Grace watched him, wondering. How did Max know this? Was he connected across the ether? Just making a guess on a hunch? 'This

small dark place - is it in the woods? In a town? Under ground or above ground? On water?'

'I can't see, Roy. I can't tell.'

'How long has he got?' Grace asked.

'Not long. I don't know if he's going to make it.'

64

'You see, here's the thing, Mike. Not everyone gets to have a lucky day on the same day. So we have a sort of irregular situation here - this is your lucky day and it's my lucky day. How lucky is that?'

Michael, weak, shivering from fever and near-delirious, stared up, but all he could see was darkness. He did not recognize the man's voice; it sounded a hybrid of Australian and south London, spoken quickly, with fast, nervy inflections. Davey with another of his accents? No, he did not think so. His brain swirled. Confused. He did not know where he was. In the coffin?

Dead?

His head pounded, his throat was parched. He tried to open his mouth, but his lips would not part. Ice squirmed through his veins.

I'm dead.

'You were in a horrible wet coffin, getting all soggy and rheumatoid, now you're in a nice, dry, cosy cot. You were going to die. Now maybe you aren't going to die - but I want to stress that's a pretty big maybel'

The voice receded into the darkness. Michael was sinking, going down a lift shaft, down, down, the walls rushing past. He tried to call out, but his lips would not move. There was something pressing tightly around his mouth. All he could do was make a panicky grunt.

Then the voice again, really close, as if the man was in the lift with him. 'Do you know about Schrodinger's Cat, Mike?'

They were still going down. How many floors? Did it matter?

'Did you study physics when you were at school?'

Who was this? Where was he? 'Davey', he tried to say, but all that came out was a murmur.

'If you know anything about science, Mike, you'd know about it. Schrodinger's Cat was inside a box, and was both alive and dead at the same time. That's like you now, my friend.'

Michael felt consciousness slipping away. The lift was swaying on ropes now; darkness seemed to be racing past him, round and round. He closed his eyes. Then felt a blast of heat and saw red through his eyelids. He opened his eyes, then immediately squeezed them shut against a blinding glare of light.

'I don't think you should be going to sleep; you need to keep awake now, Mike. Can't let you die on me, I went to a lot of trouble. I'll give you more water and glucose in a while, got to introduce foods to you slowly. I got trained in all this stuff, you're in good hands. Jungle training. I know how to survive, and help others survive. You're lucky it was me who came along. Need to keep you awake. We'll chat to each other for a while, get to know each other a little better - bond a little, OK?'

Michael tried to speak again. Just a murmur came out. He was trying to remember, the sensation of being lifted from the coffin, of being on something soft in a van - but was that on the stag night? Was this maybe one of his mates? Weren't they dead? Mark? He just wanted to close his eyes and sleep now.

Cold water lashed his face, startling him. His eyes sprang open, blinking into watery darkness.

'I'm just keeping you awake, no offence meant, mate.' The voice sounded more Australian than south London now.

Michael shivered; the water had sharpened him a fraction. He tried to move his arms, to see if he was still in the coffin, but he couldn't move them. He tried to move his legs, but they wouldn't move either; it was as if they were bound together. He tried to raise his head, to touch the lid, but he barely had the strength to raise it a couple of inches.

'Guess you're wondering who I am and where you are?'

Michael closed his eyes tightly again as a blast of light dazzled him, hurting his retinas like sunburn. He emitted another grunt.

'It's OK, Mike, don't bother to try to talk back. It's duct tape - hard to say anything through that. I'll do the talking and you just do the listening - until you're better, that is. We have a deal?'

Michael felt bewildered; but at the same time deeply apprehensive. Nothing was making any sense - he wondered if he was dreaming or hallucinating.

PETER I

'First, Mike, I'm going to give you the house rules. You don't ask my name and you don't ask where we are. You got that?'

Michael grunted again.

'I'll remind you later, anyway. You ever see that Stephen King film, Misery!'

Michael heard the question through his drifting mind, but was unsure whether it was directed at him or someone else. Misery. He seemed to recall it. Kathy Bates. He tried to ask if Kathy Bates was in it, but his damned lips wouldn't move. 'Mnhhhh,' he said.

'That was some movie. Remember, James Caan got caught by his crazy fan, Kathy Bates, who smashed his legs with a sledgehammer so he couldn't run away? But that wasn't faithful to the novel, you know, Mike? Did you know that?'

'Mnhhhh.'

'In the novel she actually cut one leg off, then cauterized it with a blow torch. You got to be pretty weird to do that, wouldn't you think, Mike?'

Michael stared into the darkness, trying to make out his features, to put a face to the voice, to check if this voice was coming from above him, below him, inside him.

'You would, wouldn't you, Mike?'

'Mnhhhh.'

'I've been listening to you for five days, Mike. You and your buddy, Davey. Figured you were getting pretty frustrated with him I would have been too, in your shoes.' The man laughed. 'I mean, that's pretty tough shit. You get trapped and the only person in the whole world who knows you're alive is a fucking moron!' He was silent for some moments, then he continued. 'Of course, I was there with you, Mike, as well, but I just didn't want to interrupt. Breakers' code, don't butt in on someone else's conversation. Well, that's my code anyway. How you doing?'

Michael's head was throbbing, darkness swirling all around him even faster now.

'You're doing OK. Another twenty-four hours in that grave and you might as well have stayed there. But you'll be OK now. I'll get your strength up; you're lucky, I was trained in the Australian Marines. Signals. I know all about survival; you couldn't be in better

hands, Mike. I'd say that was worth a lot, wouldn't you? I'm talking about money, Mike. Big money! Moolah!'

'Mnhhhh.'

'But I'm afraid I'm going to need some bona fides, Mike. Understand what bona fides are? Proof it's you - are you on my bus?'

Michael squeezed his eyes shut against another burst of light. Then he opened them again and caught a glint of steel.

'This will hurt a little, but you don't have to worry, Mike. I'm not doing a Kathy Bates on you - I'm not crazy; I'm not about to cripple you. Just need some bona fides, that's all.'

Then Michael, through his delirium, felt an excruciating pain in his left index finger. He bellowed in agony, a tornado of air hurtling up his windpipe and screeching through the duct tape like a banshee.

65

Arriving back in Brighton shortly before midnight, Roy Grace was wide awake. The large espresso Candille had made him seemed to be having an effect like rocket fuel on his energy level. For no particular reason he decided to make a small detour and swing past the offices of Double-M Properties, in the street just below Brighton station.

As he approached he was surprised to see Warren's BMW parked right outside. He pulled up in front of it, climbed out and looked up. He could see on the third floor that the lights were on, and again, purely on a whim, he walked up to the front entrance and pressed the Double-M button on the panel.

After some moments he heard a crackly, very wary-sounding Mark Warren.'Hello?'

'Mr Warren - Detective Superintendent Grace.'

There was a long silence. Then Mark Warren said, 'Come on up.' There was a sharp rasping sound from the lock, and Grace pushed open the door, then climbed three steep, narrow flights of stairs.

Mark opened the glass-panelled door into the reception area, looking sheet-white and, in Grace's opinion, very uneasy. 'This is a bit of a surprise, officer,' he said clumsily.

T was just passing, saw the lights were on - wondered if we could have a quick chat. I thought you might like an update.'

'Um - yes, thank you.'

Mark shot a nervous glance at an open door behind him, which led into an office where he was clearly working. He then steered Grace in a different direction, into a cold, windowless boardroom, switched on the lights and pulled out a chair for him at the highly polished conference table.

But before he sat down, Grace fished in his pocket and pulled out

the bracelet he'd been given by Ashley. 'I found this on the staircase - does it belong to anyone who works here?'

Mark stared at it. 'On the staircase?'

Grace nodded.

Actually, yes, this is mine - it has tiny magnets at each end -1 wear it for my tennis elbow. I -1 don't know how it got there.'

'Lucky I spotted it,' Grace said.

'Indeed - thank you.' Mark seemed very confused.

Grace noted a row of framed photographs on the walls: a warehouse at Shoreham Harbour, a tall Regency terraced house and a modern office block, which he recognized as being on the London Road, on the outskirts of Brighton. 'These all yours?' he asked.

'Yes.' Mark fiddled with the bracelet for some moments, then pulled it onto his right wrist.

'Impressive/ Grace said, nodding at the photographs. 'Seems like you have a good business.'

'Thank you. It's going well.'

Mindful of the blasting he'd had from Ashley after being rude to the Detective Superintendent yesterday at the wedding, Mark was now making a big effort to be polite. 'Can I get you a coffee or anything?' 'I'm fine, thanks all the same,' Grace said. 'Equal shares -you and Michael Harrison?'

'No - he has the majority.'

'Ah. He put up the money?'

'Yes - well, two thirds. I put up the rest.'

Watching his body language carefully, Grace asked, And there are no issues between you, over this imbalance?'

'No, officer - we get on well.'

'Good. Well . . .' Grace stifled a yawn. 'We're stepping up our search of the area in the morning. As you may have heard, we had a false alarm today'

'The body of the young man. Who was he?'

A local chap - a young man who I'm told was a bit backward. Quite a few of the local police knew him, apparently - his dad's got a tow-truck and crash repair business - does quite a lot of work for the Traffic Division.'

'Poor sod. He was murdered?'

'It seems likely,' Grace said guardedly. Then, watching Mark again closely, he said, 'Am I correct that you and Michael Harrison have a bank account in the Cayman Islands?'

Without flinching, Mark replied, 'Yes, we have a company there, HW Properties International.'

'Two-thirds - one-third split?'

'Correct.'

Grace remembered there was at least one million pounds in that account. More than a tidy sum. 'What kind of insurance do you and Michael have? Do you have life insurance policies on each other, as business partners?'

'We have the usual key-man insurance - do you want to see the policy?'

'Not at this moment, but at some point I'd like to, yes. Perhaps you could fax a copy over to the Incident Room for me tomorrow?'

'No problem.'

Grace stood up. 'Well, I won't trouble you any more tonight. Busy are you? Often work on a Sunday night?'

'I like to catch up on my paperwork at the weekend. Only chance I get when the phones aren't ringing.'

Grace smiled. 'I know the feeling.'

Mark watched the detective's head disappear down the stairwell, then closed the door, making sure the latch was down, then returned to his office, switched his computer back on, and began the arduous task he had started a couple of hours earlier, of reading every day's back-up of Michael's Palm, going back weeks, and deleting any references to the stag night.

Ashley had been spending this afternoon doing the same on the laptops of Peter, Luke, Josh and Robbo, on the pretext to their families that she was looking for clues about Michael's whereabouts. Downstairs, Grace closed the front door behind him and walked across the pavement to his car. But it was some moments before he climbed back into it. Instead, he leaned against the passenger door, staring up at the third-floor window, thinking. Thinking.

He did not like Mark Warren. The man was a liar - and he was nervous as hell about something. Ashley Harper was a liar, also. She had deliberately given him a bracelet that did not belong to Michael.

And what exactly was Mark Warren's bracelet doing in her house?

66

'Jesus, oh Jesus.' Michael was crying in pain, holding up his left hand as far as the duct tape wound right around his body, pinioning both arms to his side, would allow. Blood gouted from the stump of his forefinger, cut off at the first joint. He stared up into the blinding lights. 'What is this; what the hell are you doing?'

'It's OK, Mike, relax!'

His arm was held by a thin, hairy hand with an iron grip, the wrist sporting a heavy diver's watch. And he could see his assailant's head now, shadowy against the dazzling lights, two eyes behind slits in a black hood.

Then he saw white cream oozing from the neck of a tube, and the next moment it felt as if ice had been put on his finger. He cried out again, the pain almost unbearable.

'I know what I'm doing, Mike. You don't have to worry; it won't go septic. I'd like you to call me Vic. Understand? Vic?'

'Vhrrrr,' Michael gasped.

'That's good, you and me on first-name terms. We're business partners, see? We should be on first-name terms.'

His assailant pulled out a long white bandage and wound it tightly around the bloody tip of the finger, then on down, tighter and tighter until it was acting as a tourniquet. Then he wound sticking plaster around it to hold it. 'See, Mike, the way I look at it, I saved your life - so that's got to be worth something, hasn't it? And from what I read in the papers and saw on television, it seems like you're loaded. I'm not, you see, that's the difference. Want some water?'

Michael nodded. He was trying to think straight but the numbing, throbbing pain in his finger made that hard.

'If you want to drink, I have to take the tape off your mouth. I do that on condition you don't shout. Is that a deal, Mike?'

He nodded his head.

'My word has always been my bond. Is it yours?'

Again Michael nodded.

An arm reached down. The next instant Michael felt as if half the ikin on his face had been ripped away. His mouth gasped open, his Chin and cheek stinging like hell. Then the man reached down again holding a plastic mineral water bottle with the top removed and tilted some of the contents into Michael's mouth. It tasted cold and good as he gulped it down greedily, some spilling over and dribbling down his chin and neck. Then some went down the wrong way and he began to choke.

The bottle was withdrawn. He carried on coughing. When the fit finally stopped, he felt more alert. He could smell dank air and engine oil as if he was in some kind of underground car park. Looking up at the eye slits he asked, 'Where am I?'

'You have a short memory, Mike. I told you never to ask where you are, or who I am.'

'You - you said Vic - your name.'

'I'm Vic to you, Mike.'

There was a silence between them.

In his rapidly clearing brain Michael was starting to feel more scared of this man that he had been in the coffin. 'How- how did you find me?'

'I spend all week out in my camper van, Mike - see, I check on mobile phone masts around the south of England, for the phone companies. Listen to the old Citizens' Band radio, chat to a few mates around the globe. When there's no one to chat to, I scan all the radio bands, sometimes listen in to the police chatter. With my kit I can listen to just about any conversation I want - mobile phones, anything. Told you I was in Signals in the Australian Marines.'

Michael nodded.

'So, Wednesday, I was sitting around in the evening after work and I stumbled across Davey and you having a cosy chat. I stayed tuned to the channel and picked up some subsequent chats between you. Saw the news coverage, heard about the coffin. So I pulled on my thinking hat and I thought to myself, if I was going to take my best mate on a pub crawl why would I take a coffin? Maybe to hide you somewhere? Bit of a sick prank? So I went along to the local Planning Office in Brighton and looked up your company - and lo! - I

discover you're applying for planning consent on forest land you bought last year, right in the area where you were having your pub crawl. I figured was that a coincidence, or was that a coincidence? And I also figured, out on a pub crawl, your mates would all be lazy bastards. They wouldn't want to carry you too far. You'd be close to a track you could get a vehicle down.'

'Is that where I was?' Michael asked.

'That's where you'd still be, mate. Now tell me about this money you have stashed away in the Cayman Islands.'

'What do you mean?'

'I told you, I pick up chatter on the police radios. You've got money in the Cayman Islands, haven't you? North of a million, I understand. Wouldn't that be a reasonable reward for saving your life? Cheap at twice the price, Mike, if you ask me.'

67

At 7.20 the next morning, Grace arrived at Sussex House. The sky was dark blue, with wispy trails of cloud like strips of rags. One cop he'd been out on the beat with years back knew all about cloud formations and could predict the weather from them. From memory, the clouds up there this morning were cumulonimbus. Dry weather. Good for the search today.

In most police stations he could have got a good fry-up, which was what he needed for energy, he thought as he walked along the corridor to the bank of vending machines. He pushed a coin in the hot drinks dispenser, then waited for the plastic cup to fill with white coffee. Carrying it back to his office, he realized how weary he felt. All night he'd tossed and turned, switched the light on, made a note, switched it off, then back on again. Operation Salsa drip-fed its facts and anomalies to him relentlessly, drip by drip by drip, until grey light had begun to seep around the curtains, and the first tentative chatter of dawn birdsong had begun.

The bracelet. The BMW arriving back so late in the parking lot, covered in mud. Mark Warren working in his office at midnight on a Sunday. Ashley Harper's Canadian uncle, Bradley Cunningham. Ashley Harper's expression and behaviour at the mortuary today. Forensic results on the soil due today. CCTV results, possibly.

He looked at his in-tray, piled with post from last week he had not yet dealt with, then switched on his computer and looked at an even bigger stack of emails in his in-box. Then his door opened and he heard a chirpy, 'Good morning, Roy.'

It was Eleanor Hodgson, his management support assistant, who he had asked to come in especially early today. She held a sheet of paper in her hand.

'How was your weekend?' he asked.

'Very nice, I went to my niece's wedding on Saturday, then had a houseful of relatives yesterday. And you?'

'Managed to get out in the country yesterday.'

'Good!' she said. 'You needed a break and some fresh air.' She peered at him more closely. 'You look very pale, you know.'

'Tell me about it.' He took the sheet of paper, already knowing what it was - his agenda for the week. She had produced it every Monday morning for him, for as long as he could remember.

He sat down, the smell of the coffee tantalizing, but the liquid as yet too hot to drink, and scanned the agenda, needing to clear his diary of everything non-essential now he was the SIO on the case.

At ten this morning he was due to attend court for the continuation of the Suresh Hossain trial, and he would have to do that. At 1 p.m. he had a dentist's appointment in Lewes - which would have to be cancelled. At 3 o'clock tomorrow he had a meeting scheduled with South Wales CID for an exchange of information on a known Swansea villain found dead with a snooker cue sticking through his eye on a waste tip near Newhaven. That would have to be rescheduled. On Wednesday he was due at the Police Training College at Bramshill for an update on DNA fingerprinting. Thursday's highlight was the Sussex Police headquarters cricket team - of which he had landed himself the unwelcome headache of being Hon. Sec. - AGM. Friday was clear at the moment, and on Saturday there was a terrorist attack training exercise at Shoreham Harbour - in which he was not involved.

It would have been a nothing week, if it weren't for the Hossain trial and now Operation Salsa. But, then, in his experience, few weeks finished the way he expected them to.

He told Eleanor to reschedule everything except his trial attendances, then rummaged through his post, dictating replies to the most urgent on the pile. He scanned his emails and because time was short and he was a slow typist, dictated replies to those, too. Then he walked along the maze of corridors to the Incident Room. It was already beginning to feel like home to him.

The 8.30 a.m. Operation Salsa briefing meeting was short. There had been no new developments overnight - apart from what he had gleaned from Max Candille, which he kept to himself, and from his visit to Double-M's offices. Hopefully by their next meeting at 6.30 p.m. there might be some news.

Grace drove into Lewes, stopping at a petrol station on the way to buy an egg and bacon sandwich, which he was still munching as he walked up the courthouse steps at 9.50. It was already beginning to feel like a very long day.

The morning proceedings were taken up with in-camera submissions to the Judge by the prosecuting counsel, and all Grace could do was hang around in the waiting room, giving Eleanor some dictation over the phone and speaking to Glenn Branson a couple of times. There was not enough time to get to the office and back during the lunch recess, so instead he went along to his dental appointment after all, for his six-monthly check-up, and to his relief his teeth were fine, although he received a reprimand from the dentist about not brushing his gums carefully enough. But at least no fillings - he dreaded them, always had.

Returning to court at 2 p.m., he discovered he was not going to be needed for the rest of the day, and went back to his office. With the time Operation Salsa was now consuming, a massive backlog was building up on the rest of his paperwork, and he did his best to deal with the most urgent of it.

It was an uneventful afternoon for him, right up until his arrival at the 6 p.m. briefing in the Incident Room. He could tell instantly from the team's faces that there had been a development. It was Bella Moy who told him the news.

'I've just had a call from a Phil Wheeler, Roy - the father of the murdered lad found this afternoon.'

'Tell me?'

'He said he didn't know if it was significant, but apparently his son told him that he'd been chatting with Michael Harrison on a walkie-talkie radio - since - Thursday.'

68

Ashley walked up behind Mark, who was hunched over his desk in front of his computer screen, trying to catch up on his work. He badly owed the architect, the quantity surveyor and the construction company responses to a whole raft of emails on issues that had been raised by the Planning Department over the company's most ambitious project to date, the new Ashdown development of twenty houses.

She slipped her arms around his neck, leaned forward and nuzzled his cheek. He breathed in the heady scents of her fresh, summery cologne and the faint citrus tang of her hair.

Bleary-eyed, he lifted his arms up and cupped her cheeks in his hands. 'We're going to be OK,' he said.

'Of course. We don't do not OK, right?'

'Right.'

Leaning further over, she kissed him on the forehead.

Mark shot a glance across the office at the open doorway, wary every second of the day and night of who might walk through it.

She kissed him again. 'I love you,' she said.

'I love you too, Ashley'

'Do you? You haven't shown me much affection the past few days,' she chided.

'Oh, right, like you've been all over me?'

'Let's put that behind us.' She nibbled his ear, then, unbuttoning his shirt front, slipped her hands inside and began to tease his nipples with her fingers and thumbs. She felt him react almost instantly, heard his sharp intake of breath, felt his chest tighten. Slipping her hands out, she- reached around him, clicked his mouse to exit the program, then whispered into his ear, 'Fuck me.'

'Here?'

'Here, now!'

Mark stood up, a little panicky, and glanced at his watch. 'The cleaners come around six-thirty - they'll be--'

Ashley unbuckled his suit trousers, and jerked down his zip. Then she pulled down his trousers and underpants together in one swift tug. 'So we'll just have to have a quickie, won't we?' She stopped and stared for a moment, as if in appreciation, at his engorged penis, then said, 'Well, somebody seems pleased to see me!'

Then she took him in her mouth.

Mark stared out of the window. They were in full view of the windows across the street. He tried to step sideways and almost tripped over his trousers and pants. He leaned down, fumbled with the buttons on Ashley's blouse, got his hands inside, unhooked her bra. Within a couple of minutes, naked except for his shoes and socks, he was lying on top of her, deep inside, the dusty, nylon smell of the hard carpet mingling with Ashley's scents in his nostrils.

Then there was a sharp buzz from the intercom.

'Shit!' he said, panicking. 'Who the fuck's that?'

Ashley pulled him tighter into her, her nails raking his back. 'Ignore it,' she said.

'What if it's Michael? Checking if anyone is in?'

'You're such a wuss!' she said, releasing him.

Ignoring the remark, Mark hauled himself to his feet and hobbled out of the room and over to the reception desk which Ashley normally manned and stared at the small black and white CCTV monitor. He could see a man in a motorcycle helmet, holding a package, standing outside the front door in the street. Mark pressed the speak button. 'Hello?'

'Package for Mr Warren, Double-M Properties.'

'Do you want to just put it through the letter box?'

'I need a signature.'

Mark cursed. 'I'll be down in a moment.'

He pulled his clothes back on, stuffing his shirt tails into his trousers, and blew Ashley a kiss. 'Back in two sees.'

'Don't worry about me,' she said unsmiling. 'I'll carry on without you.'

He hurried downstairs, opened the door and took a small Jiffy bag, with a printed label addressed to him but no information where

it was from, from a stocky hulk of a man in leathers with 'FAST TRACK COURIERS' embossed on the front. He signed the docket, was given a duplicate copy then closed the door and climbed back up the staircase.

The sender's handwritten name on the docket read, 'JK Contractors'. Mark had no idea what was inside it. There was so much damned paperwork on the planning applications that he was steadily sinking under the mountain. This was probably a bunch of technical drawings from the quantity surveyor. Typically extravagant to send them by courier when post would have been fine. He would open it later. Right now there was just one thing on his mind, Ashley, lying naked on his office floor. And he was feeling crazily, dizzily, rampantly horny.

Then, totally unexpectedly, within seconds of lying back on top of her it was all over.

'Sorry,' he said, taking his weight on his elbows. 'I--'

'Get turned on by motorcycle couriers, do you?' she asked, seemingly only partly in jest.

'Oh sure.'

'A lot of men are gay and don't realize it. You know, bikers in leather can be a pretty erotic thing for guys.'

'What is this?'

'What do you think it is? You leave me here naked and on the verge of coming; you go down and see a guy in leathers and the next moment you shoot your bolt before you've barely got back inside me.'

He rolled off and sat up beside her on the floor, a wave of gloom washing through him. 'I'm sorry,' he said. 'I just have a shitload of stuff going on in my head at the moment.'

'And I don't?'

'Maybe you're better at handling this than I am.'

'I don't know what you're capable of handling, Mark. I thought you were the strong guy and Michael was the weak one.'

He leaned forward and placed his face in his hands. 'Ashley, we're both tense, OK.'

'You shouldn't be tense, you just had a great orgasm.'

'OK, OK, OK. I have apologized. You want me to work on you? I'll make you come - you know - by hand.'

She stood up abruptly, picking up some of her clothes as she did. 'Forget it, I'm not in the mood any more.'

They both dressed in silence. It was Ashley, putting on some liptick, who finally broke it. 'You know what they say, Mark? Good sex is one per cent of a relationship; bad sex is ninety-nine per cent.'

'I thought we had great sex - normally.'

She checked her lipstick in her compact mirror, as if she was about to go out on a date. 'Yes, well, I did, too.'

Mark walked over and put an arm around her. 'Ashley, darling, come on, I apologized - I'm so damned stressed. We should go away for a few days.'

'Sure, that would look good, wouldn't it.'

'I mean when this is all over.'

She gave him a sharp look. 'When exactly will it all be over?'

'I don't know.'

She put her mirror away in her handbag. 'Mark, darling, it can never be over while Michael is alive. We both know that. We burnt our bridges on Thursday night when you took out the breathing tube.' She gave him a peck on the cheek. 'See you in the morning.'

'Are you going?'

'Yes, I'm going. I always go at the end of the day; something wrong with that? I thought we were supposed to be keeping up appearances?'

'I guess, yes -1 mean ..."

She looked at him for a couple of seconds. 'Pull yourself together, for Christ's sake. Understand?'

He nodded lamely. Then she was gone.

He stayed on for another hour, working on his emails, then, with the noise of the cleaners driving him to distraction, he decided to quit for the day and take the rest of his work home.

On his way to the door, he picked up the package he had signed for earlier and tore it open. There was something inside, a small object, tightly wrapped in cellophane then bound with tape.

Frowning, he wondered what it was. A replacement sim card for a mobile? A computer part?

He pulled a pair of scissors out of the desk drawer and snipped one end open, squeezed it, and peered inside.

At first he thought it was a joke, one of those plastic fake fingers you can buy in novelty shops. Then he saw the blood.

'No,' he said, feeling giddy suddenly. 'No. NO.'

The severed fingertip fell from the pack and landed noiselessly on the carpet.

Stepping back away from it in horror, Mark saw there was an envelope inside the packet.

69

Grace turned off the main road and onto a country lane, barely beyond the outskirts of Lewes. He passed a farm-shop sign, a telephone booth, then saw a tall mesh fence topped with barbed wire, some of it erect, some in a state of collapse, ahead on his left. There were two gates, wide open, that didn't look as if they had been closed in a decade. Fixed to one of them was a faded, cracked painted sign which read 'WHEELER'S AUTO RECOVERY'. Beside it was another, much smaller warning sign, reading 'guard dogs.''

The appearance of the place was about as near to a hillbilly homestead as Grace had ever experienced. It was beyond ramshackle; it was beyond the most untidy place he had ever seen in his life.

The yard was dominated by a large blue tow-truck, parked amidst a dozen or so partially or totally cannibalized carcasses of vehicles, some smashed, some badly rusted, and one, a small Toyota, just looking as if it had been parked and someone had nicked everything it was possible to nick from it.

There were piles of sawn and unsawn logs, a wooden trestle, a rusting bandsaw, a decrepit Portakabin, against which was a faded chalked sign which read 'xmas trees sale', and a wood-framed bungalow that looked as if it could collapse at any moment.

As he drove in and switched the engine off, he heard the fierce, deep barking of a guard dog shattering the quiet stillness of the warm evening, and remained prudently in the car for some moments, waiting for a hound to appear. Instead, the front door of the bungalow opened, and a hulk of a man came out. In his fifties, he had thinning, greasy hair, a heavy five-o'clock shadow and a massive beer belly barely restrained by a string vest and bulging over the buckle of his brown dungarees like an overhang of snow about to avalanche.

'Mr Wheeler?' Grace said, approaching, still wary of the sound of the barking dog, which was getting even louder and deeper.

'Yes?' The man had a gentle face with big sad eyes, and massive, grimy hands. He smelled of rope and engine grease.

Grace pulled out his warrant card and held it up for him to see. 'Detective Superintendent Grace from Sussex CID. I'm very sorry to hear about your son.'

The man stood still, impassively, then Grace saw he was starting to tremble. His hands clenched tight, and a tear rolled down from the corner of each eye. 'You want to come in?' Phil Wheeler said, in a faltering voice.

'If you have a few minutes, I'd appreciate it.'

The inside of the house was pretty much like the outside and the reek of the place indicated a heavy smoker. Grace followed the man into a dingy sitting room with a three-piece suite and a large old television. Almost every inch of the floor and furniture was covered in motorbiking magazines, country and western magazines and vinyl record sleeves. There was a photograph of a fair-haired woman resting her hands on the shoulders of a small boy on a scooter, on the sideboard, and a few cheap-looking china ornaments, but nothing at all on the walls. A clock on the mantelpiece, set into the belly of a chipped porcelain racehorse, indicated the time at ten minutes past seven. Grace was surprised, checking it against his own watch, that it was more or less accurate.

Scooping several record sleeves off an armchair, Phil Wheeler said, by way of an explanation, 'Davey liked this stuff, used to play it all the time, liked to collect--'

He broke off and walked out of the room. 'Tea?' he called.

'I'm fine,' Grace said, unsure what kind of hygiene went on in the kitchen.

This level of interview would have been delegated to someone junior by most SIOs, but Grace had always been a firm believer in getting out in the field himself. It was his style of operating - and it was one of the aspects of police work that he found most interesting and rewarding if sometimes, like now, challenging.

After a couple of minutes, Phil Wheeler lumbered back into the room, swept a pile of magazines and some more record sleeves off

the settee and eased himself down, then pulled a tobacco tin out of his pocket. He prised open the tin with his thumbnail, removed a packet of cigarette papers, then proceeded, one-handed, to roll himself a cigarette. Grace couldn't help watching; it had always fascinated him how people could do this.

'Mr Wheeler, I understand your son told you he had some conversations on a walkie-talkie radio with a missing person, Michael Harrison.'

Phil Wheeler ran his tongue along the paper and sealed the cigarette. 'I can't understand why anyone would want to hurt my boy. He was the friendliest person you could meet.' Holding his unlit cigarette, he bicycled his hand in the air. 'Poor kid had - you know water on the brain, encephalitis. He was slow, but everyone liked him.'

Grace smiled in sympathy. 'He had a lot of friends in the traffic police.'

'He was a good lad.'

'So I understand.'

'He was my life.'

Grace waited. Wheeler lit the cigarette from a box of Swan Vesta matches and moments later the sweet smoke wafted across to Grace. He breathed in deeply, enjoying the smell, but not enjoying this task. Talking to the newly bereaved had always been, in his view, the single worst aspect of police work.

'Can you tell me a bit about the conversations he had? About this walkietalkie?'

The man inhaled, smoke spurting from his mouth and nostrils as he spoke. 'I got pretty angry with him on -1 don't know - Friday or Saturday. 'I didn't know he had the damned thing. He finally told me he'd found it near that terrible wreck on Tuesday night with the four lads.'

Grace nodded.

'He kept talking about his new friend. To be honest I didn't take much notice. Davey lived in - how do you put it - his own little world most of the time - always off having conversations with people inside his head.' He put the cigarette down in a tin ashtray, then blotted his eyes with a scrunched up handkerchief and sniffed. 'He was

always chatting. I sometimes had to switch off, otherwise he could drive me nuts.'

'Can you remember what he said about Michael Harrison?'

'He was very excited - I think it was Friday - he'd been told he could be a hero. You see, he loved American cop shows on the telly he always wanted to be a hero. He was going on about knowing where someone was, and that he was the only person in the world who knew, you see, and this was his chance to be a hero. But I didn't take much notice; had a busy day with two wrecks we had to bring in -1 didn't make the connection.'

'Do you have the radio?'

He shook his head. 'Davey must have taken it with him.'

'Did Davey drive?'

He shook his head. 'No. He liked to steer the truck sometimes, I let him do that on a quiet road - you know - like one hand on the wheel? But no, he could never drive, didn't have the ability. He had a mountain bike, that was all.'

'He was found about six miles away from here - do you think he went off to find Michael Harrison? To try to be a hero?'

'I had to pick up a car on Saturday afternoon. He didn't want to come with me, told me he had important business.'

'Important business?'

Philip Wheeler gave a sad shrug. 'He liked to believe he mattered.' Grace smiled, thinking privately, we all do. Then he asked, 'Did you glean anything from Davey about where Michael Harrison might be?'

'No, it didn't occur to me to make any connection - so I didn't take much notice of what he said.'

'Would it be possible to see your son's room, Mr Wheeler?'

Phil Wheeler jabbed a finger, pointing past Grace. 'In the Portakabin. Davey liked it there. You can go across - please don't mind if I don't -1--' He pulled his handkerchief out.

'That's fine, I understand.'

'It's not locked.'

Grace crossed the yard and walked up to the Portakabin. The dog which he had still not yet seen, which he thought had to be on the

far side of the bungalow, began barking again, even more aggressively. Fixed to the wall beside the front door was a warning sign to Intruders reading 'armed response!'

He tested the door handle, then pulled the door open and stepped inside onto carpet tiles, several of which were curling at the edges, but most of which were covered in either socks, underpants, T-shirts, sweet wrappers, a Macdonalds burger container lying open, the lid smeared with congealed ketchup, car instruments, hub caps, old American licence plates and several baseball caps. The room was even more untidy than the bungalow, and had a rank odour of cheesy feet, which reminded him of a school locker room.

Much of the space in the room was taken up by a bed and an unstable television flickering between colour and black and white, on which he saw the credits running for Law and Order. Grace never liked watching British cop shows - they always managed to irritate him by showing wrong procedures or stupid decisions by the investigating officers. US cop shows seemed more exciting, more together. But maybe that was because he didn't know US police procedures well enough to be critical.

Glancing around, he saw adverts which looked like they had been torn from magazines plastered all over the walls. Looking more closely, he identifed all of them as being for things American - cars, guns, food, drink, vacations.

Stepping past the burger container, he looked down at a very old Dell computer, with a floppy disk protruding from the front of the processor, sharing a work surface that sufficed for a desk with a carton of Twinkie bars, a six-inch-tall plastic Bart Simpson and a large scrap of lined notepaper on which there were ballpoint jottings in child-like handwriting.

Grace looked carefully at the jottings and realized it was a crude diagram. Beside two sets of parallel lines was scrawled: 'A 26. NORTH KROWBURG. DUBBLE KATTLE GRYD. 2 MYLES. WITE COTIDGE.'

It was a map.

Below it, he saw a sequence of numbers: 0771 52136. It looked like a mobile number, and he tried dialling it, but nothing happened.

He spent another twenty minutes rummaging through everything in the room, opening every drawer, but he found nothing else

of interest. Then he took the sheet of paper back to the bungalow and showed it to Phil Wheeler.

'Did Davey talk to you about this?'

Phil Wheeler shook his head. 'No.'

'Do the directions mean anything to you?'

'Double cattle grid, two miles, white cottage? No, don't mean anything.'

'The number? Do you recognize this?'

He looked at the number, reading out each digit aloud. 'No, not any number I know'

Grace decided he had got about as much out of the man as he was going to get tonight. He stood up, thanked him, and told him again how sorry he was about his son.

'Just catch the bastard who did it, Detective Superintendent. Do that at least, for me and Davey, will you?'

Grace promised to do his best.

70

Mark Warren, dripping with perspiration, jigged the key in the front door lock of his apartment, panicking for a moment that the lock was Jammed. Then he pushed the door open fearfully, stepped inside, closed it, locked it and engaged the safety chain.

Ignoring the bundle of post awaiting him, he set down his briefcase, ripped off his tie, unbuttoned his shirt collar, then slung both his jacket and the tie on the sofa. He poured himself four fingers of Balvenie, chinked some ice cubes out of the fridge straight into the glass, then gulped down some of the whisky.

He opened his leather laptop bag and removed the Jiffy bag that had arrived earlier, holding it at arm's length, hardly daring to look at it. He put it on a black lacquered table on the far side of the room, took out the note which he had already looked at earlier, in the office, then walked over to the coffee table, took another deep gulp of his whisky and sat down.

The note was short, printed off a computer on blank A4 paper. It said: 'Have the police check the fingerprints out and you'll find it is your friend and business partner. Every 24 hours I will cut an increasingly bigger bit off him. Until you do exactly what I tell you.'

There was no signature.

Mark drank some more whisky, draining the glass. He refilled it another four fat fingers but the same ice cubes, and read the note again. Then again. He heard a siren somewhere outside and flinched. Then the door intercom buzzed, throwing him into a flat spin of panic. Marching across to the CCTV panel, he desperately hoped it was Ashley. Her phone had been off when he tried to call her from the office and it had still been off when he had called her again minutes ago coming up in the lift.

But it wasn't Ashley; it was the face of a man he was starting to see too much of, for his liking, Detective Superintendent Grace.

For some moments he wondered whether to ignore him, let him go away, come back some other time. But maybe he had news.

He picked up the receiver and told Grace to come in, then pressed the button for the electronic door catch.

It seemed only seconds later that Grace was knocking on his door, and he'd barely had time to scoop up the note and the Jiffy bag and stuff them in a cupboard.

'Good evening, officer,' Mark said as he opened the door, conscious suddenly that he was feeling a tad muzzy from the drink and that his voice was affected, too. He kept a full arm's length as he shook Grace's hand, so that the policeman wouldn't notice the alcohol on his breath.

'Mind if I come in for a few minutes, or are you busy?'

'Never too busy for you, officer - I'm around to help you seventwofour. What news do you have? Can I get you a drink?'

'A glass of water, please,' Grace said, feeling parched.

They sat down opposite each other on the deep leather sofas, and Grace watched him for a little while. The man looked in a bad state of nerves; he seemed a little uncoordinated and smelled strongly of alcohol. Watching his eyes carefully, Grace asked him, 'What did you have for lunch today?'

Mark's eyes shot to the left momentarily and then back to the centre. 'I had a turkey and cranberry sandwich, from a deli just around the corner. Why?'

'It's important to eat,' Grace said. 'Particularly when you are stressed.' He gave Mark a smile of encouragement then sipped some water from the tall, expensive-feeling glass he had been given. 'Got a bit of a mystery, Mark, which I wonder if you could help me with?'

'Of course-I'll try.'

'A couple of CCTV cameras picked up a BMW X5 registered in your name, late Thursday night, heading into Brighton from the direction of Lewes ...' Grace paused to pull his Blackberry out of his pocket. 'Yes, at 12.29 a.m. and again at 12.40 a.m.' Grace decided for the moment to say nothing about the results of the soil analysis that he'd been given at the briefing meeting, earlier. Like a lion closing in on a kill, he leaned forward. 'You went for a late-night drive in Ash down Forest, perhaps?'

Now he watched Mark's eyes rigidly. Instead of going back to the left, to the same side as when Mark answered his question about the andwich, to the memory side, they swung wildly, right, then left, then right again, very definitely settling right now. Construct mode. He was intending to lie his way out of this one.

'I may have done,' he replied.

'You may have done? Isn't driving in a forest at midnight a little bit of an unusual thing to do? Wouldn't you remember a bit more clearly?'

'It's not unusual for me,' Mark responded, seizing his drink, his entire body language changing suddenly. It was Grace's turn to feel uneasy now, wondering what was going on. Mark leaned back, swirled the whisky around in his glass, the ice cubes chinking. 'You see, that's where we are doing our new big property development. We got outline planning permission a couple of months back for twenty new houses on a five-acre site in the heart of the forest, and now we're working on the details - because we're getting a lot of hostility from the environmental groups. I go back and forward to the forest all the time, day and night - I have to check out the environmental factors, and a big part of that is the impact on the wildlife at night time. I'm working up a whole report to support our application.'

Grace's heart sank; he felt as if a rug had just been pulled away, quickly and very smartly, from beneath him. He'd just wasted the best part of a thousand pounds of his budget on the soil analysis, and he felt an idiot. Why hadn't he known this? Why hadn't Glenn or anyone on the team known it?

His brain was spinning and he tried to slow it down and get some traction on this thoughts. Mark Warren still looked a wreck and he just did not get the impression it was from worrying about his business partner. The aggression he had shown at the wedding indicated something else altogether, but he didn't know what.

Then, for about the third time in the past ten minutes, he saw Mark Warren's eyes flick across to a point on the far side of the room, as if someone was standing there. Grace deliberately dropped the cover of his Blackberry on the floor and, in leaning down to get it, glanced back in the direction Mark kept looking at. But he couldn't see anything of significance. Just the smart hi-fi set, some interesting modern art and a few cupboards.

'I read about that young man - in the mortuary. Saw the piece in the paper today. Very sad,' Mark said.

'Might even have been on your land,' Grace said, testing.

'I don't know exactly where it happened.'

Fixing on his eyes again, and remembering the words on the sheet of notepaper in Davey's bedroom, Grace said, 'If you take the A26 outside Crowborough just past a white cottage, then over a double cattle grid. Is that where you are?'

Mark didn't need to respond. Grace could see all he needed to know from the rapid swivelling of his eyes, the furrowing of his forehead, the hunching of his entire frame and the change in tone of his face colour.

'It could be - possibly - yes.'

Now it was all starting to come clear to Grace. 'If a bunch of you were going to bury your mate alive in a coffin, it would make sense to do it on land you own, wouldn't it? Somewhere familiar to you?'

'I -1 suppose

'You're still insisting you had no idea of any plan to bury Michael Harrison in a coffin?'

His eyes were all over the place for a few seconds. 'Absolutely. Nothing at all.'

'Good, thank you.' Grace studied his Blackberry for a moment. 'I also have a number I wonder if you could help me with, Mark?'

'I'll try.'

Grace read out the number that had been written on the same diagram.

'0771 52136,' Mark repeated. His eyes shot instantly to the left. Memory mode. 'That sounds like Ashley's mobile with a couple of digits missing. Why do you ask?'

Grace drained his water and stood up. 'It was found in Davey Wheeler's home - the murdered boy. Along with the directions I just gave you.'

'What?'

Walking over to the window, Grace slid open the patio door and stepped out on to the teak decking that covered the balcony.

Steadying himself on the metal guard rail, he looked down four floors fit the bustling street below. It wasn't far, but it was enough for him; i had always suffered from vertigo, never had any head for heights.

'How did this boy get Ashley's phone number and the directions to our land?' Mark asked.

'I'd also like to know that very much.'

Once again Mark's eyes shot across the room. Grace wondered, was it the cupboard? Something in there? What? Grace had such bad feelings about this man, and about Ashley Harper, that he wanted to get search warrants and take their homes - and office - apart. But to do that was not easy. Magistrates required convincing to sign warrants, and to convince them you needed evidence. The bracelet she had given him wouldn't be enough. Right now, on both Mark Warren and Ashley Harper all he really had were gut feelings. No evidence.

'Mark, is this land of yours easy to find? The directions - the white cottage, the cattle grid?'

'You have to know the turn-off- it's not marked, other than by a couple of stakes - we didn't want to draw attention to it.'

'Sounds to me that that's the place to look for your partner, pretty damned quick, wouldn't you say?'

'Absolutely.'

'I'll liaise with the Crowborough police, who are already doing a full search of the area, but it sounds like it would be vital for you to be there - at least point them to the right area. If I arrange to get you picked up in the next half-hour?' 'Fine. Thank you. Ah - how long do you think I'll be needed?'

Grace frowned. 'Well - all I need is for you to show us the entrance - the turn-off - and to take us to where your land begins. Maybe an hour altogether. Unless you want to join in the search yourself?'

'Sure -1 mean - I'll do what I can.'

71

Mark closed the door on Grace, ran into the bathroom, knelt down and threw up into the toilet bowl. Then he threw up some more.

He stood up, pressed the flush lever, then rinsed his mouth with cold water; his clothes were wringing wet with perspiration, his hair plastered to his head. With the tap running, he nearly didn't hear the landline phone ringing.

Grabbing the receiver off the hook, he just caught it on the last ring before it would have diverted to voicemail. 'Hello?'

A male voice with an Australian accent said, 'Is that Mark Warren?'

Something about the voice made Mark instantly wary. 'This is an ex-directory number. Who am I speaking to?'

'My name's Vic - I'm with your friend, Michael - he gave me your number. Actually he'd like to have a quick word with you; shall I put him on?'

'Yes.' Mark gripped the receiver hard against his ear, trembling. Then he heard Michael's voice, very definitely Michael, but making a sound unlike Mark had ever heard before. It was a bellow of pain that seemed to start deep within Michael's soul then burst, like a train from a tunnel, into a crescendo of utter, unbearable agony.

Mark had to pull the phone away from his ear. The roar died away then he heard Michael whimpering then screaming again. 'No, please, no, no. NO NO NO NO!'

Then he heard Vic's voice again. 'Bet you're wondering what I'm doing to your mate, don't you, eh Mark? Don't worry, you'll find out when it arrives in tomorrow's post.'

'What do you want?' Mark asked, straining his ears, but he could hear no sound from Michael now.

'I need you to transfer some money in your Cayman Islands bank to an account number I'm going to give you shortly'

'It isn't possible - even if I was willing to do it. Two signatures are

Bded for any transaction, Michael's and mine.'

'In your safe in your company office you have documents signed ' both of you, giving power of attorney to a lawyer in the Cayman Islands; you put it there last year when you both went off sailing for week, and you were hoping to close on a property deal in the [Grenadines that then didn't happen. You've forgotten to destroy those documents. Just as well, I'd say.'

How the hell did the man know this, Mark wondered.

'I want to speak to Michael -1 don't want to hear him in pain, I'd Just like to talk to him, please.'

'You've talked to him enough today. I'm going to leave you to think about this, Mark, and we'll catch up later, have a cosy chat. Oh, and Mark, not a word of this to the police - that could really make me angry.'

The line went dead.

Immediately Mark hit the last number recall button. But it was no surprise that the automated voice came up with, 'I'm sorry, we do not have the caller's number.'

He tried Ashley's number again. To his relief she answered.

'Thank God,' he said. 'Where have you been?'

'What do you mean, where have I been?'

'I've been trying to get hold of you.'

'I went to have a massage, actually. One of us has to keep a cool head, OK? Then I popped in to see Michael's mum and now I'm on my way home.'

'Can you swing by here - like now, this second?'

'Your voice is slurred - have you been drinking?'

'Something's happened, I have to speak to you.'

'Let's talk in the morning.'

'It can't wait.'

The imperative in his voice got through. Reluctantly she said, 'OK -1 just don't know if it's a good idea coming to you - we could meet somewhere neutral - how about a bar or a restaurant?'

'Great, somewhere the whole world can hear us?'

'We'll just have to talk quietly, OK? It's better than me being seen coming over to your apartment.'

'Jesus, you are paranoid!'

The? You're a fine one to talk about paranoia. Name a restaurant.' Mark thought for a moment. A police car would collect him in half an hour. It was about half an hour's drive out to the site. Maybe just ten minutes there, then half an hour back. It was eight o'clock on Monday night; places would be quiet. He suggested meeting at ten at an Italian restaurant near the Theatre Royal, which had a large upstairs dining area that would almost certainly be empty tonight.

It wasn't. To his surprise, the restaurant was heaving - he had forgotten that after the Brighton Festival the city was still in full swing, its bars and restaurants crowded every night. Most of the tables upstairs were taken as well, and he was squeezed into a cramped table behind a rowdy party table of twelve. Ashley wasn't there yet. The place was typically Italian: white walls, small tables with candles jammed in the top of Chianti bottles and loud, energetic waiters.

The ride out to Crowborough and back had been uneventful: two young detectives in an unmarked car, who had spent most of the way out there arguing about football players, and most of the way back discussing cricket. They showed no interest in him at all other than to tell him they should both have gone off duty an hour ago and were in a hurry to get back. Mark viewed that as good news.

He directed them to the start of the track, with the double cattle grid, then sat and waited as they radioed for the local search team to join them. After a short while several minibuses, headed by a police Range Rover, arrived in convoy.

Mark got out of the car, explained how far up they had to drive, but did not volunteer to join them. He did not want to be there when they found the grave - and they would find it for sure.

He needed a drink badly, but was not sure what he wanted. He was thirsty, so he ordered a Peroni beer to tide him over, then stared at the menu as a distraction from his thoughts. Moments later, Ashley arrived.

'Still drinking?' she admonished, by way of a greeting, and without kissing him, squeezed in opposite him, throwing a disapproving glance at the rowdy group beside them, who were guffawing at a joke , then put her very bling pink Prada handbag on the table.

She looked more beautiful than ever, Mark thought, dressed in a [ ftwhionably ragged cream blouse, which gave her breasts considerftble, and very erotic, exposure, and a small choker; she had her hair Up. She looked fresh and relaxed, and smelled of a gorgeous perfume he recognized but could not name.

Smiling at her, he said, 'You look stunning.'

Her eyes were darting around the room impatiently, as if seeking a waiter. 'Thanks - you look like shit.'

'You'll understand why in a moment.'

Semi-ignoring him, she raised a hand, and when a waiter finally scuttled over, she imperiously ordered a San Pellegrino.

'Want some wine?' Mark said. 'I'm going to have some.'

'I think you should have water, too - you're drinking far too much just recently. You need to stop, get a grip. OK?'

'OK. Maybe.'

She shrugged. 'Fine, you do what you want.'

Mark slipped his hand across the table towards hers, but she withdrew her hands, sitting bolt upright, arms firmly crossed.

'Before I forget, tomorrow is Pete's funeral. Two o'clock, the Good Shepherd, Dyke Road. Luke's is on Wednesday; I haven't got the time yet - and I don't know about Josh and Robbo yet. So what's this big latest thing you have to tell me?'

The waiter came with her water, and they ordered. Then when the waiter had moved away Mark began by telling her about the finger.

She shook her head, sounding shocked. 'This cannot be true, Mark.'

Mark had put the finger in the Jiffy bag into the fridge in his apartment, but he'd brought the note with him and gave it to her.

Ashley read it carefully, several times, mouthing the words as if in total disbelief. Then suddenly there was anger in her eyes and she looked at him accusingly. 'This isn't your doing, Mark?'

It was Mark's turn to be shocked. He mouthed the word before he said it. 'What? You think I have Michael hidden somewhere and I cut his finger off. I might not like him too much but--'

'You're happy to let him die of asphyxiation in a coffin - but you wouldn't ever do something nasty to him, like cut a finger off? Come on, Mark, what kind of bullshit is this?'

He glanced around, alarmed at the way she had raised her voice. But no one was taking any notice.

Mark could not believe the way she seemed to be turning on him. 'Ashley, come on, this is me. Jesus Christ, what's got into you? We're a team, you and I - isn't that the deal? We love each other; we're a team, right?'

She softened, glanced around, then reached forward, took his hand and brought it to her lips, planting a gentle kiss on it. 'My darling,' she said, her voice lowered. 'I love you so much - but I'm just in shock.'

The too.'

'I suppose we all handle shock, stress - you know - in different ways.'

He nodded, pulled her hand towards his mouth and kissed it tenderly. 'We have to do something for Michael.'

She shook her head. 'It's perfect, don't you see? We just do nothing! This man - Vic - he's going to think you care because you're Michael's partner.' She grinned. 'It's an incredible situation!'

'It's not; I haven't told you everything.' He drained his beer and looked around, wondering if the wine was on its way. Then he told her about the phone call from Vic and the sound of Michael screaming. Ashley listened in silence. 'Christ, poor Michael - he--' She bit her lip and a tear rolled down her cheek. 'I mean - oh shit, oh shit.' She closed her eyes for some moments, then opened them again, staring directly into Mark's. 'How - how the hell - how did this man find Michael?'

Mark decided not to mention the visit from Grace at this moment; Ashley was already distressed enough. 'All I can think is he must have stumbled across the grave - it wasn't exactly well concealed. Hell, the boys only planned to be away a max of an hour or two. I camouflaged it a bit - but it wouldn't have been hard - a rambler could easily have seen it.'

'A rambler's one thing,' she said bleakly. 'This guy's not a ram r.'

'He's a chancer, maybe. Finds Michael, figures out from all the I and media coverage that this is the rich guy everyone's looking f- it's the chance of a lifetime. He takes him off to another location

1 sends us a ransom note - and proof that he has Michael.'

Ashley said, her voice faltering, 'How - how do - you - we )ne -1 mean - how do we know it's Michael's finger?'

'About three weeks ago Michael and I were on the boat, doing jme maintenance work on her, on a Saturday afternoon - rememIber?' 'Vaguely.'

'The heads door slammed shut on Michael's index finger. He was hopping around, cursing, running it under a cold tap. He showed me a few days later a black band right across the nail.' He paused. 'The finger that arrived has a black band. OK?' A hearty plate of avocado, mozzarella and tomatoes arrived for Ashley. And a large bowl of minestrone was set down in front of Mark. When the waiter went away again, Ashley said, 'Do you want to call the police, Mark? Tell the bloodhound Detective Superintendent about this?'

Mark churned that over in his mind, letting his soup cool while Ashley began eating. If they told the police and the man carried out his threat to kill Michael, that was one elegant solution to the situation. Except the bellow of pain from Michael had got to him. None of this had seemed quite real before. All the boys dead in the wreck. Going up to the grave and taking the air tube. Even when Michael had shouted out in the coffin, it hadn't affected him, not really. Not the way the sound of him in pain was affecting him now.

'Michael must have his Palm. If he gets out alive he is going to know that I knew where he was being buried.'

'Since the accident there's never been any question of him getting out alive,' she said. Then after a moment's hesitation added a testy, 'Has there?'

Mark was silent. His mind, normally so orderly and focused, was a messed-up jumble at this moment. They'd never intended to harm Michael with the stag-night prank - that was just the payback for all his jokes. And the original plan he'd hatched With Ashley had never involved hurting Michael either, surely? Ashley was going to many him, and get half his shares in Double-M Properties. When the ink was dry on the certificates, Mark and she would have enough votes between them to take control of the company. They would vote Michael off the Board of Directors, and then he would be a minority shareholder - and wouldn't have much option but to let them buy him out at a low price.

Why the hell had he kept quiet the night he had arrived home from Leeds and heard about the accident. Why? Why?

But of course he knew the real reason why. Pure jealousy. It was because he had never been able to bear the thought of Ashley going off on honeymoon with Michael - and the solution had fallen into his lap.

'Has there, Mark?' Ashley's persistent voice cut through his thoughts.

'Has there what?'

'Duh! Hello! Has there ever been any question of him getting out alive?'

'No, of course not.'

She stared at him, a firm, steady gaze.

He stared back, replaying the terrible screams of pain over and over inside his head, thinking, Ashley, you didn't hear them.

72

ichael lay in the bitumen-black darkness, his heart thudding, his Bad pounding, his index finger throbbing, and excruciating spikes I Of pain from his balls shooting deep up into his belly. It was - he didn't know how long ago, maybe an hour, maybe more, maybe less - from when that hooded bastard had clipped callipers to them and fired electric shocks into them.

But the pain was nothing compared to the dark, cold fear that Stalked his mind. He was remembering the movie, The Silence of the Lambs, which he had seen some years back, and again more recently on television with Ashley. A girl, a senator's daughter, had been kept In the bottom of a well by the serial killer who skinned his victims. He couldn't help it; he was shivering, trying to focus his thoughts, determined, somehow, to survive.

To get back to Ashley. To take her down the aisle. That was all he wanted.

God, how he pined for her!

He couldn't move his arms or his legs. After spooning him tinned stew and bread, his captor had sealed his mouth again with duct tape and he had to breathe just through his nose, which was partially blocked. He sniffed, suddenly panicking that it was getting completely blocked. Sniffed again, harder, deep, rapid sniffs, setting his heart racing.

He tried to work out where he might be. The place smelled dank, musty, there was still a faint reek of engine oil. He was lying on a hard surface and something sharp was digging into the base of his spine, hurting like hell, getting worse by the minute.

He felt stronger, despite the pain, much stronger than he had earlier. The food was having an effect. / am not fucking staying here and dying. I haven't done everything in life to end up here. No way. No absolutely no absolutely no, no no fucking way.

He struggled against his bonds. Breathed in deeply, trying to

shrink his body, then out, trying to expand. And felt something give. Some tiny hint of slack. In again, pulled his arms in tight, tight, tight, out, in, out. Oh sweet Jesus he could move his right arm. Only a tiny amount. But he could move it! He pushed against his bonds, constricted, pushed again, constricted. More slack for his right arm.

Then more still!

He rolled over onto his side, then his stomach. His nostrils filled with the reek of engine oil now; he was lying face down in the slimy stuff, but it didn't matter, because at least the pain in the base of his spine had stopped.

He wriggled his hand round, further round, and then touched something.

OhmyGod!

He was touching the top of his Ericsson mobile!

Got his hand on it, pulled, and it came out of the back pocket of his trousers.

His heart kicked into overdrive. It had been there in the coffin, underwater. Even though it was supposed to be waterproof he doubted it would work. All the same, he ran his fingers over its surfaces as if he was caressing the best friend he had ever had in his life. Found the power button at the top, pushed it. Listened.

There was the faintest beep. Then a dim glow of light, enough that he could see steep walls either side of him. He was in a space about six feet wide and maybe five feet high, covered with a door of some kind. And suddenly he was alert, his brain sharp and focused. He tried to move his hand, to slip it free of the bonds and bring the phone up to his face, but nothing he did succeeded. The bonds were too tight, too well wound around his arms.

Yet.

He had to think this through.

Text.

He could try to send a text.

Think! You switch the phone on and what happens? First is a request for the pin code. Like most people, he used a simple code: 4-4-4-4, his lucky number.

He ran his finger across the key pad - 4 was far left, second row. He tapped it and heard a beep; then another beep each time he

tapped the next three. Incredible! The thing had been submerged in the coffin but it was working. Enough to send a text?

The next part was going to be much harder. He had to work out the letters on the keys. On key number 1 he remembered there were no letters. Key number 2 had ABC. He did some maths in his head the whole alphabet was in groups of three letters except for two numbers, where there were four. Which numbers? Shit, he had used text so much, it must be imprinted in his brain, if he could just access it.

It had to be the least popular letters in the alphabet, Q and - X orZ?

Taking it slowly, counting very carefully, he tried to recall the sequence on his phone. The menu button was top left. One tap took you to messages. The second tap took you to write message. The third tap took you to the blank screen. Then he tapped out what he hoped were the right letters. Alive. Call police.

The next tap, he hoped he remembered correctly, took you to send.

The one after that to phone number.

He tapped in Ashley's number.

The one after that should be send.

He pressed, and to his incredible relief heard a confirmation beep. The message had gone!

Then he felt a stab of panic. Even if the message had gone successfully, what use would it be to her, or the police? How the hell would they be able to find him from a text? Within moments he was engulfed in despair darker than the blackness that surrounded him.

But he refused to give up. There had to be a way. Think! Think!

His fingers moved along the keys, counting, 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9.

He pressed 9-9-9. Then he pressed the send button. Moments later he heard a faint ringing sound. Then a female voice, very faint also.

'Emergency, which service?'

He tried desperately to speak, but all he could make was his feeble grunting sound. He heard the voice say, 'Hello? Caller? Hello? Is everything all right? Hello, Hello, caller, can you identify yourself? Hello? Caller, are you in trouble? Can you hear me, caller?'

There was a silence.

Then her voice again. 'Hello, caller, are you there?'

He hung up, dialled again. Heard another female voice speak almost identical words. He hung up again. They would have to understand if he kept doing this. Surely they would understand?

73

In the saloon bar of the pub, Grace ordered Cleo Morey her second Polstar vodka and cranberry, and himself a Diet Coke. One large Glenfiddich had been enough - he was going to have to return to the Incident Room later this evening and needed all his wits.

They sat on cushioned seats at a corner table. With less than a dozen other people in the pub the place was not very busy. A one armed bandit at the far end of the room winked and blinked away forlornly like an old tart in a windswept alley.

Cleo looked stunning. Her hair, freshly washed and shining, hung down over her shoulders. She wore a classy-looking light suede jacket over a beige tank top, white jeans of fashionable three quarter length, revealing her slender ankles, and plain white mules.

Grace had dashed from Mark Warren's apartment to the Incident Room to get copies of Davey's diagram faxed out to the team, and from there went straight on to the pub, still arriving an hour and twenty minutes late. Of course he had had no time to change or even tidy himself up. He was wearing the plain navy suit he had put on early this morning in case he had to appear in court, with a white shirt and plain navy tie - now slackened and hanging at half mast with his top button open. Compared to Cleo he was feeling very dowdy.

'I've never seen you in civvies before,' he joked.

'Would you have felt more comfortable if I'd turned up in my green gown and wellies?'

'I guess it would have had a certain je ne sais quoi about it.'

She beamed at him, and raised her glass. 'Cheers!'

She had a great figure. He loved her blue eyes, her small, pretty nose, her almost rosebud lips, her dimpled chin, her lean body. And she smelled stunning too, as if she had been marinated in some very classy perfume. Some difference to the reek of Trigene disinfectant that he normally associated her with - tonight she radiated femininity, her eyes sparkled with fun, and every man in the pub was j ogling her. Grace wondered if they would still be ogling if they knew| what she spent her days doing.

He poured some more Coke over the ice cubes and lemon an<|| raised his glass back. 'Good to see you.'

'And you, too. So, tell me about your day?'

'You don't want to hear about my day!'

She leaned closer, all her body language receptive to him. If she came any closer still she would be snuggling up to him. He felt very good, very comfortable sitting here with her, and for a moment all his cares were parked in another space. 'I do,' she said. 'I want a blow-by-blow account of every minute!'

'How about the edited version? I got up, had a shower, went out, met Cleo for a drink. That enough?'

She laughed. 'OK, that's a start. Now talk me through the bits you edited out.'

He gave her a brief summary, mindful of the time. It was a quarter past nine - in an hour he had to be back in the Incident Room. He shouldn't have come on this date at all, he ought to have cancelled because of everything he had to do, but hell, didn't he have the right to enjoy himself just once in a while?

'Must be tough, interviewing the bereaved,' she said. 'In seven years I should have got used to seeing people, often within a few hours of getting the news that their loved one is dead; but I still dread every single one of those moments.'

'It might sound callous,' Grace said, 'but catching the bereaved within a few hours is the best chance we have of getting them to talk. When people have just lost someone, their first automatic response is to go into shock. While they are in that state they will talk. But within twelve hours or so, with family and friends gathering around, they start to close ranks, and clam up. If you are going to get anything useful, in my experience, you have to do it in those first hours.'

'You like what you do?' she asked.

He sipped his Coke. 'I do. Except - when I run up against people in my organization with limited minds.'

Cleo poked around in her drink with a cocktail stick as if looking for something, and for a moment the intensity of her gaze reminded

Grace of her at work in the post-mortem room, when she was taking ft tissue sample. He wondered what it would be like if he ever made love to her. Would the sight of her naked body remind him of all the naked cadavers he had looked at with her? Would he be put off by knowing that beneath her beautiful skin were the same hideous, slimy, fat-coated internal organs that all humans - and all mammals - shared in common?

'Roy, there's something I've been wanting to ask you for a long time. And of course I saw that stuff in the papers last week. How did you get interested in the supernatural?'

It was his turn to probe his drink. With the plastic cocktail stick he squeezed the lemon flesh, releasing some of the juice into the Coke. 'When I was a kid, my uncle - my dad's brother - lived on the Isle of Wight - in Bembridge. I used to go and stay every summer for a week - and loved it. They had two sons, one slightly older than me, the other slightly younger -1 kind of grew up with them from about the age of six. I don't know if you've ever been to Cowes?'

'Yes, Daddy's taken me sailing there during Cowes Week lots of times.'

Mimicking her posh accent, Grace said, 'Ew, Deeaddy would.'

Grinning and blushing, she gave him a friendly prod in the arm. 'Don't be mean! Carry on with your story.'

'They had a tiny terraced cottage, but right opposite was quite a grand house - a townhouse, four storeys high. There were two very sweet old ladies who lived there, and they were always sitting in a big bay window on the top floor, and they'd wave at us every time we saw them. When I was fourteen my aunt and uncle sold their house and emigrated to New Zealand, and I didn't go back there for about eight years. Then, in the spring of the summer that Sandy and I got married, I was taking her on one of those kind of meet the ancestors tours - and I thought it would fun to show her Cowes and the place where I'd spent so many happy holidays as a kid.'

He paused to light a cigarette, clocking Cleo's frown of surprise, then continued. 'When we got to my uncle's house, the beautiful townhouse opposite was in the process of being demolished - to make way for an apartment building. I asked the workmen what had happened to the two old ladies and they introduced me to the

property developer - he'd lived in Cowes all his life and knew just about everyone. He told me the house had been empty for over forty] years.'

He paused to drag on his cigarette. 'There had been two oldf ladies, sisters - both had lost their husbands in the First World Waf� � the story goes. They became inseparable, then one was diagnosed with cancer and the other decided she didn't want to go on livingj alone. So they both gassed themselves in that top room, sitting in the ' bay window. That was in 1947.'

Cleo sat for some moments, thinking. 'You never saw the old ladies outside?'

'No - I was young - just a kid. I suppose at the time it never occurred to me that they were always indoors. I supposed that some old people did just stay indoors.'

'And your uncle and aunt?'

'I spoke to them about it afterwards - called them in New Zealand. They said they used to wave at this blank window just to humour us - they thought these two old ladies were our imaginary friends!'

'And they were real to you?'

'I looked them up in the newspaper archives. There were photographs of both of them - unmistakeable. Absolutely no question in my mind - these were the two old ladies I had waved at - and who had waved at me every day for a week, for ten years of my childhood.' 'Amazing! That's a pretty convincing story,' she said. 'So what is your explanation?'

He noticed her glass was empty. Another?'

'Oh, why not!' she said. 'But it's my turn to buy.'

'I kept you waiting and hour and twenty minutes - I'm buying the drinks. No argument!'

'So long as I can buy them on our next date - deal?'

They locked eyes, both smiling. 'Deal.'

Then she tapped the table impatiently with her manicured finger. 'So, come on, what is your explanation?'

Grace ordered Cleo Morey a third vodka and cranberry, then said,

'I have several theories about ghosts.' After a brief pause, he added, 'What I mean is, I believe there are different types of ghosts--'

He was interrupted by the beeping of his phone.

Apologizing to Cleo, he answered with a curter than usual, 'Grace speaking.'

It was DC Boutwood in the Incident Room. 'Sorry to bother you, sir. There has been a development. Are you on your way back yet?'

He looked at Cleo Morey, loath to tear himself away, and said with more than a trace of reluctance, 'Yes, I'll be there in fifteen minutes.'

74

In the studious atmosphere of the Incident Room time barely intruded. At five past ten, when Grace walked back in, all the desks were almost fully manned. At the Operation Salsa work station, Nick forked his way through a Chinese takeaway, Bella munched on an apple, and Emma-Jane sat glued to her computer screen, sipping a carton of Ribena through a straw. For a moment none of them noticed him.

'Hi,' he said. 'What's up?'

Immediately all three of them looked up. Bella Moy said, through a mouthful of apple, 'Glenn's had to rush home - some problem with the babysitter. He'll be back shortly.'

'Great! Is that the development you wanted to tell me about?'

DC Boutwood looked at him nervously; the junior on the team, she hadn't yet spent enough time with him to know when he was being funny and when he was in a temper. She was wise to be cautious - at this moment it was borderline and he was very tired. 'Sir, they've found a coffin in a concealed grave on land owned by Double-M Properties - from the diagram you brought in.'

'Brilliant! Fantastic news!'

Then he was aware of all three pairs of eyes on him, and that there was something wrong. 'Yes?'

'I'm afraid it's not such good news, sir. There's no one in it.'

'Just an empty coffin? In a proper grave?'

'As I understand, sir, yes.' She was getting increasingly nervous.

'Was there anyone in it -1 mean - had there been anyone in it?'

'Apparently on the lid - the inside - there were signs of it, yes sir.'

'Cut the sir, OK? Call me Roy' 'Yes, sir -1 -1 - mean - Roy.'

He gave her a fleeting smile of reassurance. 'What kind of signs inside the lid?'

'Evidence of someone trying to scrape - cut - their way out of it.'

'And Michael Harrison, or whoever it was, succeeded?'

'The lid was off, sir - Roy - but apparently the grave was covered with a corrugated iron sheet and someone had put shrubs and mosses on top. Sounds like they were trying to conceal it.'

Grace leaned his arms wearily on the work-station surface. 'So who the hell are we dealing with here? Houdini?'

'It doesn't make much sense,' added Nicholl.

'The guy - Michael Harrison - has a reputation as a practical joker. It makes plenty of sense,' Grace retorted testily. He was starting to feel very tired and very grumpy and wished he wasn't here at all, but back in the pub, chatting with the warm and lovely Cleo Morey.

Realizing his blood sugar must be running low - he'd not eaten anything since a sandwich at lunchtime, and was now starving - he went out, down the corridor to a vending machine, and bought himself a double espresso, a bottle of water and a Mars Bar.

When he returned to the Incident Room, already munching on the Mars, Emma-Jane was holding a telephone receiver up for him.

'Ashley Harper - she's insisting on speaking to you and says it is very urgent.'

Grace swallowed his mouthful, and took the receiver. 'This is Detective Superintendent Grace,' he said.

'It's Ashley Harper,' she said, sounding frantic. 'I've just had a text message from Michael. He's alive!'

'What does he say?'

'Alive, call police. I think that's what it says.'

'You think?'

'The spelling's a bit strange - text messages come out a bit oddly sometimes, don't they?'

'That's all it says?'

'Yes.'

Thinking fast, Grace asked, 'From his own mobile?'

'Yes, his normal number.'

He could have dispatched Nick or Bella over to her, but he decided he wanted to see Ashley himself. 'Stay there. I'm coming over right now.'

75

Mark stared at his gloomy reflection in the smoked-glass mirror in the lift that was sweeping him up to the fourth floor of the Van Allen building. Everything seemed to be unravelling around him.

Less than a week ago he'd sat on the aeroplane flying back from Leeds, reading the road test on the Ferrari 365 and trying to decide whether he would buy one in red or in silver, and whether it should have Formula-One-style gear-shift paddles, or a conventional lever on the floor.

Now that car was fast receding towards the horizon, without him. And everything else seemed to be, too.

What was Ashley's problem? For months they had been so incredibly close, as close as he could ever imagine two human beings could be. They shared the same humour, the same taste in food, drink, the same interests; they fancied each other like crazy, making love whenever they could snatch a few precious moments - and on a couple of occasions coming perilously close to being caught by Michael. She was an amazing girl, smart, super-bright and yet so loving and caring. He had never met anyone remotely like her, and could not imagine life without her.

So why was she being so short with him now? OK, it had been stupid to get drunk at the wedding and to be rude to the smartarse cop. But all this talk about killing Michael really worried him. Murder had never been on the agenda. Ever. Now she was talking like it had been all the time. Her words of half an hour ago in the trattoria echoed in his head.

There's never been any question of him getting out alive, has there?

And yes, he'd gone along with her plan. Not actually to murder Michael - just to - to - to--

Not murder. Definitely not murder.

Murder was when you planned things, wasn't it? Premeditated? This had all just been circumstance. Burying Michael alive, then the accident. He had no love for Michael. Michael was always first every fucking thing. At school, Michael won the 100 metres and ji about every damn thing else. He was the one who got to score goals in football; he was the first of their group to lose his virginit women always gravitated to him, always, always. Mark would himself standing next to Michael in a crowded bar, and a couple i beautiful girls would come up to Michael, and he would say, 'This j my friend, Mark!' And the girls would smile and say, 'Hi, Mark!' then turn their backs on him for the entire evening. It didn't happe once, it happened time and time again.

It had been the same with Ashley, in the beginning. In that: interview six months back it had been Michael, as usual, who done all the talking and Ashley had seemed captivated by him, barely! even casting Mark a glance. (Later she'd told Mark that it was all anf act, because she had so desperately wanted the job and had been5^ tipped off that it was Michael who really controlled the company.)

During the first month or so, Mark had been able to see how interested Michael was in Ashley. He knew his friend well enough to read the signs - he was flirting with her through his jokes, questions, flattery, stories about himself, exactly the way he flirted with all the women he fancied, and Mark had watched Michael's continuing flirtation with her with huge amusement - and satisfaction. It was the first time ever he had pulled a girl that Michael had fancied - and it felt terrific, liberating, as if finally, after fifteen years of their friendship, he no longer felt under Michael's thumb.

The plan had been Ashley's idea. Mark had had no qualms about any of it, except the notion of Ashley and Michael on honeymoon. That he had found so hard to bear. That, he knew in his heart, had been the reason he'd driven out into the forest last Thursday night and removed the air tube.

But now to let this madman torture and mutilate his friend? To death? He wasn't sure he had the stomach to do that.

He unlocked his front door, and as he stepped inside, the landline phone rang. He slammed the door shut, ran across the room, glanced at the display, but there was no caller number showing.

'Hello?' he answered.

The same Australian voice he had heard before said, 'Hi, mate,

; Vic here. I'm a little curious about the copper who popped round to | lee you earlier. Thought I told you about not speaking to the cops.'

'I didn't,' Mark said. 'This is a Detective Superintendent investiS gating Michael's disappearance -1 had no idea he was coming.'

'I don't know if I believe you or not, mate. Want to have another chat with Mike about it, or are we cool?'

Trying to follow what he meant, Mark said, 'I think we're cool.'

'So you are going to do what I tell you?'

'I'm listening.'

'Just go to your office right now, open the safe, take out the documents signed by you and Mike giving power of attorney to a lawyer in the Cayman Islands called Julius Grobbe and fax it to him. At the same time you phone Julius Grobbe and tell him to transfer one million, two hundred and fifty-three thousand, seven hundred and twelve pounds from your bank account there to the numbered account in Panama I have already faxed to him. I'll phone you back here in exactly one hour and you can tell me how you got on. If you don't pick up the receiver, your friend loses another bit of his body, and this bit will really hurt him. Copy?'

'Copy.'

One million, two hundred and fifty-three thousand, seven hundred and twelve pounds was the exact total Mark and Michael had in their joint account.

76

Roy Grace and Glenn Branson - who had arrived back at Sus House just as Grace was leaving - sat down in Ashley's cool, mini imalistic sitting room and studied the very badly texted message oi*| her dinky Sony Ericsson phone.

aliVe. * cAlll ponlice

Ashley sat opposite them, wringing her hands, her face pale, eyes watery. She looked as if she had been out somewhere, Grace thought, staring at her ragged cream blouse, her hair, linen skirt, and smelling the powerful aroma of perfume she exuded. Where? With whom?

He ought to be feeling sorry for her, he knew. Her fiance had vanished, their wedding had been called off and tonight, instead of being somewhere on honeymoon, she was sitting crying in her house in Brighton. But he didn't feel sorry, couldn't feel sorry. All he could feel was deep suspicion.

'Have you tried calling him back?'

'Yes, and I've texted him. The line just rings and goes to voicemail.' 'That's better than before,' Grace said. 'It didn't ring before, just went straight to voicemail.'

Branson was fiddling with the phone - as he was much better with gadgets than Grace. 'It was sent by Michael Harrison, phone number plus 44797 134621,' he announced, then pressed a button with his thumb whilst sucking in his lower lip in concentration. 'At 22.28, today.' Both Grace and Branson checked their watches. Just over an hour ago.

Twenty minutes before she rang, Grace thought. Why did she wait twenty minutes?

Glenn Branson dialled the number and held the phone to his ear. Grace and Ashley watched him, expectantly. After some moments,

Branson said, 'Hello, Michael Harrison, this is Detective Sergeant Branson of Brighton CID responding to your text to Ashley Harper. Please call or text me on 0789 965018. The number again is 0789 965018/ Then he ended the call.

'Ashley, does Michael normally text you?'

She shrugged. 'Not a huge amount, but yes - you know - little love messages, that sort of thing.' She smiled suddenly, and in the warmth it brought to her face, and the beauty it seemed to animate, Grace could see her melting almost any heart she chose.

Branson grinned. 'Has he always been a crap texter?'

'Not usually, no.'

Grace stared again at the words. aliVe. *� cAlll ponlice

It looked like an infant had texted them, not a grown man. Unless of course he had done them in a hurry, or while driving.

'What information can you get from this?' Ashley asked.

Grace was about to tell her, then decided not to. He surreptitiously touched Branson's leg with his own as a signal not to contradict him. 'Not a lot really, I'm afraid. It's good news in one respect, in that we know he's alive, but it is bad news, because he is clearly in trouble. Unless it is part of a hoax.'

Her eyes were all over the place, Grace noticed; he had been watching every inch of her body language since she had appeared at the door; everything was considered, all done after a pause, nothing spontaneous.

'You can't still believe Michael is doing some kind of a hoax?' she said incredulously. Grace noticed something very forced and theatrical about the way this came out. He told her about the discovery of the coffin - all the details.

'So he's escaped - is that what you think?'

'Maybe,' Grace said. 'Or maybe he was never there.'

'Oh, right, so he like scratched the inside of the lid himself?'

'I think that's one possible scenario, yes. It is not necessarily the right one.'

'Oh, come on, get real! This text message is desperate and you are sitting here giving me a bullshit theory about a hoax?'

'Ashley, we are very real,' Grace said calmly. 'We have an entire team in the Major Incident Suite; we have over one hundred officers out searching for Michael Harrison; we are getting national media coverage - we are doing all we possibly can.'

She looked contrite suddenly, a little girl lost and scared. She stared meekly at the two police officers, eyes wide, and dabbed them with a handkerchief. 'I'm sorry,' she sniffed, 'I didn't mean to have a go at you; you have been so brilliant, both of you. I'm just so - so--' She began to shake, her face scrunched up against a flood of tears.

Grace stood up awkwardly, and Branson followed.

'It's OK,' Grace said. 'We'll see ourselves out.'

He made the call. But it took five attempts for the damned fax to go through. The first time, trying to do it too quickly, he hadn't loaded the letter in straight and it had jammed. He'd spent ten precious minutes trying to unjam it without tearing the letter.

He'd driven, which was stupid considering the amount he'd drunk, but it was too far to walk to the office and back in the time, and he hadn't wanted to risk not being able to get a taxi.

Now, bursting in through the door of his apartment with less than three minutes to the deadline, he made straight for the drinks cabinet, poured himself three fingers of Balvenie and gulped it straight down. He felt the burn in his gullet, then winced as it burnt his stomach even harder, closing his eyes for a moment.

His mobile beeped. A text message signal.

He pulled it out of his pocket and stared at the display.

Well done, mate! Just made it.

The phone was jigging in his hand from nerves. Where the hell was this man, Vic? He punched the options button, trying to see the source of the text. It was a number he did not recognize. Clumsily, he typed back, Are we OK now?Then pressed the send button. Instantly there was a soft beep, indicating the text had been sent.

The whisky wasn't working, at least not on his nerves. He walked unsteadily over towards the drinks cabinet. But before he reached it, the phone beeped again. Another incoming text.

Walk out onto your balcony, mate. Look down at the street below!

Mark made straight for the patio doors, unlocked them and stepped out onto the teak decking, then crossed the narrow balcony, past two sun-loungers, placed his hands on the rail and looked down. Music pounded from a gay nightclub a few yards down the

street, and he could see the bald domes of the two bouncers. A couple walked along arm in arm. Three drunk girls were staggering along, bumping into each other, giggling. A steady stream of cars drove past.

He looked at the far side of the street, wondering if that was where Vic meant, but all he could see was a couple snogging. Holding his phone in the palm of his hand, he tapped out, / cannot see you. And sent it. Again he scanned the street.

Moments later, there was another beep. The reply on his screen read: I'm right behind you!

But before he had a chance to turn, one strong hand grabbed the rear of his belt, and another his shirt collar. A fraction of a second later, both his feet were in the air. He dropped his phone, desperately trying to grab the balcony rail, but he was too high up, and his fingers clawed at nothing but air.

Before he even had time to shout, he was launched like a javelin over the rail and plunged down towards the pavement.

He landed flat on his back, with an impact that broke his spine in seven places and shattered his skull with the impact of a coconut hit by a sledgehammer.

One of the drunk girls screamed.

Grace and Branson heard the call on the police radio in Grace's car minutes before they arrived back at Sussex House. An apparent suicide jumper at the Van Allen building on the Kemp Town seafront.

They looked at each other. Grace pulled his blue light from the glove compartment, clipped it to the roof, and hit the accelerator. They raced through a speed camera which flashed at them, but he didn't care; he could sort that one out.

Seven minutes later he was forced to slow to a crawl as he drove onto Marine Parade. Ahead he could see a whole circus of flashing blue lights, a crowd of people and two ambulances.

After double parking, both of them leaped out of the car, pushed their way through the crowd and reached two uniformed constables who were busily putting up a tape barrier bearing the wording 'police line, do not cross'.

Flashing their warrant cards, they ducked under the tape and saw two paramedics standing uselessly by the crumpled heap of a man on the ground, with a dark pool of blood stained with yellow seeping from his head and another, larger, darker stain from his torso.

Under the amber glare of the street lighting Grace could see the man's face. It was Mark Warren, no question. Fighting the rising bile in his throat, he turned to one of the constables and showed him his warrant card.

'What happened?'

'I - don't know, sir. I just spoke to a witness - she was walking along with her friends when he landed, almost at their feet. She's in the far ambulance - bad shock.'

Grace glanced at Branson, who was looking unsteady, then down at the clearly lifeless body. Mark Warren's eyes were wide open, as if in shock.

Christ. Only a few hours ago he had been talking to the man. He had reeked of alcohol and seemed a nervous wreck. Suddenly Grace thought about Cleo. How she would be busy in about an hour's time at the mortuary, making him look presentable for some relative to come and identify him. He didn't envy her that one bit.

'Does anyone know who this man is?' said a voice.

'Yeah, I know him,' said another voice. 'On my floor. He's my neighbour!'

Grace heard a siren, coming closer. 'I know him too,' he said. Then corrected himself. 'Knew him.'

Robert Allison, a tough Detective Inspector - and former Sussex Police snooker champion - who Grace knew well, emerged from the front door of the building and Grace, followed by Branson, walked over to him.

'Roy! Glenn!' Robert Allison greeted them. 'What are you two stop-outs doing here?'

'Thought we'd swing by to catch some sea air,' Grace said.

'Dangerous thing to do around here,' the Detective Inspector said, nodding at the corpse. 'He thought he'd step out on his balcony and catch some sea air, too.' A police surgeon had arrived, and a police photographer. Allison spoke to them both briefly then returned to Grace and Branson.

'Any information about what happened?' asked Grace.

'Not yet.'

'I know him,' Grace said. 'I interviewed him earlier this evening. About eight o'clock. He's the business partner of the young man who's missing - the wedding prank - the four lads killed last week.'

Allison nodded. 'Right.'

'Can we get into his apartment?'

'I've just been up there - the porter has a key. Want me to come with you?'

'Yes, sure, why not?'

A few minutes later Grace, Branson and Detective Inspector Allison entered the apartment. The porter, a muscular-looking man in his fifties, wearing shorts and a singlet, waited outside.

Grace strode into the sitting area, with which he was already a little familiar, and walked over towards the balcony, which he had stepped out onto a few hours back. He went out again and looked down at the scene below. He could see the small crowd, the two ambulances, the police cars, the flashes of the police photographer's camera, the tape cordoning off the crumpled figure of Mark Warren, the dark stains like shadows leaking from his body and head.

He thought back to the wedding, when Mark had come up to him so aggressively. Then tonight when he was a drunken wreck. Grace knew from his experience that survivors of accidents in which others had died often got chewed up with guilt that they had survived; it could destroy some people. But had Mark Warren jumped over the balcony for that reason?

That night he had come back late to this apartment with mud on his car - had that been a guilt trip to the scene of the accident he should have died in with his friends? Possibly. But what was the damned aggression about at the wedding? That bit did not fit. He hadn't had a good feeling about Mark Warren. The best man who didn't know what the stag night plans were.

How likely was that?

He went back inside pensively. 'Let's just take a good look around for a few minutes,' he said, and began by walking over to the cupboard door Mark had kept staring at earlier. But all it contained were two dusty flower vases and an empty box of Cohiba Robusto cigars.

Steadily he worked his way through each cupboard, opening every door and drawer. Glenn Branson began doing the same, while Allison watched. Then Grace reached the fridge in the open-plan kitchen and opened the door. Casting his eye across the cartons of skimmed milk, yoghurt pots, clumps of fashionable salad leaves and several bottles of white burgundy and champagne, he almost missed the Jiffy bag on the third shelf.

He pulled it out and peered inside, frowning. Then he tipped the small plastic bag it contained out on the black marble kitchen work surface.

'Jesus,' Branson said, staring at the fingertip.

'OK,' Robert Allison said. 'Now this starts to make sense. I found it on the victim when I was looking for ID.' He pulled a folded sheet of A4 paper from his pocket and handed it to Grace.

Grace and Branson both read it.

'Check the fingerprints out and you'll find it is your friend and business partner. Every 24 hours I will cut an increasingly bigger bit off him. Until you do exactly what I tell you.' Grace read it again, and then a third time. 'I think this tells us two things,' he said. Both detectives looked at him, but they had to wait some while before he spoke, finally. 'The first is that I don't think we're looking at a suicide here. And secondly, if I'm right in that assumption, we'll be lucky to find Michael Harrison still alive.'

The phone was ringing again! The third time! Each time before he had hit the buttons, trying to stop it in case Vic heard. Then he had fumbled with the keyboard, dialling 901. And each time got the same damned woman's voice. 'You have no messages.' But now her voice said something different. 'You have one new message.' Then he heard, 'Hello, Michael Harrison, this is Detective Sergeant Branson of Brighton CID responding to your text to Ashley Harper. Please call or text me on 0789 965018. The number again is 0789 965018.' It was the sweetest sound Michael had ever heard in his life. Again he fumbled with the keys, trying to text a reply in the dank darkness: A'88m breing h$ld-- Then dazzling, blinding white light.

'Got a mobile you didn't tell me about, have you, Mikey? Naughty boy, aren't you? Think I'd better take that off you before you get yourself into trouble.' 'Urrrr,' Michael said through the duct tape. The next moment he felt the phone being ripped from his hand. Followed by Vic's reproachful voice. 'That's not playing the game fair, Mike. I'm very disappointed in you. You should have told me about the phone. You really should have done.'

'Urrrr,' Michael mumbled again, shimmying in terror. He could see eyes glinting through the hood above him, inches from his face, bright green eyes like a feral cat.

'You want me to hurt you again? Is that what you'd like, Mikey? Let's see who you were calling, shall we?' Moments later Michael heard the police officer's faint voice through the phone's speaker again. 'Well, fancy that,' the Australian said. 'How sweet. Calling your fiancee. Sweet, but naughty. I think it's time for a punishment. Would you like me to cut off another finger - or clip the callipers back on your bollocks?'

'Noorrrrrrr.'

'Sorry, mate, you'll need to articulate better. Talk me through what you'd like best. It's all the same to me - and by the way, your mate Mark is a rude bastard. Thought you'd like to know he never said goodbye.'

Michael blinked against the light. He didn't know what the man was talking about. Mark? Dimly he wondered where it was that Mark had gone. 'Here's something for you to think about, Mikey. That one million, two hundred thousand pounds you have salted away in the Cayman Islands. That's one hell of a nest egg, wouldn't you say?' How much did this man know about him and his life, Michael wondered. Was that what he was after? He could have it, every damned penny, if he would just let him go. He tried to tell him.

'Urrrrrrr. Ymmmgghvwwit.'

'That's sweet of you, Mikey, whatever it is you're trying to tell me. I really appreciate all the efforts you are making. But here's the thing, you see. Your problem is, I already have it. And that means I don't need you any more.'

Shortly before midnight, Grace drove back into the car park of Sussex House, giving a weary nod to the security guard. They had said little on the drive back from the Van Allen building; Grace and Branson were both wrapped in their thoughts. As Grace pulled the car up, Branson yawned noisily.

'Think we can go home, go to bed, get some sleep?' 'No stamina, youth?' Grace chided. 'And you're wide awake, full of beans? Firing on all cylinders, yeah? I've heard when you get past a certain age you start needing less sleep; which apparently is just as well, since you spend half the night getting up to piss.' Grace smiled. 'I don't look forward to old age much,' Branson said. 'Do you?' 'To be honest, I don't think about it. I see a guy like Mark Warren, lying all broken, leaking his brains out on the pavement, and I remember he and I were talking just a few hours before; things like that make me believe in just living one day at a time.' Branson yawned again.

'I'm going back to work,' Grace said. 'You can fuck off home if you want.'

'You know, you can be such a bitch at times,' Branson said, reluctantly following him to the main entrance, through the doors and up the staircase past the displays of truncheons. Emma-Jane Boutwood, wearing a white cardigan tied around her neck and a pink blouse, was the only person still in the Incident Room. Grace walked over to her, then gestured at the empty work stations. 'Where's everyone, EJ?' She leaned forward as if to read some small print on her computer screen and said distractedly, 'I think they've all gone home.' Grace stared at her tired face, and gave her a light pat on her shoulder, his hand touching the soft wool of the cardigan.

'I think you should go home too; it's been a long day.'

'Can you just give me one minute, Roy? I have something I think is going to interest you - both of you.'

'Anyone like a coffee?' Grace asked. 'Water? Coke?'

'You buying?' Branson said.

'No, the ratepayers of Sussex are buying this time. They want us working at midnight, they can buy us coffee. This one's going on expenses.'

'I'll have a Diet Coke,' Branson said. 'Actually, no, change that. Make it a full-strength Coke; I need the sugar hit.'

'I'd love a coffee,' Emma-Jane said. Grace walked out, along the empty corridor to the rest area with its kitchenette and vending machines. Fumbling in his pocket he pulled out some change, bought a double espresso for himself, a cappuccino for Emma-Jane and a Coke for Branson, then carried them back to the Incident Room on a plastic tray. As he walked in, the young detective constable was pointing at something on her computer screen, and Branson, leaning over her shoulder, seemed engrossed.

Without turning his head, he said, 'Roy, come and take a look at this!'

Emma-Jane turned to Grace. 'You asked me to check up on Ashley Harper's background--' 'Uh huh. What have you found?' Almost swelling with pride she said, 'Actually, quite a lot.'

'Tell me.'

She flipped a couple of pages on a notepad covered in her neat handwriting, checking her notes as she spoke. 'The information you gave me was that Ashley Harper was born in England, and her parents were killed in a car crash in Scotland when she was three; that she was subsequently brought up by foster parents, in London first, then they moved to Australia. When she was sixteen she went to Canada and stayed with her uncle and aunt - and that her aunt died recently. Her uncle's name was Bradley Cunningham - I don't have her aunt's first name.'

Still reading from her pad she went on: Ashley Harper returned to England - to her roots - about nine months ago. You said that previously she had worked in real estate in Toronto, Canada and that her employers were a subsidiary of the Bay group.' Then she looked up to Grace and Branson as if for confirmation.

Grace replied. 'Yes, that's right.'

'OK,' she said. 'Earlier today I spoke to the head of Human Resources for the Bay group in Toronto - as you may know they are one of the largest department store chains in Canada. They do not have a real estate subsidiary, nor have they ever had an Ashley Harper work for them. I did some further checking and found there are no real estate firms anywhere in Canada with the name "The Bay" in them.' 'Interesting,' Branson said, flipping the ring-pull of his Coke. There was a sharp hiss. 'It gets even more interesting,' she said. 'There is no Bradley Cunningham listed in any phone directory for Toronto, nor for anywhere else in the whole of Ontario. I haven't had time to check out the rest of Canada yet. But. . .' she paused to sip some chocolate-covered froth off the top of her cappuccino, 'I have a journalist friend on the Glasgow Herald in Scotland. She's checked back in the archives of all the principal Scottish papers. If a three-year-old girl was orphaned in a car crash, it would have made the news, right?'

'Usually,' Grace said.

'Ashley claims to be twenty-eight. I've had her go back twenty five years, and then five years either side of that. The name Harper has not come up.'

'She could have taken the name of her foster parents,' Branson said.

'She could,' agreed Emma-Jane Boutwood. 'But what I'm about to show you reduces that possibility.' Grace looked admiringly at the young DC. She seemed to be growing in confidence in front of his eyes. She was exactly the kind of new blood the police force so badly needed. Smart, hardworking youngsters with determination. 'I had the name Ashley Harper run through the Holmes network, as you requested,' she said, addressing Grace. Holmes-2 was the second phase in a computerized database of crimes, linking all police forces throughout the UK and Interpol and, more recently, other police networks overseas.

'Nothing showed up under the name Ashley Harper' she said. 'But this is where it gets interesting. Taking the initials "AH", and linking them to a broad category heading of "property", Holmes came up with the following. Eighteen months ago a young lady called Abigail Harrington married a wealthy property developer in Lymm, Cheshire, called Richard Wonnash. He was big into free-fall parachuting. Three months after their wedding, he died when his parachute failed to open during a jump. Four years ago, in Toronto, Canada, a woman called Alexandra Huron married a real estate developer called Joe Kerwin. Five months after their wedding he drowned in a sailing accident on Lake Ontario. Seven years ago, a woman called Ann Hampson married a property developer in London called Julian Warner. He was a high-profile society bachelor, with big holdings in London docklands around the time of the early 1990s property crash. Six months and two days after their wedding, he gassed himself in an underground car park in Wapping.'

She took another sip of her froth.

'Same initials,' Branson said.

'But what does that prove?'

'A lot of con artists keep the same initials when they change their names,' she said. 'I read about this at police training college. In itself it proves nothing. But here's where it gets better.' She tapped her keyboard and a black and white newspaper photograph of a young woman with close-cropped dark hair appeared. The face belonged to Ashley Harper - or her double. 'This is from the Evening Standard article on the death of Julian Warner,' she said.

There was a long silence while Grace and Branson studied the photograph. 'Shit,' Branson said. 'Certainly looks like her.' Saying nothing, she tapped the keyboard again. Another photograph, also in black and white, appeared. This showed a woman with shoulder-length fair hair. Her face looked even more like Ashley Harper. 'This is from the Toronto Star, four years ago, reporting on the death of Joe Kerwin.' Grace and Branson said nothing. Both were stunned. 'This next one is from the Cheshire Evening Post, eighteen months ago, in an article about the death of Richard Wonnash. Abigail Harrington was the beautiful grieving widow.' She tapped her screen and a new photograph appeared, in colour. The hair was red, styled in an elegantly short razor cut. The face yet again was, almost beyond doubt, Ashley Harper's. 'Bloody hell!' Branson exclaimed. Grace stared at the face, pensively, for a long time.

Then he said, 'Emma-Jane, well done.'

'Thank you Roy.' Grace turned to Glenn Branson.

'So,' he said. 'It's twenty minutes to one. Which magistrate do you feel brave enough to wake up?'

'For a search warrant?'

'You worked that all out by yourself did you?'

Ignoring Branson's grimace, Grace stood up. 'Emma-Jane, go home; get some sleep.'

Branson yawned. 'How about me? Do I get some sleep?'

Grace clapped a hand on his shoulder. 'I'm afraid, my friend, your day's only just begun.'

81

A few minutes later, Grace was on the phone to a very sleepy sounding magistrates' clerk, who asked if this couldn't wait until the morning. 'We're investigating a possible abduction, and it's a potential lifeordeath situation,' Grace informed her.

'I need an evidential warrant and I'm afraid it absolutely cannot wait.'

'OK,' she said reluctantly. 'The duty magistrate is Mrs Quentin.'

Grace smiled to himself. Hermione Quentin was one magistrate he particularly disliked, having had a run-in with her some months back in court over a suspect he had wanted to hold in custody; she had refused. She was the worst kind of magistrate in his view, married to a wealthy stockbroker, living in a vulgar ostentatious house, a middle-aged glamour queen with no experience of the real world and some kind of zealous personal agenda to change the way the police in general viewed criminals. It would give him the sweetest pleasure to get her out of bed to sign the warrant in the small hours of the morning. Grace and Branson then spent a further ten minutes on the phone, organizing a team to assemble at Sussex House at 5 a.m. Then, taking pity on Branson, Grace sent him home to get a couple of hours' kip. Next he rang DC Nicholl, and apologized for disturbing him, then instructed him to head for Ashley Harper's house and keep watch on it for any movement. At 2 a.m., with the signed warrant in his hand, Grace arrived back at his home, set his alarm for 4.15, and crashed out.

When he hit the alarm button and jumped automatically out of bed in the dark room, he could hear the first twitterings of the dawn chorus, reminding him as he stepped into the shower that, although summer had not yet begun, they were less than a month shy of the longest day, 21 June. At 5 a.m. he was back at Sussex House, feeling remarkably perky on his two and a bit hours' sleep. Bella and Emma-Jane were already there, as was Ben Farr, a round-faced, bearded Sergeant in his late forties who was to be the Exhibits Officer, and Joe Tindall. Glenn Branson arrived a few minutes later. Over cups of coffee, Grace briefed them. Then, shortly after half past five, all wearing protective waistcoats, they set off in a police Transit van and a marked car, which Branson drove, Grace in the passenger seat. Reaching Ashley's street, Grace told Branson to pull up alongside Nick's unmarked Astra, and wound his window down. 'All quiet,' Nicholl reported. 'Good boy,' Grace said, noting that Ashley Harper's Audi TT was in its usual place outside her house. He told Nicholl to cover the street behind, then they drove on. There were no free spaces in the street, so they double parked beside the Audi. Grace gave Nick Nicholl a couple of minutes to get in place, then, leading the posse, marched up to the front door, in full daylight now, and rang the bell. There was no response. He rang again, then, after a minute, rang yet again. Then he nodded to Ben Farr, who went over to the Transit and removed a heavy-duty ram, the size of a large fire extinguisher. He hefted it up to the front door, swung it hard and the door flew open.

Grace went in first. 'Police!' he shouted. 'Hello? Police!'

The silent, winking lights of the hi-fi system greeted him. Followed by the rest of his team, he walked up the stairs and paused on the first-floor landing. 'Hello!' he called out again.

'Miss Harper?'

Silence. He opened one door, onto a small bathroom. The next door was to a small, bland spare bedroom that didn't look as if it had ever been used. He hesitated, then pushed the remaining door, which opened onto a master bedroom, with a double bed that had clearly not been slept in. The curtains were drawn shut. He found the light switch and turned it on, and several ceiling spots lit up the room.

The place had a deserted feel, like a hotel room waiting for its next occupant. He saw an immaculate duvet over a queen-size bed, a flat-screen television, a clock radio plus a couple of Hockney swimming pool prints on the wall. No Ashley Harper. So where the hell was she? Feeling a stab of panic, Grace exchanged glances with Glenn Branson. They both knew that somewhere along the line they had been outsmarted, but where and how? For a moment all he could think of was the bollocking he would get from Alison Vosper if it turned out he had woken a JP in the middle of the night to get a search warrant for no good reason. And there could be all kinds of good reasons why Ashley Harper wasn't here tonight. For a moment he felt angry at his friend. This was all Glenn's fault. He'd suckered him into this damned case. It wasn't anything to do with him, not his problem. Now he owned the fucking problem and it was getting deeper. He tried to recap, to think how he would cover his arse if No. 27 hauled him in. There was Mark Warren's death. The note. The finger in the fridge. Emma-Jane's findings. There was a whole ton of things that were not right. Mark Warren, so belligerent at the wedding reception. Bradley Cunningham, so smooth, so upmarket at the wedding. Actually the pants are killing me . . . rented this lot from your wonderful Moss Bros, but I think I got given the wrong pants!' From the time he had spent in the United States and in Canada, and the conversations Grace had had about the differences in their language, he knew that classy Americans and Canadians might call ordinary trousers 'pants', but they would called dressier trousers 'trousers'. It had been an instant giveaway that Bradley Cunningham might not be who he made himself out to be. Not that that slender hypothesis would satisfy Alison Vosper.

'Take this place apart,' he told his team wearily. 'Look under every bloody stone. Find out who owns this place. Who owns the televisions, the hi-fi, the Audi outside, the carpets, the wall sockets. I want to know every damned detail about Ashley Harper. I want to know more about her than she knows herself. Everybody understand?'

After two hours of searching, so far no one had found anything. It was as if Ashley Harper had been through the place with some kind of super-Hoover. There was nothing other than the furniture, a bio yoghurt pot in the fridge together with some soya milk, a bunch of radishes and a half-drunk bottle of Sainsbury's own-label Scottish mineral water. Glenn Branson came up to Grace, who was busy lifting the mattress off the spare bed.

'Man, this is so weird - it's as if she knew we were coming, know what I mean?'

'So why didn't we know she was leaving?' Grace asked.

'There you go again. Another question.'

'Yes,' said Grace, tiredness making him snappy now. 'Maybe that's because you're always giving me questions instead of fucking answers.'

Branson raised a hand in the air. 'No offence, man.'

'None taken.'

'So where the fuck is she?'

'Not here.'

'I figured that one.'

'Roy! Take a look at this - I don't know if it's of any use?' DC Nicholl came into the room holding a small piece of paper, which he showed to Grace. It was a receipt from a company called Century Radio on Tottenham Court Road. On the receipt was printed: 'AR5000 Cyber Scan, 2,437 pounds 25 pence.

'Where was this?' Grace asked.

'In the dustbin in the back yard,' Nick replied, with pride.

'Two thousand, four hundred and thirty-seven pounds for a scanner?' Grace asked. 'What kind of scanner costs that much? Some kind of computer scanner?' After a few moments thought, he added, 'Why would anyone throw away the receipt? Even if you couldn't charge the scanner to your business, sure as hell you would keep the receipt in case it went wrong. Wouldn't you?'

'I sure as hell would,' Branson agreed.

Grace looked at the date on the receipt. Last Wednesday. Time of purchase showed as 14.25. On Tuesday night, her fiance1 disappears. On Wednesday afternoon she goes out and buys a two-and-a-halfthousandquid scanner. This didn't make sense - yet. His watch showed that two hours had elapsed so far, it was now just past 8 a.m. 'I don't know what time Century Radio opens - but we need to find out about that scanner,' he said.

'You have some thoughts about it?' Branson asked.

'Plenty,' Grace replied. 'Too many. Far too many.' Then he added. 'I have to be at Lewes Crown Court by quarter to ten.'

'For your good friend Suresh Hossain?'

'I'd hate to think he was missing me. How about some breakfast? A big fry-up - the works?'

'Cholesterol, man, bad for your heart.'

'You know what? Right now everything's bad for my heart.'

82

As Grace entered the large, bustling waiting area for the three courtrooms housed in the handsome Georgian Lewes Crown Court building with plenty of time to spare, he switched his phone to silent. At least Claudine seemed to have got the message and had stopped texting him. He yawned, his body feeling leaden, the massive fry-up he'd just eaten sapping his energy rather than fuelling it. He just wanted to lie down somewhere and have a kip. It was strange, he thought. A week ago this trial had dominated his life, his every waking thought. Now it was secondary; finding Michael Harrison was all that mattered. But this trial did matter a lot, too. It mattered to the widow and children of Raymond Cohen, the man beaten to a pulp with a spiked stick, either by Hossain or by his thugs. It mattered to every ordinary decent person in the City of Brighton and Have, because they had a right to be protected from monsters like him, and it mattered a very great deal to Grace's credibility. He had to shed his tiredness and concentrate. Finding a quiet corner in the room, he sat down and returned a call to Eleanor, who was dealing with his post and email for him.

Then he closed his eyes, grateful for the rest it gave them, and cradled his head in his hands, trying to catnap, trying to block from his ears the swinging of doors opening and closing, the cheery banter of greetings, the clicks of briefcase locks, the murmured voices between lawyers and clients. After a couple of minutes he took two deep breaths, and the oxygen hit gave him an instant small boost. He stood up and looked around. In a moment he might find out whether he would be needed or not today. Hopefully not, and he could get back to Sussex House, he thought, looking around for the person he needed to speak to, Liz Reilly from the Crown Prosecution Service.

There were a good hundred people in the room, including several gowned barristers and assistants, and he spotted Liz at the other end of the room, a smartly dressed, conservative-looking woman in her early thirties, holding a clipboard and deep in conversation with a barrister he did not recognize. He walked across and stood near them, catching her signal that she would be with him in a moment. When she finally broke away. from the barrister, she looked excited. 'We have a possible new witness!' 'Really? Who?' 'A call-girl from Brighton. She rang the GPS last night saying she's been following the trial in the papers, and alleging that Suresh Hossain beat her up during a session with her.

The sex session was on the night of February 10th last year, in Brighton.' February 10 was the night of the murder for which Suresh Hossain was on trial. 'Hossain has a cast-iron alibi that he was at dinner in London with two friends that night. Both have testified,' Grace said. 'Yes he has, but they are both employees of Hossain. This girl isn't. She's terrified of him - the reason she hasn't come forward before is she's been threatened with her life if she does. And there's a problem, which is she doesn't trust the police. That's why she rang us, rather than the police.' 'How credible do you think she is?'

'Very,' she said. 'We'd need some high-level witness protection for her.'

'Whatever she wants. Anything!' Grace wrung his hands in excitement. He wanted to hug Liz Reilly. This was wonderful news. Wonderful! 'But someone's going to have to go and convince her that the police won't bust her for - you know - her trade.' 'Where's she now?' 'At her home.' Grace looked at his watch. 'I could go and see her right away. Is that possible?'

'Go in an unmarked car.'

'Yes, and I'll take a WPC with me who can stay with her. We don't want to give Hossain any chance of getting at her. I want to go and see her and persuade her to come in right away.'

'If you play her carefully, you'll be pushing on an open door.' Suddenly, Grace wasn't tired any more.

83

It was shortly after midday when he arrived back in the Incident Room. The witness, Shelley Sandier, was good, he thought. Mid twenties, intelligent, articulate, vulnerable, she'd be highly credible in court. Just so long as she didn't panic and change her mind at the last minute, as so often happened. But she seemed determined to get back at Hossain. Very, very determined. This was such good news. After a shaky few days last week, it now looked to Grace as if getting the verdict he so badly wanted was going to be achievable. The full team were at the work station, plus two new assistants, a young male constable and a middle-aged female assistant, so he called a briefing meeting, telling them all to stay seated. Keeping his voice low, as the other work stations were occupied also with teams hard at work,

Nick Nicholl spoke first. 'Roy, the receipt we took earlier this morning from Miss Harper's house, two thousand, four hundred and thirty-seven pounds for a scanner?'

'Uh huh.'

'I got all the information on it from Century Radio.' He handed a few printed sheets off a web page to Grace. 'The rest of us have seen this.' Grace looked at it.

AR5000 Receiver 'Cyber Scan'. Incredible 10Khz-2600Mhz Frequency Range! The AR5000 advances the frontiers of performance, providing excellent strong signal handling, high sensitivity and wide frequency coverage with microprocessor facilities to match including 5 independent VFOs, 1,000 memory channels, 20 search banks, Cyber Scan fast scan and search including all mobile frequencies. Scanning and search speed is 45 channels or increments per second...

He turned to Branson. 'You're the best techie I know. I think I have already guessed what this thing is - can you confirm?'

'It's a state-of-the-art radio frequency scanner. It's the kind of thing used by Citizens' Band radio nuts to find new friends, to eavesdrop on police radio networks or on mobile calls.' Grace nodded. Then to Emma-Jane Boutwood he said, 'Do we have any evidence that Ashley Harper was ever into Citizens' Band radio either in her current incarnation or any previous one?'

'We don't,' she said. 'No.' He looked at the colour picture of the scanner. A large silver box on its own legs, with a dial on the front, and the same perplexing array of knobs and buttons you'd find on any complex piece of radio kit. 'So, on Tuesday night her fiance disappears. Wednesday afternoon at two-thirty she legs it to London and buys a radio scanner for two and a half thousand quid. Any good theories why? And how the hell did she knew how to use it?' 'Desperation?' volunteered Nick Nicholl. 'I don't buy that,' Grace said.

'She obviously genuinely did not know where he was,' Bella Moy suggested. Grace nodded distractedly. That made sense, but to him it did not fit. 'She might have known that Michael Harrison had a walkietalkie. Perhaps it was to try to communicate with him?' Emma-Jane Boutwood said. 'Or - how about - to listen in to who else he might be communicating with?' Grace was impressed. 'Yes, good thinking.' He looked around. 'Any more theories? OK, let's park this for a moment. Any other progress?'

'Yes,' Nick Nicholl said. 'After you left Ashley Harper's house, Joe Tindall started pulling up floorboards. We discovered an envelope full of receipts behind a chest of drawers we moved - it might have fallen there accidentally or it might have been hidden. Most of the receipts don't seem that interesting to us, but there is one here you should see.' It was for 1,500 pounds from a company with a Maddox Street, London Wl address, called Conquest Escorts. Underneath the name was the legend 'Discreet, charming male and female escorts for every occasion'. Two dates were shown - the previous Saturday, the intended day of Ashley Harper's wedding, and the previous Monday.

'Turn it over, Roy,' Nick Nicholl said. 'Take a look at the other side.'

Grace turned it over and saw written in ballpoint pen the name Bradley Cunningham. His mind shot back to the conversation he had had with Ashley, in her house, on Friday night. He could remember her sitting there so dejectedly, talking about her Canadian uncle, saying, 'We adore each other... he took the whole week off just so he could be at the rehearsal on Monday.' '

She's faked an uncle?' he said, puzzling.

'She's faked a whole lot more than just an uncle - E-J will tell you in a minute,' Glenn Branson said. 'Take a look at this first.'

He handed Grace a photocopied sheet of A4 paper. It was a faxed instruction to Bank Hexta, registered on Grand Cayman Island, to transfer the sum of 1,253,712 pounds to a numbered account at Banco Aliado in Panama. The instruction was signed by both Michael Harrison and Mark Warren, and the date and time at the top showed 11.25 p.m., the previous day. Grace read it through twice then frowned at Branson.

'This is about twenty minutes before he went off his balcony.'

'Yes, correct.' Grace thought about the note found in Mark Warren's pocket. 'So he went and transferred the money in order to save his friend's life. Then he goes and tops himself?'

'Maybe they had some big debt to pay. Panama could be tied up with Colombia - the Colombian mafia - maybe they got themselves into shit on a loan? They pay it off, and Mark Warren then tops himself?' 'It's a reasonable theory/ Grace said. 'But these two guys have been doing pretty well. They have this huge development at Ash down - twenty houses - that could make them several million. Why top himself for - what would his share be - a few hundred thousand pounds?' 'So he makes the transfer and then is killed.'

'That's a more elegant theory,' Grace said. 'I spoke to Cleo Morey at the mortuary just now. There's a Home Office pathologist on his way down. We might have a bit more information later today.' DS Bella Moy then told Grace she had some information from the phone company. Vodafone had logged activity from Michael Harrison's mobile between 10.22 p.m. and 11 p.m. the previous night, and there had been several 999 emergency calls made from Michael Harrison's phone, but on each occasion the operator could not hear anyone at the other end and got no response to her questions. 'What about the cell mast?' 'I was just coming to that, Roy. Vodafone have been very helpful this morning, and we already have from them the location of the closest cell radio mast to Michael Harrison's phone,' she said. 'Where is it?'

Her face fell a little. 'This is not such good news - it's in the town centre of Newhaven, and the one mast covers the entire town.' 'Well, it's some help,' Grace said. 'Any coincidence that Newhaven is a Channel seaport?' 'I've already put out an all-ports alert,' she said. 'For what?' 'For Ashley Harper and for Alexandra Huron - that's the name she was using in Canada four years ago.' She clearly had more to say, so Grace let her go on. 'I checked on her Audi TT car. It was leased by her, in her own name, from a dealer in Hammersmith a year ago. All payments are up to date and kosher. Same with her house, leased, but the lease expires at the end of this month.' 'To coincide with her wedding?' Branson suggested.

'Quite possible,' Emma-Jane said. 'Then on a hunch I had our new recruits do a trawl of all the car and van rental firms in the area, and gave them all of Ashley Harper's previous names in addition to her own. Nothing showed up under the name Ashley Harper,' she said. 'But at ten past midnight - this morning - a woman called Alexandra Huron rented a Mercedes saloon from a local Avis at Gatwick Airport, using a Toronto Dominion Bank of Canada credit card. The assistant who dealt with the customer has now positively identified her from photographs as Ashley Harper.'

'CCTV cameras,' Grace said. 'What I--' Glenn Branson raised a hand. 'We're already on the case. We're already having every camera checked between Gatwick and Newhaven from the time she picked up the car.' 'She left her house about an hour before you went there, Nick,' Grace said to DC Nicholl. 'Yes.' 'Do we know how she got to the airport?'

'No.' Grace fell silent. For a few moments no one had anything to say. He was busy thinking through all the timings last night - when he had been to see Mark Warren, when he and Glenn Branson had visited Ashley. Mark Warren being taken out to the forest to help locate the grave. The money being transferred. Mark Warren's death. Ashley renting the car under a different name. Now he knew what her game was; that was clear enough. And he knew that they needed to find her. Absolutely nothing else mattered at this moment than to do that. And quickly. If it wasn't already too late.

84

'Strewth, woman, four fucking suitcases - what's the matter with you, Alex?'

'What do you mean?' 'I'm not helping you lug four fucking suitcases, that's what I mean.'

'So we'll get a porter.' 'And what about theexcess baggage charge?' 'We're travelling Club, Vic; they have a big baggage allowance. Relax.'

'Fucking relax? Why can't you just leave all this shit behind, buy new stuff in Sydney - they have shops there, you know!'

Ashley, in a Prada denim trouser suit and high heels, standing between her suitcases in the living room of the small detached house in Newhaven, placed her hands defiantly on her hips and stared out of the window. The view from the rented house's remote hilltop position took in almost the whole of the town, and much of the port that was part of it. She watched the Seacat cross-Channel ferry slipping past the harbour mole, heading out to sea. It was a flat, grey day, and humid; she was perspiring, which added to her bad mood, and her period was about to start, which made it even worse. She turned on him, her voice rising in acidity.

'Really? They have shops in Sydney? You mean shops you can walk into and buy things from?'

'Oh, fuck off, you stupid cow - don't speak to me like I'm some fucking servant.'

'You fuck off. Why should I leave all this stuff behind? This is my life.'

'What do you mean this is your life?' At five foot, seven inches, Vic stood barely half an inch taller than Ashley, but he had always seemed to her to be much taller. He had the wiry, muscular build and the persona of a fighting man, with tattooed arms, crew-cut hair and a rough-hewn, handsome face. His clothes added to his military persona; at this moment he was dressed in a combat jacket over a black T-shirt, baggy khaki chinos and what could have been black marching boots. 'Do you mean Michael is your life? Mark? These two gits have been your life, is that what you mean? Have I got something wrong here -1 thought I was your life, you stupid bitch.' 'I thought you were too,' she said tightly, holding back tears. 'So what the fuck does that mean?' 'Nothing,' she said. He grabbed her by the shoulders and turned her round to face him.

'Alex, relax, OK. We're nearly there, home free; let's just calm right down.' 'I'm perfectly calm/ she said. 'You're the one who's all wired.' He pulled her towards him. Stared into her green eyes. Then tenderly pushed some stray strands of her hair back up her forehead.

'I love you,' he said. 'I love you so much, Alex.'

She put her arms around his neck, pulled his lips up against hers and kissed him passionately for some moments. "I love you too, Vic. I always have.'

'And yet you happily went off and screwed Mark, then Michael. And a whole bunch of guys before them.'

She stepped back angrily and almost fell over a suitcase. 'Jesus Christ, what's got into you?'

'What's got into me? We've fucked up this time, that's what. OK?'

'We haven't fucked up, Vic; we have a result.'

'A lousy one-point-two million quid? Half a year of our lives for that?'

'Neither of us could have foreseen what was going to happen the crash.'

'We should have played it differently. You could have got Michael out, gone through with the wedding, and then we'd have had half his money, and his partner's.'

'And that would have taken months, Vic - maybe years. They still have some planning issues on their big development. As it is, we got a quick result. And if you hadn't gambled away half our goddamn money, we wouldn't have even needed to be here at all in the first place, OK?' Sheepishly, he looked at his watch. 'We have to get going if we're going to make the flight.'

'I'm ready.'

'You don't have any idea how fucking painful this stuff is for me, Alex, do you? What we do? My sitting on the sidelines, knowing this year you're screwing Michael and Mark, before that you were screwing that jerk Richard in Cheshire, not to mention Joe Kerwin and Julian Warner.'

'I can't believe I'm hearing this, Vic. I did what I did because that was my part of our bargain, OK?'

'No, not OK.'

'You've always had your sweet revenge on them in the end - so what's your problem? And this way, I get to spare you and me from a honeymoon with Michael.' He looked at his watch again, anxiously.

'We'll talk in the car -I have one more thing to do before we leave.' He lugged her suitcases out into the hall, then went back into the sitting room and moved the sofa right across the room. Then he knelt down and peeled back a corner of the carpet.

'Vic,' she said. He looked up. 'What?' 'Can't we just leave him?'

'Leave him?'

'He's not going anywhere, is he? He's not going to get out - he can't even speak, you said.'

'I'm going to finish him off, put him out of his misery.'

'Why not just leave him? No one's ever going to find him.'

'Take me ten seconds to crush his neck.'

'But why?' He glared at her. 'You are sweet on him, bitch, aren't you?'

Blushing she said, 'I am absolutely not sweet on him.'

'You were never worried about me getting rid of any of the others. What's so special about Mikey boy?'

'Nothing's special about him.' He let the carpet fall back in place, stood up, and rolled the sofa back to where it had been. Then he repositioned the coffee table. 'You've got a point, Alex, about him not getting out. Why show any mercy on the little bastard by putting him out of his misery? We'll just let him starve to death all on his own in the darkness. Happy with that?'

She nodded. 'Have you checked today's papers?'

'No, I've been cleaning the place out. Got all yesterday's - nothing to worry about. We'll check today's at the airport.' He grinned. 'Then after that, no worries, right?' Five minutes later the Mercedes was packed with Ashley's four suitcases and Vic's large holdall. He locked the front door and pocketed the keys. 'Do you think we should drop them back in to the agency?'

'We have five more months to run on the lease, woman! You want people going in there and sniffing around? Because I tell you one thing, it ain't going to smell too good in there in a week or two.'

She said nothing as she clipped on her seatbelt, watching the house out of the window for the last time. It was a strange house, perfect for their purposes because of its isolation - the nearest neighbour was a quarter of a mile away - and in fact doubly perfect in the light of events last Tuesday night. You could never in a million years call it a pretty or stylish house. Built on scrubby wasteland - which hadn't changed - in the 1930s, it looked like one truncated half of a pair of semi-detached houses, as if the other side of it had never been built. Originally there had been an integral garage, but some years back that had been converted into what was now the sitting room. He started the car. In an hour they would be at Gatwick Airport. Tomorrow, or later today - she always had a problem with the time zones - they would be back in Australia. Home. Specks of drizzle pattered onto the windscreen. Regardless, she slipped on her new Gucci sunglasses. Vic had cropped her hair - no time to go to a salon - then she had put on this morning a short, dark wig. If there was any search at all at the airport, they would be watching for Ashley Harper. There was just the smallest possibility they might be looking for Alexandra Huron. But as she looked at the passport in her handbag, which still had two years to run, she smiled. Certainly no one would be looking for Anne Hampson.

Vic put the gear lever into drive, then fumbled around. 'Where's the fucking brake?'

'It's a handle; you pull it.'

'Why the fuck do they have a handle? Why didn't you rent a normal car?'

'How much more normal than a Mercedes can you get?' 'One with a proper parking brake!' 'For Christ's sake!' He slid down his window and shouted out, 'Bye, fuckwit. Have a nice rest of your life!'

'Vic?'

'Yeah?'

He accelerated away fiercely down the potholed road, which the council seemed to have forgotten. 'What's the matter, missing your lover boy's dick already?'

'You know something? It's bigger than yours!' He lunged out at her, slapping her face, the car swerving onto the overgrown grass verge, then back onto the road, lurching through a pothole.

'Does that make you feel good, hitting me?'

'You are just a fucking slapper.'

They reached a T-junction and turned right by a modern housing development, the trees still saplings.

'And you're just a bully, Vic. You're a sadist, you know that? Does that make you feel good? Is that how you really get your rocks off, tormenting someone like Michael?'

'And you get your rocks off by screwing him and knowing that one day you are really going to screw him?' He turned to glare at her, then pulled out onto the main road. It happened so fast, all she saw was what felt, for an instant, like a sudden change in the light. There was a tremendous bang; she felt a fierce jerk; her ears went numb; and the interior of the car filled with what looked like feathers, and reeked of cordite. At the same time the horn began to blare.

'Oh shit, oh shit, shit, shit!' Vic hammered on the steering wheel with his fists; the driver's air bag hanging like a spent condom from the wheel boss, and another air bag limp beside his head. 'Are you all right?' he asked Ashley.

She nodded, staring at the bonnet of the car, which was raised jaggedly up in front of her, the Mercedes star that had been on the end now invisible. There was another car, white, stopped at a crazy angle in the middle of the road a few yards away.

Vic tried to open his door, and seemed to be having difficulty. Then he threw his weight against it and, with a scream from the hinges, it opened.

Ashley's door opened without a problem. She undipped her belt and stepped out shakily, then pinched her nose and blew hard to clear her ears. She could see a bewildered-looking grey-haired woman behind the wheel of the other car, a Saab, with much of its nose crumpled.

Vic inspected the damage to the Mercedes. The offside front wheel was crushed and buckled and pushed right into the engine compartment. There was no chance of the car being driveable.

'You stupid fucking bitch!' Vic yelled, above the blare of the Mercedes horn, at the Saab.

Ashley could see another car coming up the road, and a van coming from the opposite direction. And she could see a young man running towards them. 'Vic,' she shouted urgently, 'we need to do something, for Christ's sake!'

'Yeah, right, we need to do something. What do you fucking suggest?'

346

Back at the Incident Room, Nick Nicholl suddenly yelled at Grace. 'Roy! Line seven, pick it up, pick it up!'

Grace stabbed the button and lifted the receiver to his ear. 'Roy Grace,' he said. It was a Detective Sergeant from Brighton police station called Mark Tuckwell. 'Roy,' he said, 'the Mercedes you have an alert out on, blue saloon, Lima-Juliet-Zero-Four-Papa-X-RayIima?'

'Yes.'

'Its just been involved in a RTA in Newhaven. The occupants, one male, one female, have hijacked a vehicle.' Grace sat bolt upright, the phone clenched to his ear, adrenaline exploding.

'Have they taken hostages?'

'No.'

'Do we have descriptions of the two people?'

'Not great ones so far. Man stocky, Caucasian, cropped hair, mid forties; the woman has short dark hair, late twenties, early thirties.' Grabbing a pen, he asked, 'What are the details of the vehicle they've taken?'

'A Land Rover Freelander, Green, Whisky-Seven-Nine-Six-LimaDeltaYankee.' Scribbling this down, Grace asked, 'Any contact with this car so far?'

'Not yet.'

'Exactly how long ago was it taken?'

'Ten minutes.' Grace thought for a moment. Ten minutes. You could get a long damned way in ten minutes. He thanked the Detective Sergeant and told him he would call him back in a couple of minutes and to keep his line clear. Then Grace quickly briefed his team. Handing the vehicle details to Nick Nicholl he said, 'Nick, circulate the vehicle details to all the surrounding counties - Surrey, Kent, Hampshire - and also the Met. Now!' He thought for a moment. The roads to the east of Newhaven went to Eastbourne and Hastings. To the north were the fast roads to Gatwick Airport and to London. To the west was Brighton. Most likely, if they stayed with the Land Rover, they would head north. Turning to DS Moy he said, 'Bella, get the helicopter up. On the assumption they are heading away from the area, get it positioned to cover the roads ten to fifteen miles north of Newhaven.'

'Right.'

'When you've done that, get a watch put on all CCTV at the railway stations in the area, in case they try to ditch the vehicle and get a train.' He drank a swig of water. 'Emma-Jane, call the Road Policing Department and get some vehicles up on the A23 on look-out for this car immediately. When you've done that, alert the police at Newhaven Harbour and Gatwick and Shoreham Airports.' He ran through a mental checklist, stations, seaports, airports, roads. Often, he knew, when people hijacked cars they would only drive them a short distance, ditch them and take a different car.

'Glenn,' he said, 'get the whole surrounding area of Newhaven flooded - we want to make sure they haven't abandoned the car yet. Also get a couple of our patrol cars here on standby.' 'I'll do it now.' Grace rang through to the Ops Room and informed them he was taking command of the incident. The clerk there told him there was one update that had just come in. A car matching the description had sideswiped several cars at a traffic light as it had cut past them on the pavement to get over the Newhaven swing bridge seconds before it opened. This information was just two minutes old.

Vic Delaney stabbed the brake pedal hard as they came into a righthander on the winding country road that was much sharper than he had realized. The front wheels locked and for a sickening moment they carried straight on, towards a poplar tree, while he wrestled with the chunky steering wheel. Ashley screamed, 'Viiiic!' The car lurched violently to the right, the front slewing round, the rear wheels breaking way, then he over-corrected and they were heading at another poplar. Then back, the top-heavy car swinging like a weighted sack, their luggage crashing around in the rear. Then they were back under control. 'Slow down, Vic, for God's sake!' There was a massive truck ahead, crawling along, and in a moment they were on its tail, with no room to pass. 'Oh, fucking Jesus!' he said, braking, hammering the steering wheel in frustration. It had all gone wrong. The story of my life, he thought. His dad had died of drink when he'd been in his teens. Shortly before his eighteenth birthday he'd beaten up his mother's lover because the guy was a punk and treated her like shite. And his mother had responded by throwing him, Vic, out. He'd drifted into the services in search of adventure, and instantly felt at home in the Marines, except he'd also acquired a taste for money. Lots of money. In particular he liked fancy clothes, cars, gambling and tarts.

But above all else he liked the feeling he got - all that respect - when he walked into a casino in a sharp suit. And what better massage for a man's pride could there be than to get comped at a casino for a steak dinner, maybe a room, too. A lucky streak in the casinos during his second year in the Marines netted him some big loot, then an unlucky streak wiped him out. He'd then teamed up with a bent Quartermaster called Bruce Jackman, in charge of the ordnance supplies, and found an easy way to make fast money by selling off guns, ammunition and other military supplies via a website. When that was in the process of beir rumbled, he'd garrotted Bruce Jackman, and left him hanging in bi*| bedroom with a suicide note. And had never lost a night's sleep over| it since. Life was a game, survival of the sharpest. In his view humans made the mistake of trying to pretend they were any different to the animal world. All life was the law of the jungle. That didn't mean you couldn't love someone. He'd been deeply, crazily, besottedly in love with Alex from the moment he had first seen her. She had it all: real class, style, stunning beauty, a great body, and she was a dirty cow in bed. She was everything he had ever wanted in a woman and way more. And she was the only woman he had met who was more ambitious than himself - and who had a game plan to achieve her simple goals: make a fortune when you are young, then spend the rest of your life enjoying it. Dead simple. Now all they had to do was get to Gatwick Airport and catch a plane. The interior of the Freelander stank of diesel fumes from the exhaust of the massive lorry in front of him, crawling at less than 30 mph.

He pulled out to see if he could pass, then pulled back in sharply as a truck thundered past in the opposite direction. Increasingly impatient, they followed the truck through a sweeping, dipping, S-bend, past a quarry sign, then up a hill, the truck slowing even more. He slipped his left hand over into Ashley's lap, found her hand, squeezed it. 'We'll be all right, angel.' She squeezed his hand back, by way of a reply. Then a blue sparkle in the mirror caught his eye. And a cold sliver of fear whiplashed through his belly. He watched the mirror carefully. Tarmac, grass and trees unspooled behind them. Then the sparkle of blue again and this time there was no mistaking it. Shit. Any second it would come into sight around the corner. Pulling out again, he suddenly saw to his right a wooden public footpath signpost, and a wide track, and in one swift jerk of the wheel, swung the Freelander right across the path of an oncoming van and onto the bumpy, overgrown track, the car crashing into a deep, water-filled pothole, then out the other side. In his mirror he saw a police car flash past in the opposite direction, much too fast, he hoped, to have seen them.

'Why have you turned off?'

'Police.' He accelerated, felt the wheels spinning, gripping, the car lurching forward, sliding up the ruts, then down again. They passed a farmyard, with an empty horsebox outside and a silent tractor, and a corrugated iron structure rilled with empty sheep pens.

'Where does this go?' Ashley asked.

'I don't fucking know.' At the end of the track he turned left onto a metalled lane; they drove past several cottages, then reached a very busy main road. Vic, winding down his window and dripping with perspiration, said, 'This is the A27 - it takes us to the A23 - straight up to Gatwick, right?'

'I know. But we can't go on the main road.' 'I'm thinking - the best way--' Both of them heard the clatter of the helicopter. Vic stuck his head out of the window and looked up. He saw a dark blue helicopter bearing down out of the sky straight towards them. As it arced round, the sound even louder, it was low enough for him to read the stencilled white 'police' beneath the cockpit. 'Bastards.' There was no break in the traffic, so he judged it too risky to go straight over. Instead he made a left turn, accelerating hard out in front of a Jaguar, which proceeded to flash him with its lights and hoot, both of which he ignored, staring fixedly ahead, his brain in panic mode. The traffic was slowing down ahead. Shit, it was coming to a standstill! Pulling out to the right a fraction and peering past the traffic, he could see the reason for the jam, despite part of his view being obscured by a tall caravan. A police car had blocked off the road, and there was a large blue 'POLICE STOP' barrier either side of it.

'They just rammed through a police barrier at the Beddingham roundabout,' the Ops Clerk, Jim Robinson, informed Grace, 'and are now proceeding west on the A27. Their next turn-off options are the roundabout in one mile, where they have a choice of a right turn towards Lewes or left towards Kingston village.' 'Have we got anyone at the roundabout?'

'A bike on its way - might just get there in time.'

'A bike's no use. We need to get them boxed in. At least they're not in a fast car, so we can catch them. We need four cars - where are the nearest four located?' 'We have two heading for the A23 junction, one on its way from Lewes, ETA four minutes, one on its way over from Shoreham, ETA three minutes to the A23/A27 junction, two here at Sussex House ready to go, and one coming in from Haywards Heath, ETA two minutes.' 'The helicopter still has them in sight?' 'Right above them.' Grace closed his eyes a moment, visualizing the road. Right now the villains, whoever they were - and he had the strongest suspicions about who one of them was - had made the error of picking the road on which he drove to and from work every day, and knew better, probably, than any other road on the planet. He knew every turnoff, every opportunity, adding in the fact they were in a vehicle with off road capabilities, and although the ground was fairly soggy from all the recent rainfall, there would be plenty of opportunities to get off the road and across farmland if they wanted.

'Can we get a couple of police off-roaders into the mix as well?' Grace said. 'Position them as close to the A27/A23 junction as you can.' He looked at his watch. A quarter to two. Tuesday. There would be a fair amount of traffic on the move and one consideration was other road users. The police had had a lot of bad press in recent years over reckless car pursuits and some tragic deaths of innocent people in the process. He needed to keep this pursuit as safe as was possible in the circumstances. Boxing them in would be best: a car in front, a car behind, one either side and slowly bring their speed down. That would be the textbook happy ending. Except he hadn't known too many happy endings since he'd grown too old to enjoy fairy tales.

Barrelling down a long, curving hill in the fast lane, with the speedometer needle flickering past 125 mph, Vic knew the A23 junction would be coming up in a minute or so, and he was going to have to make a decision. For the past couple of minutes, aware of the constant shadow of the helicopter, his mind had been occupied with one thought: If I was a cop what bases would I be covering right now? Airports were not going to be an option. Nor ferry-ports. But there was one thing that the cops probably had not considered probably because they didn't even know about it. But to get to it they needed to lose the damned chopper. And there was a place, just a few miles ahead, where he could do that. The dual carriageway rose dramatically uphill, with undulating open Downland countryside to his right, and the vast urban sprawl of Brighton and Have to his left. And ahead, some miles yet, the tall chimney landmark of his intended destination, Shoreham Harbour. But that wasn't going to be his first stop.

'Why've you carried on, Vic?' Ashley asked nervously. 'I thought we were going to Gatwick.'

Vic did not reply. A little old man was pottering along in the inside lane in a bronze four-door Toyota that looked a good ten years old. Perfect! The tunnel was coming up any moment now. From memory it was about a quarter of a mile long, cutting through the Downs. They passed the 'No Overtaking' warning sign and entered the dimly lit gloom of the tunnel doing a good 110 mph. Instantly, Vic swerved into the inside lane and stamped on the brakes, slowing the car down to a crawl and putting on his hazard flashers.

'Vic - what the hell--' But he was ignoring her, staring in the mirror, watching a line of cars flash past. And now the Toyota was approaching. Vic tensed, knowing he had to get his timing absolutely right. The Toyota indicated that it was going to pull out to overtake, and began moving out, but instantly there was a flash of lights and the blare of a horn as a Porsche hurtled past, and the Toyota, braking hard, swerved back into the inside lane. Beaut! Vic jerked on the Land Rover's handbrake as hard as he could, knowing it would stop the car without the brake lights showing. 'Brace yourself!' he shouted, releasing the brake and accelerating. There was a scream of tyres behind, but by the time the Toyota struck them, they already had some forward momentum again. There was a small impact, just a tiny jolt that he barely felt, and the sound of breaking glass.

'Out!' yelled Vic, hurling open his door, jumping down, running back and surveying the damage. All he was concerned with was the front of the Toyota. It looked fine - the grille was stove in and a headlamp gone, but no oil or water was spewing out.

'Get the fucking bags!' he yelled at Ashley, who was walking, startled, towards him. 'The fucking bags, woman!' He wrenched open the driver's door of the Toyota. The driver was even more frail than he had looked when he had driven past, well north of eighty, with a liver-spotted face, wispy hair and spectacles with bottle-glass lenses.

'Hey, what - what do you think - what--?' the old man said. Vic undipped his seatbelt, aware that a car was pulling up behind them, then removed his glasses to disorient him.

'I'll get you into the ambulance, mate.'

'I don't need a bloody--' Vic hauled the man out, hefted him over his shoulder and placed him on the rear seat of the Land Rover, then shut the door. A potbellied, middle-aged man who had just climbed out of a Ford people-carrier that had pulled up behind the Toyota came running up to Vic. 'I say, do you need any help?'

'Yes, poor bloke, I think he's had a stroke - was swerving all over the place.' A lorry thundered past, then two motorbikes.

Ashley shouted out, 'For God's sake help me, Vic, I can't manage these bloody cases on my own!'

'Leave the fucking things!'

'One has all my papers in it--'

Vic saw the pot-bellied man looking at Ashley oddly and decided the fastest solution was to deck him. He knocked him out cold with one punch, and propped him up against the front of his Ford. Then they hastily loaded Vic's holdall and two of Ashley's cases into the Toyota and jumped in. Vic found reverse, then, with a grinding noise coming from what he presumed was the fan belt, he eased the car back several feet, then he found drive, and the car juddered. He checked his mirror, then accelerated, pulling out past the Land Rover, and accelerated as fast as the distinctly clapped-out old Toyota would go towards the rapidly widening light at the far end of the tunnel.

Ashley was staring at him in shock. 'That was clever,' she said.

'Can you see the fucking chopper?' he asked, squinting as they came back out into bright light. She squirmed around in her seat, craning her neck upwards through first the front windscreen, then the rear.

'It's not following!' she exclaimed. 'It's hovering over the front of the tunnel - wait - great - now it's going back to the rear!'

'Fucking A!' Vic took the first exit off the dual carriageway, which came up a mile on. It took them down into the mixed urban and industrial sprawl of Southwick, the suburb separating the city of Brighton and Have from Shoreham. They had a few minutes' head start before the police got an ident on this car, and maybe with a bit of luck the old git who owned it couldn't remember the licence number, Vic hoped.

'OK, so where the hell are we going, Vic?'

'To the one place the police aren't looking at.'

'Which is?'

'Michael and Mark have a boat, right, a proper yacht. You've been on it?'

'Yes, I've told you - I've been out on it a few times.'

'It's big enough to cross the Channel, right?'

'The guy they bought it from sailed it across the Atlantic'

'That's fine. You and I know how to sail.'

'Yes.' Ashley remembered several sailing holidays they'd had in Australia and in Canada, chartering a yacht, going off on their own. Some of the few happy and peaceful moments of her life.

'So now you know where we're going. Unless you have a better idea?'

'Take their boat?'

'We'll sail after dark.'

They were now on a busy main road, with semi-detached houses on each side, set well back. He slowed down as they approached a red light and could see a shopping parade ahead on both sides of the road. Then, as he halted, his face fell. Brilliant white light filled the rear-view mirror. He heard the sharp blast of a two-tone siren. Saw a blue flashing light, heard the blip of a loud throttle; then a police motorcyclist pulled alongside his window, signalling for him to get out. Instead, he floored the accelerator and shot straight over the lights, right across the path of a heavy truck. 'Oh shit,' Ashley said. Moments later, siren on, the motorcycle was alongside again, the cop signalling sternly for him to pull over. Instead, Vic turned the wheel sharply to the right, deliberately striking the bike, sending it hurtling over on its side; in his mirror he caught a fleeting glimpse of the cop, unseated, rolling across the road. Panicking, Vic saw a pillar box ahead, and a quiet-looking side street. He turned sharply into it, hearing the sound of the bags sliding across the back seat, then accelerated down the tree-lined avenue. It was starting to rain again, and he fumbled around with the switches until he found the wipers and got them working. They reached a T-junction, with a church ahead.

'Do you know where we are?'

'The harbour can't be far,' he said. He drove on, through a maze of quiet residential streets, then suddenly they came out into a narrow, bustling high street, with traffic crawling down it.

'There!' Vic pointed ahead. 'That's the harbour!' At the bottom of the high street, they came to the junction with the main coast road that ran all the way along Brighton and Hove seafront, past Shoreham Harbour and then along the banks of the River Adur. 'Which way's the boat?' 'It's at the Sussex Motor Yacht Club/ she said. 'You have to go left.' There was a bus coming, quickly. He was going to wait to let it pass when a glint of white light in his mirror caught his eye; almost in disbelief, he saw a police motorbike weaving through the jammed traffic behind him. The same damned cop he had just knocked off his machine? He pulled out in front of the bus, tyres screeching. Then, moments later, out of nowhere, a black BMW with a flashing blue light on the dash and more flashing blue lights inside its rear windscreen, hurtled past the bus and his Toyota, cutting in front of him, forcing him to brake sharply. Above its rear bumper the words, in flashing red lights, appeared: 'stop police'. In complete blind panic he swung the car round in a Uturn, accelerating back the other way, weaving through the traffic, which was slowing down ahead at a roundabout. The motorbike was right behind him, siren howling. Putting two wheels on the pavement, jamming his hand on the horn, making pedestrians leap out of the way, Vic squeezed past the line of cars and a van and reached the roundabout.

There were three choices: right seemed to go back into the maze of houses; straight on the traffic was clogged up. Left went over a metal-girdered bridge spanning the river. He turned left, the motorbike glued to his tail as he accelerated as hard at the Toyota would go, the fan grinding, shrieking, the noise getting worse every second. Below, the tide was right out, the river just a slack brown trickle between the mud banks, with moored boats lying on their sides, many of them barely looking as if they were capable of floating when the tide came back in. On the far side of the bridge the road was clear. But within moments the BMW was coming up fast behind him. The motorbike suddenly whipped in front of him and then decelerated, trying to force him to slow.

'Thought I fucking gave you a lesson already,' Vic muttered, accelerating, trying to ram it, but the rider was too quick for him, darting forward as if anticipating this. Vic, trying desperately to think straight, looked at the landscape to either side. On the left was a garage, a parade of shops and what looked like a large residential area. Over to his right he could see the flat expanse of Shoreham Airport, used mostly by private aircraft and a few small Channel Islands airlines. The entrance was coming up. Without signalling he swung right, onto the narrow road. There was a concrete wall on his left, and the open expanse of the airfield to his right, dotted with hangars, with small planes and helicopters parked in front, and the white Art Deco control tower building, in need of a lick of paint. The thought now going through his head was that if he could just shake off the cops for a few minutes, they could hijack a light aircraft, like the twin-engined Beechcraft he could see coming in now - just drive straight over to it, grab the pilot.

As if anticipating exactly that, the BMW pulled alongside, then swung into him, forcing him into the concrete wall. Ashley screamed as the car slammed against it, grating along it with sparks showering past them.

'Vic, for Christ's sake do something!'

He sat, gripping the wheel for dear life, clenched up in concentration, knowing they were hopelessly underpowered against the BMW and the bike. There was a tunnel coming up ahead. He could guess exactly what the BMW had in mind - to go in it ahead of him and then stop. So he stamped on the brakes. Caught by surprise, the BMW shot past, and instantly he swerved behind it, off the road and onto the airfield itself. The bike stayed with him, and moments later, the BMW was behind him as well. He drove across the bumpy grass straight towards the first row of parked aircraft, weaving wildly in between them, trying to shake off the cops behind him, trying to spot someone walking to a plane or getting out of one. Then, as he headed for a gap between a Grumman executive jet and a Piper Aztec, the BMW suddenly rammed him hard, jolting them both forward, Ashley, despite her seatbelt, cracking her head on the windscreen and crying out in pain. He heard the BMW revving. The runway was right in front of him, and he could see the twin-engined plane bearing down, yards away from touching down. He floored the accelerator, lurched across the runway, right through the shadow of the plane. And then, for a brief moment, no bike and no BMW in his mirror!

He kept going, flat out, the car lurching, the grating from the engine getting worse and accompanied by an acrid smell of burning now, straight toward the perimeter fence and the narrow road beyond that.

'We need to get out and hide, Vic. We're not going to outrun them in this thing.'

'I know,' he said grimly, panic gripping him again as he couldn't see a gap anywhere in the fence. 'Where's the fucking exit?'

'Just go through the fence.' T

aking her advice, he continued driving flat out at the fence, slowing just before they struck it, the wire mesh making a dull clanging sound, and ripping like cloth. Then he was on the perimeter road, with the mudflats of the river to his right and the airfield to his left, and the bike and the car were right behind him. A Mercedes sports was coming the other way. Vic kept going. 'Out the fucking way!' At the last moment the Mercedes pulled over onto the verge. They were coming up to a T-junction with a narrow road that was little more than a lane. To the left there was a removals lorry parked outside a cottage, unloading, blocking the road completely. He turned right, flooring the pedal, watching in his mirror. At least this lane was too narrow for the BMW to get past. The bike was getting in position. Any moment it would whip past. Vic swerved out to warn it off. They were doing seventy, seventy-five, eighty, approaching a wooden bridge over the river. Then, just as he reached the bridge, two small boys on bicycles appeared at the far end, right in the middle of the road.

'Shiiiiiiiit, oh shiiit, oh shiiit,' Vic said, stamping on the brakes, thumbing the horn, but there was no time; they were not going to stop, and there was no room to get past them. Ashley was screaming. The car slewed right, left, right. It struck the right-hand barrier of the bridge, veered over and struck the left, pinballed off it, doing a half pirouette, then rolled over onto its roof, bounced in the air, clearing the safety barrier, bursting through the wooden side of the bridge's superstructure, splintering it like matchsticks, and plunging, upside down, the rear doors flying open, and the suitcases hurtling alongside the car towards the mudflats below, which were as soft and treacherous as quicksand. The motorcyclist dismounted and, limping from his leg injury from when he had been knocked off his machine only a few minutes earlier, hobbled over to the hole in the side of the bridge and peered down. All he could see protruding from the mud was the grimy black underbelly of the Toyota. The rest of the car had sunk into it. He stared at the metal floor pan, the exhaust and silencer, the four wheels still spinning. Then, in front of his eyes, the mud bubbled all around the car, like a cauldron brewing, and moments later the underbelly and the wheels slipped beneath the surface and the mud closed over it. There were some deep bubbles which broke the surface, as if the underwater lair of some monster had been disturbed.

Then nothing.

89

The incoming tide was hampering their efforts. A wide cordon had been thrown around the whole area where the car had gone in, canvas sheeting only partially obscuring the view from a swelling crowd of curious onlookers on the far bank. A fire engine, two ambulances, half a dozen police vehicles, including a crash recovery tender, were all parked down the lane. A crane had been driven onto the elderly bridge despite concerns about how much weight it could stand. Grace stood on the bridge himself, watching the recovery proceedings. Police frogmen were working hard to get the hooks of the lifting gear dangling from the crane onto secure fixings on the Toyota. The sky, which had been delivering spots of rain on and off all day, had lightened in the last hour and the sun was trying to break through. The tightly packed mud had made it impossible for the frogmen to get down any further, and the only hope that the occupants were alive rested on the windows having stayed intact and that there was air trapped inside the car. The amount of shards of glass strewn over the bridge made this seem more than a long shot. Two suitcases had been recovered from the abandoned Land Rover Freelander, but all they contained were women's clothes; not one scrap of paper that could give a clue to Michael Harrison's whereabouts. Grace had a grim feeling this car would yield something.

Glenn Branson, standing next to Grace, said, 'You know what this reminds me of? The original Psycho - 1960. When they winch the car with Janet Leigh's body in out of the lake. Remember?'

'I remember.'

'That was a cool movie. The remake was shit. I dunno why people bother with remakes.'

'Money,' Grace said. 'That's one of the reasons why you and I have a job. Because people do an awful lot for money'

After a few more minutes the hooks were in place. Then the lifting began. Against the deafening roar of the crane's engine, Grace and Branson barely heard the sucking and gurgling sounds of the mud, beneath the waters of the rising tide, yielding its prize. Slowly, in front of their eyes, and washed clean by the water, the bronze Toyota rose up in the air, its boot-lid open and hanging. Mud oozed slowly out of all of the window frames. The car looked badly smashed and the roof pillars were buckled. It didn't look as if one single window had remained in place. And as the mud fell out, some in slabs, some in squitty streaks, at first just the silhouettes of the two occupants became visible, and then, finally, their inert faces. The crane swung the car over onto the bank, lowering it on its roof a few yards from a rotting houseboat. Several fireman, police officers and workmen who had come with the crane, unhooked the lifting gear then slowly righted the car. As it rolled back onto its wheels, the two figures inside jerked like crash-test dummies, Grace, with trepidation, followed by Branson, walked down to it, squatted and peered in. Even though there was some mud Still Stuck to her face, and her hair was much shorter than the last time he had seen her, there was no question it was Ashley Harper, her eyes wide open, unblinking.

Then he shuddered in revulsion as a scrawny, long-legged crab crawled across her lap. 'Jesus,' Branson said. Who the hell was the man next to her, in the driving seat? Grace wondered. His eyes were open also, a powerful, thuggish-looking man with a shocked death mask. 'See what you can find on her,' Grace said, wrenching open the driver's door, and checking the man's sodden, muddy clothing for ID. He pulled out a heavy leather wallet from inside his jacket and opened it. Inside was an Australian passport. The photograph was the man in the car, no question. His name was Victor Bruce Delaney and he was forty-two years old. Under emergency contact was written the name Mrs Alexandra Delaney, and an address in Sydney. Glenn Branson wiped mud from a yellow handbag, unzipped it and after a few moments also pulled out a passport, this one British, which he showed to Grace. It contained a photograph that was, without doubt, Ashley Harper, but with close-cropped black hair, and it bore the name Anne Hampson. Under emergency contact nothing had been written. There were credits cards both in the man's wallet and in a purse inside the handbag, but nothing else. Not a clue about where they had come from or where they might be headed.

'Houston, we have a problem' Glenn Branson said quietly to Grace, but there was no humour in his tone.

'We do.' Grace stood up and turned away. 'It's suddenly a whole lot bigger than it was two hours ago.'

'So how the hell are we going to find Michael Harrison now?' After a moment's silence Grace said, 'I have an idea, but you're not going to like it.' Glancing uncomfortably at the occupants of the car, Glenn Branson said, 'I don't like anything much at the moment.'

90

An hour and a half later, Grace helped buckle the diminutive, wiry figure of Harry Frame into the front seat of the pool Ford Mondeo he and Branson had used this afternoon. The pony-tailed, goatee-bearded medium, reeking of patchouli oil and wearing his trademark kaftan and dungarees, had a street map of Newhaven laid out in his lap, and held a metal ring on a length of string in his right hand. Grace had decided to leave Glenn Branson out of this. He didn't want any negative vibes, and he knew that Harry Frame's energy was sensitive at best.

'So did you bring me something, as I requested?' Harry Frame asked Grace as he climbed behind the wheel of the car. Grace dug a box out of his pocket and handed it to the medium. Frame opened it and removed a pair of gold cufflinks. 'These are definitely Michael Harrison's,' Grace said. 'I took them from his flat on my way here.' 'Perfect.' It was only a short distance along the coast from Harry Frame's Peacehaven home to Newhaven. As they drove past the seemingly endless sprawl of shops and takeaway restaurants, Harry Frame was holding the cufflinks in his closed palm.

'Newhaven, you said?' 'There was a car we were interested in that was involved in an accident in Newhaven earlier today. And Newhaven is where Michael Harrison's mobile signal came from. I thought we'd drive to that spot and you could see if you pick anything up. Is that a good idea?' In his effusive, high-pitched voice, the medium said, 'I'm already picking up something. We're near, you know. Definitely.' Grace, following the directions he had been given, began to slow down. Some tyre marks, a spill of oil on the road and a few sparkling shards of safety glass showed him where the Mercedes had been in the accident, and he turned right into a modern housing development of small, detached houses with immature gardens, then immediately pulled over and stopped.

'OK,' he said. 'This is where the accident happened this morning.' Harry Frame, holding the cufflinks in his left hand, began to swing the pendulum over the map, taking increasingly deep breaths. He closed his eyes tightly and after a few moments said, 'Drive on, Roy, just drive straight on. Slowly'

Grace did as he was instructed. 'We're getting closer!' Frame said. 'Definitely. I see a turn-off to the left coming up shortly - might not even be a road, just a track.' After about a hundred metres, there was indeed a track going up to the left. It had been metalled, very many years ago, but had fallen into a state of total disrepair. It went uphill, through windblown, scrubby wasteland, and it did not seem from here, at least, that it was going to lead to anything. 'Make a left turn, Roy!' Grace looked at him, wondering if he was cheating by peeping through his eyelids. But if Harry was looking anywhere, it was down into his lap. Grace turned onto the track and drove up it for a quarter of a mile, then a squat, ugly detached house came into view just on the crest of the hill. It had fine views over Newhaven and the harbour beyond, but little else to recommend it. 'I see a house, all on its own. Michael Harrison is in this house,' Frame said, excitement raising his voice even higher. Grace pulled up outside.

The pendulum was swinging fast in a tight circle, and Harry Frame, eyes still tight shut, was juddering as if he had been plugged into an electrical socket. 'Here?' Without opening his eyes, Harry Frame confirmed, 'Here.' Grace left him in the car, then stopped at the front gate, staring at the neglected front lawn and the flower beds, which were a tangle of bindweed. There was something odd about the house, which he couldn't immediately figure out. It looked as if it had been built in the 1930s, or maybe early 1950s, and the design was strange, lopsided. He walked up a path of concrete slabs with weeds sprouting between the cracks, and pressed the cracked plastic front-door bell.

There was a shrill ring, but no one came to the door. He tried again. Still no answer. Then he did a circuit around the house, peering into each window as he went. It had a forlorn, neglected air about it, both inside and out. All the furnishings looked twenty or thirty years old, as did the design of and appliances in the kitchen. Then he noted, to his surprise, that there was a stack of newspapers on the kitchen table. He looked at his watch. It was just gone 6 p.m. He ought to get a search warrant, he knew. But that would take another couple of hours - and with every minute that passed the chances of finding Michael Harrison alive were shrinking. How much did he trust Harry Frame? The medium had been right on several occasions in the past - but he had been wrong on just as many. Shite. The thought of what Alison Vosper would say to him if he was caught breaking into a house without a warrant bothered him. He didn't have enough to back his judgement up, but it would have to do.

Time was running out for Michael Harrison. With a loose brick from the garden, he smashed a kitchen window pane, then wrapping his hand in his handkerchief, he removed the pieces of glass that remained lodged in the putty, found the window catch, opened it and crawled in. 'Hello!' he shouted. 'Hello! Anyone home?' The place felt and smelled dingy. The kitchen was clean, and other than some newspapers, all bearing yesterday's date, there was no sign of anyone having lived here recently. He checked out each of the downstairs rooms.

The large sitting room was drab as hell, with a couple of framed prints of seascapes on the walls. He noticed there were lines on the carpet, as if someone had recently moved the sofa. He moved on into a dark dining room, with an oak table and four chairs, and flock wallpaper, then on to a small lavatory, with a 'God Bless This House' cross-stitch hanging on the wall. Upstairs felt equally unloved and unlived in. There were three bedrooms, all the beds stripped to bare mattresses with old, yellowing pillows, without slips, lying on them, and a small bathroom, with a geyser boiler and stained washbasin and bath.

Above the bed in the smallest room was a loft hatch. By placing a chair, precariously, on the mattress, then standing on it, he was able to push open the hatch and peer in. To his surprise there was a light switch just inside the hatch, which worked, and he could see in an instant there was nothing up here. Just a small water tank, an old carpet sweeper and a rolled-up rug. He opened every cupboard and cabinet door. Upstairs, all the bed linen and bath towels were folded away in the cupboards. Downstairs, the kitchen cupboards contained basics - coffee, tea, a few tins, but nothing else. It could easily have been a year or two since anyone had been here. No sign of Michael Harrison. Nothing. Nowhere. He checked the hall cupboard, in case there was a cellar entrance in there, although he knew that few houses after the Victorian era had cellars.

He needed to find out who owned this place and when it was last lived in. Maybe the owners had died and it was in the hands of executors? Maybe a cleaning lady came up here occasionally? A cleaning lady who read every national newspaper? Grace let himself out of the back door and walked around to the side of the house, where there were two dustbins. He lifted the lid of the first one, and instantly he had a different story.

There were eggshells, used tea bags, an empty skimmed milk carton bearing a sell-by date of today and a Marks and Spencer lasagne carton bearing a sell-by date that had not yet been reached. Thinking hard, he walked round to the front of the house, trying again to work out what it was that was wrong with the design. Then he realized. Where there was now an ugly plastic-framed window to the right of the front door, there should have been an integral garage. He could see it now, clearly; the tone of the bricks didn't match the rest of the house. At some point someone had converted this into a living room.

And suddenly it reminded him of something from his childhood: his dad, tinkering with things. He liked to do his own servicing on his car, changing the oil, doing the brake linings, staying out of the hands of the rip-off merchants, as his dad called garages. He remembered the inspection pit in their garage, where he had spent many happy hours of his childhood helping his dad service the succession of Fords he always bought, getting covered in oil and grease - not to mention the occasional spider. And he thought about the lines on the carpet in the sitting room that he had just seen, where the sofa had been moved. On just a hunch, no more than that, he went back into the house and straight to the sitting room. He lifted the coffee table aside, then pushed back the sofa along the tracks in the green floral carpet that had been made previously.

Then he noticed that one corner of the carpet was slightly curled up. He knelt and gave it a tug, and it lifted easily. Far too easily. And instead of dust and fluff beneath there was a thick underlay that was not like any conventional carpet underlay. He knew exactly what it was. Soundproofing material. His excitement mounting, he glanced over his shoulder, then peeled the heavy grey material back, and saw beneath it a large sheet of plywood.

He worked his fingers under the edges, with some difficulty, as it fitted flush into a groove in the floor, then prised it up, and pulled it aside. Instantly he gagged from the stench that hit his nostrils. A horrendous reek of body odour, urine and excrement. Holding his breath and scared of what he was going to find, he peered into the six-foot-deep garage inspection pit and saw a shadowy figure at the bottom, bound hand and foot and across the mouth with duct tape. At first he thought the figure was dead. Then the eyes blinked. Frightened eyes. Oh sweet Jesus, he was alive! Grace felt an almost uncontainable feeling of joy erupt through him.

'Michael Harrison?'

A muffled 'Mnhhhh' greeted him.

'Detective Superintendent Grace of Sussex CID,' Grace said, lowering himself into the pit, oblivious to the smell now, just desperately anxious to see what condition the young man was in. Kneeling beside him, Grace gently peeled the duct tape away from his lips. 'Are you Michael Harrison?'

'Yes,' he croaked. 'Water. Please.'

Grace squeezed his arm gently. 'I'll get you some right away. And I'll get you out of here. You're going to be fine.'

Grace scrambled up out of the pit, hurried into the kitchen and ran the tap, radioing for an ambulance at the same time. Then he climbed back down into the pit clutching a pint tumbler of water.

He tilted it into Michael Harrison's mouth, who drank it down in one long, greedy draught, with only a few drops spilling down his chin. Then, as he removed the glass, Michael looked at him and asked, 'How's Ashley?'

Grace stared back at him, thinking hard, then gave him a gentle, reassuring smile. 'She's safe,' he said.

'Thank God.'

Grace squeezed his arm again. 'Want more water?'

Michael nodded.

'I'll get you some, then I'll cut this tape off you.'

'Thank God she's safe,' Michael said, his voice weak and trembling. 'She's all I've thought of, all I -1...'

Grace climbed back out of the pit. At some point he was going to have to tell Michael everything, but this didn't feel like the time or the place.

And he didn't know how to begin.