Left You Dead

17

Just gone midday, Roy Grace was reading through his completed draft report for the Chief Constable and was starting to think about lunch when he was interrupted by his job phone ringing. He answered it.

‘Sir, it’s Bryce Robinson. I have you down as the on-call SIO?’

Grace had been so absorbed in the report, and his thoughts about Guy Batchelor and Cassian Pewe, that he’d forgotten he’d assumed the role, from 7 p.m. last night until the same time next Sunday, as the duty Senior Investigating Officer for the Surrey and Sussex Major Crime Team.

‘Yes, that’s right, Bryce,’ he said to the DI, trying not to sound too thrown. ‘Tell me?’

Robinson talked him through the disappearance of Eden Paternoster and his concerns.

When the DI had finished, Grace asked him, ‘Who were the officers who attended at the Paternosters’ house?’

When he heard one of them was John Alldridge, he immediately took what he had heard even more seriously. ‘Alldridge was on my team for a while, Bryce — he’s sound, a very good copper.’

‘I agree with you, sir.’

‘It’s good to raise this,’ Grace said. He asked the DI to recap on a few points on which he wasn’t clear, then he sat thinking for some moments. ‘I wouldn’t ordinarily be worried after someone was missing for such a short time, but there’s something about this that feels wrong. You’ve done the right thing, calling me.’

Robinson was one of the diminishing number of senior officers in the force who remembered that Roy Grace’s own wife, Sandy, had disappeared, well over a decade ago now. And he was glad it was Grace who was the on-call SIO — some might have been dismissive, but from his own past experience, he clearly wasn’t.

‘Leave it with me, Bryce, I’ll have it looked into right away. You’ve circulated her photograph?’

‘I have, sir.’

‘Good work.’

Ending the call, Roy Grace thought for a short while. Ordinarily, he would have delegated a routine suspicious misper enquiry to one of his team, but something about this one intrigued him. And besides, he’d been deskbound for several weeks. One thing he’d always promised himself, each time he had been promoted further up the ranks, was that he would never end up as a desk jockey, as so many of his colleagues had, and that he would always try to remain hands-on whenever he could.

But there was something else here that resonated powerfully. The memory of that day, on his thirtieth birthday, when he’d come home, looking forward to a romantic celebratory dinner with Sandy, only to discover she had vanished off the face of the earth. And the years of hell that had followed, during which, while continuing to function as a homicide detective, he’d spent every spare second of his life searching for her and wondering what might have happened to her. If Eden Paternoster had done a ‘Sandy’ on her husband, Niall, then he really felt for the poor bastard.

He called Glenn Branson.

‘Boss?’ the DI answered.

‘I’m just calling to see if you need any groceries?’

‘What? You’ve taken up moonlighting for Ocado to supplement your income?’

‘Haha.’

Grace brought him up to speed on the Paternoster situation and the DI immediately became serious. ‘Doesn’t sound good, boss, but one thing doesn’t make sense.’

‘Tell me?’

‘Well, if I’d disappeared my wife why would I call the police and get them crawling all over me — rather than give it a few days?’

‘Who’s to say he hasn’t already given it a few days?’

‘I’m not with you.’

‘What if he’s planned it all carefully?’ Grace posited. ‘He’s murdered and disposed of his wife already and now he’s faking her vanishing, by way of an explanation?’

‘I guess that’s a possibility,’ Branson replied.

‘Speed is of the essence, I think we’re going to need to get on this one straight away, it really doesn’t feel right. Meet me in the car park. We’re going to Tesco Holmbush.’

‘Great! I’ll bring my shopping list with me.’