Looking Good Dead

72

From the parchment colour of Alfonso Zafferone’s face, Grace guessed he wasn’t going to have any more arrogance from this young DC for a while. He could not recall, in his entire career, when he had been in a room full of people so quiet.

Dennis Ponds was staring, bug-eyed and unfocused, as if he had just been told he was going to be put in the bathtub next.

It was Norman Potting who finally broke the silence. He coughed, clearing his throat, then said, ‘Do we presume this is a snuff movie, Roy?’

‘Well it’s not his fucking family album,’ Glenn Branson rounded on him.

There was no titter of laughter. Nothing. One of the female indexers was staring down at the table as if afraid to lift her eyes, in case there was more.

‘Dennis,’ Grace said, ‘I’m going to give you a copy on your laptop to take to the editor of the Argus. Don’t show him everything, but make him aware of just what we’re dealing with here. I want him to run photographs of Mr and Mrs Bryce on the front page of the midday edition of his paper. We have a day and a half to find these people. Does everyone understand that? That they are going to be killed and video’d?’

Branson took a deep breath, then exhaled loudly. ‘Man, who watches that kind of shit?’

‘A lot of very ordinary people with sick minds,’ Grace said. ‘It could be any one of us in this room – or your neighbour, your doctor, your plumber, your vicar, your mortgage broker. The same kind of people who slow down to rubberneck road accidents. Voyeurs. There’s a little bit of it in all of us.’

‘Not me,’ Branson said. ‘I couldn’t watch stuff like that.’

‘Are you saying that we are all potential killers?’ Nick Nicholl asked.

Grace remembered something a psychological profiler who had lectured on snuff movies at a homicide convention in the States had told him late one night in a bar. ‘We all have the capacity to kill, but only a small percentage of us have the ability to live with having killed. But there are plenty of us who are curious; we’d like to experience it vicariously. Snuff movies enable you to do that – to experience the killing of a human being. Think about it,’ he said. ‘There’s no opportunity for normal people to actually kill someone.’

‘I could have happily killed my mother-in-law,’ Potting said.

‘Thank you, Norman,’ Grace said, silencing him before he could go on. Then he turned to Glenn Branson. ‘Tom Bryce left his house in the middle of the night in a Renault Espace. There can’t have been much traffic on the road. We don’t know where he was going. We don’t know how much fuel there was in the vehicle. I want you to call off the search for Janie Stretton’s head and redeploy every single officer, all the Specials and all the CSOs to cover every CCTV camera – police, civic, petrol station, the lot – within a thirty-mile radius of this city.’

‘Right away.’

Then, turning back to DS Barker, he said, ‘Don, I want someone to go through all of Reggie D’Eath’s personal records – bank statements, credit card statements-’

‘Someone’s already on to that.’

‘Good.’

Grace checked his watch. He had a nine thirty with Alison Vosper, then somehow had to get to a 10.00 a.m. appointment he had made on the other side of town. ‘I’ll see you all back here at six thirty p.m. Everyone know what they’ve got to do? Any further questions?’

Usually there would be plenty. This morning there were none.

Then a phone rang. It was answered by the secretary, who handed it after a few moments to Glenn Branson. Everyone watched him as if sensing there was some important news coming.

Branson asked the caller to hold for a moment, covered the mouthpiece with his hand, and said, ‘The Bryces’ Renault Espace has been found down a farm track off the A23 at Bolney,’ he said.

‘Empty?’ Grace said, knowing the answer to the question, but asking it anyway.

‘Burned out.’