MatchUp

VAL MCDERMID TELLS ME THAT the idea for this story came while she was having her feet worked on by a brisk German reflexologist. While lying there she kept thinking about how most people consider feet unattractive, and yet for some they’re a powerful sexual fetish.

A thought occurred.

What would happen if a foot-fetishist reflexologist confronted a pair of feet so perfect he wanted to keep them forever.

And the story was born.

Both Peter and Val are British crime (thriller) writers. But their novels are set at opposite ends of the country. Val’s principal characters are a detective and a psychological profiler. Peter’s is a pure detective. For them both, the whole world of foot fetishists was a relatively unexplored subject. Learning about the weird and wonderful world of feet, as objects of eroticism, seemed a bit mind-boggling for them.

But there was an element of fun to it too.

Peter wrote the skeleton of an outline. Val then fleshed it out and drafted the opening, setting the scene and the tone. Together, they then worked back and forth, each writing segments of about a thousand words. Val counted on Peter for all the police procedural elements, which gave her free rein to have some fun with the characters. And they both had “a bit of a giggle” at each other’s terrible puns about feet.

The result is something quite unique.

Footloose.

FOOTLOOSE

A WATERY RED SUN WAS struggling to defeat skeins of cloud above the moors of either Lancashire or West Yorkshire, depending on personal allegiance. A narrow ribbon of road wound down from the high tops toward the outskirts of Bradfield, its gray sprawl just emerging from the dawn light. Gary Naylor steered a van crammed with bacon, sausages, and black pudding from his organic piggery down the moorside, knowing his bladder wasn’t going to make it to the first delivery.

There was, he knew, a lay-by round the next bend, tucked in against a dry stone wall. He’d stop there for a quick slash. Nobody around to see at this time of the morning. He pulled over and squirmed out, duckwalking over to the wall. He had eyes for nothing but his zip and his hands and then, oh, the relief as he directed his hot stream over the low wall.

That was when he noticed her.

Sprawled on the far side of the gray drystone dike lay a woman.

Blond, beautiful, dressed in a figure-hugging dress, wide-eyed and indisputably dead.

Dead and covered in his steaming piss.

DETECTIVE CHIEF INSPECTOR CAROL JORDAN of the Regional Major Incident Team had already been awake when the call came in. She’d been halfway up the hill behind her converted barn home, exercising Flash, her border collie. She walked; the dog quartered the hillside in a manic outpouring of energy that made her feel faintly inadequate. She took the call and turned, whistling the dog to follow. Five yards in and Flash was in front of her, heading like an arrow for home.

She let the dog in and called to the man who shared her home but not her bed.

Dr. Tony Hill emerged from his separate suite at the far end of the barn, hair wet from the shower, tucking his shirt into his jeans.

“What’s up?” he asked.

“Body of a woman found up on the moors. A fresh kill, by all accounts.”

“And it’s one for ReMIT?”

“Oh yes. It’s definitely one for us. She’s got no feet.”

Carol Jordan and Tony Hill were a better fit in their professional lives than they’d ever managed personally.

He was a clinical psychologist who specialized in unraveling the motivations of the twisted killers who wanted to express themselves again and again. She was the kind of detective for whom justice matters more than any other consideration. Now she’d been put in charge of ReMIT, he was at the heart of the tight-knit team she’d built to deal with major crimes across six police areas. So when they turned up at the lay-by on the moors, there was a perceptible lowering of the level of tension among the local officers who’d been called to the scene first.

They could relax a bit.

This wasn’t going to be down to them if it all went tits up.

The detective sergeant who’d been on duty when the call came in introduced them to Gary Naylor, sitting hunched in his van with the door open.

“I’m sorry,” Naylor said. “I’m so, so sorry. I never saw her till it was too late.”

For a moment Carol thought she was hearing a confession.

But the DS explained. “Mr. Naylor urinated on the woman’s body. Then when he realized what he’d done, he threw up.” He tried to keep his voice level, but the disgust showed in the line of his mouth.

“That must have been upsetting for you,” Tony said.

“Have we taken a statement from Mr. Naylor?” Carol asked.

“We were waiting for you, ma’am,” the DS said.

“Have someone take a statement from Mr. Naylor, then let the poor man get on with his day.”

An edge to her voice stung the DS into action.

They took the marked path to the wall and looked down at the woman’s body. Even stinking of urine and vomit, it was possible to see that she’d been attractive. Pleasant enough face, though nothing out of the ordinary. Good figure. Shapely legs. Except that where her feet should have been there was a puddle of blood-matted grass and heather.

“What do you make of that?” Carol asked.

Tony shook his head. “I’m not sure what he’s saying to us. Don’t think you can run away from me? You’ll never dance with another guy now? Impossible to know until I know a lot more about the victim.”

She gestured to the forensic technicians working the scene. “Hopefully they’ll have something for us soon.

“How’s it looking, Peter?” she called out to the crime scene manager.

He gave her a thumbs-up. “It’d be easier if the witness hadn’t voided most of his body fluids over her. On the plus side we’ve got a clutch bag with a credit card, a business card, a set of keys, a lipstick, and forty quid in cash. The name on the credit card is Diane Flaherty. The business card is for a model called Dana Dupont. The contact number is an agency in Bradfield. I’ll ping the details to your e-mail account as soon as I can get a strong enough signal. It’s a nightmare up here.”

“What’s the agency called?”

“Out on a Limb.”

Tony raised an eyebrow. “Interesting.”

She nodded. “Let’s get down to the office and see what Stacey can dig out about Diane Flaherty and this agency.”

She tossed Tony a warning look.

“And don’t tell me to put my foot down.”

MOST DAYS SARAH DENNISON RECKONED she had the best job in the world, but today it felt like the worst.

The worst by a million, backbreaking stinky miles.

And it was getting even worse.

This would have been a perfect day for it to have rained and a howling gale to have blown, as it seemed to have done for most of this summer. Instead, under a searing midday sun and beneath a cloudless sky, the air in the West Brighton Domestic Waste Recycling and Landfill Site stood still, rank and fetid. The waste was literally steaming, the methane gas rising from it offering her and her colleagues a headache.

Sarah was a sergeant in Brighton and Hove Police, and part of her speciality training was as a POLSA. Police search advisor. Normally she loved the challenge of searching, particularly fingertip searches at the scene of a major crime, looking for the one incriminating strand of hair or clothing fiber on a carpet, or maybe in a field. It was always looking for needles in haystacks and she was brilliant at spotting them. But today it wasn’t a needle, it was a murder weapon, small fire extinguisher that had come out of a van and been used to strike a man on the head after a row over a girl in a nightclub.

And this was no haystack.

It was twenty acres of rotting bin bags full of soiled nappies, rotting food, dead animals, with aggressive feral rats running amok.

She and her five colleagues lined out to her right and left, steadily working their way through the rubbish, were constantly having to fend off rats with the rakes they were using to tear open and sift through the contents of every single bag. They’d been here since 7 a.m., and her back was aching like hell from the constant raking motions. It was now 2 p.m. and they would keep on going into the evening, for as long as there was light, until they found what they were looking for, or could conclude, for certain, it wasn’t here. She’d not eaten anything since arriving here, nor had any of her colleagues.

None of them had any appetite.

“Skipper,” a voice called out.

She turned to see PC Theakston at the end of the line to her right, dressed as they all were in blue overalls, face masks, gloves and boots, signaling.

“You’d better come and take a look at this.”

His tone was a mixture of excitement and revulsion, in equal parts. Perhaps more revulsion.

And she could see and smell why.

Through a mist of buzzing blowflies a rat was gnawing hungrily at one of two severed human feet, cut off above the anklebones, lying on the ground. The terrible, rancid, cloying smell of dead flesh filled the air all around them, and Sarah yanked a handkerchief from her pocket and jammed it over her nose. The feet were intact, but some of the flesh had turned a mottled green color. Specks of pink varnish dotted some of the nails.

“Where’s the rest of the body?” she said, wondering aloud.

“Done a runner?” the constable said.

NORMALLY, DURING HIS WEEK AS the on-call senior investigating officer, Detective Superintendent Roy Grace, who was a few weeks shy of his forty-second birthday, wanted nothing more than a challenging homicide inquiry—a Gucci job, as he called them—that he could get his teeth into. One that would attract national press, and where he might have a chance to shine to his superiors. Most of the murders in the city of Brighton and Hove in recent months had been anything but. Lowlifes on lowlifes. A street drug dealer knifing another. Then a small-time drug dealer locked in the boot of a car that was then torched. Both of these, like most of that kind, were solved within days. A blindfolded monkey could have solved them in his view.

He knew it was wrong to be hoping for a good murder. But that’s what every homicide detective secretly, and sometimes not so secretly, was after. As he sat at his desk poring over the trial papers of a suspect he had arrested the previous year, a highly evil female killer, whose case was coming up at the Old Bailey next month, his phone rang.

He answered and listened.

Then hung up.

He should wish for things more often.

An hour later, accompanied by his colleague and mate Detective Inspector Glenn Branson—tall, black, and bald as a bowling ball—Grace drove up to the entrance to the West Brighton Recycling and Landfill Site. A marked police car as well as a white CSI van were pulled up beside a Portacabin that housed the site office, and there was a line of blue-and-white police tape across the road, with a uniformed officer standing in front with a clipboard.

Grace was pleased to see that the site was already secured. But the site manager, a burly harassed-looking woman in a yellow uniform, with the name Tracey Finden on her lapel badge, clearly was not. She strode over before they were even out of the car. As Grace rolled down the window, introduced himself, and showed her his warrant card, she replied, “You can’t do this, sir. We’ve got lorries and the general public coming and going all day. This is going to cause chaos.”

“I do understand that and we’ll be as quick as we can.”

“I thought your officers were looking for a bloody fire extinguisher.”

“They were—and still are. But now you have to understand this is a potential murder inquiry, and I’m treating this place as a crime scene.”

“For how long?”

“At this moment, I cannot tell you. It could be several days.”

“Several days? You’re joking?”

“I don’t think a dead human being is something to joke about.”

“It’s a pair of feet, right? That’s all.”

“That’s all?” Grace replied.

“They could have come from anywhere. You don’t seriously think whoever they belong to is wandering around the site looking for them, do you?”

“I don’t think anything at this stage,” he replied calmly. “Until I have more information. But I am going to need your help, Tracey. Is there CCTV here?”

“Yes, six cameras.”

“How long do you keep the recordings?”

“Two weeks before they’re automatically recorded over.”

“I’m going to need the memory cards. Also the details of all lorries that you’ve logged in the past month and any information you can give about them and their drivers.”

The two detectives climbed out of their car, wormed their way into their protective onesies, followed by overshoes, gloves, and face masks, then they signed the scene log and ducked under the tape.

“Yugggggh,” Branson said, wrinkling his nose at the stench.

Grace too had to swallow to stop himself from gagging.

Then they followed the long length of police tape that had been laid on the ground, guiding them in a straight line through the garbage toward a small knot of people in uniform, standing amid a cloud of buzzing flies.

Unsurprisingly, the home office pathologist, pedantic Groucho Marx look-alike Dr. Frazer Theobald, declined the opportunity to view the feet in situ at the waste site, requesting them to be recovered and taken to the mortuary. Sarah Dennison and her colleagues had completed their search by late afternoon and no other body parts had been found. This, both Grace and the pathologist agreed, indicated the place was more likely to be a deposition site than the crime scene itself.

Assuming it was a crime scene—and Grace was always wary of assumptions. Ass–u–me makes an ass out of u and me was something he frequently liked to remind people of. The feet could have come from a hospital mortuary, taken in a sick prank by medical students. Things like that had happened before. Or some sicko might have stolen them from an undertaker. A funeral director would be loath and probably too embarrassed to report such a theft.

He stood with DI Branson, gowned up in green protective clothing and white clogs in the Brighton and Hove City Mortuary, along with his wife, Cleo, the chief mortician. Or senior anatomical pathology technician as the role was now known. Darren Bourne, Cleo’s assistant, a coroner’s officer, a crime scene photographer, and the crime scene manager.

So far Dr. Frazer Theobald had established the feet were female, size seven, and at some time recently, presumably prior to being severed, had been pedicured. He wasn’t able to date how long they had been severed precisely, and his best estimate from the deterioration of the flesh, and the generation of blowfly larvae, was somewhere between three to five weeks. Tissue had been sent to the DNA lab with an urgent request. But it would be a couple of days before they would know if the owner of the feet was on the national database. The absolute priority for both detectives was to identify that person.

One thing the pathologist pointed out to Grace and Branson, with the aid of a microscope, was the surgical precision with which the leg bones had been sawed through. There were tiny, matching serrations on both feet. What that indicated to him was that the feet had not been hacked off in anger, or as some form of torture or revenge. They’d been removed by someone with medical skills, or possibly with butcher training. But beyond that the pathologist could offer no further suggestion at this stage. Nothing that would help answer the one burning question Roy Grace had right now.

Why?

At 6 p.m. that same evening, Grace sat in the Major Crime Suite conference room at the police HQ near Lewes, where his department was now based. Glenn Branson, DS Norman Potting, and several other members of his regular team, including a HOLMES—Home Office Large Major Enquiry System—analyst, an indexer, and a researcher sat around the oval table.

“This is the first briefing of Operation Podiatrist,” he read out from his notes. “The investigation into the discovery of a pair of female feet found at the West Brighton Domestic Waste Recycling and Landfill earlier today, which I am treating as a homicide investigation.”

Norman Potting began sniggering. Under Roy’s withering glare he raised an apologetic hand. “Sorry, Chief. Operation Podiatrist? Feet?”

Several others around the table also grinned.

No one could accuse the police computer, that randomly produced operation names, of not having a sense of humor.

Grace fought back a smirk too. “I don’t imagine the lady who’s missing them is finding it quite so funny.”

“I should think she’s hopping mad.” Potting chortled, looking around for appreciation, but all he saw were stony stares.

“One immediate line of inquiry,” Grace said, “is to see if there is anything similar out there on the database. We need to take a look on the Serious Crime Analysis Section system and also log everything we have so far on Op Podiatrist on it. Another will be to map out the exact area of the city all the refuse lorries collect from, and their delivery times to the site. One thing we do know is that it’s only refuse lorries that have access to the site. I want an outside inquiry team to list and interview all the refuse crews.”

Jack Alexander, a young DC, raised a hand. “Are you considering utilizing the volunteer search team for the other body parts?”

“Not at this stage, Jack,” Grace replied. “We have no idea where to begin. We don’t even know how far and wide the other parts could be scattered. If at all.”

“Seems to me,” DS Potting said, “that the victim’s giving us a right old runaround.”

IF IT WAS IN CYBERSPACE, Carol Jordan was convinced that DC Stacey Chen could find it. Barricaded from the rest of the room by an array of six monitors, Stacey’s fingers moved over her keyboard more quickly than the eye could follow. Nobody, Carol thought, was ever going to pick up her pin number shoulder-surfing at a cash machine. By the time they got back to the office, Stacey already had results from the scant information Carol had passed on to her.

She flicked a finger at the bottom right-hand screen.

“Out on a Limb is a specialized model agency.” Stacey caught Tony’s single raised eyebrow and gave him a long hard look. “Not that kind of specialized.”

Tony opened his eyes wide in a look of mock innocence. “I never said a word.”

“What kind of specialized?” Carol asked, cutting across the banter, eager to get to the point.

“I suppose you’d call it extremities,” Stacey said doubtfully. “They do hands and legs and feet, not whole bodies. Their clients sell shoes, tights, stockings, jewelry, that kind of thing. They’ve even got a selection of ears for modeling earrings.”

“I’d never thought about it. But I suppose it makes sense,” Carol said. “So is this Diane Flaherty on their books?”

“Not that I can see. But Dana Dupont is.”

Stacey tapped a trackpad and another screen rearranged its pixels. A shapely pair of calves appeared. Another tap and the image changed to elegant ankles and a pair of feet that appeared to be free from any of the myriad blemishes that most people’s feet reveal. No hard skin, no corns, no bunions, no dry skin, no fungal infections, no ingrowing toenails, no oddly shaped toes. Just a pair of immaculate, enviable feet that looked as if they’d never so much as bent a blade of grass.

“Anything on Diane Flaherty at all?” Carol asked.

“There’s a Diane Flaherty with an address in Bradfield. Self-employed, no criminal record, drives an Opel Corsa. Nobody else listed at her address.” Stacey woke up a third screen with an address and a driver’s license photo.

“That’s the dead woman,” Carol said. “We need to get a team round there, see what we can dig up. And I need to talk to somebody at Out on a Limb. You coming, Tony?”

He started, dragging his attention away from the pictures of Dana Dupont’s feet.

“Yeah,” he said absently. “And you need to get a list of people they send their catalogs to. If I was a foot fetishist, or I had a thing about ears or whatever, their catalogs would make me a happy bunny.”

“It takes all sorts,” Carol muttered.

“Otherwise we’d be out of a job,” Tony said, following in her wake.

THE PHYSICAL PREMISES OF OUT on a limb were a lot less glossy than their catalog implied. A narrow doorway on the Halifax road between a kebab takeaway and a cancer charity shop led up a steep staircase to a Spartan office where strenuously artificial air freshener battled with the smell of stale fat.

So far, the fat was winning.

The woman who had buzzed them up leaned against the desk in what might have passed for a provocative pose in someone twenty years younger and two stone lighter.

“You said on the phone you were the police?” she said, her voice surprisingly warm and almost seductive. “Can I see some ID?”

Carol produced her warrant card and Tony smiled. “I’m not actually a police officer.”

“Dr. Hill is a consultant,” Carol butted in before he could say anything unfortunate. “And you are?”

“Margot Maynard,” the woman said. “Out on a Limb is my business.”

“I’m afraid I have some disturbing news, Ms. Maynard. This morning, a woman’s body was found on the moors. In her bag she had a card belonging to one of your models.” Carol proffered her phone, where she’d taken a photo of Dana Dupont’s business card.

Margot Maynard paled and nodded. “That’s one of ours. Dana is our most successful foot model. You’re not telling me she’s dead?”

“We believe the dead woman is called Diane Flaherty. Do you know a Diane Flaherty?”

“Diane is Dana Dupont. It’s her working name. Oh my God, what’s happened? Are you sure it’s Diane? That can’t be right.”

Margot Maynard looked as if she might faint. Tony stepped forward and, taking her arm, led her to the office chair behind the desk.

“Can I get you anything? A glass of water?” Carol asked.

“No, I feel sick as it is. Diane? Dead? What happened? Was it a car crash? What?”

“I’m sorry to tell you that we’re treating Diane’s death as suspicious.”

“What does that mean?”

Tony squatted down beside her. “Diane was murdered, Margot. And the killer took her feet.”

She reared back in her chair. “Her feet? Oh my God, I always knew it would come to this one day.”

They drove back to the police station in glum silence, turning over what they’d learned.

After she’d calmed down, Margot Maynard had explained that the agency had been plagued over the years by an assortment of what she called “weirdos and perverts.” Men whose sexual fetishes focused on particular body parts. Feet, shoulders, even ears. The photographic studio where Out on a Limb did their catalog shots was across the landing from the office, and these strange, obsessive men haunted the street below, sometimes following the models after a photo shoot.

“Talk to the local cops,” Margot had said bitterly. “They must have a record of all the times we’ve called them because one of the girls has been harassed. You wouldn’t believe the disgusting things they’ve suggested to our models.”

Tony knew precisely the kind of thing those poor women would have been subjected to. “Was anyone ever arrested?”

“There were a couple of men, a few years ago now. Mostly they back off when the police caution them. They’ve generally got too much to lose. Wives, jobs, reputation.”

Carol’s phone rang and she took it on speaker.

“Stacey here, guv. I’ve thought I might take a quick look at the SCAS—”

“Serious Crime Analysis Section,” she muttered for Tony’s benefit.

“I know I’m rubbish with acronyms but I do know that one,” he said.

“If I could finish?” Stacey showed a sign of irritation.

“Go on,” Carol said. “SCAS?”

“There’s a report here from Sussex Police. They found a pair of feet on a rubbish tip in Brighton. It can’t be our victim’s feet, because they weren’t fresh.”

“But we don’t believe in coincidence at ReMIT,” Carol said. “Nice work, Stacey. Who’s the SIO?”

“DST Roy Grace.”

“I’ll call him as soon as I get back. When’s the autopsy?”

“They’ve bumped it up the list. They’re doing it this afternoon.”

Carol ended the call. “Weird. Maybe while I’m talking to Brighton and attending the autopsy you can check out the foot fetishists.”

Tony nodded. “I’ll take a look online. Most people with fantasies like these are pretty harmless. In my experience they tend not to be violent. They’re often socially inadequate, shy, poor at forming relationships. They want to kiss and touch, not possess. Elvis Presley was one. So was Thomas Hardy.”

Carol gave him a baffled look. “How do you know things like that?”

He shrugged. “Pub quizzes?”

Exasperated, she shook her head. “Go and find me an Elvis impersonator with homicidal tendencies, then.”

TONY WAS ACCUSTOMED TO SPENDING his days trying to empathize with the messy heads of murderers and rapists. But an afternoon on the trail of body part fetishists left him feeling more grimy than the average working day. There was something deeply unsettling about the transference of the sexual urge on to isolated bits of bodies. He found it dehumanizing and reductive. The more he read on forums and discussion groups, the clearer the picture became. Men, for it was almost invariably men, posturing to cover deep feelings of inadequacy. If you couldn’t handle a whole woman in her challenging complexity, how about her feet?

Or her hands?

Some even tried to rationalize it as a form of safe sex. Tony, who was used to a wide range of extraordinary rationalizations among serial offenders, thought that was right out there on the edge of daft, a technical term he used only when talking to Carol.

Whenever he came across someone who seemed to him to lean toward more salacious tendencies, he punted their details across to Stacey who performed her black arts to track down their location. Everybody who worked in the ReMIT team knew that Stacey had ways and means that went beyond the narrow confines of the law. But nobody cared because she knew how to cover her tracks and the intel she produced was worth more to them than being on their best behavior. Raiding people’s privacy for intel that could lead to evidence was a small transgression compared with murder and rape.

By the end of the afternoon, Stacey had run checks on half a dozen possibles, and they were both growing weary of their subjects’ apparent respectability outside the murky world of online fetishists. But as Tony browsed yet another chat room, Stacey abruptly called his name.

“I’m pinging something across to you.”

Tony glanced at the info sheet Stacey had sent, then sat up straight in his chair as he absorbed the key points.

Leyton Gray was a reflexologist based in Bradfield. A man whose profession necessitated the touching and manipulation of feet. A perfectly respectable calling, provided you weren’t also spending hours of your free time online looking at feet and talking to other people whose sexual urges were awakened by them.

But there was more.

One of his clients had complained to the police about his behavior. In her statement, Jane Blackshaw said he’d appeared to become sexually aroused while supposedly massaging her feet to treat a problem with irritable bowel syndrome. He’d left the room in the middle of her treatment and returned a few minutes later, flushed and out of breath. Stacey had tracked down a photograph of Jane Blackshaw, who was an unexceptional-looking woman in her early twenties.

Leyton Gray had been interviewed and had denied that anything inappropriate had taken place. He described Jane Blackshaw as an attention seeker and pointed out none of his other clients had ever complained either to his professional body or to the police. It was his word against hers. So the file was marked No Further Action.

But the clincher as far as Tony was concerned was the final paragraph in Stacey’s report. It had been snipped from the program of a complimentary therapy festival in Brighton.

“Returning by popular request, Leyton Gray will be talking about new developments in reflexology techniques. Leyton has been a regular speaker at our events and his sessions are always sold out. Book early to avoid disappointment.”

Leyton Gray, it appeared, was no stranger to the town where a pair of feet had turned up on the rubbish tip.

“HAPPY FEET. REMEMBER THAT MOVIE?” Glenn Branson said breezily as he entered Roy Grace’s office shortly after 9 p.m., carrying two mugs of coffee.

More breezily than he or his boss felt.

Grace frowned. “No, I don’t.”

“It was brilliant. Animated. With penguins dancing.”

“Lovely,” Grace said, distractedly.

“Awesome cast. Robin Williams, Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman. Your kid would like it.”

“Noah’s eight months old.”

“Yeah, maybe wait a few years.” He paused, then pulled up a chair in front of Grace’s desk, turned it around and sat, resting his hands on the back. “I’ve had a thought.”

Grace opened his hands, expansively. “I’m all ears.”

“Forensic gait analysis. That specialist guy, Haydn Kelly, we’ve used on previous cases. Maybe we should bring him in. He knows more about feet than anyone on the planet, and he has a massive database. Worth a shot?”

“Good thinking, if he’s around.”

Kelly had developed software that, from a single footprint, could enable someone to be picked out in a crowd from his or her gait. Everyone walked in a unique way; every human being’s gait was as unique as their DNA.

“Call him and see if he’s in the country and available to come down. I know he’s abroad a lot.”

His phone rang.

“Roy Grace,” he answered.

“Detective Superintendent Grace? This is DCI Carol Jordan of the Northern Regional Major Incident Team.”

A strong, pleasant, if a tad formal, northern voice.

And the name rang a bell.

“Was it you involved with the Jennifer Maidment case?”

“I was, yes.”

“That’s where I know your name from. How can I help you?”

“Your inquiry team entered a pair of feet on SCAS. We have a female body up here missing her feet, and although we’ve had a man in for questioning, we didn’t have enough evidence to hold him. So any supporting info would be helpful.”

He felt a beat of excitement and gave her all the information he had, informing her that tissue had been sent to the lab for fast-track DNA analysis.

“From what I’ve read on SCAS, I’m pretty sure we won’t get a DNA match to your victim. Our body here is fresh. Your feet sound a few weeks old, which doesn’t tally with our time of death estimates or last-seen evidence.”

“They are old. I can’t give you a precise date. About two to three weeks is our pathologist’s educated guess from the generations of insect larvae.”

“Those serration marks you’ve just described interest me,” she said. “Could you send me photographs? If we could establish whether the same, or a similar instrument has been used to sever both pairs of feet, we might make progress.”

“I’ll have them to you in a few minutes.”

Carol Jordan thanked him and told him she would call back as soon as she had confirmation, one way or the other.

Ending the call, he turned to Glenn Branson. “You’re a movie buff. What films can you think of where people have had their feet severed?”

“Misery. In the book the batty woman chain-sawed off one of his legs and cauterized it with a blowtorch. But they tamed it down in the film and she just shattered his legs with a sledgehammer.”

“Anything more helpful?”

He was feeling tired and fractious.

Branson yawned. “There was some horror movie I saw years ago, but I can’t remember the title. They hacked this guy’s legs off and fed them to a pig in front of him.”

“It had a happy ending?”

“Not exactly. They fed the rest of him to the pig, too.”

“Let me guess, then they ate the pig?”

“You saw it, boss?”

AT 7 A.M., GRACE WAS BACK in the CID HQ for the daily management meeting, prior to the next briefing on Operation Podiatrist. Just as he was entering the room, accompanied by Glenn Branson, his phone rang. Answering it, he heard the excited voice of the duty inspector, Ken “Panicking” Anakin.

“Roy, something that might be of interest to your current inquiry. A uniform crew got called to a firm of undertakers on the Lewes Road at 2 a.m., in response to an alarm and reports of lights on in the premises. It sounds like someone, maybe a drunk, broke in and disturbed some of the bodies in coffins prepared for funerals today. There’s one in particular that might be significant. A young deceased woman in her early twenties, whose feet are missing.”

“Can you give me the name and address?”

Anakin provided him the details and he jotted it down. “Is anyone there now?”

“The keyholder and proprietor. Mr. James Houlihan is quite upset.”

“Meet me there in fifteen minutes,” Grace said.

He brought Branson up to speed as they hurried out to the car park and into his unmarked Ford Mondeo, then with the DI reaching forward and switching on the blue lights and siren, ripped the five miles into central Brighton. Heading past the row of funeral directors’ premises along Lewes Road, they slowed. A short distance along they saw a neat-looking building, with the sign announcing HOULIHAN AND SONS, ESTABLISHED 1868. There were crimson curtains in the windows either side of a grand front door, and a smaller sign with an arrow that indicated parking in the rear.

The two detectives stopped right outside and walked swiftly toward the front door. As they reached it and Grace rang the bell, a marked police car drew up behind theirs. Ken Anakin, wearing his inspector’s braided cap, and a yellow high-viz over his uniform, looking as ever as if the world was going to end in five minutes, hurried over to join them.

The door was opened by a portly, balding man in his late fifties, soberly dressed in a charcoal suit and black tie and wearing unfashionably large glasses. He looked agitated.

“Thank you for coming; this is all quite distressing,” he said, in a mournful voice honed and toned by a lifetime of consoling loved ones and advising them on the decorum of funerals. It was the voice of a master salesman of quality coffins, and all the accoutrements for the funeral of a lifetime you had always promised yourself.

The two detectives introduced themselves and showed him their warrant cards, which he barely glanced at.

“Come in, please. What am I going to say to all my clients? What a disaster. Who would do such a thing?”

Grace and Branson, accompanied by the uniformed inspector, entered a small reception area. It had a deep pile carpet, ornate vases of flowers that looked too real to be real, and framed testimonials on the walls. Houlihan led them on through a door, along a corridor lit with sconces adorned by pink tasseled shades. He stopped outside a closed door.

“Our viewing room is there,” he pointed. “We call it the chapel of rest. That has not been violated, fortunately.”

It was strange, Grace thought; he didn’t mind the mortuary, and postmortems never bothered him, but there was something about funeral homes that gave him the heebie-jeebies. He could see Branson looking uncomfortable, too.

The proprietor opened a door a short distance on, pressed some switches, and led them into a large workspace. Grace smelled glue, varnish, and a strong reek of disinfectant. He heard the click-whirr of a refrigerator, and a steady tick . . . tick . . . tick . . . of a clock or a meter of some kind. He saw a row of health and safety notices taped to one wall, and a drinking water dispenser nearby. Several coffins, some plain, others more ornate, rested on metal trestles, with their lids lying randomly on the floor beside them. In the far corner of the room was a tiled alcove. There, a cadaver lay on a steel tray beneath a white cover, with one darkened, shriveled foot protruding. A large glass container filled with what looked like pink embalming fluid sat on a table, amid several neatly laid out surgical instruments and a long rubber tube.

“It is this one over here, gentlemen,” Houlihan said.

Grace walked past several coffins.

He saw a tiny old lady in one, her face so white it blended, ghostlike, with her hair color. The undertaker had stopped beside a plain pine coffin. Lying inside, between the cream, quilted satin sides, wearing a plain shroud, was a very attractive young woman, with flowing, titian red hair.

Pulling out a pair of protective surgical gloves from his pocket, he snapped them on, then with the undertaker’s nodded assent, he lifted away the shroud completely. Everything else of her beautiful and well-endowed body was intact. Crude stitches right down her midriff showed she’d had a postmortem, and further marks were visible at the start of her hairline.

But her feet were missing.

They’d been severed at the ankles by an instrument that both detectives could see, with their naked eyes, had a serrated blade.

A pile of what was obviously her clothing lay alongside the coffin so she could be dressed for the funeral.

He found his phone and snapped several close-up photographs of the leg stumps. He e-mailed them to the crime scene manager and asked him to send them straight to DCI Carol Jordan.

“What can you tell us about this young lady, and the circumstances,” he asked Houlihan, as he watched the e-mail sending on his screen.

The undertaker led them through to his small, overly cozy and plush office, Grace dropping his gloves in a trash can on the way. There were more flowers on display, pictures of a smiling woman, presumably Houlihan’s wife and two small girls, also happy, and a stack of leather-bound books, which Grace presumed contained photographs of coffins, urns, and other funeral accoutrements. They sat in red leather armchairs in front of his desk, while Houlihan settled on the far side and glanced down at some notes.

“Her name is Sarah O’Hara, twenty-three, a waitress in Brighton, who was trying to become a fashion model. Tragically broke her neck when her boyfriend crashed his motorcycle.”

“What about the break-in during the night?” Glenn Branson asked.

“When I first got here to deal with the alarm, and everything, I thought it was vandals. Drunks. Kids. We do get a bit of trouble here in this area. I thought maybe they’d just been fooling around with the coffins.” He broke off for an instant. “How rude of me, I’ve not offered you gentlemen anything. Tea, coffee?”

“I’m fine, thanks,” Grace said.

Branson smiled at him. “I’m good.”

“But the thing is after finding this terrible thing, this dreadful desecration of this poor young lady’s body, I’ve begun to change my mind.” Houlihan cradled his head in his hands and fell silent for some moments. “How am I going to tell her family? What am I going to say? This will ruin my business. One hundred and forty-nine years my family has run this company, and we’ve never had a problem, ever. We were planning big celebrations for next year. Now will we even be in business?”

“I’m sure there’ll be ways through this for you. But if we could just focus for now on establishing the facts we need.”

“Of course.”

Grace pulled out his notebook. “You don’t believe it was vandals, you said? What are your reasons for that?”

“I was called out because the alarm was ringing. But I’m not the first keyholder contact. That is my embalmer, Rodney Tidy. I have a deal with him. I pay him a little bit of cash to come out if the alarm goes off. It’s worth it not to have a disturbed night. Usually it’s something silly, mice chewing through the wire, or a spider’s web across a sensor that’s set it off—that sort of thing.”

“Mr. Tidy’s away, is he?” Branson asked.

“No, he is not. So this is the strange thing. I got telephoned by the alarm company because they said they could not get an answer from Rodney.”

“This was around 2 a.m.?” Grace asked.

Houlihan nodded.

“Late for someone to be out on a midweek night,” Branson commented.

“Extremely unusual behavior for him.”

“What do you know about him?” Grace asked.

“He’s a bit of an oddball. But then again, embalming isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, so to speak. He’s somewhat of a loner. Not married and he really does not have good social skills.”

“You haven’t been to check up on his address, to see if he’s ill or anything?” Ken Anakin asked.

“I did. About 4 a.m. I waited here just to ensure whoever had done this didn’t come back, but I was careful not to touch anything, as I was instructed by the officers who attended. Then I went to his address over in Portslade, but I couldn’t find his house.”

Grace carefully watched the man’s face and his body language. It wasn’t surprising he was in an agitated state, but it seemed there was something the undertaker was holding back.

“Couldn’t find it?”

“I thought I must have written it down wrong. But when I got back here and checked it, I had it down correctly.”

Grace let it go for a moment. “How many people do you employ here?”

“Just a few. We are a real family business. My wife, Gudrun, my son, Kevin, his wife, Gemma, my bookkeeper—her name’s Eleanor Walker—and Rodney Tidy.”

“This may be a difficult question for you to answer,” Grace said, continuing to watch him carefully. “Could this have been done by a member of your staff.”

Houlihan leaned forward, lowered his voice as if scared he might be overheard, and said, “There is only one person who could possibly have done this. Actually, there is something odd. When I was called here, because the alarm was ringing, the first thing I did was switch it off. Then I went around the entire premises with the two police officers and we couldn’t find any unlocked outside doors, or open or broken windows.”

“Meaning someone either had a door key or picked a lock?” Grace said.

“After the officers left, I checked the alarm. I know a bit about technology. On the control panel you can access the history of when it has been switched on and off.” He raised a finger in the air, conspiratorially. “Here’s the strange thing: The alarm was switched off at 1:10 a.m. this morning, a full fifty minutes before it was set off.”

“Someone came in, switched the alarm off, did the damage, perhaps including sawing off the feet, then activated the alarm and left. Is that what you’re saying?” Glenn Branson asked.

“Either activated the alarm accidentally, or perhaps deliberately to make it look like there had been a break-in.”

“What time is Rodney Tidy due in for work?” Grace asked.

Houlihan checked his ornate antique watch. “He should have been in over an hour ago. We start early here, because sometimes relatives or partners want to come in on the morning of a funeral to view their loved one just one more time before they are interred or cremated.”

“Did you ever check on Rodney Tidy’s address previously?” Grace asked.

“Never had any reason too. He had excellent references when he applied for the job. Like I said, he’s an oddball, but always a hard worker.”

Grace looked at Branson. “I think we should go and pay Rodney Tidy a visit.”

Houlihan provided them the address.

“I know roughly where that is,” Branson said.

“In the meantime, I’d appreciate you not touching anything in the room where the coffins and the bodies are,” Grace said. “We’re going to need to seal your premises.”

“Seal them?”

“I’m afraid so. This is potentially connected to a murder inquiry, so I’m declaring it a crime scene.”

“But I’ve got funerals today, Detective.”

“And I have a murdered young woman who may be connected to this.”

“At least let me ship the bodies out that I have here.”

“I’m sorry, I can’t allow anything to be moved. But what we’ll do is check those due for funerals today first, and see if we can get them released, although I can’t promise anything at this stage.”

“I can’t tell six families there’s going to be no funeral today.”

“I’m sorry, you’ll have to. I’m sure the dead bodies won’t mind waiting.”

Instantly he regretted making such an insensitive remark.

“This is outrageous. I want to speak to your superior, at once.”

“His name is Assistant Chief Constable Cassian Pewe. Good luck with him, sir.”

The three police officers left the building. Grace asked Anakin to remain until a scene guard was in place and to ensure Houlihan followed instructions.

Moments later Grace and Branson approached their car.

“You drive, Glenn,” he said. “I need to make some calls.”

“Okay, boss.”

“And no jokes about legging it?”

“Absolutely not. I’d hate to do what you just did and put my foot in it.”

CAROL LOOKED OVER TONY’S SHOULDER.

He’d logged into what seemed to be the most popular foot fetishist forum as Doctor Sole and was browsing the comments. There seemed to be three or four others online, swapping resources for podiatric porn.

“I’ve just had Roy Grace on from Brighton,” she said, filling him in on the raid at the undertaker’s. “The embalmer seems to be on the missing list. Name of Rodney Tidy.”

“Nobody uses their real names on here,” Tony said. “But an embalmer would fit the bill. He’d have access to bodies. Most funerals are closed-coffin affairs, so he could help himself to the best feet after the lid was screwed down and nobody would be any the wiser. He could have been doing this for years.”

“So why mess it up last night? Why set off the alarm and leave the coffin open so anyone could see what he’d done?” she asked.

“Maybe he didn’t,” Tony said. “Maybe it wasn’t down to him. Maybe Rodney did what half the world seems to do on the Internet these days.”

She frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Maybe he made a date online. He could have met someone in a chat room or a forum who shares his fetish. Not just lovely feet, but dead feet. Who knows? Maybe there’s a secret place on the darknet. A Grindr for fetishists. Footr. Archr.”

Carol groaned. “Make it stop. Okay, supposing you’re right, what do you think might have happened?”

“Tidy could have invited him back to the undertaker’s to show him round. Perhaps they’d made a pact to take a pair of feet together. Tidy insists they have to leave after they’ve done one. His new friend doesn’t agree and bursts back inside, setting off the alarm.” He shrugged one shoulder. “It does feel to me like somebody else’s presence precipitated a different set of behaviors from Tidy.” He raised his voice. “Stacey? That analysis you were doing of the chat rooms? Did you find anybody posting about embalmed feet?”

The sound of fingers whisking over keys could be heard. Then, from behind the bank of monitors, Stacey said, “About a dozen.”

“Can you find out if any of them is Rodney Tidy?” Carol asked.

Before Stacey could respond, Carol’s phone gave its text alert.

“Message from Roy Grace,” she muttered. “They can’t trace Rodney Tidy. The address he gave his employer doesn’t exist. He could be anywhere.”

“He uses the site you’re on right now,” Stacey said. “His handle is Cold Feet. He was last on two days ago, talking about a beautiful specimen who had walked into his world. He seems most friendly with Arch Lover, but I can’t track his ID. He comes on through a proxy server in Belarus.”

Carol paced back and forth across the incident room. “We know Leyton Gray goes to Brighton. And we know he’s been accused of behavior that amounts to foot fetishism. Am I reaching to think there might be a connection? Can we put them together? Do we know where Gray stays when he’s there?”

Stacey rolled her eyes. “We had him in here for three hours. What do you think?”

“I think you’ve already accessed his credit cards and his Internet history,” Tony said.

Stacey tutted. “You should know me better than that. A teenage boy could manage that. I’ve also mirrored his phone. So I can tell you there’s no record of credit card payments to any hotel or B&B in Brighton. But I can also tell you that three months ago he googled directions to an address in Kemptown. And he’s referenced it twice since.”

Carol’s phone pinged.

“There you go, boss. It might be worth Superintendent Grace getting his team round there.”

AN HOUR LATER, ROY GRACE and Glenn Branson drove their plain Ford Escape slowly past a row of four-story Regency terraced houses, with railed-off basements, just off the seafront, all of them badly in need of a lick of paint. In Victorian times each would have been a single dwelling, with servants quartered down in the basements and up on the attic floors. But now they’d been broken up into flats and bedsits.

“Number fourteen, boss,” Glenn Branson said, pointing through the side window.

Grace nodded and carried on a short distance, then pulled into an empty space behind a marked police car and climbed out in the blustery, salty wind.

Four uniformed officers in the marked car climbed out, also: the duty inspector at John Street police station, Ken “Panicking” Anakin, and three PCs, two male and one female.

One of the males was a man-mountain.

Anakin’s nickname was well deserved. He panicked about pretty much everything. He approached Roy and Glenn with a twitchy smile. “Good to see you both.”

“And you, Ken.”

Anakin unfolded a large-scale map of the area, struggling to hold it steady in the gusting wind, and the three of them peered at it.

“Roy, this is the street behind.” He ran a finger along. “Mews garages, but behind them are the rear gardens of these houses, so it could be an escape route. It’s the basement flat, right?”

“That’s the information I have; 14B sounds like a basement address,” Grace replied.

“I think we should cover the rear,” Anakin said.

Anakin dispatched two of the uniformed officers, then, accompanied by the man-mountain, followed the detectives up to the front and down the shabby basement steps, past the dustbins. In contrast to the rest of the building, the front door to the basement flat was well presented, recently painted a gloss white and with polished brass letters.

14B.

There was a modern Entryphone system with CCTV.

Grace pressed the bell.

They heard a buzz from the interior, but there was no response. After a brief pause, he tried again.

Still no response.

Ken Anakin radioed the officers he’d dispatched to the rear, asking if they could see into the flat. After a minute his radio crackled into life.

The woman PC spoke, “Sir, it’s hard to see in because there are no lights on and it’s dark. But it looks like there’s a man in an armchair. We’ve rapped on the window a couple of times, but he’s not reacted. I think he might be a G5.”

That was the police terminology in Brighton for a sudden death.

Anakin thanked her and relayed the information to Grace and Branson.

“Push the door in,” Grace said.

“I’ve got a bosher in the car,” the man-mountain said.

“May not need it.”

Branson braced himself, then kicked out hard with his size eleven boot, straight below the keyhole. With a splintering crack the door swung open, part of the frame going with it, the bottom of the door sweeping over a pile of mail that lay on the mat.

Grace breathed in a rank smell.

Not the smell of death that he’d been expecting; this was more a laboratory smell.

Preservatives. Formalin?

He entered first, followed by Glenn Branson, Anakin, and the man-mountain. They were in a narrow but smart hallway, with a red carpet, and recently painted cream walls, hung with professionally framed photographs of feet.

Ladies’ feet.

Extremely beautiful feet.

The toes of one were curled around a snake. A lighted cigarette was held between two toes of another. As they walked toward the far end of the hall, the rank smell grew stronger.

Grace walked through an open door at the far end, into a large, elegantly furnished living room, and froze.

Directly in front of him, seated in an armchair with his back to the window, sat a man, staring at him, a hand resting on each arm of the chair.

Motionless.

He was in his early fifties and had the air of a provincial bank manager. Short, neat, graying hair. A gray pin-striped suit, a pale gray shirt, and one of those rather naff matching tie and pocket handkerchiefs, both in purple. All that was missing were his shoes and there was a good reason for that.

His feet were missing too.

His legs ended just below the bottoms of his trousers, in two blackened, cauterized stumps. Darkened bloodstains lay on the carpet beneath them. In the man’s slowly blinking eyes, Grace could see a vision of hell.

He could see something else too, as his eyes became increasingly accustomed to the dimness in here. One entire wall of the room was full of rows of glassed-in shelving, like in a museum. Lined along each row of shelves were perfectly preserved human feet.

“Rodney Tidy?” Grace asked.

“Help . . . me.”

The voice was weak and parched, more a faint croak.

Grace ran forward, and it took him only moments to realize why the man was motionless.

Arms, hands, the back of the head, shoulders, and the entire spine were all bonded to the chair.

With superglue.

LEYTON GRAY, ACCOMPANIED BY HIS solicitor, an intensely serious woman in her early thirties, sat opposite Carol Jordan and another colleague in the small, starkly furnished interview room.

For the benefit of the CCTV recording Jordan announced, “DCI Carol Jordan and DS Paula McIntyre interviewing Leyton Gray under caution in the presence of his solicitor, Susan Ansell. The time is 10:05 a.m., Wednesday, July twelfth.”

Then she leaned forward. “Mr. Gray, can you tell us your relationship with Mr. Rodney Tidy?

“Rivals. We’ve always been rivals.”

Ignoring his solicitor’s signals for him to keep quiet, he went on.

“I had to stop him. I had to, somehow. He always beat me to the best feet. He just always did. He told me once how much he loved to stare at feet. That he loved nothing more than to sit in a room and look at his latest trophies. So I obliged him. I’ve stopped him from ever getting to feet ahead of me again, and he gets his dream, to sit and look at feet. Did you see his own up there? They’re not exactly beautiful, but I thought it would be a nice touch. That is, of course, if he’s smart enough to understand my signal. Rodney, old boy, you’ve been de-feeted.”