Need You Dead

16 Wednesday 20 April

Roy Grace looked guiltily at his watch and thought, grimly, how true that expression was about the road to hell being paved with good intentions. It was 8.30 p.m. Yet here he was once again, in his office long past when he should have gone home. Sipping cold coffee, fretting about a crucial piece of evidence and waiting for a call from a Crown Prosecution lawyer to discuss it.

He took a moment out to schedule a timed Tweet, a ‘Happy Birthday’ greeting to DC Jack Alexander, who would be twenty-six tomorrow, then focused back on his work.

In a couple of weeks he had to go to the Old Bailey, the Central Criminal Court in London, for a plea hearing regarding his most recent case, a female sociopath — in his view — called Jodie Bentley, who was currently on remand in London’s Bronzefield Prison. He had strong evidence that she had murdered a lover and then her husband, but he was pretty certain her death toll went beyond that. He still had hours of paperwork to read through. The barrister she’d hired, Richard Charwell, was a man he’d come up against before. Charwell had once ridiculed him in court for taking a piece of evidence in a murder trial — a shoe — to a medium. Although Grace had got the better of him under cross-examination in the witness box, the mud had stuck — and the killer had very nearly walked.

A canny, smart and manipulative lawyer, Charwell knew how to play a jury better than anyone Grace had encountered in his entire career. He had to make absolutely sure their prosecution case was belt and braces. This barrister was a man who could limbo dance a client below the smallest gap in a cell door.

Although the evidence against Jodie Bentley was strong, and the sometimes tricky Crown Prosecution Service had agreed, quickly, to bring a murder charge against her, it wasn’t watertight. There were plenty of holes for a smart barrister like Charwell to drive a coach and horses through. Grace knew this woman was guilty as hell. He was confident that taking the witness stand in front of a sensible jury, he could say enough to convince them beyond reasonable doubt. And yet he was painfully aware that a defence barrister’s job was to sow that doubt. For them it was a game. For the police it was the difference between a killer being put behind bars, or being free to roam the streets and kill again.

But juries were unpredictable, and never more so than now, when there was a lot of anti-police and anti-establishment sentiment. Some of it had been fostered by politicians, and some by the police themselves, after a series of bungled high-profile prosecutions of celebrities. He had no way of knowing how Charwell would play things in a future trial. His one certainty was that his immediate boss, Assistant Chief Constable Cassian Pewe, would be watching like a hawk, ready to pounce on him for the way he had handled the case if it went badly, but of course taking the credit if it went well.

Grace was gloomily aware of not being a magician. He couldn’t always make things happen the way he wanted them to. All he could do was his best. To try to lock up the killers who took people’s lives. He despised murderers with all his heart and soul. A thief could pay back some or all of what they had taken. But a murderer could never undo what he — or she — had done. And murderers didn’t just destroy the lives of the victims, they destroyed the lives of all their victims’ loved ones, too. For ever.

In general, homicide detection rates in the UK were high. Year on year, around eighty-five per cent of killers were caught. That compared, he knew, to just fifty-five per cent in America. But he would never be complacent. There had been a room at the old CID HQ, in Sussex House, occupied by the cold case squad, who carried out continual reviews on unsolved murders.

For Roy Grace, ‘unsolved’ was a euphemism for failure. There were thirty unresolved murders in the counties of East and West Sussex. Thirty, that was, of which the police were aware. How many more people were murdered every year that the police never found out about, was something never far from his thoughts.

Homicide investigations were never closed. Not so long as there was anyone still alive who was connected to the victim. And in some cases, beyond even that.

When Roy Grace had first joined the Major Crime Branch, he had made a pledge to himself. He was going to raise that bar from eighty-five per cent of homicides solved to as close as possible to one hundred per cent.

In his view, every killer made one mistake. Somewhere.

You just had to find it.