Need You Dead

51 Sunday 24 April

‘The time is 4.30 p.m., Sunday, April 24th, this is the fifth briefing of Operation Bantam,’ Guy Batchelor said. Roy Grace, seated beside him in the conference room, was happy to let him continue in his deputy SIO role.

Batchelor brought the team up to speed on the developments of the day, regarding the interview with Seymour Darling, the results on the semen taken from Lorna Belling, and the new information that had come to light that she appeared to have had a lot of contact with a man they believed to be Kipp Brown. So far, he said, Brown did not appear on their radar, and had no history or form.

DI Dull, hunched over his tablet, raised a hand. ‘Guy?’

‘Go ahead, Donald,’ he said.

Dull had a slow, monotone voice. As he spoke, Roy Grace wondered, privately, if he wouldn’t be better employed providing sleep therapy to insomniacs. After thirty seconds he was ready to nod off.

‘You can see from my spreadsheet,’ Dull droned, pointing at a whiteboard to which a series of graphs were pinned, with highlights in orange, green and purple, ‘I’ve put all the details about Kipp Brown that the search engines would provide. You’ll appreciate the time constraints, so there may be omissions. I’ve made a matrix of his life on a spreadsheet — taking into account background, schooling, business and social interests, history of relationships. Then I’ve compared them to known data on six convicted criminals in related fields, as I thought it might give us some helpful insights.’

Grace stared at the man, listening intently and a tad impatiently. Dull seemed to be assuming the role of amateur psychological profiler. But fair play if he came up with something of interest.

Dull turned to another whiteboard, which had seven different graph plots on it. Six of them converged on several points. The seventh, in a thicker, black line, was well clear of the rest.

‘The six different coloured lines that you can see here,’ Dull said, standing up and pointing with a red dot from a laser pen, ‘represent six individual convicted murderers. I’ve created spreadsheets on each of them, drawing on socio-economic backgrounds, offending histories, age and a number of other significant factors. The wider black line is a plot of Kipp Brown, from what I’ve been able to ascertain about him from a trawl through search engines and his LinkedIn profile. As you can see, his journey is completely different.’

Grace, a tad baffled, frowned. ‘And your conclusion is what, exactly, Donald?’

‘Well, sir, he doesn’t fit any of these profiles of a murderer.’

‘So we can safely ignore him?’ Grace was trying hard to mask his scepticism.

‘No, I wouldn’t say that exactly, sir.’

‘OK, what would you say?’

‘Well,’ he replied, ponderously, ‘Kipp Brown is a person who could well slip under our net if we were to run a profiling matrix.’

Just what planet did Cassian Pewe find this guy on, Grace wondered, still unsure what the hell he was talking about. But, mindful that with Pewe’s unpredictable machinations Donald Dull could end up being his boss in the near future, he kept his calm. ‘So if I understand correctly, Donald, Kipp Brown is a potential suspect, albeit from left field?’

‘You could interpret the data that way, sir, yes. But I wouldn’t rely on it.’

‘So is there something in your findings we can rely on?’

Norman Potting raised a hand. ‘Yes, chief, getting a good mortgage deal from this man!’

He paused for a moment to look around but no one reacted.

‘Trust Kipp!’ Potting continued. ‘He says it, so it must be true.’

‘Thank you, Norman,’ Grace said. ‘If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years it’s when someone tells you that you can trust them, it usually means you can’t.’

‘So,’ Batchelor said, ‘at this moment we have three possible suspects: Corin Belling; Seymour Darling; and now Kipp Brown. To recap on the evidence to date: we have fingerprint and DNA confirmation that Lorna’s late husband, Corin, who had a history of abuse against her, was in the flat at some point prior to her death. We also know that he released six tiny puppies she had been rearing out onto the street, just to get at her. That’s a pretty good indicator of the state of his mind.’

He looked around the room, then continued. ‘We have Seymour Darling, extremely aggrieved about being screwed trying to purchase her car. He blames her, but might well be a victim of cyber fraud. And now we have in the frame Kipp Brown, a successful Brighton businessman — and a married man. What is his contact with our victim? And we still cannot rule out suicide, given the distressing history of her marital relationship.’

Jon Exton raised a hand, addressing Batchelor. ‘What has this character, Brown, had to say, Guy?’

Grace had been looking at Exton carefully, several times, during this meeting. As he had noticed last week, the normally neatly dressed detective’s hair was untidy, he was unshaven, and his complexion was sallow. He would have another quiet word with him later, he decided, concerned for him.

‘We haven’t talked to him yet, Jon. I’m intending to talk to him tomorrow.’

Batchelor then ran through the lines of enquiry to date. The most important at this time were the outside enquiry teams; they were interviewing everyone who lived in Vallance Mansions, as well as the tradesmen visiting the apartment building; checking for CCTV in the surrounding area, and talking to all the neighbours; checking vehicle movements with the nearest ANPR — Automatic Numberplate Recognition devices — to the area immediately around Vallance Mansions; and finding and interviewing all Lorna Belling’s friends, relatives, clients and associates, and continuing to build the association chart for her — which was pinned up on the fourth whiteboard. He would hold a full press conference in the morning, at which he would appeal to the Argus and the local media in particular to put out a request to the public for any sightings of anyone unfamiliar in the vicinity of Vallance Mansions on the afternoon and evening of Wednesday, April 20th.

Fifty minutes later the meeting was terminated. Guy Batchelor told them the next briefing would be tomorrow morning.

He went back to his office, sat down at his desk, pulled up the information he had on Kipp Brown, which included the distinctive personalized registration number of his Porsche, then put in a request for an ANPR plot on the movements of this car during the past week.

Ten minutes later he had the information. Every weekday, the car left Brown’s residence in Dyke Road Avenue, Hove, headed to Kemp Town, then turned back on itself, heading west across the city towards where the offices of Kipp Brown Financial Services were located. He frowned. Why did Brown dogleg across the city to get to work? Did he drop someone off en route?’

He looked back at the information Donald Dull had come up with on Brown, and then the penny dropped.