Not Dead Yet

103

On a whiteboard in the Conference Room of the Major Crime Suite was a blow-up of Drayton Wheeler’s passport photograph.

‘The time is 8.30 a.m., Wednesday, June the fifteenth. This is the twenty-first briefing of Operation Icon,’ Roy Grace said to his team, which this morning included DI Tingley, Haydn Kelly, and Ray Packham from the High Tech Crime Unit. ‘We have developments that are leading me to believe Operation Icon may have links to the real-life icon who is currently here in Brighton shooting a movie – Gaia.’

He registered the immediate highly focused attention he had from every single member of his team. Then he relayed the events of last night, his viewing of the Gaia video, and his search on the internet this morning. He looked at DC Reeves. ‘Emma, I found the winning bid amount that was paid for the suit from the eBay site, but it would not give me any details about the bidders. We need to find that out very urgently. I’m tasking you to contact eBay and find out the names of all the people involved in that auction. As soon as you have them I want them checked against all databases. In particular, we need to find the underbidder who didn’t get it.’

‘Yes, sir,’ she said.

He turned to Ray Packham. No one could look less like a computer geek than the High Tech Crime Unit analyst, but his mastery of technology was better than anyone Grace had ever met. ‘You’ve looked yourself, Ray, and not been able to find it either?’

‘No, chief – but eBay should be able to come up with the information pretty quickly.’

‘Good. And you have a result for us on the email sent on Monday night?’

‘I do,’ he said proudly. ‘We’ve looked at the IP address on it, and I’ve got some good news. It’s a fixed IP registered at the internet café – Café Conneckted in Trafalgar Street. It was sent from there at 8.46 p.m. Monday night.’

‘You’re a genius!’

‘I know,’ Packham said, with a tongue-in-cheek grin.

Grace pointed at Drayton Wheeler’s passport photograph on the whiteboard. ‘The man’s body has not yet been formally identified, but we are satisfied that this is the man crushed to death by the chandelier last night.’ Grace then listed the receipts found in his hotel room. ‘The Café Conneckted receipt puts Wheeler in that café on Monday, the day the email was sent – we need to find out what time he was there. Norman, I want you to be there at 10 a.m. when it opens.’

Potting nodded. ‘Yes, chief.’

‘If we can establish Wheeler was there at 8.46 p.m. on Monday, that could be good news. If he wasn’t there at that time, we need to know who was. Hopefully you can get a result from the CCTV.’

‘Leave it with me.’

Grace glanced at his notes. ‘SOCO, who have been working through the night, reported their findings to me a short while ago. Mercuric chloride is an acid that apparently can be synthesized very easily from mercury, obtained from thermometers, sulphuric acid, from car batteries, and hydrochloric acid found in paint stripper. Receipts for all these items were present in Wheeler’s room at The Grand. SOCO tell me that mercuric chloride is particularly efficient at dissolving aluminium – which is what the shaft supporting the chandelier was made from.’

‘Chief,’ DS Guy Batchelor said, ‘I’m having problems connecting the dots between the suit fabric and the chandelier.’

‘Join the club,’ Grace said. ‘The connection is Gaia, and I can’t guarantee we can connect the dots, Guy. But I’m treating it as a line of enquiry, okay?’

The DS nodded.

‘The most urgent thing we need to do at this moment is establish whether or not Drayton Wheeler sent that email,’ Grace continued. ‘I’m hoping he did. Because if he didn’t, we have a big problem.’