Not Dead Yet

14

Roy Grace, followed by Glenn Branson, stepped out of the stench and din of the birds in the chicken shed, into the blustery sunshine, and breathed in the fresh air with relief.

‘Shit,’ Glenn said.

‘Good observation!’

Glenn lowered his mask. ‘Foul play, I’d say.’

Grace groaned. ‘That’s truly terrible, even by your standards.’

‘Sorry.’

‘I’d like you to be my deputy SIO on this. I’m going to get you sanctioned as a temporary Detective Inspector. Does that appeal?’

‘What’s the catch?’

Grace grinned. ‘I have my reasons.’

‘Yeah, well, they’d better be good.’

Grace patted him on the shoulder. ‘I know I can rely on you – you’ve done a good job on Operation Violin. ACC Rigg has noticed that.’

Glenn’s face lit up. ‘He has?’

‘Yes – and I bigged you up on it. I have a feeling this case now could be a runner. Handle this well and it could count a lot in your promotion boards.’

Branson had all the qualities for promotion to the rank of Inspector, and Grace was determined to help his friend up the ladder. With his ongoing marriage problems that had been dragging him down for months, promotion, he was certain, would be the fillip that could really lift Glenn out of his increasingly frequent bouts of depression.

Grace remembered, a few years back, when he’d got that crucial promotion to Detective Inspector, how everything had changed for him. Starting with the surly uniform stores manager, whose whole demeanour had altered the day he had gone in requesting an Inspector’s tunic with the two pips instead of stripes, and that coveted cap with its band of black braid. When you became an Inspector you truly felt you had become officer class, and everyone’s attitude in the police – and public, too – towards you changed.

‘I want you to handle the media on this one,’ Grace said.

‘Media – I don’t – don’t have much experience. You mean I’ll have to deal with that toerag Spinella?’

Kevin Spinella was the senior crime reporter on the local newspaper, the Argus, who always managed to find out about any crime long before anyone else. He had an informant inside the police somewhere, and it had long been one of Grace’s ambitions to find and nail that person, and he was working on it. ‘Spinella and everyone else. You can do your first press conference later today.’

‘Thanks,’ Glenn said doubtfully.

‘I’ll help you,’ Grace said. ‘I’ll hold your hand.’

Branson nodded, staring around. ‘So where do I start here?’

‘By clearing the ground beneath your feet. Okay? First thing, get a POLSA up here and a team from the Specialist Search Unit to do a fingertip search beneath the gridding and above. Second, we need to know all the access roads in the surrounding area, and we need to start a house-to-house in all the villages. You have to inform the Divisional Commander for East Sussex Division, and tell him you’ll need some help from uniform and local PCSOs, and maybe the Specials. Contact the local MP and the Police Authority member. Tell them it looks neat and tidy to you, at the moment, and that you feel there is minimal community impact.’

‘Anything else, boss?’

‘Think of a holding statement for the media. Start planning about your communications strategy for public reassurance. Get the names of everyone who has access to this place – who delivers the mail, the milk, the newspapers, the animal feed, the heating oil or Calor gas – everyone who could have been here in recent months – every visitor. I’d suggest setting a parameter of one year back. Find out if there is any CCTV.’

As with every major crime investigation that he ran, Grace needed to establish a range of parameters for all aspects, and to plan out the immediate steps in his Policy Book. One of the first problems he needed to address was the business of this farm. The owner, Keith Winter, would want the minimum disruption to his livelihood.

His immediate impression was that, unlike some farms he had visited, everything here looked clean and modern. The long, single-storey shed. The shiny silos. The handsome farmhouse that looked newly built. The gleaming Range Rover, its registration plate indicating it was less than a year old. The Subaru Impreza, two years old according to its index, signalling someone who liked fast cars. The good things in life.

Someone who would kill for such things?

There was a smart electric gate at the start of the mile-long driveway up here. Okay, people were security conscious these days, but how many farmers had security gates? Hiding something? Or a precaution against travellers?

Going through his mind right now were potential suspects, or those he needed to know more about. The first notes he made on his pad were to get intelligence on the owner of this place. Who was Keith Winter? What was his background? How long had he owned Stonery Farm? What was his financial situation? Did he have partners? When had that grid last been cleared? Who did he employ here? Each of his employees, current and past, would need to be identified and questioned. Would Winter really have put a murder victim in his chicken shed? Perhaps he thought it would be completely dissolved. Certainly it was a known fact that the Italian Mafia used pig farms as an effective means of disposing of bodies, and there had been a case in the UK a few years back. But pigs were omnivores.

He shared his thoughts with Glenn Branson.

‘Ever see that Pasolini film, Porcile?’ the DS replied.

‘No, never heard of it.’

‘It’s a classic. A bloke gets eaten by a pig in that.’

‘Think I’ll give it a miss,’ Grace said.

‘You already have missed it, it came out in 1969.’ Then Branson frowned. ‘I know someone who might be able to tell us a bit about the cloth, if we’re right about it being suit fabric.’

‘Oh?’

‘A tailor in Brighton, works at Gresham Blake.’

Gresham Blake was Brighton’s society tailor. ‘That where you get your clothes made these days?’ Grace looked at him quizzically.

‘I wish. I met him a few years ago when his flat was burgled. Gresham Blake’s where you should go though, on your Big Cheese salary.’

There was no certainty, Grace thought, that the clothing fabric was even connected to the victim, but it was an important line of enquiry. Most murder investigations began with a missing person and until that person was identified, it was hard to make real progress. One of the key things he needed to establish at this moment was the age of the body, and how long it had been here. He pulled out his phone and called forensic archaeologist Joan Major, asking her if she could come here as soon as she was finished at the mortuary. She told him her work on the skeletal remains was almost completed.

It was possible they could get DNA from the victim, which might help identification. Failing that, if the age, or at least the age range, of the victim could be established, they could make a start by looking at the county and region’s missing persons list.

He stared around again. There were some farm buildings beyond the shed, and another, smaller dwelling. One immediate decision he needed to make was whether to treat just the chicken shed as the crime scene, or the entire farm including the farmhouse. He did not feel he had enough to justify that draconian measure, which would have meant Winter and his family having to move out into temporary accommodation. His view was to treat the farmer as a person of interest to his enquiry for now, but not a suspect.

Despite his wariness of the danger in making assumptions, Roy Grace always made hypotheses at every crime scene. And the first one he made here was that money might be involved. A dead man in expensive clothes. A business partner? A blackmailer? Winter’s wife’s lover? Winter’s own lover? A creditor? A business rival? Or was it someone totally unconnected with Winter, who had merely used this place as a dump site?

‘Glenn,’ he said. ‘Early in my career I had a very wise Super in Major Crime. He said to me, there is no case colder than one in which the victim is unidentified. Remember that. Identifying the victim is always the first priority.’

Sending Branson back inside with his head spinning, Grace walked over to the car, sat in the driver’s seat and closed the door for some privacy. He started to jot down the names of the enquiry team he wanted to put together, hoping that some of his regulars, recently stood down from Operation Violin, would be available. After a quiet start to this year, everything had kicked off in May. Sussex had an average of eighteen murders a year. So far in these first five months, there had been sixteen already. A statistical blip, or a sign of the times?

He stared through the windscreen at the expensive Range Rover and the Impreza – a rich man’s toys – and the architect-designed farmhouse. Maybe there was money to be made in farming chickens?

But, as experience had long taught him, wherever there was money to be made, there was killing to be done, too.