Not Dead Yet

81

‘The time is 6.30 pm, Monday, the thirteenth of June. This is the eighteenth briefing of Operation Icon,’ Roy Grace said to his team. ‘We’ve made some good progress since this morning.’ He turned to Potting. ‘Norman?’

Potting had a smug smile on his face that made him look like a gross Buddha, Glenn Branson thought, staring at the old warhorse, still unable to believe this man was now, unknowingly, his love rival.

‘We have a report back from the lab,’ Potting said, smugly, in his rural burr. ‘The DNA from the hairbrush and toothbrush I took from the home of Myles Royce matches the DNA from the torso recovered from Stonery Farm, and the limbs recovered from the West Sussex Piscatorial Society. No question, it is the same person.’

The atmosphere in the room changed perceptibly.

‘Good work, Norman,’ Grace said. ‘Okay, we need to do our background on the victim. Norman, as you’ve already met the mother, you should take a Family Liaison Officer with you and break the news. See what further information you can find out from her about his friends and associates. Get the mother’s permission to search his house. In particular let’s see if he left a computer or mobile phone – and hopefully both. If his mobile phone isn’t there, ask his mother for his number, and we can still get most of what we need from his service provider. We can get cell-site analysis done on his movements, and we can see who he talked to.’

He paused and made a note. ‘If he owned a car, let’s gets its movement history over the past eighteen months off the ANPR network. Also see what photographs he has in his house of other people – who his friends were and who he admired. I’ll get the High Tech Crime Unit to hunt on social networking sites – see if he tweeted, had a Facebook page, Linked-In, any of those. We need to know everything about him. Who he engaged with, where he went to socialize, what hobbies or kinky perversions he was into, what clubs he was a member of. In particular I want to know more about his Gaia obsession and any fan clubs he had joined. Okay, Norman, that’s your action.’

‘Yes, chief.’

Glenn looked at Potting, then at Bella. She looked so sad today, yet he knew how he could make her happy. If he could get that prat Potting out of the way.

Was he being ridiculous? His own life was a total mess, and maybe it was totally wrong to start thinking about messing with someone else’s.

‘Glenn?’

‘Right, boss, me and Bella interviewed all fourteen staff members of the chartered accountancy firm Feline Bradley-Hamilton today. This is the only company we’ve found that has links with both Stonery Farm and the West Sussex Piscatorial Society; the firm’s made a specialist accountancy practice in farming and outdoors pursuits – and it’s created its own software package for farmers. During this process we encountered one person we are not happy about, and we feel should be looked into further.’ He glanced at his notes. ‘His name is Eric Whiteley.’

‘Tell me your reasons,’ Grace said.

‘I used your right-eye, left-eye technique that you taught me.’

Grace nodded. Human brains were divided into left and right hemispheres. One contained long-term memory storage, and in the other, the creative processes took place. When asked a question, people’s eyes almost invariably moved to the hemisphere they were using. In some people the memory storage was in the right hemisphere and in some the left; the creative hemisphere would be the opposite one.

When people were telling the truth, their eyes would swing towards the memory hemisphere; when they lied, towards the creative one – to construct. Branson had learned from Roy Grace to tell which, by tracking their eyes in response to a simple control question such as the one he had asked Eric Whiteley earlier, about how long he had worked for the firm – to which there would have been no need for him to have lied.

‘And?’ Roy Grace asked.

‘It’s my view he was lying to us.’

Grace turned to Bella. ‘What did you think?’

‘I agree, sir. Whiteley’s an oddball. I wasn’t at all happy with how he responded to our questions.’

Grace made a note on his pad. Eric Whiteley. Person of Interest? ‘Did you get his home address?’

‘Yes,’ Bella said. ‘With difficulty.’

Grace raised his eyebrows. ‘Oh?’

‘He kept trying to tell us we were invading his privacy,’ Branson said.

‘I think you two should go to his house and talk to him again there. Sounds like we need to either bring him in or eliminate him from our enquiries.’

The problem, he knew, with not having a time or date of Royce’s death is that all the team were working in a vacuum. When there was a clearly established time of death, alibis were often a fast and efficient way to eliminate people like Whiteley – or incriminate them. He turned to his HOLMES – Home Office Large Major Enquiry System – and Intelligence researchers. ‘I want you to check the serials going back two years, and see if any of Whiteley’s neighbours have ever complained about him. See if he’s been involved in any incidents. We need more information on him.’ Then he said to Bella, ‘I think you should have a word with Whiteley’s senior partner and find out what kind of employee he is.’

‘I have a call in to him already, sir.’

‘Good!’ Then he turned to DC Exton. ‘The Hunter wellington boots – anything to report from the stockists?’ He pointed up at the trio of whiteboards. One board showed a photograph of Stonery Farm, circled in blue marker ink, and a photograph of the West Sussex Piscatorial Society trout lake, also circled in blue, with a line connecting them. A second showed photographs of a Hunter boot, and three photographs of the actual-size prints found around the edge of the trout lake. The third board had photographs of the torso and limbs of Myles Royce, and now, just added today, his face.

‘I’ve obtained a list of online retailers,’ Exton said. ‘We’ve been working through these, compiling a list of names of customers they’ve supplied in our parameter area of Sussex, Surrey and Kent in the past two years. But the problem as we know with many stockists, like garden centres and outdoor wear shops, is many don’t keep customer records. We’re getting as much as we can through credit card records, but that is slow and incomplete. I’ve been feeding names as they come through to the indexer.’ He looked at Annalise Vineer.

‘Nothing so far,’ she said. ‘I’ve names from sixteen stockists of people who’ve made recent purchases, but no hits, and that includes Eric Whiteley.’

Grace had worked with her on several murder enquiries and knew just how thorough she was. If she said no hits, she meant it. He looked at his notes. ‘Haydn – how are you doing on gait analysis?’

‘I’ve completed my computer modelling. I won’t bore you with the technical data but analysis of these prints shows our perp has a very unusual gait. I’m confident I could pick him out in a crowd. I could spend a few days in the CCTV control room at John Street, if you like?’

Brighton and Hove had one of the most comprehensive CCTV networks of any city. This was helped by the fact that the English Channel bordered the south, giving a relatively narrow arc to the east, north and west. But the problem, as Grace saw it, was which crowd? Haydn Kelly was on an expensive daily rate; he couldn’t just sit him down in front of a bank of television monitors and have him observe real-time footage in the hope of spotting the perp, when there were no guarantees that Myles Royce’s killer was even in the city.

He looked up at the dead man’s photograph. Royce was fifty-two, his mother had told Potting. He looked a little younger, in Grace’s view. The unfortunate man had not been blessed with great looks. He had a rather weak, flaccid face with bulging eyes, as if he had a thyroid problem, protruding lips, a squat nose and a shapeless mop of dark-brown hair with the unnatural flat tones of a bad dye job.

A trustafarian. Modest inherited wealth. Never had to do a day’s work in his life. Just dabbled in property from time to time. From the expression he wore in his photograph, he sure as hell did not look happy, Grace thought.

So how did you end up like this? Your torso covered in quicklime and immersed in chicken shit? Your limbs in a trout lake? And your head missing?

‘You know what, chief?’ Norman Potting said, as if reading his mind. ‘If we could just find his head, maybe he could tell us who did it!’

There was tittering in the room. Roy Grace did his best to keep a straight face, but after some moments he allowed himself a grin.

In all the murder enquiries he had attended, and more recently had run, he could not remember a single one where there had been less information about the victim or the suspected perpetrator.

In two hours’ time he had to attend a press conference with Glenn. If they put over their messages correctly, it could lead to a crucial witness either phoning the police directly or the Crimestoppers line anonymously. The enormity of his responsibility never escaped him. Myles Royce was his mother’s only child. He was her life. For over thirty years after leaving home, he went to see her every week, and phoned her every Sunday evening at seven, without fail. Now he hadn’t phoned for almost six months. And he wouldn’t be phoning ever again.

What had he done to deserve ending up dead, and with such appalling lack of dignity? Who had done this to him – and why? Was the motive sexual? Jealousy? Robbery? Homophobia? A random psychotic attack? Revenge? An argument that turned into a fight?

He looked at his team. ‘Which of you are Gaia fans?’

Several hands shot up. He looked at Emma Reeves, who seemed the keenest. ‘Am I right that Gaia includes a bit of S &M in her work, yes?’

‘Yes, chief – but only in a fun way in one of her acts, and on one of her album covers.’

‘Are we missing something very obvious here? Did she ever write a song about dismemberment? Or have some sick art about it that someone might have copied?’

‘I know everything she’s done, sir,’ Emma Reeves said. ‘That makes me a bit sad, doesn’t it?’

Grace smiled. ‘Not at all.’

‘But there’s nothing I can think of in her work that would send some sicko off to dismember someone.’

After the briefing ended, Grace returned to his office and made a new entry into his Policy Book.

Homophobic murder?

Blackmail of a gay lover?

Criminal involvement? Witnessed something? Drugs deal at a gay cruising site?

His phone rang. He looked down at the display and did not recognize the number. He stepped out into the corridor as he answered it.

The voice of the caller was low and furtive. ‘Detective Superintendent Grace?’

Grace didn’t need to ask who was calling. He recognized the voice of the recidivist and informer, Darren Spicer. ‘Yes, how can I help you?’

‘Got some more information for you. You can have this for free.’

‘That’s very generous.’

‘Yeah. Thought you’d like to know. That deal I was offered, what we discussed?’

‘Uh huh.’

‘Your friend’s just come back to me and doubled it, for me to do that job.’