One of Us Is Dead

59 Monday 10 October 2022

Roy Grace drove his Alfa, with Glenn in the passenger seat, past Lewes and down towards the Beddingham roundabout. They were approaching the scene of the accident.

A short distance past Firle he braked and turned off the A27 onto a minor road, densely wooded either side, and drove along it for a quarter of a mile. He was intrigued by what James Biggs had said — or rather had not said: a Ferrari, a multimillionaire and his girlfriend, a 3D printed gun in the glove box. ‘You wanted a more challenging murder case to work on, matey; I think we’ve just got one.’

‘Yep, sounds it.’

Ahead, just before a bend warning sign, he saw the familiar cluster of police and forensic vehicles that signalled a major RTC.

He pulled the Alfa up behind the last vehicle in the line, a marked Roads Policing Unit car, angled across the road, protecting the scene, and they climbed out, Grace taking his time.

‘You’re still not recovered, are you, mate?’ Branson said, genuinely concerned. ‘You need some X-rays, I think, you might have internal damage.’

‘I’m fine.’ Grace closed the door. ‘Do you hear that, Glenn?’

‘What? I can’t hear a thing.’

‘Exactly. The previous vicar of St Peter’s told me he’d been to Auschwitz and said it was the strangest feeling, because there was utter silence, you couldn’t even hear birds singing. I’ve noticed the same thing sometimes at murder scenes out in the countryside or woodlands. And at fatal RTCs too. It’s as if there really is some vibe in the air that spooks all the wildlife into staying away.’

Branson reflected for some moments, then said, ‘Maybe it’s the reaction to being so struck by the horrors that our brains blank out the sound of birdsong?’

‘There’s the detective in you, looking for the rational explanation.’

He shrugged. ‘I’ve heard that too, but I’m a realist. There must have been countless generations of birds born in those areas since the end of the war and the liberation of those camps. I’m not saying it’s impossible there isn’t some bad vibe in the air around them, but I think there’s maybe another reason people don’t hear it.’ Branson looked at Grace. ‘Sometimes I think you’re too sensitive a soul to be a cop. Maybe you’d have been a good parish priest, or a counsellor.’

Grace glanced at him. ‘You don’t have to be a hard, cynical bastard to be a detective, Glenn.’

‘No, but maybe it helps.’

Roy grinned.

‘Do we need our onesies?’ Branson asked.

The detective superintendent shook his head. ‘From what Biggsy’s told me, it sounds like every man and his dog’s trampled all over the scene before they realized there might be something more to it. And, besides, you never look that great in one — they kind of cramp your style.’

‘And they make you look like a sperm.’

‘Thanks for the compliment.’

‘Any time.’

They strode towards a marked police car, a line of blue and white tape stretched across the road behind it. An irate woman of around sixty, with a foghorn of a voice, was haranguing the scene guard. She was dressed in a puffa, with baggy jeans and wellies, a tangle of grey hair and holding a restless lurcher the size of a small donkey by the lead.

‘Do you realize, officer, yesterday the High Sheriff of East Sussex and his wife had to walk to our house to lunch because of all this idiocy?’

‘Madam,’ the officer replied calmly, ‘two people died on Saturday night. We need to understand what happened and the victims’ loved ones need to understand too.’

‘It’s perfectly simple: that idiot Dermot Bryson always drove like he was a flipping — what’s his name, that racing fellow? — Lewis Hamilton. All of us knew he was an accident waiting to happen — it’s a mercy he didn’t kill any of us in the village too.’

‘It may be helpful if you gave a statement, madam,’ he said, doing his best to placate her. ‘If you let me have your name and phone number, someone will be in touch.’

She huffed. Ignoring her, Grace and Branson signed the outer cordon scene guard log, and walked a short distance up the road towards the inner cordon.

‘See, it’s not my imagination,’ Grace said. ‘I can’t hear any birdsong. Can you?’

They both stopped for a moment. Branson cocked his head. There was a very distant sound of a combine harvester, but nothing else. Silence. He frowned. ‘Have you got me at it too, now?’

‘Imagining the silence?’ Grace quizzed.

‘When I was a young kid, my mum taught me how to make clouds disappear. She told me I had magic powers and that I could dissolve clouds. If I just stared at a small cloud hard, really hard, and kept staring at it, it would break up and disappear.’

‘Did it work?’

Branson nodded. ‘Often it did. For a while I thought I was really special and that I did have magic powers — you know, that I had a gift — like that kid Danny Torrance in The Shining. Then I told a science teacher at school and he explained that clouds didn’t last long anyway — a few hours at the most, and many change shape and dissipate in minutes, whether anyone was watching them or not. I experimented and realized he was right. And yet, you know, I do still look at clouds today and make them dissolve.’

Grace smiled. As they walked on, he caught the scent of wet grass and the sharper, ranker smell of hogweed. In front of them, a single autumnal leaf zigzagged to the ground. Continuing around the bend, the large, square-sided Forensic Collision Investigation Unit truck, parked in front of the inner cordon, came into view.

Startled by a whirring sound, they looked up, to see a drone pass a short distance above them and then hover in the air. On the far side of the cordon one of the FCIU Team, in overalls, was holding the controls and being directed by a similarly attired DC Simon Rideout, the Forensic Collision Investigation Unit officer currently in charge.

Grace had met the young detective on a couple of previous occasions and had always warmed to him. He did one of the grisliest jobs imaginable, and yet seemed always to manage to balance charm, humour and respect perfectly. Someone who looked less like a Forensic Collision Investigator would be hard to imagine.

Rideout was tall with the warm, smiling face of a natural entertainer, this effect enhanced by his head of thick, long, fair hair and a magnificent moustache twirled at each end. He could have been the compère on a cruise ship, or a famous stage magician. Instead he worked his magic on computers, lasers, mathematical calculations on the angles of bends and the speed of vehicles. He could tell if an indicator was on or off at the time of the collision. From minute clothing fibres on seat belts and on seats he could prove who was sitting where, as well as a whole host of other vital information. Over recent years he had carved a reputation as a brilliantly incisive investigator — the nearest Sussex Police had to a Sherlock Holmes of fatal traffic collisions.

Grace could see the sweeping curving clockwise lines of coloured cat’s eye markers and numbering cones, and then an abrupt change in direction to the left. Matching the path of the swerving Ferrari in the recording he had just seen.

He signed the second log, ducked under the red and white tape, and was immediately greeted by the amiable Inspector, a stocky figure with a buzz-cut, who always exuded an air of both authority and efficiency — not something mutually compatible in every police officer, in Roy Grace’s experience. Biggs was an innately kind man, and Grace often wondered, after twenty years as a traffic cop, how much horror and tragedy he had seen, and would forever have to live with.

A hive of activity was going on behind him.

‘Morning, boss.’ Then the RPU Inspector frowned and peered more closely at Grace. ‘I hope the other fellow came off worse.’

‘He did,’ he replied with such feeling that Biggs looked startled.

‘Don’t tell me you were in a bundle, boss? A proper roll-around?’

‘Quite a grave one, actually.’

Biggs frowned. ‘You’ve been checked over?’

‘I wish everyone would stop bloody asking me that! It was over two weeks ago. I’m on the mend. It’s good to see you, Biggsy. How’s your lovely Nadine?’

‘She’s a lot better, boss, thanks for asking.’

‘Glad to hear it, please give her my love. So — what do we have?’

‘Apart from confirmation of a stat I heard recently?’

‘And that is?’ Grace asked.

Biggs beamed as he enlightened him. ‘Fifty-two per cent of all road traffic collisions happen within five miles of the drivers’ homes?’

‘I didn’t know that, but it makes sense. I also heard that in eighty per cent of collisions that happen between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m., the driver hadn’t had breakfast.’

‘Could make a great ad,’ Biggs said, with typical gallows humour cynicism. ‘Eat your Shreddies or get in your car and become one.’

Grace shook his head good-humouredly. ‘You’ve been doing this job too long, mate.’

‘Tell me about it. One hundred and thirty-two more shifts and then I’m done. Got the chart on the wall.’

It was something Roy Grace heard all too often these days and it made him sad that so many really good officers, like Biggs, were literally counting down the days to their retirement. But, equally, he could understand it. Once, in his father’s time, and during his own early days on the force, the police had the public with them. In recent times, a handful of corrupt officers, and an even smaller number of officers who were sexual predators, had hit and dominated the nation’s headlines. Added to that had been some tragic deaths during blue-light pursuits, and right now it felt as if the police were Public Enemy No. 1.

‘So what do we have?’

‘I’m hoping you’ll tell me that, boss. I’m going to hand you over to Simon Rideout. But essentially, we have a Ferrari, travelling at high speed but, from the pathologist’s report, driven by someone completely sober and not on any drugs, on a road familiar to him. He swerves left to avoid an unseen obstacle, swerves right, left again, then rotates, fatally, off the road into the woods. We will need to check that there were no mechanical defects with the Ferrari once we’ve recovered the vehicle.’

Grace glanced at Rideout, who was kneeling a short distance away and picking up something with gloved hands, which he then bagged. Dotted around the tarmac, and in the weeds at the edges, were numbered cones, used at crime scenes to mark items considered to be possible evidence by the FCIs. Sunlight seemed to be glinting off something marked by a few of them.

Over to his right, he saw the final yards the Ferrari had travelled, into the woods. Shrubbery torn away, a small sapling mown down by the car, which had then hit and scarred a large oak, before striking more trees, breaking up in the process. There were small cones on and around the path. He stared at the car’s mangled cockpit and rear end in one place, the front wheel assembly in another, and the engine, still in its bay, on its side in a partially demolished bush.

‘Not as pretty as when it came out of the factory, is it?’ Biggs said.

‘Looks to me like a masterclass in how to deconstruct a Ferrari.’ Grace gave him a grim smile.

‘Just needs a couple of bolts, a bit of panel beating, a lick of T-Cut and it’ll be back on the road in no time,’ James Biggs said.

‘And it probably will be,’ Grace said, thinking about the unscrupulous motor trade. Some rogue would doubtless one day turn this mess back into a handsome Ferrari on a lot, and the purchaser would be none the wiser. He looked around, taking in the scene. ‘So you said there are no skid marks from the oncoming car, and there’s something you want me to see?’

Biggs nodded. ‘Simon Rideout feels something doesn’t make sense about this and I agree with him — actually not just one thing, several things, boss.’

‘Like a guy with everything to live for trashing himself and his girl on a road he’s driven a thousand times?’

‘That’s a good place to start. Next up is that car coming from the opposite direction — you’ve seen the dashcam footage — it’s impossible that the other car didn’t brake. But we can walk further up the road and you won’t see any sign of the kind of tyre marks you get before a collision or a near-collision, like we have from Bryson’s Ferrari. We’ll get some house-to-house done for doorbell or other private cameras to see if that comes up with anything.’

They walked on around the curve. As they passed more yellow cones, Grace saw several more glints of reflected sunlight. He stopped by one cone, numbered in marker pen, 27. It was beside a jagged piece of foil no more than two inches square. Frowning at Biggs he asked, ‘Chocolate wrapper?’

‘If it is, boss, and it came from the Ferrari, Dermot Bryson would have to be a major chocoholic — seems there’s enough foil to wrap a hundred bars.’

As he spoke, Biggs pointed out several other cones with glinting fragments beside them, but Grace was already there. He’d been wondering about the foil — the more he looked around, the more bits of it, marked by cones, he noticed. ‘So, if it’s not been wrapping chocolate, why do you think there’s so much of it around, James?’

The Inspector shrugged.

‘DC Rideout’s team are saying the car the Ferrari hit, head-on, was made of foil and disintegrated. They’ve found foil embedded in the front of the Ferrari and in the tree trunk.’

‘And the driver disintegrated too? Into thin air?’

‘It’s the best I can come up with, boss. Unless you believe in ghosts. Ghosts that drop aluminium foil in their wake.’

Roy Grace nodded at Rideout who was walking towards them. ‘Been in an accident, sir?’ the FCI detective asked.

Grace nodded. ‘I’m fine, thanks, Simon. So what have you found so far?’

‘We’re baffled at the moment by the bits of foil we’ve found around the scene, sir. We’ve been looking at a few heavy footwear marks we’ve found in the ground around the trees. We’d normally associate boot prints with the fire service, but some of the prints seem further afield than the fire service team would have needed to go when they attended, so I’ve requested the CSIs to take a look at them. James Gartrell’s photographing them with a scale ruler and we’re using a Crownstone plaster cast to collect impressions of them. I’m also looking for dirt, examining the cleanliness of each bit of foil to understand if it’s fresh or been there a while. We’re also using CSIs to look for any discarded items from people in the area, especially those around trees — cigarette ends, drinks containers, or fibres caught on branches.’

Grace nodded.

Rideout continued. ‘My team are also looking for alien objects on or around the wreckage of the vehicle. We’re checking for body tissue in case it struck someone, although that doesn’t appear to be the case here, or paint transfer — or in this case embedded foil.’

Grace looked around. He noticed two sturdy trees on either side of the road and walked over to one, studied the base of the trunk, then crossed over and studied the other in the same place. Then he turned back to the FCIU detective. ‘Do you have any hypothesis about how this accident occurred, Simon?’

‘Initially I would have said he’d come around the corner and swerved to avoid an animal. But now I’ve looked at the dashcam, that doesn’t work. But the oncoming car has vanished and left no trace. It’s like it was never there and yet I can see headlights in the recording. Do you have any thoughts, sir?’

Grace looked down at the ground again, at several of the cones marking foil fragments. ‘Something’s not right, for sure, that’s what I’m thinking, Simon.’

‘And me, sir.’