One of Us Is Dead

62 Tuesday 11 October 2022

If you ever think you’re having a bad day, or that life is treating you like shit, pop along to your local mortuary, Roy Grace thought sometimes. Check out the refrigerator doors. Look at the name tags. Mostly such ordinary names. Because on the other side of those doors were such ordinary people. Well, technically no longer people, just the shells of what were once people. Fathers, mothers, husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, loved ones. Human beings.

They were no longer having good or bad days. But you could guarantee one thing, and that was that all the people who had loved them were having days that ranged from pretty shitty to God-awful. For many, their worst days ever. And he never forgot that.

But also, in a bizarre way, Grace found his regular visits to the mortuary to be almost life-affirming. There were some cultures he knew where, if people saw a dead body, they would laugh — because they were celebrating. Someone had to die that day and it wasn’t them. He could understand that, not that he had ever laughed at a body. Far from it. But every time he came here, it made him feel grateful for what he had. For simply being alive, and for all he had in this world that he loved — such as his wife, his children, their dog, their hens, his friends, his job and his colleagues.

There were two separate post-mortem rooms in the Brighton and Hove City Mortuary. This was so that when a potentially suspicious death was handled by a specialist Home Office pathologist there was no risk of cross-contamination with the more routine post-mortems that were carried out daily.

Ordinarily, anyone killed in a road traffic accident would be given a thorough but brief post-mortem by one of the local pathologists, unless foul play was suspected. Its purposes would be to establish whether the cause of death was from their injuries sustained in the accident or whether the cause of the accident was due to a medical condition, such as a heart attack, stroke or diabetic hypo. But, because of the suspicions raised by Inspector James Biggs at the scene, which Roy Grace had agreed with, the two victims were now going to be subjected to far more elaborate, time-consuming and expensive Home Office pathologist post-mortems.

The process was just starting now, at a few minutes to 8 a.m. It was Roy Grace’s duty as the SIO to attend, or for continuity, to delegate another detective from his team should he need to leave. He was currently attending with Branson so that they could discuss Operation Meadow during what promised to be a long and slow day, and assess any findings from the pathologist.

In the cold, gloomy room, all gowned up in green, wearing cloth caps and gauze masks, were: the Spanish-born pathologist, Nadiuska De Sancha; the coroner’s officer, Michelle Websdale; CSI photographer James Gartrell; Grace’s wife, Cleo; and her deputy, Darren Wallace. The latter two had carried out a forensic recovery of the bodies from the scene. This involved placing bags over the head, hands and feet of the deceased — and, in Dermot’s case, the head separate to the body. Then they were packaged into individual white body sheets, rolled up and sellotaped at each end — ‘cracker wrapped’, as Norman Potting had once described it, with his grim gallows humour — then placed inside body bags, which were zipped up.

Grace looked at the body bags, each lying on a steel table, each tagged with a brown exhibit label. Last week Dermot Bryson was a very rich man with a Ferrari worth over a million quid. Now he was a crime scene exhibit. He looked at Tracey Dawson’s label, wondering what her story was. Someone hard as nails, or a soft, kind young woman with her whole future ahead of her, perhaps swept off her feet by Bryson? Or an accomplice in whatever nefarious activities he was involved in that required him to keep a gun in his glove box?

Then he thought back to the crash scene.

Glenn Branson said something he did not hear, he was so wrapped up in his thoughts.

‘Hello!’ Branson said again. ‘Anyone home?’

That got through. Grace looked at him with a startled grimace. ‘Sorry, I was miles away.’

Branson looked at the body bags and shivered. ‘Wish we both were. It was a lot warmer in Barbados.’

‘That footage we viewed from the Ferrari’s dashcam. I’ve just realized what it is that’s been bugging me.’

‘Which is?’

‘So a car’s coming the other way around that bend, towards the Ferrari, right?’

‘Yes.’

‘But we didn’t see any headlights on that footage of an oncoming car before the bend. We only saw the lights of the oncoming car when they were actually head-on.’

Branson frowned. ‘What are you saying?’

‘Bear with me. There are no turn-offs along Sparrowhawk Lane, until you get to the main road at the far end. There’s only one property along the lane that had outward facing CCTV, Cobhouse Lodge, and Biggsy said they’d checked it and it didn’t pick up any vehicle coming from the other direction fifteen minutes either side of the time of the crash.’

‘There was a lot of foil on the ground. What was all that about?’

‘A ghost car that turned to fragments of foil on impact, perhaps.’

‘Ghost car?’

Grace nodded. And in response to his colleague’s frown said, ‘I’m just going to step out and make a call.’

He walked out into the corridor and went into the privacy of Cleo’s little office, where he sat down at her desk, smiling at the tiny frame containing a photograph of himself, Noah and Molly. He called Jack Alexander. When he answered, Grace said, ‘Jack, I need a roll of mirror foil, four foot wide and thirty long, as soon as possible. Find a local supplier for this and call me back as soon as you have. I also need to know all the local firms who could supply this, and any who have sold rolls of this size in the past month.’

The DS said he would be right on it.

Grace could hear the unasked question, why, in his voice.

Instantly he ended the call his phone rang again. It was Jonathan Jackson from the Met’s Central Image Investigation Unit.

‘Sir, we’ve got a result for you on the CCTV you sent through of the blind man with his dog.’

‘Tell me?’ Grace said, feeling a surge of adrenaline.

‘The footage wasn’t great, but we have run it through our new Facial Recognition System. The algorithms are much better these days and it looks at loads of measurements between the eyes, the nose, the mouth, the chin et cetera. It kicks out a handful of possible matches, but it still takes a human to compare and make a decision. I had one of my best officers, Andy Eyles, look at it.’

Grace could hear the excitement in his voice. ‘And, JJ?’

‘We’re now sure it is your dead man walking. Rufus Rorke.’