One of Us Is Dead

67 Wednesday 12 October 2022

Roy Grace always thought that Haywards Heath police station looked far too big a building for the requirements of this quiet, affluent small town, fourteen miles north of Brighton, in the heart of the West Sussex countryside. Populated by just forty thousand people, a substantial number of whom were commuters to London, a little over half an hour away by train, the town had a relatively low crime rate, despite being named, so one rumour had it, after a highway robber called Jack Hayward. It was a rumour Grace liked to believe.

Since being built, the creatively designed, three-storey 1960s building had housed not only all the wide variety of police officers and support staff required for the town, but it had also been the HQ of both the West Sussex Roads Policing Team, COMMS, where all 999 calls came in, as well as forensic imaging. Today, while still a live police station, that was only a small part of the work that went on inside.

From a distance, with its smart, modern exterior, the police station could have been mistaken for the corporate headquarters of any number of multinational finance or insurance companies, until you drove closer, and saw the police vehicles filling much of the car park. It was when you approached the back entrance that you began to realize that, no matter what the exterior of a police station told the world, the staff entrance was almost invariably a reinforced steel door, with a handful of people smoking outside, accessed by a keycard that instead of opening onto a grand foyer, puts you at the bottom of narrow steep stairs as lavishly appointed as a fire escape.

Which was where Grace and Branson found themselves now, shortly after 8 a.m. They climbed up the two flights, passing the Crime Management Unit floor, and reached the second storey, where the Sussex Digital Forensics and Cybercrime units were housed.

Grace held his passcard to the keypad, but all he got was a beep and a flashing red light. He cursed, but at the same time respected the security of this unit being so tight it would not even allow access to the Head of Major Crime for the two counties.

‘Not as important as you thought you were, eh, boss?’ Branson quipped.

Grace narrowed his eyes at him. ‘All right, smartypants, try yours.’

Branson did. As he pressed the card to the pad there were two sharp beeps and a green light. He pushed the door open and held it for Grace, who stood there, shaking his head at him. ‘What?’

Branson grinned.

‘What?’ Grace said again.

Still grinning he tweaked his jacket lapels. ‘You just need influence, boss. Like what I have.’

Shaking his head from side to side, Grace walked beside his colleague along a short corridor lined with warning posters about passwords and into the large, open-plan office that was the nerve-centre of the Digital Forensics team. There was an atmosphere of quiet, studious energy in here. Casually dressed people, mostly in their late twenties and thirties, worked at the rows of two-abreast workstations lined down each side of the room, each with a single keyboard and twin screens. Many were cluttered with personal stuff — water flasks, mugs with slogans — and the walls were lined with whiteboards, all with writing and diagrams. On one partition, he saw a yellow hazard warning sign that read: WARNING. HANGRY. DO NOT APPROACH (UNLESS WITH FOOD)

He grinned, then saw the figures of Aiden Gilbert and Jason Quigley, two of the most long-serving people in this department. Wearing their ID lanyards around their necks, both were dressed in what was pretty much the male uniform here of polo shirts over jeans and trainers. They greeted the two detectives with warm smiles. Gilbert, energetic, with his silver hair brushed forward and his blue polo shirt long and baggy, could have been a famous Shakespearian actor who had just stepped out of rehearsals for a brief moment. Quigley, tall and shaven-headed with a neatly trimmed beard, exuded debonair, almost avuncular charm. This small corner of the large room was now the only section dedicated to computers, Grace knew.

When he’d first visited this department, many years back, then known as the High Tech Crime Unit, it was tucked away in the basement of the old CID headquarters, Sussex House, and computers were the main focus. Today, it was increasingly all about the phones.

‘So your reprogrammed card worked, Glenn?’ Gilbert said.

‘Worked a treat!’

Grace looked at Gilbert then Branson, and saw he’d been pranked. ‘Bastards!’

Grinning, Gilbert said, ‘Sorry, Glenn, I’m afraid I’ll have to deauthorize your card now. Can we get you anything to drink?’

‘I’m good, thanks,’ Grace said.

Branson nodded, the same.

‘Have a seat, gents,’ he said, indicating two spare swivel chairs at the empty workstation next to him. As they perched on them, he said, ‘I think we’ve found something of interest from interrogating Barnie Wallace’s computer — in particular from the folders of photographs, in addition to the ones we’ve already sent you from his phone. I’ll take you down to Charlotte Mckee afterwards, she’s in the process of doing a full extraction from his phone and laptop.’

Quigley brought up an image of what looked a pure work of art. A length of chargrilled fish, topped with prawns and stalks of dill and surrounded by a tiny lake of green sauce. A row of edamame beans was elegantly laid out around the rim of the plate, like a string of beads.

‘From the photographs on his computer there seem to be only two subjects Wallace took photographs of — the first is food,’ Quigley said. He showed several art images of dishes in succession, some still photographs, some frenetic videos of Barnie Wallace in his kitchen cooking in speeded-up time. ‘Raw ingredients,’ Quigley continued. ‘Cooking utensils, ingredients in prep and in stages of being cooked, and finished dishes and plates of food.’

The image on the screen changed to a photograph of a tall man in a long coat, hoodie, face covering and dark glasses, against a Brighton residential street background. He was immediately familiar to the two detectives who had been working on the initial images that had been sent to them. ‘This is his other subject,’ Jason Quigley said. ‘A tall man whose identity we don’t know. There are literally hundreds of photographs of him, all taken through a long lens — a Tamron 400mm on a Nikon D5300 camera.’

‘You can tell the camera and lens make, from the photographs?’ Grace asked, impressed.

‘The lens, camera make, model and location to within approximately twenty feet, and time, Roy,’ Aiden Gilbert butted in.

‘I always knew you were a smart guy, Aiden, I didn’t know you were a genius!’

‘I’m not! It’s all built into the camera’s memory, unless the person using it disables it. Maybe Mr Wallace didn’t know about that.’

Grace thought hard for a moment. ‘Can you get the images of this man’s face enhanced, Aiden?’

‘The best people to do that are the Met Facial Imaging Team, up in Lambeth. But they’ll only be able to help if there is a crime connection in their area.’

‘There is,’ Grace replied. ‘Our suspect — the man we might be looking at — we now believe committed a murder in Bond Street about a year ago where he shoved a man into the road, under a bus. It was caught on a shop’s outward-facing CCTV.’

‘Good,’ Gilbert said. ‘This fellow always seems to have been careful not to show too much of his face — in the photos he wears a baseball cap and a face mask a lot of the time, or a hoodie and mask or scarf high up his face.’

‘Not surprising, since he’s dead,’ Grace said.

The two forensic investigators both looked bemused. ‘He’s been photographing a ghost?’ Quigley said.

Grace smiled. ‘OK. What can you tell me about the location of these photographs? Is there any pattern?’

‘There is,’ Gilbert said, sounding very pleased with himself. ‘I’ll show you on a map. But Charlotte Mckee will have a lot more on this for you, from his phone.’

‘This camera — the Nikon D5300 — how easy would it be to identify where it was bought?’ Branson asked.

‘Not easy at all, it’s one of their most popular models — there are literally thousands of them out there. But in terms of the pattern of photographs, Jason and I have done a matrix and the majority are around an address in Kemp Town. When we narrow it down further, it points to Arundel Terrace. Again, Charlotte will be able to give you more on this, I’m pretty sure.’

Grace knew the road. One of the city’s finest addresses — a row of grand, elegant, terraced Regency buildings facing directly onto the English Channel. They had once been individual houses, but most of them now, if not all, were divided into apartments. His late, former wife, Sandy, had said more than once that if they ever won the lottery, Arundel Terrace was one of the places she would love to live.

‘Can you pinpoint any further than that?’ he asked.

‘Yes. But not the exact number — I can narrow it down to three — approximately mid-terrace.’

‘Three is good.’

Moments later, they saw a sequence of numbered photographs on the screen. He got as far as number seven when Branson exclaimed, ‘Bloody hell.’

‘You took the words out of my mouth!’ Grace said.

A tall figure in a hoodie, bulky black jacket, jeans and trainers, and with a very confident, erect posture, was striding up a street towards the camera, but clearly unaware of it. The background was blurry, but looked like the sea in the distance.

Grace looked at the date and time on the photograph: 2.12 p.m., Thursday, 1 September. The coordinates were next to it. He turned to Branson. ‘Looks very much like our mushroom switcher again. Two days before he strikes.’

‘Could be his identical twin,’ the DI retorted with a grin.

‘The coordinates, Aiden. Where do those put him?’

Quigley tapped his keyboard. After a few moments a map of part of Kemp Town seafront appeared. ‘Chichester Terrace,’ he announced.

Grace, born and raised in the city, had a good knowledge of its streets. ‘If I was going to walk from an apartment in Arundel Terrace to Organica supermarket, that is one of the streets I would choose as part of my route. This is two days before the mushroom switch? Is he on a recce?’

Quigley brought the image of the man back up and zoomed in tight on his face. He was wearing a scarf that covered his nose and lower part of his face, and his hood came down low over his forehead. His eyes were concealed by large sunglasses. ‘Looks like someone not too keen to be recognized.’

Branson nodded slowly. ‘And just like the Switcher. Same good posture.’

‘What we need now is the CCTV footage from Organica for that afternoon, Thursday, September the first. On the assumption they still have it,’ Grace said. ‘See if we can spot him doing a recce.’

‘We’re getting there, aren’t we? Slowly but steadily,’ Branson said.

Grace smiled. ‘You know what they say about science? It advances one funeral at a time.’

‘And we’re one funeral in. Two to go.’

‘Let’s hope we can keep it to that.’

They were interrupted by a sudden roar of laughter.

Gilbert and Quigley stood up. Grace and Branson joined them and they saw a tall, bearded man giving a speech, with the attention of everyone in the room.

‘Good news!’ whispered Gilbert. ‘It’s a leaving assassination speech. It means there will be cake!’

‘You mean we can have it and eat it?’ Branson said.