One of Us Is Dead

85 Tuesday 18 October 2022

Roy Grace went and sat down in the conference room shortly after 7.15 a.m. The morning briefing wasn’t due to start until 8.30 but he had a lot of prep to do. He wanted first to review the footage of the blind man and the photographs taken from Barnie Wallace’s camera on the big screen in the room. He had a growing feeling of despondency.

Yesterday morning the ACC had asked him to throw him a bone. Grace had hoped that an ANPR camera in the vicinity of Dartford, where the roll of foil had been purchased, might have shown up the Kingsway Electrical van, but it hadn’t. Nor had any of the city’s CCTV cameras picked it up either side of the time when the roll was collected.

The search of the bins at 118 Arundel Terrace had revealed nothing else, either. The only positive he had, so far, came via Jonathan Jackson at the Met’s Central Image Investigation Unit. The additional photographs they had sent of the man in the Organica supermarket, and who was the subject of the photographs taken by Barnie Wallace, had been analysed further, and Jackson said they were pretty near one hundred per cent certain it was Rufus Rorke — despite superficial alterations to his face.

As he began to play the footage of the blind man, he was running through, in his mind, all his lines of enquiry. They had not yet come up with any conclusive reason Dermot Bryson had carried a gun in his car. Just speculation that he’d been involved in dodgy dealings in drugs and cybercurrency. His team had not found any copycat killings anywhere else in the UK. Emily Denyer, the financial investigator, had found evidence that Bryson was moving major amounts of cash around through Bitcoins and other cybercurrencies, but was, so far, unable to establish any criminal activity — and in the past few days after his death all activity had ceased.

Almost out of desperation, he’d had the team look at the Brighton University professor, Bill Llewellyn, just to see if there was any link to Rufus Rorke there, but they’d been unable to establish anything.

Anaphylactic shock from a wasp sting looked certain to be the coroner’s verdict. As evidence of this, a wasp had been found in the professor’s oesophagus during the post-mortem. It was late autumn, the time when wasps were at their most aggressive and carrying the most venom. Even so, he was still not satisfied that this was a tragic accident and that was why he was keeping it as part of the overall investigation. Llewellyn’s EpiPen had never been recovered — presumably thrown away by someone who was unaware of the importance of preserving everything around a sudden death. Llewellyn was a chauvinistic drunk that no female at Brighton University would be shedding any tears over, but with the total lack of evidence to the contrary, not a murder victim.

He was feeling tired this morning, after a restless night in which he could not stop his brain from churning, churning, churning. Something must have spooked Rufus Rorke. Or maybe it was his MO to keep disappearing. Playing some kind of Dead Man’s Hide and Seek. He could be anywhere in the world now. But he could have lived and operated anywhere in the world after going off the back of that yacht — so why did he return to Sussex? Sheer hubris? A belief that he was invincible? To cock a snook at him — So, Roy, you nearly caught me last time but I fooled you by dying... now I’m back, operating under your nose and you still can’t catch me!

Grace knew there were criminals with out-of-control egos who did actually think like that. He knew also they were the ones most likely to make a mistake. Rufus Rorke had made one, two years ago. He was bound to have made another — they just had to find it.

‘Morning, boss,’ Jack Alexander said, walking in looking perky, holding a large mug of coffee.

‘Any progress on the source of the guns, Jack?’

‘The Ballistics team at the Firearms Unit have said the gun in the Ferrari’s glove box was a viable weapon, but probably only good for one or two shots — which I understand is the case with most of these printed weapons. But there are a wide range of 3D printers capable of printing the components in that gun. I’ve got a list of all the manufacturers of the ones capable of producing a working firearm, and it’s a big one, boss — and they are all over the world. Colombia, the US, China, India, Argentina, the Czech Republic. To give you a sense of what we’re up against, there are currently 168,000 3D printers in use in the UK.’

‘That’s why villains like these 3D guns,’ Norman Potting said.

Grace looked up — he hadn’t noticed the DS enter the room.

‘No serial number on them,’ Potting continued. ‘They’re untraceable, as we know.’

Grace nodded, only too aware he was facing yet another blind alley in this investigation. The internal phone began warbling. Nick Nicholl, who had also just come in and was standing close to it, picked up the receiver. ‘DC Nicholl, Major Crime,’ he said.

Grace turned back to Alexander. ‘Jack, did the Ballistics guys say if that gun had ever been fired?’

‘Boss!’ Nicholl interrupted with an urgency in his tone. ‘You need to listen to this!’ He tapped a button on the phone and seconds later they all heard the voice of DC Jamie Carruthers.

‘Sir, I’ve been contacted from a woman on the dark web. She wants to speak to you and no one else. She says she knows where Paul Anthony is.’