Looking Good Dead (14 page)

‘She doesn’t like being fucked up the ass,’ Venner said, rephrasing slightly. ‘Can you believe that?’

The Weatherman didn’t really have an opinion on the subject. Feeling himself propelled forward by the short, dense mass of Carl Venner, he simply said, ‘Ummmm.’

They stopped for a moment and Venner turned his head back to Mr Brown. ‘Do what you want with her, then get rid of the little bitch.’

Putting up with this, and being party to it, was not part of his deal, but then the Weatherman had never understood the true nature of his contractor until he had started looking into Venner’s background by hacking into his private files.

He had first encountered Venner on an internet chatline for techies, where information was exchanged and technical conundrums posited and worked out. Venner had set him a challenge which the Weatherman had thought at the time was hypothetical. The challenge was whether it was possible to put up a website on the internet that would be completely and permanently untraceable. The Weatherman had already designed the system. He had thought of offering it to the British intelligence services, but then he had been pissed off about the Iraq war. And anyway he distrusted all government bodies, everywhere. In fact he distrusted just about everything.

Venner propelled him through into his cavernous office, which comprised most of the upstairs floor of the warehouse. It was a vast, windowless and soulless place, carpeted in the same cheap material as the front office and almost equally sparsely furnished, apart from one area at the far end taken up with several racks of computer hardware – which the Weatherman knew inside out, as he had installed it all himself.

Venner’s desk, on which sat four open laptops and nothing else other than a glass ashtray with two crushed cigar butts and a glass bowl full of chocolate bars, was a clone of the one outside. There was an old executive black leather armchair behind it, and a long brown leather sofa, in poor condition, near the desk. On the carpet just in front of it the Weatherman noticed a crumpled pair of skimpy lace knickers. Above him, raindrops were pattering down on the metal warehouse roof.

As ever, Venner’s two silent Russian colleagues, in their black suits, materialized from nowhere and flanked the fat man, silent and unsmiling, giving the Weatherman just faint nods of acknowledgement.

‘You know, she really did fucking bite me. Look!’ Venner exhaled a blast of cigar-laced halitosis and held up a fat, stubby index finger, nail gnawed to the quick.

The Weatherman could see deep puncture marks just above the first knuckle. Peering at them he said, ‘You’ll need a tetanus jab.’

‘Tetanus?’

The Weatherman fixated on the knickers on the carpet, rocking backwards and forwards in silence, deep in thought.

‘Tetanus?’ the American repeated, worried.

Still staring at the knickers Frost said, ‘The bacterial inoculum of human bite wounds is worse than any other animal. Do you have any idea how many organisms thrive in human oral flora?’

‘I don’t.’

Still rocking, the Weatherman said, ‘Up to one million per millilitre – with over one hundred and ninety different bacterial species.’

‘Terrific.’ Venner stared dubiously at his wound. ‘So . . .’ He strutted agitatedly around the floor in a small circle, then closed his hands together, his expression indicating a complete change of mood and subject. ‘You have the information?’

‘Ummm.’ The Weatherman continued to stare at the knickers, still rocking. ‘What is going to, umm – going to, ummm – to the girl? Happen to her?’

‘Mick’s taking her home. What’s your problem?’

‘Ummm – no I, umm – good. OK, great.’

‘Do you have what I asked you to bring? What I’m fucking paying you for?’

The Weatherman unbuttoned the back pocket of his trousers and pulled out a small, lined sheet of paper torn from a notebook and folded twice. He handed it to Venner, who took it with a grunt. ‘You are one-hundred-per-cent sure?’

‘Yes.’

This seemed to satisfy Venner, who waddled over to his desk to read it.

Written on it was the address of Tom and Kellie Bryce.

21

Professor Lars Johansson was a man who, in Grace’s opinion, looked more like an international banker than a scientist who had spent much of his life crawling through bat caves, swamps and hostile jungles around the globe in search of rare insects.

Over six foot tall, with smooth blond hair and suave good looks, attired in a three-piece chalk-striped suit, the Anglo-Swede exuded urbane charm and confidence. He sat at his large desk, in his cluttered office on the top floor of London’s Natural History Museum, with his half-moon tortoiseshell glasses perched on the end of his nose, surrounded by display cases and bell jars filled with rare specimens, a microscope, and a raft of medical implements, rulers and weights. The entire room could have come straight from the set of an Indiana Jones movie, Grace thought.

The two men had met and become friends a few years back at the International Homicide Investigators Association Convention, an event hosted in different US cities, which Grace attended annually. Ordinarily Grace would have sent one of his team to see Johansson, but he knew he’d get quicker answers by coming in person.

The entomologist removed the plastic bag containing the beetle from the buff-coloured police evidence bag. ‘It’s been swabbed, Roy?’ he asked in his cultured English accent.

‘Yes.’

‘So it is OK to take it out?’

‘Absolutely.’

Johansson carefully extracted the two-inch-long beetle with a pair of tweezers and laid it on his blotter pad. He studied it in silence for some moments with a large magnifying glass while Grace sipped gratefully on a mug of black coffee, thinking ruefully for a moment about the date with Cleo he had had to cancel tonight, in order to first be here and then get back to Sussex House for a late briefing of his team. He had been looking forward to it more than anything he could remember in a very long time and felt gutted he was not going to see her. But at least they had made a new date, for Saturday, just two days away. And the bonus was that that would give him time to buy some new gear.

‘It’s a good specimen, Roy,’ he said. ‘Very fine.’

‘What can you tell me about it?’

‘Where exactly did you find this?’

Grace explained, and the entomologist, to his credit, barely raised an eyebrow.

‘That would fit,’ he said. ‘Very sick but very apt.’

‘Fit?’ Grace asked.

‘It is an appropriate location – for reasons that will become clear to you.’ He gave a wry smile.

‘I’m all ears.’

‘Do you want the full Year Two university biology class lecture on this little fellow? Or the short summary.’

‘Just the simpleton download – I’ll have to pass it on to some people who are even bigger numbskulls than myself.’

The entomologist smiled. ‘His name is Copris lunaris, and he’s about average length – they are normally fifteen to twenty-five millimetres. He’s indigenous to southern Europe and North Africa.’

‘Are they found here at all?’

‘Not outside a zoo.’

Grace frowned, thinking about the ramifications of this.

The Professor continued: ‘It was considered a sacred creature by the ancient Egyptians, and is also known as a dung beetle or Scarab.’

Now Grace understood. ‘Dung beetle?’

‘Exactly. The best known are the subspecies called dung-rollers. They use their head and front legs to scrape up the dung and shape it into a ball, then they roll it along until they find a suitable place to bury it, so it can mature and break down.’

‘Sounds delicious,’ Grace said.

‘I think I prefer Swedish meatballs.’

Grace thought for a moment. ‘So putting this beetle up the woman’s rectum has some significance.’

‘It would seem a warped one, but yes.’

A siren whupped past in the street below. ‘I think it’s a fair assumption that we’re dealing with someone who has a different value set to you and me,’ Grace said with a grimace. ‘What exactly is the connection with the ancient Egyptians, Lars?’

‘I’ll print it out for you; it’s really quite fascinating.’

‘Will it help me find my killer?’

‘He’s clearly someone who knows about symbolism. I would think it is important for you to understand as much about this as possible. You haven’t been to Egypt, Roy?’

‘No.’

The Professor was starting to look quite animated. ‘If you go to Luxor, the Valley of the Kings or any of the temples, you’ll see scarabs carved everywhere; they were a fundamental part of Upper and Lower Egyptian culture. And of course they were significant in funeral rites.’

Grace sipped some more of his coffee, running through in his mind all he had to do this evening, while the Professor worked on his keyboard for a few moments.

Twenty minutes ago DC Emma-Jane Boutwood had phoned to tell him the DNA results were in and there was no match on the database. No more body parts had yet been found. One more of the missing women had been eliminated in the past hour. DNA from the rest had been couriered up to the lab and hopefully – for the police, at any rate – there would be a match. If not they would have to immediately widen their search.

Suddenly, a printer spat a sheet of paper out inches from where he was sitting, startling him.

‘Funeral rites?’

‘Yes.’

‘What was the significance of these beetles in funeral rites, Lars?’

‘They’d be put in the tombs to ensure eternal resurrection.’

Grace thought about it for some moments. Were they dealing with a religious fanatic? A game player? Clearly it was someone intelligent – cultured enough to have read up on ancient Egypt – the placing of this particular beetle in the woman’s rectum was no random act. ‘Where would someone get hold of a scarab beetle in England?’ he asked. ‘Only in a zoo?’

‘No, there are a few importers of tropical insects who would deal in them. I don’t doubt they are available on the internet as well.’

Grace made a mental note to have someone list and visit every tropical insect supplier in the UK and do a trawl on the Web.

The entomologist returned the beetle to the evidence bag. ‘Is there anything else I can help you with on this, Roy?’

‘I’m sure there will be. I can’t think of anything more at the moment. And I really appreciate your staying on late to see me.’

‘It’s not a problem.’ Lars Johansson nodded towards the window and the view out over Exhibition Road. ‘Turned out to be a fine evening. Are you heading back down to Sussex?’

Grace nodded.

‘Let me buy you a drink – one for the road?’

Grace glanced at his watch. The next fast train down to Brighton was in about forty minutes. He did not have time for a drink, but he sure felt in need of one. And as the Professor had been helpful to him so many times in the past, he thought it would be rude to decline. ‘Just a quick one,’ he said. ‘Then I’ll have to run.’

Which was why, thirty minutes later, at a street table outside a crowded pub, he found himself wondering just exactly what the hell was wrong with his life. He should have been out on a date tonight with one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen. Instead he was drinking his second pint of warm beer, having first had a fifteen-minute lecture on the digestive system of the scarab beetle, and now a lengthy analysis from the increasingly maudlin Lars Johansson of all that was wrong with the man’s marriage.

22

The Thursday-night rush hour traffic out of London had been worse than usual. And tonight being a fine, balmy night, it seemed every Londoner was escaping into the countryside. Tom normally travelled by train to avoid this hell, but he’d had to take the car today to get out to Ron Spacks’s office, and afterwards he’d had to drive back into central London to collect his laptop.

His plans to get home early and have a barbecue supper in the garden with his family had been shot to ribbons by Chris Webb arriving late to fix his computer and then taking much longer than he had thought. It was almost half past four in the afternoon by the time Chris had finished, freeing Tom to start his journey at the worst possible time.

Normally in the car he would catch up on phone calls or listen to the radio – in London he particularly liked David Prever on Smooth FM, otherwise he listened to the Radio 4 news or Jazz FM – but this evening, apart from one call to Ron Spacks to say he had his team working on prices for the Rolex Oyster watches – that was potentially a dream order he just had to get – he had driven in silence, just with his own sombre thoughts.

Is that Tom Bryce speaking?

The strong eastern European accent. His conversation with Kellie earlier.

What kind of an accent?

Sort of European, not English.

The same person?

Last night you accessed a website you were unauthorized to visit. Now you have tried to access it again. We do not appreciate uninvited guests. If you inform the police about what you saw or if you ever try to access this site again, what is about to happen to your computer will happen to your wife, Kellie, to your son, Max, and to your daughter, Jessica. Take a good look, then have a hard think.

Tom had had no intention of informing the police about what he had seen on Tuesday night. The internet was a sewer; you could find anything you wanted on it, however erotic or gross. He’d been to a website that was either a movie trailer or some gratuitously violent site for sickos and would have left it at that. It wasn’t his job to police the sewer.

But that threatening email implied there was something more to that site.

He was approaching the South Downs now; the traffic, although heavy, was moving quickly. Over to his left, half a mile across meadows, he saw a glint of light in reflected glass. A train. Forgetting the cramped, stuffy conditions for a brief moment, he envied its passengers the relative ease of their journey. However, he’d be home in fifteen minutes, and he was looking forward to a large, stiff drink.

He looked out through the windscreen at the brilliant yellow ball of sun sinking low in the cobalt sky. Beyond the hills was his home, his sanctuary. But he didn’t feel safe; something was shaking his insides, mixing up all his emotions, pouring a cocktail of confused fears into him.

He didn’t want to tell Kellie that he’d had the same call, and yet they had always been so open and honest with each other, he wondered if it would be wrong not to tell her. Except it would only make her even more nervous. And then he’d have to explain the CD.

And then?

The threat in the email was clear. If he informed the police. If he attempted to visit the site again.

Well the fact was he intended to do neither. So they should be fine.

So why the calls? Maybe he’d been stupid to make that second visit to the website, he realized.

As he turned into his street and drove up the hill, an alarm bell rang inside him. Ahead he could see Kellie’s old maroon Espace parked out in the street. She normally put it in the carport. Why was it out on the street? he wondered.

Moments later as he pulled up outside the house he saw the reason. Almost every square inch of the carport was taken up by a crate. It was one of the biggest crates he had ever seen in his life. It could easily have housed a full-grown elephant, with room for it to swing a cat from its trunk.

The thing was taller than the garage door, for Chrissake.

And instead of the front door opening wide, and Kellie, Max, Jessica and Lady bursting out through it to greet him, the door opened just a few inches and Kellie’s face peered round, warily, before she emerged wearing a baggy white T-shirt over cut-off denim shorts and flip-flops. Somewhere at the back of the house he could hear Lady barking in furious excitement. No sign of the kids.

‘It’s a little bigger than I expected,’ Kellie said, meekly, by way of a greeting. ‘They’re going to come back tomorrow to put it together.’

Tom just stared at her for a moment. She looked so vulnerable suddenly. Scared of the phone call or of him? ‘Wh— what is it?’ he asked. All he could think was that whatever was in there had to have cost serious money.

‘I just had to buy it,’ she said. ‘Honestly, it was such good value.’

Jesus. Trying desperately to hold on to his fast-unravelling patience. ‘What is it?’

She gave a little shrug and said, trying to sound nonchalant and not succeeding, ‘Oh, it’s just a barbecue.’

Now he understood the reticence in her voice when he had suggested earlier today that they had a barbecue this evening. ‘A barbecue? What the hell do you barbecue in a thing that size? Whales? Dinosaurs? An entire fucking herd of Aberdeen Angus?’

‘The list price new is over eight thousand pounds. I got it for three thousand!’ she exclaimed.

Tom turned away, his temper just a few threads from fraying completely. ‘You’re unbelievable, my darling. We’ve already got a perfectly decent kettle barbecue.’

‘It’s rusting.’

‘So, you could get a brand new one from Homebase for about seventy quid. You’ve spent three thousand? And where the hell are we going to put it – the thing’ll take up half the garden.’

‘No, I don’t – it’s not – not that big when it’s assembled. It just looks so cool!’

‘You’ll have to send it back.’ Then he paused, looking around. ‘Where are the kids?’

‘I told them I needed to speak to you before you saw them. I warned them that Daddy might not be too pleased.’ She slipped her arms around him. ‘Look, there’s something I haven’t told you – I sort of wanted it to be a surprise.’ She gave him a kiss.

Christ, he wondered, what now? Was she going to tell him she was pregnant?

‘I’ve got a job!’

The words actually jolted a smile out of him.

Half an hour later, after he had read Jessica several pages of Poppy Cat Loves Rainbows, then Max a chapter of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and had watered his tomatoes in the greenhouse, and the raspberry canes, strawberries and courgettes in the strip of soil beside it, he was seated with Kellie at the wooden table on their terrace, with a massive vodka martini in his hand, catching the last rays of the evening sun on their garden. They clinked glasses. Near his feet, Lady crunched contentedly on a bone.

Len Wainwright’s head was visible, through the wisteria Kellie had trained along the top of the fence to give them added privacy, moving along, down towards his shed. Len had spent a lot of time, time that Tom could not afford, talking him through the various stages in the construction of this shed. But he had never actually explained its purpose. Kellie had once suggested that he was going to murder his wife and put her underneath. It had seemed funny at the time; Tom wasn’t smiling any more.

The air smelled sweet and was still, other than the busy evening chatter of birds. It was a time of year he normally loved, a time of day when he normally unwound and began enjoying life. But not this evening. Nothing seemed to calm the undefined fear that just went round and round inside him.

‘I – I didn’t know you . . . I – I mean I thought you weren’t keen on, you know, being apart from the kids, working?’ he said.

‘Jessica’s now started at nursery school, so I have time,’ she replied, sipping her wine. ‘It’s a new hotel started up in Lewes – I’ve been offered a job on the front desk, flexi-hours, starting Monday week.’

‘Why hotel work? You’ve never done hotel work. Why don’t you go back to teaching if you want to work again?’

‘I feel like doing something different. They’ll train me. There’s nothing to it. It’s mostly dealing with stuff on the computer.’

Giving you the opportunity to stay on eBay all day long, Tom thought, but said nothing. He took a gulp of his drink and started doing some mental calculations. If Kellie could earn enough just to cover her purchases that would be a considerable help. But three thousand pounds off her credit card today for the damned monster barbecue . . . It would take her months to earn that. Meantime he was going to have to fund it. Then his mobile phone, which he had left in his den, began to ring.

They caught each other’s eyes. He saw the flash of fear in Kellie’s, and wondered if she saw it in his own, also.

He hurried upstairs, and saw with relief on the caller display it was Chris Webb.

‘Hi, Chris,’ he said. ‘Have you found out anything from the disc?’

The techie’s voice was sour. ‘No, and it doesn’t look like I’m going to.’

‘How come?’

‘I got home and my whole place has been ransacked. Someone’s been through everything, and I mean everything. It’ll take a week to sort this lot out.’

‘Christ. Have you had much taken?’

‘No,’ he said, ‘I haven’t.’ There was a long pause during which Tom heard the click of what sounded like a cigarette lighter and a sharp inhalation. ‘In fact there seems to be only one damned thing missing.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Your CD.’

23

Alison Vosper, the Assistant Chief Constable, was the boss to whom Roy Grace ultimately had to answer. She possessed a mercurial temper, turning her from sweetness and light one moment to very sour the next. Some years back she had been given the sobriquet No. 27 by a wag in the force, naming her after a sweet-and-sour dish at a local Chinese takeaway. It had stuck, although it seemed to Grace it was probably time to change it, as he could not remember the last time she had actually been in a sweet mood.

And she most certainly was not in one today.

Nine o’clock on this Friday morning found him standing on the deep pile carpet of Vosper’s office, in front of her desk, with that same sick feeling in the pit of his stomach he used to get when told to report to the headmaster’s office at school. It was ridiculous for a man of his age to be nervous of a superior, but Alison Vosper had that effect on him, as indeed she did on everyone, whether they cared to admit it or not.

He had been summoned here ostensibly to give her a private briefing in advance of the daily press conference, but there wasn’t a whole lot to say. Nearly forty-eight hours on, they did not know who the victim was and they had no suspect.

One thing Grace had learned in his years as a police officer was how much importance senior officers attached to letting the public feel they were getting results. From the standpoint of trying to make the great unwashed feel all warm and fuzzy about the police, Grace had the feeling that the superiors sometimes considered on balance that it was better to bang somebody into custody, however innocent they might be, and at least show they were doing something, than to have to admit lamely to a room full of journalists trying to flog column inches that they hadn’t a clue.

Unlike the modern, soulless building of the CID headquarters at Sussex House where he was now based, the big cheeses were all housed in this handsome Queen Anne mansion, at the centre of the untidy cluster of buildings that comprised Sussex Police headquarters, on the edge of the ancient county town of Lewes.

The building’s fine original features had been left intact in most of the grander offices, in particular the delicate stucco work and the ornate ceilings. Alison Vosper’s was a fine example. Her ground-floor room was immaculate, with a fine view out over a manicured lawn, and it was furnished with elegant antiques which gave a sense of both authority and permanence.

The centrepiece was a large expanse of polished rosewood desk on which sat a black-edged blotter, a slim crystal vase containing three purple tulips, framed photographs of her husband – a police officer several years older but three ranks her junior – and her two children, a boy and a girl, immaculate in their school uniforms, an ammonite pen holder, and as always a stack of the morning’s papers fanned out. Mercifully Grace did not feature on any of the front pages.

Assistant Chief Constable Alison Vosper was not only sour this morning, she was extremely frosty, an effect enhanced by her starchy-looking high-necked blouse the colour of ice, cinched at the front by an equally icy-looking diamanté brooch. Even her perfume had an acidic tang to it.

As usual Vosper did not invite him to sit down – a technique she had long used on all juniors as a way of keeping meetings short and to the point. Grace informed her of everything that had happened since yesterday’s very late briefing. The only visible reaction he got was when he came to the beetle – enough revulsion to show that beneath her hard carapace Alison Vosper was still human.

‘So we have three possibles among the women reported missing in the past few days?’ she said. Her accent was a flat Midlands Brummie, which made her sound even harder.

‘Yes, and we’ve couriered material collected from their homes up to Huntingdon for DNA analysis – I’ve called in a favour there. We’ll get a match sometime today.’

‘And if there is no match?’

‘We’ll have to go wider.’

Her phone rang. She pressed a button, held it down and snapped, ‘I’m busy.’ Then she looked up at the Detective Superintendent again. ‘You know there’s a lot riding on this for you, Roy?’

He shrugged. ‘More than any other case?’

She gave him a long, hard, silent look. ‘I think we both know that.’

Grace frowned, unsure what was coming next and uncomfortable at her words.

She twisted her gold wedding band around on her finger for a moment, and it seemed to soften her. ‘You’ve been lucky, spending your career so far in one area, Roy. A lot of police officers have to move around, constantly, if they want to get promotion. Like me. Birmingham’s my home, but I’ve spent just three years in my whole career in Brum. I’ve been all over the place – Northumberland, Ipswich, Bristol, Southampton. It’s different to your dad’s day. He spent all his career with the force in Brighton, didn’t he?’