Dead Like You (4 page)

1997

9

Thursday 25 December

They were moving. Driving somewhere. Rachael Ryan could hear the steady, dull boom of the exhaust and she was breathing in lungfuls of its fumes. She could hear the sound of the tyres sluicing on the wet road. Could feel every bump jarring her through the sacking on which she lay trussed up, arms behind her back, unable to move or speak. All she could see was the top of the back of his baseball cap in the driver’s cab up front and his ears sticking out.

She was frozen with cold, with terror. Her mouth and throat were parched and her head ached terribly from when he had hit her. Her whole body hurt. She felt nauseous with disgust – dirty, filthy. She desperately wanted a shower, hot water, soap, shampoo. Wanted to wash herself inside and out.

She felt the van going around a corner. She could see daylight. Grey daylight. Christmas morning. She should be in her flat, opening the stocking her mother had posted to her. Every year of her childhood and still now, at twenty-two, she had a Christmas stocking.

She began crying. She could hear the clunk-clop of windscreen wipers. Suddenly, Elton John’s ‘Candle in the Wind’ began playing loudly and crackly on the radio. She could see the man’s head swaying to the music.

Elton John had sung that song at Prince Diana’s funeral, with new lyrics. Rachael remembered that day so vividly. She had been one of the hundreds of thousands of mourners outside Westminster Abbey, listening to that song, watching the funeral on one of the huge television screens. She had camped the night on the pavement, and the day before had spent a big part of her week’s wages from her job on the help desk in the customer relations department of American Express in Brighton on a bouquet of flowers that she had placed, alongside the thousands of others, in front of Kensington Palace.

She had idolized the Princess. Something had died inside her the day Diana died.

Now a new nightmare had begun.

The van braked sharply to a halt and she slid forward a few inches. She tried again to move her hands and her legs, which were agonizingly cramped. But she could move nothing.

It was Christmas morning and her parents were expecting her for a glass of champagne and then Christmas lunch – followed by the Queen’s speech. A tradition, every year, like the stocking.

She tried again to speak, to plead with the man, but her mouth was taped shut. She needed to pee and had already once, some time ago, soiled herself. She could not do that again. There was a ringing sound. Her mobile phone; she recognized the Nokia ring-tone. The man turned his head for an instant, then looked to the front again. The van moved forward. Through her blurry eyes and the smeared windscreen she saw a green traffic light pass by. Then she saw buildings on her left that she recognized. Gamley’s, the toyshop. They were on Church Road, Hove. Heading west.

Her phone stopped. A short while later she heard a beep-beep, signalling a message.

From whom?

Tracey and Jade?

Or her parents calling to wish her Happy Christmas? Her mother anxious to know if she liked her stocking?

How long before they started to worry about her?

Oh, Christ! Who the hell is this man?

She rolled over to her left as the van made a sharp right turn. Then a left turn. Then another turn. And stopped.

The song stopped. A cheery male voice began talking about where the wonderful Elton John was spending his Christmas.

The man got out, leaving the engine running. The fumes and her fear were making her more and more nauseous. She was desperate for water.

Suddenly he came back into the van. They moved forward, into

increasing darkness. Then the engine was switched off and there was a moment of complete silence as the radio went off too. The man disappeared.

There was a metallic clang as the driver’s door shut.

Then another metallic clang, cutting out all light.

She lay still, whimpering in fear, in total darkness.

10

Friday 26 December

Suited and booted and proudly wearing the smart red paisley tie that Sandy had given him yesterday for Christmas, Roy passed on his left the blue door marked
Superintendent
and on his right the one marked
Chief Superintendent.
Roy often wondered whether he’d ever get to make Chief Superintendent.

The whole building felt deserted this Boxing Day morning, apart from a few members of the
Operation Houdini
team in the Incident Room on the top floor. They were still working around the clock to try to catch the serial rapist known as the Shoe Man.

As he waited for the kettle to boil, he thought for a moment about the Chief Superintendent’s cap. With its band of silver to distinguish it from the lesser ranks, it was, no question, very covetable. But he wondered if he was smart enough to rise to such a rank – and doubted it.

One thing Roy Grace had learned about Sandy, in their years of marriage, was that she had at times a perfectionist view of how she wanted her particular world to be – and a very short fuse if any aspect failed her expectations. On a number of occasions, her sudden flare of temper at an inept waiter or shop assistant had left him feeling acutely embarrassed. But that spirit in her was part of what had attracted him to her in the first place. She had all the support and enthusiasm in the world for success, however big or small, but he just had to remember that, for Sandy, failure was never an option.

Which explained, in part, her deep resentment, and occasional outbursts of anger, that, after years of trying almost every fertility treatment possible, she was still unable to conceive the baby they both so desperately wanted.

Humming the words of Eric Clapton’s ‘Change the World’ – which for some reason had popped into his head – Roy Grace carried his mug of coffee down to his desk in the deserted open-plan Detectives’ Room on the second floor of Brighton’s John Street police station, with its rows of partitioned desks, its manky blue carpet, its crammed pigeonholes and its view to the east of the white walls and gleaming blue windows of the American Express headquarters. Then he logged on to the clunky, slow computer system to check the overnight serials. While he waited for it to load, he took a sip of coffee and fancied a cigarette, silently cursing the ban on smoking in police offices which had recently been introduced.

An attempt had been made, as it was every year, to bring some Christmas cheer into the place. There were paper-chains hanging from the ceiling. Bits of tinsel draped along the tops of the partitions. Christmas cards on several desks.

Sandy was deeply unimpressed that this was the second Christmas in three years that he had found himself on duty. And, as she quite rightly pointed out, it was a lousy week to be working. Even most of the local villains, off their trolleys with drink or off their faces with drugs, were in their homes or their lairs.

Christmas was the peak period for sudden deaths and for suicides. It might be a happy few days for those with friends and families, but it was a desperate, wretched time for the lonely, particularly the elderly lonely ones who didn’t even have enough money to heat their homes properly. But it was a quiet period for serious crimes – the kind that could get an ambitious young detective sergeant like himself noticed by his peers and give him the chance to show his abilities.

That was about to change.

Very unusually, the phones had been quiet. Normally they rang all around the room constantly.

As the first serials appeared, his internal phone suddenly rang.

‘CID,’ he answered.

It was a Force Control Room operator, from the centre which handled and graded all enquiries.

‘Hi, Roy. Happy Christmas.’

‘You too, Doreen,’ he said.

‘Got a possible misper,’ she said. ‘Rachael Ryan, twenty-two, left her friends on Christmas Eve at the cab rank on East Street to walk home. She did not show up for Christmas lunch at her parents and did not answer her home phone or mobile. Her parents visited her flat in Eastern Terrace, Kemp Town, at 3 p.m. yesterday and there was no response. They’ve informed us this is out of character and they are concerned.’

Grace took down the addresses of Rachael Ryan and her parents and told her he would investigate.

The current police policy was to allow several days for a missing person to turn up before assigning any resources, unless they were a minor, an elderly adult or someone identified as being vulnerable. But with today promising to be quiet, he decided he’d rather be out doing something than sitting here on his backside.

The twenty-nine-year-old Detective Sergeant got up and walked along a few rows of desks to one of his colleagues who was in today, DS Norman Potting. Some fifteen years his senior, Potting was an old sweat, a career detective sergeant who had never been promoted, partly because of his politically incorrect attitude, partly because of his chaotic domestic life, and partly because, like many police officers, including Grace’s late father, Potting preferred frontline work rather than taking on the bureaucratic responsibilitiesthat came with promotion. Grace was one of the few here who actually liked the man and enjoyed listening to his ‘war stories’ – as police tales of past incidents were known – because he felt he could learn something from them; and besides, he felt a little sorry for the guy.

The Detective Sergeant was intently pecking at his keyboard with his right index finger. ‘Bloody new technology,’ he grumbled in his thick Devon burr as Grace’s shadow fell over him. A reek of tobacco smoke rose from the man. ‘I’ve had two lessons, still can’t make sodding head nor tail of this. What’s wrong with the old system we all know?’

‘It’s called progress,’ Grace said.

‘Hrrr. Progress like allowing all sorts into the force?’

Ignoring this, Grace replied, ‘There’s a reported misper that I’m not very happy about. You busy? Or got time to come with me to make some enquiries?’

Potting hauled himself to his feet. ‘Anything to break the mahogany, as my old auntie would say,’ he replied. ‘Have a good Christmas, Roy?’

‘Short and sweet. All six hours of it that I spent at home, that is.’

‘At least you
have
a home,’ Potting said morosely.

‘Oh?’

‘I’m living in a bedsit. Threw me out, didn’t she? Not much fun, wishing your kids a merry Xmas from a payphone in the corridor. Eating an ASDA Christmas Dinner for One in front of the telly.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Grace replied. He genuinely was.

‘Know why women are like hurricanes, Roy?’

Grace shook his head.

‘Because when they arrive they’re wet and wild. When they leave they take your house and car.’

Grace humoured him with a thin, wintry smile.

‘It’s all right for you – you’re happily married. Good luck to you. But just watch out,’ Potting went on. ‘Watch out for when they turn. Trust me, this is my second bloody disaster. Should have learned my lesson first time around. Women think coppers are dead sexy until they marry ’em. Then they realize we’re not what they thought. You’re lucky if yours is different.’

Grace nodded but said nothing. Potting’s words were uncomfortably close to the truth. He had never been interested in opera of any kind. But recently Sandy had dragged him to an amateur operatic society performance of
The Pirates of Penzance.
She had nudged him continually during the song ‘A Policeman’s Lot is not a Happy One’.

Afterwards she had asked him, teasing, if he thought those words were wrong.

He’d replied that yes, they were wrong. He was very happy with his lot.

Later, in bed, she’d whispered to him that perhaps the lyrics needed to be changed. That they should have sung, ‘A policeman’s
wife’s
lot is not a happy one.’

11

Thursday 1 January

Several of the houses in the residential street outside the hospital had Christmas lights in the windows and wreaths on the front door. They’d be coming down soon for another year, Grace thought a little sadly, slowing as they approached the entrance to the squat slab of stained concrete and garishly curtained windows of Crawley Hospital. He liked the magical spell that the Christmas break cast on the world, even when he had to work through it.

The building had no doubt looked a lot more impressive under the sunny blue sky of the architect’s original impression than it did on a wet January morning. Grace thought that the architect had probably failed to take into account the blinds blocking half of its windows, the dozens of cars parked higgledy-piggledy outside, the plethora of signs and the weather stains on the walls.

Glenn Branson normally liked to terrify him by showing off his driving skills, but today he had allowed his colleague to drive here, freeing him to concentrate on giving Roy the full download on his lousy Christmas week. Glenn’s marriage, which had hit new lows in the weeks building up to Christmas, had deteriorated even further on Christmas Day itself.

Already livid that his wife, Ari, had changed the locks on their house, his temper had boiled over on Christmas morning when he’d arrived laden with gifts for his two young children and she’d refused to let him in. A massively powerful former nightclub bouncer, Glenn kicked open the front door, to find, as he suspected, her new lover ensconced in
his
house, playing with
his
children, in front of
his
Christmas tree, for God’s sake!

She had dialled the nines and he had narrowly escaped being arrested by the Response Team patrol car that had turned up from East Brighton Division – which would have put paid to his career.

‘So what would you have done?’ Glenn said.

‘Probably the same. But that doesn’t make it OK.’

‘Yeah.’ He was quiet for a moment, then said, ‘You’re right. But when I saw that dickhead personal trainer playing the X-Box with
my
kids, I could have fucking ripped his head off and played basketball with it.’

‘You’re going to have to keep a lid on it somehow, matey. I don’t want you screwing your career up over this.’

Branson just stared through the windscreen at the rain outside. Then he said bleakly, ‘What does it matter? Nothing matters any more.’

Roy Grace loved this guy, this big, well-meaning, kind-hearted man-mountain. He’d first encountered him some years back, when Glenn was a freshly promoted detective constable. He had recognized in him so many aspects of himself – drive, ambition. And Glenn had that key element it took to make a good policeman – high emotional intelligence. Since then, Grace had mentored him. But now, with his disintegrating marriage and his failing control of his temper, Glenn was dangerously close to losing the plot.

He was also dangerously close to damaging their deep friendship. For the past few months Branson had been his lodger, at his home just off the Hove seafront. Grace did not mind about that, as he was now effectively living with Cleo in her town house in the North Laine district of central Brighton. But he did mind Branson’s meddling with his precious record collection and the constant criticism of his taste in music.

Such as now.

In the absence of having his own car – his beloved Alfa Romeo, which had been destroyed in a chase some months earlier and was still the subject of an insurance wrangle – Grace was reduced to using pool cars, which were all small Fords or Hyundai Getzs. He had just mastered an iPod gadget that Cleo had given him for Christmas which played his music through any car’s radio system and had been showing off to Branson on the way here.

‘Who’s this?’ Branson asked, in a sudden change of focus as the music changed.

‘Laura Marling.’

He listened for a moment. ‘She’s so derivative.’

‘Of whom?’

Branson shrugged.

‘I like her,’ Grace said defiantly.

They listened in silence for a few moments, until he spotted an empty slot and steered into it. ‘You’re soft in the head for women vocalists,’ Branson said. ‘That’s your problem.’

‘I do actually like her. OK?’

‘You’re sad.’

‘Cleo likes her too,’ he retorted. ‘She gave me this for Christmas. Want me to tell her you think she’s sad?’

Branson raised his huge, smooth hands. ‘Whoahhhh!’

Yeah. Whoahhhh!’

‘Respect!’ Branson said. But his voice was almost quiet and humourless.

All three spaces reserved for the police were taken, but as today was a public holiday there were plenty of empty spots all around. Grace pulled into one, switched off the ignition and they climbed out of the car. Then they hurried through the rain around the side of the hospital.

‘Did you and Ari ever argue over music?’

‘Why?’ Branson asked.

‘Just wondering.’

Most visitors to this complex of buildings would not even have noticed the small white sign with blue lettering saying SATURN CENTRE, pointing along a nondescript pathway bordered by the hospital wall on one side and bushes on the other. It looked as if it might be the route to the dustbins.

In fact it housed Sussex’s first Sexual Assault Referral Centre. A dedicated unit, recently opened by the Chief Constable, like others around England it showed a marked change in the way rape victims were treated. Grace could remember a time, not so long ago, when traumatized rape victims had to walk through a police station and frequently be interviewed by cynical male officers. All that had now changed and this centre was the latest development.

Here the victims, who were in a deeply vulnerable state, would be seen by trained same-sex officers and psychologists – professionals who would do their very best to comfort them and put them at their ease, while at the same time having to go through the brutal task of establishing the truth.

One of the hardest things facing Sexual Offences Liaison Officers was the fact that the victims actually had to be treated as crime scenes themselves, their clothes and their bodies potentially containing vital trace evidence. Time, as in all investigations, was crucial. Many rape victims took days, weeks or even years before they went to the police, and many never reported their attacks ever, not wanting to relive their most tormented experience.

*

Branson and Grace hurried past a black wheelie bin, then a row of traffic cones incongruously stacked there, and reached the door. Grace pressed the bell and moments later the door was opened. They were ushered in, and out of the elements, by a woman staff member he knew, but whose name he had momentarily forgotten.

‘Happy New Year, Roy!’ she said.

‘You too!’

He saw her looking at Glenn and desperately racked his brains for her name. Then it came to him!

‘Glenn, this is Brenda Keys – Brenda, this is DS Glenn Branson, one of my colleagues in the Major Crime Branch.’

‘Nice to meet you, Detective Sergeant,’ she said.

Brenda Keys was a trained interviewer who had processed victims in Brighton and other parts of the county before this facility was established. A kind, intelligent-looking woman with short brown hair and large glasses, she was always dressed quietly and conservatively, as she was today, in her black slacks and a grey V-neck over a blouse.

You could tell you were inside one of the modern generation of interview suites with your eyes shut, Grace thought. They all smelt of new carpets and fresh paint and had a deadened, soundproofed atmosphere.

This one was a labyrinth of rooms behind closed pine doors, with a central reception area carpeted in beige. The cream-painted walls were hung with framed, brightly coloured and artily photographed prints of familiar Sussex scenes – beach huts on the Hove promenade, the Jack and Jill windmills at Clayton, Brighton Pier. It all felt well intentioned, but as if someone had tried just a bit too hard to distance the victims who came here from the horrors they had experienced.

They signed themselves in and Brenda Keys brought them up to speed. As she did so, a door opened along the corridor and a heavily built female uniformed constable with spikes of short black hair rising from her head, as if she had stuck her fingers into an electrical socket, ambled towards them with a genial smile

‘Constable Rowland, sir,’ she said. ‘Detective Superintendent Grace?’

‘Yes – and this is DS Branson.’

‘They’re in Interview One – only just started. The SOLO, DC Westmore, is talking to the victim and DS Robertson’s observing. Would you like to go into the observation room?’

‘Is there room for us both?’

‘I’ll put another chair in. Can I get you anything to drink?

‘I’d murder a coffee,’ Grace said. ‘Muddy, no sugar.’

Branson asked for a Diet Coke.

They followed the constable down the corridor, past doors marked
Medical Examination Room
,
Meeting Room
, then
Interview Room
.

A short distance along she opened another door with no sign on it and they went in. The observation room was a small space, with a narrow white worktop on which sat a row of computers. A flat-screen monitor was fixed to the wall, displaying the CCTV feed from the adjoining interview room. The Detective Sergeant who had first attended at the Metropole Hotel, a boyish-looking man in his late twenties with a shaven fuzz of fair hair, was seated at the desk, an open notebook in front of him and a bottle of water with the cap removed. He was wearing an ill-fitting grey suit and a purple tie with a massive knot, and he had the clammy pallor of a man fighting a massive hangover.

Grace introduced himself and Glenn, then they sat down, Grace on a hard secretarial swivel chair which the Constable had wheeled in.

The screen gave a static view of a small, windowless room furnished with a blue settee, a blue armchair and a small round table on which sat a large box of Kleenex. It was carpeted in a cheerless dark grey and the walls were painted a cold off-white. A second camera and a microphone were mounted high up.

The victim, a frightened-looking woman in her thirties, in a white towelling dressing gown with the letters MH monogrammed on the chest, sat, hunched up like a ball on the sofa, arms wrapped around her midriff. She was thin, with an attractive but pale face, and streaked mascara. Her long red hair was in a messy tangle.

Across the table from her sat DC Claire Westmore, the Sexual Offences Liaison Officer. She was mirroring the victim, sitting with the same posture, arms wrapped around her midriff too.

The police had learned, over the years, the most effective ways to obtain information from victims and witnesses during interviews. The first principle concerned dress code. Never wear anything that might distract the subject, such as stripes or vivid colours. DC Westmore was dressed appropriately, in a plain blue open-neck shirt beneath a navy V-neck jumper, black trousers and plain black shoes. Her shoulder-length fair hair was swept back from her face and cinched with a band. A simple silver choker was the only jewellery she was wearing.

The second principle was to put the victim or witness in the dominant position, to relax them, which was why the interviewee – Nicola Taylor – was on the sofa, while the DC was on the single chair.

Mirroring was a classic interview technique. If you mirrored everything that the subject did, sometimes it would put them at ease to such an extent that they began to mirror the interviewer. When that happened, the interviewer then had control and the victim would acquiesce, relating to the interviewer – and, in interview parlance, start to
cough
.

Grace jotted down occasional notes as Westmore, in her gentle Scouse accent, slowly and skilfully attempted to coax a response from the traumatized, silent woman. A high percentage of rape victims suffer immediate post-traumatic stress disorder, their agitated state limiting the time they are able to concentrate and focus. Westmore was intelligently making the best of this by following the guidelines to go to the most recent event first and then work backwards.

Over his years as a detective Grace had learned, from numerous interviewing courses he had attended, something that he was fond of telling team members: there is no such thing as a bad witness – only a bad interviewer.

But this DC seemed to know exactly what she was doing.

‘I know this must be very difficult for you to talk about, Nicola,’ she said. ‘But it would help me to understand what’s happened and really help in trying to find out who has done this to you. You don’t have to tell me today if you don’t want to.’

The woman stared ahead in silence, wringing her hands together, shaking.

Grace felt desperately sorry for her.

The SOLO began wringing her hands too. After some moments, she asked, ‘You were at a New Year’s Eve dinner at the Metropole with some friends, I understand?’

Silence.

Tears were rolling down the woman’s cheeks.

‘Is there anything at all you can tell me today?’

She shook her head suddenly.

‘OK. That’s not a problem,’ Claire Westmore said. She sat in silence for a short while, then she asked, ‘At this dinner, did you have very much to drink?’

The woman shook her head.

‘So you weren’t drunk?’

‘Why do you think I was drunk?’ she snapped back suddenly.

The SOLO smiled. ‘It’s one of those evenings when we all let our guard down a little. I don’t drink very much. But New Year’s Eve I tend to get wrecked! It’s the one time of year!’

Nicola Taylor looked down at her hands. ‘Is that what you think?’ she said quietly. ‘That I was wrecked?’

‘I’m here to help you. I’m not making any assumptions, Nicola.’

‘I was stone cold sober,’ she said bitterly.

‘OK.’

Grace was pleased to see the woman reacting. That was a positive sign.

‘I’m not judging you, Nicola. I’d just like to know what happened. I honestly do understand how difficult it is to speak about what you have been through and I want to help you in any way I can. I can only do that if I understand exactly what’s happened to you.’