Dead Man's Time (6 page)

She had compound and depressed skull fractures, a lesion to the cervical region of her spinal cord, from where someone had stamped on her, which was likely to leave her a paraplegic if she
survived, as well as an almost irrelevant – at this stage – fractured right clavicle and fractured pelvis.

Aileen had been in steady decline throughout the day, and although he was still clinging to a desperate, increasingly irrational hope, he was starting to sense a terrible inevitability.

Every few moments he heard the
beep-beep-bong
of a monitor alarm. He breathed in the smells of sterilizing chemicals, the occasional tang of cologne, and a faint background smell of
warm electrical equipment.

She was in the bed, bandaged and wired, endotracheal and nasogastric tubes in her mouth and nostrils. She had a probe in her skull to measure her intracranial pressure, another on one finger,
and a forest of IV lines and drains from bags suspended from drip-stands running into her crinkly arms and abdomen. Eyes shut, she lay motionless, surrounded by racks of monitoring and life-support
apparatus. Two computer display screens were mounted to her right, and there was a laptop on the trolley at the end of the bed with all her notes and readings on it.

‘Aileen, I’m here with you. It’s Gavin. I’m here.’

Then he saw her lips moving, although he could not hear her voice. He leaned down, close to her lips, but still could hear no sound. He looked back at her.

‘What did they take?’ she mouthed.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what they took yet, but none of that matters. Only you matter.’

Again she mouthed the words. ‘Did they take the watch? It was all we had of him. Remember the message that boy gave you.
Watch the numbers?
’

And suddenly he was back ninety years. To the quay on Ellis Island, waiting to board the
Mauretania
. The youth in the cap with the heavy brown-paper bag. And he remembered those words
too now.

‘What do you think he meant, Aileen?’

But there was no reaction.

The elderly blue Mercedes limousine, with its darkened rear windows, wound down the potholed drive. Music was playing loudly. The ‘Ode To Joy’ chorus from the
Philharmonic Orchestra. His boss’s choice. The boss liked cultural stuff like this. Choral, ethereal. Music that sounded like the gods were calling you. That kind of shit.

The grand Edwardian house sat below them, fronted by mature shrubbery, a rockery and a steep lawn. The drive went all the way around to the rear. At the bottom, in the wide space between two
decrepit garages, was a whole cluster of vehicles. Two marked police cars, and what looked like two unmarked ones, and a white van with the Sussex Police crest and the words
SCIENTIFIC SUPPORT UNIT
emblazoned along the side. Blue and white crime scene tape sealed off the pathway to the house itself, in front of which stood a uniformed woman police officer
with a clipboard.

The driver got out; a week short of his seventieth birthday, he was thin as a rake and stooped, with ragged silver hair poking out beneath his chauffeur’s cap that was two sizes too
big.

‘Sorry about the bumps, boss,’ he wheezed as he opened the rear door.

Gavin Daly put down the SuDoku he was working on, stepped out, steadying himself with his black, rubber-tipped cane. Its silver head was a hawk with a piercing gaze. He ignored his
minder’s proffered helping hand, and pulled himself upright.

Tanned, with immaculate, veneered teeth and a ramrod posture, Daly could have passed for a man two decades younger. He had a hooked, down-turned flat nose that gave him the air, like the head of
his stick, of a bird of prey, a shoulder-length mane of white hair, and electric-blue eyes that were normally filled with warmth and charm, but today burned bright with anger behind his horn-rimmed
glasses. He was dressed in a beige linen suit, open-neck blue shirt with a paisley cravat, tasselled brown Ferragamo loafers, and held an unlit, half-smoked Cohiba in his hand. Only the liver spots
on his face and hands, his wrinkled neck and his slow pace gave any real clue to his age.

Masking his fury as he walked up to the police officer, he spoke calmly but firmly. ‘My name is Gavin Daly,’ he said. ‘This is my sister’s house. Detective Superintendent
Grace is expecting me.’ His voice was rich and polished, carrying just the faintest trace of his Irish antecedents. When he needed it, he had the true gift of the gab. He could sell snow to
Eskimos, sand to Bedouins and bathing suits to fish. He had made his first fortune in clocked old cars, and his second, much greater one, in high-end antiques, specializing in watches and
clocks.

She looked down at her clipboard, then spoke into her radio.

A few moments later a tall black man in a white protective oversuit and overshoes approached him. ‘Mr Daly, I’m Detective Inspector Branson, the Deputy Senior Investigating Officer
on this case. Thank you for coming – and I’m sorry about the circumstances.’

‘Not as sorry as I am,’ Daly said, with a wry smile.

‘Of course, sir. I understand.’

‘You do? Tell me what you understand? You know what it feels like, do you, to see your ninety-eight-year-old sister in Intensive Care, and to be told of the vile things that have been done
to her?’

‘We’re going to do everything in our power to catch the despicable people who did this, sir.’

Daly stared back at him, but said nothing. He was going to have his son do everything in his power to find them too. And if his violent son got there first, as he intended, the police
weren’t going to find them. Ever.

A stocky man, fully suited and hooded, appeared holding a protective suit and boots. ‘I’m David Green, the Crime Scene Manager, sir. I’d appreciate it if you would put these
on.’

Glenn Branson helped the old man struggle into them. As he did so he said, ‘I understand you’ve flown back from France today – and you’ve been to see your
sister?’

‘I have.’

‘How is she doing?’

‘Not good,’ Daly replied, curtly. ‘What would you expect? That she’s standing on her bed performing a jig?’

Branson was grateful that Roy Grace was here at the scene. This man was not going to be easy to deal with – as he had already been forewarned. David Green handed Daly a pair of gloves,
then the three walked around to the front of the house. As they entered the porch, and walked onto SOCO metal stepping plates through the doorway into the hall, Daly saw two Scenes of Crime
Officers, a male and a female, both in white over-suits, the woman on her knees making tapings, the man taking photographs.

He looked around at the dark rectangles on the walls. He’d last been here a fortnight ago. Then it had been filled with paintings and beautiful objects. Now it looked like removals men had
cleared the place.

‘Your sister lived here all on her own, Mr Daly?’

‘She has a part-time housekeeper – but the woman’s away on holiday. And a gardener who comes once a week.’

‘Would you consider both of them trustworthy?’

‘The housekeeper’s about seventy-five – she’s been with my sister for over thirty years – and the gardener for at least ten years. No question.’

‘We’ll need to talk to them, to eliminate them from our enquiries – if you can let me have their contact details, please.’

Daly nodded.

‘Something that’s very important is if you could indicate as much as you can of what’s been taken. I understand you know this house well, sir?’ Glenn Branson said.

‘I guided my sister on just about everything she bought,’ Daly said. ‘She and her late husband. I don’t see anything important remaining in this hall. Whoever’s
done this knew what they were doing. I can list everything that was in here. There should be a photograph album somewhere of all the most valuable items.’

‘That could be very helpful.’

Daly was silent for some moments. Then he said, ‘Helpful to whom?’

‘This enquiry, sir.’

Daly looked at him sceptically. ‘You really think so?’

‘It would help us if you could identify, as much as possible, everything that’s been taken.’

‘From what I’ve seen just in this room, it might be easier to identify what’s been left behind.’

Branson looked at him uneasily. ‘It does seem like the perpetrators are professionals.’

Daly did not reply. He walked through into the drawing room. Above the mantelpiece used to be one of his sister’s most valuable pictures, a Landseer landscape, worth a good half a million
pounds. He had long tried to convince her to move it to another location for fear of heat damage from the fire. Now, fire damage was the least of her problems, he thought, staring at the dark
rectangle. On the wall opposite had hung a gilded, hand-made, eighteen-wheel Whitehurst clock, made in 1791. It had exposed workings, which showed the time anywhere on the globe. Its auction value,
today, would be over three hundred thousand pounds.

He looked around at other dark rectangles on the walls. At empty spaces in the display cabinets, and on the walnut bureau. Everything of high value was gone. Almost everything. But there was one
thing he was more anxious about than anything else. He went through into his sister’s office and stared at the wall. As he suspected, the safe door was open. He peered in, but the door to the
second, secret chamber at the back was open, also.

His heart sank, but anger rose inside him.

‘Bastards,’ he said, quietly. He shook his head, stared again, just to be quite certain. ‘Bastards.’

Then he walked back into the hall, followed by the Detective. There was a pile of mail sitting on top of a Victorian table, one he had never particularly cared for. Ignoring Branson’s
caution not to touch it without his gloves on, he began sifting through it. Halfway through the pile was a single A4 sheet of paper with a form letter.

It was headed:
R. C. MOORE
.

Below was an address in Brighton’s Kemp Town. And beneath that the wording:

‘Looks like a knocker-boy leaflet,’ Glenn Branson said, bagging it to get it fingerprinted later.

Brighton’s knocker-boys hailed back to the post-war days of the rag and bone men, and they had been a scourge of the elderly and vulnerable for decades, using leaflets like these to get
inside houses and then either rip off the owners or pass on tips about valuable items to professional burglars.

Daly nodded. He knew. He’d been one himself, years back. Then suddenly his phone rang. Excusing himself, he stared at the display. There was no name showing.

‘Gavin Daly,’ he answered.

‘It’s Nurse Wilson, Mr Daly. Your sister is weakening. I think you should come back quickly.’

Roy Grace, in protective clothing like everyone else in Aileen McWhirter’s house, stood alone in her ground-floor study, at the rear of the property, on his phone, with a
map of the area in front of him. He paused from his task of putting together his enquiry team, and issuing instructions to each person he called, to text Cleo and warn her he would be very late
home tonight.

The only information Aileen McWhirter had been able to give was that two of the men who attacked her were in brown uniforms, saying they were from the Water Board. He needed to cocoon an area
around the property, and arrange for a house-to-house enquiry team to approach neighbours to see if any of them had had similar visits. But the officers carrying out this task needed to make these
into reassurance visits at the same time so they did not frighten people, and to dispense crime-prevention advice. They needed to see if there were any CCTV cameras in the area that might have
picked up anything. Unfortunately Withdean Road and its environs were not covered by the city’s police CCTV network, although plenty of the homes had their own. He needed to establish whether
there had been any similar crimes in the city, or in the county, recently. And he needed to set up an ‘anniversary visit’ check, placing Sussex Police billboards on the street, either
side and to the front of the property, asking if anyone had seen unfamiliar vehicles in the area either on the night of the attack, or the previous Tuesday evening.

When villains cased a property, he knew from experience, they would often carry this out a week before, checking the movement patterns of the occupants for the same day.

Something felt wrong about this devastating attack on the old lady, but he could not put his finger on it. This kind of brutal tie-up robbery had, sadly, a long history. But all his instincts
told him there was something more going on here.

The contents of the bookshelves had been the first thing to catch his eye in here. Then a movement outside distracted him. Through the leaded-light window he saw a sparrow washing itself in an
ornamental fountain, totally unaware of the horror that had recently taken place here.

Grace had never been particularly interested in poetry, but there was one poem he remembered from his schooldays, because he’d had to learn it by heart and recite it during an English
class. It was by W. H. Auden, and the first two lines seemed so apt here, he thought suddenly.

He stared beyond the bathing sparrow across the terrace of lawns and over to the far side of the valley, a mile distant. This time of the year much of the view of the eastern side of the city
was obscured by greenery, but he could still make out the large rectangle of Varndean School, where he had been a pupil, before becoming a police cadet.