Dead Simple (40 page)

‘OK,’ she said reluctantly. ‘The duty magistrate is Mrs Quentin.’

Grace smiled to himself. Hermione Quentin was one magistrate he particularly disliked, having had a run-in with her some months back in court over a suspect he had wanted to hold in custody; she had refused. She was the worst kind of magistrate in his view, married to a wealthy stockbroker, living in a vulgar ostentatious house, a middle-aged glamour queen with no experience of the real world and some kind of zealous personal agenda to change the way the police in general viewed criminals. It would give him the sweetest pleasure to get her out of bed to sign the warrant in the small hours of the morning.

Grace and Branson then spent a further ten minutes on the phone, organizing a team to assemble at Sussex House at 5 a.m. Then, taking pity on Branson, Grace sent him home to get a couple of hours’ kip.

Next he rang DC Nicholl, and apologized for disturbing him, then instructed him to head for Ashley Harper’s house and keep watch on it for any movement.

At 2 a.m., with the signed warrant in his hand, Grace arrived back at his home, set his alarm for 4.15, and crashed out.

When he hit the alarm button and jumped automatically out of bed in the dark room, he could hear the first twitterings of the dawn chorus, reminding him as he stepped into the shower that, although summer had not yet begun, they were less than a month shy of the longest day, 21 June.

At 5 a.m. he was back at Sussex House, feeling remarkably perky on his two and a bit hours’ sleep. Bella and Emma-Jane were already there, as was Ben Farr, a round-faced, bearded Sergeant in his late forties who was to be the Exhibits Officer, and Joe Tindall. Glenn Branson arrived a few minutes later.

Over cups of coffee, Grace briefed them. Then, shortly after half past five, all wearing protective waistcoats, they set off in a police Transit van and a marked car, which Branson drove, Grace in the passenger seat.

Reaching Ashley’s street, Grace told Branson to pull up alongside Nick’s unmarked Astra, and wound his window down.

‘All quiet,’ Nicholl reported.

‘Good boy,’ Grace said, noting that Ashley Harper’s Audi TT was in its usual place outside her house. He told Nicholl to cover the street behind, then they drove on.

There were no free spaces in the street, so they double parked beside the Audi. Grace gave Nick Nicholl a couple of minutes to get in place, then, leading the posse, marched up to the front door, in full daylight now, and rang the bell.

There was no response.

He rang again, then, after a minute, rang yet again. Then he nodded to Ben Farr, who went over to the Transit and removed a heavy-duty ram, the size of a large fire extinguisher. He hefted it up to the front door, swung it hard and the door flew open.

Grace went in first. ‘Police!’ he shouted. ‘Hello? Police!’

The silent, winking lights of the hi-fi system greeted him. Followed by the rest of his team, he walked up the stairs and paused on the first-floor landing. ‘Hello!’ he called out again. ‘Miss Harper?’

Silence.

He opened one door, onto a small bathroom. The next door was to a small, bland spare bedroom that didn’t look as if it had ever been used. He hesitated, then pushed the remaining door, which opened onto a master bedroom, with a double bed that had clearly not been slept in. The curtains were drawn shut. He found the light switch and turned it on, and several ceiling spots lit up the room.

The place had a deserted feel, like a hotel room waiting for its next occupant. He saw an immaculate duvet over a queen-size bed, a flat-screen television, a clock radio plus a couple of Hockney swimming pool prints on the wall.

No Ashley Harper.

So where the hell was she?

Feeling a stab of panic, Grace exchanged glances with Glenn Branson. They both knew that somewhere along the line they had been outsmarted, but where and how? For a moment all he could think of was the bollocking he would get from Alison Vosper if it turned out he had woken a JP in the middle of the night to get a search warrant for no good reason.

And there could be all kinds of good reasons why Ashley Harper wasn’t here tonight. For a moment he felt angry at his friend. This was all Glenn’s fault. He’d suckered him into this damned case. It wasn’t anything to do with him, not his problem. Now he owned the fucking problem and it was getting deeper.

He tried to recap, to think how he would cover his arse if No. 27 hauled him in. There was Mark Warren’s death. The note. The finger in the fridge. Emma-Jane’s findings. There was a whole ton of things that were not right. Mark Warren, so belligerent at the wedding reception. Bradley Cunningham, so smooth, so upmarket at the wedding.

‘Actually the pants are killing me … rented this lot from your wonderful Moss Bros, but I think I got given the wrong pants!’

From the time he had spent in the United States and in Canada, and the conversations Grace had had about the differences in their language, he knew that classy Americans and Canadians might call ordinary trousers ‘pants’, but they would called dressier trousers ‘trousers’. It had been an instant giveaway that Bradley Cunningham might not be who he made himself out to be.

Not that that slender hypothesis would satisfy Alison Vosper.

‘Take this place apart,’ he told his team wearily. ‘Look under every bloody stone. Find out who owns this place. Who owns the televisions, the hi-fi, the Audi outside, the carpets, the wall sockets. I want to know every damned detail about Ashley Harper. I want to know more about her than she knows herself. Everybody understand?’

After two hours of searching, so far no one had found anything. It was as if Ashley Harper had been through the place with some kind of super-Hoover. There was nothing other than the furniture, a bio yoghurt pot in the fridge together with some soya milk, a bunch of radishes and a half-drunk bottle of Sainsbury’s own-label Scottish mineral water.

Glenn Branson came up to Grace, who was busy lifting the mattress off the spare bed. ‘Man, this is so weird — it’s as if she knew we were coming, know what I mean?’

‘So why didn’t we know she was leaving?’ Grace asked.

‘There you go again. Another question.’

‘Yes,’ said Grace, tiredness making him snappy now. ‘Maybe that’s because you’re always giving me questions instead of fucking answers.’

Branson raised a hand in the air. ‘No offence, man.’

‘None taken.’

‘So where the fuck is she?’

‘Not here.’

‘I figured that one.’

‘Roy! Take a look at this — I don’t know if it’s of any use?’ DC Nicholl came into the room holding a small piece of paper, which he showed to Grace.

It was a receipt from a company called Century Radio on Tottenham Court Road. On the receipt was printed: ‘AR5000 Cyber Scan, ?2,437.25’.

‘Where was this?’ Grace asked.

‘In the dustbin in the back yard,’ Nick replied, with pride.

‘Two thousand, four hundred and thirty-seven pounds for a scanner?’ Grace asked. ‘What kind of scanner costs that much? Some kind of computer scanner?’ After a few moments thought, he added, ‘Why would anyone throw away the receipt? Even if you couldn’t charge the scanner to your business, sure as hell you would keep the receipt in case it went wrong. Wouldn’t you?’

‘I sure as hell would,’ Branson agreed.

Grace looked at the date on the receipt. Last Wednesday. Time of purchase showed as 14.25. On Tuesday night, her fiancé disappears. On Wednesday afternoon she goes out and buys a two-and-a-half-thousand-quid scanner. This didn’t make sense — yet. His watch showed that two hours had elapsed so far, it was now just past 8 a.m. ‘I don’t know what time Century Radio opens — but we need to find out about that scanner,’ he said.

‘You have some thoughts about it?’ Branson asked.

‘Plenty,’ Grace replied. ‘Too many. Far too many.’ Then he added. ‘I have to be at Lewes Crown Court by quarter to ten.’

‘For your good friend Suresh Hossain?’

‘I’d hate to think he was missing me. How about some breakfast? A big fry-up — the works?’

‘Cholesterol, man, bad for your heart.’

‘You know what? Right now everything’s bad for my heart.’

As Grace entered the large, bustling waiting area for the three courtrooms housed in the handsome Georgian Lewes Crown Court building with plenty of time to spare, he switched his phone to silent. At least Claudine seemed to have got the message and had stopped texting him.

He yawned, his body feeling leaden, the massive fry-up he’d just eaten sapping his energy rather than fuelling it. He just wanted to lie down somewhere and have a kip. It was strange, he thought. A week ago this trial had dominated his life, his every waking thought. Now it was secondary; finding Michael Harrison was all that mattered.

But this trial did matter a lot, too. It mattered to the widow and children of Raymond Cohen, the man beaten to a pulp with a spiked stick, either by Hossain or by his thugs. It mattered to every ordinary decent person in the City of Brighton and Hove, because they had a right to be protected from monsters like him, and it mattered a very great deal to Grace’s credibility. He had to shed his tiredness and concentrate.

Finding a quiet corner in the room, he sat down and returned a call to Eleanor, who was dealing with his post and email for him. Then he closed his eyes, grateful for the rest it gave them, and cradled his head in his hands, trying to catnap, trying to block from his ears the swinging of doors opening and closing, the cheery banter of greetings, the clicks of briefcase locks, the murmured voices between lawyers and clients.

After a couple of minutes he took two deep breaths, and the oxygen hit gave him an instant small boost. He stood up and looked around. In a moment he might find out whether he would be needed or not today. Hopefully not, and he could get back to Sussex House, he thought, looking around for the person he needed to speak to, Liz Reilly from the Crown Prosecution Service.

There were a good hundred people in the room, including several gowned barristers and assistants, and he spotted Liz at the other end of the room, a smartly dressed, conservative-looking woman in her early thirties, holding a clipboard and deep in conversation with a barrister he did not recognize.

He walked across and stood near them, catching her signal that she would be with him in a moment. When she finally broke away from the barrister, she looked excited. ‘We have a possible new witness!’

‘Really? Who?’

‘A call-girl from Brighton. She rang the CPS last night saying she’s been following the trial in the papers, and alleging that Suresh Hossain beat her up during a session with her. The sex session was on the night of February 10th last year, in Brighton.’

February 10th was the night of the murder for which Suresh Hossain was on trial.

‘Hossain has a cast-iron alibi that he was at dinner in London with two friends that night. Both have testified,’ Grace said.

‘Yes he has, but they are both employees of Hossain. This girl isn’t. She’s terrified of him — the reason she hasn’t come forward before is she’s been threatened with her life if she does. And there’s a problem, which is she doesn’t trust the police. That’s why she rang us, rather than the police.’

‘How credible do you think she is?’

‘Very,’ she said. ‘We’d need some high-level witness protection for her.’

‘Whatever she wants. Anything!’ Grace wrung his hands in excitement. He wanted to hug Liz Reilly. This was wonderful news.
Wonderful!

‘But someone’s going to have to go and convince her that the police won’t bust her for — you know — her trade.’

‘Where’s she now?’

‘At her home.’

Grace looked at his watch. ‘I could go and see her right away. Is that possible?’

‘Go in an unmarked car.’

‘Yes, and I’ll take a WPC with me who can stay with her. We don’t want to give Hossain any chance of getting at her. I want to go and see her and persuade her to come in right away.’

‘If you play her carefully, you’ll be pushing on an open door.’

Suddenly, Grace wasn’t tired any more.

It was shortly after midday when he arrived back in the Incident Room. The witness, Shelley Sandler, was good, he thought. Mid-twenties, intelligent, articulate, vulnerable, she’d be highly credible in court. Just so long as she didn’t panic and change her mind at the last minute, as so often happened. But she seemed determined to get back at Hossain. Very, very determined.

This was such good news. After a shaky few days last week, it now looked to Grace as if getting the verdict he so badly wanted was going to be achievable.

The full team were at the work station, plus two new assistants, a young male constable and a middle-aged female assistant, so he called a briefing meeting, telling them all to stay seated.

Keeping his voice low, as the other work stations were occupied also with teams hard at work, Nick Nicholl spoke first. ‘Roy, the receipt we took earlier this morning from Miss Harper’s house, two thousand, four hundred and thirty-seven pounds for a scanner?’

‘Uh huh.’

‘I got all the information on it from Century Radio.’ He handed a few printed sheets off a web page to Grace. ‘The rest of us have seen this.’

Grace looked at it.

AR5000 Receiver ‘Cyber Scan’. Incredible 10Khz—2600Mhz Frequency Range! The AR5000 advances the frontiers of performance, providing excellent strong signal handling, high sensitivity and wide frequency coverage with microprocessor facilities to match including 5 independent VFOs, 1,000 memory channels, 20 search banks, Cyber Scan fast scan and search — including all mobile frequencies. Scanning and search speed is 45 channels or increments per second…

He turned to Branson. ‘You’re the best techie I know. I think I have already guessed what this thing is — can you confirm?’

‘It’s a state-of-the-art radio frequency scanner. It’s the kind of thing used by Citizens’ Band radio nuts to find new friends, to eavesdrop on police radio networks or on mobile calls.’