Looking Good Dead (23 page)

Beetle Riddle in Brighton Law Student Murder

Seething with anger, he grabbed a copy of the paper from the stand. There was the photograph of Janie Stretton he had released yesterday. Inset below it was a small photograph of a scarab beetle.

Sussex CID are refusing to say whether a rare scarab beetle, not native to the British Isles, might hold a vital clue to Janie Stretton’s killer. When asked to confirm the discovery of the beetle during the post-mortem examination by Home Office Pathologist Dr Frazer Theobald, Senior Investigating Officer Detective Superintendent Roy Grace of Brighton and Hove CID was not available for comment . . .

Grace stared at the words, his fury growing by the minute. Not available for comment? No one had bloody asked him to comment. And he had given strictest instructions that the press were not to be told about the discovery of the beetle.

So who the hell had leaked it?

35

A few minutes before eight thirty, having showered, grabbed a quick bowl of cereal and, although it was Saturday, thrown on a dark suit, white shirt and plain tie – not knowing what the day would bring and who he might have to meet – Grace arrived at MIR One in the Major Incident Suite in a filthy mood, ready to skin someone alive.

His whole team was already there, waiting for him – and by the looks on their faces, all of them had seen the Argus headline too.

Just in case they hadn’t, he thumped the paper down on the workstation. By way of a greeting he said, ‘OK, who the fuck is responsible for this?’

Glenn Branson, Nick Nicholl, Bella Moy, Emma-Jane Boutwood, Norman Potting and the rest of the team all stared back at him blank-faced.

Grace fixed his accusatory gaze on Norman Potting as his first port of call. ‘Any thoughts, Norman?’ he said.

‘The writer on the piece is that young journo, Kevin Spinella,’ Potting rumbled in his deep rural voice. ‘That bugger’s always trouble, isn’t he?’

Grace suddenly realized that in his anger he had neglected to look at the byline. It was because he was tired; he did not have his brain fully in gear after his sleepless night. A long run normally charged him up, but at this moment he felt drained and badly in need of a strong coffee. And the smell of the stuff was rising tantalizingly from several cups on the desk.

Kevin Spinella was a recent recruit to the paper, a young, sharp-voiced rookie crime reporter, fast carving a reputation for himself at the expense of the Sussex Police. Grace had had a previous run-in with this journalist, as had most of his colleagues.

‘OK, Norman, your first task today is to get hold of this scumbag and find out where he got his story from.’

The Detective Sergeant pulled a face then sipped on his styrofoam cup of coffee. ‘He’ll probably just tell me he’s protecting his sources,’ he said with a smugness that really irritated Grace.

Grace had to restrain himself from yelling at the man because the truth was, Potting was probably right.

‘The problem is, Roy,’ Branson said, ‘we’ve got a hundred Specials drafted in, searching for the victim’s head. Could be one of them. Could be one of the SOCOs. Could have come from the Coroner’s office. Or the mortuary.’

He was right, Grace knew. That was the problem with a major enquiry like this. Everyone was curious, that was human nature. It only needed one careless person to leak anything and it would spread in minutes.

But the bloody damage that could do. Or had done.

Parking the issue for the moment, he ran through the list that Bella Moy and Eleanor had prepared, and would continue to update, twice daily, throughout this enquiry. Then Norman Potting interrupted him.

‘You never know, Roy; we might be able to pin something on this Kevin Spinella.’

‘Like what?’ Grace said.

‘Well, I heard rumours that he might be a brown-hatter. You know, a turd-burglar.’

Grace, his heart sinking, felt another Potting moment coming on. ‘Gay is the word we use.’

‘Exactly, my friend.’

Grace stared at him sternly. Norman Potting was just so out of touch with the real world. ‘And how exactly would that help us?’

Potting pulled a briar pipe, with a well-chewed stem, out of his suit pocket and stared at it with pursed lips. ‘I’m wondering how the editor of the Argus, the voice of the City of Brighton and Hove, would feel about having a poof working for him.’

Grace could scarcely believe his ears. ‘Norman, as the City of Brighton and Hove has the largest gay community in the whole of the UK, I think he’d be quite happy if the entire editorial team was gay.’

Potting turned to Emma-Jane and gave her a broad wink, a bead of spittle appearing in the corner of his mouth. Jerking his thumb at his own chest he said, ‘It’s all right, darling; lucky there’re still a few real men around. Make the most of ’em.’

‘When I find one, I will,’ she said.

‘Norman,’ Grace said, ‘the language you’re using is totally unacceptable. I want to see you in my office straight after this meeting.’

Then to the team he said, ‘OK, let’s focus. E-J and I have an appointment at an insect farm in Bromley at eleven. Norman, you have your day cut out with Spinella and your follow-ups on Janie Stretton’s answering machine.’

He continued on through the list of the day’s tasks for each member of the team. All being well there would be a one-hour window this afternoon for himself and Glenn to meet in downtown Brighton, and do a spot of serious clothes shopping.

Then he tried to push aside the guilt he felt for just thinking this when all his attention should have been concentrated on Janie Stretton. Surely, after all the years of hell he had been through, he was allowed one treat, just occasionally?

Then, like a dark cloud slipping over the sun, he thought about Sandy again. She was always there, quietly in the background. It was as if he needed her approval for anything he did. He thought guiltily about her belongings that only a couple of hours or so ago he had dumped into a black bin liner. In case he brought Cleo Morey back home tonight?

Or just to try to clear his past, to make way for the future?

Sometime soon, when he had a moment to himself, he would go to an estate agent and put the bloody house on the market.

Even just the thought of that was like some giant weight lifting from his shoulders.

Glenn Branson’s phone rang. He glanced at Grace, who nodded approval for him to answer.

‘Incident room, DS Branson speaking. How can I help you?’

‘Do you know why most men die before their wives?’ Norman Potting suddenly said.

Grace, trying to listen to Branson’s conversation, braced himself for what was coming next.

In response to a sea of shaking heads, Potting said, ‘Because they want to!’

All the women groaned loudly in unison. Glenn Branson clapped the phone closely to his head and covered his opposite ear with his hand, trying to blot out the sound.

Potting, the only person who seemed to find his joke funny, was chortling away to himself.

‘Thank you, Norman,’ Grace said.

‘Got a whole lot more where that came from,’ the DS said.

‘I’ll bet you have,’ Grace retorted. ‘But it is a quarter to nine on a Saturday morning. Maybe you’d like to tell us some a bit later on, after we’ve arrested our killer?’

‘Good plan!’ Potting said, after some pensive moments. ‘Can’t fault you on that one, Roy.’

Grace stared back at the man. It was hard to tell sometimes whether he was being smart or just totally stupid. From past experience with the Detective Sergeant, he seemed, usually, to manage to be both simultaneously.

Branson, dressed today in an expensive-looking collarless leather jacket over a black T-shirt, was scribbling a number down on his pad. ‘Ten minutes,’ he said. ‘I’ll call you back. No, don’t worry. Absolutely. Thank you.’

Everyone had suddenly fallen silent, watching him. As Branson hung up the receiver he said, ‘Another possible lead.’

‘Any good?’ Grace asked.

‘A man was calling me from a payphone – he was scared to talk from his home. Then he started worrying about a car parked down the street. He wanted to walk past it, check it out. I have to call him back in exactly ten minutes.’ Branson checked his watch, a massive, stainless-steel rectangle that he liked to show off ad nauseam. It was a Russian divers’ watch, he told everyone, which he had bought from some trendy shop in Brighton. It was meant to be the largest wristwatch in the world. Grace had seen grandfather clocks that had smaller faces.

They had logged over two hundred and fifty calls from the public since the story of the murder first broke on Wednesday afternoon. All of them had to be followed up, and all but a tiny percentage would amount to nothing. Now with the information about the scarab beetle in today’s Argus – and it would no doubt be in all the nationals tomorrow – the call rate would probably go up, and they would have a much harder time sorting the genuine from the cranks.

‘Time waster or real?’ Grace asked.

‘He says he thinks he witnessed Janie Stretton’s murder.’

36

Grace drove while Emma-Jane Boutwood, smartly dressed in a navy two-piece with a pale blue blouse, sat in the passenger seat of the unmarked Mondeo, with the directions she had printed off the internet on her lap on top of a large brown envelope.

Normally Roy Grace would have used an hour-long car journey as an opportunity to bond with a junior member of his team, but he had too much on his mind this morning, of which his anger at Norman Potting was just a small part, and their conversation was sporadic. E-J told him a little about herself – that her father had an advertising agency in Eastbourne and that her kid brother had survived a brain tumour some years back. Enough for Grace to get some sense of the human being behind the front of the young ambitious policewoman that he saw in the office. But she got very little back from him, and after a few attempts at engaging him in conversation she took the hint that he wanted silence.

He kept the car to a steady 75 mph, travelling anti-clockwise along the M25. It was one of his least favourite roads, its frequent heavy congestion causing many people to nickname it the world’s biggest parking lot, but this Saturday morning the traffic was light and moving steadily. After a fine early start the weather was now deteriorating, the sky turning an increasingly ominous charcoal colour. A few spots of rain were striking the windscreen, but not enough yet to put the wipers on. He barely even noticed them; he was driving on autopilot, his conscious brain focusing on the case.

Janie Stretton had been murdered some time on Tuesday night and it was now Saturday morning, he was thinking. They still did not have her head, nor any motive, nor any suspect.

Not one damned clue.

And Alison Vosper had told him that on Monday the supremely arrogant Detective Inspector Cassian Pewe from the Met was joining Brighton CID at the same rank as himself. He had no doubt that the Assistant Chief Constable was waiting for him to put just one more foot wrong, and he would be off this case in a flash, replaced by Pewe, with his shiny blond hair, angelic blue eyes and voice as invasive as a dentist’s drill.

Alison Vosper would be keen for her new protégé – which was how Pewe seemed to Grace – to make his mark quickly, and there could be no better showcase than a high-profile murder like this, where the existing team was getting nowhere.

What puzzled Grace most was the savage nature of the killing – the assailant must have been in a total frenzy – yet the absence of any apparent sexual assault. Did they have someone totally deranged, perhaps another schizophrenic like Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, on their hands? A man who heard voices from God telling him to kill hookers?

Or had Janie Stretton made an enemy?

Obviously her last boyfriend Justin Remington was a potential suspect, but from what Janie’s father had said, he was a long shot. Bella Moy was a good judge of people – Grace would have a better feel about this man after she had interviewed him, which would be today, with luck, if she could get hold of him. If she felt any inkling of something not being right, he would then go and see the former boyfriend himself. But if, as he strongly suspected, it wasn’t Justin Remington, then who? Why? Where was the killer now? Out there somewhere, about to strike again?

Last night, after he had been to see Brent Mackenzie, he had grabbed some fish and chips – and a pickled onion – and taken them back to the then almost deserted MIR One. He had washed the meal down with a tannic cup of vending-machine tea while poring over the case notes to date that Hannah Loxley, the team’s typist, had prepared for him.

He had sat there a long time, staring at the photograph of Janie Stretton’s face, then at the two large whiteboards. On one was pinned a section of an Ordnance Survey map of Peacehaven, with the two locations where her hand and the rest of her headless torso had been found ringed in red. There were also photographs of the body in situ, and a couple taken during the post-mortem, one showing the beetle in her rectum. He could picture, vividly, every detail of them now, and shuddered suddenly in revulsion.

What happened to you, Janie, on Tuesday night? And who was Anton? Did Anton do this to you?

His thoughts turned to Derek Stretton. Over 95 per cent of all murder victims in the UK were killed either by a member of their own family or by someone they knew. Was there anything he and Glenn Branson had missed when they had gone to see Janie’s father yesterday? Something the man said that suggested he might have butchered his own daughter? Anything was possible; Grace had learned that much during his years in the force. But Stretton had seemed genuine, a sad father, down and lost. He did not have the aura of a man who had just killed someone.

The car radio crackled into life. They were out of range of Sussex Police airwaves now and were picking up a Bromley area controller, calling for a car to attend an RTA. Emma-Jane turned the sound down. ‘Almost there,’ she said. ‘Go straight over the next roundabout, then it should be the second street on the left.’

Suddenly, as if the sky had been saving it all up, a torrent of rain exploded onto the windscreen, danced on the bonnet of the Ford, rattling like pebbles on the roof. Grace fumbled to find the wipers, then got them on, slow at first, then faster; they smeared the rain into an opaque film, and for some moments he had to really concentrate until the screen cleared a little.