Dead Man's Footsteps (12 page)

It was a litany. A list of all the stuff that had happened that he already knew. And some time soon George Bush was going to be saying something. Meantime, Mayor Giuliani was on his way downtown. America was under attack. There would be more information as it came in.

Inside Ronnie’s mind, his plan was coming together steadily.

They were gliding along a wide, silent street. To their right was a threadbare grass verge with trees and lampposts. Beyond the grass was a pathway, or a cycleway, and then a railing, and beyond that another street, running parallel, with cars and vans parked along it, and red-brick apartment buildings that were not too tall, nothing like the Manhattan monoliths. After half a mile or so they gave way to big, angular, detached dwellings that might have been single-occupancy or divided into apartments. It looked a prosperous area. Pleasant and tranquil.

They passed a road sign which said ‘Ocean Parkway’.

He watched an elderly couple walking slowly on the sidewalk and wondered if they knew the drama that was unfolding just a short distance away across the river. It didn’t seem like it. If they had heard, they would surely now be glued to their television set. Apart from them, there was not a soul in sight. OK, at this time of day, during the week, a lot of people would ordinarily have been in their offices. But mothers would be out pushing infants in strollers. People would be walking dogs. Youths would be loitering. There was no one. The traffic seemed light too. Much too light.

‘Where are we?’ he said to the driver.

‘Brooklyn.’

‘Ah, right,’ Ronnie said. ‘Still Brooklyn.’

He saw a sign on a building saying  YESHIVA CENTER. It seemed like they had been driving for an age. He hadn’t realized Brooklyn was so large. Large enough to get lost in, to disappear in.

Some words came into his head. It was a line from a Marlowe play,  The Jew of Malta, that he’d gone to see recently with Lorraine and the Klingers at the Theatre Royal in Brighton.

But that was in another country.

And besides, the wench is dead.

The street continued dead straight ahead. They crossed an intersection, where the elegant red brick gave way to more modern pre-cast concrete blocks. Then, suddenly, they were driving along beneath the dark green steel L-Train overpass.

The driver said, ‘Rushons. This whole fuggin’ area is now Rushon.’

‘
Rushon?
’ Ronnie queried, not knowing what he meant.

The driver pointed to a row of garish store fronts. A nail studio. The Shostakovich Music, Art and Sport School. There was Russian writing everywhere. He saw a pharmacy sign in Cyrillic. Unless you spoke Russian, you wouldn’t know what half these stores were. And he didn’t speak a word.

Rushon. 
Now Ronnie understood.

‘
Little Odessa
,’ the driver said. ‘Yuge fuggin’ colony. Didn’t used to be, not when I was a kid. Perestroika, glasnost, right? They let them travel, waddya know? They all come here! Whole world’s changing – know what I’m saying?’

Ronnie was tempted to shut the man up by telling him that the world had changed once for the Native Americans too, but he didn’t want to get thrown out of the truck.

So he just said another, ‘Yep.’

They made a right turn into a residential cul-de-sac. At the far end was a row of black bollards with a boardwalk beyond, and a beach beyond that. And then the ocean.

‘Brighton Beach. Good place. Be safe here. Safe from the planes,’ the driver said, indicating to Ronnie that this was journey’s end.

The driver turned to the ghosts behind. ‘Coney Island. Brighton Beach. I gotta get back to find my ladders, my harnesses, all my stuff. Expensive stuff, you know.’

Ronnie unclipped his seat belt, thanked the man profusely and shook his big, callused hand.

‘Be safe, buddy.’

‘You too.’

‘You bet.’

Ronnie opened the door and jumped down on to the tarmac. There was a tang of sea salt in the air. And just a faint smell of burning and aviation fuel. Faint enough to make him feel safe here. But not so faint that he felt free of what he had just been through.

Without casting a backwards glance at the ghosts, he walked on to the boardwalk, with almost a spring in his step, and pulled his mobile phone from his pocket to check that it was definitely off.

Then he stopped and stared past the sandy beach at the vast flat expanse of rippling, green-blue ocean and the hazy smudge of land miles in the distance. He took in a deep breath. Followed by another. His plan was still only very vague and needed a lot of work.

But he felt excited.

Elated.

Not many people in New York on the morning of 9/11 punched the air in glee. But Ronnie Wilson did.

36          
OCTOBER 2007

Abby sat cradling a cup of tea in her trembling hands, staring through a gap in the blinds down at the street below. Her eyes were raw from three sleepless nights in a row. Fear swirled inside her.

I know where you are.

Her suitcase was by the front door, packed and zipped shut. She looked at her watch: 8.55. In five minutes she would make the call she had been planning to make all yesterday, just as soon as office hours started. It was ironic, she thought, that for most of her life she had disliked Monday mornings. But all of yesterday she had willed it to come.

She felt more scared than she had ever felt in her life.

Unless she was completely mistaken, and panicking needlessly, he was out there somewhere, waiting and watching. Her card marked. Waiting and watching and  angry.

Had he done something to the lift? And its alarm? Would he have known what to do? She repeated the questions to herself, over and over.

Yes, he’d been a mechanic once. He could fix mechanical and electrical things. But why would he have done something to the lift?

She tried to get her head around that. If he really knew where she was, why hadn’t he just lain in wait for her? What did he have to gain by getting her stuck in the lift? If he wanted time to try to break in, why hadn’t he just waited until she went out?

Was she, in her panicked state, simply putting two and two together and getting five?

Maybe. Maybe not. She just didn’t know. So most of the day, yesterday, instead of going out, buying the Sunday papers and lounging in front of the television, as she would ordinarily have done, she sat here, in the same spot where she was now, watching the street below, passing the time by listening to one Spanish lesson after another on her headphones, pronouncing, and repeating, words and sentences out aloud.

It had been a foul Sunday, a south-westerly twisting off the English Channel, continuing to blast the rain on the pavement, the puddles, the parked cars, the passers-by.

And it was the cars and the passers-by that she was watching, like a hawk, through the rain that was still pelting down today. She checked all the parked cars and vans first thing, when she woke up. Only a couple had changed from the night before. It was a neighbourhood where there was insufficient street parking, so once people found a space, they tended to leave their cars until they really needed to go somewhere. Otherwise, the moment they drove off, another vehicle took their place, and when they came back they might have to park several streets away.

She’d had two visitors yesterday, a photographer from the  Argus, whom she’d told on the entryphone to go away, and the caretaker, Tomasz, who had come to apologize, maybe concerned for his job and hoping she wouldn’t make a complaint about him if he was nice to her. He explained that vandals must have broken into the lift motor-room and tampered with the brake mechanism and electrics. Low-lifes, he said. He had found a couple of syringes in there. But he wasn’t able to explain convincingly to her why the alarm system, which should have rung through to his flat, had failed to do so. He assured her the lift company was working on it, but the damage the firemen had done meant it would be several days before it was working again.

She got rid of him as quickly as she could, in order to return to her vigil of watching the street.

She called her mother, but she said nothing about receiving any phone calls from anyone. Abby continued the lie that she was still in Australia and having a great time.

Sometimes text messages went astray, got sent to wrong numbers by mistake. Could this have been one?

I know where you are.

Possible.

Coming on top of the lift getting stuck, was she jumping to conclusions in her paranoid state? It was comforting to think that. But complacency was the one luxury she could not afford. She had gone into this knowing the risks involved. Knowing that she would only get away with it by living on her wits, 24/7, for however long it took.

The only thing that had made her smile yesterday was another of his lovely texts. This one said:

You don’t love a woman because she is

beautiful, but she is beautiful because you

love her.

She had replied:

It’s beauty that captures your attention –

personality which captures your heart.

She saw nothing untoward in the street all Sunday. No strangers watching her. No Ricky. Just the rain. Just people. Life going on.

Normal life.

Something she was – for just a short while longer, she promised herself – no longer a part of. But all that would be changing soon.

OCTOBER 2007

Rain rattled down on the roof and the van rocked in strong gusts of wind. Although he was well wrapped up, he was still cold in here, only daring to run the engine occasionally, not wanting to attract attention to himself. At least he had a comfortable mattress, books, a Starbucks nearby and music on his iPod. There was a public toilet close by on the promenade with an adequate washing facility and it was conveniently out of sight of any of the city’s CCTV cameras. Very definitely a public convenience.

He had once read a line in a book someone had given him which said,  Sex is the most fun you can have without laughing.

The book was wrong, he thought. Sometimes revenge could be fun too. Just as much fun as sex.

The van still had the  FOR SALE  note written in red ink on a strip of brown cardboard stuck in its passenger-door window, although he had actually bought it, for three hundred and fifty pounds cash, over two weeks ago. He knew Abby was sharp, and had observed her checking the vehicles daily. No point in removing the sign and alerting her to any change. So if the previous owner got pissed off with people phoning, wanting to buy it, tough. He hadn’t bought it because he needed transport. He had bought it for the view. He could see every window of her flat from here.

It was the perfect parking spot. The van had a valid tax disc and MOT and residents’ parking sticker. All of them ran out in three months’ time.

By then he would be long gone.

OCTOBER 2007

It was the same every damn time. Whatever confidence Roy Grace felt when he set off to come to this impressive place deserted him when he actually arrived.

Malling House, the headquarters of Sussex Police, was just a fifteen-minute drive from his office. But in atmosphere, it was on a different planet. Strike that, he thought as drove past the raised barrier of the security gate, it was in a whole different  universe.

It sat within a ragbag complex of buildings on the outskirts of Lewes, the county town of East Sussex, housing the administration and key management for the five thousand officers and employees of the Sussex Police Force.

Two buildings stood out prominently. One, a three-storey, futuristic glass and brick structure, contained the Control Centre, the Crime Recording and Investigation Bureau, the Call Handling Centre and the Force Command Centre, as well as most of the computing hardware for the force. The other, an imposing redbrick Queen Anne mansion, once a private stately home and now a Grade 1 listed building, was what had given its name to the HQ.

Although conjoined to the ramshackle sprawl of car parks, single-storey pre-fabs, modern low-rise structures and one dark, windowless building, complete with a tall smokestack, which always reminded Grace of a Yorkshire textile mill, the mansion stood proudly aloof. Inside were housed the offices of the Chief Constable, the Deputy Chief Constable and the Assistant Chief Constables, of whom Alison Vosper was one, together with their support staff, as well as a number of other senior officers working either temporarily or permanently out of these headquarters.

Grace found a bay for his Alfa Romeo, then he made his way to Alison Vosper’s office, which was on the ground floor at the front of the mansion. It had a view through a large sash window out on to a gravel driveway and a circular lawn beyond. It must be nice to work in a room like this, he thought, in this calm oasis, away from the cramped, characterless spaces of Sussex House. Sometimes he thought he might enjoy the responsibility – and the power trip that came with it – but then he would always wonder whether he could cope with the politics. Especially the damned, insidious, political correctness that the brass had to kowtow to a lot more than the ranks.

The ACC could be your new best friend one day and your worst enemy the next. It had seemed a long time since she had been anything but the latter to Grace, as he stood now in front of her desk, used to the fact that she rarely invited visitors to sit down, in order to keep meetings short and to the point.

Today he was actually rather hoping he wouldn’t get invited to sit down. He wanted to deliver his angry message standing up, with the advantage of height.

She didn’t disappoint him. Giving him a cold, hard stare, she said, ‘Yes, Roy?’

And he felt himself trembling. As if he had been summoned to his headmaster’s study at school.

In her early forties, with wispy blonde hair cut conservatively short, and framing a hard but attractive face, Assistant Chief Constable Alison Vosper was very definitely not happy this morning. Power-dressed in a navy suit and a crisp white blouse, she was sitting behind her expansive, immaculately tidy rosewood desk with an angry expression on her face.

Grace always wondered how his superiors kept their offices – and their desks – so tidy. All his working life, his own work spaces had been tips. Repositories of sprawling files, unanswered correspondence, lost pens, travel receipts and out-trays that had long given up on the struggle to keep pace with the in-trays. To get to the very top, he had once decided, required some kind of a paperwork management skill for which he was lacking the gene.

Rumour was that Alison Vosper had had a breast cancer operation three years ago. But Grace knew that’s all it would ever be, just rumour, because she kept a wall around herself. Nonetheless, behind her hard-cop carapace, there was a certain vulnerability that he connected to. In truth, she wasn’t at all bad-looking, and there were occasions when those waspish brown eyes of hers twinkled with humour and he sensed she might almost be flirting with him. This morning was not one of them.

‘Thanks for your time, Ma’am.’

‘I’ve literally got five minutes.’

‘OK.’

Shit. 
Already his confidence was crumbling.

‘I wanted to talk to you about Cassian Pewe.’

‘Detective Superintendent Pewe?’ she said, as if delivering a subtle reminder of the man’s position.

He nodded.

She opened her arms expansively. ‘Yes?’

She had slender wrists and finely manicured hands, which seemed, somehow, slightly older and more mature than the rest of her. As if making a statement to show that although the police force was no longer a man-only world, there was still considerable male dominance, she wore a big, loud, man’s wristwatch.

‘The thing is …’ He hesitated, the words he had planned to deliver tripping over themselves inside his head.

‘Yes?’ She sounded impatient.

‘Well – he’s a smart guy.’

‘He’s a very smart guy.’

‘Absolutely.’ Roy was struggling under her glare. ‘The thing is – he rang me on Saturday. On  Operation Dingo. He said you’d suggested that he call me – that I might need a hand.’

‘Correct.’ She took a dainty sip of water from a crystal tumbler on her desk.

Struggling under her laser stare, he said, ‘I’m just not sure that’s the best use of resources.’

‘I think I should be the judge of that,’ she retorted.

‘Well, of course – but—’

‘But?’

‘This is a slow-time case. That skeleton has been there ten to fifteen years.’

‘And have you identified it yet?’

‘No, but I have good leads. I’m hoping for progress today from dental records.’

She screwed the top back on the bottle and set it down on to the floor. Then she placed her elbows on the shiny rosewood and interlocked her fingers. He smelled her scent. It was different from the last time he had been here, just a few weeks ago. Muskier. Sexier. In his wildest fantasies he had wondered what it might be like to make love to this woman. He imagined she would be in total control, all of the time. And that as easily as she could arouse a man, she could rapidly make his dick shrivel in terror.

‘Roy, you know that the Metropolitan Police have been one of the first forces in the UK to start getting rid of bureaucracy on arrests? That they now employ civilians to process criminals so police officers don’t have to spend two to four hours on paperwork on every person they arrest?’

‘Yes, I had heard that.’

‘They’re the biggest and most innovative police force in the UK. So don’t you think we can learn something from Cassian?’

He noted the use of the man’s first name. ‘I’m sure we can – I don’t doubt that.’

‘Have you thought about your personal development record this year, Roy?’

‘My record?’

‘Yes. What’s your assessment of how you have done?’

He shrugged. ‘Without blowing my own trumpet, I think I’ve done well. We got a life sentence on Suresh Hossain. Three serious crime cases solved, successfully. Two major criminals awaiting trial. And some real progress on several cold cases.’

She looked at him for some moments in silence, then she asked, ‘How do  you  define success?’

He chose his words carefully, aware of what might come next. ‘Apprehending perpetrators, securing charges against them from the Crown Prosecution Service and getting convictions.’

‘Apprehending suspects regardless of cost or danger to the public or your officers?’

‘All risks have to be assessed in advance – when practical. In the heat of a situation, it’s not always practical. You know that. You must have been in situations where you had to make snap decisions.’

She nodded and was silent for some moments. ‘Well, that’s great, Roy. I’m sure that helps you to sleep at night.’ Then she fell silent again, shaking her head in a way that he really did not like.

He heard a distant phone ringing, unanswered, in another office. Then Alison Vosper’s mobile pinged with a text. She picked it up, glanced at it and put it back down on her desk.

‘I look at it slightly differently, Roy. And so do the Independent Police Complaints Authority. OK?’

Grace shrugged. ‘In what way?’ He already knew some of the answers.

‘Let’s look at your three major operations in the past few months.  Operation Salsa.  During a chase you were handling personally, an elderly member of the public was hijacked and physically injured. Two suspects died in a car crash – and you were in the pursuit car right behind them. In  Operation Nightingale, one of your officers was shot and another was severely injured in a pursuit – which also resulted in an accident causing serious injury to an off-duty police officer.’

That officer had been Cassian Pewe. Delaying his start here by some months.

She continued. ‘You had a helicopter crash, and an entire building burned down – leaving three bodies beyond identification. And in
Operation Chameleon 
you allowed your suspect to be pursued on to a railway line, where he was maimed. Are you proud of all this? You don’t think there is room for improvement with your methods?’

Actually, Roy Grace thought, he was proud. Extremely proud of everything but the injuries to his officers, for which he would always blame himself. Maybe she genuinely did not know the background – or she was choosing to ignore it.

He was cautious in his reply. ‘When you look at an operation after the event, you can always see ways you could have improved it.’

‘Exactly,’ she said. ‘That’s all Detective Superintendent Pewe is here to do. Bring the benefit of his experience with the best police force in the UK.’

He would have liked to have replied,  Actually, you are wrong. The guy is a total wanker.  But his earlier feeling that Alison Vosper had some other agenda with this man was even stronger now. Maybe she really was shagging him. Unlikely, for sure, but there was something between them, some hold over her that Pewe had. Whatever, it was clear that at this moment he was definitely not teacher’s pet.

So, on one of the rare occasions in his career, he played along with the politics.

‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Thanks for clarifying that. It’s really helpful.’

‘Good,’ she said.

As Grace left the room, he was deep in thought. There had been four Senior Investigating Officers at Sussex House for the past five years. The system was fine. They didn’t need any more. Now they had five, at a time when they were short of recruits lower down and running way over budget. It would not be long before Vosper and her colleagues started reducing the number back down to four. And no prizes for guessing who would be axed – or, rather, transferred to the back of beyond.

He needed a plan. Something that would cause Cassian Pewe to shoot himself in the foot.

And at this moment he didn’t have one.