Dead Man's Footsteps (17 page)

OCTOBER 2007

‘What’s wrong with liking Guinness?’ Glenn Branson asked.

‘Did I say there was anything wrong?’

Roy Grace set Glenn’s pint and his own large Glenfiddich on the rocks down on the table, along with two packets of bacon-flavoured crisps, then sat facing his friend. Monday night at 8 o’clock and the Black Lion was almost empty. Even so they had chosen to sit in the far corner, far enough from the bar not to be overheard by anyone. The piped music also helped to mask their voices and give them privacy.

‘It’s the way you look at me every time I order Guinness,’ Branson said. ‘Like it’s the wrong kind of drink or something.’

Your wife is turning you from a confident man into a paranoid one
, Grace thought but didn’t say. Instead he quoted, ‘To the man who is afraid, everything rustles.’

Branson frowned. ‘Who said that?’

‘Sophocles.’

‘What movie was that in?’

Grace shook his head, grinning. ‘God, you’re an ignoramus sometimes! Don’t you know  anything  that isn’t in a movie?’

‘Thanks, Einstein. You really know where to hit a man when he’s down.’

Grace raised his glass. ‘Cheer up.’

Branson raised his, with no enthusiasm, and clinked it against Grace’s.

They both took a sip, then Grace said, ‘Sophocles was a philosopher.’

‘Dead?’

‘He died in 406  BC.’

‘Before I was born, old-timer. I suppose you went to his funeral?’

‘Very witty.’

‘I remember, when I stayed with you, all those philosophy books you had lying around.’

Grace took another pull of his whisky and smiled at him. ‘You have a problem with someone trying to educate themselves?’

‘Trying to keep up with their bird, you mean?’

Grace blushed. Branson was quite right, of course. Cleo was doing an Open University course in philosophy and he was trying hard in his free time to get his head around the subject.

‘Hit a nerve, did I?’ Branson gave him a wan smile.

Grace said nothing.

‘Rhinestone Cowboy’ was playing. They both listened to it for a while. Grace mouthed the words and swayed his head to the music.

‘Jesus, man! Don’t tell me you like Glen Campbell?’

‘I do, actually, yes.’

‘The more I get to know you, the more sad I realize you are!’

‘He’s a real musician. Better than that rap crap you like.’

Branson tapped his chest. ‘That’s my music, man. That’s my people speaking to me.’

‘Does Ari like it?’

Branson suddenly looked deflated. He peered into his beer. ‘She used to. Dunno what she likes any more.’

Grace took another sip. The whisky felt good, giving him a warm buzz. ‘So tell me? You wanted to talk about her?’ He tore open his packet of crisps and dug his fingers in, pulled out several crisps in one go and crammed them into his mouth. He crunched as he spoke. ‘You look like shit, you know that. You’ve looked terrible for the last two months, since you went back to her. I thought everything was better, that you bought her the horse and she was fine. No?’ He ate another fistful of crisps hungrily.

Branson drank some more of his Guinness.

The pub had a pristine smell of carpet cleaner and polish. Grace missed the smell of cigarettes, the fug of cigar and pipe smoke. For him, pubs didn’t have any atmosphere any more now the smoking ban had come into force. And he could have done with a cigarette right now.

Cleo hadn’t invited him over later because she had a paper to write for her course. He was going to have to grab something to eat, either here or from the freezer at home.

Cookery had never been his strong point and he was getting dependent on her, he realized. These last couple of months she had cooked for him most nights, healthy food mostly, steamed or stir-fried fish and vegetables. She was appalled at the junk-food diet most police officers existed on much of the time.

‘Rhinestone Cowboy’ finished and they sat in silence for a while.

Glenn broke it. ‘You know we haven’t had sex, right?’

‘Not since you went back to her?’

‘Nope.’

‘Not once?’

‘Not once. It’s like she’s trying to punish me.’

‘For what?’

Branson drained his pint, blinked at the empty glass and stood up. ‘N’other?’

‘Just a single,’ he said, mindful that he had to drive.

‘Usual? Glenfiddich on the rocks. Tiniest bit of water?’

‘So your memory hasn’t gone?’

‘Fuck off, old-timer!’

Grace thought hard for a few moments, his mind back on his work. Chewing over the 6.30 briefing meeting they’d just had. Joanna Wilson. Ronnie Wilson. He knew Ronnie from a long time back. One of Brighton’s rogues. So Ronnie had died in 9/11. Events like that were so random. Had Ronnie killed his wife? His team were on the case. Tomorrow they would start checking into the man’s background, and his wife’s.

Branson returned and sat back down.

‘What do you mean, Glenn, that Ari’s trying to punish you?’

‘When Ari and me met, we shagged all day. You know? We’d wake up and shag. Go out somewhere, get an ice cream maybe, and we’d fool around. Shag again in the evening. Kind of like it wasn’t the real world.’ He drank some more of his beer, almost half the glass, straight down. ‘OK, I know you can’t maintain that for ever.’

‘It was the real world,’ Roy said. ‘But the real world doesn’t stay the same. My mother used to say that life is like a series of chapters in a book. Different things happen at different times. Life changes constantly. You know one of the secrets of a happy marriage?’

‘What?’

‘Don’t be a police officer.’

‘Funny. Ironic, isn’t it, that’s what she wanted me to be.’ He shook his head. ‘What I don’t get is why she’s angry all the time. At me. You know what she said this morning?’

‘Tell me?’

‘She said that I deliberately keep her awake, right? Like, when I get up in the night to go to the toilet, you know, have a piss, that I deliberately aim into the water so it makes a splashing sound. She said that if I really loved her, I would pee on the side of the bowl.’

Grace tipped the contents of the new glass into his existing one. ‘You’re not serious?’

‘I’m serious, man. There’s nothing I can do right. She’s, like, told me she needs her space, and screw my career as a policeman. She’s gonna go out in the evenings, she’s not prepared to be tied to the kids, and it’s my responsibility. If I have to work lates, then I have to find babysitters.’

Grace sipped his drink and wondered if perhaps Ari was having an affair. But he didn’t want to upset his friend further by suggesting it.

‘You can’t live like this,’ he said.

Branson picked up his packet of crisps and turned it over and over in his hands. ‘I love my kids,’ he said. ‘I can’t go through some divorce shit and, like, see them for a few hours once a month.’

‘How long has it been like this?’

‘Ever since she got this bug in her head about self-improvement. Mondays she does evening classes in English literature, Thursdays she does architecture. And all kinds of other shit in between. I don’t know her any more – I can’t reach her.’

They sat in silence for a while before Branson mustered a cheerful smile and said, ‘Anyhow my shit to deal with, right?’

‘No,’ Roy replied, even though he knew that if Ari threw Glenn out again, he’d be lumbered once more with the lodger from hell. He’d had Glenn to stay a couple of months ago and the house would have been tidier if he’d had an elephant high on magic mushrooms come to stay. ‘I sort of feel we are in this together.’

For the first time that evening, Glenn smiled. Then he finally ripped open his packet of crisps, peering inside with a faint look of disappointment, as if he had been expecting it to be filled with something else.

‘So, what’s happening with Cassian Pewe – sorry,  Detective Superintendent  Cassian Pewe?’

Grace shrugged.

‘Is he eating your lunch?’

Grace smiled. ‘I think that was his game plan. But we’ve put him back in his box.’

OCTOBER 2007

Cassian Pewe took another tentative sip of his tea, wincing as the hot liquid touched his teeth. Last night he had slept with whitening gel on them and today they were sensitive to extremes of temperature.

Putting the cup down in the saucer, he said to Sandy’s parents, ‘I do want to make one thing clear. Detective Superintendent Grace is a well-respected police officer. I have no agenda other than to discover the truth about your daughter’s disappearance.’

‘We need to know,’ Derek Balkwill said.

His wife nodded. ‘That’s the only thing that matters to us.’

‘Good,’ he said. ‘It’s very reassuring to know we are all on the same page.’ He smiled at them. ‘But,’ he went on, ‘without wanting to cast any aspersions, there are a number of senor officers in the Sussex CID who feel that a proper investigation has never been carried out. This is one of the main reasons I have been drafted in.’

Pausing, he was satisfied by their receptive nods, and a little emboldened. ‘I’ve been studying the case file all day today and there are many unanswered questions. I think, if I was in your shoes, I would be feeling less than satisfied with the work of the police to date.’

They both nodded again.

‘I really don’t understand why Roy was allowed to review the investigation himself, when he was so personally involved.’

‘We understand there was an independent team appointed a few days after our daughter disappeared,’ Margot Balkwill said.

‘And who was it who reported their findings to you?’ Cassian Pewe asked.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘it was Roy.’

Pewe opened his arms. ‘There, you see, is the problem. Normally when a wife goes missing, her husband is instantly the prime suspect, until cleared. From what I have read and heard, it doesn’t seem to me that your son-in-law was ever formally regarded as a suspect.’

‘Are you saying that you regard him as a suspect now?’ Derek asked.

He picked up his teacup and again Pewe noticed the tremor. He wondered whether the man was nervous or it was the onset of Parkinson’s.

‘I wouldn’t go so far as to say that, at this stage.’ Pewe smiled smugly. ‘But I’m certainly going to take radical steps to eliminate him from suspicion – which is something that has clearly not yet been done.’

Margot Balkwill was nodding. ‘That would be good.’

Her husband nodded, also.

‘Can I ask you both a very personal question? Has either of you ever, for a moment, suspected that Roy might be hiding something from you?’

There was a long silence. Margot furrowed her eyebrows, pursed her lips, then clenched and opened her hands several times. They were coarse hands, Pewe noticed, a gardener’s hands. Her husband sat still, his shoulders hunched, as if being slowly crushed by a huge, unseen weight.

‘I think you should understand,’ Margot Balkwill said, ‘that we don’t have any animosity towards Roy.’ She spoke like a schoolmistress delivering a report to a parent.

‘None,’ Derek said emphatically.

‘But,’ she said, ‘a little bit of you can’t help wondering … Human nature. How well do any of us really know anyone. Isn’t that right, Officer?’

‘Oh, absolutely,’ Pewe agreed silkily.

In the silence that followed Margot Balkwill picked up her spoon and stirred her tea. Pewe noticed that although she didn’t take sugar, this was the third time now she had stirred it. ‘Was there ever anything you noticed in the way Roy treated your daughter,’ he asked. ‘Anything that bothered you? I mean, would you say they had a happy marriage?’

‘Well, I don’t think it’s easy for anyone being married to a police officer. Particularly an ambitious one like Roy.’ She looked at her husband, who shrugged assent. ‘She had to put up with being on her own a lot. And being disappointed at the last minute when he got called out.’

‘Did she have her own career?’

‘She worked for a travel agent in Brighton for a few years. But they were trying for a child and nothing was happening. The doctor told her she should do something less stressful. So she left, got a part-time job as a receptionist at a medical centre. She was between jobs when she …’ Her voice tailed off.

‘Disappeared?’ Pewe prompted.

She nodded, tears welling in her eyes.

‘It’s been hard on us,’ Derek said. ‘Particularly hard on Margot. She and Sandy were very close.’

‘Of course.’ Pewe pulled out his notebook and made some jottings. ‘How long were they trying for a child?’

‘Several years,’ Margot replied, her voice choked.

‘I understand that’s hard on a marriage,’ Pewe said.

‘Everything’s hard in a marriage,’ Derek said.

There was a long silence.

Margot sipped her tea, then asked, ‘Are you implying there is more behind this than we’ve been told?’

‘No, I wouldn’t want to speculate at this stage. I simply have to say that the methodology underpinning the investigation of your daughter’s disappearance is, in my view as an officer of some nineteen years’ experience in the top police force in the UK, wanting. That’s all.’

‘We don’t suspect Roy,’ Margot Balkwill said. ‘Just so you don’t jump to the wrong conclusions.’

‘I’m sure you don’t. Perhaps I should make one thing clear from the outset. My investigation is not a witch hunt. It is merely about closure. Enabling you and your husband to move on.’

‘That will depend, won’t it, on whether our daughter is alive or dead?’

‘Absolutely,’ Cassian Pewe said. He drank some more of his tea, then cleaned his teeth with his tongue. He pulled his card from his pocket and laid it on the table. ‘If there is anything, at any time, you think of that might be helpful for me to know, call me.’

‘Thank you,’ Margot Balkwill said. ‘You are a good man. I can feel it.’

Pewe smiled.

OCTOBER 2007

Abby blinked, waking up from a confusing dream to a strange whirring sound. Her stomach was hurting. Her face felt numb. She was freezing cold. Shivering. Staring at cream wall tiles. For a moment she thought she was in a plane, or was it a cabin on a ship?

Then the steady, slow realization that something was very wrong. She couldn’t move. She smelled plastic, grout, tile cement, disinfectant.

Now it was coming back. And with an explosion of swirling darkness inside her, she remembered.

Fear shimmied through her. She tried to raise her right arm to touch her face. And that was when she realized she couldn’t move.

Or open her mouth.

Her head was pulled back so much her neck was hurting and something hard was sticking into her back. It was the cistern, she realized. She was seated on the lavatory. It was hard to see anything except straight ahead and she had to strain her eyes to look down. When she did, she became aware she was naked, bound with grey gaffer tape around her midriff, her breasts, her wrists and ankles, her mouth and, she assumed, because that was what it felt like, her forehead.

She was in the guest shower room of her flat. Staring at the walk-in shower cabinet, with a packet of expensive soap, never unwrapped, in the dish, a sink and a few towel rails, and the beautifully tiled walls, in cream with Romanesque tiles and a dado rail. There was a door to her right, through to the tiny utility room, in which were crammed a washing machine and tumble dryer, and at the back of which was a fire escape door out on to the stairwell. The main door out on to the hallway, to her left, was ajar.

She began to shake, then nearly vomited with fear. She didn’t know for how long she had been imprisoned in here, in this small, windowless room. She tried to shift her position, but the bindings were too secure.

Had he gone? Taken everything and just left her here like this?

Her stomach was hurting. The tape had been put on so tightly, she was losing feeling in some parts, and had pins and needles in her right hand. The hard seat was digging into her bum and thighs.

She was trying to remember what was behind the toilet, so that she could work out what the tape was fixed to behind her. But she couldn’t picture it.

The light was on, which kept the extractor fan running, she realized, making that steady, gloomy whirr.

Her fear turned to despair. He had gone. After all that she’d been through, and now this. How had she let this happen? How had she been so stupid? How? How? How?

Her despair turned to anger.

Then back to fear again as she saw a shadow moving.