Dead Man's Footsteps (20 page)

OCTOBER 2007

After the briefing meeting, Roy Grace retreated to the quiet sanctuary of his office and spent a few moments looking out of the window, across the main road at the ASDA car park, and the ugly slab building of the supermarket itself cutting off what would have been a fine view across the city of Brighton and Hove he loved so much. At least he could actually see some sky, and for the first time in several days patches of it were blue, with rays of sun breaking through the cloud.

Nursing the hot mug of coffee that Eleanor had just brought him, he glanced down at the plastic trays containing his prized collections – three dozen vintage cigarette lighters that he hadn’t yet put up on display and a fine selection of international police caps.

Lying beside the stuffed brown trout he had caught on a visit to Ireland some years ago was a new addition, a birthday present from Cleo. It was a stuffed carp, in a display case, at the base of which was engraved the legend – a terrible pun – Carpe diem.

His briefcase sat open on the table, together with his mobile, his dictating machine and a bunch of transcripts relating to the court hearings he was helping to prepare, one of which he had go through this morning, because the CPS lawyer was on his back for it.

What’s more, thanks to his promotion, he now had new stacks of files, growing by the minute, that Eleanor was bringing in and placing on every available flat surface. They contained case summaries of all the major crimes that Sussex CID were currently investigating, which he now had to review.

He made a list of everything he needed to follow up on Operation Dingo, then he went through the transcript, which took him an hour. When he had finished, he pulled out his notebook and, starting at the back, read his most recent jotting. His handwriting was bad, so he took a moment to decipher it and remember.

Katherine Jennings, Flat 82, Arundel Mansions,

29 Lower Arundel Terrace.

He stared at it blankly, for some moments. Waiting for his brain’s synapses to kick in and provide him with some recollection of why he had written that down. Then he remembered Kevin Spinella cornering him after the press briefing yesterday. Telling him something about her being freed from a trapped lift and that she had seemed frightened about something.

Most people trapped in a lift would have been frightened. Mildly claustrophobic and with a fear of heights, he probably would have been too. Scared witless. Still, you never knew. He decided to do the dutiful thing and report it to East Brighton District. He dialled the internal number of the most efficient officer he knew there, Inspector Stephen Curry, gave him the woman’s name and address, and explained the provenance.

‘Don’t make it a priority, Steve. But maybe have one of your beat officers swing by some time, make sure all is OK.’

‘Absolutely,’ said Stephen Curry, who was sounding rushed. ‘Leave it with me.’

‘With the greatest pleasure,’ Grace said.

Having hung up, he looked down at the workload on his desk and decided he would stroll down later this morning, towards lunchtime, to collect his car. Take in a bit of fresh air. Enjoy a rare bit of sunshine and try to clear his head. Then make his way downtown to see if he couldn’t find one or two of Ronnie Wilson’s old acquaintances. He had a good idea where to start looking.

12 SEPTEMBER 2001

Ronnie spent a restless night lying between unwashed nylon sheets, trying to cope with a foam pillow that felt as if it was filled with rocks and a mattress whose springs bored into him like corkscrews. He had a choice between keeping the window shut and enduring the air-conditioning unit that made a noise like two skeletons fighting in a metal shed, or opening it and being kept awake by the non-stop wailing of distant sirens and the chop of helicopters.

At a few minutes to 6 he lay wide awake, scratching one of several tiny red bites on his leg. He soon discovered more that were itching like fury on his chest and stomach.

He fumbled on the bedside table for the remote and switched the television on. The urgency of the outside world suddenly filled his room. Images of New York were on the screen. There were distraught-looking people, women and men, holdinguphand-made boards, placards, signs, some with photographs, some with just names, in red or black or blue writing, all asking, HAVE YOU SEEN?

A newscaster appeared, giving an estimate of the numbers dead. Emergency phone numbers to call ran along the bottom, as well as more breaking news.

All kinds of bad stuff.

Bad stuff was churning around inside his head too, together with everything else that had been in the mix all night long. Thoughts, ideas, lists. Lorraine. Donald Hatcook. Flames. Screams. Falling bodies.

His plan.

Was Donald OK? If he had survived, was there any guarantee he would agree to back his biodiesel venture? Ronnie had always been a gambling man and he didn’t reckon the odds on that were as good as the odds on his new plan working. So far as he was now concerned, alive or dead, Donald Hatcook was history.

Lorraine would be hurting. But in time she would understand that there was no gain without pain.

One day the silly cow would understand – one day soon, when he showered her in fifty-quid notes, bought her everything she ever wanted and more!

They would be rich!

Just had to suffer some pain now.

And be very, very careful.

He looked at his watch to double-check: 6.02. It took a few moments for his tired, jet-lagged brain to work out whether the UK was ahead in time or behind. Ahead, he finally decided. So it would be just after 11 in the morning in Brighton. He tried to think what Lorraine would be doing. She’d have phoned his mobile, phoned the hotel, phoned Donald Hatcook’s office. She might be round at her sister’s house, or, more likely, her sister would be round at theirs.

A police officer was speaking now, straight at the television. He was saying volunteers were needed to come and help out on the pile. They needed people down in the disaster area to help with the digging, to hand out water. He looked exhausted, as if he had been up all night. He looked like a man stretched to breaking point from tiredness and emotion and just sheer workload.

Volunteers. Ronnie thought about that for some moments. Volunteers.

He climbed out of bed and stood in the puny shower, feeling strangely liberated, but nervous. There were a thousand and one ways he could screw this up. But also there were ways he could be smart. Really smart. Volunteers. Yes, that had something! That had currency!

Drying himself, he focused on the news, watching a New York channel, wanting to see what was predicted for the city today. The other shoe that was going to drop that people were talking about? Meaning more attacks. Or was business going to get back to normal today? At least in some parts of Manhattan?

He needed to know, because he had transactions to make. His new life was going to require funding. You had to speculate to accumulate. Stuff he needed was going to be expensive and, wherever he got it, he would have to pay in cash.

The item he wanted was coming up on the news now. The parts of New York that would be closed off and the parts that were open. What was running on the transit system. It seemed there was a lot, that most of it was operating. The anchor woman was saying, solemnly, that yesterday the world had changed.

She was right, he thought, but for many today it would be business as usual. Ronnie was relieved about that. After his binge in the bar yesterday, his evening meal and his advance on the room, his resources were down to about three hundred and two dollars.

The reality of that was hammering home. Three hundred and two dollars to last him until he could make a transaction. He could pawn his laptop, but that was too risky. He knew, to his own cost, when the computer at the car dealership had been seized a few years back, that it was almost impossible to wipe a computer memory clean. His laptop would always be traceable back to him.

They were talking about volunteers wanted for the pile on the screen again now. Volunteers, he thought. The idea was taking root, exciting him.

Now, thanks to the morning news, he had another piece of his plan in place.

OCTOBER 2007

Sussex House had originally been acquired as the headquarters for Sussex CID. But recently, despite the fact that the building was bursting at the seams, a uniformed district, East Brighton, had been squeezed into the premises as well. The Neighbourhood Specialist Team officers, involved in community-orientated problem-solving, occupied a tight space behind double doors leading directly off the reception area.

One downside of this location for Inspector Stephen Curry was that every morning he needed to be in two places at once. He had to be here for his daily briefing with the duty Neighbourhood Policing Team inspector, which ended just after 9 o’clock, and then he had a mad dash through the Brighton rush hour to be at Brighton Police Station in John Street for the daily 9.30 review meeting chaired by the Superintendent Crime and Operations for Brighton and Hove Division.

A strong-framed man of thirty-nine with hard-set good looks and a youthful air of enthusiasm about him, Curry was in even more of a rush than usual today, looking anxiously at his watch. It was 10.45. He had just returned to his office at Sussex House from John Street, to deal with a couple of urgent matters, and was about to fly back out of the door when Roy Grace phoned him.

He carefully wrote down the name Katherine Jennings and the address in his notebook, then told Grace he would get someone from his Neighbourhood Specialist Team to stop by the place.

As the matter didn’t sound urgent, he decided it could wait till later. Then he jumped up, grabbed his cap off the door, and hurried out.

12 SEPTEMBER 2001

Lorraine was sitting once again at the kitchen table in her white towelling dressing gown, a cigarette in her mouth and a cup of tea in front of her. Her head was pounding and she was bleary-eyed, not fully with it, from an almost sleepless night. Her heart felt like a lead weight in her chest and she had a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach.

She tapped the cigarette on the ashtray, sending a quarter-inch of ash tumbling in to join the four fresh butts already there this morning. The  Daily Mirror  lay beside her and the news was on television, but for the first time since yesterday afternoon, her mind was on something else.

In front of her lay the post that had arrived that morning, as well as yesterday’s and Monday’s. Plus more opened post she had found in Ronnie’s bureau in the small spare room upstairs he used as his office.

The letter she was looking at now was from a debt-collection agency called EndCol Financial Recovery. It was acknowledging an agreement Ronnie appeared to have entered into to pay off the hire-purchase payments on the large-screen television in the living room. The next one was from another debt-collection agency. It informed Ronnie that the phone line to the house was going to be disconnected if the outstanding balance of over six hundred pounds was not paid within seven days.

Then there was the letter from Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs, demanding that nearly eleven and a half thousand pounds be paid within three weeks or a distraint order would be made.

Lorraine shook her head in disbelief. Half the letters were demands for payment on overdue bills. And one, from his bank manager, told him that his request for a further loan had been rejected.

The worst letter of all was from the building society. She had found it in his bureau and it informed Ronnie that they were foreclosing on the mortgage and commencing court proceedings to repossess the house.

Lorraine crushed out the cigarette, buried her face in her hands and sobbed. All the time thinking,  Why didn’t you tell me this, Ronnie darling? Why didn’t you tell me the mess you – we – are in? I could have helped, gone out and got a job. I might not have earned much, but it would have helped. It would have been better than nothing.

She shook another cigarette out and stared numbly at the screen. At the people in New York walking around with their placards, their photographs of lost loved ones. That’s what she needed to do, she knew. She had to get over there and find him. Maybe he’d been injured and was lying in a hospital somewhere …

He was alive, she felt it in her bones. He was a survivor. All these debts, he would deal with them. If Ronnie had been here last night, he’d never have let them take the car. He’d have cut a deal, or found some cash, or torn the fuckers’ throats out.

For the millionth time, she dialled his number. And it went straight to his voicemail. Not his voice, just an impersonal one telling her sorry, the person she had called was not available and inviting her to leave a message.

She hung up, sipped her tea, then lit the cigarette and coughed. A deep, hacking cough which made her eyes water. They were now showing the smouldering rubble, the skeletal walls, the whole apocalyptic scene of what had been, until yesterday morning, the World Trade Center. She tried to work out from the images now on the screen – first a tight shot of a fireman in the foreground wearing a face mask, stumbling across a hillock of shifting, smoking masonry, then a much wider shot showing a slab maybe a hundred feet high and a flattened cop car – where the South Tower had been. What was left of it. When had Ronnie got out of it and how?

Her front doorbell rang. She froze. Then there was a sharp rap.

Shit. Shit. Shit.

She slunk upstairs and into the front bedroom, the one that Ronnie used, and peered down. There was a blue van outside in the street, blocking her drive, and two burly men were standing outside her front door. One had a shaven head and was wearing a parka and jeans; the other, with close-cropped hair and a large gold earring, was holding a document.

She lay still, almost holding her breath. There were more raps on the door. The bell rang again, twice. Then, finally, she heard the van drive off.