Dead Man's Footsteps (7 page)

11 SEPTEMBER 2001

Ronnie Wilson had lost all track of time. He just stood still, transfixed, holding the handle of his bag as if it was his crutch, watching something he could not comprehend unfolding before his eyes.

Stuff was tumbling out of the sky on to the plaza and the surrounding streets. Raining from the sky. A never-ending downpour of masonry, office partitions, desks, chairs, glass, pictures, framed photographs, sofas, computer screens, keyboards, filing cabinets, waste bins, lavatory seats, washbasins, paper like letter-sized white confetti. And bodies. Bodies falling. Men and women who were alive in the air one moment, exploding and disintegrating as they landed. He wanted to turn away, to scream, to run, but it was as if a massive leaden finger was pressing down on his head, forcing him to stand still, to observe in numb silence.

He felt that he was watching the end of the world.

It seemed that every fireman and every police officer in New York was running into the Twin Towers. An endless stream entering, barging past the endless stream of bewildered men and women leaving at half-speed, staggering out as if from some other world, covered in dust, dishevelled, some with their arms or faces tracked with blood, contorted by shock. Many of them had mobiles pressed to their ears.

Then came the earthquake. Just a gentle vibration beneath his feet to start with, then more vigorous, so that he really had to grip the handle of his bag hard for support. And suddenly the zombies emerging from the South Tower seemed to wake up and quicken their pace.

They started running.

Ronnie looked up and saw the reason why. But for a moment he thought it must be a mistake. This was not possible! It was an optical illusion.  It had to be.

The entire building was collapsing in on itself, like a house of cards, except—

A police car a short distance in front of him was suddenly flattened.

Then a fire engine was flattened too.

A cloud of dust like a desert sandstorm rolled towards him. He heard thunder. Rolling, rumbling, surround-sound thunder.

A whole stream of people disappeared under masonry.

The dark grey cloud was rising in the air like a storm of furious insects.

The thunder was numbing his ears.

This was not possible.

The fucking tower was coming down.

People sprinting for their lives. A woman lost a shoe, continued limping along on one foot, then shed the other shoe. A terrible tearing sound in the air, drowning out the sirens, as if some giant monster was ripping the world in half with its claws.

They were running past him. One person, then another, and another, their faces etched into masks of panic. Some were sheet-white masks, some were dripping water from sprinkler systems, some dripping blood or showering slivers of glass. Bit-part players in a weird early-morning carnival.

A BMW suddenly jumped in the air, yards from where he stood, and came down on its roof minus its front end. Then he saw the black cloud rising, tumbling straight towards him like a tidal wave.

Gripping the handle of his bag, he turned and followed them. Not knowing where he was going, he just ran, putting one foot in front of the other, towing his bag, not sure, not even caring, whether his briefcase was still on top. Running to keep ahead of the black cloud, of the falling tower that he could hear, thundering, rumbling in his ears, in his heart, in his soul.

Running for his life.

OCTOBER 2007

By now the lift seemed alive, like some preternatural creature. When Abby breathed, it sighed, creaked, moaned. When she moved, it swayed, twisted, rocked. Her mouth and throat were parched; her tongue and the inside of her mouth felt like blotting paper, instantly absorbing any tiny drop of saliva she produced.

A cold, persistent draught was blowing on her face. She fumbled in the darkness for the cursor button on her phone, then pressed it to activate the light on the display. She did this every few minutes, to check whether there was any signal and to bring a small but desperately welcome ray of light into her unstable, swaying prison cell.

No signal.

The time on the display read 1.32 p.m.

She tried dialling 999 yet again. But the feeble signal had gone.

With a shiver, she again read the text that had come through:

I know where you are.

Despite not recognizing the number, she knew who it was; there was only one person who could have sent it. But how did he have her number? That was what really worried her at this moment.  How the hell do you know my number?

It was a pay-as-you-go phone, which she had bought for cash. She’d seen enough cop shows on television to know that was what crooks did so their calls could not be traced. These were the phones drug dealers used. She had bought it to keep in touch with her mother, who now lived in nearby Eastbourne, to see if she was OK, while pretending to her that she was still abroad and was well. Almost as importantly, the phone was so she could keep in touch with Dave – and occasionally send pictures. It was hard being apart for this long from someone you loved.

The thought suddenly occurred to her:  had the sender gone to her mother?  But even if he had, he wouldn’t have got her number. She was always careful to withhold it. Besides, when she had called yesterday, her mum had said nothing and sounded fine.

Could he have been following her, seen where she bought the phone and got the number that way? No. No chance. She had bought it from a small mobile phone shop in a side street off Preston Circus, where she had been able to make doubly sure no one was observing her. At least, as best she could.

Was he here in the building now? What if he was responsible for trapping her like this? And was using the time to break into her flat … ? What if he was in the flat now, searching?

What if he found—

Unlikely.

She looked at the display again.

The words scared her more and more. Coils of fear spiralled inside her. She stood up in panic, pressing the cursor again as the light went off, pushing her fingers in the crack between the doors for the hundredth time, trying to force them apart, weeping in frustration.

They wouldn’t move.

Please, please open. Oh, God, please open.

The lift swayed wildly again. An image flashed in her mind of divers in a shark cage, with a Great White nosing against the bars. That’s what he was like. A Great White. A numb, unfeeling predator. She must have been mad, she decided, to have agreed to this.

If ever there had been a moment in her life when her resolve to succeed faltered, and she would willingly have traded all she had just to turn the clock back, it was now.

OCTOBER 2007

Blowflies or bluebottles – or blue-arsed flies, as the Aussies called them – can scent a dead body from twelve miles away. Which gives them a considerable amount in common with crime reporters, Roy Grace was fond of telling members of his team. They feed on the fluid protein excretions that ooze from a decomposing cadaver. Not much different from crime reporters there either, he liked to add.

And, no surprise, there was one outside the door of the SOCO van at this very moment, the  Argus’s most persistent – and best informed, it had to be said – crime reporter, Kevin Spinella. Sometimes  too  well informed.

Grace told the scene guard who had radioed to inform him of the reporter’s presence that he would speak to Spinella, and stepped outside into the rain, relieved to get away from the rank smell of Norman Potting. As he walked towards the reporter, he noticed two photographers hanging around.

Spinella stood without an umbrella, hands in his pockets, wearing a sodden gumshoe raincoat with epaulettes and a belt, and the collar turned up. He was a slight, thin-faced man in his early twenties with alert eyes and his mouth was busily working a piece of chewing gum. His thin black hair, brushed and gelled forward, was at this moment matted to his head by the rain.

Beneath the reporter’s coat, Grace could see, he was wearing a dark business suit and a shirt that was at least one size too big for him, as if he hadn’t grown into it yet. The collar was hanging slack around his neck, despite the big, clumsy knot of his crimson polyester tie pulled tight. His flashy black shoes were caked in mud.

‘You’re a bit late, old son,’ Grace said as a greeting.

‘Late?’ The reporter frowned.

‘The blowflies beat you by several years.’

Spinella gave him the merest hint of a smile, as if unsure to what extent Grace was taking the mickey. ‘Wondered if I could ask you a few questions, Detective Superintendent.’

‘I’ll be holding a press conference on Monday.’

‘Is there anything you can tell me in the meantime?’

‘I thought maybe you might be able to tell me something – you normally appear to be better informed than I am.’

Again the reporter seemed uncertain about his attitude. With a thin smile of acknowledgement he said, ‘Heard you found a skeleton, a woman, down in a storm drain just over there on the site. Is that correct?’

The casual way he asked the question, as if they were remains of no significance, angered Grace. But he needed to keep his cool. There was nothing to be gained by antagonizing Spinella; it was always better, in his experience of dealing with the press, to be guardedly helpful.

‘The remains are human,’ he replied. ‘But so far the gender hasn’t been positively ascertained.’

‘I heard it is definitely a female.’

Grace smiled. ‘You see, I just said you were better informed than me.’

‘So – er – is it?’

‘Who do you want to trust, your sources or me?’

The reporter stared at Grace for a few moments, as if trying to read him. A drip formed on the bottom of his nose, but he made no attempt to wipe it off. ‘Can I ask you something else?’

‘If it’s quick.’

‘I hear you’ve got a new colleague starting at Sussex House on Monday – an officer from the Met, Detective Superintendent Pewe?’

Grace felt himself tighten. One more smug remark and he was going to knock that drip off Spinella’s nose with his bare fist. ‘You hear correctly.’

‘I understand the Met is the first police force in the UK to start cutting down on bureaucracy properly.’

‘You do, do you?’

The reporter’s snide grin was almost unbearable, as if he knew all kinds of secrets he was not revealing. For a wild moment Grace even thought that he might have been leaked something confidential by Alison Vosper.

‘They’re employing civilian clerks to book people into custody, so their arresting officers can go straight back out on patrol – instead of spending hours filling out forms,’ Spinella said. ‘Do you reckon Sussex CID will be learning things from Detective Superintendent Pewe?’

Fighting his anger, Grace was careful with his answer. ‘I’m sure Detective Superintendent Pewe is going to be a valuable member of the Sussex CID team,’ he said.

‘I can quote you on that, can I?’ The grin was getting even worse.

What do you know, you little shit?

Roy’s radio phone crackled. He held it to his ear. ‘Roy Grace?’

It was one of the SOCOs in the tunnel, Tony Monnington. ‘Thought you’d like to know, Roy, we seem to have found our first possible piece of evidence.’

Grace politely excused himself from the reporter and made his way back to the storm drain, phoning Norman Potting to tell him he would be some minutes. It was strange how things in life changed on you constantly, he thought. A little while ago, he could not wait to get out of the storm drain. Now, when the alternatives were either standing in the rain and talking to Spinella or going back to being closeted in the SOCO van with Norman Potting, suddenly it seemed to have a lot going for it.

OCTOBER 2007

It was Abby’s room-mate, Sue, who had inadvertently changed her life. The two of them had met working in a bar down on the Yarra waterfront in Melbourne and became instant friends. They were the same age and, like Abby, Sue had gone to Australia from England in search of adventure.

One evening, nearly a year ago, Sue told Abby that a couple of good-looking blokes, a bit older than them but very charming, had been in the bar, chatting to her. They said they were going to a barbie on Sunday with a fun crowd of people and to come along if she was free, to bring a girlfriend with her if she liked.

Having no better offers, they went. The barbecue was at a cool bachelor pad, a penthouse apartment in one of Melbourne’s hippest districts, with fine views across the bay. But in those heady first hours, Abby had barely taken in her surroundings, because she had been instantly and totally smitten with her host, Dave Nelson.

There were a couple of dozen other people at the party. The men, ranging from about ten years older than her to north of sixty, looked like extras from the set of a gangster film, and the women, dripping with bling, all seemed to have just stepped out of beauty salons. But she barely noticed them either. In fact, she hardly spoke a word to anyone else from the moment she set foot in the door.

Dave was a tall, lean, rough diamond in his mid-forties with a rich tan, short gelled hair and a world-weary face that had probably been seriously handsome in his youth, but now looked comfortably lived in. And that was how she felt, instantaneously, with him. Comfortable.

He moved around the apartment with an easy, animal grace, lavishly sloshing out Krug from magnum bottles all afternoon. He was tired, he said, because he had been playing poker for three days around the clock, in an international tournament, the Aussie Millions, at the Crown Plaza casino. He’d paid an entry fee of one thousand dollars, and had survived four rounds, building up a pot of over one hundred thousand, before being knocked out. A trip of aces, he’d told Abby ruefully. How was he to know the guy had two aces in the hole? When he had three kings, two hidden, for Christ’s sake!

Abby had never played poker before. But that night, after the rest of the guests had gone, he’d sat her down and taught her. She’d liked the attention, liked the way he looked at her all the time, told her how pretty she was, then how beautiful she was, then how good she made him feel just being there with him. His eyes scarcely left her face in all the hours they sat there together, as if nothing else mattered. They were good eyes, brown with a hint of green, alert but tinged with sadness, as if there was some loss hurting him deep inside. It made her want to protect him, to mother him.

She loved the stories he told her about his travels, and how he had made his fortune dealing rare stamps and playing poker, mostly on the internet. He worked a gambling system which seemed so obvious, when he explained it, and so clever.

Internet poker games took place all over the world, 24/7. He’d use the time zones, logging on to games that were being played where it was the small hours of the morning by people who were tired and often a little drunk. He’d watch for a while, then join in. Easy pickings for a man fully awake, sober and alert.

Abby had always been attracted to older men and this guy, who seemed so tough, yet was passionate about tiny, delicate, beautiful stamps and enthused to her about their links with history, fascinated her. For a girl from a staid British background, he was totally different from anyone she had ever met. And although there was that vulnerability about him, at the same time there was something intensely strong and manly that made her feel safe with him.

For the first time in her life, breaking her own rule with total abandon, she slept with him that very night. And she moved in with him just a couple of weeks later. He took her shopping, encouraging her to buy expensive clothes, and often came home with jewellery or a new watch or an insanely lavish bunch of flowers if he’d had a good poker win.

Sue had done her best to dissuade Abby, pointing out that he was a good deal older than her, that he had a somewhat uncertain past and a reputation as something of a ladies’ man – or, put more crudely, was a serial shagger.

But Abby had ignored all of that, dumping her friendship first with Sue and subsequently with the other friends she had made since arriving in Melbourne. Instead, she enjoyed meeting Dave’s older and – to her – much more glamorous and interesting circle. Big money had always had an allure for her and these people were all big spenders.

As a child, in her school holidays she had sometimes gone on jobs with her father, who ran a small floor and bathroom tiling business. She had loved helping him, but a stronger attraction for her was the houses – some of them really incredible – where rich people lived. Her mother worked at the public library in Hove and their little semi in Hollingbury, with its neat garden, which both her parents tended lovingly, was the extent of their horizons.

As she grew up, Abby felt increasingly constricted, and restricted, by her modest upbringing. In her teens she read the works of Danielle Steel, Jackie Collins and Barbara Taylor Bradford avidly, and of every other novelist who wrote about the lives of the rich and glamorous, as well as devouring  OK!  and  Hello!  magazines cover-to-cover every week. She secretly harboured dreams of vast wealth, and the grand houses and yachts in the sun that would come with it. She longed to travel and she knew, deep down, that one day she would get her chance. By the time she was thirty, she promised herself, she would be rich.

When a friend of Dave’s was arrested on three murder charges she was appalled, but she couldn’t help feeling a frisson of excitement. Then another of his circle was shot dead in his car, in front of his twins, while watching a children’s football training session. She began to realize that she was now part of a very different culture from the one she had grown up in and had previously understood. But despite her shock at the man’s death, she found the funeral exciting. To be there as part of all these people, to be accepted by them – it was the biggest turn-on of her life.

At the same time she began to wonder what else Dave was really up to. She noticed him sometimes fawning over the guys he had told her were the biggest players, trying to do some kind of business with them. One morning she overheard him on the phone telling someone that trading in stamps was a great way to launder money, to move it around the globe, as if he was trying to sell the concept to them.

She didn’t like that so much. It was as if she hadn’t minded all the time they were on the fringe, just hanging out in bars and partying with these people. But actually doing business with them – almost begging them to let him do business – lowered Dave in her eyes. And yet, deep in her heart, she felt she might be able to help him, if she could just get through the wall he seemed to have erected around himself. Because, after several months with him, she realized she knew no more about his past than when she had first met him, other than that he’d had two previous wives and both his divorces had been painful.

Then one day he dropped a bombshell.