Dead Simple (7 page)

One of Grace’s colleagues had nicknamed her ‘No. 27’, and it had stuck. No. 27 was a sweet and sour dish on the local Chinese takeaway menu. Conversely, when ordering the dish, it was always referred to as an Alison Vosper. That’s exactly what she was, sweet and sour.

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 sour this morning. Even the powerful floral scent she was wearing had an acrid tinge.

Power-dressed in a black two-piece with a crisp white blouse, she sat behind an expanse of polished rosewood desk, in her immaculate ground-floor office in the Queen Anne police headquarters building in Lewes, with its view out across a trimmed lawn. The desk was bare except for a slim crystal vase containing three purple tulips, framed photographs of her husband (a police officer several years older but three ranks her junior) and her two children, an ammonite pen holder and a stack of the morning’s newspapers fanned out like a triumphant poker hand.

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 decided, required some kind of 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 the Assistant Chief Constable kept a wall around herself. Nonetheless, behind her hard-cop carapace, there was a certain vulnerability that he connected to. In truth, at times he fancied her, and there were occasions when those waspish brown eyes of hers twinkled with humour, and when he sensed she might almost be flirting with him. This morning was not one of them.

No handshake. No greeting. Just a curt nod for him to sit in one of the twin high-backed chairs in front of her desk. Then she launched straight in, with a look that was part reproach, part pure anger.

‘What the hell is this, Roy?’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘
Sorry?
’

He nodded. ‘I — look, this whole thing got taken out of context—’

She interrupted him before he could continue. ‘You realize this could bring the whole case crashing down on us?’

‘I think we can contain it.’

‘I’ve had a dozen calls from the national press already this morning. You’ve become a laughing stock. You’ve made us look like a bunch of idiots. Why have you done this?’

Grace was silent for some moments. ‘She’s an extraordinary woman, this medium; she’s helped us in the past. It never occurred to me anyone would find out.’

Vosper leaned back in her chair, staring at Grace, shaking her head from side to side. ‘I had great hopes for you. Your promotion was because of me. I put myself on the line for you, Roy. You know that, don’t you?’

Not strictly true, but this wasn’t the moment to start splitting hairs. ‘I know,’ he said, ‘and I appreciate it.’

She pointed at the newspapers. ‘And this is how you show it? This is what you deliver?’

‘Come on, Alison, I’ve delivered Hossain.’

‘And now you’ve given his defence counsel a crack big enough to drive a coach and horses through.’

‘No,’ he said, rising to this. ‘That shoe had already been through forensics, signed out and signed back in. They can’t lay an exhibits contamination charge on me. They might be trying to take a pop at my methods, but this won’t have any material effect on the case.’

She raised her manicured fingers and started examining them. Roy could see the tips were black from newsprint ink. Her scent seemed to be getting stronger, as if she were an animal excreting venom. ‘You’re the senior officer, it’s your case. If you let them discredit you it could have a very big effect on the outcome. Why the hell did you do it?’

‘We have a murder trial and we don’t have a body. We
know
Hossain had Raymond Cohen murdered, right?’

She nodded. The evidence Grace had amassed was impressive and persuasive.

‘But with no body there’s always a weak link.’ He shrugged. ‘We’ve had results in the past from mediums. Every police force in the nation’s used them at one time or another. Leslie Whittle, right?’

Leslie Whittle was a celebrated case. Back in 1975 the seventeen-year-old heiress had been kidnapped and vanished into thin air. Unable to find any clues to her whereabouts, the police finally acted on information from a clairvoyant using dowsing techniques, who led them to a drainage shaft, where they discovered the unfortunate girl tethered and dead.

‘Leslie Whittle wasn’t exactly a triumph of police work, Roy.’

‘There have been others, since,’ he countered.

She stared at him in silence. Then dimples appeared in her cheeks as if she might be softening; but her voice remained cold and stern. ‘You could write the number of successes we’ve had with clairvoyants on a postage stamp.’

‘That isn’t true, and you know it.’

‘Roy, what I know is that you are an intelligent man. I know that you’ve studied the paranormal and that
you
believe. I’ve seen the books in your office, and I respect any police officer who can think
out of the box
. But we have a duty to the community. Whatever goes on behind our closed doors is one thing. The image we present to the public is another.’

‘The public
believe,
Alison. There was a survey taken in 1925 of the number of scientists who believed in God. It was forty-three per cent. They did that same survey again in 1998, and guess what? It was still forty-three per cent. The only shift was that there were less biologists who believed, but more mathematicians and physicists. There was another survey, only last year, of people who had had some kind of paranormal experience. It was ninety per cent!’ He leaned forwards. ‘Ninety per cent!’

‘Roy, the Great Unwashed want to believe the police spend ratepayers’ money on solving crimes and catching villains through established police procedures. They want to believe we are out scouring the country for fingerprints and DNA, that we have labs full of scientists to examine them, and that we are trawling fields, woods, dredging lakes, knocking on doors and interviewing witnesses. They don’t want to think we are talking to Madame Arcata on the end of Brighton Pier, are staring into crystal balls or are shifting upturned tumblers around rows of letters on a bloody Ouija board! They don’t want to think we are spending our time trying to summon up the dead. They don’t want to believe their police officers are standing on the ramparts of castles like Hamlet talking to his father’s ghost. Understand what I’m saying?’

‘I understand, yes. But I don’t agree with you. Our job is to solve crimes. We have to use whatever means are at our disposal.’

She shook her head. ‘We’re never going to solve every crime, and we have to accept that. What we have to do is inspire public confidence. Make people feel safe in their homes, and on the streets.’

‘That’s such bullshit,’ Grace said, ‘and you know that! You know fine well you can massage the crime statistics any way you want.’ No sooner had he said it than he regretted his words.

She gave him a thin, wintry smile. ‘Get the Government to give us another hundred million pounds a year and we will eradicate crime in Sussex. In the absence of that all we can do is spread our resources as thinly and as far as they will go.’

‘Mediums are cheap,’ Grace said.

‘Not when they damage our credibility.’ She looked down at the papers. ‘When they jeopardize a court case they become more than we can afford. Do you hear me?’

‘Loudly, if not clearly.’ He couldn’t help it, the insolence just came out. She was irritating him. Something chauvinistic inside him that he couldn’t help, made it harder for him to accept a dressing-down from a woman than from a man.

‘Let me spell it out. You’re lucky to still have a job this morning. The Chief is not a happy bunny. He’s so angry he’s threatening to take you out of the public arena for ever, and have you chained to a desk for the rest of your career. Is that what you want?’

‘No.’

‘Then go back to being a police officer, not a flake.’

For the first time since he had joined the Force, Roy Grace had recently begun wondering whether he should ever have become a policeman. From earliest childhood it was all he had wanted to be, and in his teens he had scarcely even considered any other career.

His father, Jack, had risen to the rank of Detective Inspector, and some of the older officers around still talked about him, with great affection. Grace had been in thrall to him as a child, loved to hear his stories, to go out with him — sometimes in a police car, or down to the station. When he was a child, his father’s life had seemed so much more adventurous and glamorous than the dull lives most of his friends’ dads lived.

Grace had been addicted to cop shows on television, to books about detectives and cops of every kind — from Sherlock Holmes to Ed McBain. He had a memory that bordered on photographic, he loved puzzles, and he was physically strong. And from all he saw and heard from his father, there seemed to be a teamwork and camaraderie in police life that really appealed.

But now, on a day like this, he realized that being a police officer was less about doing things to the best of your abilities and more about conforming to some preordained level of mediocrity. In this modern politically correct world you could be a law enforcement officer at the peak of your career one moment and a political pawn the next.

His latest promotion, making him the second-youngest Detective Superintendent ever in the Sussex Police Force, and which just three months ago had so thrilled him, was fast turning out to be a poisoned chalice.

It had meant moving from the buzz of Brighton police station in the heart of the town, where most of his friends were, out to the relative quiet of the former factory on an industrial estate on the edge of the city, which had recently been refurbished to house the headquarters of Sussex CID.

You could retire from the force on a full pension after thirty years. No matter how tough it got, if he just stuck it out he would be financially set up for life. That was not how he wanted to view his job, his career. At least, not normally.

But today was different. Today was a real downer. A reality-check day. Circumstances changed, he was thinking, as he sat hunched over his desk, ignoring the pinging of incoming emails on his computer screen, munching an egg and cress brown sandwich, and staring at court transcripts of the Suresh Hossain trial in front of him. Life never stands still. Sometimes the changes were good, sometimes less than good. In little over a year’s time he would be forty. His hair was going grey.

And his new office was too small.

The three dozen vintage cigarette lighters that were his prize collection hunched together on the ledge between the front of his desk and the window which, unlike the fine view from Alison Vosper’s office, looked down onto the parking lot and the cell block beyond. Dominating the wall behind him was the large, round wooden clock that had been a prop in the fictitious police station in
The Bill
. Sandy had bought him it for his twenty-sixth birthday.

Beneath it was a stuffed seven-pound, six-ounce brown trout he had caught on a visit to Ireland some years ago. He kept it beneath the clock to give him a joke he could crack to detectives working under him, about patience and big fish.

Lined up on either side and slightly cramping it were several framed certificates, and a group photograph captioned ‘Police Staff College Bramshill. Management of Serious and Series Crimes. 1997’, and two cartoons of him in the police ops room, drawn by a colleague who had missed his true vocation. The opposite wall was taken up by bookshelves bulging with part of his collection of books on the occult, and filing cabinets.

His L-shaped desk was cluttered by his computer, overflowing in- and out-trays, Blackberry, separate piles of correspondence, some orderly, most less so, and the latest edition of the magazine with a bad pun of a title,
Fingerprint Whorld
. Rising from the mess was a framed quotation: ‘We don’t rise to the level of our abilities, we fall to the level of our excuses.’

The rest of the floor space was occupied by a television and video player, a circular table, four chairs and piles of files and loose paperwork, and his leather go-bag, containing his crime-scene kit. His briefcase sat open on the table, his mobile, dictating machine and a bunch of transcripts he had taken home with him last night all lay beside it.

He dropped half his sandwich in the bin. No appetite. He sipped his mug of coffee, checked the latest emails, then logged back on to the Sussex Police site and stared at the list of files he had inherited as part of his promotion.

Each file contained the details of an unsolved murder. It represented a pile of about twenty boxes of files, maybe even more, stacked on an office floor, or bulging out of cupboards, or locked up, gathering mould in a damp police garage in a station in the area where the murder happened. The files contained scene-of-crime photographs, forensic reports, bagged evidence, witness statements, court transcripts, separated into orderly bundles and secured with coloured ribbon. This was part of his new brief, to dig back into the county’s unsolved murders, liaise with the CID division where the crime happened, looking for anything that might have changed in the intervening years that could justify reopening the case.

He knew most of their contents by heart — the benefit of his near photographic memory which had propelled him through exams both at school and in the Force. To him each stack represented more than just a human life that had been taken — and a killer who was still free — it symbolized something very close to his own heart. It meant that a family had been unable to lay its past to rest, because a mystery had never been solved, justice had never been done. And he knew that with some of these files being more than thirty years old, he was the last hope the victims and their relatives probably had.