Pewe wagged a warning finger.
Ignoring it, Grace said, ‘Christ, you were once a detective yourself. Would you have looked at a body hanging from a cord around the neck with her feet six inches above anything she could have stood on and not wondered how she could possibly have done that by herself?’
‘No,’ Pewe replied, flatly.
‘Do you want to tell me she stood on a block of ice, like that old locked-room puzzle?’
‘I’m not playing puzzle games with you, Roy, I’m looking at the evidence, the facts. We have a bereaved and lonely woman. She’s looking for love online and all she finds is conmen. Then her sister dies, the final straw. Did she know? Maybe she got drunk, fell over, bashed her head. Had enough, ended it all. End of.’
‘Very few women hang themselves, sir, that’s a known fact. It’s extremely rare.’
‘Good, so you have an extremely rare situation. As you are into known facts and presumably statistics, too, let me throw a few at you. Last year in the UK we had a total of 585 homicides. We had 1,730 road traffic deaths. Those figures pale into insignificance when you look at the number of suicides: 6,188. How does that weight the odds, Roy?’
The Detective Superintendent shook his head in disbelief at his boss’s attitude.
‘Anything else I can help you with today?’ asked Pewe.
‘You’re really happy to leave it there?’ Grace stared at him with a mixture of frustration and anger.
‘Until I see better evidence to convince me she might have been murdered, I am, Roy. Perhaps you should be wondering to yourself, Roy, how come — when we were both the same rank less than two years ago — you are exactly where you were and I’m now an ACC? Maybe there’s a reason for it which is now becoming self-evident.’
It was all Grace could do not to punch his boss’s supercilious face. He stood, simmering. ‘And what about her dead sister in Germany?’
Pewe replied, ‘Is that information confirmed yet? It’s for them to investigate, not us.’
‘It’s not confirmed one hundred per cent, but it’s looking like the two sisters were killed and their deaths are linked.’
‘Not in my mind, they’re not. And while you’ve been out there garnering more newspaper column inches, you’ve been totally ignoring another directive I gave you, Roy.’
‘I have?’
‘You don’t think so?’
‘Which directive are you referring to, sir?’ Pewe threw so many at him, he had lost track.
‘I’m referring to one from the latest Home Office report, Roy. Can you tell me exactly how you have delivered, supported and inspired your team in a way that’s led to an increase in diversity?’
Grace stared back at him, almost incredulous. ‘Sir, at this moment we are facing a crime epidemic. Sussex citizens on dating agencies were scammed out of £30 million last year. Our murder rate in the last twelve months is at a fifty-year record high, as are burglaries and street crime. And you are worrying about diversity? I’m extremely proud of the diversity in my team, sir. I’m afraid I don’t have any field officer in a wheelchair because unfortunately, in my wide but admittedly limited experience, not many victims are considerate enough to always be murdered in access-friendly locations.’
‘You’re sailing very close to the wind, Roy,’ Pewe said.
All of it coming from your backside, with a very nasty smell, Grace would dearly love to have said.
As he left the ACC’s office a few minutes later, closing the grand door behind him, he was thinking about the words an embittered colleague had said to him recently, over a pint: ‘It’s not the down-and-outs and the criminals on the outside that you have to worry about, Roy, it’s the ones on the inside who’ll cut your throat and hang you out to bleed dry.’
His phone rang.
‘Roy Grace,’ he answered, standing in the corridor; Pewe’s assistant sat typing in her booth, opposite him.
It was DC Kevin Hall, a member of the small Major Enquiry Team he had assembled to investigate Susan Driver’s death.
‘Boss, we’ve just heard back from the Landeskriminalamt in Munich. Could be quite significant.’
‘Tell me?’
‘Lena Welch, the woman who went over her balcony in Munich, and Suzy Driver, are definitely confirmed as sisters. It took them a while to make the connection because both of them have married names. And there’s more, boss. Velvet’s just spoken to a close friend of Mrs Driver. She’d been telling her, very excitedly, about the dating agency she’d joined about a year ago. The friend told Velvet that recently the sisters had been concerned that a man Suzy had been talking with, who she found very attractive, had asked her for money and she was becoming suspicious about him.
‘And now both sisters are dead,’ Grace said.
‘It gets better. Munich police recovered from Lena’s flat a digital recording device, which shows images of her killer. There might be more to this than meets the eye, boss — in my humble opinion.’
Roy Grace was feeling a sudden burst of elation. ‘Humble is good, Kevin!’ Ending the call, he spun round and knocked on ACC Pewe’s door, a rat-a-tat-tat riff on the classic policeman’s knock, and loud enough to annoy him. He was more than a little pleased that he was about to ruin his boss’s morning — and, with a bit of luck, his entire day.
40
Monday 8 October
Johnny Fordwater, nursing a stinger of a hangover, was feeling tired and fractious. It was 9 a.m. in New York but his metabolism was elsewhere, in another time zone. It was 2 p.m. UK time, he calculated, which would be fine if he’d managed to sleep last night, which he hadn’t. He’d dozed for a while on the flight over from London, but it had been hard in the cramped economy seat. Then he and Sorokin met and hit it off like old mates. They’d sat drinking far too much whisky in his hotel bar late into the evening.
Now, in the open-plan offices of the Conviction Review Team, on the second floor of the handsome building of the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office, Johnny sat perched alongside his new comrade-in-arms on a wobbly swivel chair. Facing them, arms outstretched on top of his cluttered desk, was the tall, broad-shouldered figure of Detective Investigator Pat Lanigan. In his mid-fifties, the Irish-American had begun his working life in the US Navy, before becoming a stevedore in the docks and then joining the NYPD. He had a pockmarked face with greying brush-cut hair and a light beard. He exuded charm and seemed genuinely concerned for their predicament.
The Conviction Review Team shared the floor with the Mafia-busting Team. A short distance behind Fordwater and Sorokin was a large whiteboard on which was charted the family tree of one of the most notorious New York crime families.
‘So, Johnny,’ Pat Lanigan said in a strong Brooklyn accent, ‘I wanna tell you something about how I feel about all vets, OK? The American flag that you see on our roof and every other place does not fly because the wind moves past it. Our beautiful flag flies from the last breath of each military member who has died serving it. And that goes for the flag you served under, too, Johnny. I don’t like to see anyone screwed over, but most of all someone who’s put their life on the line serving all that we believe in and stand for.’
‘Thank you,’ Johnny said. He had liked Lanigan instantly, the moment he met him, just fifteen minutes or so ago. Matt Sorokin, dressed in jeans, a leather jacket over a turquoise polo shirt and cowboy boots, looked like a guy who had been born angry and had just got even angrier with each passing year.
‘Good old Lanigan horseshit!’ Sorokin retorted.