Cleo and her assistant, Darren, stood by, ready to assist the pathologist, but at the moment they had nothing to do but watch. Occasionally she would look in Grace’s direction and give him a surreptitious smile.
The Detective Superintendent was thinking hard. Preece’s hands glued to the wheel confirmed, beyond any doubt in his mind, that the man had been murdered. And the presence of that camera in the vehicle was bothering him a lot. Put there by the killer? Some sadistic bounty-hunter associate of Preece who had known where he had been hiding?
Or was there an even darker aspect to this? The Mafia connection was weighing heavily on his mind. Could this have been a sadistic revenge hit?
The body had not yet been formally identified. That would be done later by his mother or sister. Nadiuska said she would be able to dissolve the glue with acetone, leaving Grace’s team able to get fingerprints which would further confirm his identity, and as backup they would be able to get a DNA sample. But from the tattoos on his body and the scar on his face, Ford Prison had already confirmed his identity beyond much doubt.
With Kevin Spinella from the Argus and the rest of the press having been kept well away from the crime scene, only the immediate team at the quay, and those here in the mortuary, knew that the man’s hands had been glued to the steering wheel. Grace intended to keep this information quiet for the moment. If it made the press during the next few hours, he would know where to look for the leak.
He stepped out of the PM room and made a call to MIR-1, instructing Norman Potting to organize a group within the inquiry team to find out all they could about the camera, in particular where such a device was available for sale, in Brighton or beyond, and any recent purchases that had been made.
Next he made a phone call to Detective Investigator Pat Lanigan, who was their liaison officer with the Revere family in America, to ask him whether in his experience the dead boy’s parents were the kind of people who might be sufficiently aggrieved to go for a revenge killing.
Lanigan informed him that they had the money, the power and the connections – and that with people like this a whole different set of rules applied. He said that he would see what intelligence he could come up with. Sometimes, when a contract was put out, they would get to hear of it. He promised to come back to Grace as soon he found out anything.
Grace hung up with a heavy heart. Suddenly he found himself hoping that whoever had killed Preece was just a local chancer. The notion of a Mafia-backed killing in the heart of Brighton was not something that would sit well with anyone – not the council, not the tourist board, not his boss, ACC Rigg, and not with himself, either.
He sat on a sofa in the small front office of the mortuary, poured himself a stewed coffee from the jug that was sitting on the hotplate and felt a sudden grim determination. Lanigan had said a whole different set of rules applied.
Well, not in his beloved city, they didn’t.
57
‘The time is 8.30 a.m. Saturday 1 May,’ Roy Grace announced to his team in MIR-1. ‘This is the eighteenth briefing of Operation Violin. The first thing I have to report is the positive identification of Ewan Preece.’
‘Shame to have lost such an upstanding member of Brighton society, chief,’ said Norman Potting. ‘And such a tacky way to die.’
There was a titter of laughter. Grace gave him a reproachful look.
‘Thank you, Norman. Let’s hold the humour. We have some serious issues on our hands.’
Bella Moy rattled her Malteser box, extracted a chocolate and popped it into her mouth, biting into it with a crunch. Grace looked back down at his notes.
‘It will be some days before we get the toxicology reports, but I have significant findings from the PM. The first is that there was bruising to the side of Preece’s neck very similar to the bruising that was found on his sister, Evie, who is claiming to have remembered nothing after going outside on Monday night to let her cat out. According to Nadiuska De Sancha, this is consistent with a martial arts blow with the side of a hand to cause instant loss of consciousness. This could be the way Preece was overpowered by his assailant.’
Grace looked down again. ‘The seawater present in Preece’s lungs indicates that he was alive at the time the van went into the water and he died from drowning. The fact that his hands were glued to the steering wheel makes this extremely unlikely to have been suicide. Does anyone have a different view?’
‘If he was unconscious, sir,’ said Nick Nicholl, ‘how did the van actually get into the water? It would have been difficult for someone to physically push it, because when the front wheels went over the edge of the quay, surely the bottom of the chassis would have grounded on it. Wouldn’t it have needed to be driven at some speed?’
‘That’s a good point,’ Grace said. ‘Dudman, who own that particular section of the wharf, say that their fork-lift truck had been moved. It could have been used to push the van in.’
‘Wouldn’t that have required someone with an ignition key?’ asked Bella Moy.
‘I’m told that particular kind of fork-lift has a universal ignition key,’ Grace replied. ‘One key operates all of those vehicles in the UK. And anyone with a basic knowledge could have started it with a screwdriver.’
‘Has the kind of glue been established?’ asked DS Duncan Crocker.
‘It has been sent for lab analysis. We don’t have that information yet.’
‘There was no tube of glue found in the vehicle?’ Crocker asked.
‘No,’ Grace replied. ‘The Specialist Search Unit did an extensive dive search around the area where the van was recovered, but so far they have found nothing. There is almost zero visibility down there, which is not helpful. They are continuing searching today and doing a fingertip search of the quay areas. But my sense is that they are not going to find anything helpful.’
‘Why do you think that, chief?’ Glenn Branson asked.
‘Because this smells to me like the work of a professional. It has all the hallmarks,’ Grace said. Then he looked around at his team. ‘I did not like the mention of the hundred-thousand-dollar reward from the get-go. It wasn’t put up, as is usual, for information leading to the arrest and conviction, but just for the driver’s identity. I think we could be looking at an underworld hit here.’
‘Does that change anything in this inquiry, sir?’ Emma-Jane Boutwood asked.
‘In the 1930s this city got the sobriquet Murder Capital of Europe,’ Grace retorted. ‘I don’t intend to let anyone think they can come here, kill someone for a bounty and get away with it. And that’s what we could be dealing with right now.’
‘If it’s a professional Mafia hit,’ Nick Nicholl said, ‘whoever did this could already be back in America. Or wherever he came from.’
‘Evie Preece does not have an internal door into her garage,’ Grace replied. ‘If our man knocked Preece out, he would have had to carry him out of the house and into the garage – on a street in a densely populated neighbourhood. When he got to Shoreham Harbour, he would have had to leave him in the van while he opened the gates. Then he would have had to glue his hands to the wheel, start the fork-lift truck and use it to push the van into the water. OK, I’m speculating. But Evie Preece had a whole bunch of neighbours. Also, there are houses all around Shoreham Harbour. It’s possible Preece’s killer got lucky and no one saw a thing. But I want to ramp up those house-to-house enquiries in her street and around the harbour. Someone might have been out walking their dog or whatever. Someone must have seen something, and we have to find them.’