‘I’ll be right there.’
Grace threw himself down a few steps, sprinted along the corridor and entered the packed Incident Room. In contrast to the corridor, which had a permanent smell of fresh paint, MIR-1 at lunchtime always smelled like a canteen. Today an aroma of hot soup and microwaved Veg Pots was mixed with a tinge of curry.
There was that quiet buzz of energy in here that Grace loved so much. A sense of purpose. Some members of the team at their workstations – on the phone or reading or typing – and some standing, making adjustments to the family tree or photograph displays on the whiteboards. There was a constant muted ringing of landline phones, plus the louder cacophony of mobile phones and the rattle of keyboards.
Some of the team were eating as they worked. Norman Potting was hunched over a printout, munching a huge Cornish pasty, oblivious to the crumbs falling like sleet down his tie and bulging shirt.
Glenn Branson was seated in the far corner of the room, close to a water dispenser. Grace hurried across to him, ignoring Nick Nicholl and David Howes, who both tried to get his attention. He glanced at his watch, then at the clock on the wall, as if to double-check. It was something he often did and could not help. Every second of every minute in this current situation was crucial.
‘Boss, have you used an iPhone?’
‘No. Why?’ Grace frowned.
‘There’s an app called Friend Mapper. It operates on GPS, just like a satnav. You and someone you know with an iPhone can both be permanently logged on to it. So, for instance, if you and I are logged on to it, provided you’ve got the app running, I’d be able to see where you are, anywhere in the world, and ditto you’d be able to see me, to within about fifty yards.’
Grace suddenly had a feeling he knew where this was going.
‘Carly Chase and her son?’
‘Yes!’
‘And? Tell me.’
‘That apparently was the deal when Carly Chase got her son an iPhone, that he had to keep Friend Mapper on all the time he was out of her sight.’
‘And it’s on now?’
We had a call from her twenty minutes ago. ‘It’s not moving, but there was a signal coming from Regency Square. We don’t know whether it’s been switched off or the battery’s dead – or he could, as I suspect, just be in a bad reception area.’
‘How old is this signal?’
‘She can’t tell, because she’s only just checked. But she doesn’t understand why it’s where it is. Regency Square’s a couple of miles east of the school and nowhere near where his dental appointment is. She says Tyler would not have had any reason to be there. She’s magnified the map as much as she can. She says it looks like it’s very near the entrance to the underground car park.’
Grace suddenly felt himself sharing Branson’s excitement. ‘If he’s in the car park that could explain the lack of a signal!’
Branson smiled. ‘Gold’s got every unit in Brighton down there now. They’re ring-fencing it, covering every exit, searching the place and any vehicle that leaves.’
‘Let’s go!’ Grace said.
90
With his memory of Glenn Branson’s driving still too close for comfort, Grace took the wheel. As they blitzed through Brighton’s lunchtime traffic, the Detective Sergeant said, ‘Carly Chase is booked on a BA flight that leaves at 8.40 a.m. New York time – 1.40 p.m. UK time – less than an hour. She’ll get back to Heathrow at 8.35 p.m.’
‘OK.’
Grace’s phone rang. ‘Could you answer it, Glenn?’
Branson took the call while Grace overtook a line of traffic waiting at a red light at the junction of Dyke Road and the Old Shoreham Road, blazing down the wrong side of the road. He checked that everyone had seen him, changed the tone of his siren, then accelerated over the junction.
When Branson ended the call he turned to Grace. ‘That was E-J, reporting back from Avis. That Toyota Yaris was rented Monday morning of last week to a man called James John Robertson, according to his licence. The address he had given was fictitious and the information received back from the High-Tech Crime Unit was that the Visa credit card he had paid with was a sophisticated clone. Avis gave a description of the renter, but it wasn’t much to go on. A short, thin man with an English accent, wearing a baseball cap and dark glasses. He’d been offered an upgrade which he had declined.’
‘Interesting to decline an upgrade,’ Grace said. ‘Wonder why?’
Branson nodded. ‘You know, it would be brilliant if we could take Carly Chase’s son to the airport to greet her,’ he said.
‘It would.’
‘And with a bit of luck, that’s going to happen.’
Roy Grace shared his friend’s hope, but not his optimism. After enough years in this job, your optimism gradually got eroded by experience. So much so that if you weren’t careful, one day you’d wake up the cynical bastard you’d always promised yourself you would never become.
Driving normally, the journey to Regency Square from Sussex House would have taken around twenty minutes. Grace did it in eight. He turned off the seafront, ignoring the No Entry sign, and pulled up behind two marked cars and two police transit vans that were halted either side of the car park entry ramp. They were both out of the Ford almost before the wheels had stopped turning.
The entire historic, but in parts dilapidated, square was teeming with uniformed police officers, and the statuesque figure of the Brighton and Hove Duty Inspector, Sue Carpenter, was heading over to greet them. In her early forties, she stood a good six feet tall and the hat riding high on her head, with her long dark hair pushed up inside it, made her look even taller. Grace remembered her from some years back, when she was a sergeant, and had been impressed by her competence.
‘Good afternoon, sir,’ she said, greeting him with nervous formality, and then giving Glenn Branson a quick smile.
‘How are you doing?’ Grace asked.
‘We’ve just found a taxi parked on the third level – the lowest. The vehicle is locked, sir. It’s a bit unusual to find a taxi in a city multi-storey car park. We’ve radioed Streamline, which it’s registered with, to see if we can get any information.’
‘Let’s take a look,’ Grace said.
As a precaution, never knowing when he might need them, he took out a pair of blue gloves from his go-bag in the boot of the car, and a couple of small, plastic evidence bags. Then he glanced quickly around the grassy centre of the square. Across the far side, where the exit was, he saw a halted Jaguar surrounded by police, with its boot open.
‘Presumably there’s CCTV on the entrance and exit?’
‘There are cameras, sir, and some inside. Every single one of them was vandalized last night.’
‘All of them?’
‘Yes, they’re being replaced later today, but that doesn’t help us, I’m afraid.’
‘Shit, shit, shit,’ he said, banging his knuckles together. He shook his head. ‘Seems a little coincidental, the timing.’
‘This car park is quite a hot spot for trouble, sir – in fact this whole area is,’ she reminded him, and pointed across the road at the ruin of the West Pier – one of Brighton’s biggest landmarks, which had been burned down some years before in one of the city’s biggest ever acts of vandalism.
Grace and Branson followed Inspector Carpenter past a PCSO who was guarding the entrance and down a smelly concrete stairwell. Then they walked along the bottom level of the car park, which was almost deserted and smelled of dry dust and engine oil. The old, tired-looking concrete floor, white stanchions and red piping stretched away into the distance, gridded by parking-bay markings.
Over to the right, partially obscured by a concrete abutment, he saw a Skoda saloon taxi that had been reversed into a bay and backed up tight against the rear wall. Two young officers stood beside it.
As they approached, Grace noticed a few fragments of black plastic on the ground close to the car. He fished the gloves from his pocket and snapped them on. Then he knelt, picked the fragments up and put them in an evidence bag, just in case.