When he left it was 7.15 p.m. He needed to hurry home to shower and change; he was picking up Suki Yang at 8 p.m. and taking her for a meal at Spoons. A couple of hours ago he’d been worrying about taking her to such an expensive place and wondering whether to go for something cheaper. But now he felt much better about it.
He climbed into the Porsche, but kept the roof shut, and keyed in a number on his phone.
A crisp, hostile voice he recognized answered.
‘It’s Gareth Dupont,’ he said.
‘I don’t like being called on my mobile – what do you want?’
‘I just saw the Argus.’
‘What about it?’
‘It’s pretty tempting.’
‘Are you insane?’
‘Not at all. I’d like to talk business. Like – renegotiate terms?’
‘I’m not talking any more on this phone. I’ll meet you at the Albion pub, Church Road, Hove at 8 p.m.’
Dupont was thinking about his date with Suki Yang. ‘Eight’s difficult.’
‘Not for me it isn’t.’
28
Trudie’s was one of the few perks of Sussex House, Roy Grace thought. The former CID HQ – now renamed, in the ever changing police world, as the Force Crime and Justice Department – was situated on a dull industrial estate. But this mobile cafe, a short walk away, produced the best bacon butties to be had in the county, along with the cheeriest staff behind the counter. Despite Cleo’s best efforts at persuading him to eat a healthy diet, Roy Grace had picked up a fried egg and bacon sarnie from them on his way in at 7 a.m.
Then he had become so absorbed in checking through the overnight logs of serious crimes in Sussex, responding to a ton of emails, and answering some more questions from the Prosecuting Counsel on the Venner court case, he had forgotten to eat it.
He munched it now, not caring that it had gone cold, washing it down with mouthfuls of coffee as he sat, suited and booted, in Major Incident Room One going through his briefing notes for Operation Flounder as he waited for his team to assemble, and listened to the pelting rain outside. The names of operations were thrown up at random by the Sussex Police computer. At the moment it was working its way through fish. Flounder was particularly appropriate, Grace thought, because at this moment, exhausted after yet another sleepless night thanks to Noah, he truly felt that he was floundering on this case.
It was a week since Aileen McWhirter had died. The time of the robbery was estimated sometime between 6 and 9 p.m. on the night of Tuesday, 21 August. If there had been three perpetrators, it was estimated it would have taken them a good couple of hours to have physically removed the items they took and wrapped and stowed them in a vehicle. The perps had vanished into thin air with ten million pounds’ worth of antiques and fine art. And in ninety minutes’ time he was going to have to give his mercurial boss, ACC Rigg, an update on progress.
Great.
Running murder enquiries was the job Roy Grace loved, and it was what he wanted to do for the rest of his career. He had been fascinated by homicides ever since the first one he had attended, many years back as a young DC. Normally at the start of each new day of an enquiry he would feel energized, however late he might have gone to bed. But this morning, thanks to a case of baby brain, he was struggling.
He stared up at the large colour photograph of the old lady’s wrinkled, but still handsome, face, which was stuck to a whiteboard. Next to it, on another whiteboard, were SOCO photographs of three different shoeprints, and catalogue illustrations of the trainers they had come from, and two other whiteboards were almost covered with photographs of antique furniture, pictures and jewellery that had been stolen from the house in Withdean Road.
Aileen McWhirter’s white hair, elegantly coiffed, was held in place by a ruby-studded barrette. Her blue eyes, pin-sharp but twinkling with warmth, peered out through the lenses of her tortoiseshell glasses. She was wearing a white blouse with an embroidered collar and pearl earrings. An antique pearl pendant hung around her crinkly neck. She looked serene and wise and elegant.
She must have been very beautiful when she was younger, he thought. Anyone would have been proud to have her as their grandmother. Throughout his career he had carried a particular hatred for the creeps who breached the sanctuary of people’s homes, and even more so for those who harmed vulnerable, elderly people.
He thought about the small, ring-bound crime scene photograph album in his desk drawer, locked to prevent any snooping cleaning staff from coming across it. Despite being hardened to most sights, he found some of the pictures, taken by a Crime Scene Officer, James Gartrell, in the mortuary, almost too distressing to look at. Thinking now about those images of some of the terrible injuries inflicted on her, he squirmed with anger and revulsion.
Eighteen months short of her one hundredth birthday – and the traditional missive from the Queen that would have come with it – Aileen McWhirter had been the victim of brutality on a level that had profoundly upset even the most hardened members of the investigating team. The post-mortem revealed she had burns to her body that were consistent with a pair of heated curling tongs found on her bedroom floor.
But the post-mortem had revealed few clues about who had attacked her. There was no flesh under her fingernails, which meant she probably had not succeeded in scratching any of them. Shame, Grace thought. It would have been nice to think she had managed to gouge at least one of their eyes out.
The only clues found in the house were three sets of shoeprints that did not match up with any of her regular visitors – her part-time housekeeper who normally came twice a week, her gardener, her nephew Lucas’s wife, Sarah, and her brother. Copies had been sent to forensic podiatrist Haydn Kelly, who had previously produced some outstanding gait identification results for Roy Grace using the latest technology, and a match had been found to the trainers they believed the perpetrators had worn.
It was strange, he thought, how in these past two months since Noah’s birth, violence was affecting him in ways it never had previously. One of the many books he had read on parenting had predicted that would happen.
Above the photograph in front of him on the whiteboard was handwritten, in clear but untidy capitals, in black marker pen:
OPERATION FLOUNDER
DECEASED. AILEEN McWHIRTER. D.O.B. 24 APRIL 1914.
RELEVANT PERIOD (ESTIMATED)
SUNDAY, 19 AUGUST – WEDNESDAY, 22 AUGUST.
Below was an inventory, provided by the dead woman’s brother, Gavin Daly, of the items he was certain had been stolen from her home.
But what absorbed Roy Grace at this moment were two sheets of computer printout showing standard family-tree icons and graphs.
He followed the horizontal then the vertical lines. There was a horizontal black one, with an arrow to Gordon Thomas McWhirter. Deceased. DOB 26.03.1912. Her husband, he presumed.
Then a vertically descending red arrow to the deceased children, and a further arrow to the grandchild. Then to their left, another vertical red arrow pointed to Brendan Daly and Sheenagh Daly. Beneath Sheenagh Daly was written, DOB 19.09.1897. Deceased. 18.02.1922. Beneath Brendan was written, DOB 07.08.1891. Missing, presumed dead.