The American had been identified from his driving licence as John Daniels, with an address in New York City. He had a bar receipt in his wallet for the Waterfront Hotel in Brighton. The hospital had checked with the hotel, but they said they had no record of any John Daniels, though they did have a large group of Americans staying for a conference in the city. A request had been sent by Brighton Police to the New York Police Department for the contact details of the man’s next of kin, but so far nothing had come back.
Now, this afternoon, the duty nurse in charge of him had called the registrar, excitedly, to say that he was showing signs of coming round.
‘Welcome back, Mr Daniels!’
Tooth blinked. The man was a fuzzy outline. As his focus slowly returned he saw a man in his early thirties, with close-cropped fair hair, dressed in blue surgical scrubs and holding a clipboard. Beside him stood an Arabic woman, similarly attired, and another man in dark trousers and a white short-sleeved shirt, who looked authoritative.
Tooth stared at them blankly. Was he in Iraq? ‘Back?’ he asked. ‘Back?’
‘I’m Dr Martin, this is Mr Buxton, our consultant neurosurgeon, and our registrar — you’re at the Royal Sussex County Hospital.’
‘Hospital?’
All Tooth could think was that he was in hospital in Iraq. Had he been shot? He remembered a shadow looming over him. That was all. ‘Hospital?’ he repeated blankly. ‘Doc Marten. Boots?’
The man in the white shirt, with the faintest trace of a smile, said, ‘Very good.’
Tooth squinted at him. Was the man CIA?
‘Wolverine,’ Tooth rambled. ‘One Thousand Mile Boots.’
The man in the white shirt smiled again. ‘Very good!’
‘How are you feeling, Mr Daniels?’ the one with the short hair, in scrubs, asked.
He’d been trained to keep silent if ever captured. So, staring at the blue curtains all around him and the monitor showing his vital signs, he said nothing.
He was in some kind of military hospital. American, he hoped.
He closed his eyes and drifted off.
The medical team remained around him for some moments, then stepped away and out through the curtains, safely out of earshot.
‘He’ll be confused for a while yet,’ the neurosurgeon said. ‘There are no abnormalities showing on his brain scan. There are a number of contusions consistent with this kind of accident, which will take a while to subside. I’ll come back and see him in a couple of days. If there’s any dramatic change in his condition either way please let me know immediately. The biggest danger is a cerebral haemorrhage from damaged blood vessels, and that’s something we cannot see from the current scans.’
As they walked away across the ward, Tooth grappled with his mind. It felt like he was trying to grip a wriggling fish with a greasy hand.
It slipped free.
Everything went blank again.
68
Monday 9 March
The wet weekend had only worsened Roy Grace’s sense of gloom and confusion. On Saturday, he’d tried hard to put his troubled thoughts away and focus on spending time with Noah who was now, at eight months, able to crawl at some speed. He’d also busied himself stripping the wallpaper off the spare room in their cottage, and exploring a new area of the surrounding countryside with Humphrey — and trying to train him — unsuccessfully so far — to ignore sheep in the neighbouring field. They’d also had a site meeting with a man from Sussex Oak Framers, who was going to quote for an extension they wanted to add to enlarge the kitchen — provided they could get planning permission.
Planning permission was a dirty expression in the village at the moment, due to proposals, which everyone in the area thought were absurd, for an entire new town to be built nearby. It was being actively fought by a protest group, LAMBS, who had invited him to be their spokesperson. He’d had to decline, reluctantly, because of his position as a police officer, but he privately supported their aims.
On Saturday night, leaving Noah in the care of Kaitlynn, Cleo and he had packed an overnight bag and gone to dinner at the Cat Inn at West Hoathly. Both of them had ended up drinking far too much, in an effort to relax, and had returned yesterday morning, with bad hangovers, to Noah screaming. He felt guilty that for much of yesterday Noah had been propped in front of the TV for his entertainment, whilst they had recovered.
All he could really think about was Sandy. Lying right now in the Munich hospital. With her life slipping away?
He had to see her again one more time before she was gone for good, either into a grave or a crematorium incinerator.
Had to have closure for both himself and Cleo.
Cleo had asked him, repeatedly, over the weekend what was wrong, and each time he’d fobbed her off by telling her he was fretting about Crisp.
But the reality was he’d barely thought about the serial killer. And he’d hardly slept a wink over the weekend.
Sandy.
He’d simply not been able to pluck up the courage to talk to Cleo, unrealistically hoping it would all go away.
But it wouldn’t. It would never go away. Not until they had closure. There was only one way to do that.
He had to go to Munich and see her again.
That scared the hell out of him. He remembered the saying, ‘And the truth shall set you free.’
But would it?
What if it was quite the reverse?
He had a bad feeling, a really bad feeling.
As he stood in the shower after his early-morning run, feeling as if he’d had no weekend at all, he knew what he had to do.
But he really wasn’t sure how to do it.
69
Monday 9 March
An hour later, in his office, Roy Grace began the week as he always did, by glancing through the serials of the past few days. He saw several dwelling burglaries, two Range Rover thefts and a missing vulnerable teenager who had last been seen heading towards Dukes Mound, a popular gay cruising area. A nasty bicycle accident on Friday, close to the pier, where an American visitor and two cyclists had been hospitalized, and a reported robbery at 5 a.m. on Sunday morning by two youths and a woman who had taken a mobile phone and wallet from a man in the city centre.
Soon after making a start on the papers relating to Crisp, his phone pinged with a text from his sister asking when she could next come over to see her ‘favourite and only’ nephew — and spend some time with them all.
He texted back with a photograph of a giggling Noah with a thumb raised in the air, looking like he was in agreement, and gave her some dates that worked for him and Cleo.
At 10 a.m. he had a meeting in his office with financial investigators DS Peter Billin and Kelly Nicholls, who had been piecing together the complex paperwork relating to ownership of the house next door to Crisp’s home, where several of his murders appeared to have been carried out, and which clearly linked Crisp to the property.
Then an unexpected call came from an Interpol detective in London, Tom Haynes, shortly after 11 a.m.
‘Sir,’ he said, ‘formal arrangements have been made for two of your officers to travel to Lyon to liaise with French police over Edward Crisp.’
As soon as he had finished speaking to the man, he informed ACC Cassian Pewe; then he called Glenn Branson and asked him to come to his office. Whilst waiting, he leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes and lapsed back into his troubled thoughts.
‘Can’t take the pace at your age?’