Holiday, he thought wistfully. The last holiday he’d had was in Cornwall with Ari nearly two years ago. It had rained for a solid fortnight. That hadn’t done their failing relationship much good.
‘Right, sir, they’re just setting it up for you now!’
Branson turned. ‘Great, thank you.’
‘No, sir, it’s my pleasure, absolutely my pleasure.’
Roy Grace had just arrived back from two awkward meetings. The first with ACC Peter Rigg who wanted to know how, despite the tight security that Grace had been requested to plan, someone had managed to hide directly above where the filming was taking place – and had been a fraction of a second away from killing Gaia’s son. The second had been with the Chief Constable, who had been a little more understanding, but unhappy, nonetheless.
But Rigg had not tried to hide his fury. Sitting in front of him, Roy Grace felt as if he were back in the presence of his former boss, the acerbic Alison Vosper, who delighted in putting him on the spot at any opportunity. When he attempted to explain the difficulties of securing a site to which the general public had daily access, the ACC snorted in derision. ‘My dear fellow,’ he said, pompously. ‘You were tasked with overall responsibility for Gaia’s safety while she is a guest in our city – and so far you’ve given a less than impressive performance. You knew there was a threat to her life; did it not occur to you to check the roof spaces, as something utterly elementary?’
‘It did, sir, and they were checked. The police checked thoroughly, initially, and it has been down to the Pavilion’s own security since then. I’m a homicide investigator, not a security analyst or expert.’
‘Thank God you’re not. I’d hate to be in a situation where my life or the safety of my family was dependent on any plan you produced to protect them. What’s up, man, were you sleepwalking, or something? It’s all over the bloody news – you’ve seen the front page of the Argus?’
Gaia son escapes death by inches
The ACC’s criticism wasn’t fair, Grace knew. If they’d had an unlimited budget, no one would have got into that damned roof space, but the truth was, with the battle he’d had to get even very limited resources for Gaia’s security, there were inevitably going to be gaps. It wasn’t unreasonable to expect that the Pavilion would have been capable of protecting itself.
And Rigg was very definitely being unreasonable at this moment. But he wasn’t about to tell him that. The police force was a hierarchical system. In many ways it was like the military; you respected ranks senior to yourself and obeyed them without question, whatever you really thought.
‘There were gaps in the security that should not have been there,’ Roy Grace conceded. ‘It looks like we were lucky.’
‘I don’t like that word lucky,’ the Assistant Chief Constable said.
Being lucky was better than the alternative, Grace thought, but did not say.
107
Shortly after 4 p.m., the steady concentration of the seventeen people currently packed around the three large workstations in MIR-1 was broken by a loud curse from Norman Potting. Several people looked up. Then the steady putter of keyboards resumed. A mobile phone rang, playing ‘Greensleeves’, and Nick Nicholl answered it quickly.
Bella crunched on a Malteser. She had been tasked with contacting all the bidders on this and previous eBay auctions of Gaia memorabilia, in the hope one of them might know the elusive Anna Galicia personally. Meanwhile, down in the High Tech Crime Unit, Ray Packham was trying to navigate a path through a complex trail of encrypted email accounts. If they’d hoped to find her quickly by following the trail back from PayPal, they were going to have to be very patient. It was going to take days, and possibly weeks – if ever.
Potting cursed again. Then he said, ‘Bloody banks! Can you bloody believe it?’
‘Believe what, Norman?’ Glenn Branson asked, secretly pleased that Potting was struggling. Badly though he wanted this case solved, he really hoped it wouldn’t be Potting who made the breakthrough.
Potting turned to face him. ‘We’re reasonably certain that Anna Galicia went to one of the two HSBC hole-in-the-wall machines in Queen’s Road, at around 8.30 p.m. on Monday. The CCTV room has images of her approaching the machine and then leaving at around that time. The bank are telling me there were seven withdrawals from those two machines between 8.15 and 9 p.m. that night – and all of them were male accounts.’
‘Maybe her card didn’t work in those machines?’ Branson said. ‘We’ve all had that happen. Don’t they have CCTV running – a lot of them have a camera that looks outward – so you can see the faces of everyone using the machines.’
‘I’ve asked for that,’ Potting said. ‘It’s going to take them an hour or so – they’re going to email me the image sequence they have, along with all the names and addresses of the people who used the machine. So we’ll see then if she appears.’
‘Have you got a list of all the other cash machines in easy walking distance from those two?’ Bella asked him.
Glenn watched her face. She looked more attractive every time he looked at her, and it really stung him to see this interaction between her and Potting. It was almost like she was feeding him a pre-rehearsed prompt, to big him up.
‘I have,’ Potting said, grinning smugly as ever. There’s a Santander Bank, a Barclays and a Halifax. I’m waiting for information back from all of them.’
Roy Grace entered the room, turning his head to see who was here. Then he turned to Glenn. ‘How are we doing?’
‘Apart from the doorman of The Grand confirming the Anna Galicia we are looking for is the same person involved in the incident with Gaia’s bodyguards last week, nothing else so far, boss. What’s happening at the Pavilion?’
‘The chandelier’s been removed into police storage,’ Grace reported, ‘much to the outrage of the Curator. The Search Team have found a baby monitor transmitter underneath a table in the Banqueting Room – it’s a Mothercare make, consistent with the receipt in Wheeler’s hotel room – and consistent with the broken receiver up in the roof space above the chandelier. I’ve given permission to the producers to re-enter the building and film in the Banqueting Room tonight – they’re planning to shoot indoors, without the chandelier. The producer just told me that they will be able to add it in afterwards through some computer generated technique.’
Grace looked at his watch, worried. ‘So, we can’t be certain that email was not sent by Wheeler, but it’s looking unlikely. Is that about the right assessment?’
‘The timings don’t work for Wheeler,’ Branson said.
Timings were very much on Grace’s mind at the moment. Within the next hour Gaia would be leaving the security of her hotel suite and going to the Pavilion. On his advice she had remained in her suite all day, and her son was staying in the suite this evening. Grace had arranged for his god-daughter Jaye Somers to come over for a couple of hours to play.
He knew Gaia was safe all the time she was in the hotel, but he was worried about the Pavilion. Had Rigg been too harsh on him, or did the ACC have a valid point? Had it been a visit from a member of the Royal Family or a senior politician, they would have searched the building with a fine-toothed comb, and sealed off all areas such as cellars and roof spaces where a potential perpetrator could hide either themselves or a bomb. But as the film company required unrestricted daily access, and it remained open to the public, security was always going to be an issue.
Had he been too complacent?
Well that wasn’t going to happen again tonight. During the past two hours the building had been searched with the same rigour as if a political conference were being staged there.