‘Let me have the address.’ She gave it to him and Grace did a quick calculation. ‘OK, I’ll be there in half an hour. Is the body taped off?’
‘It is, sir, and we’ve a scene guard present.’
‘Good work, Sapna. What I’d like you to do is arrange a CSI team to attend the scene as quickly as possible, and I’ll meet them there.’
‘I will do, sir.’
Grace had a quick shower, dressed hastily, knotting his tie, then explained the situation, apologetically, to a drowsy Cleo.
‘So you won’t be making lunch,’ she murmured.
‘I’ll do my best to be back in time.’
‘It wasn’t a question,’ she said, sounding more awake now. ‘It was a statement.’
‘I’ll do my best.’
‘I’ll get those words engraved on your tombstone,’ she said.
He looked down at her. ‘Baby.’
Then she pursed her lips. ‘I’m sorry, that wasn’t very sensitive. I understand what you have to do.’ She raised a hand from under the duvet and waved it. ‘Let me know how it’s going, and when you know you’ll be back.’
He lingered for some moments, temporarily lost for words, leaned over and kissed her, then headed downstairs.
A heart laden with guilt. And worry. And grief.
There was a dead body lying on a pavement in a suburb of Brighton. And quite likely a loving partner wondering why he hadn’t come home last night.
Could a police officer responsible for finding the answers as to why he hadn’t come home and to who had killed him, sit comfortably in his skin on a chair in a Sussex pub, enjoying a prawn cocktail, perfectly roast beef and a few glasses of a decent red wine? If so, that person was in the wrong job.
You had to make choices in life and live with the consequences, not only those of your actions, but of your inactions.
Roy Grace went downstairs, ate a piece of toast spread with Marmite, peanut butter and slices of cucumber, downed it with a Nespresso, then hurried out to his car.
Before he drove off, he texted Cleo:
Love you so much, babes. XXXX
59
Sunday, 3 November
Thirty minutes later, following the satnav on his phone, in its cradle on the Alfa’s dash, Roy Grace passed the Lido then turned off the coast road, winding up through the network of Saltdean’s pleasant residential streets.
There had been no reply yet from Cleo.
Cresting the brow of a steep hill, a glorious, sunny view of the English Channel came into sight. Then a short distance ahead he saw a cluster of vehicles — two marked police cars, a white CSI van as well as an unmarked saloon. There was a small knot of members of the public standing well back down the road behind crime scene tape and he kicked, almost on autopilot, into full work mode.
A uniformed officer stood steadfast behind another line of blue and white crime scene tape. A motionless male human shape sprawled on the pavement behind her, between the grass verge and a low brick wall that protected the car port of the long, low house beyond that was sunk down below street level. A large off-roader was parked on the far side of the wall, obscuring the view of the front door area.
On the outside of the tape a bewildered-looking man, with gelled silver hair, was in conversation with a police officer. Three officers stood nearby. One he recognized as Detective Sergeant Sally Walker, the other two, a male and a female officer, he didn’t know.
No press, so far, but that wouldn’t last long. He wouldn’t be surprised to see Glenn’s fiancée, Siobhan, arrive any minute — as the Argus’s senior crime reporter, she was normally the first of the press pack at any scene. He parked and approached the group.
‘Good morning, sir,’ DS Walker said. She was tall, fair-haired and all smiles despite the seriousness of the situation.
‘What do we have?’ Grace asked.
She indicated the silver-haired man, who looked, in Grace’s view, very traumatized — and he wasn’t surprised. Finding a dead body on your doorstep was rarely going to be the best start to anyone’s day.
‘This is Mr Hegarty, who lives at the house, number 20, who called it in. He was about to walk his dogs when he came across the body.’
Hegarty, Grace thought. Interesting. Then out of the corner of his eye, he saw the youthful-looking figure of Crime Scene Manager Chris Gee, in full protective clothing, climb out of the CSI van.
Grace hurried back to his car, opened his go-bag in the boot and wormed into a hooded protective suit and then pulled on overshoes and gloves. He greeted Gee, then both of them signed the crime scene log, ducked under the tape and walked towards the body.
Grace could smell the reek of petrol while he was still yards away. He pulled on his mask, glad for the protection against the stench it gave him, and kneeled down a few inches away.
The dead man lay on his back with congealed blood behind his right ear. He was in his sixties, Grace estimated, lean and tall with thinning strands of grey hair. He was dressed in jeans, trainers and a jacket, with a white T-shirt beneath. His pasty face was craggy, tiny shrivel-creases in the skin indicating he had probably been a heavy smoker, this backed up by the ochre shade of his visible front teeth. The fingertips of both his hands looked crushed, the nails dark with congealed blood. Torture? he wondered.
He studied the injury behind the man’s right ear carefully, wondering if it could have been made from impact with the pavement, but it looked too deep, as if something had gouged it. And there were no blood spots on the pavement. It had been a dry night, so no rain could have washed it away.
From what he could see, other than the wound, there was no other injury. He touched the man’s arm with a gloved hand. The flesh was stiff.
It was currently just gone 9.30 a.m. From his observations, he probably died a good few hours earlier at the very least, and possibly longer. Which meant, if he had died here, he’d been lying in this residential street some time and no one had noticed. Pretty unlikely.
Not wanting to disturb the body’s position more than he needed, he asked Gee to help lift him up a little to check for any obvious injuries to his back. But they could see none — no visible wounds to the back of the head, or slash marks from a knife or visible gunshot holes in his clothes.
‘Clearly been dead a while,’ Gee said.
Nodding, Grace replied, ‘I know him. I once nicked him, around twenty years ago, when I was in uniform. He looked a bit prettier then. Archie Goff is — was —’ he corrected himself, ‘a career house burglar.’ He stood up, wanting to get away from the smell, but continued staring down at the body, trying to study it dispassionately, but at the same time unable to detach himself from it emotionally.
There was always something intrusive about being in the presence of a dead human being. All the time you were alive you had options about who you invited into your personal space. The moment you were dead, those ceased. You didn’t even own your body any more, it had become the property of the coroner.
It was coming back clearly now, when he had arrested this man, all those years ago. Archie Goff had broken into a mansion on the outskirts of the city, where the unfortunate man had subsequently been cornered in the garden, backed up against a tree after fleeing, by a particularly aggressive Rhodesian Ridgeback. The owners were out, and it had required two Sussex Police dog handlers to restrain the Ridgeback and cuff the man.
So what was Goff doing here? His normal MO, from memory, was large country houses. And he’d been nicked again back in September for just such a burglary. But he’d made bail. Goff had recently been of interest to Roy and his team as part of the Porteous investigation but was just one of many lines of enquiry. This was a comfortable middle-class area, but not somewhere that would generally house the kind of valuables Goff specialized in nicking. And why doused in petrol?