From the way Goff lay, it looked to Grace highly unlikely that he’d doused himself in petrol and then collapsed on this spot. He had died somewhere else and his body been deposited here. But how had he died, who had dumped him here and why had he been doused in petrol — and why this location? What was that about?
And how inflammable was he now?
‘We need a fire extinguisher,’ he said to Gee. ‘As a precaution.’
‘I’ll get one from the van.’ Gee hurried off.
Grace glanced around at the neighbouring houses, looking for any outward-facing CCTV camera that might provide a clue. There were none he could immediately see but they could be hidden anywhere. To get to this house, whoever had brought Goff here would have to have driven along a zigzag of residential streets. Hopefully one or more of the houses in this neighbourhood might have cameras that would have picked up the vehicle. Or at least someone might have seen an unfamiliar vehicle.
As the Crime Scene Manager returned with a small fire extinguisher, Grace said, ‘Chris, I’m treating this as a suspicious death.’
‘I agree, sir.’
Grace turned to DS Walker. ‘Sally, we need to liaise with the Coroner’s Officer and be authorized to contact the on-call Home Office pathologist. Once we know who it is, get their sanction to move the body.’
Home Office pathologists these days were paid by the job, not the hour, so it was rare for them to spend time at the crime scene itself, although occasionally they insisted on doing that.
‘I’ll get right on it, sir.’
Grace turned back to Gee. ‘We don’t yet know what we’re looking for, but we need a Police Search Adviser and a POLSA team doing a fingertip search in the area.’
Gee nodded. ‘I’ll organize it.’
Grace then thought hard and calmly about what Hegarty’s link might be to the body. A major league art forger. Charlie Porteous and the Fragonard. The Kiplings, who had taken a Fragonard to the Antiques Roadshow and had subsequently reported a break-in after the programme had aired. Was there a link with Archie Goff?
It could of course be a complete coincidence that the old lag’s body had been dumped here in this particular location, but, just as the petrol on his clothes didn’t smell right, the deposition site stank.
But what the hell could the connection be? Goff had been assaulted, doused in petrol. Now he was dead. It looked like he’d been murdered.
Hopefully the postmortem might provide the evidence.
Whatever had ended Archie Goff’s life, Grace was as certain as could be that natural causes was only a bit-part player in his demise. He pulled out his phone and called Glenn Branson.
When his sleepy friend, colleague and protégé answered, Grace asked, ‘How’s your Sunday, so far?’
‘It was pretty good until now,’ Branson retorted, with a yawn. ‘I’ve got plans — me and Siobhan are going to have a nice day and talk through all our issues. Don’t tell me you’re going to mess all that up?’
So the reporter wasn’t about to turn up here, Grace thought. And he was pleased to hear his friend sounding positive. Which made what he had to say next even harder. With his voice tinged with genuine apology, he replied, ‘Sorry, I am going to mess all that up.’
60
Sunday, 3 November
‘You’re not really sorry at all, are you, boss?’ Glenn Branson said, a few hours later in the mortuary.
It was just gone 2 p.m. The one positive about today, Grace thought, was that Dr Frazer Theobald was unavailable. Instead they’d been assigned Nadiuska De Sancha, who was far quicker, just as thorough and much more fun to work with.
‘Depends, how do you define sorry?’ Grace raised his eyebrows. They were gowning up in the cramped changing room of the Brighton and Hove Borough Mortuary.
The DI shook his head, seated on a bench and pulling on white gum boots. ‘There you go again, pissing me off by answering a question with a question. You’ve screwed up my Sunday, and you’ve probably screwed up my life,’ he joked.
‘Welcome to the Major Crime Team,’ Roy Grace retorted. ‘Anytime you want out and decide you’d like to return to your former life working nightclub doors, be my guest. I won’t stop you.’
‘But seriously, Roy. My wedding — it’s like hanging on a knife edge.’
‘Because you’ve been called out to be Deputy SIO on a murder enquiry?’ Grace was being serious now. ‘Siobhan’s a top crime reporter. Get real, she didn’t achieve that by sticking to office hours. Reporters and coppers are part of the same breed. We have to drop everything for a murder, reporters have to drop everything for a story. If she doesn’t get why you’re here at this moment, instead of having a cosy Sunday brunch with her in some trendy cafe, then the optics aren’t good.’
Branson gave him a sideways look. ‘Optics? So Cassian Pewe’s lingo’s rubbed off on you?’
Grace pulled on his cloth head-cover, then selected a fresh gauze mask. ‘It may not seem like it at this moment, but I’m doing what I always try to do, which is to advance your career.’
‘Really?’
Grace shrugged. ‘You’ve gone from a PC to DC to DS to Detective Inspector in how few years?’
‘And lost my wife, nearly lost my kids and now I’m about to lose my fiancée in the process. Should I be grateful?’
‘Depends; how do you define gratitude?’
‘There you go again, you bastard! Answering with a question.’
‘So tell me?’
Grace saw Glenn wringing his hands in frustration. ‘Glenn,’ he said, trying to calm him, then secured his mask. ‘Let’s go do it.’
They walked out into the narrow corridor and turned right, passing the closed door of the isolation room and into the wide, open-plan twin postmortem rooms separated only by an arch.
The mortuary operated normal working-week hours, on the basis that in general, their occupants weren’t in any particular hurry to be postmortemed and nor were their loved ones, most of the time. So the regular team of three pathologists who carried out postmortems on deaths that weren’t suspicious had the luxury of weekends off.
For Home Office pathologists, who specialized in suspected murder victims, where time was almost always critical, there was no such luxury. They were far more highly paid, but they earned their money by being on-call 24/7, ready to travel anywhere, instantly, and spend however many hours it took, both at the crime or deposition scene, and then in the mortuary, examining every aspect of the body, and often of the surroundings where it was found, in scrupulous detail. Few took less than six hours, and some far longer.
To Grace’s left were four empty stainless-steel postmortem tables. To his right were another four that were empty, on this Sunday afternoon, and one on which lay the body of Archie Goff, still at this moment fully clothed, beneath bright lights, and the centre of attention of a number of people, all in identical blue gowns, white boots and blue and white gauze hats and face masks. Coroner’s Officer Michelle Websdale, Crime Scene Photographer James Gartrell, alternating between taking stills and video, Darren Wallace, the Assistant Anatomical Pathology Technician, and Cleo, who was taking notes alongside centre-stage, flame-haired Nadiuska De Sancha who was at this moment taping every inch of Goff’s clothing, while Gartrell moved his plastic ruler up the body each time she nodded.
This was the part of the murder investigation Roy Grace always found unpleasant. If he’d had any other Deputy SIO, he would have happily left them to it and gone home to enjoy his Sunday. But he felt obligated to Glenn. The moment they’d first met, when Glenn had joined his Major Enquiry Team as a very junior Detective Constable, Grace had taken a liking to him, recognizing in him, perhaps, something of his own young, ambitious self and ability. Ever since then he’d been on a mission to nurture Glenn, becoming close friends in the process.