‘One key line of enquiry,’ Grace said, ‘is to establish whether there is a link between the derailment and the shooting, or whether what we have are two wholly separate incidents. Another line of enquiry will be, who knew the timetable for the train?’ He pointed to another of the screens, which showed a small photograph of Greaves, in a chalk-striped suit with neatly coiffed hair, and a large and very gruesome photograph of the remains of the Private Secretary’s head, on the grass, amid blood and other matter. He had chosen to have this image very large for maximum impact on his team.
‘I would say that’s a no-brainer, chief!’ quipped Potting, who, as he often did, began chortling at his own joke.
‘That is truly terrible, Norman,’ Velvet Wilde chided in her rich Belfast accent.
Several of the team shook their heads, unable to suppress their grins. Grace himself struggled, too. ‘Thanks, Norman,’ he said. ‘Very helpful.’ Then he looked back down at his notes. ‘We have one hypothesis that the derailment was intentional, with the purpose being to have the royal party leave the train on foot and emerge from the tunnel where any of them would be an easy target for a sniper. A second hypothesis is that, as I just posited, the two events are disconnected and the shooting of Sir Peregrine was accidental — but with what we’ve seen and know, I am discounting that; it’s hardly going to be someone shooting rabbits, is it?’
‘Chief,’ Potting said. ‘I was raised on a farm and used to go shooting rabbits regularly when I was a nipper. We shot them because they were vermin, but they were also good food, and the best weapon for a rabbit is a rifle firing a .22 bullet, which will kill the animal, but leave it intact. A shotgun is another alternative, but you’ve got the problem of multiple lead pellets inside it.’
‘And your point is, Norman?’ Grace asked, feeling a tad fractious and with less patience for the old warhorse today than he might normally have had.
Potting turned and pointed at the photograph of Greaves’ head. ‘Whatever bullet that was, chief — a hollow-nose, dum-dum, ballistic tip — you wouldn’t use that for shooting rabbits. You wouldn’t use it for any kind of rough shooting, unless you were after moose or buffalo — and there aren’t too many of those running wild on the South Downs.’
Grace nodded. ‘That’s helpful, thank you, Norman. As I said, it’s unlikely to be that.’
The Met Counter Terrorism Command DI, Brent Dean, a tall, lean man in his early forties, with a sharp, dark suit and a permanently cynical expression, as if he was bored stiff by all these tedious minions, said in a bland north London accent, ‘I think we can do away with all the time-wasting speculations, Detective Superintendent. We all know what has happened. The Not-My-King brigade derailed the train with a steel bar wedged across the rail, in order to get Her Majesty out of the train and make it an easy shot for an accomplice. Fortunately for all of us this accomplice missed — probably because the intended target made him a bag of nerves.’
‘Thank you, DI Dean,’ Grace replied. ‘For the benefit of all us, would you like to expand on your theory — sorry, hypothesis?’
‘I would say it’s obvious, with respect, sir. The shooter missed, hitting the wrong target, took a panicky second shot — then ran to his motorbike and took off. All the hallmarks of an amateur operation.’
Grace nodded. ‘To counter that, I would say that for an amateur, the shooter was pretty professional. I went with our ballistics expert to what we believe was the shooter’s location, and he — or she — left behind no trace at all. One of our search team spoke to a man out jogging near the suspect location and he said he heard a motorbike close by. He thought it strange for someone to be out there at that time — he has never, in thirty years of jogging there, encountered anyone in that location before. So, between him and the person who clocked the motorbike passing at speed a few minutes after the shots were fired, we have a gap of several hours. Further, if the biker was our shooter, he spent some hours in his location without leaving a trace. No cigarette butts, no urine, no crumbs, no spent shells, nothing other than some flattened grass. We also had PC Andy Crabb and his dog Merlin search the entire area from the shooting location in all directions, but again no potential evidence was found. It could have been a rank amateur, of course. But an amateur waiting that long to take a shot at The Queen? Isn’t he going to be nervous? And don’t nerves make you want to pee? To me, it smacks of someone being very forensically aware. Not a rank amateur.’
The Met DI wasn’t done. ‘So, if you are hypothesizing that it was a professional sniper, and their two shots went wide, one hitting the wrong target, and the other missing completely, why didn’t this person shoot again?’
‘My point exactly,’ Grace said. ‘The best hypothesis I can give you is that this person did not shoot a third time, because he had done what he came to do.’
DI Dean frowned. ‘With respect, you are making a very dangerous assumption — apologies — hypothesis. If you are wrong, it means someone is still out there looking for another opportunity to shoot our Queen.’
‘And if I’m right,’ Roy Grace said, ‘Sussex Police, the Met and the Royal Protection team are all running round like blue-arsed flies, looking up their own backsides, and missing what is really going on.’
‘Which is?’ Brent Dean challenged.
‘I have no idea,’ Grace said. ‘But I intend to find out, ASAP.’
25
Tuesday 21 November 2023
In contrast to yesterday’s glorious sunshine, overnight the weather had turned back to late autumnal, with an overcast sky and a chill wind. Roy Grace and the ballistics scientist, Baz Dyson, followed by Nick Nicholl and EJ Boutwood, approached the inner cordon. All were in forensic oversuits, and today Grace was grateful for the meagre warmth it was giving him.
And he was grateful to be out in fresh air. Grateful that he’d not had to spend too much time in the mortuary — he’d delegated most of that treat to Glenn Branson. And while the Home Office pathologist, Nadiuska de Sancha, was no doubt feeling the pressure, conducting the most high-profile postmortem of her career, much of it was overkill — on someone who had very definitely been overkilled.
Cause of death wasn’t exactly hard to establish. Digging out microscopic fragment after microscopic fragment of the exploded bullet that had caused the catastrophic damage to the victim’s head was the laborious task, in the hope that, between the fragments of the two bullets found by the pathologist and the CSIs from their ongoing fingertip search around the crime scene, there would be enough to construct at least part of one whole bullet. Or at least enough to help identify the make and bore of rifle it was fired from, and to start narrowing down the very wide field.
But the postmortem wasn’t just about finding microfragments of a bullet. The general health of a murder victim was also a potential factor in any ensuing trial. Grace had once seen a slam-dunk of a murder charge downgraded to manslaughter purely because the victim’s health was so poor, it was argued by a QC at the time that it could not be proven it was actually the stab wound that had killed her; it could have been her already badly diseased heart failing from shock.
Although in this case, he thought grimly, as and when this shooter was brought to trial, it would take a somewhat smarter than average brief to convince a jury that cause of death might be down to something other than the victim being short of most of the essential components of his head.