Dead Like You

Turning to the Constable, he said, ‘He was wearing a mask, right?’

‘Yes, sir, he was – a hood with slits cut in.’

Grace nodded. ‘Has the husband been contacted?’

‘He’s going to try to get a flight back today.’

Alcorn went out to check the other rooms.

Joe Tindall was holding a compact camera up to his eye. He took a 360-degree video of the scene, then zoomed in on the bed.

‘Did you attend alone?’ Grace asked the Constable.

He cast his eyes around the room as he spoke. On the floor lay a pair of cream undies, a white blouse, a navy skirt and top, tights and a bra. They weren’t strewn around the room as if they had been torn off the woman; they looked as if they had been stepped out of carelessly and left where they fell.

‘No, sir, with Sergeant Porritt. He’s accompanied her and the SOLO to the Saturn Centre.’

Grace made a brief sketch plan of the room, noting the doors – one to the hallway, one to the en-suite bathroom – and the windows, all as possible entry/exit areas. He would require careful combing of the room for fingerprints, hair, fibres, skin cells, saliva, semen, possible lubricant traces from a condom, if one had been used, and footprints. The outside of the house would need to be searched carefully also, especially for footprints, and for clothing fibres that might have come off on a wall or a frame if the offender escaped via a window, as well as for cigarette butts.

He would need to write out and give Tindall his recovery policy on how much of the contents of the room and the house and surroundings he might want bagged and tagged for lab testing. The bedding, for sure. Towels in the bathroom in case the offender had dried his hands or any parts of his body. The soap.

He made notes, padding around the room, looking for anything out of the ordinary. There was a huge fixed mirror facing the bed, put there for kinky purposes he thought, not disapprovingly. On one bedside table were a diary and a chick-lit novel and on the other a pile of IT magazines. He opened each of the wardrobe doors in turn. There were more dresses hanging here than he had ever seen in his life.

Then he opened another and, breathing in a luxurious rich scent of leather, he encountered an Aladdin’s cave of shoes. They were racked floor-to-ceiling on slide-out drawers. Grace was no expert on ladies’ footwear, but he could tell at a glance that these were serious and classy. There had to be more than fifty pairs in here. The next door he opened revealed another fifty pairs. Followed by the same behind the third door.

‘Looks like she’s a high-maintenance lady!’ he commented.

‘I understand she has her own business, Roy,’ David Alcorn said.

Grace silently chided himself. It had been a stupid comment, the kind of sexist assumption he might have expected from someone like Norman Potting.

‘Right.’

He walked over to the window and peered out at the rear garden, a handsomely landscaped plot, with an oval swimming pool, beneath its winter cover, as its centrepiece.

Beyond the garden, visible through dense shrubs and young trees, were school playing fields. Rugby posts were up on two pitches and netted football goals on a third. This would have made a possible access route for the offender, he thought.

Who are you?

The Shoe Man?

Or just another creep?

33

Friday 9 January

‘Yer could have fucking knocked,’ Terry Biglow whined.

Knocking had never been Darren Spicer’s style. He stood in the small room, in the semi-darkness from the drawn window blind, clutching his holdall and trying to breathe in as little as possible of the fetid air. The room reeked of ingrained cigarette smoke, old wood, dusty carpet and rancid milk.

‘Thought you was still inside.’ The elderly villain’s voice was small and reedy. He lay, blinking into Spicer’s torch beam. ‘Anyhow, what the fuck you doing here at this hour?’

‘Been shagging,’ Spicer replied. ‘Thought I’d pop by and tell you all about her, and pick up my stuff while I was at it.’

‘Like I need to know. My days of shagging are over. Can hardly get it to piss. What do you want? Stop shining that bleedin’ thing in my face.’

Spicer flicked the beam around the walls, found a wall switch and clicked it on. A gloomy overhead light in an even gloomier tasselled shade came on. He wrinkled his face in disgust at the sight of this room.

‘You gone over the wall again?’ Biglow said, still blinking.

He looked terrible, Spicer thought. Seventy, going on ninety.

‘Good behaviour, mate, yeah? I’m on early release licence.’ He tossed a wristwatch on to Biglow’s chest. ‘Brought you a present.’

Biglow grabbed it with his gnarled little hands and peered at it greedily. ‘Wossis? Korean?’

‘It’s real. Nicked it last night.’

Biglow hauled himself up a little in the bed, scrabbled on the table beside him and put on some reading glasses that were unfashionably large. Then he studied the watch. ‘Tag Heuer Aquaracer,’ he a

‘Other way around.’

Biglow gave him a thin smile, revealing a row of sharp little teeth the colour of rusty tin. He was wearing a filthy-looking T-shirt that might once have been white. Beneath it he was all skin and bone. He smelt of old sacks.

‘Nice,’ he said. ‘Very nice. Wot yer want for it?’

‘A grand.’

‘Yer having a laugh. Might get yer a monkey if I can find a buyer – and if it’s kosher and not some copy. Otherwise, a one-er now. I could give yer a one-er now.’

A monkey was £500; a one-er £100.

‘It’s a two-grand watch,’ Spicer said.

‘And we’re in a bleedin’ recession and all.’ Biglow looked at the watch again. ‘You’re lucky you didn’t come out much later.’ He fell silent, then when Spicer said nothing he went on. ‘I ain’t got long, see?’ He coughed, a long, harsh, racking cough that made his eyes water, and spat some blood into a grimy handkerchief. ‘Six months they gimme.’

‘Bummer.’

Darren Spicer cast his eyes around the basement bedsit. It shook as a train thundered close by outside, emitting an eerie howl. A cold draught of air blew through the room. The place was a tip, just like he remembered it when he had last been here, over three years ago. A threadbare carpet covered some of the floorboards. Clothes hung from the dado rail on wire hangers. An old wooden clock on a shelf said it was 8.45. A crucifix was nailed to the wall just above the bed and a Bible lay on the table beside Biglow, along with several labelled bottles of medication.

This is going to be me in thirty years’ time, if I get that far.

Then he shook his head. ‘This it, Terry? This where you’re ending your days?’

‘It’s all right. It’s convenient.’

‘Convenient? Convenient for what? The fucking funeral parlour?’

Biglow said nothing. A short distance away, across the Lewes Road, adjacent to the cemetery and the mortuary, was a whole line of undertakers.

‘Ain’t yer got ru

‘Course I have,’ Biglow spluttered, through another fit of coughing. He pointed across the room at a washbasin.

‘Don’t you ever wash? It smells like a toilet in here.’

‘You want a cup of tea? Coffee?’

Spicer looked at a corner shelf on which sat a kettle and some cracked mugs. ‘No thanks. Not thirsty.’

He shook his head as he looked down at the old villain. You were a big player in this city. Even I was shit scared of you as a lad. Just the name Biglow put the fear into most people. Now look at you.

The Biglows had been a crime family to be reckoned with, ru