Dead Like You

‘Doesn’t make any sense. She normally phones her parents every day and chats to them. Eight days of silence? And at this time of year – Christmas and New Year? No call to wish them Happy Christmas or Happy New Year? Something’s happened to her, for sure.’

Tingley nodded. ‘Abducted by aliens?’

Grace looked back down at his notes. ‘The Shoe Man took his victims in a different place each time, but what he did to them was consistent. And even more important was what he did to his victims’ lives. He didn’t need to kill them. They were already dead inside by the time he had finished with them.’

Are you a victim of the Shoe Man, Rachael? Or has some other monster got you?

37

Friday 9 January

MIR-1, the larger of the two Major Incident Rooms at Sussex House, had an atmosphere that Roy Grace always found energizing.

Located in the heart of the Major Crime Suite at the CID headquarters, it would have looked to a casual observer like any other large administrative office. It had cream walls, functional grey carpeting, red chairs, modern wooden workstations, filing cabinets, a water dispenser and several large whiteboards on the walls. The windows were high up, with permanently closed blinds across them, as if to discourage anyone from wasting one second of their time looking out of them.

But to Roy Grace this was much more than an office. MIR-1 was the very nerve centre of his current investigation, as it had been with the previous ones he had run from here, and to him it had an almost hallowed atmosphere. Many of the worst crimes committed in Sussex in the past decade had been solved, and the offenders locked up, thanks to the detective work that had been carried out in this room.

The red, blue and green marker-pen scrawlings on the whiteboards in any other office out in the commercial world might have been performance figures, sales targets, market penetrations. Here they were timelines of the crimes, family trees of the victims and suspects, along with photographs and any other key information. When they got an E-Fit of the offender, hopefully soon, that would go up too.

The place instilled in everyone a sense of purpose, of racing against a clock, and, except during briefings, there was little of the chat and banter between colleagues that was usual in police offices.

The only frivolity was a photocopied cartoon of a fat blue fish from the film Finding Nemo which Gle

There were three other dedicated Major Crime Suites around the county, also housing similar rooms, the most recent being the purpose-built one at Eastbourne. But this location was more convenient for Roy Grace, as well as being well sited, because the two crimes he was now investigating had occurred only a couple of miles away.

There were all kinds of repeating patterns in life, he had noticed, and it seemed that recently he was on a run of crimes that took place – or were discovered – on Fridays, thus ensuring his and everyone else’s weekend was wiped out.

He was meant to be going to di

Fortunately for him, unlike Sandy, who had never understood or got used to his frequent crazy working hours, Cleo was regularly on call herself 24/7, having to go out at all hours to recover bodies from wherever they were found. Which made her much more sympathetic – although not always totally forgiving.

It was the case in the early stages of any major crime investigation that everything else had to be instantly dropped. The first task of the Senior Investigating Officer’s assistant was to clear the SIO’s diary.

It was the first twenty-four hours after the crime had been discovered that were the most crucial. You needed to protect the crime scene to preserve the forensic evidence as much as possible. The perpetrator would be at his most heightened state of anxiety, the red mist that people tended to be in after committing a serious crime, in which they might behave erratically, drive erratically. There would be possible eyewitnesses for whom it was all fresh in their minds, and a chance to reach them quickly through the local press and media. And all CCTV cameras within a reasonable radius would still retain footage for those past twenty-four hours.

Grace looked down at the notes typed by his assistant – his MSA – which lay beside his fresh Policy Book for this case.

‘It is 6.30 p.m., Friday, 9 January,’ he read out. ‘This is the first briefing of Operation Swordfish.’

The Sussex Police computer threw up operation names at random, most of them totally irrelevant to the case on which they were working. But here, he thought wryly, it was just a tad appropriate, fish being slippery creatures.

Grace was pleased that all but one of the trusted key CID members he wanted for his core team were available. Seated around the workstation with him were DC Nick Nicholl, still looking bleary-eyed from recent fatherhood, DC Emma-Jane Boutwood, highly effective DS Bella Moy, an open box of Maltesers, as ever, in front of her, belligerent DS Norman Potting, and Grace’s mate and protégé DS Gle

Also present among Grace’s regulars was HOLMES analyst John Black, a mild, grey-haired man who could have been a backroom accountant, and DC Don Trotman, a Public Protection Officer, who would be tasked with checking on MAPPA, the Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements, whether any recently released prisoners who were sexual offenders fitted the MO of the current offender.

New to the team was an analyst, Ellen Zoratti, who would be working closely with Brighton division and the HOLMES analyst, progressing the intelligence leads, checking with the National Police Crime Database and SCAS, the Serious Crime Analysis Section, as well as carrying out instructions from Roy Grace.

Also new was a female press officer, Sue Fleet, from the revamped Police Public Relations Team. The pleasant thirty-two-year-old redhead, who had been a trusted and popular member of the Central Brighton John Street team, had replaced the previous public relations officer, De

Grace wanted Sue Fleet present to organize an immediate media strategy. He needed to get a quick public response to help in the task of finding the offender and to alert the female population to the possible dangers they now faced, but at the same time he did not want to throw the city into panic. It was a delicate PR balance and would be a challenging task for her.