Dead Like You

48

Saturday 10 January

‘I’ve had a go at the wording on the wedding invites,’ Cleo called out from the kitchen.

‘Great!’ Roy Grace said. ‘Want me to take a look?’

‘We’ll go through it when you’ve had supper.’

He smiled. One thing he was learning about Cleo was that she liked to plan things well in advance. It was going to be touch and go for the wedding to take place before their child was born. They couldn’t even set a firm date yet because of all the bureaucracy that had to be dealt with to have Sandy declared legally dead first.

Humphrey lay contentedly beside him now on Cleo’s living-room floor with a goofy grin, head flopped over, his tongue half out. Roy ran his palm back and forward across the happy creature’s soft, warm belly, while a Labour politician on the flat-screen TV on the wall pontificated on News at Ten.

But he wasn’t listening. With his suit jacket removed and his tie loosened, his thoughts were on the evening briefing and the pages of work he had brought home, which were spread out on the sofa beside him. In particular, he was poring over the similarities between the Shoe Man and the new offender. A number of unanswered questions were going around his mind.

If the Shoe Man was back, where had he been for the past twelve years? Or if he had remained in the city, why had he stopped offending for so long? Was it possible that he had raped other victims who had not reported it?

Grace doubted that he could have raped repeatedly for twelve years without someone reporting it. Yet so far there were no rapists showing up on the national database with a comparable MO. He could of course have gone abroad, which would take a massive amount of time and resourcing to establish.

However, this evening it emerged that there was one potential suspect in the city, following the Analyst’s search of the ViSOR and MAPPA databases, ViSOR being the Violent and Sex Offender Register and MAPPA the Multi-agency Public Protection Arrangements.

Having been set up to manage the release of violent and sexual offenders back into the community after their release from prison on licence, MAPPA graded these offenders into three categories. Level 1 was for released prisoners who were considered to have a low risk of reoffending and were monitored to ensure that they complied with the terms of their licence. Level 2 was for those considered to be in need of moderately active inter-agency monitoring. Level 3 was for those considered to have a high risk of reoffending.

Zoratti had discovered that there was a Level 2 who had been released on licence, from Ford Open Prison, having served three years of a six-year sentence, mostly at Lewes, for burglary and indecent assault – a career burglar and drugs dealer, Darren Spicer. He’d attempted to kiss a woman in a house he had broken into, then run off when she’d fought back and had pressed a hidden panic button. Later, she’d picked him out in an identity parade.

Spicer’s current place of residence was being traced urgently tonight through the Probation Service. But while he was worth interviewing, Grace wasn’t convinced Darren Spicer ticked many boxes. He had been in and out of jail several times in the past twelve years, so why had he not offended in the interim? More important, in his view, was the fact that the man had no previous record of sexual assaults. The last offence that had contributed to Spicer’s sentence appeared to be a one-off – although, of course, there was no certainty of that. With the grim statistic that only 6 per cent of rape victims ever reported the crimes, it was quite possible he had committed previous such offences and got away with them.

Next he turned his mind to the copycat theory. One thing that was deeply bothering him was the missing pages from the Rachael Ryan file. Sure, it was possible that they had simply been misfiled somewhere else. But there could be a much darker reason. Could it be that the Shoe Man himself had accessed the file and removed something that might incriminate him? If he had access to that file, he would have had access to all the Shoe Man’s files.

Or was it someone else altogether who had gained access to them? Someone who had decided, for whatever sick reason, to copy the Shoe Man’s MO.

Who?

A member of his trusted team? He didn’t think so, but of course he couldn’t discount that. There were plenty of other people who had access to the Major Crime Suite – other police officers, support staff and cleaning staff. Solving that mystery, he realized, was now a priority for him.

‘Are you nearly ready to eat, darling?’ Cleo called out.

Cleo was grilling him a tuna steak. Roy took this as a sign that maybe, finally, she was starting to wean herself off curries. The reek of them had gone and there was now a strong smell of wood smoke from the crackling fire that Cleo had lit in the grate some time before he had arrived, and the welcoming aroma of scented candles burning in different parts of the room.

He took another long sip of the deliciously cold vodka martini she had mixed, enviously, for him. He now had to drink for both of them, she’d told him – and tonight he did not have a problem with that. He felt the welcoming buzz of the alcohol and then, still mechanically stroking the dog, he lapsed back into his thoughts.

A car had been seen leaving the Pearce house in The Droveway at 9 p.m. on Thursday, which fitted perfectly with the timing of the attack. It had been travelling at speed and nearly ran over a local resident. The man was so angry he tried to take a note of the number plate, but could only be certain of two digits and one letter of the alphabet. Then he did nothing about it until he read of the attack in the Argus, which prompted him to phone the Incident Room this evening.

According to him, the driver was male, but with the vehicle’s tinted windows he had not been able to get a clear look at his face. Somewhere in his thirties or forties with short hair was the extent of his description. He did much better with the car, asserting it was a light-coloured old-model Mercedes E-Class saloon. Just how many of those Mercedes were there around, Grace wondered? Loads of them. It was going to take a while to sift through all the registered keepers when they didn’t have a full registration number to work from. And he did not have the luxury of time.

With the rising frenzy in the media after two stranger rapes in the city in a little over a week, the news stories were ramping up fear in the public. The call handlers were being inundated with queries from anxious women about whether it was safe to go out and he was aware that his immediate superiors, Chief Superintendent Jack Skerritt and ACC Peter Rigg, were anxious to see rapid progress with this case.

The next press conference was scheduled for midday on Monday. It would calm everything down greatly if he could a

The fact that the car was being driven recklessly was a good indicator that it might have been the suspect. It was a known fact that offenders often drove badly immediately after committing a crime – because they were in a heightened state of anxiety, the red mist.

He’d sent all his team home for the night to get some rest, except for the two Analysts, who were working a 24/7 rota between them. Gle