Dead Like You

‘What’s your reasoning for giving that to the Argus, Roy?’ Emma-Jane Boutwood asked.

‘Because I suspect this creep thinks he’s very clever. He got away with his attacks before and now he’s confident he’s going to get away with these new ones too. If Dr Proudfoot is right and he committed the ghost train rape as well, then he’s clearly stepping up both the speed and the braze

‘Or be more brutal to their victims,’ Bella Moy said. ‘Isn’t that a risk?’

‘If he killed last time, Bella, which I think is likely,’ Grace replied, ‘there’s a high risk he’ll kill again, strop or no strop. When someone has taken a life once, they’ve crossed a personal Rubicon. It’s far easier the second time. Particularly if they found they enjoyed it the first time. We’re dealing with a nasty, warped freak here – and someone who’s not stupid. We need to find ways to trip him up. I don’t just want him not being more brutal to a victim – I want him not to have another victim, full stop. We have to catch him before he attacks again.’

‘Anyone figure out his accent?’ Nick Nicholl asked.

‘Sounds local to me,’ DC Foreman said, ‘but difficult with that background noise. Can we get the recording enhanced?’

‘That’s being worked on now,’ Grace replied. Then he turned to Proudfoot. ‘Can you estimate the man’s age from this?’

‘That’s a hard one – anywhere between thirty and fifty, I’d guess,’ he said. ‘I think you need to run this through a lab, somewhere like J. P. French, which specializes in speaker profiling. There’s quite a bit of information they could get us from a call like this. Probably the man’s regional and ethnic background, for a start.’

Grace nodded. He’d used the specialist firm before and the results had been helpful. He could also get a voiceprint from the lab that would be as unique as a fingerprint or DNA. But could they do it in the short amount of time he believed he had?

‘There have been mass DNA screenings in communities,’ Bella Moy said. ‘What about trying something like that in Brighton with the voiceprint?’

‘So all we’d have to do, Bella,’ Norman Potting said, ‘is get every bloke in Brighton and Hove to say the same words. There’s only a hundred and forty thousand or so males in the city. Shouldn’t take us more than about ten years.’

‘Could you play it again, boss, please,’ said Gle

He played the tape again.

‘Have we been able to trace the call, sir?’ Ellen Zoratti asked.

‘The number was withheld. But it’s being worked on. It’s a big task with the amount coming through the Call Centre every hour.’ Grace played the tape again.

When it finished, Gle

‘Good thinking,’ Grace said. ‘Although it sounded more like a landline than a mobile from the way he hung up.’

‘Yes,’ Michael Foreman said. ‘That clunking sound – that’s like an old-fashioned handset being replaced.’

‘He might have just dropped his phone, if he was as nervous as Dr Proudfoot suggests,’ said DC Boutwood. ‘I don’t think we should rule out a mobile.’

‘Or it could be a public phone booth,’ Foreman said. ‘In which case there may be fingerprints.’

‘If he’s angry,’ Proudfoot said, ‘then I think it’s even more likely he’ll strike again quickly. And a racing certainty is that he’ll copy his pattern from last time. He’ll know that worked. He’ll be fine if he sticks to the same again. Which means he’s going to strike in a car park next – as I’ve said before.’

Grace walked over to a map of central Brighton and stared at it, looking at each of the main car parks. The station, London Road, New Road, Churchill Square, North Road. There were dozens of them, big and small, some run by the council, some by NCP, some part of supermarkets or hotels. He turned back to Proudfoot.

‘It would be impossible to cover every damned car park in the city – and even more impossible to cover every level of every multi-storey,’ he said. ‘We just don’t have the number of patrols. And we can hardly close them down.’

He was feeling anxious suddenly. Maybe it had been a mistake telling Spinella that yesterday. What if it pushed the Shoe Man over the edge into killing again? It would be his own stupid fault.

‘The best thing we can do is get plain-clothes officers into the CCTV control rooms of those car parks that have it, step up patrols and have as many undercover vehicles drive around the car parks as we can,’ Grace said.

‘The one thing I’d tell your team to watch out for, Detective Superintendent, is someone on edge tonight. Someone driving erratically on the streets. I think our man is going to be in a highly wired state.’

65

You think you’ve been clever, don’t you, Detective Superintendent Roy Grace? You think you’re going to make me angry by insulting me, don’t you? I can see through all that shit.

You should accept you are just a lame duck. Your colleagues didn’t catch me before and you won’t catch me now. I’m so much smarter than you could ever dream of being. You see, you don’t realize I’m doing you a favour!

I’m getting rid of the poison in your manor! I’m your new best friend! One day you’ll come to realize that! One day you and I will walk along under the cliffs at Rottingdean and talk about all of this. That walk you like to take with your beloved Cleo on Sundays! She likes shoes too. I’ve seen her in some of the shops I go in. She’s quite into shoes, isn’t she? You are going to need saving from her, but you don’t realize that yet. You will do one day.

They’re all poison, you see. All women. They seduce you with their Venus fly trap vaginas. You can’t bear to be apart from them. You phone them and text them every few minutes of your waking day, because you need to know how much they still love you.

Let me tell you a secret.

No woman ever loves you. All she wants to do is control you. You might sneer at me. You might question the size of my manhood. But I will tell you something, Detective Superintendent. You’ll be grateful to me, one day. You’ll walk with me arm in arm along the Undercliff Walk at Rottingdean and thank me for saving you from yourself.