Dead Like You

Twelve years ago, if he was right, the Shoe Man had used a white van in his attack. It would fit Proudfoot’s theory on his symmetry if he did the same thing again tonight.

Was that the reason those particular pages had been taken from the file, he wondered? The ones relating to an eyewitness report about a woman abducted in a white van? Did they contain vital clues about his behaviour? His MO? The identity of the van?

Something that had been bothering him about the lock-up garage was bothering him even more now. If the Shoe Man had driven the van out of the garage, why had he bothered to lock all four locks? There was nothing in there to steal except two useless licence plates.

That really did not make sense to him.

93

Saturday 17 January

The only passengers Yac disliked more than drunks were the ones who were high on drugs. This girl on the back seat was almost bouncing off the roof.

She talked and she talked and she talked. She had spewed words non-stop since he had collected her from an address close to the beach in Lancing. Her hair was long and spiky, the colour of tomato ketchup and pea soup. She talked rubbish and she was wearing rubbish shoes. She reeked of cigarettes and Dolce & Gabbana Femme, and she was a mess. She looked like a Barbie doll that had been retrieved from a dustbin.

She was so out of it, he doubted she would notice if he drove her to the moon, except he didn’t know how to get to the moon. He hadn’t worked that one out yet.

‘Thing is, you see,’ she went on, ‘there’s a lot of people going to rip you off in this city. You want quality stuff. You tell them you want brown and they just give you shit, yep, shit. You had that problem?’

Yac wasn’t sure whether she was talking into her mobile phone, which she had been for much of the journey, or to him. So he continued driving in silence and looking at the clock and fretting. After he dropped her off in Kemp Town he would park up and ignore any calls on his data unit from the dispatcher, wait for 7 p.m. and then drink his tea.

‘Have you?’ she asked more loudly. ‘Have you?’

He felt a prod in his back. He didn’t like that. He did not like passengers touching him. Last week he had a drunk man who kept laughing and thumping him on the shoulder. He had begun to find himself wondering what the man’s reaction would be if he hit him in the face with the heavy, four-way steel brace for removing wheel nuts that was stored in the boot.

He was starting to wonder how this girl would react if he did that now. He could easily stop and get it out of the boot. She’d probably still be sitting in the back, talking away, even after he had hit her. He’d seen someone do that in a film on television.

She prodded him again. ‘Hey? So? Have you?’

‘Have I what?’

‘Oh shit, you weren’t listening. Like, right, OK. Shit. Haven’t you got any music in this thing?’

‘Size four?’ he asked.

‘Size four? Size four what?’

‘Shoes. That’s what you are.’

‘You a shoemaker when you’re not driving or something?’

Her shoes were really horrible. Fake leopard skin, flat and all frayed around the edges. He could kill this woman, he decided. He could. It would be easy. He had lots of passengers he did not like. But this was the first one he actually thought he might like to kill.

But it was probably better not to. You could get into trouble for killing people if you got caught. He watched CSI and Waking the Dead and other shows about forensic scientists. You could learn a lot from those. You could learn to kill a stupid person like this woman, with her stupid hair and her stupid black nail paint and her breasts almost popping free of their scarlet cups.

As he turned left at the roundabout in front of Brighton Pier and headed up around the Old Steine, she suddenly fell silent.

He wondered if she could read his mind.

94

Saturday 17 January

Roy Grace, seated in the office at the end of the Ops Room, was working his way through a horrible slimy and almost stone-cold mound of chicken and shrimp chow mein that some well-meaning officer had brought him. If he hadn’t been ravenous, he would have bi

All had been quiet at the garage behind Mandalay Court. But the number and quality of the locks on the door continued to bother him. ACC Rigg had agreed readily to allowing Darren Spicer to tell them what he saw without incriminating himself, but as yet Gle

He dug the plastic fork into the foil dish, while staring at the gridded image on the computer screen on the desk in front of him. All the cars and the thirty-five officers on his operation were equipped with transponders which gave him their exact position to within a few feet. He checked the location of each in turn, then the images of the city streets on the CCTV cameras. The images on the screens on the wall showed their night-vision sight as clear as daylight. The city was definitely busier today. People might have stayed home yesterday evening, but Saturday was starting to look like it might be something of a party night.

Just as he munched on a desiccated shrimp, his radio phone crackled into life and an excited voice said, ‘Target One sighted! Turning right-right into Edward Street!’

Target One was the code designated to John Kerridge – Yac. Target Two, and further numbers, would be applied to any white van or pedestrian arousing suspicion.

Instantly, Grace put down the foil dish and tapped the command to bring up, on one of the wall-mounted monitors, the CCTV camera trained on the junction of Edward Street and Old Steine. He saw a Peugeot estate taxi, in the turquoise and white Brighton livery, accelerate out of the camera’s view along the road.

‘One female passenger. He is proceeding east-east!’ he heard.

Moments later Grace saw a small Peugeot heading in the same direction. The transponder showed on the grid this was one of his covert cars, no. 4.

He called up the next image in sequence on the CCTV screens and saw the taxi crossing the intersection with Egremont Place, where Edward Street became Eastern Road.

Almost exactly the same pattern as last night, Grace thought. But this time, although he could not have explained why, he sensed there was a difference. At the same time, he was still worried about the amount of faith he had put in Proudfoot’s judgement.

He spoke on the internal phone to his Silver. ‘Have we found out his destination from the taxi company?’

‘No, chief, didn’t want to alert them, in case the operator says anything to the driver. We’ve enough cover to keep him in view if he stays in the area.’

‘OK.’

Another excited voice crackled on the radio phone. ‘He’s turning right – right into – what’s that street – Montague, I think. Yes, Montague! He’s stopping! Rear door opening! She’s out of the car! Oh, my God, she’s ru