Dead Man's Time (12 page)

Aileen McWhirter’s white hair, elegantly coiffed, was held in place by a ruby-studded barrette. Her blue eyes, pin-sharp but twinkling with warmth, peered out through the lenses of her
tortoiseshell glasses. She was wearing a white blouse with an embroidered collar and pearl earrings. An antique pearl pendant hung around her crinkly neck. She looked serene and wise and
elegant.

She must have been very beautiful when she was younger, he thought. Anyone would have been proud to have her as their grandmother. Throughout his career he had carried a particular hatred for
the creeps who breached the sanctuary of people’s homes, and even more so for those who harmed vulnerable, elderly people.

He thought about the small, ring-bound crime scene photograph album in his desk drawer, locked to prevent any snooping cleaning staff from coming across it. Despite being hardened to most
sights, he found some of the pictures, taken by a Crime Scene Officer, James Gartrell, in the mortuary, almost too distressing to look at. Thinking now about those images of some of the terrible
injuries inflicted on her, he squirmed with anger and revulsion.

Eighteen months short of her one hundredth birthday – and the traditional missive from the Queen that would have come with it – Aileen McWhirter had been the victim of brutality on a
level that had profoundly upset even the most hardened members of the investigating team. The post-mortem revealed she had burns to her body that were consistent with a pair of heated curling tongs
found on her bedroom floor.

But the post-mortem had revealed few clues about who had attacked her. There was no flesh under her fingernails, which meant she probably had not succeeded in scratching any of them. Shame,
Grace thought. It would have been nice to think she had managed to gouge at least one of their eyes out.

The only clues found in the house were three sets of shoeprints that did not match up with any of her regular visitors – her part-time housekeeper who normally came twice a week, her
gardener, her nephew Lucas’s wife, Sarah, and her brother. Copies had been sent to forensic podiatrist Haydn Kelly, who had previously produced some outstanding gait identification results
for Roy Grace using the latest technology, and a match had been found to the trainers they believed the perpetrators had worn.

It was strange, he thought, how in these past two months since Noah’s birth, violence was affecting him in ways it never had previously. One of the many books he had read on parenting had
predicted that would happen.

Above the photograph in front of him on the whiteboard was handwritten, in clear but untidy capitals, in black marker pen:

Below was an inventory, provided by the dead woman’s brother, Gavin Daly, of the items he was certain had been stolen from her home.

But what absorbed Roy Grace at this moment were two sheets of computer printout showing standard family-tree icons and graphs.

He followed the horizontal then the vertical lines. There was a horizontal black one, with an arrow to
Gordon Thomas McWhirter. Deceased. DOB 26.03.1912
. Her husband, he presumed.

Then a vertically descending red arrow to the deceased children, and a further arrow to the grandchild. Then to their left, another vertical red arrow pointed to Brendan Daly and Sheenagh Daly.
Beneath Sheenagh Daly was written,
DOB 19.09.1897. Deceased. 18.02.1922.
Beneath Brendan was written,
DOB 07.08.1891. Missing, presumed dead.

He frowned, thinking back to the books in the dead woman’s library on the early history of New York.

‘Ever see that movie,
Gangs of New York
?’ Glenn Branson said, suddenly, standing over his shoulder.

Grace turned. ‘A while ago, but I fell asleep during it.’

Branson grinned. ‘Yep, well, that’s what happens at your age!’

‘Sod off!’

Branson patted him on the shoulder. ‘Don’t take it personally; it’s a fact.’

Grace levelled him with his eyes.

‘All that stuff predates Aileen McWhirter. But it gives interesting background during the time the lady was a kid,’ Glenn Branson said, serious now. ‘Back in the 1800s there
were gang wars between the native Americans and the Irish immigrants. We’re picking up decades later, when the White Hand Gang was the principal mob of the Irish Mafia. They controlled the
Manhattan and Brooklyn waterfronts – all the wharfs and piers. Their boss was a character called Dinny Meehan – he was the guy who kicked Frankie Yale and Johnny Torrio, who headed the
Black Hand Gang, out of New York, along with Al Capone, which was why Capone ended up in Chicago. Capone came back to New York with a vengeance in the late-twenties, wiped out the Irish Mafia and
took control. Dinny Meehan was murdered in 1920. Brendan Daly was one of his lieutenants, who was missing, presumed murdered, in a power struggle for control of the White Hand Gang.’

‘Thanks for the history lesson!’

Branson looked at him then shook his head. ‘Didn’t they teach you anything at school?’

Grace gave him a wry smile. ‘Obviously nothing that mattered!’

Branson tapped his own chest. ‘Yeah, well, we descendants of slaves need to know about history.’

‘You’re not descended from a slave,’ Grace said with a grin. ‘Your dad was a bus driver in London.’

Ordinarily, his mate would have come back at him with some riposte or a movie quote – he was a total movie buff. But this morning he gave him a strangely sad smile. Grace could read defeat
in his eyes, and that upset him.

Glenn Branson’s marital life was a train wreck. Grace had helped him out for most of this past year by letting him lodge in his empty house, and the Detective Sergeant managed to keep that
looking, most of the time, like a train wreck too. Feeding Grace’s goldfish, Marlon, seemed to be the limit of Glenn Branson’s housekeeping skills.

Behind him was a familiar rustling sound. He turned to see that Detective Sergeant Bella Moy was now seated at her workstation, red Maltesers box in front of her. She seemed to live on the
chocolates. Yet she never appeared to put on weight. And recently, he’d noticed, she seemed to have blossomed.

In her mid-thirties, living with and looking after her sick, elderly mother, Bella used to wear drab clothes, had dull hair and seemed permanently melancholic. But lately she looked a lot more
glamorous.

He watched her pop a Malteser in her mouth. Heard the crunch. And suddenly he found himself rather fancying one himself. As if clocking this, she held the box out towards him. He took one, and
instantly regretted it, because the moment he had eaten it, he immediately wanted another.

There was one absentee from the team of twelve people: DS Norman Potting. Grace looked at his watch. It was 8.35 a.m. Five minutes late in starting already. He was due to meet with his Assistant
Chief Constable Peter Rigg at 10 a.m., and Rigg was a stickler for punctuality.

Suddenly he was distracted by his thoughts. He’d long had a near-photographic memory, and as he looked up again at Aileen McWhirter’s serene face, he could picture those books
packing the shelves on her study walls so clearly. Title after title, including
The Gangs of New York. American Gangsters Then And Now. The First 100 Years of the American Mafia. Young Capone.
Early Street Gangs and Gangsters of New York City. Irish Organized Crime. King of the Brooklyn Waterfront.

There were fifty titles, probably more. She hadn’t been an academic or a writer, and this number of books amounted to more than just a passing interest in a subject – this was
bordering on an obsession. They might of course have been her husband’s books. Both Daly, which was her maiden name, and McWhirter were Irish names.

He decided, later, to run the names Daly and McWhirter through some Internet searches. Then he turned to his notes, and began the meeting.

Ten minutes after the start, Norman Potting shuffled into the briefing looking very gloomy. The Detective Sergeant, who was in his mid-fifties, had joined the police force
relatively late in life and was not popular, being regarded as a politically incorrect dinosaur by many, but Roy Grace tolerated him, because he was one of the most reliable and doggedly persistent
detectives he had ever worked with.

‘Sorry I’m late, chief,’ he said in his gruff voice. ‘Had to see the quack.’ Then, lowering his voice, he whispered to Grace, ‘Not very good news.’

‘I’m sorry, Norman. Do you want to tell me about it later?’ Grace quizzed, genuinely worried for the man.

Potting shrugged, then gave a defeatist grimace and sat down. Roy Grace frowned as he noticed the exchange of glances between Potting and Bella Moy. He had wondered for a couple of months now if
something was going on between them. They seemed too different, and Norman, with his bad comb-over and constant reek of pipe tobacco, never struck him as an appealing man. Yet he’d had four
wives, and Grace had long ago learned that life never ceased to surprise you.

Other assembled members of his team included recently married – and now pregnant – DC Emma-Jane Boutwood, Crime Scene Manager David Green, DS Guy Batchelor, Ray Packham from the High
Tech Crime Unit, two indexers, a HOLMES (Home Office Large Major Enquiry System) analyst, a crime analyst, the manager for the analysts and indexers, an Intelligence Officer, several Detectives and
Press Officer Sue Fleet, a striking redhead. The Chief Constable placed particular importance on keeping the public – or
the customers we serve
, as the public were now called in the
latest police newspeak – properly informed.

Roy Grace had never been able to get his head around that word
customers.
The police force, in his experience, had always kept a distance between themselves and the general public. But
he had no option but to go along with changes, however absurd he felt some of the government’s diktats to be. He looked around fondly at his team, here to serve their
customers.

The one regular who was missing was DC Nick Nicholl, who had recently been transferred to the Serious and Organized Crime Branch. He was sorry to lose him, but since becoming a father, Nick had
definitely become a less effective detective – in part from lack of sleep. Grace made a mental note not to go the same way. Somehow.

Then he said, ‘Okay, this is the tenth briefing of Operation Flounder.’ He looked at Bella. ‘Can you update us on the actions from the Outside Enquiry Team?’

‘We’re continuing with house-to-house enquiries, sir,’ the DS replied. ‘One problem, as we know, is that Withdean Road is not exactly a closely knit neighbourhood.
They’re all large houses in their own grounds; only a few of the people we’ve talked to have ever met their neighbours. We believe the perpetrators must have used at least one
substantial van, if not two, for all the items they took, but no one in the area noticed anything – and there is no CCTV on that road or any intersecting roads. There is just one thing of
possible interest.’

‘Yes?’

‘It’s a call we had in response to our boards out on the street. What makes this particularly interesting is it was possibly an
anniversary visit.
The Tuesday night, exactly
a week before the robbery.’

Bella had everyone’s attention now.

‘A neighbour in the street, a few houses along, phoned in to say he remembered seeing a black Porsche parked on the kerb outside the victim’s house as he drove home, about 7 p.m. A
man was sitting in the car. He said he didn’t think anything of it at the time; he assumed the driver had stopped to make a phone call or something.’

‘Did he get a description of the driver or the car’s registration?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Black Porsches are not uncommon in Brighton,’ Grace said. ‘But there can’t be that many. Get a list of all the ones with Sussex registrations and see if that throws up
any names.’

‘Yes, sir. Oh, and there’s one other thing that may be significant, although I don’t think so. There was a G5 in Brighton last week, a man called Ralph Meeks, found dead in his
house. He used to work as a gardener for Mrs McWhirter – I understand he was sacked by her about fourteen years ago. Possibly he had a grudge – although his estimated time of death was
some days before the robbery.’

‘All right, see if you can find out any more.’

‘Yes, I have someone on it, sir.’

Grace thanked her. Then, looking around the team, said, ‘Okay, how’s the checking of van rental companies going?’

‘I’m working through them, sir,’ said a young DC, Jack Alexander, who Grace had brought in to replace Nick Nicholl. ‘There’s a huge number – quite apart from
the national rental companies, there are hundreds of small van hire firms.’

Grace thanked him and turned back to Bella. She glanced down at her notes. ‘We’ve covered eBay and all the antiques dealers in the Brighton and Hove area for the minor stolen items.
We’ve circulated all the photographs of the high-value items that we know to be missing to all of Sussex’s principal dealers, and I’m working through a list of all other UK
dealers who might handle these valuable items, as well as compiling a list of international ones – and we are liaising with the insurance company’s loss adjusters. It’s very
possible they’re being shipped abroad – and might already have been. We’re keeping an eye on Shoreham and Newhaven harbours and have officers searching all containers being
exported. One area we are also looking at is any upcoming specialist auctions. The highest-value item taken was the 1910 Patek Philippe pocket watch, which is uninsured and worth over two million
pounds.’

‘Sir Hugo Drax wore a Patek Philippe in the novel of
Moonraker
!’ Glenn Branson announced. ‘But it was changed to a Swatch in the film!’

‘Very helpful, Glenn,’ Grace said tartly. Then he turned to Bella. ‘Good thinking,’ Grace said, making a note. ‘Don’t restrict your auction search just to the
UK. A watch would be easily portable to anywhere in the world.’