Through the gap they opened up, Omotoso saw, facing them on the far side of the crest of the hill, a stationary small white Ford van. Spread-eagled, motionless on the ground close to it, was a motorcyclist, a trail of dark crimson blood running from inside his black helmet and pooling on the road. Two men and a woman were kneeling beside him. One of the men appeared to be talking to him. A short distance away lay a red motorcycle.
‘Another Fireblade,’ Upperton said grimly, almost under his breath as he brought the car to a halt.
The Honda Fireblade was a classic born-again-biker machine, one of the motorcycles de choix for blokes in their forties who had ridden in their teens, had now made some money and wanted a bike again. And naturally they wanted the fastest machine on the road, though they had no real understanding of just how much faster – and harder to handle – modern bikes had become during the intervening years. It was a grim statistic, evidenced by what Omotoso and Upperton – and dozens of other Road Policing Officers like them – saw daily, that the highest risk age group were not tearaway teenagers but middle-aged businessmen.
Omotoso radioed in that they were at the scene, and was told that an ambulance and fire crew were on their way. ‘We’d better have the RPU inspector up here, Hotel Tango Three-Nine-Nine,’ he told the controller, giving him the call sign for the duty Road Policing Unit inspector. This looked bad. Even from here he could see that the blood wasn’t the light, bright red of a superficial head wound, but the ominous colour of internal bleeding.
Both men got out of the car, assessing the scene as quickly and as well as they could. One thing Tony Omotoso had learned in this job was never to jump to rapid conclusions about how any accident had happened. But from the skid marks and the positions of the car and the bike, it looked as if the car had pulled out into the path of the motorcycle – which must have been travelling at speed to have caused that kind of damage and spun the car around.
The first priority on his mental checklist was danger from other road users. But all the traffic seemed securely halted in both directions. He heard the wail of a siren approaching in the distance.
‘She pulled out, fucking stupid woman. Just pulled straight out!’ a male voice shouted to them. ‘He didn’t stand a chance!’
Ignoring the voice, they ran up to the motorcyclist. Omotoso edged between the people already beside him and knelt down.
‘He’s unconscious,’ the woman said.
The victim’s dark, tinted visor was down. The police officer knew it was important not to move him if at all possible. As gently as he could, he lifted up the visor, then touched the man’s face, opened his lips, felt inside his mouth for his tongue.
‘Can you hear me, sir? Can you hear me?’
Behind him, Ian Upperton asked, ‘Who is the driver of the BMW?’
A woman walked up to him, clutching a mobile phone, her face sheet white. In her forties, she was brassy-looking, with bleached blonde hair, and was wearing a fur-trimmed denim jacket, jeans and suede boots.
Subdued, she spoke in the gravelly voice of a heavy smoker. ‘Me,’ she said. ‘Shit, oh shit, oh shit. I didn’t see him. He came up like the wind. I didn’t see him. The road was clear.’ She was shaking, in shock.
The officer, long practised, put his face up close to hers, much closer than he needed just to hear her. He wanted to smell her, or, more particularly, smell her breath. He had a keen nose and he could frequently detect last night’s alcohol on someone who had been on a bender. There might be just the faintest trace now, but it was hard to tell, as it was so heavily masked by minty chewing gum and the reek of cigarette tobacco.
‘Would you step into my car, front passenger seat? I’ll be with you in a few minutes,’ Upperton said.
‘She pulled straight out!’ a man in an anorak said to him, almost incredulously. ‘I was right behind him.’
‘I’d appreciate your name and address, sir,’ the PC said.
‘Of course. She just pulled straight out. Mind you, he was travelling,’ the man admitted. ‘I was in my Range Rover.’ He jerked a thumb. ‘He absolutely flew past me.’
Upperton could see the ambulance arriving. ‘I’ll be right back, sir,’ he said, and hurried down to meet the paramedics.
How they handled the scene from here would very much depend on their initial assessment. If in their view it looked likely to be a fatality, then they would have to close the road until the Crash Scene Investigators had carried out their survey. In the meantime he radioed the controller and asked for two more units.
7
Festive parties had started early this year. At just after quarter to nine on Wednesday morning Detective Superintendent Roy Grace was sitting in his office nursing a hangover. He never used to suffer from hangovers, or at least very rarely, but recently they seemed to have become a regular occurrence. Maybe it was an age thing – he would be forty next August. Or maybe it was…
What exactly?
He should be feeling more settled in himself, he knew. For the first time in nine years since his wife, Sandy, had vanished, he was in a steady relationship, with a woman he really adored. He had recently been promoted to head up Major Crime, and the biggest obstacle to his career, Assistant Chief Constable Alison Vosper, who had never liked him, was moving to the other end of the country to take up a Deputy Chief Constable position.
So why, he kept wondering, did he so often wake up feeling like shit? Why was he drinking so recklessly suddenly?
Was it the knowledge that Cleo, who was about to turn thirty, was subtly – and sometimes not so subtly – angling for commitment? He had already effectively moved in with her and Humphrey, her mongrel rescue puppy – at least on a semi-permanent basis. The reason was in part that he really did want to be with her, but also because his mate and colleague Detective Sergeant Glenn Branson, whose marriage was on the rocks, had become an increasingly permanent lodger in his house. Much though he loved this man, they were too much of an odd couple to live together, and it was easier to leave Glenn to his own devices, although it pained Roy to see the mess he kept the place in – and in particular the mess he had made of Roy ’s prized vinyl and CD music collection.
He drained his second coffee of the morning, then unscrewed the cap of a bottle of sparkling water. Last night he had attended the Christmas dinner of the staff of Brighton and Hove City Mortuary, in a Chinese restaurant on the Marina, and then, instead of doing the sensible thing and going home afterwards, he had gone on with a crowd to the Rendezvous Casino, where he had drunk several brandies – which always gave him the worst hangovers – lost a rapid £50 on roulette and a further £100 at a blackjack table, before Cleo had – fortunately for him – dragged him away.
Normally at his desk by seven in the morning, he had just arrived in the office ten minutes ago, and so far the only task he had been able to perform, other than making himself coffee, was logging on to his computer. And tonight he had to go out again, to the retirement party of a chief superintendent called Jim Wilkinson.
He stared out of the window, at the car park and the ASDA supermarket across the road, then at the urban landscape of his beloved city beyond. It was a fine, crisp morning, the air so clear he could see the distant tall white chimney of the power station at Shoreham Harbour, with the blue-grey ribbon of the English Channel beyond, before it blended into the sky on the distant horizon. He’d only been in this office for a short while, after moving across from the other side of the building, where his view had been of the grey slab of the custody block, so this fine view was still something of a novelty and a joy. But not today.
Gripping his coffee mug in both hands, he saw to his dismay it was shaking. Shit, how drunk had he got last night? And from his hazy memory, Cleo had not drunk anything, which was just as well, as she’d been able to drive him back to her place. And – bloody hell – he could not even remember if they’d made love.
He shouldn’t have driven here this morning, he knew. He was probably still way over the limit. His stomach felt like a revolving cement mixer and he wasn’t sure whether the two fried eggs Cleo had forced down him had been a good idea or not. He was cold. He unhooked his suit jacket from the back of his chair and pulled it back on, then peered at his computer screen, glancing through the overnight serials – the list of every logged incident in the city of Brighton and Hove. New items got added by the minute and older ones that were still current got updated.
Among the more significant were a homophobic attack in Kemp Town and a serious assault in King’s Road. One, which had just been updated, was an RTC on Coldean Lane, a collision between a car and a motorcycle. It had first been logged at 08.32 and had just been updated with the information that H900, the police helicopter with a paramedic on board, had been requested.
Not good, he thought, with a slight shiver. He liked bikes and used to have them in his teens, when he first joined the police force and was dating Sandy, but he hadn’t ridden one since. A former colleague, Dave Gaylor, had bought himself a cool black Harley with red wheels when he retired, and, now that he had free use of a car as part of his promotion, Grace was tempted to replace his Alfa Romeo, which had recently been written off in a chase, with a bike – when the bastards at the insurance company finally coughed up – or rather,
if
. But when he’d mentioned it to Cleo, she had gone ballistic, despite being a little reckless behind the wheel herself.
Cleo, who was the Senior Anatomical Pathology Technician (as chief morticians were now known, in the new politically correct jargon which pervaded every aspect of police life, and which Roy privately detested with a vengeance) at Brighton and Hove City Mortuary, launched into a litany of the fatal injuries she witnessed regularly on her hapless overnight motorcyclist guests at the mortuary every time he raised the subject. And he knew that in some medical circles, particularly those working in trauma, where black humour was prevalent, bikers were nicknamed Donors on Wheels.
Which explained the presence of a pile of motoring magazines, featuring road tests and listings of used cars – but no bikes – that occupied some of the few remaining square inches of space on his absurdly cluttered desk.
In addition to all the files relating to his new role, and the mountains of Criminal Justice Department files on impending trials, he had inherited back the command of all the Sussex Police Force’s cold-case murder files, following the recent sudden departure of a colleague. Some sat in green plastic crates, occupying most of the floor space that was not already taken up by his desk, the small, round conference table and four chairs, and his black leather go-bag, which contained all the equipment and protective clothing he needed to have with him at a crime scene.
His work on the cold-case files progressed painfully slowly – partly because neither he nor anyone else here at HQ CID had enough time to devote to them, and partly because there was little more that could be done on them proactively. The police had to wait for advances in forensics, such as new developments in DNA analysis, to reveal a suspect, or for family loyalties to change – perhaps a wife who had once lied to protect her spouse becoming aggrieved and deciding to shop him. The situation was about to change, however, because a new team had been approved to work under him, reviewing all the outstanding cold cases.
Grace felt bad about unsolved murders, and the sight of the crates was a constant reminder to him that he was the last chance the victims had of justice being done, the last chance the families had of closure.
He knew most of the files’ contents by heart. One case concerned a gay vet called Richard Ventnor, found battered to death in his surgery twelve years ago. Another, which moved him deeply, concerned Tommy Lytle, his oldest cold case. At the age of eleven, twenty-seven years ago, Tommy had set out from school, on a February afternoon, to walk home. He’d never been seen again.
He looked back at the Criminal Justice Department files again. The bureaucracy demanded by the system was almost beyond belief. He swigged some water, wondering where to start. Then decided to look at his Christmas present list instead. But he only got as far as the first item, a request from the parents of his nine-year-old goddaughter, Jaye Somers. They knew he liked to give her gifts that made her think he was cool and not a boring old fart. They were suggesting a pair of black suede Ugg boots, size three.
Where did you buy Ugg boots from?
One person would definitely know the answer. He stared down at a green crate, the fourth in a stack to the right of his desk. The Shoe Man. A cold case that had long intrigued him. Over a period of time, several years back, the Shoe Man had raped six women in Sussex, killing one of them, probably by accident, in panic, it had been concluded. Then he had inexplicably stopped. It might have been that his last victim had put up a spirited fight, and had managed to partially remove his mask, enabling an Identikit drawing of the man to be made, and that had scared him off. Or perhaps he was now dead. Or had moved away.
Three years back, a forty-nine-year-old businessman in Yorkshire who had raped a string of women in the mid-1980s, and had always taken their shoes afterwards, had been arrested. For a time Sussex Police had hoped he might be their man too, but DNA testing ruled that out. Besides, the rapists’ methods were similar but not identical. James Lloyd, the Yorkshireman, took both shoes from his victims. The Sussex Shoe Man took just one, always from the left foot, together with his victims’ panties. Of course, there could have been more than six. One of the problems with tracking down rapists was that victims were often too embarrassed to come forward.
Of all criminals, Grace hated paedophiles and rapists the most. These men destroyed their victims’ lives forever. There was no real recovering from a kiddie fiddler or a rapist. The victims could try to put their lives back together, but they could never forget what had happened to them.