‘I’ve cracked it!’ he shouted across the room at Roy Grace, beaming like an exuberant kid and brandishing two CD cases in the air.
‘What? What have you cracked? Anna Galicia?’ Grace asked.
The forensic podiatrist moved Grace’s keyboard aside and set his laptop down on the worktop. He flipped open the lid and tapped in his code. Moments later Grace was staring at a screen that was split vertically. On the left-hand side he saw what looked like CCTV footage of the woman he recognized from earlier, Anna Galicia, walking along a street in Brighton. On the right-hand side of the screen was a balding man in a business suit. Along the top were several columns of spinning numbers and algebraic symbols that seemed to be calibrating and re-calibrating as each person walked.
Haydn Kelly pointed at the left screen. ‘See our mysterious Anna Galicia?’
Grace nodded.
‘There’s a good reason why no one’s been able to find her.’
‘Which is?’
Kelly pointed at the right-hand screen. At the balding man in the business suit. ‘Because that’s
her
.’
Grace looked at the forensic podiatrist’s face for an instant, in case he was joking. But he appeared deadly serious. ‘How the hell do you know?’
‘Gait analysis. See all those computations on the screen? I can do the analysis visually, to a pretty high degree of accuracy because I’ve done it for so long, but those calculations done by the algorithm I developed add certainty. There is a very minor variation because the woman is on high heels and the man is wearing conventional male shoes. But they’re the same person. No question.’
‘Beyond doubt?’
‘I’d bet my life on it.’
Roy Grace stared at the screen, his eyes switching from the woman to the man to the woman again, feeling a sudden chill deep in the pit of his stomach. ‘Glenn,’ he said. ‘Come and see this.’
Branson stepped over, looked at the screen and exclaimed, ‘That looks like our friend Eric Whiteley!’
‘Whiteley?’ Grace said, the name ringing a strong bell, and trying to place it.
‘Yeah – the weirdo accountant me and Bella interviewed. That’s the outside front door of his office – who’s taken it?’
Norman Potting looked up. ‘I’ve got something interesting here about Eric Whiteley, assuming it’s the same one, Glenn.’
‘In what context?’
‘Could just be a strange coincidence. I’ve got the name
Eric Whiteley
just come in on an email from HSBC,’ Potting said. ‘I’ve got a list of all people who made cash withdrawals at hole-in-the-wall machines close to Café Conneckted on Monday night. According to the bank, he drew fifty pounds out of one of one of their machines in Queen’s Road, at 8.32 p.m.’
‘Do they have his photograph?’
‘Well, this is the strange thing, they haven’t.’ Potting pointed at his own screen. ‘This is the person who appears to have withdrawn the money – Anna Galicia. The bank think it’s possible she’s stolen his card.’
Glenn Branson was shaking his head. ‘No, she hasn’t stolen Eric Whiteley’s card. She
is
Eric Whiteley!’
Grace looked at his watch. 5.20 p.m. He radioed the Control Room and asked for the on-duty Ops 1 Controller. Moments later he was through to Inspector Andy Kille, a highly competent man he liked working with. He explained the situation as quickly as he could, and asked for uniformed and plain clothes officers to go to Whiteley’s office, with luck catching him before he left for the day, and arrest him. He told Kille to warn them the man could be violent.
When he ended the call he instructed Guy Batchelor and Emma Reeves to take an unmarked car to Whiteley’s home address, and sit close by in case Whiteley showed up. Next he told Nick Nicholl to get a search warrant for both Whiteley’s home and his office signed by a magistrate, and then to head directly to Whiteley’s house.
Next, he spoke to the Ops 1 Controller again, and asked for a unit from the Local Support Team – the public order unit which specialized in executing warrants and wore full protective clothing, including visors, for the purpose – a POLSA and Search Officers to stand by near to Whiteley’s house, but out of sight, until Nicholl arrived with the search warrant, then to go straight in, accompanied by DS Batchelor and DC Reeves. Again he cautioned the man might be violent.
Less than five minutes later, Andy Kille radioed Roy Grace back with news from two Response officers who were now on site at the offices of accountants Feline Bradley-Hamilton. Eric Whiteley had not turned up for work today. His office hadn’t heard from him and he had not responded to their calls.
Shit
, Roy Grace thought,
shit, shit, shit
. The deep chill inside him was rapidly turning into the white heat of panic. The innocuous ones. So often it was the meek, mild-looking guys who turned out to be monsters. The UK’s worst ever serial killer Harold Shipman, a bearded, bespectacled, kindly looking family doctor who just happened to have a penchant for killing his patients, and despatched 218 of them, and possibly many more.
He stared at Whiteley’s image on the screen. One thing he knew for sure: someone who was capable of killing once was well capable of killing again. And again. His mind was spinning.
Whiteley had not showed up for work all day.
He turned to Glenn Branson.
‘Glenn, you spoke to Eric Whiteley’s boss a few days ago, didn’t you?’
‘Yes, chief.’
‘Do I remember right that he said the man was a bit of an oddball but a very reliable employee?’
‘Yes. Said he was a loner, but yes, totally reliable.’
‘So him not showing up for work all day without contacting the office, or having an outside appointment in his diary, is out of character?’
‘It would seem so, but we do know that he occasionally works away from the office at the premises of clients.’
Grace was liking this less and less. Hopefully the man was sick, in bed. But in his bones he didn’t think so. He called Guy Batchelor. ‘How are you doing?’
A blast of expletives came back down the phone, followed by, ‘That sodding bus lane! Sorry Roy, but we’re sitting in gridlock from Roedean all the way through to Peacehaven.’
‘Okay, let me know when you are on site.’ Grace immediately radioed the Ops 1 Controller again. ‘Andy, do you have a unit in the Peacehaven area?’
‘I’ll check.’
‘Send the nearest one straight to Eric Whiteley’s house. I need to establish if he’s at home – top priority.’
‘Leave it with me.’
Grace was suddenly craving a cigarette. But he didn’t carry any on him these days, and he didn’t have time to find someone to bum one from – and even less time to go outside and smoke it.
Please God, let Whiteley be at home.
And if he wasn’t?
He was thinking of Gaia, she seemed to be a sweet and fragile person behind her tough public persona. He liked her, he was utterly determined to do all he possibly could to protect her and her son. After the incident with the chandelier, the consequences of any similar occurrences were not worth thinking about. Neither morally, nor career-wise.
He glanced at the serials – the log of all incidents in Sussex that was updated constantly. So far it was a quiet afternoon, which was good because that meant most of the officers on duty would be available if needed. He was thinking ahead. Clearly Andrew Gulli had not managed to convince Gaia to leave town, as the production’s call sheet, which he had requested and was lying in front of him, required her in make-up at 4 p.m. and on set at 6 p.m.
Andy Kille called him back. ‘Roy, I’ve got a Neighbourhood Policing Team car at Whiteley’s house now. They’re not getting any response from the doorbell or knocking and they can’t see or hear any signs of movement inside the house.’
Grace was tempted to instruct them to break in. If Whiteley was unconscious or dead, it would change the whole dynamics. But the fact the man had not turned up for work wasn’t sufficient grounds. They needed the warrant.
Twenty anxious minutes later, Nick Nicholl called him to say he had the warrant signed by a magistrate who lived close to Whiteley’s house in Peacehaven, and he was standing by, two streets away, with DS Guy Batchelor, DC Emma Reeves and six members of the Local Support Team. The POLSA and four Specialist Search Unit officers were minutes away.
‘Send the LST in,’ Grace instructed, urgently. ‘Now!’
Eric Whiteley’s house, 117 Tate Avenue, was near the top of a hill, in a network of streets filled with post-war houses and bungalows, all fairly tightly packed together. It was a quiet area, with the cliff-top walk above the sea a quarter of a mile to the south, and the vast expanse of farmland and open grassland of the South Downs just two streets away to the north.
Number 117 had a rather sad look about it, Guy Batchelor thought. It was a modest, drab 1950s two-storey brick and wood structure, with an integral garage, and fronted by a tidy but unloved garden. A sign on the garage doors, in large red letters on a white background, proclaimed,
DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT PARKING HERE
.
He waited on the pavement with DCs Nicholl and Reeves as the six officers from the Local Support Team went down the drive, two peeling off and hurrying down the side alley, past the dustbins, to cover the rear of the property. All six were in blue jump suits, with body armour, and military-style helmets with the visors down. One carried the cylindrical battering ram. Another two carried the hydraulic jamb spreader, and its power supply, which was used for forcing apart the steel reinforced door frames that drug dealers were increasingly fitting to slow down entry of any police raid. A fourth officer, the Sergeant in charge of this section, carried the search warrant.
Shouting, ‘POLICE! OPEN UP, POLICE!’ the first officer banged on the door, rang the doorbell and banged hard on the door again. He waited some moments, then turned, looking for a signal from his Sergeant, who nodded. Immediately, he swung the battering ram at the door. It burst open on the second strike, and three LST officers rushed in, bellowing, ‘POLICE! POLICE!’ while the Sergeant held back, in case their intended target tried to do a runner out of the garage door.
Guy Batchelor, Emma Reeves and Nick Nicholl stayed outside, until they got the all clear, confirming that the rooms had all been checked and there was no threat. Then they entered.
And stopped in their tracks in astonishment.
Nothing about the exterior of the house had given them any hint of the quite astonishing room they had stepped into.
There was a marble floor that would have looked more at home in an Italian palazzo than an urban annexe of Brighton and Hove. The walls were ceiling-to-floor mirrors, decorated with Aztec art and posters of Gaia. Batchelor stared at a signed monochrome of the icon in a black negligee – one of her most famous images. But it was ripped through several times with what must have been a knife blade, so that parts had peeled away and were hanging down. In angry red letters across it was daubed,
BITCH.
He looked uneasily at Emma Reeves. She pointed to the left, above a white leather armchair. At another huge framed poster, in which Gaia was wearing a tank-top and leather jeans, captioned G
AIA
R
EVELATIONS
T
OUR
. Across it was daubed in the same red paint,
LOVE ME OR DIE, BITCH.
Above the fireplace, clearly in pride of place was a blow-up of the icon’s lips, nose and eyes in green monochrome, captioned, G
AIA
U
P
C
LOSE AND
P
ERSONAL
. It was also personally signed. It too was slashed to ribbons in parts, and painted across, again in red, was the word
COW.
One of the Specialist Search Unit officers, gloved and wearing black, was opening drawers in a chest on the far side of the room. Batchelor stared at each of the posters, at the violent rips, at the red paint, feeling deep, growing unease. He glanced out of the window; it was a grey, blustery afternoon and he could see a neighbour’s washing flapping in the wind, in front of a breeze-block garage. Something flapped in his belly. He had been in a lot of bad situations in his career, but he was experiencing something new to him at this moment. It was an almost palpable sense of evil. And it was spooking him.
A shadow moved, making him jump. It was a small Burmese cat, back arched, eyeing him suspiciously.
‘Take a look up here!’ another Search Unit officer called down to them from upstairs.
Batchelor, followed by Emma Reeves and Nick Nicholl, charged up the stairs, and, following the direction he was signalling, entered a room that felt like a cross between a museum and a shrine. And in which there had been a recent explosion of anger.
Shop window dummies lay on their sides on the floor, wearing dresses covered in clear plastic, and daubed in red paint. More autographed posters on the walls were ripped and daubed. CDs, tickets to Gaia concerts, bottles of Gaia’s mineral water, a smashed Martini glass and a fly-fishing rod snapped in two were among the other detritus that lay on the floor streaked, like blood, in red paint.
Some items remained in their glass display cabinets, but many of these were barely visible behind the furious red words all over the glass.
BITCH. COW. DIE. LOVE ME. I’LL TEACH YOU. FUCK YOU.