No one smiled.
Grace’s thoughts immediately returned to the spelling mistakes. Someone not quite a hundred per cent fluent in the English language, or someone trying to misdirect him? He looked down at his notes, thinking, before looking up again at his team. ‘OK, we understand that Mungo Brown’s best friend at Brighton College is Aleksander Dervishi, son of Jorgji Dervishi, and Dervishi might well have had business dealings with Kipp Brown. I want Dervishi interviewed tonight.’
‘It’s late, guv,’ Hall said. ‘10.15 p.m.’
‘This is a kidnap, Kevin, where every second counts. I don’t care if it’s 3 a.m. Call him and tell him we need to speak to him tonight, urgently. Hopefully his son will be home and you can talk to him, too. If Dervishi is difficult you can tell him he can do it the pleasant, informal way or we can arrest him in connection with the blinding of one of his countrymen — and the phone.’ He looked around at his team, considering who might be appropriate to interview him. Detective Sergeant Norman Potting was a blunt straight-talker who could stand up to anyone. To offset him, DC Velvet Wilde, who had a more subtle approach to people, might make a good foil. He gave them the action.
Moments later his phone rang again. It was Oscar-1, Inspector Keith Ellis.
‘Guv, we’ve just had in an ANPR track on BMW index Echo X-ray One-Three Bravo Delta Uniform’s movements. It pinged three cameras after leaving the Amex Stadium.’
‘Which direction, Keith?’
‘It headed east on the A27, past Lewes. The last camera to pick it up was at the Beddingham roundabout, where the vehicle either carried on eastwards towards Polegate and Eastbourne or could have turned right on the A26 and down towards Newhaven and the cross-Channel ferry port. But it didn’t get picked up by the next camera along the A27, nor the next one on the A26, just north of Newhaven. And I’ve got some significant further information on the vehicle. The East Sussex Fire and Rescue team are currently tackling a car on fire on a farm track just off the A26 south of Beddingham. It’s the suspect vehicle, index Echo X-ray One-Three Bravo Delta Uniform.’
‘Shit!’ Grace said. ‘So, it might have put Mungo Brown down somewhere in that area.’
‘Sounds very likely, guv.’
Sensing a possible breakthrough, Grace jumped up from the table and walked over to a large-scale map of Sussex on the wall in front of him, still holding his phone to his ear. He picked up a red marker pen from a holder beneath it and drew a circle round the area that Ellis had given him, which covered several square miles.
‘This is mostly rural, farming community all around here, Keith,’ he said. ‘Any number of barns. Sounds very possible Mungo might have been taken to a hiding place in this area.’
‘It does,’ Ellis said.
Grace thought hard. Both the A27, which was the main route connecting East and West Sussex, and the A26, which had ferry traffic to and from Newhaven Harbour, were busy roads. Whoever had taken Mungo, and had then dumped and torched the BMW, must have left in another vehicle either parked down that farm track or which had been driven there to pick them up. But with the numbers of vehicles travelling on both roads, it would be a near-impossible task to check up on them all. Mungo might have been transferred to another vehicle and taken to the Newhaven — Dieppe ferry, and spirited away to France — although the plug in the photograph indicated otherwise. However, all that meant was that the photograph had probably been taken in England. He could then have been taken on to France. Or the kidnappers could be holding him somewhere inside the red circle.
The police helicopter was equipped with a heat-seeking camera, which could detect living — or recently dead — bodies out in the open or inside buildings. ‘Keith,’ he said. ‘Can you see if NPAS-15 is available to do a fly-over of the area, looking at barns, outbuildings, anywhere Mungo might be?’
‘Right away, guv.’
Ending the call, Grace turned to DC Hall. ‘Kevin, get on to the Newhaven ferry company and find out the times of any sailings to France after 6 p.m. today. It’s a three-and-a-half-hour crossing, so if Mungo Brown is on a ferry, perhaps locked in the boot of a car, it’s possible he’s not yet in France. Then arrange with the port authorities in France to be vigilant and to look out for a teenage boy, possibly with a topknot, in any vehicle leaving the ferry — and get a photograph of him pinged to them.’
Hall nodded. ‘Yes, guv.’
Keith Ellis rang back. ‘NPAS-15’s attending an RTC in Kent, guv. Won’t be available for at least ninety minutes.’
‘God love our budget cuts!’ Grace said, frustrated. Until a few years ago, when the then Home Secretary, Theresa May, had started to decimate police budgets around the country, Sussex Police had had their own helicopter. Now they not only had to share one with Kent and Surrey but, because it doubled as an air ambulance, it was only occasionally available when it was actually needed.
‘Cheer up, boss,’ Norman Potting said. ‘The good news is that the money saved on our helicopter is helping people in need. Such as al-Qaeda and ISIS terrorists getting legal aid of a quarter of a million pounds a pop to fight their deportation orders. There’s always a silver lining, eh?’
Grace’s phone rang again. It was Glenn Branson.
‘Boss, we’ve just had a ransom demand come in. And it’s a strange one in a couple of ways.’
49
Saturday 12 August
21.30–22.30
The receiving bay of the Brighton and Hove City Mortuary was on the far side of the building, out of sight of the general public. Whoever originally designed the building was clearly on a mission not to make it look grim — and had fallen victim to the old adage that ‘No good deed goes unpunished’.
From the outside, the building looked like the kind of provincial, pebbledash-rendered bungalow with a steeply pitched roof and an attached garage that would, in estate agency parlance, have ideally suited an elderly retired couple. But the very innocent cuteness made it all the more grim when anyone realized what this building actually housed: a large postmortem suite, fridges capable of holding up to eighty bodies, a chapel and viewing room, and an office.
Cleo loved driving, and Darren Wallace, her deputy, was always happy to ride shotgun beside her. Their very silent passenger was zipped up in a black plastic body bag in the rear.
On the busy M23 motorway south from Gatwick Airport towards Brighton, in the dark van with the Coroner’s emblem on each side, Cleo and Darren had been chatting about the new lady in Darren’s life, called Natasha, whom Cleo had met and really liked. This was a tough job of many parts. You had the grim task of recovering bodies — sometimes badly mangled in accidents, charred or decomposed or partially eaten by insects or crustaceans — and helping to prepare them for postmortems; you tried, where it was possible, to make them look presentable for their loved ones to view; and you had the constant emotional challenge of receiving the loved ones who had come to identify their wives, husbands, partners; often it was someone who had kissed them goodbye just hours before.
You needed to have some normality you could escape to at the end of your day — or night. Cleo counted her blessings constantly that she had finally found love with such a decent and caring human being as Roy. Although she never stopped worrying about him. In the relatively short time they had known each other, and even shorter time they had been together, he had put his life on the line in the course of his job on too many occasions for her liking. And she knew that for as long as he remained in the police service, he always would. His commitment to what he did was an essential part of the man she had fallen in love with and married, the father of their child, the man with whom she wanted to spend the rest of her life.