'Are you going?'
'Yes, I'm going. I always go at the end of the day; something wrong with that? I thought we were supposed to be keeping up appearances?'
'I guess, yes -1 mean ..."
She looked at him for a couple of seconds. 'Pull yourself together, for Christ's sake. Understand?'
He nodded lamely. Then she was gone.
He stayed on for another hour, working on his emails, then, with the noise of the cleaners driving him to distraction, he decided to quit for the day and take the rest of his work home.
On his way to the door, he picked up the package he had signed for earlier and tore it open. There was something inside, a small object, tightly wrapped in cellophane then bound with tape.
Frowning, he wondered what it was. A replacement sim card for a mobile? A computer part?
He pulled a pair of scissors out of the desk drawer and snipped one end open, squeezed it, and peered inside.
At first he thought it was a joke, one of those plastic fake fingers you can buy in novelty shops. Then he saw the blood.
'No,' he said, feeling giddy suddenly. 'No. NO.'
The severed fingertip fell from the pack and landed noiselessly on the carpet.
Stepping back away from it in horror, Mark saw there was an envelope inside the packet.
69
Grace turned off the main road and onto a country lane, barely beyond the outskirts of Lewes. He passed a farm-shop sign, a telephone booth, then saw a tall mesh fence topped with barbed wire, some of it erect, some in a state of collapse, ahead on his left. There were two gates, wide open, that didn't look as if they had been closed in a decade. Fixed to one of them was a faded, cracked painted sign which read 'WHEELER'S AUTO RECOVERY'. Beside it was another, much smaller warning sign, reading 'guard dogs.''
The appearance of the place was about as near to a hillbilly homestead as Grace had ever experienced. It was beyond ramshackle; it was beyond the most untidy place he had ever seen in his life.
The yard was dominated by a large blue tow-truck, parked amidst a dozen or so partially or totally cannibalized carcasses of vehicles, some smashed, some badly rusted, and one, a small Toyota, just looking as if it had been parked and someone had nicked everything it was possible to nick from it.
There were piles of sawn and unsawn logs, a wooden trestle, a rusting bandsaw, a decrepit Portakabin, against which was a faded chalked sign which read 'xmas trees sale', and a wood-framed bungalow that looked as if it could collapse at any moment.
As he drove in and switched the engine off, he heard the fierce, deep barking of a guard dog shattering the quiet stillness of the warm evening, and remained prudently in the car for some moments, waiting for a hound to appear. Instead, the front door of the bungalow opened, and a hulk of a man came out. In his fifties, he had thinning, greasy hair, a heavy five-o'clock shadow and a massive beer belly barely restrained by a string vest and bulging over the buckle of his brown dungarees like an overhang of snow about to avalanche.
'Mr Wheeler?' Grace said, approaching, still wary of the sound of the barking dog, which was getting even louder and deeper.
'Yes?' The man had a gentle face with big sad eyes, and massive, grimy hands. He smelled of rope and engine grease.
Grace pulled out his warrant card and held it up for him to see. 'Detective Superintendent Grace from Sussex CID. I'm very sorry to hear about your son.'
The man stood still, impassively, then Grace saw he was starting to tremble. His hands clenched tight, and a tear rolled down from the corner of each eye. 'You want to come in?' Phil Wheeler said, in a faltering voice.
'If you have a few minutes, I'd appreciate it.'
The inside of the house was pretty much like the outside and the reek of the place indicated a heavy smoker. Grace followed the man into a dingy sitting room with a three-piece suite and a large old television. Almost every inch of the floor and furniture was covered in motorbiking magazines, country and western magazines and vinyl record sleeves. There was a photograph of a fair-haired woman resting her hands on the shoulders of a small boy on a scooter, on the sideboard, and a few cheap-looking china ornaments, but nothing at all on the walls. A clock on the mantelpiece, set into the belly of a chipped porcelain racehorse, indicated the time at ten minutes past seven. Grace was surprised, checking it against his own watch, that it was more or less accurate.
Scooping several record sleeves off an armchair, Phil Wheeler said, by way of an explanation, 'Davey liked this stuff, used to play it all the time, liked to collect--'
He broke off and walked out of the room. 'Tea?' he called.
'I'm fine,' Grace said, unsure what kind of hygiene went on in the kitchen.
This level of interview would have been delegated to someone junior by most SIOs, but Grace had always been a firm believer in getting out in the field himself. It was his style of operating - and it was one of the aspects of police work that he found most interesting and rewarding if sometimes, like now, challenging.
After a couple of minutes, Phil Wheeler lumbered back into the room, swept a pile of magazines and some more record sleeves off
the settee and eased himself down, then pulled a tobacco tin out of his pocket. He prised open the tin with his thumbnail, removed a packet of cigarette papers, then proceeded, one-handed, to roll himself a cigarette. Grace couldn't help watching; it had always fascinated him how people could do this.
'Mr Wheeler, I understand your son told you he had some conversations on a walkie-talkie radio with a missing person, Michael Harrison.'
Phil Wheeler ran his tongue along the paper and sealed the cigarette. 'I can't understand why anyone would want to hurt my boy. He was the friendliest person you could meet.' Holding his unlit cigarette, he bicycled his hand in the air. 'Poor kid had - you know water on the brain, encephalitis. He was slow, but everyone liked him.'
Grace smiled in sympathy. 'He had a lot of friends in the traffic police.'
'He was a good lad.'
'So I understand.'
'He was my life.'
Grace waited. Wheeler lit the cigarette from a box of Swan Vesta matches and moments later the sweet smoke wafted across to Grace. He breathed in deeply, enjoying the smell, but not enjoying this task. Talking to the newly bereaved had always been, in his view, the single worst aspect of police work.
'Can you tell me a bit about the conversations he had? About this walkietalkie?'
The man inhaled, smoke spurting from his mouth and nostrils as he spoke. 'I got pretty angry with him on -1 don't know - Friday or Saturday. 'I didn't know he had the damned thing. He finally told me he'd found it near that terrible wreck on Tuesday night with the four lads.'
Grace nodded.
'He kept talking about his new friend. To be honest I didn't take much notice. Davey lived in - how do you put it - his own little world most of the time - always off having conversations with people inside his head.' He put the cigarette down in a tin ashtray, then blotted his eyes with a scrunched up handkerchief and sniffed. 'He was
always chatting. I sometimes had to switch off, otherwise he could drive me nuts.'
'Can you remember what he said about Michael Harrison?'
'He was very excited - I think it was Friday - he'd been told he could be a hero. You see, he loved American cop shows on the telly he always wanted to be a hero. He was going on about knowing where someone was, and that he was the only person in the world who knew, you see, and this was his chance to be a hero. But I didn't take much notice; had a busy day with two wrecks we had to bring in -1 didn't make the connection.'
'Do you have the radio?'
He shook his head. 'Davey must have taken it with him.'
'Did Davey drive?'
He shook his head. 'No. He liked to steer the truck sometimes, I let him do that on a quiet road - you know - like one hand on the wheel? But no, he could never drive, didn't have the ability. He had a mountain bike, that was all.'