‘Shit, man! How do people afford these places?’ Glenn said, staring at the steel gates between two columns topped with stone balls.
‘By not being cops,’ Grace retorted.
Money had never been a big factor in Grace’s life. Sure he liked nice things, but he’d never had swanky aspirations and he had always been careful to live within his means. Sandy had been terrific at saving here and there. It always amused him that she used to buy the next winter’s Christmas cards in the January sales.
But from these savings she was always buying them little treats, as she liked to call them. During the first few years of their marriage, when she worked for a travel agent and could get discounted holidays, she had twice saved enough for an entire fortnight abroad.
But no amount of scrimping and saving on his salary, even with all the overtime bonuses in the world that he used to get as a junior officer, would ever buy him anything close to the magnitude of the spread he was looking at now.
‘Remember that film, The Great Gatsby?’ Branson said. ‘The Jack Clayton version, with Robert Redford and Mia Farrow, right?’
Grace nodded. He remembered it vaguely, or at least the title.
‘Well that’s what this place is, innit? That’s a fuck-off house you’re looking at.’
And it was: a dead straight tree-lined drive, several hundred yards long, opening into a circular car park with an ornamental pond in the middle, in front of a substantial white Palladian – or at least Palladian-style – mansion.
Grace nodded. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the doors of the Volvo open. ‘Here comes trouble,’ he said quietly. The DCs climbed out of their car.
Maggie Campbell, a dark-haired woman in her early thirties, and Vanessa Ritchie, a tall thin redhead, two years her senior, with a harder face – and demeanour – strode up to them, both in smart but sombre plain clothes.
‘There’s no way four of us can go in, Roy,’ DC Ritchie said. ‘It’s too many.’
‘I’ll go in first with Glenn, and break the news. Then I’ll phone you when I think you should come in and take over.’
He saw Maggie Campbell frown. Ritchie shook her head. ‘It’s the wrong way round – you know that.’
‘Yes, I do, but that’s the way I want to play this.’
‘Play this?’ she responded angrily. ‘This isn’t some kind of a bloody experiment. It’s wrong.’
‘What’s wrong, Vanessa, is that a father shouldn’t have to find out that part of his daughter has been found, short of a few important bits such as her head, in a bloody field with a beetle up her rectum. That’s what’s bloody wrong.’
The FLO tapped her chest. ‘That is what we did our training for. We are specialists in all aspects of bereavement.’
Grace looked at the women in turn. ‘I know all about your training and I know both of you – I’ve worked with you before and I respect you. This has nothing to do with your abilities. Your training gives you guidance, but at the end of the day there’s also the policing aspect. On this occasion I have my reasons for wanting to break the news, and as the SIO on this case I set the rules, OK? I don’t want any more sour faces from you, I want cooperation. Understood?’
The two FLOs nodded but still did not look comfortable.
‘Have you decided how much you are going to tell the father?’ Vanessa Ritchie said tartly.
‘No, I’m going to play it by ear. I’ll bring you up to speed before I call you in, OK?’
Maggie Campbell smiled in a half-hearted, conciliatory way. DC Ritchie gave him a reluctant You’re the boss shrug.
On a nod from his boss, Branson pressed the bell, and moments later the gates swung jerkily open. They drove up to the house. Grace parked between the two cars outside, an old, rather grubby BMW 7 series and a very ancient Subaru estate.
As they approached the front door it was opened by a distinguished-looking man in his mid-fifties, with dark hair streaked with silver at the temples, wearing an open-necked white business shirt with gold cufflinks, suit trousers and shiny black loafers. He was holding a mobile phone.
‘Detective Superintendent Grace?’ he said in an upper-crust accent which was slightly muffled as he seemed to speak through his teeth, scanning both police officers uncertainly. He had a pleasant smile, but sad blue-grey eyes like a pair of little lost souls.
‘Mr Derek Stretton?’ Grace asked. Then he and Branson both showed him their warrant cards out of courtesy.
Ushering them in, Derek Stretton asked, ‘How was your drive?’
‘It was fine,’ Grace said. ‘I think we picked a good time of day.’
‘It’s a beastly road; can’t think why they can’t just make it motorway. Janie’s always spending hours stuck when she comes down here.’
The first thing Grace noticed as he entered the hallway was how sparsely furnished the place was. There was a fine long inlaid table, and a tallboy and antique chairs, but there were no rugs or floor coverings, and he observed a row of shadows along the walls where paintings had clearly recently been removed.
Leading them through into an equally barren drawing room, with two large sofas on bare boards and what looked like a plastic picnic table put between them as a coffee table, Derek Stretton seemed in a hurry to explain, gesturing at the bare walls of the room and the large rectangular shadows, many with bare wires poking out, some with small lights at the top. ‘Afraid I’ve had to let go of some of the family silver. Made a few bad investments…’
That explained the shadows on the wall, Grace thought. They’d probably gone to auction. Stretton looked so distressed, he felt genuinely sorry for the man, and that was without the bombshell he was about to drop.
‘My housekeeper isn’t-’ He waved his arms helplessly in the air. ‘Um, but can I get you some tea? Coffee?’
Grace was parched. ‘Tea please, milk, no sugar.’
‘The same, please,’ Branson said.
As Stretton went out, Grace walked over to one of the few pieces of furniture in the room, an elegant side table covered in photograph frames.
There were a couple of much older people – grandparents, he presumed. Then one of a slightly younger Derek Stretton with an attractive woman of about the same age. Next to this was a young woman – Janie, he guessed. She was about seventeen or eighteen in the photograph, pretty and very classy-looking, in a black velvet ball gown, with long fair hair swept up and clipped by two diamanté barrettes, and an ornate silver choker around her neck. She bore a striking resemblance to a young Gwyneth Paltrow. She was smiling at the camera, but there was nothing self-conscious in that smile. To Grace it was a Yes, I am gorgeous and I know it smile.
There was another photograph next to it, also of Janie, a couple of years younger, on a ski slope, wearing a lilac anorak, designer sunglasses and a seriously cool expression.
Grace glanced at his watch. It was 11.30 a.m. He’d ducked out of the press conference, leaving it to the PRO Dennis Ponds to tell the pack that they now had the name of the victim, and would be releasing it the moment her next of kin had been informed – which would be in about an hour and a half or so. Then he wanted Ponds, in particular, to get her photograph out in as many places as possible, to see what sightings of her last hours might come in from the public, and to get the case on the next episode of Crimewatch on television, the following Wednesday, if they hadn’t made progress by then.
Branson wandered over to the fireplace. A number of birthday cards stood on the mantelpiece. Grace followed. He stared at one with a cartoon of a proud-looking man in a suit and bow tie, with the wording above, ‘To a very special Dad!’