‘And he lives there with his partner, Dawn?’
‘As I understand, yes.’
Hailsham was some twenty miles to the east of the city. ‘Has anyone said anything to him?’ Grace asked.
Batchelor shook his head. ‘I’ve told Glenn but no one else.’
‘Do you have any view on this, Glenn?’
‘I don’t, no. It may be entirely innocent — but he’s not his usual self at the moment.’
‘He told me he had some issues but didn’t go into detail,’ Grace replied.
‘His relationship’s on the rocks, I heard,’ Batchelor said.
‘I asked him the other day,’ Branson said. ‘Told him if he wanted to talk about anything, you know, man to man, I’d go and have a beer with him. He nearly bit my head off.’
‘He’s been like this for a while?’
‘Can’t say for sure, but that feels about right.’
‘Thanks, guys, leave it with me.’
Grace sat still, waiting some moments after the two detectives had left before calling Exton. Thinking. The Detective Sergeant was calling sex workers on his phone. His car repeatedly in the vicinity. His erratic behaviour starting around the time of Lorna Belling’s death.
The unthinkable?
He hoped more than anything in the world, right now, not. Despite all its problems, and the occasional total prick like Cassian Pewe, he loved the police — and particularly his own force, Sussex — with all his heart. There were few things worse than a rogue cop, because internally that damaged the trust that was vital in any team. You looked after each other, watched each other’s backs. The day you lost trust in a fellow officer was a slippery slope, because it diminished everyone in your eyes.
Not relishing the task ahead of him, he tapped the speed-dial buttons on his phone for the DS.
81
Thursday 28 April
Cleo knelt on the living-room floor encouraging Noah, who was sitting on his play mat, to touch the birds and animals on the mobile suspended above him. ‘Dog!’ she said. ‘Duck!’
Noah reached up and suddenly punched an elephant hard. It swung into a pig, making a clacking sound, and he giggled. Humphrey, asleep on his blanket, which he always dragged out of his basket, was making strange squeaking noises and twitching. Having a doggie dream, Cleo thought.
‘Humphrey!’ she said softly. ‘Humphrey, it’s OK!’
Suddenly there was a series of crashing sounds above them, like brutal overhead thunder. Noah looked up, startled. Humphrey, instantly awake, began barking loudly.
A metallic clanging sound. Another rumble of thunder.
‘Jesus!’ Cleo sprinted up the stairs and along to Bruno’s room, just as there was another shattering boom-boom-boom followed by a cataclysmic clash of cymbals, and pushed open the door.
It was Bruno, with his drum kit assembled, in full flow. He’d already explained them to her yesterday, as she had helped him unpack them, telling her very solemnly in great detail what each was called and its role. There were five black and white drums — a snare drum, a bass drum and three toms; two of them stood flat, three of them were angled towards him and had a black cross taped on them. The brand was stencilled in black on each of the cymbals. Paiste.
He was seated on a stool, in a T-shirt, tracksuit bottoms and white socks, wearing headphones, pounding away for all he was worth with the wooden sticks, and working the foot pedals for the bass drum and hi-hat cymbals. He was lost to the world, with a distant smile on his face as he nodded his head, vigorously and in deep concentration. A red and white football lay on the floor near him.
Looking around the room, Cleo saw a ring-bound notebook lying open on his bed. On it were multi-coloured squares. Red, orange, blue, green, yellow. It was headed Week ‘A’, and just below, Week ‘B’. Divided into periods, blocked days down the left were marked 1–5. She read across some of the classes: Spanish; Science; Maths; Music.
His school timetable. She was pleased and impressed he had already filled it in. Clearly he was meticulous with detail. Something he had inherited from his father, she wondered? Roy had that same methodical mind — something she realized that came with the territory of being a good detective.
He didn’t notice her.
She walked across to him, and tapped him gently.
He lifted off his headphones.
‘Bruno, you forgot to put the soft pads on! It makes quite a noise downstairs — and you’d wake your brother if he was sleeping.’
Bruno apologized and said he had forgotten and would put them on immediately.
She slipped back out and closed the door, gently — not that he would probably have heard if she had slammed it. She went back downstairs and squatted on the floor with Noah, who now seemed oblivious to the din. Humphrey was looking up at the ceiling and growling.
She stroked the dog’s head. ‘It’s OK, boy!’
Humphrey growled again.
As she played with Noah she was thinking about a book she had read, in translation, as part of her A-level literature studies at school, The Tin Drum, by the German writer Günter Grass. From what she could remember, the main character was an autistic boy called Oskar, who could only remember his childhood by getting himself into some kind of a trance by pounding on a toy tin drum.
But Bruno didn’t seem like that at all. Maybe right now, up in his room, he was dreaming he was playing in a rock band. Of a future as a rock band drummer? She looked up at the ceiling. He was drumming again without the pads on, obviously ignoring her. Even though he was two floors above her, the sound was reverberating through the house. She was going to have to take this up with Roy.
Noah put a plastic sheep into his mouth. As she pulled it out, he began to cry, then scream, reaching for it back. His screams almost drowned out the sound of the drums. Almost.
Scooping up Noah in her arms, he screamed even louder, scrabbling his hands through the air, reaching out for the sheep again.
Sitting there on the floor, with the stereo din of her son crying and her stepson above her making an increasingly demented sound with the drums, she found herself, very unmaternally, wishing she was back at work right now. She was missing what now seemed the blissful silence of the mortuary.
82
Thursday 28 April
At a few minutes past 5 p.m. there was a faint knock on Roy Grace’s door.
‘Come in!’ he called out.
Jon Exton entered. The black bags under his eyes seemed to have deepened further, and his stooped posture made him look as if he had shrunk. He smiled nervously. ‘Hi, boss.’
Grace gestured him to sit down and stared hard across the table at him. ‘Jon, I need to know just what is going on with you. Is there something you want to say to me?’
Exton’s hands were shaking as he spoke. ‘As I told you earlier, boss, just going through a bit of a bad patch with my beloved.’
‘With Dawn?’
‘Yes.’
Grace nodded. ‘I’m not here to judge you, but I need you to tell me the absolute truth.’ Watching his eyes intently, he went on. ‘I’ve been asked to speak to you by Professional Standards — or rather, let me put it another way, I persuaded them to give me the chance to speak to you before they do, OK? So I don’t want any bullshit from you.’
‘Professional Standards? What — what about, boss?’
Looking at him even more intently, Grace asked, ‘Jon, have you been using the services of prostitutes?’
The DS’s astonishment was real, Grace could see it in his eyes.
‘What? Prostitutes? Me?’ He sounded incredulous.
‘You heard what I just asked you. Have you been using your phone to look for sex?’