Dead Like You (14 page)

1998

36

Friday 2 January

It was now eight days since Rachael Ryan had been reported missing by her parents.

Eight days in which there had been no proof of life.

Roy Grace had worked doggedly on the case since Christmas Day, increasingly certain something was very wrong, until Chief Inspector Jack Skerritt had insisted that the Detective Sergeant take New Year’s Eve off to spend with his wife.

Grace had done so reluctantly, torn between his concern to find Rachael and his need to keep the peace at home with Sandy. Now, after a two-day absence, he returned on this Friday morning to a briefing update by Skerritt. The Chief Inspector told his small team of detectives of his decision, made in consultation with his ACC, to upgrade
Operation Sundown
to an Incident Room. A HOLMES – Home Office Large Major Enquiry System team – had been requisitioned, and six additional detectives from other parts of the county were being drafted in.

The Incident Room was set up on the fourth floor of John Street police station, next to the CCTV department and across the corridor from the busy
Operation Houdini
Incident Room, where the investigation into the Shoe Man continued.

Grace, who was convinced that the two operations should be merged, was allocated his present desk, where he was to be based for the duration of the inquiry. It was by the draughty window, giving him a bleak view across the car park and the grey, rain-soaked rooftops towards Brighton Station and the viaduct.

Seated at the next desk along was DC Tingley, a bright, boyish-looking twenty-six-year-old police officer whom he liked. In particular, he liked the man’s energy. Jason Tingley, sleeves rolled up, was on the phone, pen in hand, dealing with one of the dozens of calls that had come in following their reconstruction, three days earlier, of Rachael’s journey from the East Street taxi rank back home.

Grace had a thick file on Rachael Ryan on his desk. Already, despite the holidays, he had her bank and her credit-card details. There had been no transactions during the past week, which meant he could effectively rule out that she had been mugged for the contents of her handbag. There had been no calls from her mobile phone since 2.35 on Christmas morning.

However, there was something useful he had gleaned from the mobile phone company. There were mobile phone base stations, or mini masts, located around Brighton and Hove, and every fifteen minutes, even in standby mode, the phone would send a signal to the nearest mast, like a plane radioing its current position, and receive one back.

Although no further calls had been made from Rachael Ryan’s phone, it had remained switched on for three more days, until the battery died, he guessed. According to information he’d received from the phone company, shortly after her last phone call, she had suddenly moved two miles east of her home – in a vehicle of some kind, judging from the speed at which it had happened.

She had remained there for the rest of the night, until 10 a.m. on Christmas Day. Then she had travelled approximately four miles west, into Hove. Again the speed of the journey indicated that she was travelling in a vehicle. Then she had stopped and remained static until the last signal received, shortly after 11 p.m. on Saturday.

On a large-scale map of Brighton and Hove on the Incident Room wall, Grace had drawn a red circle around the maximum area that would be covered by this particular beacon’s range. It included most of Hove as well as part of Brighton, Southwick and Portslade. Over 120,000 people lived within its radius – an almost impossible number for house-to-house enquiries.

Besides, the information was only of limited value, he realized. Rachael could have been separated from her phone. It was just an indicator of where she
might
be, but no more. But so far it was all they had. One line he would try, he decided, was to see if anything had been picked up on CCTV cameras on the routes matching the signal information. But there was only coverage on major routes and that was limited.

Rachael did not own a computer and there was nothing on the one in her office at American Express to give any clue as to why she might have disappeared.

At the moment it was if she had fallen through a crack in the earth.

Tingley put down the phone and drew a line through the name he had written a couple of minutes earlier on his pad. ‘Tosser!’ he said. ‘Time waster.’ Then he turned to Roy. ‘Good New Year’s Eve, mate?’

‘Yeah, it was all right. Went with Dick and Leslie Pope to Donatello’s. You?’

‘Went up to London with the missus. Trafalgar Square. It was brilliant – until it started pissing with rain.’ He shrugged. ‘So what do you think? She still alive?’

‘Not looking good,’ he replied. ‘She’s a homebody. Still sore about the bust-up with her ex. Into shoes, big time.’ He looked at his colleague and shrugged. ‘That’s the bit I keep coming back to.’

Grace had spent an hour earlier in the day with Dr Julius Proudfoot, the behavioural analyst
Operation Houdini
had drafted into their team. Proudfoot told him that, in his view, Rachael Ryan’s disappearance could not be connected to the Shoe Man. He still did not understand how the arrogant psychologist had arrived at that conclusion, since he had so little evidence.

‘Proudfoot insists this isn’t the Shoe Man’s style. He says the Shoe Man attacks his victims and then leaves them. Because he’s used the same MO for five victims, Proudfoot doesn’t accept that he would suddenly have changed and kept one.’

‘Similar MO, Roy,’ Jason Tingley said. ‘But he takes them in different places, right? He tried that first one in an alley. One in a hotel room. One in her home. One under the pier. One in a multi-storey car park. Clever if you want to look at it that way – makes it hard for anyone to second-guess him.’

Grace looked down at his notes, thinking hard. There was one common denominator with each of the Shoe Man’s victims. All of them were into designer shoes. Each one had bought a new pair of shoes, from different shops in Brighton, shortly before they were attacked. But so far interviews with staff in the shops had revealed nothing helpful.

Rachael Ryan had bought a new pair of shoes too. Three days before Christmas. Expensive for a girl of her means – £170. She had been wearing them the night she vanished.

But Proudfoot had dismissed that.

Grace turned to Tingley and told him this.

Tingley nodded, looking pensive suddenly. ‘So if it isn’t the Shoe Man, who’s taken her? Where has she gone? If she’s OK, why isn’t she contacting her parents? She must have seen the appeal in the
Argus
or heard it on the radio.’

‘Doesn’t make any sense. She normally phones her parents every day and chats to them. Eight days of silence? And at this time of year – Christmas and New Year? No call to wish them Happy Christmas or Happy New Year? Something’s happened to her, for sure.’

Tingley nodded. ‘Abducted by aliens?’

Grace looked back down at his notes. ‘The Shoe Man took his victims in a different place each time, but what he did to them was consistent. And even more important was what he did to his victims’ lives. He didn’t need to kill them. They were already dead inside by the time he had finished with them.’

Are you a victim of the Shoe Man, Rachael? Or has some other monster got you?

37

Friday 9 January

MIR-1, the larger of the two Major Incident Rooms at Sussex House, had an atmosphere that Roy Grace always found energizing.

Located in the heart of the Major Crime Suite at the CID headquarters, it would have looked to a casual observer like any other large administrative office. It had cream walls, functional grey carpeting, red chairs, modern wooden workstations, filing cabinets, a water dispenser and several large whiteboards on the walls. The windows were high up, with permanently closed blinds across them, as if to discourage anyone from wasting one second of their time looking out of them.

But to Roy Grace this was much more than an office. MIR-1 was the very nerve centre of his current investigation, as it had been with the previous ones he had run from here, and to him it had an almost hallowed atmosphere. Many of the worst crimes committed in Sussex in the past decade had been solved, and the offenders locked up, thanks to the detective work that had been carried out in this room.

The red, blue and green marker-pen scrawlings on the whiteboards in any other office out in the commercial world might have been performance figures, sales targets, market penetrations. Here they were timelines of the crimes, family trees of the victims and suspects, along with photographs and any other key information. When they got an E-Fit of the offender, hopefully soon, that would go up too.

The place instilled in everyone a sense of purpose, of racing against a clock, and, except during briefings, there was little of the chat and banter between colleagues that was usual in police offices.

The only frivolity was a photocopied cartoon of a fat blue fish from the film
Finding Nemo
which Glenn Branson had stuck on the inside of the door. It had become a tradition in Sussex CID for a jokey image to be found for each operation, to provide a little light relief from the horrors that the team had to deal with, and this was the movie-buff Detective Sergeant’s contribution to
Operation Swordfish.

There were three other dedicated Major Crime Suites around the county, also housing similar rooms, the most recent being the purpose-built one at Eastbourne. But this location was more convenient for Roy Grace, as well as being well sited, because the two crimes he was now investigating had occurred only a couple of miles away.

There were all kinds of repeating patterns in life, he had noticed, and it seemed that recently he was on a run of crimes that took place – or were discovered – on Fridays, thus ensuring his and everyone else’s weekend was wiped out.

He was meant to be going to dinner with Cleo at one of her oldest friend’s tomorrow night – Cleo wanted to show him off, as she grinningly told him. He had been looking forward to a further insight into the life of this woman he was so deeply in love with and still knew so little about. But that was now down the khazi.

Fortunately for him, unlike Sandy, who had never understood or got used to his frequent crazy working hours, Cleo was regularly on call herself 24/7, having to go out at all hours to recover bodies from wherever they were found. Which made her much more sympathetic – although not always totally forgiving.

It was the case in the early stages of any major crime investigation that everything else had to be instantly dropped. The first task of the Senior Investigating Officer’s assistant was to clear the SIO’s diary.

It was the first twenty-four hours after the crime had been discovered that were the most crucial. You needed to protect the crime scene to preserve the forensic evidence as much as possible. The perpetrator would be at his most heightened state of anxiety, the
red mist
that people tended to be in after committing a serious crime, in which they might behave erratically, drive erratically. There would be possible eyewitnesses for whom it was all fresh in their minds, and a chance to reach them quickly through the local press and media. And all CCTV cameras within a reasonable radius would still retain footage for those past twenty-four hours.

Grace looked down at the notes typed by his assistant – his MSA – which lay beside his fresh Policy Book for this case.

‘It is 6.30 p.m., Friday, 9 January,’ he read out. ‘This is the first briefing of
Operation Swordfish
.’

The Sussex Police computer threw up operation names at random, most of them totally irrelevant to the case on which they were working. But here, he thought wryly, it was just a tad appropriate, fish being slippery creatures.

Grace was pleased that all but one of the trusted key CID members he wanted for his core team were available. Seated around the workstation with him were DC Nick Nicholl, still looking bleary-eyed from recent fatherhood, DC Emma-Jane Boutwood, highly effective DS Bella Moy, an open box of Maltesers, as ever, in front of her, belligerent DS Norman Potting, and Grace’s mate and protégé DS Glenn Branson. Absent was DS Guy Batch-elor, who was away on annual leave. Instead he had a detective constable he’d worked with some while back and had been very impressed with, Michael Foreman, a lean, quietly authoritative man, with gelled dark hair, who had an air of calm about him that made people naturally turn to him, even when he wasn’t the senior officer present at a situation. For the past year, with a temporary promotion to acting sergeant, Foreman had been on secondment to the team at the Regional Intelligence Office. Now he was back at Sussex House, in his old rank, but Grace did not think it would be long before the man became a full sergeant. And, no question, he was heading for a much higher things than that.

Also present among Grace’s regulars was HOLMES analyst John Black, a mild, grey-haired man who could have been a backroom accountant, and DC Don Trotman, a Public Protection Officer, who would be tasked with checking on MAPPA, the Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements, whether any recently released prisoners who were sexual offenders fitted the MO of the current offender.

New to the team was an analyst, Ellen Zoratti, who would be working closely with Brighton division and the HOLMES analyst, progressing the intelligence leads, checking with the National Police Crime Database and SCAS, the Serious Crime Analysis Section, as well as carrying out instructions from Roy Grace.

Also new was a female press officer, Sue Fleet, from the revamped Police Public Relations Team. The pleasant thirty-two-year-old redhead, who had been a trusted and popular member of the Central Brighton John Street team, had replaced the previous public relations officer, Dennis Ponds, a former journalist who had never had an easy relationship with many members of this force, including Grace himself.

Grace wanted Sue Fleet present to organize an immediate media strategy. He needed to get a quick public response to help in the task of finding the offender and to alert the female population to the possible dangers they now faced, but at the same time he did not want to throw the city into panic. It was a delicate PR balance and would be a challenging task for her.

‘Before I start,’ Grace said, ‘I want to remind you all of some statistics. In Sussex we have a good clear-up rate for homicide – with 98 per cent of all murders in the past decade solved. But in rape we’ve fallen behind the national average of 4 per cent to just above 2 per cent. This is not acceptable.’

‘Do you think that’s down to the attitude of some police officers?’ asked Norman Potting, dressed in one of the tired old tweedy jackets that reeked of pipe smoke that he always seemed to wear. In Grace’s view they made him look more like an elderly geography teacher than a detective. ‘Or that some victims are just not reliable witnesses – because of other agendas?’

‘Other agendas, Norman? Like that old attitude police officers used to have that women who got raped asked for it? Is that what you mean?’

Potting grunted, non-committally.

‘For God’s sake, what planet are you on?’ Bella Moy, who had never liked him, rounded on him furiously. ‘It’s like living a real
Life on Mars
working with you.’

The DS shrugged defensively and then mumbled, barely audibly, as if he wasn’t convinced enough to say whatever he had on his mind more boldly, ‘We know that some women cry rape out of guilt, don’t they? It does make you wonder.’

‘Makes you wonder what?’ Bella demanded.

Grace was glaring at him, scarcely able to believe his ears. He was so angry he was tempted to kick the man off his investigation right now. He was beginning to think he had made a mistake bringing this tactless man in on such a sensitive case. Norman Potting was a good policeman, with a range of detective skills that were, unfortunately, not matched by his social skills. Emotional intelligence was one of the major assets of a good detective. On a scale of one to a hundred, Potting would have rated close to zero on this score. Yet he could be damned effective, particularly on outside enquiries. Sometimes.

‘Do you want to stay on this investigation, Norman?’ Grace asked him.

‘Yes, Chief, I do. I think I could contribute to it.’

‘Really?’ Grace retorted. ‘Then let’s get something straight, from the start.’ He glanced around the assembled company. ‘I hate rapists as much as I hate murderers. Rapists destroy their victims’ lives. Whether it is a stranger rape, a date rape or a rape by someone the victim knew and thought they trusted. And there’s no difference in that, whether it’s female rape or male rape, OK? But at this moment we happen to be dealing with attacks on women, which are more common.’

He stared pointedly at Norman Potting, then went on: ‘Being raped is like being in a bad car crash that leaves you disabled for life. One moment a woman is going about her day or her night, in her comfort zone, the next moment she is shattered, and she’s all smashed up in the wreckage. She faces years of counselling, years of terror, nightmares, mistrust. No matter how much help she receives, she will never be the same again. She will never lead what we know as a
normal
life again. Do you understand what I’m saying, Norman? Some women who are raped end up maiming themselves afterwards. They scrub their vaginas with wire wool and bleach because they have such a need to get rid of what happened. That’s just a small part of what being raped can do to someone. Do you understand?’ He looked around. ‘Do you all understand?’

‘Yes, chief,’ Potting mumbled in his thick burr. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be insensitive.’

‘Does a man with four failed marriages know the meaning of the word
insensitive
,’ Bella Moy asked, angrily snatching a Malteser from the box, popping it in her mouth and crunching it.

‘OK, Bella, thank you,’ Grace said. ‘I think Norman knows where I’m coming from.’

Potting stared at his notepad, his face a dark shade of beetroot, and nodded, chastened.

Grace looked back down at his notes. ‘We have another slightly sensitive issue. The Chief Constable, the Deputy Chief Constable and two of our four Assistant Chief Constables were all at the same dinner dance at the Metropole Hotel on New Year’s Eve which Nicola Taylor, the first rape victim, attended.’

There was a moment of silence as everyone reflected on this.

‘Are you saying that makes them suspects, boss?’ DC Michael Foreman asked.

‘Everyone who was in the hotel is a potential suspect, but I think I’d prefer to call them at this point
material witnesses to be eliminated from our enquiries
,’ Grace replied. ‘They’re going to have to be interviewed along with everyone else. Any volunteers?’

No one raised a hand.

Grace grinned. ‘Looks like I’ll have to allocate that task to one of you. Could be a good opportunity to get noticed for promotion, or screw up your career permanently.’

There were a few uncomfortable smiles in the room.

‘Perhaps I can recommend our master of tact, Norman Potting,’ Bella Moy said.

There was a titter of laughter.

‘I’d be happy to take that on,’ Potting said.

Grace, deciding that Potting was the last person in this room he would allocate that task to, scribbled a note in his Policy Book, then studied his briefing notes for a moment.

‘We have two stranger rapes within eight days, with enough similarity in the MO to assume for the moment it is the same offender,’ he went on. ‘This charmer made both his victims perform sexual acts on themselves with their shoes, then penetrated them anally with the heels of their shoes, then raped them himself. From what we have been able to establish – and the second victim has so far only given us a little information – he was unable to maintain an erection. This may have been due to premature ejaculation or because he is sexually dysfunctional. There is one significant difference in his MO. Back in 1997, the Shoe Man took only one shoe, and his victim’s panties. In the Metropole rape of Nicola Taylor he took all her clothes, including both her shoes. With Roxy Pearce, he took just her shoes.’

He paused to look down at his notes again, while several members of his team made notes also.

‘Our offender appears to be forensically aware. In each case he wore a black hood and surgical gloves and used a condom. He either shaved his bodily hair or naturally had none. He is described as being of medium to small height, thin and softly spoken, with a neutral accent.’

Potting put up his hand and Grace nodded.

‘Chief, you and I were both involved with
Operation Sundown
, the disappearance of a woman back in 1997 which may or may not have been connected to a similar case then, the Shoe Man –
Operation Houdini
. Do you think there’s a possible link?’

‘Apart from the differences in the trophies he took, the Shoe Man’s MO is remarkably similar to the current offender’s.’ Grace nodded at the Analyst. ‘This is one reason I’ve brought Ellen in.’

Sussex CID employed forty analysts. All but two of them were female, most of them with social sciences backgrounds. Male analysts were so rare that they were nicknamed
manolysts.
Ellen Zoratti was a very bright woman of twenty-eight, with dark hair just off her shoulders, cut in a sharp, modern style, and was elegantly dressed in a white blouse, black skirt and zebra-striped tights.