Want You Dead (38 page)

Roy Grace had, fortunately, never lost an officer before, and the fact that Bella Moy had been such a long-standing member of his team, someone he had greatly respected and grown fond of, made it all far worse. Norman Potting, bravely, was attending, red-eyed and hunched over the table looking lost. He had wanted to be there, he told Roy, as he couldn’t face the alternative of going home and sitting all alone. And besides, this was now personal. Roy agreed he could attend the briefing, but they both decided that he should no longer be part of the investigation.

It was too early for the investigators to tell the cause of the fire that had gutted the Royal Regent, but the coincidence of it being the place Red Westwood had been planning to move to was deeply suspicious to all the team. And the fact that there had been two hoax calls, sending the nearest fire appliances away in opposite directions to the fire, was too coincidental to be ignored.

The investigation into the cause of the fire would begin in earnest tomorrow morning, by which time the building should have cooled down sufficiently to enable structural engineers to enter and make it safe.

‘I want to start this evening,’ Roy Grace said, ‘with one minute’s silence in honour of our fallen colleague, Detective Sergeant Bella Moy, one of the very best and nicest officers I have ever worked with. She gave her life to save a small girl.’

He looked at his watch, then closed his eyes. Throughout the ensuing long minute, he could hear Norman Potting sobbing. When he opened his eyes, counting down silently the last few seconds, hardly any of the team had a dry eye.

‘Can I suggest Bella be put forward for a medal for bravery, Roy?’ Guy Batchelor said.

He nodded. ‘Yes, I’m going to talk to the Chief about it.’

Dave Green, the Crime Scene Manager, said grimly, ‘So damned tragic.’

Roy Grace said firmly, but gently, ‘She saved a child’s life.’

‘So why didn’t Bella come out after doing that?’ Green said. ‘She must have stayed on to try to get the dog.’

‘We don’t know that,’ Grace said. ‘We don’t know what happened in there.’

‘If it’s any consolation,’ Haydn Kelly said, ‘the sculptor Giacometti was once asked, if he was in a burning house and had the choice of saving a Rembrandt or a cat, which would he save? He replied the cat. He said that in any choice between art or life, he would choose life every time.’

Potting, his face buried in his hands, sobbed even more loudly. Roy Grace stood up, walked over to him, and put his arms around him. ‘She did something very brave, Norman,’ he said. ‘What’s happened is terrible and there are no words to describe how we are all feeling – and especially how you must be feeling. She did something that any of us might have done – and might one day have to do. That’s why we are police officers, and not clerks sitting behind desks, spending our lives pushing paper around, living in a sterile cocoon of sodding health and safety. Every time we go out, we potentially face a life-threatening situation. I would hope that in the same situation that Bella found herself in, any of us would have the courage to do the same thing, to take that same risk she did.’

He squeezed the Detective Sergeant’s shoulders. ‘The best possible way we can honour Bella is to ensure she did not die in vain – and that means catching this bastard before he can put any more lives at risk.’ He leaned down, kissed Norman Potting on the cheek, then returned to his chair, and looked down at his notes through eyes blurred with tears.

He paused for a moment to dab them with his handkerchief. ‘Okay, the first and most urgent item concerns Red Westwood, who has not been seen since she left her office at 10 a.m. today for a number of viewings of residential properties in the Brighton area. Her mother has been trying to get hold of her for several hours. Her last confirmed sighting was at a house in Coleman Avenue, Hove, where she showed a couple around. Then she had an appointment with a client to view a house in Tongdean Avenue.’ He looked at DS Exton. ‘Jon, you went there. Can you tell us your findings?’

‘Yes, sir. I attended with DC Davies. The gates to the property were open, and I found a Mini with the Mishon Mackay logo on it apparently abandoned there. There was no answer when we rang, so we forced entry and searched the house and surrounding grounds, but there was no sign of Red Westwood. I’ve requested ANPR and all CCTV sightings of her car prior to her arriving at the house, and what I have to date confirms her journey from the previous address to Tongdean Avenue. The surveillance team saw her enter the property, but don’t know what happened after that. She just disappeared. They couldn’t get too close in such a quiet area, but they did say no one followed her into the grounds of the house. When they were able to move forward safely they found her Mishon Mackay Mini still at the premises, but she was nowhere to be found. Subsequently, on searching the gardens at the rear of the property, officers discovered that a six-foot-wide piece of panelling that fenced the property off from the road on the other side had been removed, and there were tyre marks over the ground. It appeared that a vehicle had left the property by this makeshift exit.’

Grace nodded, annoyed about the loss, but knew from his own past experience that surveillance work could never be one hundred per cent. ‘I’ve taken the step of having Red Westwood’s parents temporarily removed from their hotel in Eastbourne, where they’ve been staying because of their house being torched. I’ve also ordered a round-the-clock police guard on her best friend, Raquel Evans, and her husband. We’ve put out an alert to find Ms Westwood and that operation is being run by the Duty Gold, Superintendent Jackson, alongside this investigation.’

As this was now a formal Sussex Police operation, the Gold, Silver and Bronze command structure was in place. Gold had set the strategy, Silver was implementing the strategy, and the Bronze commanders each had their own areas of responsibility, such as investigations, firearms or search.

He looked at DS Batchelor. ‘You’ve checked on her flat, Guy?’

‘Yes, sir. There’s no sign of her there.’

‘ So, working back to her last known sighting, which was with – ’ He paused to look down at his notes. ‘A Mr and Mrs Morley. They have subsequently been spoken to, correct?’ He looked at DC Jack Alexander.

‘Yes, sir, I met Mr John Morley at his office, a firm of independent financial advisers, early this afternoon. He said they had arrived late for the viewing because of having gone to the wrong address first, and that Ms Westwood seemed in a slightly agitated state because they had made her late for her next appointment. But she showed them round, was pleasant and helpful.’

‘Anything suspicious about him?’ Grace quizzed.

‘No, sir. He dropped his wife back at Seaford for an amateur dramatic rehearsal at ten past twelve. I checked this out and he was telling me the truth.’

‘And what about Morley’s movements after then?’

‘He had lunch with a client at Topolino’s restaurant in Hove. I spoke to one of the owners who confirmed he had arrived shortly after 1 p.m.’

‘Good work,’ Grace said.

‘Ms Westwood’s manager at Mishon Mackay informed me that her next appointment, the last before she was due to return to the office, was for midday, at a house in Tongdean Avenue called Tongdean Lodge. The appointment was with a Mr Andrew Austin. He was a new client, with a wife and son, looking for a prestigious property, and she had noted down the phone number on the log she had written in the ledger and entered on the computer. This is a procedure carried out by all estate agents ever since the disappearance of Suzy Lamplugh.’

Suzy Lamplugh was an estate agent who went missing, presumed murdered, in south London in 1986. She had gone to show a client, who had given his name as Mr Kipper, around a secluded property, and was never seen again.

‘Has someone phoned Mr Austin?’ Grace asked.

‘Yes, sir. The manager tried the number, and I tried it also. It’s answered by an elderly man on holiday in Tenerife in the Canary Isles. I contacted the phone provider, O2, and they’ve confirmed his name as the subscriber, and I’ve phoned the hotel where he claimed to be staying and they’ve confirmed he and his wife are there.’

‘Tongdean Lodge is on for three and a half million pounds, sir,’ DC Alexander said.

Grace was pensive for some moments. ‘Andrew Austin. Someone who can afford a house of that value has to be pretty seriously wealthy. Have you tried Googling him? Looking him up on Wikipedia?’

‘Both, sir,’ Alexander replied. ‘There are hundreds of them.’

‘What about the owners of Tongdean Lodge?’

‘They’re away at a second home they own in Florida.’ Jack Alexander checked his notes. ‘They have a couple who clean, called Mark and Debbie Brown, but they were not there today. The gardener comes on a Friday. There would not have been anyone at the property.’

Grace looked down at some jottings he had made on his pad. ‘So Red was last seen apparently on her way to meet a man who might not exist, who gave a false phone number?’ He looked around the grimly silent sea of faces. ‘I don’t like the sound of this. Not one bit.’

‘Presumably someone has checked again that she’s not lying somewhere in the grounds?’ Guy Batchelor asked.

‘Yes,’ Alexander replied. ‘The grounds have been searched and she’s not there.’

Grace looked back down at his pad. This day, which he thought could not possibly get any worse, had suddenly got a whole lot worse.

96

Monday, 4 November

Red had a splitting headache, made worse by the smell of exhaust fumes and the jolting of the vehicle. Her mouth and throat were parched and she was desperate for water. And the pounding inside her head was making it hard for her to think clearly. She should be afraid, she knew, but instead she was angry. Angry at herself for having walked into this trap.

Angry at Bryce.

She tried yet again to move her numb arms and then her legs, but he’d done a good job on them, and she could not even bring her legs together; she felt like a manacled animal. And she desperately needed to pee. She was not going to be able to hold on much longer. The vehicle, presumably the white van she had seen at the house, lurched again over something – a rut or a rock.

‘Guess you must be thirsty? Need the loo? You could never go very long without needing to pee, could you, Red? Using the
facilities
, as you always so delicately called them. You’ll be needing the
facilities
now, I’ll bet, eh?’

Then he picked up her mobile phone from the passenger seat. ‘I’d so love to switch this on, Red. Your phone I’m holding! I had to switch it off, same as I did mine, because phones give out a location position, even when they’re idle. Be nice to switch it on, though, and see who’s been missing you. Your mummy and daddy, I’ll bet. Wonder what she would say if she could see the two of us now, eh? The happy couple. We would have been, we both know that, if she hadn’t meddled so much. She just didn’t get it, did she? She didn’t get
us
. She was all obsessed about my past. Hey, who hasn’t bigged themselves up just a little? We’ve all told little porkies – do you think there’s a politician in the world who hasn’t? That’s all I did, and she destroyed us for that. You heard all those texts you sent me. They were from your heart, Red. Surely, you meant all you said in them? Because you loved me for what I was, not all the shit I had once been. If only your mother could have seen that, everything would be so very different now.’

He smiled and looked in the mirror, although he could see only darkness reflected in it. ‘We’re nearly there. I’ll take your gag off and your blindfold and we’ll see what you have to say for yourself. I do keep thinking that maybe I should give you one more chance – if you’re willing to give it a go. But then I realize all the bad stuff I’ve done just recently, that’s going to catch up with me, and where’s that going to leave us? Me in prison, knowing you are out there screwing a new man? It’s one hell of a dilemma, eh, Red?’

He halted the van outside the cluster of farm buildings, climbed out, leaving the engine running, and jerked open the two barn doors of the old grain store beside his workshop, drove in, and stopped, then switched off the engine and lights. Then he opened his door. The hot engine ticked and pinged noisily in the silence. The barn was cold and smelled of old straw and, at this moment, exhaust fumes from the van.

He turned his head to gaze at his prisoner, in the weak glow of the roof light. ‘Oh, Red, how different it could have been, eh? How very different. I’m quite sad, really. This is not what I had planned for you, all that time back, on our first date. It really isn’t. I’m sure this isn’t how either of us wanted to end up, is it?’

She lay motionless.

‘Red?’ he said. Then he became alarmed. ‘Red? Red?’

He ran around to the rear of the van, opened the doors and climbed in. ‘Red?’

She lay as still as a corpse.

97

Monday, 4 November

Roy Grace’s mother used to look at the clock on their kitchen wall at home and say, ‘How’s the enemy?’

Time was always the enemy to her, to the end, finally running out on her in the cancer ward at the Royal Sussex County Hospital. Time was everyone’s enemy, he thought more acutely than ever at this moment, checking his watch in the conference room of Sussex House. It was 6.45 p.m. Right now the enquiry was in ‘fast time’, where every second counted. If Red Westwood had been taken at the house, by the mysterious Andrew Austin, that would have been shortly after midday. Over six hours ago.

It was a grim fact that most victims of abductions were murdered within three hours. But if Andrew Austin was indeed Bryce Laurent, which seemed the most likely scenario, then there was a good chance she was still alive. Grace had no real idea what Laurent would want with her, or hope to gain by abducting her, and a number of dark scenarios crossed his mind.

Normally his team were sparking with thoughts and ideas at briefings, but this evening they were all so damned quiet. He suddenly clapped his hands together, really loudly. ‘Listen, everyone! I know we’re all in shock, but that’s not going to help save Red Westwood’s life if, I just hope to hell, she is still alive now. Okay? Right now, forget Bella, however tough that is for all of us. We have a very serious and urgent job to do.’