Want You Dead (42 page)

‘None.’

‘The thing is, I’m not allowed to open up any property without knowing I have consent from the owner.’ He was staring at her more closely now.

‘I’ve just been abducted – kidnapped – by my ex. He’s got my handbag with everything in it. I need to change the locks before he – he – ’ Her eyes welled with tears. ‘Please,’ she said. ‘Please help me.’

She could see through her blurred eyes that he was wavering. ‘The thing is, I need to know it’s your property, lady. It’s more than my job’s worth.’

‘Come on, you don’t look like a jobsworth to me. You must have this all the time – I can’t believe that everyone who gets locked out of their home has ID with them, surely?’

She turned, wiping away her tears, and stared warily around. Looking back at where she thought she had seen the shadow moving. But the street was deserted. ‘Please help me, please.’

‘Is there one of your neighbours who could vouch for you?’ he asked, more friendly now.

She shook her head. ‘I haven’t been here very long . . . you see . . .’ She hesitated, unsure whether to tell him. But she couldn’t see any option. ‘This is . . . well, the thing is, I’m being stalked by my ex. This is a police safe house. The Sanctuary Scheme arranged this for me.’

‘Okay, so could we phone the police and have someone come down?’

‘I don’t have my phone. He kidnapped me and I escaped.’ She raised her arms. ‘Look at me, look at the state I’m in. I’ve just escaped – I’ve run over fields near the Dyke. He shot down a police helicopter. Some kind stranger gave me a lift here. There’s an officer who looks after me, PC Spofford, at Brighton police station – John Street.’

‘You look frozen,’ he said. ‘Tell you what, jump in, and I’ll phone him and put you on.’

She climbed gratefully into the dry warmth of the van. There was a strong reek of tobacco. As she pulled the door shut she said, ‘What’s your name?’

‘Mal Oxley,’ he said.

‘Do you have a ciggie I could bum, Mal?’

‘How do you know I smoke?’

‘I can smell it on you.’

Mal Oxley grinned. ‘I’ve only got roll-ups.’

‘A roll-up would be fine.’

He picked up his phone from the dashboard cradle. ‘Do you know PC Stafford’s number?’

‘Spofford,’ she said. ‘Just dial 999 and ask for the police – that’s what I’ve been told to do in any emergency.’

He dialled, put the phone on loudspeaker and jammed it back in the cradle. Moments later an operator answered.

‘Emergency, which service do you require?’

‘Police,’ he said, then rummaged in his pocket and produced a tobacco pouch and a pack of Rizla cigarette papers.

‘Sussex Police,’ a stern male voice answered moments later. ‘May I have your name and number, please.’

‘I have a very distressed lady with me who needs to speak urgently to a PC . . . er . . . Stanford.’

‘Spofford!’ Red corrected him.

‘I’m sorry, that should be PC Spofford.’

‘What is the lady’s name, please?’

Red leaned forward. ‘My name’s Red Westwood.’

There was a brief silence; she heard the putter of a keypad, then the change in tone of the operator’s voice. ‘I’ll try to reach him for you, Ms Westwood. We’ve been looking for you – are you safe now?’

‘Yes.’ She began crying again.

‘Can you give me your location?’

‘I’m outside my flat.’ She gave him the address. ‘I’ve just been kidnapped and escaped, but I can’t get inside because I don’t have my keys.’

‘I’ll try to contact PC Spofford, but in the meantime I’ll have a car with you within a few minutes. Are you safe for the moment?’

She looked at the locksmith, who was engrossed in laying a filter at one end of the brown cigarette paper. ‘Yes, thank you, I am.’ She peered nervously through the windscreen.

‘Can we contact you via this number?’ He was sounding kindly now, so kindly that her tears worsened.

‘Yes,’ she said, and sniffed.

‘If it makes you more comfortable, I’ll stay on the line until someone is with you.’

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Thank you very much. I’m in a van marked with a locksmith name.’ She looked at her companion.

‘24-Hour Lock-up,’ he said clearly, into the phone. ‘We’re parked on Westbourne Terrace just to the north of the Kingsway.’

With his large, grubby hands, he laid thick, golden strands of tobacco along the length of the paper, added more to it, then brought it to his lips, licked along the length, and rolled it. Then he handed the thin, slightly creased, but well-formed tube to her. ‘Get me into trouble, smoking in the workplace,’ he grinned, then held up the flame of a plastic lighter.

She inhaled the sweet smoke gratefully. As she did so, she was aware of what she assumed was an unmarked police car pulling up alongside, and suddenly she felt better, safer.

She opened the door and jumped down onto the road. Two uniformed officers climbed out of the car. One was a sturdily built woman in her late twenties, with brown curly hair and a friendly face; the other was a male, in his forties, tall and thin, holding a torch.

‘Ms Westwood?’ the woman asked, looking at her sympathetically.

Red nodded.

‘PC Holiday and PC Roberts. We’re on the Neighbourhood Team, with PC Spofford, so we know all about you. You look injured – do you need to go to hospital?’

‘I’m okay,’ Red said, wiping away her tears with the back of her hand, then pressing it against each of her eyes in turn to stop the stinging. She was aware of the cigarette in her left hand.

‘Have you just been up near the Dyke?’

Red nodded.

‘We need to get you to hospital.’

‘No, I’m okay – I – I ran into a barbed-wire fence, just cut myself a bit. I want to get into my flat, I have to get cleaned up. What’s happened – to the helicopter? I saw it – I saw it on fire.’

The two officers shot a glance at each other. ‘We don’t have any information yet,’ PC Roberts said. ‘We were just down the road when we got the call to come here.’

‘Thank you,’ Red said.

‘Were you with Bryce Laurent?’

She nodded. ‘I went to show a prospective client around a property at lunchtime. Then next thing I knew I was tied up in the back of a van being driven by Bryce. We went into some kind of car park for . . . I don’t know how long. Then out to the Dyke. I managed to escape. He was shooting at me – with a crossbow, I think. I was able to get to the road and flag down a car – the driver kindly dropped me here.’

‘Why didn’t you call us then?’

Red began crying again. ‘I – I don’t know. I – I just wanted to get home. I had no phone or money; I was just terrified, not thinking straight. But I realized I don’t have my keys or anything.’ She jerked a finger at the van. ‘And he won’t open the door for me without ID.’

‘Okay, we’ll speak to him,’ PC Holiday said. ‘But we really need to take you to the Victim Suite, where you can be made comfortable, receive medical attention, and we can give you an opportunity to provide an account of what’s happened.’

Red replied, ‘I know, but I’m not going anywhere right now. I want to go into my flat.’ She burst into tears.

Two minutes later the four of them headed towards the front door of Red’s building, the locksmith carrying a metal toolbox.

103

Monday, 4 November

Roy Grace on the radio to Cassian Pewe said, ‘I’m making my way to the RV point, which has been set up for emergency vehicles, sir. I’ll then go closer to the crash site and meet Bronze at the Forward Control Point, which is being set up. Silver’s in the Control Room and my role is as the Senior Investigating Officer, nothing else. I’ve given Silver my investigative requirement, which has been approved by Force Gold. My team at Sussex House are also feeding up-to-date intel to him. Everyone is focused on finding Laurent and Ms Westwood.’

He could see the red glow in the distance, over to their left, in the middle of the farmland that extended a mile south from here to the Hangleton residential district of Brighton. The lights of the houses and the distant sprawl of the city beyond were faint through the driving rain.

He looked down at his phone, trying to read the text he had received with directions to the scene, but it was hard at the speed they were travelling on the uneven country road. ‘I think we make a left, opposite where the road turns right up towards the Dyke,’ he said to Glenn Branson.

‘Copy.’

‘I think this is it,’ Glenn said, the headlights picking out the sign to a farm and a track to the left. Dyke Grange Farm.

He swung the car onto it and they hurtled down a steep, potholed incline, then around the back of a cluster of buildings, far too fast. The car bounced, and Grace could feel the rear end losing traction, swinging out to the left, as Glenn sawed at the wheel. They swung violently to the right, and this time, the phone flying out of his hand, Grace was certain they were going to spin. At the last possible moment the car swung back the other way, then in the opposite direction again. Then somehow they were going in a straight line once more.

‘Sorry about that,’ Glenn said. ‘Bit of a tank-slapper!’

Grace leaned forward to retrieve his phone from the footwell, and his face slammed into the dash as they bounced over a ridge on the cart track.

‘I think we could slow down now, Lewis,’ he said.

‘Yeah, you see, Hamilton and me, we’re good in the wet. Am I scaring you?’

‘No more than usual.’ Roy Grace could smell an increasingly strong, acrid odour of burning plastic and paint. It reminded him of torched cars he had attended.

‘It’s all about keeping the car balanced. Basic physics, yeah?’

‘I thought it was all about getting to your destination alive.’ Then, staring at the cluster of police, fire and ambulance vehicles they could now see in the beam of the headlights, Grace fell into a grim silence. They had obviously arrived at the RV point. In the almost ethereal red glow, two uniformed officers in hi-viz jackets were putting up a tape barrier. Firefighters were jetting water onto the burning wreckage in the distance.

As they pulled up behind a fire appliance, another car hurtled down the track behind them. Grace and Branson climbed out, instantly feeling the heat on their faces. They were greeted by Inspector Roy Apps, in his hi-viz jacket and police hat. The red glow gave him a slightly demonic appearance. An experienced police officer, Apps was the current Golf 99 – Duty Inspector for Brighton and Hove. A wiry man in his early fifties, he had started life as a gamekeeper before joining Sussex Police. This rural setting was strangely appropriate for him.

‘Hi Roy, what’s the update?’ Grace asked him. The stench of burning was even stronger now, laced with the reek of spent aviation fuel. He could feel the heat on his face even more intensely.

Normally a cheery man, unfazed by most things he encountered, the inspector had a sad countenance tonight. ‘It’s bad news, chief. NPAS 15 down and no sign of any survivors. The information I have is that there are three on board: the pilot, a police officer, Sergeant Amanda Morrison, and a paramedic. The standard crew. We believe they’re still in the helicopter, but the blaze is too fierce for anyone to get close enough to determine that. There’s an air crash investigation team coming down, but I don’t know when they are due.’

Grace shot a glance at the burning hulk beyond him, with a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. He was trying to shut out of his mind the thought of three humans incinerated in the inferno. But he could not shut out the knowledge that today two police officers involved with his investigation had been killed.

Then he heard the nasally voice of Assistant Chief Constable Cassian Pewe right behind him. ‘This is dreadful, Roy!’

He turned, and saw Pewe in his full dress uniform and braided cap.

‘This is the second tragedy we’ve had in the city today,’ Pewe said.

At that moment, out of thin air, a fair-haired young woman appeared, holding a shorthand notepad. ‘Amy Gee from the
Argus.
You’re the new Assistant Chief Constable, sir?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is there anything you’d like to say to the people of Brighton and Hove about this terrible tragedy?’

‘It’s not safe here. We will have something to say, but for now you must get back to safety.’

She turned to Roy Grace. ‘Detective Superintendent, I understand that DS Bella Moy, who died in a house fire on Marine Parade this morning, was one of your team investigating Operation Aardvark?’

‘Yes,’ he said tersely, not wanting to be rude.

‘And this police helicopter crash occurred during your operation. Unconfirmed reports are that a woman police sergeant has died in the crash.’

‘I don’t have enough information at this stage to be able to comment,’ he replied. ‘I will be holding a press conference tomorrow morning. You need to leave now.’

‘Can I just ask you which of the fires in the city you are currently linking to the arsonist, Detective Superintendent?’

‘I hope to be able to give that information tomorrow,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, don’t think me rude, one of my officers will escort you away.’

There were more headlights behind him now. He saw a television van and a Radio Sussex van approaching.

He turned to Roy Apps. ‘Is there a scene guard yet?’

‘I’ll have one in place in a few minutes.’

‘It needs to be sorted now – I want these bloody media people kept away. This is a crime scene, for Chrissake!’

‘Yes, sir. It’s being put in place as we speak. I’ll speed it up.’

‘Do we have any witnesses?’

‘There’s a local farmer.’ He pointed to a man who was on his mobile phone. ‘He’s just speaking to somebody and he’ll be back in a minute.’

Grace jerked a finger back at the approaching vehicles. ‘Keep them all at a safe distance.’

‘I will.’

Grace ducked under the tape, followed by Glenn Branson, and immediately saw the figure of Tony McCord, the Chief Fire Officer, heading towards him, looking solemn. He was a quiet, calm man, never easily perturbed, with film-star good looks. Grace had met him several times on past cases and he always thought that if he were a casting director looking for a handsome Fire Chief, McCord would fit the bill perfectly.