Stop them dead, p.28
Stop Them Dead, page 28
The dog and the big oaf of a man marched towards him menacingly. A big, muscular, shaven-headed ugly bastard, wearing tracksuit bottoms and trainers, bare-chested, much of his flabby upper torso covered in tattoos, he strode towards Chris’s Audi, looking about as welcoming as a nuclear warhead on a guided missile.
Making a split-second decision whether to get back in his car and make a dash for it or stay and try to engage, he chose the latter. He had just put his car keys in his pocket to free up his hand to give the man a handshake, when the charmer reached him, coming too close for comfort, into his personal space, almost eyeball to eyeball. So close that when he spoke, Chris could smell recent cigarette smoke on his body and stale garlic on his breath. ‘What do you want here?’ he asked by way of introduction.
‘My name’s Christopher Fairfax – and you are?’
‘Yeah, you said. What’s it to you who I am?’
‘I’m looking for Terry Jim. I was given this address for him.’
The man gave him a smile that contained anything but humour. ‘Were you now? Well, you’ve found him, this must be your lucky day. I’d go and buy a lottery ticket if I was you.’
Unsure quite how to respond, Chris composed his thoughts for a few seconds, as Terry Jim moved his face even closer. ‘My wife and I bought a puppy a few days ago from a man who gave his name as John Peat – do you know him?’
Jim shook his head guilelessly.
‘I understand he also goes under the names of Tom Hartley, Jonathan Jones and Michael Kendrick.’
‘Must be a busy guy,’ Jim retorted.
‘You need to hear me out,’ Chris said, determined not to be cowed or intimidated, despite feeling very nervous.
‘Do I?’
‘My daughter went into a van with some puppies in cages that this John Peat had. One of these puppies bit my daughter, and she is now displaying symptoms of rabies.’
‘My condolences.’
Chris glared at him. ‘I’ve come here for two reasons, Mr Jim. The first is to try to establish if the puppy that bit my daughter, and might have given her rabies, was one of yours. And secondly to warn you that rabies is a notifiable disease, which means we have to inform both the police and Public Health England where we bought our puppy and where we suspect the source of the disease is. I hope you’ll cooperate?’
‘Am I understanding you’re accusing me of something, Mr Fairfax? You think I would sell a rabid dog? Really? Let me tell you, all our dogs are well cared for, as you can see by looking at Caesar here. All dogs we sell are seen by vets and signed off by them before we pass them on to any third party. That OK with you?’
‘Yes, and I don’t doubt it,’ Chris said, emboldened by his anger. ‘But do you know the provenance of all the dogs you trade in?’
Jim raised a massive fist in front of Chris’s face. ‘Do you see this?’
‘I do.’
‘What do you see?’
‘Your right hand.’
‘Do you doubt its provenance?’
‘If you mean does it belong to you, no.’
‘Good.’
Jim’s fist smashed into Chris’s face, slamming him back against his Audi.
83
Tuesday 30 March
Roy Grace was seated in his office, with Glenn Branson standing over his shoulder. They were studying a map spread out on the desk, showing a twenty-mile radius around the town of Hailsham in East Sussex.
It was marked with a series of red crosses, each of them a plot of cell phone masts that Lyndsey Cheetham’s phone had ‘talked to’ on the journeys she had made during the past four weeks. Two of them were additionally circled in yellow, indicating the start and finishing points of each journey and the times spent at each destination. Grace was still waiting for the analysis of the onboards of the dead girl’s car, but he was pretty confident the plot from her phone was giving all the mapping information he needed. But it would be good to get the onboard, in due course, for belt and braces.
‘Chiddingly,’ Branson said. ‘That’s her home, right?’
‘Where she lives – lived – with her parents.’
‘Nice pub there,’ he said. ‘Been there with Siobhan a few times, they have local bands playing at weekends.’
‘What will they be playing this weekend, the Funeral March?’ Grace said grimly.
‘You’re a sick puppy sometimes, aren’t you?’
Grace looked up and gave him a thin smile. ‘Yeah, that’s about the right expression. Good choice of words, mate. I’m sorry, I’ve had a long day. I’m tired. Tired of this fucking shit. Tired of these people who think they can do what they want, kill who they want, to line their filthy pockets. Sometimes I think the only progress we’ve made since the scumbags Dickens wrote about is that now they have technology.’
Branson looked at him sympathetically. ‘You need to take a break – chill for a couple of days, I’ll run the team.’
Grace smiled again, even more thinly. ‘Thanks, mate, but I’m OK, I’m good. I’ll take a break, a good long one, when we’ve locked up the people who murdered Tim Ruddle and Lyndsey Cheetham. I think we’re getting close.’ He pointed at the map. ‘So, six days a week for the past month, Lyndsey drove from her parents’ place to here.’ He stabbed the second yellow circle. ‘Appletree Farm.’ He paused.
‘Now one of the things we know about Appletree Farm is that a Polish-registered lorry was stopped in the early hours of this morning, a few miles from Newhaven, with twenty-seven puppies concealed behind hay bales. This cargo of “hay”’ – he made air-quotation marks with his fingers – ‘was destined for two farms: Appletree, owned by the lovely Terry Jim, and Long Acre, a few miles away, owned by his equally lovely son Dallas. Their names seem to be popping up a bit too regularly. From Norman and Velvet on Monday and this keen young PC, Eldhos Matthew, today. Lyndsey spent from approximately 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at Appletree Farm every day before driving back to Chiddingly. And on each of these four Saturday evenings she drove into Eastbourne, where she remained until well after midnight. For the nightlife?’
‘Nightlife in Eastbourne?’ Branson grinned.
‘Exactly, it’s full of old folk,’ Grace said.
‘Not any longer, mate,’ Branson said. ‘Same as Worthing – now Worthing’s cool. Well it’s got to be – me and Siobhan are looking at buying a place there!’
Worthing was a seaside town of around 100,000 people, a few miles west of Brighton, with a reputation as a retirement place. ‘Worthing’s cool? Seriously? When I was a kid, Worthing was known as God’s Waiting Room – all the shop windows were in bi-focal.’
‘Yeah? Well, the Almighty’s going to have to wait a long time these days – like, if we’re buying there.’
‘I hope so,’ Grace retorted. Then, focusing back on the map, he said, ‘Lyndsey’s last journey was somewhat off-piste. Monday night, she left Appletree Farm and instead of driving home to Chiddingly, she appeared to be heading towards Eastbourne. A bit early for the bars, wouldn’t you think?’
‘In her work clothes? She’d been spending all day looking after dogs in kennels. That’s not how you go partying.’
‘Which makes it all the more likely she was heading to RV with Polly?’
Branson nodded. ‘Then she gets run off the road. Hits a tree. And ends up brown bread. No chance to tell Polly about the disappearance of Rosalind Esche. Another brown bread?’
Grace looked at him again, for some moments. ‘“Brown bread”? I never took you for a Cockney.’ He glanced at the time on Branson’s flashy watch, the size of a not particularly small planet: 4.35. The next briefing was in twenty-five minutes.
Branson beamed and made a circle with his forefinger and thumb. ‘Me and Cockney rhyming slang – love it. Just like I like your whistle.’
‘Yeah, yeah, whistle and flute – suit, I know that one.’ The slang was used by criminals, historically, so they could talk in pubs without risk of arrest by any coppers who might be in there having a drink.
‘Uncle Bert? Know that one?’ Branson said eagerly.
‘No, you got me, go on.’
‘It’s obvious, matey . . . shirt!’
‘I learn something new every day,’ Grace said. ‘Thanks for the education.’
‘Be grateful. A day in which I don’t learn something new is a day wasted.’
After a few moments, Roy Grace nodded. ‘There’s something in that. So, if we can cut through your philosophical pearls for a moment – no disrespect – and focus on the map in front of us, we have a pattern with Lyndsey Cheetham, driving to and from work six days a week, until Monday. She diverts from the route she would ordinarily have taken home to her parents, on a weekday, taking a road that could have taken her to Eastbourne. To a meeting with Polly. To tell her something in person she was too scared to tell her over the phone.’
As Grace was about to continue, his job phone rang. It was Detective Sergeant Mark Taylor, who was running the surveillance team Grace had requested. He put him on loudspeaker so Branson could hear.
‘Boss, we’re set up on the location you gave us, Kingsley Avenue, with eyes on the target street numbers, 8 to 22. We’re parked up in a van and I’ve just emailed you a live video link.’
Grace thanked him, opened his inbox, found the email and opened the link. Moments later they saw a clear image of Kingsley Avenue, which was on a steep incline. From the camera angle, the surveillance team were looking up from near the bottom of the hill.
To the immediate left, a car underneath a cover was stationed off-road outside a double garage. All the other vehicles were parked pretty much nose-to-tail on both sides of the pleasant-looking street. The houses were terraced, in a mix of architectural styles dating back to the 1930s, some exteriors painted white, some tiled and some red brick. Roy Grace’s attention was drawn to a house to the right, on which he could read the number 18. A white Ford Transit panel van was parked outside, the same make and model as the one he had seen Gecko in on Goldstone Crescent, on Friday, after taking Sara Gurner’s labradoodle.
But that van was marked, he remembered, with the name of a drainage company emblazoned along the side in orange and black. A company that had turned out not to exist. This one had the name K. GATTON TV SOLUTIONS on it. Nonetheless, it held his interest. The signage on the van in Goldstone Crescent had turned out to have been fake and could have been simply magnetic panels. He called the analyst and asked for a PNC check on it.
The information came back within seconds. The van was registered to a Keith Gatton and was taxed and fully insured. A short distance along the street he saw a man up a ladder, making adjustments to a Sky aerial. Keith Gatton or one of his employees, he thought, and probably just coincidence it was parked outside a house that interested them.
There were steep steps up to the front door of number 18, and mounted on the wall by the door was a long black grab-handle.
He looked up at Branson. ‘Who has a handle like that installed by their front door?’
‘Someone elderly? Someone unsteady on their pins?’ the DI suggested.
‘How about a blind or partially sighted person who needs something to hold onto while they put their key in the lock, like you after a night out?’ He winked at Branson.
Squinting at the image, Branson said, ‘Haha! There’s something by the doorbell – can you see it?’
Grace called Taylor back and asked him to zoom in on number 18 and give them a close-up of the note.
Moments later, he and Glenn could see it clearly. It was a handwritten yellow note, taped just above the doorbell. It read, I’M DISABLED, IT TAKES ME A WHILE TO GET TO THE DOOR. DON’T GO AWAY!
They looked at each other. ‘Could be a blind person,’ Grace said.
Branson nodded. ‘Or just someone with mobility issues.’
‘One way to find out,’ Grace replied. ‘Mark, how many are you in the van?’
‘Three of us on this shift, boss. Two of us in the van and DC Erin Brown is parked up a couple of streets away.’
‘I need her to go and knock on the door on a pretext. I don’t want to spook them – we need to think of a story.’
‘Lost her cat?’ Branson suggested.
‘I’m already there, sir. Erin has a framed photograph of a cat in her vehicle with her.’
‘Seriously?’
‘We have all kinds of props, boss – and disguises.’
‘Brilliant!’ Grace replied. He thought for a moment, trying to remember the surrounding streets. One, he knew, was Matlock Road. ‘Mark, get her to knock on the door and say she lives in Matlock Road and her cat’s gone missing, she’s going around the neighbourhood in case anyone’s seen it – and keep the camera tight on the front door. Then she’ll have to go on doing all the other houses afterwards to make it look real.’
‘Right away, boss. Erin’s already bored out of her skull, she’ll be happy to stretch her legs. And she’s a cat lover.’
‘Is that relevant?’
‘What do they say, boss? If you can fake sincerity, the rest is easy.’
The two detectives watched as, a few minutes later, the tall, young PC, dressed in jeans and a leather jacket, and with a mane of red hair which would have very effectively concealed her earpiece, walked purposefully up the street, with a photograph frame under her arm. She went first up to number 26 and knocked on the door. A young man answered, they appeared to exchange a few words, then she moved on to number 24. It was opened by an elderly lady who shook her head.
Grace smiled. Erin deserved an Oscar! He watched her walk up to number 22, climb the steps and press the bell. She waited some while, then rang again. Then again.
Mark Taylor rang Grace. ‘Do you want her to keep trying, boss?’
‘Give it another minute then tell her to move on. Just keep it natural, Mark,’ Grace said, trying not to sound frustrated.
As Erin moved on to the next house, number 20, there was a knock on Grace’s office door and Norman Potting barged in, clutching a sheaf of printouts, then hovered in the doorway for some moments seeing they were preoccupied.
Grace looked up at him. ‘Yes, Norman?’
Nodding respectfully at Glenn Branson, he addressed Grace. ‘Chief, I thought you’d like to see this ahead of our evening briefing. I’ve got another plot from the phone company of Gecko’s – Marion Willingham’s – mobile phone, thanks to the smart work of your wife capturing his number.’
‘Good work,’ Grace said and waved him over.
Potting approached his desk and laid the sheaf down beside the computer monitor. ‘It shows us two things, chief. I’ve been liaising with John Street CID on the recent spate of dog thefts from the city’s parks, and this would appear to put Gecko at the scene of each of them, including the one on Thursday in Goldstone Crescent – a Mrs Sara Gurner, I believe.’
He spread the papers out excitedly, almost knocking over Grace’s framed photos of Cleo, Bruno, Noah and Molly in the process. ‘Possibly even more of interest is the plot of the journey he made after each reported dog theft. It was over towards Hailsham, to a location I’ve identified as a farm owned by a suspected crime gang boss.’
‘Don’t tell us it’s Terry Jim?’ Grace quizzed.
Looking deflated, as if the wind had suddenly gone from his sails, Potting said, ‘Move to the top of the class, chief.’
‘He’s already there, Norman,’ Branson retorted with a grin.
84
Tuesday 30 March
Chris Fairfax leaned back against his car, so dazed he was unable to move for some moments. His brain felt like it had been inside a blender, and his eyes were streaming tears. His nose was hurting like hell.
As he looked down, he saw his white shirt and pale blue tie were splattered with red stains. He put his hand to his nose. It felt like jelly, and was painful to touch. Pulling out his handkerchief, he dabbed his nostrils gingerly, and it came away covered in fresh, bright red blood.
Busted, he thought. You bastard. You absolute—
He remembered Ken Grundy’s warning and wished now he had heeded it and turned up with a posse of heavies. And it was now likely that any evidence that might be here would be long gone before the police got near this place.
The farm was deserted. Terry Jim and the dog had disappeared, and the security gate was now shut. There was no sign of anyone around. Just the faint stench of pigs and the squealing and yapping of puppies, the distant crowing of a rooster, and the muted drone of a tractor way off in the distance. He felt very disoriented. Looked at the fields all around, with a fuse of anger burning down somewhere deep inside him.
In his growing rage, he wanted to walk over to the gate and kick it in but he knew who would come off worse.
A thought, emerging somewhere deeper in his mind, told him he needed to get out of here. And – the lawyer inside him – report the assault.
Still very dazed, he somehow got the car door open, climbed into the driver’s seat, but then sat there, gripping the wheel and staring down along the bonnet at the rutted track in front of him.
‘Bastard,’ he murmured, then checked his mouth in the mirror to make sure no teeth were missing. To his relief, they were intact.
He started the engine, not confident about driving with his fuzzy brain state, but wanting to get away as quickly as he could before the thug came back. Despite his vision being blurry, he drove as fast as he dared away from the tall steel gate, stopping only to get out and dutifully shut the wooden five-barred gate. As he clicked it closed, he gave a suppressed, almost soundless laugh at the absurdity of him bothering to shut the gate for this vile ape who had just punched him in the face.
Need to go to hospital, he thought. Get the bleeding stopped, my nose fixed. But he could be there hours, he knew, all the horror stories in the Argus about waiting times in A&E. He didn’t have time, right now, he was needed at Bluebell’s bedside.
Balling his handkerchief and pressing it as gently but firmly as he could against his nose, he held it there with his left hand, gladder than ever at this moment that the car was an automatic, and steered with his right. There was a small town a few miles ahead where he would find a chemist and get a proper dressing for his nose.
