Dead Man's Time Read online

  He climbed the stairs to the landing, past the radiator that Aileen had been left chained to for two days, and went into her bedroom, which was directly opposite. After her husband had died she’d had their marital double bed replaced with a single. It looked strange to see it in this large room that still smelled very faintly of her scent. Propped up against the pillows was Mr Stuffykins, the ragged little one-eyed, one-eared bear she’d brought from New York. He made a mental note to ensure he put it in the coffin with her. He removed a pair of her long black Cornelia James gloves, from her dressing table, to put those in the coffin with her as well. Aileen would like that, he thought; she always believed a woman was not properly dressed unless she was wearing gloves. He took a brief walk through into her bathroom, then went downstairs and into her book-lined study.

  First he peered inside the opened wall-safe again, just to double-check nothing had been overlooked. But it was bare. And that dark void pained him, and angered him in so many ways. It had contained their father’s pocket watch. The only truly personal thing belonging to him that either of them had.

  He sat down at Aileen’s walnut bureau. A black Parker pen, in a holder embossed with gold letters reading HSBC – probably a Christmas gift years ago from the bank, he thought, sat on the curling leather surface of the writing area. Tiny oval-framed photographs of her husband, her children and himself were arranged on the top of it. The drawers were stuffed with correspondence, bills, stamps. There was a fresh sheet of blue headed writing paper, with an envelope beside it, and an unwritten birthday card. A letter she had been going to write to someone, which now would never be written, and a card that would never be sent. Her diary was gone, he noticed, and assumed the police had taken it.

  He pulled open one of the deep side drawers and immediately, along with a faint woody smell, caught a whiff of her scent again. After a few moments of rummaging through papers, he pulled out a leather photograph album containing pictures that had been taken of the highest-value items in the house, mostly for insurance purposes. His sister had a fine collection of oil paintings, clocks and furniture, all of which he had advised her on, and some of which he had bought for her, at knock-down prices, at rigged auctions.

  He laid it in front of him and opened it up. The first photograph should have been the uninsured gold Patek Philippe pocket watch, still with a slim gold chain attached, that their father had always worn in his waistcoat. The glass had splinter cracks, and the crown was bent at an angle, the winding arbor frozen, with the pinion inside disconnected from the centre wheel so that the hands would not move when the crown was rotated. He hadn’t seen the watch for a long time, since he’d moved it to Aileen’s safe. But he could still picture every detail, vividly. The last time he had looked at it was to check the serial number, after he had become an expert in watches and realized it possibly had a high value. He had been right.

  The watch was extremely rare and even in its busted form had a value of at least two million pounds today. Not that he or Aileen needed the money or would ever have sold it. They had both wanted to keep it as it was, the day he had been given it. Often he had thought of having it repaired and using it, wearing it with pride, but he could never bring himself to do it. With this busted watch he felt a connection with his father and he was scared to lose that.

  He had never questioned in his mind how his father, a humble stevedore, had come by something so valuable. He’d stolen it from somewhere, almost certainly.

  As executor of his sister’s will, Gavin knew she’d left everything to her granddaughter, with the exception of some bequests to her staff and to charity. As he stared at it, tears welling in his eyes, a voice from the past came back to him, like a ghost. It was long, long, ago.

  On the Manhattan wharf in 1922. As he stood there, a small boy, with his sister and his aunt, the youth with a cap, pushing through the crowd, thrusting a heavy brown-paper bag into his hand, containing a gun, the watch and the newspaper front page.

  Watch the numbers.

  He had been trying to puzzle out what the boy had meant for ninety years. He was scared he would go to his grave never knowing.

  Tears rolled down his cheeks. He felt an unbearable emptiness.

  He stared at the watch. I’m going to get you back, he promised silently. I don’t care what it costs, I’m getting you back.

  27

  Gareth Dupont liked modern churches. In particular he liked the Church of the Good Shepherd in Portslade. The district to the west of Brighton, inland from Shoreham Harbour, was where he had lived as a child, and he had always been drawn to the sharp, angular brick building. Surely God didn’t just do old stuff? he always thought. He always felt more in tune communing with God in here than in some dusty old place.

  He entered beneath a sign which proclaimed: THERE ARE NO STRANGERS IN THIS CHURCH, ONLY FRIENDS YOU HAVEN’T MET. He breathed in the smell of dry wood, polish and candle wax, and walked a short distance along the aisle and sat down, placing his copy of the Argus next to him. Then he knelt, closed his eyes and pressed his hands together, the way his mother had taught him, the way you were supposed to pray. He was supposed to be in a Catholic church, but he preferred Anglican, and he figured that would be okay with God. Particularly as the Anglican church was okay with divorce, thanks to Henry VIII, and, by inference, infidelity. And he was currently mixing it with two ladies: one single and one very married. Playing with fire. He liked fire.

  When he left it was 7.15 p.m. He needed to hurry home to shower and change; he was picking up Suki Yang at 8 p.m. and taking her for a meal at Spoons. A couple of hours ago he’d been worrying about taking her to such an expensive place and wondering whether to go for something cheaper. But now he felt much better about it.

  He climbed into the Porsche, but kept the roof shut, and keyed in a number on his phone.

  A crisp, hostile voice he recognized answered.

  ‘It’s Gareth Dupont,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t like being called on my mobile – what do you want?’

  ‘I just saw the Argus.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘It’s pretty tempting.’

  ‘Are you insane?’

  ‘Not at all. I’d like to talk business. Like – renegotiate terms?’

  ‘I’m not talking any more on this phone. I’ll meet you at the Albion pub, Church Road, Hove at 8 p.m.’

  Dupont was thinking about his date with Suki Yang. ‘Eight’s difficult.’

  ‘Not for me it isn’t.’

  28

  Trudie’s was one of the few perks of Sussex House, Roy Grace thought. The former CID HQ – now renamed, in the ever changing police world, as the Force Crime and Justice Department – was situated on a dull industrial estate. But this mobile cafe, a short walk away, produced the best bacon butties to be had in the county, along with the cheeriest staff behind the counter. Despite Cleo’s best efforts at persuading him to eat a healthy diet, Roy Grace had picked up a fried egg and bacon sarnie from them on his way in at 7 a.m.

  Then he had become so absorbed in checking through the overnight logs of serious crimes in Sussex, responding to a ton of emails, and answering some more questions from the Prosecuting Counsel on the Venner court case, he had forgotten to eat it.

  He munched it now, not caring that it had gone cold, washing it down with mouthfuls of coffee as he sat, suited and booted, in Major Incident Room One going through his briefing notes for Operation Flounder as he waited for his team to assemble, and listened to the pelting rain outside. The names of operations were thrown up at random by the Sussex Police computer. At the moment it was working its way through fish. Flounder was particularly appropriate, Grace thought, because at this moment, exhausted after yet another sleepless night thanks to Noah, he truly felt that he was floundering on this case.

  It was a week since Aileen McWhirter had died. The time of the robbery was estimated sometime between 6 and 9 p.m. on the night of Tuesday, 21 August. If there had been three perpe
trators, it was estimated it would have taken them a good couple of hours to have physically removed the items they took and wrapped and stowed them in a vehicle. The perps had vanished into thin air with ten million pounds’ worth of antiques and fine art. And in ninety minutes’ time he was going to have to give his mercurial boss, ACC Rigg, an update on progress.

  Great.

  Running murder enquiries was the job Roy Grace loved, and it was what he wanted to do for the rest of his career. He had been fascinated by homicides ever since the first one he had attended, many years back as a young DC. Normally at the start of each new day of an enquiry he would feel energized, however late he might have gone to bed. But this morning, thanks to a case of baby brain, he was struggling.

  He stared up at the large colour photograph of the old lady’s wrinkled, but still handsome, face, which was stuck to a whiteboard. Next to it, on another whiteboard, were SOCO photographs of three different shoeprints, and catalogue illustrations of the trainers they had come from, and two other whiteboards were almost covered with photographs of antique furniture, pictures and jewellery that had been stolen from the house in Withdean Road.

  Aileen McWhirter’s white hair, elegantly coiffed, was held in place by a ruby-studded barrette. Her blue eyes, pin-sharp but twinkling with warmth, peered out through the lenses of her tortoiseshell glasses. She was wearing a white blouse with an embroidered collar and pearl earrings. An antique pearl pendant hung around her crinkly neck. She looked serene and wise and elegant.

  She must have been very beautiful when she was younger, he thought. Anyone would have been proud to have her as their grandmother. Throughout his career he had carried a particular hatred for the creeps who breached the sanctuary of people’s homes, and even more so for those who harmed vulnerable, elderly people.

  He thought about the small, ring-bound crime scene photograph album in his desk drawer, locked to prevent any snooping cleaning staff from coming across it. Despite being hardened to most sights, he found some of the pictures, taken by a Crime Scene Officer, James Gartrell, in the mortuary, almost too distressing to look at. Thinking now about those images of some of the terrible injuries inflicted on her, he squirmed with anger and revulsion.

  Eighteen months short of her one hundredth birthday – and the traditional missive from the Queen that would have come with it – Aileen McWhirter had been the victim of brutality on a level that had profoundly upset even the most hardened members of the investigating team. The post-mortem revealed she had burns to her body that were consistent with a pair of heated curling tongs found on her bedroom floor.

  But the post-mortem had revealed few clues about who had attacked her. There was no flesh under her fingernails, which meant she probably had not succeeded in scratching any of them. Shame, Grace thought. It would have been nice to think she had managed to gouge at least one of their eyes out.

  The only clues found in the house were three sets of shoeprints that did not match up with any of her regular visitors – her part-time housekeeper who normally came twice a week, her gardener, her nephew Lucas’s wife, Sarah, and her brother. Copies had been sent to forensic podiatrist Haydn Kelly, who had previously produced some outstanding gait identification results for Roy Grace using the latest technology, and a match had been found to the trainers they believed the perpetrators had worn.

  It was strange, he thought, how in these past two months since Noah’s birth, violence was affecting him in ways it never had previously. One of the many books he had read on parenting had predicted that would happen.

  Above the photograph in front of him on the whiteboard was handwritten, in clear but untidy capitals, in black marker pen:

  OPERATION FLOUNDER

  DECEASED. AILEEN McWHIRTER. D.O.B. 24 APRIL 1914.

  RELEVANT PERIOD (ESTIMATED)

  SUNDAY, 19 AUGUST – WEDNESDAY, 22 AUGUST.

  Below was an inventory, provided by the dead woman’s brother, Gavin Daly, of the items he was certain had been stolen from her home.

  But what absorbed Roy Grace at this moment were two sheets of computer printout showing standard family-tree icons and graphs.

  He followed the horizontal then the vertical lines. There was a horizontal black one, with an arrow to Gordon Thomas McWhirter. Deceased. DOB 26.03.1912. Her husband, he presumed.

  Then a vertically descending red arrow to the deceased children, and a further arrow to the grandchild. Then to their left, another vertical red arrow pointed to Brendan Daly and Sheenagh Daly. Beneath Sheenagh Daly was written, DOB 19.09.1897. Deceased. 18.02.1922. Beneath Brendan was written, DOB 07.08.1891. Missing, presumed dead.

  He frowned, thinking back to the books in the dead woman’s library on the early history of New York.

  ‘Ever see that movie, Gangs of New York?’ Glenn Branson said, suddenly, standing over his shoulder.

  Grace turned. ‘A while ago, but I fell asleep during it.’

  Branson grinned. ‘Yep, well, that’s what happens at your age!’

  ‘Sod off!’

  Branson patted him on the shoulder. ‘Don’t take it personally; it’s a fact.’

  Grace levelled him with his eyes.

  ‘All that stuff predates Aileen McWhirter. But it gives interesting background during the time the lady was a kid,’ Glenn Branson said, serious now. ‘Back in the 1800s there were gang wars between the native Americans and the Irish immigrants. We’re picking up decades later, when the White Hand Gang was the principal mob of the Irish Mafia. They controlled the Manhattan and Brooklyn waterfronts – all the wharfs and piers. Their boss was a character called Dinny Meehan – he was the guy who kicked Frankie Yale and Johnny Torrio, who headed the Black Hand Gang, out of New York, along with Al Capone, which was why Capone ended up in Chicago. Capone came back to New York with a vengeance in the late-twenties, wiped out the Irish Mafia and took control. Dinny Meehan was murdered in 1920. Brendan Daly was one of his lieutenants, who was missing, presumed murdered, in a power struggle for control of the White Hand Gang.’

  ‘Thanks for the history lesson!’

  Branson looked at him then shook his head. ‘Didn’t they teach you anything at school?’

  Grace gave him a wry smile. ‘Obviously nothing that mattered!’

  Branson tapped his own chest. ‘Yeah, well, we descendants of slaves need to know about history.’

  ‘You’re not descended from a slave,’ Grace said with a grin. ‘Your dad was a bus driver in London.’

  Ordinarily, his mate would have come back at him with some riposte or a movie quote – he was a total movie buff. But this morning he gave him a strangely sad smile. Grace could read defeat in his eyes, and that upset him.

  Glenn Branson’s marital life was a train wreck. Grace had helped him out for most of this past year by letting him lodge in his empty house, and the Detective Sergeant managed to keep that looking, most of the time, like a train wreck too. Feeding Grace’s goldfish, Marlon, seemed to be the limit of Glenn Branson’s housekeeping skills.

  Behind him was a familiar rustling sound. He turned to see that Detective Sergeant Bella Moy was now seated at her workstation, red Maltesers box in front of her. She seemed to live on the chocolates. Yet she never appeared to put on weight. And recently, he’d noticed, she seemed to have blossomed.

  In her mid-thirties, living with and looking after her sick, elderly mother, Bella used to wear drab clothes, had dull hair and seemed permanently melancholic. But lately she looked a lot more glamorous.

  He watched her pop a Malteser in her mouth. Heard the crunch. And suddenly he found himself rather fancying one himself. As if clocking this, she held the box out towards him. He took one, and instantly regretted it, because the moment he had eaten it, he immediately wanted another.

  There was one absentee from the team of twelve people: DS Norman Potting. Grace looked at his watch. It was 8.35 a.m. Five minutes late in starting already. He was due to meet with his Assistant Chief Constable Peter Rigg at 10 a.m., and Rigg was
a stickler for punctuality.

  Suddenly he was distracted by his thoughts. He’d long had a near-photographic memory, and as he looked up again at Aileen McWhirter’s serene face, he could picture those books packing the shelves on her study walls so clearly. Title after title, including The Gangs of New York. American Gangsters Then And Now. The First 100 Years of the American Mafia. Young Capone. Early Street Gangs and Gangsters of New York City. Irish Organized Crime. King of the Brooklyn Waterfront.

  There were fifty titles, probably more. She hadn’t been an academic or a writer, and this number of books amounted to more than just a passing interest in a subject – this was bordering on an obsession. They might of course have been her husband’s books. Both Daly, which was her maiden name, and McWhirter were Irish names.

  He decided, later, to run the names Daly and McWhirter through some Internet searches. Then he turned to his notes, and began the meeting.

  29

  Ten minutes after the start, Norman Potting shuffled into the briefing looking very gloomy. The Detective Sergeant, who was in his midfifties, had joined the police force relatively late in life and was not popular, being regarded as a politically incorrect dinosaur by many, but Roy Grace tolerated him, because he was one of the most reliable and doggedly persistent detectives he had ever worked with.

  ‘Sorry I’m late, chief,’ he said in his gruff voice. ‘Had to see the quack.’ Then, lowering his voice, he whispered to Grace, ‘Not very good news.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Norman. Do you want to tell me about it later?’ Grace quizzed, genuinely worried for the man.

  Potting shrugged, then gave a defeatist grimace and sat down. Roy Grace frowned as he noticed the exchange of glances between Potting and Bella Moy. He had wondered for a couple of months now if something was going on between them. They seemed too different, and Norman, with his bad comb-over and constant reek of pipe tobacco, never struck him as an appealing man. Yet he’d had four wives, and Grace had long ago learned that life never ceased to surprise you.