As they entered the postmortem room with its brown and cream speckled terrazzo tile floor, stark overhead fluorescents and the male body on the steel table, he looked around at all the green-gowned people, and for an instant it reminded him of his terror, being in the operating theatre, sixteen months ago, watching the birth of their daughter Molly by C-section. And desperately worried for Cleo. This so soon after his elder son Bruno had died tragically in a road traffic accident.

  Then he tried to put that out of his mind to focus on why he was here. Molly was a healthy, happy baby, who had brought much joy back into their lives. The dead, broken corpse on the steel table had been, less than twelve hours ago, the father of two children. Now they would never see their daddy again. A husband who would never hold his wife again. Would never kiss her again. Would never tell her how much he loved her again.

  All of them were in this room firstly to establish the cause of death, and to see what clues, if any, the victim’s body would reveal to help them find the killers who had murdered him.

  And they would. Four offenders. Four would never get away with it. One killer acting solo would stand a better chance. But not four. One of them would talk, one day, to someone. One of them would brag, or, after remorse brought on by a few pints, tell someone. And the moment they told one person, they would have told the whole world. It was the unwritten law of getting away with crime, Grace knew from long experience:

  Don’t have an accomplice. Never tell a soul.

  12

  Thursday 25 March

  ‘Hey, turtle!’

  Bluebell, in her turquoise bathing costume and goggles, broke the surface smiling and swam energetically towards her father. There were other kids in the pool and other parents, but Chris Fairfax was oblivious to them. Standing waist-deep in the warm water of Brighton’s King Alfred swimming pool, he looked adoringly at his seven-year-old daughter, her blonde ringlets darkened by the water, her face the absolute picture of happiness that was, at this moment, melting his heart, and making him forget a woeful morning, filled with an entire week’s worth of client problems. One after another. Starting with poor, sad and bitter Noel Dudley.

  But right now, all that was forgotten as Bluebell swam into his arms and he raised her in the air. ‘That was brilliant, turtle!’ He kissed the tip of her tiny nose.

  ‘I’m not a turtle,’ she said indignantly. ‘I’m a girl!’

  ‘Of course you are! But in the water you’re a turtle.’

  She giggled. He loved looking at her tiny, perfect teeth, her big happy smile, holding her body so full of wriggling energy. This creature so very precious to him and Katy. This human life they’d tried for so many years to bring into the world – and ironically, just months after they’d given up with IVF and had begun seriously to consider adoption, Katy had become pregnant.

  ‘Can I do it again, Daddy?’ She pointed up at the blue water chute she’d just hurtled down.

  He glanced at his sports watch. ‘We really need to get out.’

  ‘Just one more, please!’ she shrieked, then giggled again.

  ‘Just once more, then we’ll have go get changed – unless,’ he teased, ‘you’d like to forget about seeing the puppy and stay here all afternoon?’

  ‘Nooooooo!’ She looked at him hard, as if examining his face to see if he was serious. ‘I have a name for her!’

  ‘You do? What is it?’

  ‘Not telling, it’s a secret.’

  She wriggled out of his arms and splashed her way over to the side of the pool. Chris watched her climb out and run, in her frilly costume, along to the steps up to the chute. God, he loved her so much. He watched the top of the chute for her to appear. The sheer joy of her being in his life – in his and Katy’s life. Then he felt a flash of darkness. How many other parents before him had stared with this kind of love at their child, only to watch them grow up to become like the broken people who came into his office with so much anger?

  But you won’t ever turn out like that, my darling. You will always be happy. You will have the happiest childhood in the world. Your mummy and I will make sure of that.

  He saw her now, up there. She waved at him, and he waved back. Then he saw her little body shooting down the tube, and moments later break surface, beaming again.

  His heart did a back-flip.

  Moments later, she was splashing towards him. ‘Can you pick me up again, Daddy?’

  ‘Once more, darling, then we have to go.’

  She took a deep breath, and he raised her up out of the water.

  ‘That was so high, Daddy!’

  ‘I know! Now it’s puppy time.’

  ‘Yayyyyyyy!’

  13

  Thursday 25 March

  The man on the steel table in the postmortem room looked, from a distance, as if he had just popped in here for a cheeky snooze. He lay on his back in jeans, sweatshirt and green wellington boots, his brown hair dishevelled, a large bald patch around his crown. His Barbour had been the single item of clothing removed because he had been pronounced dead almost immediately after the paramedics had arrived and therefore any life-saving procedures had been unnecessary. Only the colour of his skin, a cold, marble white, indicated he wasn’t ever going to be waking up.

  Tim Ruddle was forty-one, his wife, Sharon, had told Roy Grace tearfully. A decent, hardworking man, who should have been out milking their cows earlier this morning and then on his tractor harvesting the winter crop of kale they’d been experimenting with. Grace looked for some moments at his big hands and grimy fingernails, several badly bitten.

  It reminded him uncomfortably of visiting his own father, Jack, a few days after he had died. He’d lain in his pyjamas, in the little enclosed room at the funeral parlour, emaciated from the cancer that had killed him. But what he remembered most about that visit was his dad’s fingernails, all gnawed to the quick. His dad bit his nails and the skin around them constantly. His mum used to chide him, even playfully slapping his hand sometimes, but he had never stopped. Roy Grace always thought of that whenever he’d been about to chew his own nails and it had always prevented him. It was a ridiculous thought, he knew, but he didn’t want his own children coming to pay their last respects when his turn came, and taking away the memory that their dad was lying there with bitten nails.

  The CSI officer finished her painstaking tapings of the farmer’s clothes and boots, and the exposed parts of his flesh, in the hope that under lab analysis there might be something from which they could obtain DNA that would lead them to his killers – hairs, skin cells, clothing fibres – although the drizzle that had fallen, before the first officer attending had a chance to cover him with a tarpaulin, would have reduced the chances of that.

  Under De Sancha’s instructions, Darren and Kevin lifted the body, to enable Cleo to remove the clothing. Then, when Ruddle was laid back down, naked, she pulled off his gum boots and they were bagged and sealed along with all the other items of clothing. Other than extensive black and brown bruising around his lower abdomen and shins, the dead man did not appear to have a mark on the rest of his muscular body.

  As James Gartrell moved efficiently around, recording Ruddle from all angles, the pathologist, holding her dictating machine, turned to Grace and Branson. ‘What I’m seeing is consistent with the information I have been given about how this man may have died,’ she said in her very endearing accent. She’d been in the country for many years, after leaving her native Spain to marry her husband, a plastic surgeon, but had never fully lost that accent. ‘You can see the contusions and bruising around the pelvis.’

  Grace could see what she meant. It did look misshapen, sagging unnaturally to one side. Normally he would have expected to see the hip bones clearly delineated and protruding. But he could see no sign of either, just a sloppy mass of bruised flesh like a fat man’s belly. Except Ruddle was lean, not an ounce of fat on his body.

  ‘We will know for sure when I open him up,’ she said. ‘But I understand he was crushed between two vehicles and was conscious for a short while afterwards?’

  ‘Correct,’ Grace confirmed.

  She pointed a gloved finger. ‘At the back of the pelvis are veins and arteries that run around, supplying all the blood to the legs, bottom and bladder. The pelvis, as you will have seen before, is almost circular, with a hole in the centre – like a Polo mint!’ There was a smile in her eyes above her mask.

  Grace winced at the analogy. He used to like Polos but hadn’t eaten one in years. As a younger detective, on the advice of his dad, he used to suck on a mint when attending postmortems, as well as rubbing Vicks VapoRub under his nose, to mitigate the odours. But he was long used to them now.

  ‘It is a strong bone,’ she continued. ‘But if it is broken or crushed from the front, the person will start to exsanguinate – bleed out – all the veins becoming a complete mush, as I expect we will see shortly. It is possible, if the victim is taken to hospital in time, to repair ruptured arteries, but not veins, they can’t be repaired, and they just ooze.’

  ‘Are you saying he could have been alive for some time after he was crushed by these vehicles?’ Branson asked. ‘But there was nothing anyone could have done to save him? Not even if the ambulance had arrived sooner, or if he had been airlifted to hospital?’

  ‘You are right, Glenn, he would have been conscious but in a lot of pain and steadily getting weaker – that’s what I’m speculating. If I’m correct, that injury would not have been survivable. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We need to see if he has any other underlying health conditions that might have contributed to his death.’

  Roy Grace had handled a recent murder case where the victim turned out to have a weak heart, and he knew that when the defendants came to court, the defence counsel would have a field day if the victim had had any pre-existing health issues. He silently hoped that the farmer lying in front of him now had been in rude health, because he wanted to nail each of the individuals who had done this to the poor guy.

  Having fully examined the abdomen area where the main injuries to the body were, the pathologist then began the invasive part of the postmortem, starting with the removal of the skull cap. Grace and Branson stepped back from the mortuary table, to let her get on with the job.

  An hour later, Tim Ruddle was looking very different to when they had first seen him, and on the whiteboard on the wall behind him were written in black marker pen the weights of his brain, heart, lungs, liver and kidneys.

  ‘So far,’ De Sancha said, ‘I’ve not found any anomalies to indicate the deceased had any underlying health issues. Very little calcification in his arteries and no sign of any brain damage or heart disease, or any abnormalities with any of his other internal organs. I will be taking samples of his bloods and fluids and have analysis done on these, but from what I can see so far, he appears to have been a man in – how do you call it – rude health?’

  ‘Well, that’s good news, if you can call it that,’ Grace replied. ‘We can confirm that the reason for his death is as a result of his injuries and not by way of natural causes.’

  14

  Thursday 25 March

  The dog didn’t like him. And the feeling was entirely mutual. Gecko held it by the collar with his left hand, on the passenger seat beside him, steering the van with his right, and the poodle was constantly twisting and turning and trying to pull away from him. As well as barking at everything they drove past – cars, pedestrians, other dogs, and a horse peering over the gate of a field.

  Its curly black and white fur made it look like it was wearing an ill-fitting hand-me-down coat from an older relative. The name tag on the collar said Zulu, along with a phone number. Stupid name for a dog owned by a stupid woman. It was now barking at a retriever in the back of a stationary Volvo estate in front of them.

  ‘ZULU!’ he shouted. ‘Shut it!’ He tried bribing it with yet another from the diminishing supply of treats in his pocket. The dog gobbled it down and immediately began barking again at a passing cyclist.

  If all had been well, he would have delivered the creature over half an hour ago, but all was not well. He was stuck in this shitfest of a traffic jam. Stuck with a dog who seemed to think it had been put on this planet for the sole purpose of barking. He tapped on his phone for a traffic report and was told to expect delays of up to thirty minutes due to emergency roadworks. He gave the dog another treat, which silenced it for all of two seconds, before the biscuit went down its gullet seemingly without touching the sides.

  Why am I stealing yappy dogs for a living? he wondered. Although he knew the answer. Mr Jim. Mr Gentleman Jim, they all called him, paid him good money.

  Zulu began barking again at the retriever.

  ‘Shut up!’ Gecko yelled.

  He felt panicky. All the time he was stuck here, with the false ID on the van and the dog with him, he was a sitting duck. If anyone had reported him, he could get nicked. And that would mean a night or longer in custody. And that could not happen. It was Elvira’s birthday tonight and he’d arranged a big surprise for her, taking her for funfair rides on Brighton’s Palace Pier and then a fish and chip supper – her favourite – at Palm Court.

  And with the money Mr Jim would pay him on receipt of this dog, he’d be able to go out and buy a present for her. She’d already dropped a hint that she’d like a talking watch, and he’d found a shop in Brighton that sold them. The money Mr Jim would pay him was going to more than cover the cost of it, and that of their evening on the pier tonight.

  Suddenly the traffic was moving again.

  He drove through deep water across the road, the source of the problem, a burst water main. Then headed on towards Hailsham and Appletree Farm.

  Not that he’d ever seen an apple tree there. Only dogs, horses and pigs. The people who worked in this place were here to look after the dogs. And the pigs were here to eat anyone who upset Mr Jim, or his wife, Rula, so the rumour was. In the three months he’d worked for them, he made sure to please Mr Jim most of all. Mrs Jim was only slightly less menacing than Mr Jim, and she terrified him, too. The only seemingly nice person was Mrs Jim’s daughter, Darcy, a friendly girl in her late twenties who was into ponies. He liked her very much. He once saw Mr Jim about to stamp on a spider and she’d screamed at him and rescued it. She always smiled at him when he saw her.

  Twenty minutes later he turned off the main road onto the rutted, potholed track, with fields of crops on either side, and then, reaching the five-bar gate to the farm itself, halted, jumped out, opened the gate, drove through and closed it behind him, knowing from previous experience that Mr Jim, who had it all covered with CCTV, would bollock him if he left it open.

  After lurching across the rough cart track for another half-mile, now with barren fields on either side, and the green hills of the South Downs in the distance, he reached the tall, spiked steel security gate, put down his window and punched in the code on the panel, aware of the camera looking down at him.

  The gate swung open. He drove through, then stopped, watching in his rear-view mirror, as Mr Jim insisted, until it closed behind him. Then he drove on, the dog sitting sullen now, with nothing to bark at. Rounding a curve, he saw the familiar ventilated concrete kennels ahead. And now, even with the windows up, he could hear the cacophony of barking.

  Zulu joined the chorus, barking crazily again. The buildings they passed, Gecko knew, contained multiple litters of puppies.

  He halted, gave Zulu the last treat in his pocket to shut it up again, parked the van and walked across to a locked gate which secured the breeding pens and pressed the single button on the entryphone panel.

  After a moment a male voice replied, deep, guttural and sharp as a gunshot. ‘Yes?’

  Mr Jim.

  ‘It’s Gecko,’ he said nervously. ‘Make yourself useful, be helpful, always say yes,’ he murmured to himself.

  The gate began to open.

  15

  Thursday 25 March

  Back in his office, having left Glenn Branson at the mortuary to finalize the postmortem paperwork, Roy Grace scanned through his email mountain for anything important. He responded to one about a police rugby fixture against a team of inmates at Lewes Prison – a charity initiative he was involved with, but which would need careful handling, both the game itself and the potential media fallout.

  He made a note to ensure Arron Hendy, the editor of the influential local paper, the Argus, was properly briefed about the fixture by the Comms team, remembering the time when police officers were able to simply pick up the phone to friendly journalists, or have a drink with them in a pub.

  He had a meeting in twenty minutes to brief the ACC on Operation Brush, prior to the press conference he would attend with her tomorrow. But before making a list of the key points, he had a quick look through the serials – the ongoing log of all reported incidents in the county, and any updates. One caught his eye. It was a report of a dog theft from Hove Park. Snatched by a man who had driven off in a van.

  Here was another example of the growing crime wave in dog theft. There had been several briefing notes on the topic issued by the Rural Crimes Unit, pointing out what they had discussed in the morning’s briefing, that some local Sussex crime gangs were making more money out of these avenues than from drugs, and facing only minuscule sentences if caught.

  One report he’d read only a few days ago, from Sergeant Tom Cartwright, based at Midhurst, suggested that the national lockdowns for the Covid-19 virus had prompted a wave of panic buying of dogs for companions – pushing the prices up dramatically and playing into the hands of the criminals.

  He picked up the phone and asked the controller to see if he could locate the officer. Moments later Grace was connected to the Sergeant, who was out on an operation. Cartwright proved to be a mine of information.