Dead Like You

been held for twenty-four hours. The maximum period for detaining a suspect without charge and without obtaining a court extension was thirty-six hours. They would have to release the taxi driver at 9.30 tomorrow, unless they had enough reason to convince a magistrate to hold him longer. They didn’t yet have evidence that Jessie Sheldon’s disappearance was the work of the Shoe Man. But if Kerridge’s solicitor, Acott, got hold of this – and he undoubtedly would and probably already had – they’d have a fight on their hands to get an extension. He needed to think about this, and getting an emergency magistrates’ court appearance tonight to request a further extension.
    ‘OK, thanks. Good work, Bella.’
    Then Norman Potting raised his hand. ‘Boss, I’ve had a lot of help today from the mobile phone company, O2. I spoke to Jessie Sheldon’s fiancé early this morning, who told me that’s the supplier her iPhone’s registered with. They provided me half an hour ago with the tracking report on her phone. We may have a result here.’
    ‘Go on,’ Grace said.
    ‘The last call she made on it was logged at 6.32 p.m. last night, to a number I’ve identified as belonging to her fiancé, Benedict Greene. He confirms he received a call from her at approximately that time, telling him she was heading home from her kick-boxing lesson. He told her to hurry, because he was picking her up at 7.15 p.m. The phone then remained in standby mode. No further calls were made, but it was plotted, from contact with base stations in the city, moving steadily west from approximately 6.45 p.m. – the time of the abduction. At 7.15 p.m. it stopped moving and has remained static since then.’
    ‘Where?’ Grace asked.
    ‘Well,’ the DS said, ‘let me show you.’
    He stood up and pointed to an Ordnance Survey map stuck to a whiteboard on the wall. A squiggly blue line ran the entire length of it. There was a red oval drawn on the map, with two red Xs at the top and bottom.
    ‘The two crosses mark the O2 base stations that Jessie Sheldon’s phone is currently communicating with,’ Potting said. ‘It’s a pretty big area and unfortunately there’s no third base station within range to give us the triangulation which would enable us to pinpoint her position more accurately.’
    He pointed at the squiggly blue line. ‘This is the River Adur, which runs up from Shoreham.’
    ‘Shoreham’s where John Kerridge lives,’ Bella Moy said.
    ‘Yes, but that’s not helpful to us, since he’s in custody,’ Potting replied in a patronizing tone. Then he continued: ‘There’s open countryside on both sides of the river and Combes Road, a busy main road which runs between these two base stations. There are a few detached private houses, a row of cottages that used to belong to the old cement works, and the cement works itself. It would seem that Jessie Sheldon, or at least her mobile phone, is somewhere inside this circle. But it’s a big area.’
    ‘We can rule out the cement works,’ said DC Nick Nicholl. ‘I attended there a couple of years ago when I was on Response. It’s got extremely high security – round-the-clock monitoring. If a bird shits, it pings an alarm.’
    ‘Excellent, Nick,’ Grace said. ‘Thank you. OK. Immediate action. We need to get a ground search of the entire area at first light. A POLSA and as many Uniform, Specials and PCSOs as we can muster. I want the river searched – we’ll put the Specialist Search Unit in there. And we’ll get the helicopter up right away. They can do a floodlight search.’
    Grace made some notes, then looked up at his team.
    ‘According to the Land Registry records, the lock-up is owned by a property company, sir,’ Emma-Jane Boutwood said. ‘I’ll go to their offices first thing in the morning.’
    He nodded. Despite round-the-clock surveillance, no one had shown up there. He was not hopeful that anyone would now.
    He wasn’t sure what to think.
    He turned to the forensic psychologist. ‘Julius, anything?’
    Proudfoot nodded. ‘The man who has taken Jessie Sheldon, he’s your man,’ he said emphatically. ‘Not the chap you have in custody.’
    ‘You sound very certain.’
    ‘Mark my words. The right location, the right time, the right person,’ he said, so smugly that Grace wished desperately, for an instant, that he could prove the man wrong.

    When he returned to his office after the briefing had ended, Grace found a small FedEx package