Dead Like You

sound sorry. Really apologetic, like a man in a crowded bar who had just accidentally stepped on her foot. ‘You’re in the papers. You are on the front page of the Argus . There’s a photograph of you. Rachael Ryan. That’s a nice name.’
    He stared down at her. He looked angry. And sulky. And genuinely apologetic. ‘I’m sorry you saw my face,’ he said. ‘You shouldn’t have done that. It wasn’t clever, Rachael. It could all have been so very different. Know what I’m saying?’

NOW

24
    Monday 5 January
    The newly formed Cold Case Team was part of Roy Grace’s Major Crime Branch responsibility. It was housed in an inadequate office within the Major Incident Suite on the first floor of Sussex House, with views across a yard cluttered with wheelie bins, emergency generator housings and SOCO vehicles to the custody block, which cut out much of the natural light.
    There were few things in the world, Roy Grace always thought, that could create as much paperwork as a Major Crime investigation. The grey-carpeted floor was piled high with stacks of large green crates and blue cardboard boxes, all labelled with operation names, as well as reference books, training manuals and a doorstop of a tome sitting on its own, Practical Homicide.
    Almost every inch of the desktop space of the three workstations was covered by computers, keyboards, phones, racks of box files, crammed in trays, Rolodex files, mugs and personal effects. Post-it notes were stuck on just about everything. Two free-standing tables visibly sagged beneath the weight of files piled on them.
    The walls were plastered with news cuttings of some of the cases, and photographs and old wanted posters of suspects still at large. One was a picture of a smiling dark-haired teenager, with the wording above:
    HAVE YOU SEEN THIS WOMAN?
    £500 reward
    Another was a black-and-white Sussex Police poster featuring an amiable-looking man with a big smile and a shock of unruly hair. It was captioned:
    SUSSEX POLICE
    MURDER of JACK (John) BAKER.
    Mr Baker was murdered at Worthing, Sussex on 8/9 January 1990.
    Did you know him? Have you seen him before?
IF YOU HAVE ANY INFORMATION
PLEASE CONTACT THE MURDER INCIDENT ROOM
telephone no. 0903-30821,
OR ANY POLICE STATION.
    There were hand-drawn sketches of victims and suspects, computer-generated E-Fits, one of a rape suspect shown with different hats and hoods, with and without glasses.
    In charge of this entire new cold case initiative, and answering to Roy Grace, was Jim Doyle, a former detective chief superintendent with whom Grace had worked many years back. Doyle was a tall, studious-looking man, whose appearance belied his mental – and physical – toughness. He had about him more the courteous air of a distinguished academic than a police officer. Yet with his firm, unflappable manner, his enquiring mind and a precision in the way he approached everything, he had been a devastatingly effective detective, involved in solving many of the county’s most serious violent crimes during his thirty-year career. His nickname in the force had been Popeye , after his namesake, Jimmy ‘Popeye’ Doyle in the film The French Connection .
    Doyle’s two colleagues were similarly experienced. Eamon Greene, a quiet, serious man, was a former Sussex under-16 chess champion and was now a grand master, still playing and winning tournaments. Before retiring at just forty-nine, and then returning to the force as a civilian, he had reached the rank of detective superintendent in Sussex CID, Major Crime Branch. Brian Foster, a former detective chief inspector known as Fossy , was a lean sixty-three-year-old, with close-cropped hair and still, despite his age, boyishly handsome features. In the previous year he had run four marathons in four consecutive weeks in different countries. Since retiring from Sussex CID at the age of fifty-two, he had worked for the past decade in the prosecutor’s office of the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague, and had now returned home eager to start a new phase in his career.
    Roy Grace, wearing a suit and tie for his first meeting with the new Assistant Chief Constable later that morning, cleared a space on one of the work surfaces and sat down on it, cradling his second mug of coffee of the day. It was 8.45 a.m.
    ‘OK,’ he said, swinging his legs. ‘It’s good to have the three of you. Actually, let me rephrase that – it is bloody brilliant!’
    They all grinned.
    ‘Popeye,