Dead Like You

grey, rain-soaked rooftops towards Brighton Station and the viaduct.
    Seated at the next desk along was DC Tingley, a bright, boyish-looking twenty-six-year-old police officer whom he liked. In particular, he liked the man’s energy. Jason Tingley, sleeves rolled up, was on the phone, pen in hand, dealing with one of the dozens of calls that had come in following their reconstruction, three days earlier, of Rachael’s journey from the East Street taxi rank back home.
    Grace had a thick file on Rachael Ryan on his desk. Already, despite the holidays, he had her bank and her credit-card details. There had been no transactions during the past week, which meant he could effectively rule out that she had been mugged for the contents of her handbag. There had been no calls from her mobile phone since 2.35 on Christmas morning.
    However, there was something useful he had gleaned from the mobile phone company. There were mobile phone base stations, or mini masts, located around Brighton and Hove, and every fifteen minutes, even in standby mode, the phone would send a signal to the nearest mast, like a plane radioing its current position, and receive one back.
    Although no further calls had been made from Rachael Ryan’s phone, it had remained switched on for three more days, until the battery died, he guessed. According to information he’d received from the phone company, shortly after her last phone call, she had suddenly moved two miles east of her home – in a vehicle of some kind, judging from the speed at which it had happened.
    She had remained there for the rest of the night, until 10 a.m. on Christmas Day. Then she had travelled approximately four miles west, into Hove. Again the speed of the journey indicated that she was travelling in a vehicle. Then she had stopped and remained static until the last signal received, shortly after 11 p.m. on Saturday.
    On a large-scale map of Brighton and Hove on the Incident Room wall, Grace had drawn a red circle around the maximum area that would be covered by this particular beacon’s range. It included most of Hove as well as part of Brighton, Southwick and Portslade. Over 120,000 people lived within its radius – an almost impossible number for house-to-house enquiries.
    Besides, the information was only of limited value, he realized. Rachael could have been separated from her phone. It was just an indicator of where she might be, but no more. But so far it was all they had. One line he would try, he decided, was to see if anything had been picked up on CCTV cameras on the routes matching the signal information. But there was only coverage on major routes and that was limited.
    Rachael did not own a computer and there was nothing on the one in her office at American Express to give any clue as to why she might have disappeared.
    At the moment it was if she had fallen through a crack in the earth.
    Tingley put down the phone and drew a line through the name he had written a couple of minutes earlier on his pad. ‘Tosser!’ he said. ‘Time waster.’ Then he turned to Roy. ‘Good New Year’s Eve, mate?’
    ‘Yeah, it was all right. Went with Dick and Leslie Pope to Donatello’s. You?’
    ‘Went up to London with the missus. Trafalgar Square. It was brilliant – until it started pissing with rain.’ He shrugged. ‘So what do you think? She still alive?’
    ‘Not looking good,’ he replied. ‘She’s a homebody. Still sore about the bust-up with her ex. Into shoes, big time.’ He looked at his colleague and shrugged. ‘That’s the bit I keep coming back to.’
    Grace had spent an hour earlier in the day with Dr Julius Proudfoot, the behavioural analyst Operation Houdini had drafted into their team. Proudfoot told him that, in his view, Rachael Ryan’s disappearance could not be connected to the Shoe Man. He still did not understand how the arrogant psychologist had arrived at that conclusion, since he had so little evidence.
    ‘Proudfoot insists this isn’t the Shoe Man’s style. He says the Shoe Man attacks his victims and then leaves them. Because he’s used the same MO for five victims, Proudfoot doesn’t accept that he would suddenly have changed and kept one.’
    ‘Similar MO, Roy,’ Jason Tingley said. ‘But he takes them in different places, right? He tried that first one in an alley. One in a hotel room. One in her home. One under the pier. One in a multi-storey car park. Clever if you want to look at it that way – makes it hard for