Dead Man's Footsteps

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80
OCTOBER 2007
    Tuesday evening, 8 o’clock. Ricky sat in his van in darkness, back at the same cross-street vantage point opposite Abby’s mother’s flat where he had waited earlier. From here he could see both the front entrance and the street she would have to use if she tried sneaking out of the rear fire-escape door.
    The chill was really seeping into his bones. He just wanted to get everything back, get Abby out of his face and get the fuck out of this godforsaken damp, freezing country and into some sunshine.
    He’d hardly seen a soul in the past three hours. He seemed to remember Eastbourne had a reputation as a retirement town where the average age was either dead or nearly dead. Tonight it felt as if everyone was dead. Street-lighting fell on empty pavements. Fucking waste , he thought. Someone should talk to this place about its carbon footprint .
    Abby was inside, in the warm with her mother. He had a feeling she would be staying there tonight, but he did not dare leave his post and go to find a pub and have a drink or three until he was sure.
    About two hours ago he’d picked up the signal from her new mobile phone when she’d made a call to her mother’s new phone to test its ring tone and volume, andto give it her number. Now, thanks to that call, he had both of their numbers logged.
    When they were testing the phones he heard the television in the background. It sounded like some soap opera, with a man and a woman bickering in a car. So the bitch and her mother were settled in for a cosy evening in front of the telly, in a warm flat, charging two new mobile phones that had been bought with his money.
    The Intercept beeped busily. Abby was phoning rest homes, looking for somewhere that would take her mother in immediately for four weeks, until a room in the place she had chosen came available.
    She was interrogating them about nursing care, doctors, mealtimes, ingredients of the food, exercise, about whether there was a pool, a sauna, whether they were near a main road or somewhere quiet, gardens with wheelchair access, were there private bathrooms? Her list went on and on. Thorough. As he had learned to his bitter cost. She was a thorough bitch.
    And whose money would be paying for it?
    He listened to Abby making appointments to go and see three places in the morning. He presumed she would leave her mother behind. That she had not forgotten the locksmith was coming.
    By the time he had finished with her, it wouldn’t be a rest home she was needing. It would be a chapel of rest.

81
OCTOBER 2007
    At 8.20 the next morning, Inspector Stephen Curry, accompanied by Sergeant Ian Brown, entered the small conference room in the custody block behind Sussex House. He was clutching today’s morning briefing notes, which comprised a comprehensive review of all priority crimes that had occurred in the district over the last twenty-four hours.
    They were joined by Sergeant Morley and the second early-shift sergeant, a short, stocky officer with a fierce crew cut and even fiercer enthusiasm for her work called Mary Gregson.
    They immediately got down to the job in hand. Curry started to go through all the critical serials. There had been an ugly racist incident, with a young Muslim student badly beaten up outside a late-night takeaway in Park Road, Coldean, on his way back to the university; a traffic fatality involving a motorcyclist and a pedestrian on Lewes Road; a violent mugging on the Broadway in Whitehawk; and a young man beaten up in Preston Park in a homophobic incident.
    He went through all of them with a toothcomb, working out areas of threat, making sure, in his terminology, that he didn’t drop a bollock which could be kicked into touch by the Superintendent at the 9.30 review.
    Then they moved on to the current district mis-persand agreed lines of enquiry. Mary brought up the details of a bail returning to be charged later that day, and reminded Curry that he had an 11 a.m. with a Crown Prosecution Service solicitor, about a suspect they had arrested after a spate of handbag thefts the previous set of shifts.
    Then the Inspector suddenly remembered something else. ‘John – I spoke to you yesterday about visiting a lady down in Kemp Town. I didn’t see that on the list – what was her name? – Katherine Jennings. Any follow-up?’
    Morley suddenly blushed. ‘Oh, God, sorry, boss. I haven’t done anything about it. That Gemma Buxton incident came in and – I’m sorry – I