Dead Man's Footsteps

thrombosis. And my headset didn’t work. Other than that, you’re pretty close.’
    ‘It’s tough at the top, Roy. Isn’t that what they say?’
    ‘Yeah, yeah. This is costing a fortune. Cut the chat!’
    Branson reported on their visits to the stamp dealer Hawkes and Hugo Hegarty.
    Grace listened intently. ‘So it really is stamps! She converted the whole lot into stamps!’
    ‘That’s right. Portability. All the money-laundering regulations. They have sniffer dogs at airports that are trained to smell cash. And three and a quarter million in cash takes up a lot of space. But that value in stamps would take up just a couple of A4 envelopes.’
    ‘Do we have any idea what she did with them?’
    ‘No. Not so far. Anyhow, then we went to see Lorraine Wilson’s sister.’
    ‘What did she have to say?’
    ‘Quite a lot, actually.’
    There was a beep and the carousel started moving. Grace was jostled by two hugely fat men, then an old woman backed a luggage cart into his legs. He stepped back and away from the crowd swarming around the conveyor, to a place where he had some space but could still see the bags. He knew from a stint at Gatwick Airport some years ago that theft of luggage from conveyor belts was common.
    ‘There’s a lot of noise your end,’ Branson said.
    ‘I can hear you OK. Tell me?’
    ‘First thing is, the sister went to New York with Lorraine Wilson a week after 9/11 – just as soon as they could get a flight. They went to the hotel Ronnie was staying at, the W.’
    ‘The W?’ Grace queried. ‘The W what?’
    ‘That’s its name.’
    ‘Just W?’
    ‘Old-timer, you spend your life under a stone or what? You need to employ me as your full-time style guru. The W is a chain. They’re, like, considered über-cool hotels.’
    ‘Yeah, well, my salary doesn’t run to über-cool hotels.’
    ‘I can’t believe you haven’t heard of them.’
    ‘Well, there you go, yet another of life’s many unsolved mysteries. Anything you want to tell me about it, other than that I haven’t heard of it?’
    ‘Yeah, quite a bit. So, some of his belongings were still in the room, and the management weren’t too happy, because the credit card he’d given had maxed out on them.’
    ‘They didn’t make any allowance for the fact that he was dead?’
    ‘I presume they didn’t know at that point. He’d booked in for just two nights and left an opened credit card slip with them. Anyhow, the thing is that his passport and airline ticket back to the UK were still in the safe.’
    To his relief, Grace suddenly saw his bag appear. ‘Hang on a tick.’ He hurried forward to grab it, then said, ‘OK, go on.’
    ‘So then they went to Pier 92, where the NYPD had set up a kind of bereavement centre. People were bringing stuff like hairbrushes, so they could get the DNA ofprobable victims to help identify the bodies, or the body parts. They were also displaying personal items that had been recovered. Lorraine went there with her sister, but the police hadn’t recovered anything belonging to her husband that could identify him, at that stage.’
    Grace lugged his bag away from the crowd to a quieter spot, then had to wait for a tannoy announcement to end before he could ask, ‘What about the money Lorraine received?’
    ‘I’ll come to that – and I gotta dash in a minute to the briefing.’
    ‘Tell DI Mantle to call me afterwards.’
    ‘I will. But you’ve got to hear something first. We have a big development! So, anyhow, Lorraine blags fifteen hundred dollars from the officer at Pier 92. They were doling the dough out to anyone who’d lost someone and was suffering financial hardship.’
    ‘Fair enough at that time. She’d been left up shit creek financially, right?’
    ‘Yes. Then a couple of weeks after they get back to the UK, her sister said Lorraine got a phone call – a fire-damaged wallet containing Ronnie Wilson’s driving licence and a mobile phone identified as belonging to him were handed in by rescue workers digging in the rubble at Ground Zero. Photographs of them and the contents of the wallet were sent over to her so she could formally identify them.’
    ‘Which she was able to do?’
    ‘Yep. Now, the cash she got – the big payments of the life insurance, then the compensation – here’s the thing. Her sister was astonished when we told her. Like more than astonished, like blown-fucking-away astonished.’
    ‘Acting?’
    ‘Not in my view, nor Bella’s. She