Dead Man's Footsteps

was maimed. Are you proud of all this? You don’t think there is room for improvement with your methods?’
    Actually, Roy Grace thought, he was proud. Extremely proud of everything but the injuries to his officers, forwhich he would always blame himself. Maybe she genuinely did not know the background – or she was choosing to ignore it.
    He was cautious in his reply. ‘When you look at an operation after the event, you can always see ways you could have improved it.’
    ‘Exactly,’ she said. ‘That’s all Detective Superintendent Pewe is here to do. Bring the benefit of his experience with the best police force in the UK.’
    He would have liked to have replied, Actually, you are wrong. The guy is a total wanker. But his earlier feeling that Alison Vosper had some other agenda with this man was even stronger now. Maybe she really was shagging him. Unlikely, for sure, but there was something between them, some hold over her that Pewe had. Whatever, it was clear that at this moment Grace was definitely not teacher’s pet.
    So, on one of the rare occasions in his career, he played along with the politics.
    ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Thanks for clarifying that. It’s really helpful.’
    ‘Good,’ she said.
    As Grace left the room, he was deep in thought. There had been four Senior Investigating Officers at Sussex House for the past five years. The system was fine. They didn’t need any more. Now they had five, at a time when they were short of recruits lower down and running way over budget. It would not be long before Vosper and her colleagues started reducing the number back down to four. And no prizes for guessing who would be axed – or, rather, transferred to the back of beyond.
    He needed a plan. Something that would cause Cassian Pewe to shoot himself in the foot.
    And at this moment he didn’t have one.

39
OCTOBER 2007
    He could have murdered a Starbucks latte. Or any freshly ground coffee. But he didn’t dare leave his observation post. There was only one way out of her building, regardless of whether she used the lift or the fire escape staircase, and that was through the front door he was staring at. He wasn’t taking any chances. She had remained inside for too long, much longer than normal, and he had a feeling she was up to something.
    Finding her had been hard enough – and expensive enough. With just one piece of luck on his side: an old friend in the right place.
    Well, actually the wrong place, because Donny Winters was in jail for identify theft and fraud, but it was Ford Open Prison, where visiting hours were reasonable and it was under an hour’s drive from here. It had been a risk going to see him, and it had cost him, for the bungs Donny said he would need.
    He’d been right, of course, in his hunch. All women called their mums. And Abby’s mum was sick. Abby thought she would be safe, calling from a pay-as-you-go mobile with the number withheld. Stupid cow.
    Stupid, greedy cow.
    He smiled at the GSM 3060 Intercept, which sat on a wooden vegetable box in front of him now. If you were inrange of either the mobile handset making the call or the mobile receiving it, you could listen in and, very usefully, see the number of the caller, even if it was withheld, and the recipient, regardless of whether it was a mobile or landline. But of course she wouldn’t know that.
    He’d simply camped out in a rental car close to her mother’s flat in Eastbourne and waited for Abby to call. He hadn’t had to wait long. Then it had taken Donny just one call, to a bent mate who worked on an installation team rigging mobile phone radio masts. Within two days he had established the location of the mast which had picked up the signals from Abby’s phone.
    He learned that mobile phone masts in densely populated cities were rarely more than a few hundred yards apart, and often even closer together than that. And he learned from Donny that, in addition to receiving and transmitting calls, mobile phone masts act as beacons. Even on stand-by, a phone keeps in touch with its nearest beacon, constantly transmitting a greeting signal and receiving one back.
    The pattern of signals from Abby’s phone showed she barely went out of range of one particular beacon, a Vodafone macrocell sited at the junction of Eastern Road and Boundary Road in Kemp Town.
    This was a short distance from Marine Parade, which ran from the Palace Pier to the Marina, fronted on one side by some of the finest Regency façades in