Dead Man's Grip

realized it wasn’t her licence plates on the car. Someone had taken hers and replaced them with these.’
    ‘While she was in the Newport Pagnell Services?’
    ‘She can’t swear that, sir – she can’t remember the last time she noticed her number plates. To be honest, a lot of us probably don’t.’
    Grace thought for a moment.
    ‘So it may be that our suspect has switched plates with hers. Have you put a marker out on her plates?’
    ‘I have, sir, yes. So far nothing.’
    ‘Good work. Let me know the instant anyone sees that car.’
    ‘Of course, sir.’
    ‘Have you sent someone down to Avis at Gatwick?’
    ‘I’ve sent Sara Papesch and Emma-Jane Boutwood.’
    Grace frowned. ‘Who’s Sara Papesch?’
    ‘She’s just joined the team. Bright girl – a Kiwi detective, over here on a secondment.’
    ‘OK, good.’
    Grace liked to know everyone on his team personally. It worried him when an inquiry started getting so big that his team members began taking on new members without his sanction. He was feeling, for one of the rare moments in his career, that things were getting on top of him. He needed to calm down, take things steady.
    He looked at the round wooden clock on his wall. It had been a prop in the fictitious police station in the TV police series The Bill . Sandy had bought it for his twenty-sixth birthday. Beneath it was a stuffed seven pound, six ounce brown trout Sandy had also bought him, from an antiques stall in Portobello Road, early in their marriage. He kept it beneath the clock to give him a joke he could crack to detectives working under him, about patience and big fish.
    It was also there as a reminder to himself. To always be patient. Every murder investigation was a puzzle. A gazillion tiny pieces to find and fit together. Your bosses and the local media were always
breathing down your neck, but you had to remain calm, somehow. Panic would get you nowhere, other than leading you to make wrong, uninformed decisions.
    His door opened and Glenn Branson came in, looking as he did most of the time these days, as if he was carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. Grace waited for him to begin regaling him with the latest saga in his marriage break-up, but instead the DS placed his massive hands on the back of one of the two chairs in front of his desk and leaned forward. ‘We have a development, old-timer, and it’s not a good one. I’ve just had a call from Carly Chase in New York.’
    Now he had Grace’s full attention. ‘Her mission isn’t going well, as predicted, right?’
    ‘You could say that, boss. Tony Revere’s mother was killed in a car smash last night.’
    Grace stared at him in stunned silence. He could feel the blood draining from every artery in his body.
    ‘Killed?’
    ‘Yes.’
    For some moments, the Detective Superintendent was too shell-shocked to even think straight. Then he asked, ‘What information do you have? How? I mean, what happened?’
    ‘I’ll come back to it – that’s the least of our problems. We have a much bigger one. Carly Chase’s twelve-year-old son has gone missing.’
    ‘Missing? What do you mean?’
    ‘It sounds like he’s been abducted.’
    Grace stared into Branson’s big, round eyes. He felt as if a bolus of cold water had been injected into his stomach. ‘When – when did this happen?’
    ‘A friend of Carly, called Justin Ellis, should have picked her son up from St Christopher’s School at 11.15 a.m. to take him to a dental appointment – he was having a brace adjusted. Ellis got there at ten past, to discover the boy had been collected twenty minutes earlier by a taxi. But Carly Chase is absolutely adamant she didn’t order a taxi.’
    Grace stared at him, absorbing the information, trying to square
it with the news he had just had about the licence plates from Duncan Crocker.
    ‘She seemed in a pretty ramped-up state yesterday. Are you sure she didn’t forget she’d ordered one?’
    ‘I just came off the phone to her. She didn’t order it, she’s one hundred per cent sure.’
    Branson sat down in front of him, folded his arms and went on, ‘One of his teachers at the school got a call that the taxi was outside. She knew he was being picked up, because his mum had already told them that was going to happen. She didn’t think to query it.’
    ‘Did she see the driver?’
    ‘Not really, no. He was wearing a baseball cap. But she wasn’t really focused on him. Her concern was that Tyler