Dead Man's Grip

the other. She was stuck in her life beyond work, caring for her elderly mother. Give her a makeover, Grace always thought, and she would be one attractive lady.
    Next came DC Emma-Jane Boutwood. A slim girl with an alert face and long fair hair scooped up into a ponytail, the DC had made a miraculous recovery after being nearly killed by a stolen van the previous year.
    She was followed by the shambling figure of DS Norman Potting. Because of the pension system in operation for the police, most officers took retirement after thirty years’ service. The system worked against them if they stayed on longer. But Potting wasn’t motivated by money. He liked being a copper and seemed determined to remain one as long as he possibly could. Thanks to the endless disasters of his private life, Sussex CID was the only family he had – although, with his old-school, politically incorrect attitudes, a lot of people, including the Chief Constable, Grace suspected, would have liked to see the back of him.
    However, much though he irritated people at times, Grace couldn’t help respecting the man. Norman Potting was a true copper in the golden sense of the word. A Rottweiler in a world increasingly full of politically correct pussycats. Pot-bellied, with a comb-over
like a threadbare carpet, dressed in what looked like his father’s demob suit from the Second World War, and smelling of pipe tobacco and mothballs, Potting sat down and exhaled loudly, making a sound like a squashed cushion. Bella Moy, who loathed the man, looked at him warily, wondering what he was about to say.
    He did not disappoint her. In his gruff rural burr, Potting complained, ‘What is it with this city and football? How come Manchester’s got Man United, London’s got the Gunners, Newcastle’s got the Toon Army. What have we got in Brighton? The biggest bloody poofter colony in England!’
    Bella Moy rounded on him. ‘Have you ever kicked a football in your life?’
    ‘Actually, yes, I have, Bella,’ he said. ‘You might not believe it, but I used to play for Portsmouth’s second team when I was a lad. Centre half, I was. I was planning to be a professional footballer, until I got my kneecap shattered in a game.’
    ‘I didn’t know that,’ Grace said.
    Norman Potting shrugged, then blushed. ‘I’m a Winston Churchill fan, chief. Always have been. Know what he said?’
    Grace shook his head.
    ‘Success is the ability to go from one failure to another, with no loss of enthusiasm.’ He shrugged.
    Roy Grace looked at him sympathetically. The Detective Sergeant had three failed marriages behind him and his fourth, to a Thai girl he had found on the Internet, seemed like it was heading in the same direction.
    ‘If anyone would know, you would,’ Bella Moy retorted.
    Roy Grace looked down at the briefing notes typed out by his assistant as he waited for Glenn Branson, who had just come in, to sit down. Glenn was followed by the cheery uniformed figure of the Road Policing Unit Inspector, James Biggs, who had requested the involvement of the Major Crime Branch in this inquiry.
    ‘OK,’ Grace said, placing his agenda and policy book in front of him. ‘This is the first briefing of Operation Violin , the inquiry into the death of Brighton University student Tony Revere.’ He paused to introduce Biggs, a pleasant, no-nonsense-looking man with close-cropped
fair hair, to his team. ‘James, would you like to start by outlining what happened earlier today?’
    The Inspector summarized the morning’s tragic events, placing particular focus on the eyewitness reports of the white van which had disappeared from the scene, having gone through a red light and struck the cyclist. So far, he reported, there were two possible sightings of the van from CCTV cameras in the area, but neither was of sufficient quality, even with image enhancement, to provide legible registration numbers.
    The first sighting was of a Ford Transit van, matching the description, heading fast in a westerly direction from the scene, less than thirty seconds after the collision. The second, one minute later, showed a van, missing its driver’s wing mirror, making a right turn half a mile on. This was significant, Biggs told them, because of pieces of a wing mirror recovered from the scene. Its identity was now being traced from a serial number on the casing. That was all he had to go on so far.
    ‘There’s a Home Office post-mortem due to start in about an hour’s