Dead Simple

One’s the one you’ve been waiting for.’
    ‘Tommy Lytle?’
    ‘Yes. I’ve also got the agenda and briefing notes for your budget meeting at eleven.’
    ‘Thanks.’ As she was leaving the room he quickly sifted through the pile and pulled the Huntington report to the top. Huntingdon, in Cambridge, was one of the forensic centres that Sussex Police used. Tommy Lytle was Grace’s oldest ‘cold case’. At the age of eleven, twenty-seven years ago, Tommy had set out from school on a February afternoon, to walk home. He’d never been seen again. The only lead at the time had been a Morris Minor van, seen by a witness who had had the presence of mind to write down the number. But no link to the owner, a weirdo loner with a history of sex offences on minors, had ever been established. And then, two months ago, by complete coincidence, the van had showed up on Grace’s radar, when a classic car enthusiast who now owned it got stopped for drunken driving.
    The advances in forensics from twenty-seven years back were beyond quantum. With modern DNA testing, police forensic scientists boasted, not without substance, that if a human being had ever been in a room, no matter how long ago, given time, they could find evidence. Just one skin cell that had escaped the vacuum cleaners, or a hair, or a clothing fibre. Maybe something one hundred times smaller than a pinhead. There would be a trace.
    And now they had the van. And the original suspect was still alive. And forensics had been through that van with microscopes!
    Despite his fondness for Branson, suddenly Grace could not wait for him to leave, so he could read the report. If he solved this, it would be the oldest cold case ever solved in the country.
    Popping the remains of the croissant in his mouth and talking while he chewed, Branson said, ‘Five guys go on a stag night, right? The groom is a real joker – he’s pulled a stunt on each of the guys in the past – handcuffed one poor sod to a seat on the night train to Edinburgh when he was meant to be getting married in Brighton the next morning.’
    ‘Nice guy,’ Grace said.
    ‘Yes, just the kind of fun bloke you want for your best friend. So. Let’s look at what we have: Five of them start out. Somewhere along the line they lose the groom, Michael Harrison. Then they are in an RTA, three of them dead at the scene, the fourth in a coma and he died last night. Michael has vanished, no one has heard a word. It is now Friday morning and he’s due to be married in a little over twenty-four hours.’
    Branson sipped some coffee, stood up for a moment and walked around the office. He stopped and stared for a moment at the SASCO flip chart, on which a draft rota for something had been written in blue ink. He flipped it over, then picked up a pen and drew on the board.
    ‘We got Michael Harrison.’ He wrote his name and drew a circle around it. ‘We got the four dead mates.’ He drew a second circle. ‘Then we have the fiancée, Ashley Harper.’ He drew a third circle around her. ‘Then the business partner, Mark Warren.’ He drew a fourth circle. ‘And…’
    Grace looked at him quizzically.
    ‘We have what we dug out of his computer yesterday, yeah?’
    ‘A bank account in the Cayman Islands.’
    Still holding the pen, Branson sat down in front of Grace again.
    Grace continued. ‘The business partner wasn’t at the stag do, you said.’
    Branson never failed to be impressed by Grace’s memory for detail. He always seemed to retain everything. ‘Correct.’
    ‘Because he was stuck out of town on a delayed flight.’
    ‘That’s the story so far.’
    ‘So what does he say? Where does he think Michael Harrison went? Did he fuck off to the Cayman Islands?’
    ‘Roy, you have seen his bird. And we agreed no bloke in his right mind would ditch her and run away – she is drop-dead gorgeous, and smart with it. And…’ Branson pursed his lips.
    ‘And what?’
    ‘She lies. I did your NLP stuff on her, the eye trick. I asked her if she knew about the Cayman Islands account and she said she didn’t. She was lying.’
    ‘She was probably just being protective. Covering her boss – and fiancé’s arse.’ Grace was distracted for an instant by the ping of another incoming email. Then he thought hard. ‘What is your take so far?’
    ‘The following possible scenarios: could be his mates have been paying him back and they’ve tied him up somewhere. Or he might have had an accident. Or he’s