Looking Good Dead

minutes – if not more.
    After a further twenty minutes had passed, it became evident to Rye that Andy Gidney had vanished.
    And, he was about to discover, Gidney had securely deleted everything from the server and taken the laptop and the cloned hard drive with him.

77
    Roy Grace drove away from Harry Frame’s house suddenly feeling very low and very tired, despite the latest can of Red Bull and the caffeine tablets he had swallowed less than half an hour ago. It was too soon to take any more. He hoped to hell that the clairvoyant would suddenly get one of his sparks of inspiration.
    Then his phone rang. He answered it hopefully. It was Branson, cheery as ever.
    ‘Bearing up, old timer?’
    ‘I’m bagged,’ Grace said. ‘What news?’
    ‘Someone from DS Gaylor’s lot has been going through Reggie D’Eath’s paperwork. They’ve found a monthly standing order on his Barclaycard to a company called Scarab Entertainment. The amount is one thousand pounds.’
    ‘A thousand quid? A month?’
    ‘Yup.’
    ‘Where does someone like D’Eath get that kind of money?’
    ‘By supplying small children to rich men as a sideline.’
    ‘Where’s the company based?’ Grace asked.
    ‘That’s the bad news. Panama.’
    Grace thought for a moment. There were certain countries in the world where the law guaranteed a company total privacy from investigation. He recalled from a previous case that Panama was one of them. ‘That’s not going to help us much in the short term. A thousand quid a month?’
    ‘That’s big business,’ Branson said. ‘Couldn’t we get a court order to force all the credit card companies to tell us who else is paying a grand a month to Scarab Entertainment?’
    ‘Yes, in these circumstances with lives at stake we could, but it won’t help us. We’ll get a list of nominee directors from some law firm in Panama that’ll tell us to fuck off when we approach it.’ How manysubscribers did they have? It would not need many to make a very substantial business. One that they would go to great lengths to protect.
    DEARLY VALUED CUSTOMER, we hope you enjoyed our little bonus show. Remember to log in at 21.15 on Tuesday for our next Big Attraction – a man and his wife together. Our first ever DOUBLE KILLING!
    For a thousand a month you would want to give the odd little freebie, wouldn’t you? Just toss the occasional paedophile into an acid bath.
    ‘You still there, old timer?’
    ‘Yes. Anything else your end?’
    ‘We’ve got one sighting of Mr Bryce in his Espace, just after midnight, filling up with petrol at a Texaco garage at Pyecombe – from the CCTV camera.’
    ‘Other vehicles on the camera?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘And nothing of use in the Espace?’
    ‘Forensics are crawling all over it. Nothing so far.’
    ‘I’m coming back to the Incident Room,’ Grace said. ‘I’ll be about twenty minutes.’
    ‘I’ll have some coffee waiting.’
    ‘I need a quadruple espresso.’
    ‘Me too.’
    Grace drove on, turning off the coast road and driving inland on the upper road through Kemp Town, past the posh girls’ school, St Mary’s Hall, the Royal Sussex County Hospital, then the Victorian Gothic facade of the mixed public school, Brighton College. On his left, a short distance ahead, he saw a muscular-looking man with a strutting gait walking into a newsagent’s. Something about him looked familiar, but he couldn’t immediately think what.
    But it was enough to make him do a U-turn. He pulled over on the opposite side of the road, switched off the engine and watched.
    After no more than a minute, the man emerged from the shop, a cigarette in his lips, carrying a plastic bag with a bunch of newspapers sticking out of the top, and walked towards a black Volkswagen Golf parked with two wheels on the kerb, its hazard flashers on.

    Grace stared hard through his windscreen. The gait was distinctly odd, a curious rolling swagger that reminded him of the way some hard nuts from the armed forces walked. As if they owned the pavement.
    Dressed in a singlet, white jeans and white loafers, the man had gelled spikes of short hair and sported a heavy gold chain around his neck. Where the hell had he seen him before? And then his – sometimes – near-photographic memory kicked in, and he knew exactly where and when he had seen this man before. Last night. On the CCTV footage in the Karma Bar.
    He had been Janie Stretton’s date!
    Grace’s heart was pounding. The Volkswagen drove off.