Looking Good Dead

Divisional Inspector. To his relief, Hopkirk was in and not on a call.
    Hopkirk was a wise owl with many years of service behind him; he commanded a lot of respect in the force and was well liked. Grace had made his choice of who to call for this task very carefully. To get everything galvanized at the speed he needed, if Hopkirk agreed, he was the man.
    ‘Roy! How are you? Keep seeing your name in the press! Glad to see your move to Sussex House hasn’t blunted your appetite for pissing people off!’
    ‘Very witty. Listen, I’ll chat later. I need a big favour, and I need it right now. We’re talking about two people’s lives – we’ve reason to believe they’ve been abducted and their lives are in imminent peril.’
    ‘Tom and Kellie Bryce?’ Hopkirk said, surprising Grace.
    ‘How the hell do you know that?’ He was forgetting, just how razor sharp Hopkirk was.
    The roar of a passing lorry drowned out Hopkirk’s reply. Covering one ear and jamming the phone hard up against the other, Grace shouted, ‘Sorry? Can you repeat that?’
    ‘They’re on the bloody front page of the Argus !’
    The PRO had managed to pull it off. Brilliant. ‘OK, Mike, here’s whatI want. I need you to close down Civic Square car park for an hour – to give me enough time to search a car in here.’
    He heard what sounded like a lot of air going backwards very quickly. ‘Close it down?’
    ‘I need an hour.’
    ‘The biggest car park in Brighton, in the middle of the day. Close it down – are you out of your mind?’
    ‘No, I need you to do this, now, right this minute.’
    ‘On what grounds, Roy?’
    ‘A bomb scare. You’ve had a call from a terrorist cell.’
    ‘Shit. You are serious, aren’t you?’
    ‘Come on, it’s a quiet Monday morning. Wake up your troops!’
    ‘And if this goes pear-shaped?’
    ‘I’ll take the rap.’
    ‘Won’t be you, Roy, it’ll be me, and you know that.’
    ‘But you’ll do it?’
    ‘Civic Square?’
    ‘Civic Square.’
    ‘OK,’ he said, sounding dubious but resigned. ‘Get off my bloody phone; I need it!’
    Grace needed his, too. He called Sussex House to arrange for a SOCO team to get down here immediately, and for the officer to be accompanied by someone from Traffic who was capable of getting past the locks and security system of a VW Golf.
    Next he phoned a Detective Inspector called Bill Ankram, who was responsible for the deployment of the local surveillance team. In a rare stroke of luck, Ankram had good news for him.
    ‘We were down to follow someone in central Brighton today and the job’s gone short – we’ve had a no-show. I was about to pull the team out and have a training afternoon instead.’
    ‘How quickly could you get them covering the Civic Square car park?’ Grace asked.
    ‘Within an hour. We’re not far away already.’
    Grace made the detailed arrangements, gave him the vehicle registration and exact position of the Golf. Then he phoned the Incident Room and had them fax and email the photograph of the Volkswagen’s driver to Ankram.

    Next he spoke to Nicholl and told him he would have to see the officer from the Met on his own, after all. As he was speaking to him, there was a deafening explosion of wailing.
    It sounded as if all the emergency vehicles in the entire City of Brighton and Hove had switched on their sirens simultaneously.

78
    Kellie was scaring Tom. It was like being locked in the darkness with a total stranger. A completely unpredictable one. There were long periods of silence, then suddenly she would screech hysterical abuse at him. She was starting again now, her voice cracked and strained from so much screaming.
    ‘You stupid bastard! You idiot man! You got us into this! If you had left the bloody CD thing on the train this would never have happened! THEY’RE NEVER GOING TO LET US GO. DO YOU UNDERSTAND THAT, YOU STUPID FUCKING FAILURE OF A MAN???’
    Then she burst into a fit of sobs.
    Tom felt all scrunched up inside. The sound of her crying was terrible, so harrowing. But there was nothing he could say that she seemed to take on board. He had been talking to her continuously since the fat man had left the room. Trying to calm her down, trying to boost her, to keep up their spirits.
    Trying to do anything to distract himself from the searing agony in his bladder. From his raging thirst. And the pangs of hunger. And his fear.
    He wondered if it was the vodka that was talking, making Kellie behave like this. Or