Not Dead Enough

convictions getting quashed or a mistake that needs rectifying, that kind of thing.’
    ‘Can you tell when they’ve been touched?’
    ‘Absolutely!’ She nodded emphatically. ‘There’s an electronic footprint left any time they are altered. Actually there’s one here.’
    Grace sat bolt upright. ‘There is?’
    ‘Each of us with signatory authority has an individual access code. If we amend a record, the footprint we leave is our access code, and the date.’
    ‘So can you find out whose access code that is?’
    She smiled at him. ‘I know that access code without having to look it up. It’s Janet’s. She amended this record on –’ she peered closer – ‘7 April this year.’
    Now Grace’s adrenaline was really surging. ‘She did?’
    ‘Uh huh.’ She frowned, tapped her keyboard, then peered at the screen again. ‘This is interesting,’ she said. ‘That was her last day in the office.’

114
    An hour and a half later, shortly before eight o’clock, Nick Nicholl drove a marked police Vauxhall Vectra slowly up Sackville Road. Grace was in the front seat, wearing a bullet-proof vest beneath his jacket, and Glenn Branson, also in a bullet-proof vest, sat behind him. Both men were counting down the house numbers on the grimy Edwardian terraced buildings. Following right behind them were two marked police Ford Transit vans, each containing a team of uniformed officers from the Local Support Team.
    ‘Two-five-four!’ Glenn Branson read out. ‘Two-five-eight. Two-six-zero. Two-six-two! We’re here!’
    Nicholl double-parked alongside a dusty Ford Fiesta, the other vehicles pulling up behind him.
    Grace radioed the second LST van to drive round and cover the back entrance, and to let him know when they were in position.
    Two minutes later he got the call back that they were ready.
    They climbed out of the car. Grace instructed the SOCO to stay in his vehicle for the moment, then led the way down the concrete steps, past two dustbins, then a grimy bay window with net curtains drawn. It was still daylight, although fading fast now, so the absence of any interior light did not necessarily mean the flat was empty.
    The tatty grey front door, with two opaque glass panes in it, was in bad need of a lick of paint, and the plastic bell-push had seen better times. Nonetheless, he pressed it. There was no sound. He pressed it again. Silence.
    He rapped sharply on the panes. Then he called out, ‘Police! Open up!’
    There was no response.
    He rapped again, even more loudly. ‘Police! Open up!’ Then he turned to Nicholl and told him to get the LST team to bring the battering ram.
    Moments later two burly LST officers appeared, one of them holding the long, yellow, cylindrical door-busting ram.
    ‘OK, Chief?’ he said to Grace.
    Grace nodded.
    He swung the ram at one of the glass panes. To everyone’s amazement, it bounced off. He swung it again, harder, and again it bounced off.
    Both Branson and Nicholl frowned at him. ‘Didn’t eat enough spinach when you were a kid?’ the LST officer’s colleague joked.
    ‘Fuck this!’
    His colleague, who was even more heavily built, took the implement and swung it. Moments later he was looking sheepish too, as it bounced back from the glass again.
    ‘Shit!’ the constable said. ‘He’s got armour-plated glass!’ He swung it at the door lock. The door barely moved. He swung it again, then again, breaking out into a sweat. Then he looked at Grace. ‘I don’t think he likes burglars.’
    ‘Obviously been taking advice from his local crime prevention officer,’ Nick Nicholl quipped, in a rare display of humour.
    The constable signalled them to move out of the way, then took an almighty swing at the centre of the door, low down. It buckled, with wood splinters flying off.
    ‘Reinforced,’ he said grimly. He swung again, then again, until the wood was sheared away and he could see the steel plate behind it. It took another four swings of the ram before the plate had been bent back enough for someone to crawl through.
    Six LST officers went in first, to establish if anyone was in the flat. After a couple of minutes one of them unlocked the damaged door from the inside and came back out. ‘The flat’s empty, sir.’
    Grace thanked the LST team, then asked them to leave, explaining that he wanted to limit the number of officers on the premises in order to conduct a forensic search.
    As Grace went in, pulling on a pair of latex gloves, he found