Not Dead Yet

thought, staring at the old warhorse, still unable to believe this man was now, unknowingly, his love rival.
    ‘We have a report back from the lab,’ Potting said, smugly, in his rural burr. ‘The DNA from the hairbrush and toothbrush I took from the home of Myles Royce matches the DNA from the torso recovered from Stonery Farm, and the limbs recovered from the West Sussex Piscatorial Society. No question, it is the same person.’
    The atmosphere in the room changed perceptibly.
    ‘Good work, Norman,’ Grace said. ‘Okay, we need to do our background on the victim. Norman, as you’ve already met the mother, you should take a Family Liaison Officer with you and break the news. See what further information you can find out from her about his friends and associates. Get the mother’s permission to search his house. In particular let’s see if he left a computer or mobile phone – and hopefully both. If his mobile phone isn’t there, ask his mother for his number, and we can still get most of what we need from his service provider. We can get cell-site analysis done on his movements, and we can see who he talked to.’
    He paused and made a note. ‘If he owned a car, let’s gets its movement history over the past eighteen months off the ANPR network. Also see what photographs he has in his house of other people – who his friends were and who he admired. I’ll get the High Tech Crime Unit to hunt on social networking sites – see if he tweeted, had a Facebook page, Linked-In, any of those. We need to know everything about him. Who he engaged with, where he went to socialize, what hobbies or kinky perversions he was into,what clubs he was a member of. In particular I want to know more about his Gaia obsession and any fan clubs he had joined. Okay, Norman, that’s your action.’
    ‘Yes, chief.’
    Glenn looked at Potting, then at Bella. She looked so sad today, yet he knew how he could make her happy. If he could get that prat Potting out of the way.
    Was he being ridiculous? His own life was a total mess, and maybe it was totally wrong to start thinking about messing with someone else’s.
    ‘Glenn?’
    ‘Right, boss, me and Bella interviewed all fourteen staff members of the chartered accountancy firm Feline Bradley-Hamilton today. This is the only company we’ve found that has links with both Stonery Farm and the West Sussex Piscatorial Society; the firm’s made a specialist accountancy practice in farming and outdoors pursuits – and it’s created its own software package for farmers. During this process we encountered one person we are not happy about, and we feel should be looked into further.’ He glanced at his notes. ‘His name is Eric Whiteley.’
    ‘Tell me your reasons,’ Grace said.
    ‘I used your right-eye, left-eye technique that you taught me.’
    Grace nodded. Human brains were divided into left and right hemispheres. One contained long-term memory storage, and in the other, the creative processes took place. When asked a question, people’s eyes almost invariably moved to the hemisphere they were using. In some people the memory storage was in the right hemisphere and in some the left; the creative hemisphere would be the opposite one.
    When people were telling the truth, their eyes would swing towards the memory hemisphere; when they lied, towards the creative one – to construct . Branson had learned from Roy Grace to tell which, by tracking their eyes in response to a simple control question such as the one he had asked Eric Whiteley earlier, about how long he had worked for the firm – to which there would have been no need for him to have lied.
    ‘And?’ Roy Grace asked.
    ‘It’s my view he was lying to us.’
    Grace turned to Bella. ‘What did you think?’
    ‘I agree, sir. Whiteley’s an oddball. I wasn’t at all happy with how he responded to our questions.’
    Grace made a note on his pad. Eric Whiteley. Person of Interest? ‘Did you get his home address?’
    ‘Yes,’ Bella said. ‘With difficulty.’
    Grace raised his eyebrows. ‘Oh?’
    ‘He kept trying to tell us we were invading his privacy,’ Branson said.
    ‘I think you two should go to his house and talk to him again there. Sounds like we need to either bring him in or eliminate him from our enquiries.’
    The problem, he knew, with not having a time or date of Royce’s death is that all the team were working in a vacuum. When there was a clearly established time of death, alibis were