Not Dead Yet

apparently they were extremely close.’
    ‘Did she report him as a misper?’ Bella Moy said.
    ‘In April.’
    ‘Why did she wait so long?’ Nick Nicholl asked.
    ‘She told me he was often travelling,’ Norman Potting replied. ‘She said he was a very big fan of Gaia, obsessed by her. He’d a small trust fund, and made a bit of money, apparently, dabbling in the property market, and that enabled him to travel the world following her.’
    Grace frowned. ‘A wealthy, grown man, travelling the world for Gaia? What was all that about?’
    ‘I’m told she’s a huge gay icon,’ Potting replied.
    ‘Is – was – Myles Royce gay?’ Branson interjected.
    ‘The neighbour said she saw a few young men turn up at his house, but never any ladies,’ Potting said.
    Grace thought hard. Something didn’t quite add up. A Gaia fanbutchered. Gaia in town. A recent murder attempt on her in Los Angeles. Coincidences?
    He didn’t like coincidences much. They were too convenient. Easy to explain something away as coincidence .
    Much harder to drill down beneath the surface to see what was really there.
    ‘Has his mother got anything we might get his DNA from, Norman?’ he asked.
    Potting shook his head. ‘No, but I got the neighbour to let me into his house. I removed one of his suits. He fits our size profile exactly. And I brought back a hairbrush and toothbrush – I’ve already had them sent to the lab.’
    ‘Well done,’ Grace said. Then he lapsed into thought.
    Gaia.
    Was there a connection?
    Why should there be?
    He’d been a detective for too long to dismiss anything. A Gaia fan had possibly been murdered. Gaia was in town. But if he had been murdered, that had been long before anyone knew she was coming to town.
    He continued thinking for some moments. Deposition sites tended to be ditches beside quiet roads, or woodlands alongside them. He turned to Glenn Branson. ‘We need to get a list of all the members of the trout-fishing club and have them interviewed – see if any of them saw anything – or react suspiciously to being interviewed. It’s a pretty remote place – I’m not sure any member of the general public would find it by accident. Whoever used this as a deposition site must have had prior knowledge of it. We should also work on a list of anyone who might have had reason to visit it – like maintenance workers clearing the weeds, or working on repairs—’
    ‘I’m there, boss!’ Glenn Branson interjected, and looked at the indexer. ‘Annalise is already liaising with the trout club secretary.’
    ‘He’s being very helpful,’ Annalise Vineer said. ‘He’s given me the full membership list, and he’s working on a wider list of names of all people the club has dealings with who might have reason to have visited, or at least know its location. Such as people from the Environment Agency who handle fishing licences, their fencingcontractor, the company they use for weed control, their driveway maintenance people, their printers and their solicitors. I hope to have the full list by tomorrow.’
    Grace thanked her. Then he turned to another of the detectives on his team, Jon Exton. ‘Anything to report from the National Footwear Reference Collection, Jon?’
    ‘Yes, boss!’ Exton said. Glenn liked the young man because he was always brimming with enthusiasm.
    ‘I’ve found an exact match,’ Exton continued. ‘It’s good news and – er – not such good news.’
    Grace frowned. This wasn’t the time or place to start talking in riddles. ‘What do you mean?’ he said, a tad snappily.
    ‘Well the good news, boss, is that the print is from a wellington boot, rather than a trainer.’
    Many prisons issued prisoners with trainers when they left, if they had no other shoes. Partly as a result of that, there were more trainer footprints at crime scenes than any other kind of footwear; the vast numbers of stockists and quantity of trainer manufacturers made it hard to trace the source.
    ‘The footprint is from a Hunter wellington boot,’ Exton went on. ‘The style is one of “The Original” range. I’m afraid the bad news is that this brand is one of the most popular manufactured in this country. There are sixty-four stockists in Sussex, Kent and Surrey. And of course you can get them online.’
    Roy Grace absorbed the information, thinking hard. How many of these were self-service stores like garden centres? What was the possibility of the staff remembering who bought these