Mp, p.5
MatchUp, page 5
Why?
At 6 p.m. that same evening, Grace sat in the Major Crime Suite conference room at the police HQ near Lewes, where his department was now based. Glenn Branson, DS Norman Potting, and several other members of his regular team, including a HOLMES—Home Office Large Major Enquiry System—analyst, an indexer, and a researcher sat around the oval table.
“This is the first briefing of Operation Podiatrist,” he read out from his notes. “The investigation into the discovery of a pair of female feet found at the West Brighton Domestic Waste Recycling and Landfill earlier today, which I am treating as a homicide investigation.”
Norman Potting began sniggering. Under Roy’s withering glare he raised an apologetic hand. “Sorry, Chief. Operation Podiatrist? Feet?”
Several others around the table also grinned.
No one could accuse the police computer, that randomly produced operation names, of not having a sense of humor.
Grace fought back a smirk too. “I don’t imagine the lady who’s missing them is finding it quite so funny.”
“I should think she’s hopping mad.” Potting chortled, looking around for appreciation, but all he saw were stony stares.
“One immediate line of inquiry,” Grace said, “is to see if there is anything similar out there on the database. We need to take a look on the Serious Crime Analysis Section system and also log everything we have so far on Op Podiatrist on it. Another will be to map out the exact area of the city all the refuse lorries collect from, and their delivery times to the site. One thing we do know is that it’s only refuse lorries that have access to the site. I want an outside inquiry team to list and interview all the refuse crews.”
Jack Alexander, a young DC, raised a hand. “Are you considering utilizing the volunteer search team for the other body parts?”
“Not at this stage, Jack,” Grace replied. “We have no idea where to begin. We don’t even know how far and wide the other parts could be scattered. If at all.”
“Seems to me,” DS Potting said, “that the victim’s giving us a right old runaround.”
IF IT WAS IN CYBERSPACE, Carol Jordan was convinced that DC Stacey Chen could find it. Barricaded from the rest of the room by an array of six monitors, Stacey’s fingers moved over her keyboard more quickly than the eye could follow. Nobody, Carol thought, was ever going to pick up her pin number shoulder-surfing at a cash machine. By the time they got back to the office, Stacey already had results from the scant information Carol had passed on to her.
She flicked a finger at the bottom right-hand screen.
“Out on a Limb is a specialized model agency.” Stacey caught Tony’s single raised eyebrow and gave him a long hard look. “Not that kind of specialized.”
Tony opened his eyes wide in a look of mock innocence. “I never said a word.”
“What kind of specialized?” Carol asked, cutting across the banter, eager to get to the point.
“I suppose you’d call it extremities,” Stacey said doubtfully. “They do hands and legs and feet, not whole bodies. Their clients sell shoes, tights, stockings, jewelry, that kind of thing. They’ve even got a selection of ears for modeling earrings.”
“I’d never thought about it. But I suppose it makes sense,” Carol said. “So is this Diane Flaherty on their books?”
“Not that I can see. But Dana Dupont is.”
Stacey tapped a trackpad and another screen rearranged its pixels. A shapely pair of calves appeared. Another tap and the image changed to elegant ankles and a pair of feet that appeared to be free from any of the myriad blemishes that most people’s feet reveal. No hard skin, no corns, no bunions, no dry skin, no fungal infections, no ingrowing toenails, no oddly shaped toes. Just a pair of immaculate, enviable feet that looked as if they’d never so much as bent a blade of grass.
“Anything on Diane Flaherty at all?” Carol asked.
“There’s a Diane Flaherty with an address in Bradfield. Self-employed, no criminal record, drives an Opel Corsa. Nobody else listed at her address.” Stacey woke up a third screen with an address and a driver’s license photo.
“That’s the dead woman,” Carol said. “We need to get a team round there, see what we can dig up. And I need to talk to somebody at Out on a Limb. You coming, Tony?”
He started, dragging his attention away from the pictures of Dana Dupont’s feet.
“Yeah,” he said absently. “And you need to get a list of people they send their catalogs to. If I was a foot fetishist, or I had a thing about ears or whatever, their catalogs would make me a happy bunny.”
“It takes all sorts,” Carol muttered.
“Otherwise we’d be out of a job,” Tony said, following in her wake.
THE PHYSICAL PREMISES OF OUT on a limb were a lot less glossy than their catalog implied. A narrow doorway on the Halifax road between a kebab takeaway and a cancer charity shop led up a steep staircase to a Spartan office where strenuously artificial air freshener battled with the smell of stale fat.
So far, the fat was winning.
The woman who had buzzed them up leaned against the desk in what might have passed for a provocative pose in someone twenty years younger and two stone lighter.
“You said on the phone you were the police?” she said, her voice surprisingly warm and almost seductive. “Can I see some ID?”
Carol produced her warrant card and Tony smiled. “I’m not actually a police officer.”
“Dr. Hill is a consultant,” Carol butted in before he could say anything unfortunate. “And you are?”
“Margot Maynard,” the woman said. “Out on a Limb is my business.”
“I’m afraid I have some disturbing news, Ms. Maynard. This morning, a woman’s body was found on the moors. In her bag she had a card belonging to one of your models.” Carol proffered her phone, where she’d taken a photo of Dana Dupont’s business card.
Margot Maynard paled and nodded. “That’s one of ours. Dana is our most successful foot model. You’re not telling me she’s dead?”
“We believe the dead woman is called Diane Flaherty. Do you know a Diane Flaherty?”
“Diane is Dana Dupont. It’s her working name. Oh my God, what’s happened? Are you sure it’s Diane? That can’t be right.”
Margot Maynard looked as if she might faint. Tony stepped forward and, taking her arm, led her to the office chair behind the desk.
“Can I get you anything? A glass of water?” Carol asked.
“No, I feel sick as it is. Diane? Dead? What happened? Was it a car crash? What?”
“I’m sorry to tell you that we’re treating Diane’s death as suspicious.”
“What does that mean?”
Tony squatted down beside her. “Diane was murdered, Margot. And the killer took her feet.”
She reared back in her chair. “Her feet? Oh my God, I always knew it would come to this one day.”
They drove back to the police station in glum silence, turning over what they’d learned.
After she’d calmed down, Margot Maynard had explained that the agency had been plagued over the years by an assortment of what she called “weirdos and perverts.” Men whose sexual fetishes focused on particular body parts. Feet, shoulders, even ears. The photographic studio where Out on a Limb did their catalog shots was across the landing from the office, and these strange, obsessive men haunted the street below, sometimes following the models after a photo shoot.
“Talk to the local cops,” Margot had said bitterly. “They must have a record of all the times we’ve called them because one of the girls has been harassed. You wouldn’t believe the disgusting things they’ve suggested to our models.”
Tony knew precisely the kind of thing those poor women would have been subjected to. “Was anyone ever arrested?”
“There were a couple of men, a few years ago now. Mostly they back off when the police caution them. They’ve generally got too much to lose. Wives, jobs, reputation.”
Carol’s phone rang and she took it on speaker.
“Stacey here, guv. I’ve thought I might take a quick look at the SCAS—”
“Serious Crime Analysis Section,” she muttered for Tony’s benefit.
“I know I’m rubbish with acronyms but I do know that one,” he said.
“If I could finish?” Stacey showed a sign of irritation.
“Go on,” Carol said. “SCAS?”
“There’s a report here from Sussex Police. They found a pair of feet on a rubbish tip in Brighton. It can’t be our victim’s feet, because they weren’t fresh.”
“But we don’t believe in coincidence at ReMIT,” Carol said. “Nice work, Stacey. Who’s the SIO?”
“DST Roy Grace.”
“I’ll call him as soon as I get back. When’s the autopsy?”
“They’ve bumped it up the list. They’re doing it this afternoon.”
Carol ended the call. “Weird. Maybe while I’m talking to Brighton and attending the autopsy you can check out the foot fetishists.”
Tony nodded. “I’ll take a look online. Most people with fantasies like these are pretty harmless. In my experience they tend not to be violent. They’re often socially inadequate, shy, poor at forming relationships. They want to kiss and touch, not possess. Elvis Presley was one. So was Thomas Hardy.”
Carol gave him a baffled look. “How do you know things like that?”
He shrugged. “Pub quizzes?”
Exasperated, she shook her head. “Go and find me an Elvis impersonator with homicidal tendencies, then.”
TONY WAS ACCUSTOMED TO SPENDING his days trying to empathize with the messy heads of murderers and rapists. But an afternoon on the trail of body part fetishists left him feeling more grimy than the average working day. There was something deeply unsettling about the transference of the sexual urge on to isolated bits of bodies. He found it dehumanizing and reductive. The more he read on forums and discussion groups, the clearer the picture became. Men, for it was almost invariably men, posturing to cover deep feelings of inadequacy. If you couldn’t handle a whole woman in her challenging complexity, how about her feet?
Or her hands?
Some even tried to rationalize it as a form of safe sex. Tony, who was used to a wide range of extraordinary rationalizations among serial offenders, thought that was right out there on the edge of daft, a technical term he used only when talking to Carol.
Whenever he came across someone who seemed to him to lean toward more salacious tendencies, he punted their details across to Stacey who performed her black arts to track down their location. Everybody who worked in the ReMIT team knew that Stacey had ways and means that went beyond the narrow confines of the law. But nobody cared because she knew how to cover her tracks and the intel she produced was worth more to them than being on their best behavior. Raiding people’s privacy for intel that could lead to evidence was a small transgression compared with murder and rape.
By the end of the afternoon, Stacey had run checks on half a dozen possibles, and they were both growing weary of their subjects’ apparent respectability outside the murky world of online fetishists. But as Tony browsed yet another chat room, Stacey abruptly called his name.
“I’m pinging something across to you.”
Tony glanced at the info sheet Stacey had sent, then sat up straight in his chair as he absorbed the key points.
Leyton Gray was a reflexologist based in Bradfield. A man whose profession necessitated the touching and manipulation of feet. A perfectly respectable calling, provided you weren’t also spending hours of your free time online looking at feet and talking to other people whose sexual urges were awakened by them.
But there was more.
One of his clients had complained to the police about his behavior. In her statement, Jane Blackshaw said he’d appeared to become sexually aroused while supposedly massaging her feet to treat a problem with irritable bowel syndrome. He’d left the room in the middle of her treatment and returned a few minutes later, flushed and out of breath. Stacey had tracked down a photograph of Jane Blackshaw, who was an unexceptional-looking woman in her early twenties.
Leyton Gray had been interviewed and had denied that anything inappropriate had taken place. He described Jane Blackshaw as an attention seeker and pointed out none of his other clients had ever complained either to his professional body or to the police. It was his word against hers. So the file was marked No Further Action.
But the clincher as far as Tony was concerned was the final paragraph in Stacey’s report. It had been snipped from the program of a complimentary therapy festival in Brighton.
“Returning by popular request, Leyton Gray will be talking about new developments in reflexology techniques. Leyton has been a regular speaker at our events and his sessions are always sold out. Book early to avoid disappointment.”
Leyton Gray, it appeared, was no stranger to the town where a pair of feet had turned up on the rubbish tip.
“HAPPY FEET. REMEMBER THAT MOVIE?” Glenn Branson said breezily as he entered Roy Grace’s office shortly after 9 p.m., carrying two mugs of coffee.
More breezily than he or his boss felt.
Grace frowned. “No, I don’t.”
“It was brilliant. Animated. With penguins dancing.”
“Lovely,” Grace said, distractedly.
“Awesome cast. Robin Williams, Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman. Your kid would like it.”
“Noah’s eight months old.”
“Yeah, maybe wait a few years.” He paused, then pulled up a chair in front of Grace’s desk, turned it around and sat, resting his hands on the back. “I’ve had a thought.”
Grace opened his hands, expansively. “I’m all ears.”
“Forensic gait analysis. That specialist guy, Haydn Kelly, we’ve used on previous cases. Maybe we should bring him in. He knows more about feet than anyone on the planet, and he has a massive database. Worth a shot?”
“Good thinking, if he’s around.”
Kelly had developed software that, from a single footprint, could enable someone to be picked out in a crowd from his or her gait. Everyone walked in a unique way; every human being’s gait was as unique as their DNA.
“Call him and see if he’s in the country and available to come down. I know he’s abroad a lot.”
His phone rang.
“Roy Grace,” he answered.
“Detective Superintendent Grace? This is DCI Carol Jordan of the Northern Regional Major Incident Team.”
A strong, pleasant, if a tad formal, northern voice.
And the name rang a bell.
“Was it you involved with the Jennifer Maidment case?”
“I was, yes.”
“That’s where I know your name from. How can I help you?”
“Your inquiry team entered a pair of feet on SCAS. We have a female body up here missing her feet, and although we’ve had a man in for questioning, we didn’t have enough evidence to hold him. So any supporting info would be helpful.”
He felt a beat of excitement and gave her all the information he had, informing her that tissue had been sent to the lab for fast-track DNA analysis.
“From what I’ve read on SCAS, I’m pretty sure we won’t get a DNA match to your victim. Our body here is fresh. Your feet sound a few weeks old, which doesn’t tally with our time of death estimates or last-seen evidence.”
“They are old. I can’t give you a precise date. About two to three weeks is our pathologist’s educated guess from the generations of insect larvae.”
“Those serration marks you’ve just described interest me,” she said. “Could you send me photographs? If we could establish whether the same, or a similar instrument has been used to sever both pairs of feet, we might make progress.”
“I’ll have them to you in a few minutes.”
Carol Jordan thanked him and told him she would call back as soon as she had confirmation, one way or the other.
Ending the call, he turned to Glenn Branson. “You’re a movie buff. What films can you think of where people have had their feet severed?”
“Misery. In the book the batty woman chain-sawed off one of his legs and cauterized it with a blowtorch. But they tamed it down in the film and she just shattered his legs with a sledgehammer.”
“Anything more helpful?”
He was feeling tired and fractious.
Branson yawned. “There was some horror movie I saw years ago, but I can’t remember the title. They hacked this guy’s legs off and fed them to a pig in front of him.”
“It had a happy ending?”
“Not exactly. They fed the rest of him to the pig, too.”
“Let me guess, then they ate the pig?”
“You saw it, boss?”
AT 7 A.M., GRACE WAS BACK in the CID HQ for the daily management meeting, prior to the next briefing on Operation Podiatrist. Just as he was entering the room, accompanied by Glenn Branson, his phone rang. Answering it, he heard the excited voice of the duty inspector, Ken “Panicking” Anakin.
“Roy, something that might be of interest to your current inquiry. A uniform crew got called to a firm of undertakers on the Lewes Road at 2 a.m., in response to an alarm and reports of lights on in the premises. It sounds like someone, maybe a drunk, broke in and disturbed some of the bodies in coffins prepared for funerals today. There’s one in particular that might be significant. A young deceased woman in her early twenties, whose feet are missing.”
“Can you give me the name and address?”
Anakin provided him the details and he jotted it down. “Is anyone there now?”
“The keyholder and proprietor. Mr. James Houlihan is quite upset.”
