80

Friday 6 September

Just as he was about to enter the conference room for the evening briefing, Roy Grace’s phone rang. It was Mark Taylor.

‘Sir,’ the DS said. ‘You told me in our briefing you suspected Niall Paternoster was having an affair. We currently have eyes on a Range Rover Evoque parked up at Devil’s Dyke, where he appears to be having a liaison with a lady. The index of her car gives her as Rebecca Watkins of 17 Barrowfield Drive, Hove.’

‘Nice area,’ Grace said, memorizing the name and address. ‘Quite posh. Paternoster’s trading up, is he?’

‘Very much so,’ Taylor replied. ‘A dream house – fat chance on my pay!’

Grace ignored the comment, thinking hard, visualizing Devil’s Dyke. ‘You should have enough vehicles to cover any of the possible routes Paternoster takes from there.’

‘Yes, sir. There’s only one road out of the Devil’s Dyke car park. Soon after, there’s one junction, with an option to go straight on or turn left, up past the Dyke Golf Club. We can cover that easily.’

‘Good.’

‘Something else, sir,’ Taylor said. ‘Subject has parked out of direct sight of the Range Rover, including its mirrors. The area’s fairly quiet and we think we have a chance to put a tracker on subject’s car, while he’s otherwise preoccupied. I already have authority.’

‘Don’t take any risk of anyone being seen,’ Grace cautioned.

‘That is my job, sir.’

Grace felt the reproachful tone of the DS’s voice like a rebuke. He should have known better, he realized, than try to give advice to a man of Taylor’s calibre.

‘Of course, Mark. I understand.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

Grace took his place next to Glenn Branson at the table in the conference room, thinking to himself how the receiver of the text message from Sunday night was almost certainly Rebecca Watkins. As the team filed in, he rapidly familiarized himself with the notes he had prepared for the briefing. Over many years, he had imbued the importance of punctuality in all his team members. On one occasion, when a particularly arrogant young detective had sauntered in ten minutes after the decreed starting time, Grace had given him a withering look and said to the DC, whom he had never used again, ‘You know what being late tells me? It says that your time is more important than mine and everyone else’s gathered here.’

On the dot of 5.30 p.m. on the wall clock, with everyone present, Grace said, ‘This is the seventh briefing of Operation Lagoon, the investigation into the disappearance and suspected death of Eden Paternoster.’

A phone rang. Lorna Dennison-Wilkins glanced at the mobile on her desk then raised an apologetic hand. ‘I need to take this, sir.’

He nodded to her.

She answered, hurriedly stepping out of the room and closing the door behind her.

Continuing, Grace said, ‘We’ve had confirmation from Lucy Sibun, a short while ago, that the bone found in the grave of the deposition site in Ashdown Forest isn’t human, as her colleague suspected – it’s the tibia of a roe.’