Houlihan provided them the address.
“I know roughly where that is,” Branson said.
“In the meantime, I’d appreciate you not touching anything in the room where the coffins and the bodies are,” Grace said. “We’re going to need to seal your premises.”
“Seal them?”
“I’m afraid so. This is potentially connected to a murder inquiry, so I’m declaring it a crime scene.”
“But I’ve got funerals today, Detective.”
“And I have a murdered young woman who may be connected to this.”
“At least let me ship the bodies out that I have here.”
“I’m sorry, I can’t allow anything to be moved. But what we’ll do is check those due for funerals today first, and see if we can get them released, although I can’t promise anything at this stage.”
“I can’t tell six families there’s going to be no funeral today.”
“I’m sorry, you’ll have to. I’m sure the dead bodies won’t mind waiting.”
Instantly he regretted making such an insensitive remark.
“This is outrageous. I want to speak to your superior, at once.”
“His name is Assistant Chief Constable Cassian Pewe. Good luck with him, sir.”
The three police officers left the building. Grace asked Anakin to remain until a scene guard was in place and to ensure Houlihan followed instructions.
Moments later Grace and Branson approached their car.
“You drive, Glenn,” he said. “I need to make some calls.”
“Okay, boss.”
“And no jokes about legging it?”
“Absolutely not. I’d hate to do what you just did and put my foot in it.”
CAROL LOOKED OVER TONY’S SHOULDER.
He’d logged into what seemed to be the most popular foot fetishist forum as Doctor Sole and was browsing the comments. There seemed to be three or four others online, swapping resources for podiatric porn.
“I’ve just had Roy Grace on from Brighton,” she said, filling him in on the raid at the undertaker’s. “The embalmer seems to be on the missing list. Name of Rodney Tidy.”
“Nobody uses their real names on here,” Tony said. “But an embalmer would fit the bill. He’d have access to bodies. Most funerals are closed-coffin affairs, so he could help himself to the best feet after the lid was screwed down and nobody would be any the wiser. He could have been doing this for years.”
“So why mess it up last night? Why set off the alarm and leave the coffin open so anyone could see what he’d done?” she asked.
“Maybe he didn’t,” Tony said. “Maybe it wasn’t down to him. Maybe Rodney did what half the world seems to do on the Internet these days.”
She frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Maybe he made a date online. He could have met someone in a chat room or a forum who shares his fetish. Not just lovely feet, but dead feet. Who knows? Maybe there’s a secret place on the darknet. A Grindr for fetishists. Footr. Archr.”
Carol groaned. “Make it stop. Okay, supposing you’re right, what do you think might have happened?”
“Tidy could have invited him back to the undertaker’s to show him round. Perhaps they’d made a pact to take a pair of feet together. Tidy insists they have to leave after they’ve done one. His new friend doesn’t agree and bursts back inside, setting off the alarm.” He shrugged one shoulder. “It does feel to me like somebody else’s presence precipitated a different set of behaviors from Tidy.” He raised his voice. “Stacey? That analysis you were doing of the chat rooms? Did you find anybody posting about embalmed feet?”
The sound of fingers whisking over keys could be heard. Then, from behind the bank of monitors, Stacey said, “About a dozen.”
“Can you find out if any of them is Rodney Tidy?” Carol asked.
Before Stacey could respond, Carol’s phone gave its text alert.
“Message from Roy Grace,” she muttered. “They can’t trace Rodney Tidy. The address he gave his employer doesn’t exist. He could be anywhere.”
“He uses the site you’re on right now,” Stacey said. “His handle is Cold Feet. He was last on two days ago, talking about a beautiful specimen who had walked into his world. He seems most friendly with Arch Lover, but I can’t track his ID. He comes on through a proxy server in Belarus.”
Carol paced back and forth across the incident room. “We know Leyton Gray goes to Brighton. And we know he’s been accused of behavior that amounts to foot fetishism. Am I reaching to think there might be a connection? Can we put them together? Do we know where Gray stays when he’s there?”
Stacey rolled her eyes. “We had him in here for three hours. What do you think?”
“I think you’ve already accessed his credit cards and his Internet history,” Tony said.
Stacey tutted. “You should know me better than that. A teenage boy could manage that. I’ve also mirrored his phone. So I can tell you there’s no record of credit card payments to any hotel or B&B in Brighton. But I can also tell you that three months ago he googled directions to an address in Kemptown. And he’s referenced it twice since.”
Carol’s phone pinged.
“There you go, boss. It might be worth Superintendent Grace getting his team round there.”
AN HOUR LATER, ROY GRACE and Glenn Branson drove their plain Ford Escape slowly past a row of four-story Regency terraced houses, with railed-off basements, just off the seafront, all of them badly in need of a lick of paint. In Victorian times each would have been a single dwelling, with servants quartered down in the basements and up on the attic floors. But now they’d been broken up into flats and bedsits.
“Number fourteen, boss,” Glenn Branson said, pointing through the side window.
Grace nodded and carried on a short distance, then pulled into an empty space behind a marked police car and climbed out in the blustery, salty wind.
Four uniformed officers in the marked car climbed out, also: the duty inspector at John Street police station, Ken “Panicking” Anakin, and three PCs, two male and one female.
One of the males was a man-mountain.
Anakin’s nickname was well deserved. He panicked about pretty much everything. He approached Roy and Glenn with a twitchy smile. “Good to see you both.”
“And you, Ken.”
Anakin unfolded a large-scale map of the area, struggling to hold it steady in the gusting wind, and the three of them peered at it.
“Roy, this is the street behind.” He ran a finger along. “Mews garages, but behind them are the rear gardens of these houses, so it could be an escape route. It’s the basement flat, right?”
“That’s the information I have; 14B sounds like a basement address,” Grace replied.
“I think we should cover the rear,” Anakin said.
Anakin dispatched two of the uniformed officers, then, accompanied by the man-mountain, followed the detectives up to the front and down the shabby basement steps, past the dustbins. In contrast to the rest of the building, the front door to the basement flat was well presented, recently painted a gloss white and with polished brass letters.
14B.
There was a modern Entryphone system with CCTV.