Grace looked at his watch. His mind was partly on his date tomorrow night. It would be good to get off before the shops shut today. He knew it was wrong to be thinking this way, but for years his sister, and everyone else, had been telling him to get a life. For the first time since Sandy had gone he had met a woman that he really was interested in. But he was worried that his wardrobe was crap, and he needed some new summer clothes. Then he tried to put his date out of his mind and concentrate on his work.

The young woman’s head had still not yet been found. Roy Grace had called in a POLSA, a Police Search Adviser, and several police vans had already arrived filled with constables, many of them Specials, and begun a line search of the area. The driving rain was hampering visibility, and a helicopter droned low overhead, covering a slightly wider area. Only the police Alsatians, bounding away in the distance, seemed unfazed by the elements. To the farmer’s chagrin, a sixty-deep line of policemen, wearing fluorescent jackets in an even brighter yellow than the crop, was systematically trampling every square inch of his field.

Grace had spent much of the time on his phone, organizing the search, arranging a workspace for the team he would be assembling in the Major Incident Suite, obtaining an incident code name from the Sussex Police computer, and listening to the profiles of the handful of young women who had been reported missing in the past few days. There was only one missing person report within a five-mile radius that was a major cause for concern, a further three within the whole of Sussex, and another six in the entire south-east of England.

So far the taciturn Dr Theobald had been unable to give him much of a description, beyond light brown hair, gleaned from her pubic hair colouring, and a guess that she was either in her twenties or her early thirties.

Four women fitted that description.

Grace was well aware of the grim statistic that 230,000 people went missing in England every year. And that 90 per cent of those who turned up would do so within thirty days. More than 30 per cent of those 230,000 would never be seen again. Normally, only children and elderly people prompted immediate action. For all other missing person reports the police ordinarily waited a minimum of twenty-four hours, and usually more, depending on the circumstances.

Every missing person enquiry touched a nerve deep in Roy Grace’s soul. Each time he heard the words he gave a silent shudder.

Sandy was a missing person. She had disappeared off the face of the earth on his thirtieth birthday, just under nine years ago, and had never been seen since.

There was no evidence that the majority of those 70,000 people who vanished had died. People went missing for a raft of reasons. Mostly it was a breakdown in family relationships – husband or wife walking out, kids running away from home. Psychiatric problems. But some – and Roy Grace always hated to acknowledge this to himself – went on that list for an altogether more sinister reason. Either they were murdered, or, in rarer instances, held captive against their will. Grisly cases came to light from time to time, in the UK and in just about every other country in the world, of people being held for years, sometimes decades. Sometimes in his worst, darkest moments of despair he imagined Sandy being held chained in a cellar somewhere by a maniac.

He still believed she was alive, whatever the reason for her disappearance. Over the past nine years he had consulted almost more mediums than he could remember. Every time he heard about a medium with a good reputation he would go and see them. Whenever one came to Brighton and performed in public, he would be there in the audience.

And in all this time none of them, not one, had claimed to be in touch with his dead wife, or to have a message from her.

Grace had no unswerving belief in mediums, any more than he had in doctors, or scientists. He possessed an open mind. He believed the dictum of one of his favourite characters in fiction, Sherlock Holmes. ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’

His thoughts were interrupted by the chirrup of his mobile phone. He looked at the display but the number was withheld – most likely it was a colleague, standard practice among police officers. Answering it he said, ‘Roy Grace.’

‘Yo, old wise man!’ said a familiar voice.

‘Fuck off, I’m busy,’ Grace said with a grin. After three hours trying to make conversation with the miserably silent Dr Frazer Theobald, it was good to hear a friendly voice. Glenn Branson was a Detective Sergeant with whom he was close mates. They had worked together on and off for several years, and he was the first person Grace had recruited onto his Major Incident Team for this murder.

‘Well you can fuck off too, old timer. While you’re lounging around on your second brandy after a long lunch, I’m working my butt off doing your job for you.’

The unpleasant taste of a sardine and tomato sandwich, Grace’s lunch which seemed like an aeon ago, still lingered in his memory. ‘Chance would be a fine thing,’ he said.

‘Saw a well brilliant film last night. Serpico. Al Pacino playing this “tec” routing out bent cops in the New York Police Department. Ever see it?’ Branson was a total movie buff.

‘I saw it about thirty years ago, when I was in my cradle.’

‘It was made in 1973.’

‘Films take a long time to reach your local picture house, do they?’

‘Very witty. You should see it again – it’s so good. Al Pacino, he’s the man.’

‘Thanks for this valuable piece of information, Glenn,’ he said, stepping out of the awning and out of earshot of the pathologist, a police photographer named Martin Pile, and Dennis Ponds, the senior Sussex Police Public Relations Officer, who had just arrived and was waiting to be briefed by Grace for the press. From his experience, at this stage in a major incident it was best to say very little. The less information the press printed about what had actually been found, the state of the body or body parts and the location, the easier it would be to weed out crank phone calls and time wasters – and to tell when there was a caller with genuine information.

At the same time the police had to recognize the wisdom of maintaining a good working relationship with the media – although in Grace’s case that had been souring fast over the past couple of weeks. He’d been pilloried in today’s news over the death of two suspects, and he’d been savaged last week for admitting in court, during a murder trial, that he had consulted a medium.

‘I’m standing on a hill in the pissing rain. How exactly does this help our enquiry?’

‘It doesn’t; it’s for your education. All you ever watch is crap.’

‘Nothing wrong with Desperate Housewives.’

‘Tell me about it, I live with one. But I have some information for you.’

‘Uh huh?’

‘A trainee solicitor – an articled clerk. Just come in.’

‘Well that would be a loss,’ Grace said sarcastically.

‘You know, man, you’re sick.’

‘No, just honest.’

Like most of his police colleagues, Roy Grace disliked the legal profession, criminal lawyers in particular, for whom the law was just a game. Every day police officers risked their lives trying to catch criminals; their lawyers made good livings trying to outwit the law and free them. Sure, Grace knew, innocent people who were arrested had to be protected. But it was still early days in Glenn’s career – he wasn’t long enough in the tooth as a cop yet. He hadn’t experienced enough human scum escaping justice thanks to smart lawyers.

‘Yeah, whatever. She didn’t turn up for work today. One of her friends checked her flat. She’s not there; they’re well worried.’

‘So? When was she last seen?’