the support staff of the senior officers of the CID. On his left through a wide expanse of glass he could see into the impressive office of Detective Chief Superintendent Gary Weston. For once, Gary was actually there, busy dictating to his assistant.
Reaching the doorway at the far end, Grace held his security card up to the grey Interflex eye, then pushed open the door, entering a long, silent, grey-carpeted corridor which smelled of fresh paint. He passed a large red felt-faced noticeboard headed O peration L isbon beneath which was a photograph of a Chinese-looking man with a wispy beard, surrounded by several different photographs of the rocky beach at the bottom of the tall cliffs of local beauty spot Beachy Head, each with a red circle drawn on them. This unidentified man had been found dead four weeks ago at the bottom of the cliff. At first he was assumed to be another jumper, until the post-mortem had revealed that he was already dead at the time he took his plunge.
Grace passed the Outside Enquiry Team office on his left, a large room where detectives drafted in on major incidents would base themselves for the duration, then a door on his left, marked sio , which would be the temporary office he would move into for this enquiry. Immediately opposite was a door marked mir one , which he entered.
MIR One and MIR Two were the nerve centres for major incidents. Despite opaque windows too high to see out of, One, with its fresh white walls, had an airy feel, good light, good energy. It was his favourite room in the entire headquarters building. While in other parts of Sussex House he missed the messy buzz of police station incident rooms that he had grown up with, this room felt like a powerhouse.
It had an almost futuristic feel, as if it could as easily have housed NASA Mission Control in Houston. An L-shaped room divided by three principal workstations, each comprising a long, curved desk with space for up to eight people, it contained massive whiteboards, one marked O peration C ormorant , one marked O peration L isbon , one O peration S nowdrift , each covered in crime-scene photographs and progress charts. And there was a new one, fresh as of yesterday afternoon, labelled O peration N ightingale , the random name the SussexPolice computer had thrown out for the dismembered torso investigation.
Unlike the workstations in the rest of the building, there was no sign at all of anything personal on the desks or up on the walls in this room. No pictures of families or footballers, no fixture lists, no jokey cartoons. Every single object in this room, apart from the furniture and the business hardware, related to the matters under investigation. There was no banter, either. Just the silence of fierce concentration, the muted warble of phones, the clack-clack-clack of paper shuffling from laser printers.
Each of the workstations was manned by a minimum team of an office manager, normally a detective sergeant or detective inspector, a system supervisor, an analyst, an indexer and a typist. Grace knew most of the faces, but people were too busy to be distracted by the niceties of greetings in here.
No one looked up as he walked across to his own team except for Detective Sergeant Glenn Branson, six foot two inches tall, black and bald as a meteorite, who greeted him with a raised hand. He was dressed in one of his customary sharp suits, today a brown chalk-stripe that made him look more like a prosperous drug dealer than a cop, a white shirt with a starched collar, and a tie that looked like it had been designed by a colour-blind chimpanzee on crack.
‘Yo, old timer!’ Glenn Branson said, in a voice loud enough to cause everyone in the room to look up for a moment.
Grace glanced down at the rest of his eight core team members with a brief smile. He had taken most of them straight from his last case, which meant they hadn’t had much of a break, if any, but they were a good bunch and had worked well together. From
Reaching the doorway at the far end, Grace held his security card up to the grey Interflex eye, then pushed open the door, entering a long, silent, grey-carpeted corridor which smelled of fresh paint. He passed a large red felt-faced noticeboard headed O peration L isbon beneath which was a photograph of a Chinese-looking man with a wispy beard, surrounded by several different photographs of the rocky beach at the bottom of the tall cliffs of local beauty spot Beachy Head, each with a red circle drawn on them. This unidentified man had been found dead four weeks ago at the bottom of the cliff. At first he was assumed to be another jumper, until the post-mortem had revealed that he was already dead at the time he took his plunge.
Grace passed the Outside Enquiry Team office on his left, a large room where detectives drafted in on major incidents would base themselves for the duration, then a door on his left, marked sio , which would be the temporary office he would move into for this enquiry. Immediately opposite was a door marked mir one , which he entered.
MIR One and MIR Two were the nerve centres for major incidents. Despite opaque windows too high to see out of, One, with its fresh white walls, had an airy feel, good light, good energy. It was his favourite room in the entire headquarters building. While in other parts of Sussex House he missed the messy buzz of police station incident rooms that he had grown up with, this room felt like a powerhouse.
It had an almost futuristic feel, as if it could as easily have housed NASA Mission Control in Houston. An L-shaped room divided by three principal workstations, each comprising a long, curved desk with space for up to eight people, it contained massive whiteboards, one marked O peration C ormorant , one marked O peration L isbon , one O peration S nowdrift , each covered in crime-scene photographs and progress charts. And there was a new one, fresh as of yesterday afternoon, labelled O peration N ightingale , the random name the SussexPolice computer had thrown out for the dismembered torso investigation.
Unlike the workstations in the rest of the building, there was no sign at all of anything personal on the desks or up on the walls in this room. No pictures of families or footballers, no fixture lists, no jokey cartoons. Every single object in this room, apart from the furniture and the business hardware, related to the matters under investigation. There was no banter, either. Just the silence of fierce concentration, the muted warble of phones, the clack-clack-clack of paper shuffling from laser printers.
Each of the workstations was manned by a minimum team of an office manager, normally a detective sergeant or detective inspector, a system supervisor, an analyst, an indexer and a typist. Grace knew most of the faces, but people were too busy to be distracted by the niceties of greetings in here.
No one looked up as he walked across to his own team except for Detective Sergeant Glenn Branson, six foot two inches tall, black and bald as a meteorite, who greeted him with a raised hand. He was dressed in one of his customary sharp suits, today a brown chalk-stripe that made him look more like a prosperous drug dealer than a cop, a white shirt with a starched collar, and a tie that looked like it had been designed by a colour-blind chimpanzee on crack.
‘Yo, old timer!’ Glenn Branson said, in a voice loud enough to cause everyone in the room to look up for a moment.
Grace glanced down at the rest of his eight core team members with a brief smile. He had taken most of them straight from his last case, which meant they hadn’t had much of a break, if any, but they were a good bunch and had worked well together. From
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