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finally had some time to concentrate on cold case reviews, which was part of his remit in the recent merger of the Sussex and Surrey Major Crime branches. He had just settled at a desk in the cold case office when DS Norman Potting entered without knocking, as usual, his bad comb-over looking thinner than ever and reeking, as normal, of pipe tobacco smoke. He was holding an open notepad.
    “Had an interesting call earlier this morning from a DI in Scotland, Chief, name of Siobhan Clarke. Pity is, she had an English accent. I’ve always fancied a bit of Scottish tottie.”
    Grace raised his eyes. “And?”
    “One of her colleagues went to see a bloke in hospital in Edinburgh—apparently terminally ill, wanted to make a deathbed confession about killing a Rocker in Brighton in the summer of sixty-four.”
    “Nineteen sixty-four? That far back, and he’s dying—why couldn’t he keep his trap shut?”
    “Maybe he reckons he’ll avoid hell this way.”
    Grace shook his head. He’d never really got this religious thing about confession and forgiveness. “Just your era, wasn’t it, Norman?”
    “Ha!”
    Potting was fifty-five but with his shapeless frame and flaccid face could have passed for someone a good decade older.
    “I’ve had dealings with Edinburgh. Don’t know anyone called Clarke, though.”
    Potting looked down at his notebook. “Colleague’s name is Rebus.”
    “Now that name I do know. He worked the Wolfman killings in London. Thought he’d be retired by now.”
    “That was definitely the name she gave.”
    “So what else did she say?”
    “The deathbed confession belongs to one James Ronald King. He was a Mod back then. The bloke he killed is Johnny Greene.”
    A phone rang at one of the three unoccupied desks in the office. Grace ignored it. The walls all around were stickered in photographs of victims of murders that had never been solved, crime scene photographs, and yellowing newspaper cuttings. “How did he kill him?”
    “Stabbed him with a kitchen knife—says he took it with him for protection.”
    “A real little soldier,” Grace said sarcastically. “Have you checked back to see if there’s any truth in it?”
    “I have, Chief!” Potting said proudly. “It’s one of the things DI Clarke asked me to find out. A Johnny Earl Greene died during the Mods versus Rocker clashes on May 19, 1964. It was one of the worst weekends of violence of that whole era.”
    Grace turned to a fresh page in his policy book and made some notes. “First thing is to get the postmortem records on Greene and a mugshot and send them up to Scotland so Mr. King can make a positive ID of his victim—if he wasn’t too wasted at the time to remember.”
    “I’ve already requested them from the coroner’s office, Chief,” Potting responded. “I’ve also put a request in to the Royal Sussex County Hospital for their records at the time. He might have been brought in there if he wasn’t dead at the scene.”
    “Good man.” Roy Grace thought for a moment. “My dad was a frontline PC during that era. He used to tell me about it—how on some bank holidays back then Brighton became a war zone.”
    “Perhaps you could ask him if he remembers anything about this incident?”
    “Good idea. But we’d need to find a medium first.”
    It took a moment for this to register. Potting stood, frowning for a moment, then said, “I’m sorry, guv. I didn’t realize.”
    “No reason why you should.”
    ·  ·  ·
    Two days later, Norman Potting came back into the cold case office, clutching an armful of manila folders, which he dumped on Roy Grace’s desk, then opened the top one. It was the pathologist’s report on Johnny Earl Greene.
    “It’s not right, guv,” the old sweat said. “Take a look at the cause of death.”
    Grace studied the document carefully. The list of the man’s injuries did not make good reading:
    Multiple skull fractures resulting in subdural and extradural hemorrhage