Peter James: You Are Dead

But in the gloom of this foul December Thursday afternoon, with cold rain pelting down, and a strong, gusting wind, the whole place was forlorn and cheerless. A solitary elderly lady, in a see-through sou’wester, walked a reluctant dog, the size of a large rat, on a lead attached to a harness.

A group of workmen in fluorescent jackets, hard hats and ear defenders, working overtime beneath floodlights, were drilling open the path in front of the café. One, the foreman, stood away from the group, head bowed against the weather, holding up a tablet in a waterproof case, taking measurements and tapping them in. A cluster of cars and a van were parked nearby, as well as a noisy, yellow mobile generator.

As his drill bit broke through a fresh strip, and he levered it out of the way, one workman suddenly shouted out, in a foreign accent, ‘Oh God! Look!’ He turned anxiously towards the foreman. ‘Wesley! Look!’

Hearing his cry above the din of their machines, all the other workmen stopped, too. The foreman stepped forward and peered down, and saw what looked to his untrained eye like a skeletal hand.

‘Is it an animal?’ asked the workman.

‘Dunno,’ the foreman said dubiously. Nor could he tell how old it was. It could have been there decades. But he couldn’t think of any animal that had a paw or claw like this. Except a monkey, possibly. It looked human, he thought. He instructed all three men with the drills to concentrate on the immediate area around the hand, and to be careful not to drill deeper than necessary.

More chunks of the black asphalt were levered away and a skeletal arm appeared, attached to the hand by black tendrils of sinew. Then part of a rib cage and what was, unmistakably, a human skull.

‘OK!’ the foreman said nervously. ‘Everyone stop now. Go home and we start again in the morning, if we are permitted. See you all at 8 a.m.’

Wondering whether he should have stopped the men sooner, he went over to the van, opened the rear doors, then climbed in, rummaged around, and pulled out a tarpaulin. He laid it over the exposed parts of the skeleton, weighing it down with chunks of rubble. When he had finished, he unholstered his phone and dialled his boss, to ask for instructions. They came back loud and clear.

He ended the call, then, as he’d been told, immediately dialled 999. When the operator answered, he asked for the police.

Thursday 11 December

Shaking with fear, Jamie Ball pulled his Golf over onto the hard shoulder of the motorway, halted, and dialled Logan’s number again. The phone rang, six times, and then he heard her voicemail message.

‘Hi, this is Logan Somerville. I can’t take your call right—’

He ended the call and immediately redialled. Answer, darling Logan, answer, please answer, please answer! Again it rang six times and her message started up. A lorry thundered past, inches from his little car, shaking it and spattering it with spray. He closed his eyes, thinking, feeling close to tears. He could call the caretaker, Mark. Or their next-door neighbour who had a key to their flat.

But he had heard her scream.

Something had happened.

His car shook again as another juggernaut thundered by, far too close.

He ended the call and immediately dialled 999.

Thursday 11 December

Some idiot, an hour or so ago, had mentioned the Q word. Just as in the theatre world, where there was a deep superstition about mentioning the name of the play Macbeth — all thespians only ever referred to it as ‘the Scottish play’ — so in the police world it was considered a jinx to say that a day was quiet. And sure enough, within minutes of the tubby, fully kitted constable breezing into the Communications Department of Sussex Police Headquarters to have a word with his wife, who was one of the radio controllers, and letting slip that Q word, it had all started kicking off, it seemed, right across the county. There was a sudden spate of three separate, serious road traffic collisions; an armed robbery in Brighton; a man threatening to jump off the notorious suicide beauty spot, Beachy Head; and a missing four-year-old boy in Crawley.

The Comms Department, which was housed in a very large, open-plan room on the first floor of a modern block on the sprawling HQ campus, handled all emergency calls made to Sussex Police throughout the county, and housed the CCTV system. It was presided over by Ops-1 — the call sign for the Duty Inspector in charge. Among the responsibilities of these inspectors was the granting of authority for use of firearms in a spontaneous incident, and running and controlling any vehicle pursuit in the county.

This afternoon and evening’s Ops-1 was Andy Kille, a tall, strongly built, former British parachuting champion, in his early fifties, with a handsome face, etched cynical from almost thirty years of police service, and topped with a thin fuzz of close-cropped greying hair. Dressed in uniform dark trousers and a short-sleeved black top, with ‘Police’ embroidered in white on the sleeves, his inspector pips on his epaulettes and his ID card hanging from his neck on a blue lanyard, he currently sported a substantial and uncharacteristic pot belly — the result of recently having given up smoking and compensating by binge eating.

Kille sat at his desk in a cubicle-like space at the rear of the room, surrounded by an array of computer screens and monitors. One displayed a map of the county. Another constantly updated him on all the incidents currently running. A third, with a touch-screen, operated as his eyes and ears on the department he presided over.

On the wall at the far end of the room were monitors that displayed the performance statistics, whilst over his desk a separate screen showed images from four of the five hundred CCTV cameras around the county, as well as monitors displaying the current news. With the aid of his different and separate keyboards and a toggle lever, Kille could rotate and zoom any of the cameras within seconds. Thirty people worked in this section, most of them civilians, identified by the white embroidered words ‘Police Support’ on their sleeves, and royal blue polo shirts as opposed to the black ones of the police. Several were former police officers. At busy times there could be the best part of one hundred people working over the two levels.

At a row of desks beneath the CCTV cameras sat the radio operators; each, like almost everyone else in the room, wearing a headset. These were the people who liaised with the police officers who had been dispatched, both in vehicles and on foot. Most radio operators had a CCTV screen for the cameras on their particular area, when needed. Alongside them sat the emergency-call handlers. Emergency — 999 — calls were signalled by a low klaxon, so that in the rare instances all the call handlers were occupied, others in the room, also trained, would be alerted to answer.

Amy Wood, a placid, motherly, dark-haired woman, had twenty years of service answering emergency calls, and was one of the most experienced in the room. She loved this job, because you never knew what might happen in just ten seconds’ time. And if there was one thing, above all else, she had learned, it was that whenever you thought you’d seen it all, you were always going to be in for another surprise. She never cared for Q days so she was always secretly glad when things kicked off. And how, in the past hour! She had answered calls from witnesses to two different road traffic accidents, a man whose girlfriend had been bitten by a neighbour’s dog, someone in Bognor Regis who had just been dragged off his bicycle and seen it ridden away, and someone, who sounded off his face on drugs, complaining that a neighbour across the street kept photographing him.