Питер Джеймс: Wish You Were Dead [story]

Debbie talked to the dead. ‘Hello, boys and girls!’ she would greet them all at 10 p.m. every weekday, when she let herself into the silent mortuary, to clean. ‘Bet you wish you weren’t here!’ she would add. They never answered her back — well, at least no one had yet — and she was pretty glad about that.

Her friends asked her how she could stand to work here. Didn’t it spook her?

‘No,’ she would answer. ‘The dead don’t bother me. It’s the living that do. They’re much scarier!’

Although, in truth, with the flickering lights and the hum of the fridges, she was always just a little nervous in here. Which was why she liked to chat away, telling them all about her day and asking them about theirs. Most of them, she guessed, had had a pretty shitty day, which was why they were in this place.

She counted from the names on the fridge doors. Eighteen overnight guests. Two more than yesterday. They lay behind the doors on racks of shelves, wrapped in white plastic. Their names were on tags tied to their big toes — except for the occasional ones who arrived with no feet.

Debbie was nosey. As she went about her work, she always wondered what fate had brought each of them here. When she cleaned Mrs Grace’s office, she liked to sneak a look at the ledger.

All the details were recorded there. The name, date of death, if known, and suspected cause of death, also if known. Mostly they were known. Heart attack. Stroke. Suicide. Fall from a ladder. Stabbing. Road traffic accident. And mostly they were short-stay, before going off to a funeral home. But a few, names unknown, were here for months. One, badly burnt in a fire, who they had nicknamed Crispy, had been here for two years.

Tonight, she was on a cheeky mission. She had been offered a lovely sum of money — £500 — by Curtis, a dodgy friend of her husband, for some information. Not about one of the guests, but about Mrs Cleo Grace, who ran the Brighton and Hove City Mortuary.

Mrs Grace was going on a family summer holiday later in the year. Could she find out where, Curtis had asked, pressing the cash into her hand.

Debbie loved a challenge, and this one was much easier than she had expected. There, in a stack of papers on Mrs Grace’s desk, was a print-out of an email, with pictures, confirming her booking.

Bingo!

Checking to make sure no one was watching, she said, ‘No peeping, boys and girls!’ Then she took a photo with her phone.

If you ask, ‘Papa, how much longer?’ one more time , Detective Superintendent Roy Grace thought, I’ll throttle you! He glared in the mirror at his son, Bruno, right behind him, then at the satnav app. French names — towns, villages, roads. Every town, every village, every road. Except for the one road they wanted. Rue de Joigns.

Was there such a road at all, he was starting to wonder? Could they have been tricked? Might they be victims of an internet con man? A crook like one he had recently locked up? Surely not? Could he and Cleo have booked and paid for a week’s holiday in a French chateau that they were about to find out did not actually exist?

But of course it did! They’d looked it up on TripAdvisor, and it had loads of reviews, almost all positive. It was the rubbish satnav app on his phone that was at fault here.

Roy had started the journey in their rented car — a Citroën Space Tourer — in a very happy frame of mind. He was looking forward to this summer break in a gorgeous house in northwest France — and to rare quality time with his family. It might be their last family holiday for some while, as Cleo was now five months pregnant.

Yet something was starting to niggle him. It was like a darkness steadily rising inside him, just as the sky, loaded with rain, was steadily darkening outside. It was nearly 4 p.m. and it didn’t look as if there was going to be any evening sun today. The tall trees made the road seem even darker, more like night than a summer afternoon.

‘Papa, how much longer?’ Bruno asked.

Roy caught Cleo’s eye and saw she was grinning. She knew how much Bruno was annoying him. Actually, annoying both of them. And she was also pretty sure Bruno kept saying it on purpose — just to really piss them off. It was something the eleven-year-old seemed to like doing. One day, Bruno could put annoying people down on his CV as his hobby.

‘Not much longer, Bruno,’ Roy said. ‘It’ll be great when we get there, I’m sure.’

And it sure looked amazing in the photos on the internet. Château-sur-L’Évêque. A pool, tennis court, bicycles, beautiful grounds, deer park.

Roy took his eyes off the road for a fraction of a second, to glance again at Bruno in the mirror. But all he could see was the back of his iPad.

In the middle of their rear seat sat their delightful, twenty-eight-year-old Californian nanny, Kaitlynn, who had become something of a family friend. She was sandwiched between Bruno and their two-year-old son, Noah, in his child seat. Roy and Cleo had offered Kaitlynn and her boyfriend, Jack Alexander — a Detective Sergeant on Roy’s team — a free holiday. In return she would occasionally look after Noah while he and Cleo went out on some of the long bike rides they’d been looking forward to.

So far as he could tell, Kaitlynn had spent the entire journey either texting or Snapchatting or playing games on her phone. She’d also said that she’d been trying to call Jack to see if he’d arrived safely, but hadn’t had any luck getting through to him.

The rain got worse. This was France, mid-August, and a week of solid sunshine was forecast. So far, not a great start. Cleo peered at the map on her phone, also trying to find the road — she’d been trying for ten minutes now. Rue de Joigns. Then she shouted out, ‘Got it! About three kilometres ahead! The directions the chateau gave us say to turn left off this road, then the entrance will be four kilometres along on the left and we can’t miss it.’

‘Brilliant!’ Roy said. ‘Well done, finally! Please God they can give us something to eat, I’m starving.’

‘We all are,’ Cleo said.

Roy glanced at the clock — 3.45 p.m. ‘Try calling them again, just so they know we’re only minutes away.’

‘Roy, I’m sure if Jack’s already there he’ll have asked them to keep some food for us,’ Kaitlynn said. ‘I’ve texted him as I can’t get through on the phone, to tell him that.’

Jack had had to go to Paris yesterday to take a statement from two French police officers for one of Roy’s cases that was coming to trial. He was going straight from Paris to the chateau, a 200-kilometre drive, and should have been there by midday.

Roy and Cleo had planned to arrive by 1 p.m., to give them time to enjoy their first afternoon on holiday. But the early-morning Newhaven — Dieppe ferry had been late. Then the satnav had taken them way off track, making them even later. They’d tried calling the chateau several times. Each time all they got was crackle and a faint voice shouting, ‘ Bonjour ... bonjour ... hello?’ Then the phone would go dead.

As Cleo dialled yet again, Bruno announced, reading from his iPad, ‘Papa, Mama, listen!’

‘Yes, Bruno?’ Cleo said.

‘It says that next to being in a car, this is where you are most likely to die. Guess where?’

‘In an aeroplane?’ said Cleo, who did not like flying.

‘Wrong!’

‘Your kitchen,’ Roy Grace said.

‘Wrong, that is the third most likely place! It says here the next mostly likely place to die is on holiday. We’re in a car and we are on holiday. Doesn’t that make it probable we are all going to die?’