Peter James - Need You Dead

A canny, smart and manipulative lawyer, Charwell knew how to play a jury better than anyone Grace had encountered in his entire career. He had to make absolutely sure their prosecution case was belt and braces. This barrister was a man who could limbo dance a client below the smallest gap in a cell door.

Although the evidence against Jodie Bentley was strong, and the sometimes tricky Crown Prosecution Service had agreed, quickly, to bring a murder charge against her, it wasn’t watertight. There were plenty of holes for a smart barrister like Charwell to drive a coach and horses through. Grace knew this woman was guilty as hell. He was confident that taking the witness stand in front of a sensible jury, he could say enough to convince them beyond reasonable doubt. And yet he was painfully aware that a defence barrister’s job was to sow that doubt. For them it was a game. For the police it was the difference between a killer being put behind bars, or being free to roam the streets and kill again.

But juries were unpredictable, and never more so than now, when there was a lot of anti-police and anti-establishment sentiment. Some of it had been fostered by politicians, and some by the police themselves, after a series of bungled high-profile prosecutions of celebrities. He had no way of knowing how Charwell would play things in a future trial. His one certainty was that his immediate boss, Assistant Chief Constable Cassian Pewe, would be watching like a hawk, ready to pounce on him for the way he had handled the case if it went badly, but of course taking the credit if it went well.

Grace was gloomily aware of not being a magician. He couldn’t always make things happen the way he wanted them to. All he could do was his best. To try to lock up the killers who took people’s lives. He despised murderers with all his heart and soul. A thief could pay back some or all of what they had taken. But a murderer could never undo what he — or she — had done. And murderers didn’t just destroy the lives of the victims, they destroyed the lives of all their victims’ loved ones, too. For ever.

In general, homicide detection rates in the UK were high. Year on year, around eighty-five per cent of killers were caught. That compared, he knew, to just fifty-five per cent in America. But he would never be complacent. There had been a room at the old CID HQ, in Sussex House, occupied by the cold case squad, who carried out continual reviews on unsolved murders.

For Roy Grace, ‘unsolved’ was a euphemism for failure. There were thirty unresolved murders in the counties of East and West Sussex. Thirty, that was, of which the police were aware. How many more people were murdered every year that the police never found out about, was something never far from his thoughts.

Homicide investigations were never closed. Not so long as there was anyone still alive who was connected to the victim. And in some cases, beyond even that.

When Roy Grace had first joined the Major Crime Branch, he had made a pledge to himself. He was going to raise that bar from eighty-five per cent of homicides solved to as close as possible to one hundred per cent.

In his view, every killer made one mistake. Somewhere.

You just had to find it.

He could, of course, set fire to the flat. That was the surest way to destroy all forensic evidence, he thought. But he was mindful of the dangers of doing this. The whole decrepit building was a fire trap, and unlike modern apartment blocks a fire wouldn’t be contained to a single flat. It could end up killing others in the building.

Not an option he wanted to consider.

Shortly before 9 p.m., after the longest three hours of his life, it was finally dark enough outside. He put on his coat, took one final, careful look around using his phone torch, slipped the laptop and the photograph frame in the crook of his arm, and picked up the bunch of flowers he had brought and the two bin bags containing the other items he was removing from the flat. The last things he dropped in were the rubber gloves he had been wearing, then he walked to the front door.

In all the time they’d been meeting here, he could only ever remember seeing another resident on two occasions. One was an elderly lady in a dressing gown, who had looked half batty and wondered if he had seen her cat. The other was a young Chinese couple, who had looked like students and were so wrapped up in each other he doubted they had even noticed him.

All the same, he opened the door carefully, again using his handkerchief, listening for any sound on the landing before stepping out.

His heart seemed to be thudding even more loudly now, a steady boof ... boof ... boof , and his ears were popping. Ignoring the lift, he hurried down the three flights of stairs, then again hesitated as he reached the ground floor of the building.

As he did so, his phone began to ring.

He stood still in the small, dimly lit entrance hall of the apartment block, in the growing darkness, and pulled out his phone to see who was calling. In front of him was the constant roar of passing traffic along Kingsway. But although he could hear ringing, his phone display was dark and blank.

Then he realized. It was Lorna’s phone.

He tugged it out of his pocket and stared at the display. No caller ID.

For an instant, his reaction was to answer it. To find out who was calling, and why. Then he realized that would be too dangerous.

Was it Roxy?

Had to be. No one else had the number, did they?

He let it ring on.

Two more rings then it stopped.

He waited, rooted to the spot. Waiting for it to ping with a voicemail. But instead, after some moments, the message Missed Call appeared.

He continued to wait, in case it rang again, puzzled as he remembered something. Some while back, when Lorna had been in the bathroom, her phone had rung. She’d asked him to see if it was Roxy on the display and if so to tell her she would call her back. Studying the buttons on the unfamiliar Samsung pay-as-you-go phone, he accessed the address book. As he had guessed, it contained just one name and number: Roxy.

If it had been Roxy calling just now, why would she have withheld her identity? But if it had not been her, then who? A wrong number? A telesales call? Unlikely on a pay-as-you-go. Could it have been her husband?

He’d never met this bastard, but from all Lorna had said about him, he wouldn’t put it past him to have found the phone by searching her things when she was asleep or out. He was in the computer technology world, and probably knew how to track her movements on this phone, too.

Putting the phone back in his pocket, his head bowed, coat collar turned up and the peak of his baseball cap pulled low, he slipped out of the side door onto Vallance Street, turned right and hurried down the short distance to Kingsway, where he turned right again, passed the front entrance to the apartment block, then turned right yet again into Hove Street and headed up the busy road, past a line of parked cars, to his own elderly BMW. Starting the engine, his brain was racing. He needed to get rid of the laptop, phone and SIM card, photograph and its frame and the bin bags. But not around here. When Lorna’s body was found — perhaps as soon as tomorrow, if the electrician came — they might well do a search of all bins in the area.

He drove off, down to the seafront, and turned right, heading away from Hove towards Shoreham, passing Hove Lagoon to his left. He needed bins. A mile or so on, outside an old warehouse, he saw a builder’s skip. He stopped and, after a careful look around for any CCTV cameras, dumped one bag into it.

He drove on, thinking of another suitable location. He saw the slip road down to the harbour coming up to his left. Ideal, it would be totally dark down there, he thought. He took it and turned left again at the bottom, then right into a deserted parking area surrounded by warehouses on the wharf.