Peter James: Need You Dead

Facing him was a bank of shelves on which were stacked the box files and policy documents relating to the cases he was working on. Trials of several murder suspects he had arrested during the past twelve months were impending, one of whom was Brighton’s first serial killer in many years, Dr Edward Crisp. This workload, combined with his Senior Investigating Officer call-out responsibilities, was heavy.

But temporarily eclipsing that were the worries about the responsibilities now facing him following the death in Munich of Sandy. In particular, responsibility for her ten-year-old son, Bruno.

His son, as he had only recently discovered.

He’d agreed with Cleo that Bruno should come to live with the two of them and their baby son, Noah. But he was worried by what kind of upbringing his former wife had given him — especially during the two or three years Sandy had been a heroin addict. He would find out soon enough. He had to fly to Munich later this week to deal with all the formalities and to meet with the boy, who was currently staying with a school friend, and bring him to England. At least, apparently, he spoke good English. How would he feel about being uprooted to another country? What were his likes and dislikes? His interests? God, just so much to think about, and very importantly right now, too, Sandy’s funeral.

Initially he had thought it should be a quiet one in Munich, which she had made home for her and Bruno. Her maternal grandmother was from a small town in Bavaria, near Munich, and it was possible she had been seeing some of her family there, although he doubted it. People who deliberately disappeared knew the dangers of making contact with anyone from their former lives. But her parents, claiming to be too old to travel all the way to Munich, had pleaded for her to be brought back to England.

He had never got on well with Derek and Margot Balkwill at the best of times, and since Sandy’s disappearance even less so. He was convinced they’d believed in their hearts for all these years that he had murdered their daughter and only child. It wasn’t her parents who changed his mind, it was Cleo, suggesting that it might be comforting for Bruno to be able to visit his mother’s grave easily, whenever he wanted to — if he wanted to.

All the time that he was making these arrangements, vitally important though they were, he could not risk taking his eye off the ball on the prosecution cases he was in charge of — not while he had his boss, ACC Cassian Pewe, on his back.

And just to complicate matters further, due to recruiting issues resulting in a shortage of detectives, Surrey and Sussex Major Crime Branch were dangerously short of manpower. Kevin Shapland, the detective deputizing for him as Acting Head of Major Crime, was away on annual leave, and Grace had agreed to stand in and cover his week as the on-call SIO.

Ordinarily, even with Shapland away, it wouldn’t have been a problem as he could have shared some of his workload with his colleague and close friend, Detective Inspector Glenn Branson. But Glenn was also abroad on holiday with his fiancée, Siobhan Sheldrake, a journalist on the Argus newspaper, staying at her parents’ villa near Malaga. Instead he asked another colleague, Guy Batchelor, currently a temporary Detective Inspector, to come and see him. Batchelor was an officer he had come to respect and trust enormously. Grace felt confident that between the two of them, they could cope with the workload for the couple of days it would take him in Germany — he hoped — to sort out the arrangements for his late former wife and his son.

He felt a lot less confident about bringing a child he had not known about until these past few weeks into his and Cleo’s life.

But he had no option.

Did he?

Cleo understood. She said it would be fine. Somehow.

He wished he shared her optimism.

Matt Robinson peered out of the window, through the heavy drizzle, looking at house numbers. They raced round a long crescent, past a shabby parade of shops — a newsagent, an off-licence, a community centre — and then up an incline. The whole street had a neglected, unloved feel about it. The houses, erected in the 1950s post-war building boom, were a mishmash of terraces, semis and the occasional, slightly grander-looking, detached one. But most of them were badly in need of a fresh coat of paint and hardly any of the small front gardens showed any sign of loving care.

‘You know, this could be a lovely street,’ he said. ‘Why does it look so crap? Why doesn’t anyone care for their garden?’

‘Coz that’s where they wipe their feet when they leave,’ Juliet Solomon said, cynically.

It was an old police joke, when entering a shithole of a dwelling, that it was the kind of place where you wiped your feet on the way out. Except it wasn’t a laughing matter. Too often they went into a dwelling where the carpet was covered in mouldy food cartons, dog faeces and vomit, with a baby crawling around — but inevitably a brand-new, massive TV screen on the wall.

‘There! Seventy-three!’

He pointed at a house that was a definite cut above the others. A decent-sized three- or possibly four-bedroom detached structure, the front facade recently painted white, a shiny navy blue and rather classy front door, new-looking leaded-light windows that were over-ornate for the place, making him wonder if the owners had been the victim of a persuasive double-glazing salesman, and a neatly tended front garden with two beds of healthy-looking daffodils and rather grand stone balls on top of each of the two brick pillars. Parked on the drive between the pillars was an old model MX5 sports car, with gleaming red paintwork, a black hardtop and a hand-written sign in the rear window: FOR SALE, £3,500.

As Juliet brought the car to a halt, Matt informed the call handler they’d arrived. She replied that she had still not managed to reestablish contact with the caller.

They climbed out of the car, pulling on their hats, and hurried up the path to the front door. Matt had attended more domestics than he could remember. There would be at least one on every shift, and you never knew what to expect when you rang the doorbell. One time he’d been punched in the face by a gorilla of a man, and on another occasion the door had opened and a glass vase had hurtled past his head.

Juliet rang the bell, which triggered the yapping of several dogs. She pushed open the letterbox, peered through, then let it flap shut and stood back. Matt joined her, instinctively dropping one hand to the holster containing his Captor pepper spray.

The yapping increased. They heard a woman’s voice shouting, ‘Down! Back! Get back!’

Moments later the door opened a few inches, and an attractive-looking woman, elegantly dressed but with slightly dishevelled blonde hair, peered out at them, a bunch of shaggy puppies around her ankles. She looked nervous and her mascara had run down her tear-stained face. Her lower lip was split, with a trail of congealed blood below it. There was more congealed blood below her nostrils. She was clutching a mobile phone.

‘Mrs Belling?’ Juliet said gently. ‘Mrs Lorna Belling?’

She nodded, as if unable to speak, then nodded again. Then in a trembling voice, barely above a whisper, she said, ‘Thank you for coming. I’m sorry — sorry to have bothered you.’

‘I’m PC Solomon and this is my colleague, SC Robinson. Is your husband inside?’ Juliet asked.

She shook her head. ‘No — I saw — heard him — leave for work about ten minutes ago.’

‘Can we come in and have a chat?’

‘Please,’ the woman replied, weepily. ‘Please. Let me just put the dogs in another room so they don’t run out.’