Peter James: Love You Dead

The young, handsome Frenchman who was the ski-shop manager, and had kitted them out with their rental skis, greeted her with a smile. In a charming French accent Simon Place said, ‘You’re not skiing? We have the best conditions here in the mountains in weeks — beautiful powder — and I think this afternoon the weather will be sunshine!’

‘I’ve lost my fiancé — it was a white-out at the top when we went up. I don’t like skiing on my own. Stupidly left my phone in our room — I’m going to call him to try to find him. That’s one problem with this resort, it’s so big.’

As he helped her off with her boots, he asked, ‘You liked the skis?’

‘Yes, they’re good.’

‘Stockli skis — they are — you know — the Rolls-Royce skis.’

‘Too bad they don’t come with a chauffeur,’ she said and walked out into the corridor, leaving him puzzling over the remark.

She picked her key up from the hotel’s reception desk, telling the receptionist she’d become separated from her fiancé out skiing, and was worried because she’d waited for him at the bottom for an hour and he hadn’t turned up. She added that he was an experienced skier and she was sure he would be fine, and asked the receptionist, when Walt eventually turned up, to tell him she’d be in the spa if she wasn’t in their room. Then she took the lift up to the third floor.

The room had already been cleaned; it looked neat and tidy, and there was a faint, pleasant smell of pine. She removed her phone from the back of the shelf where she had placed her underwear and dialled Walt’s number, wanting to be sure that if the police were subsequently to check her phone, she had done what she had said.

She heard Walt’s phone buzz and then begin warbling as well. She ended the call, removed his phone from under the pile of his clothes in the drawer where she had hidden it, and placed it on the desk beside his laptop. Then she peeled off her wet jacket, hung it over a radiator, dumped her gum into the waste bin and sat down on the freshly plumped duvet, thinking hard.

So far so good. She felt hungry. And the large schnapps had gone to her head a little. She had a witness that she’d travelled up to the top with her fiancé. She had another witness in the ski shop that she had returned without him, having become separated in the white-out, and that she’d gone back to the hotel to get her phone.

And no witness to what had happened at the top of the Saulire.

When they had got engaged, Walt had told her that he had written her into his will. So sweet of him.

There was a nice spa downstairs, with a swimming pool. She’d check her emails, have some lunch in the restaurant and check with the receptionist again. Then, if no update, she’d have a relaxing afternoon in the spa and perhaps get a massage. Around 5.30 p.m., a good hour after the lifts had closed, she’d go back to the reception desk and reiterate her concerns about her fiancé not having returned — and ask if they could check with the police and clinics.

Just like any anxious loved one might do.

She was feeling pretty happy with herself.

Roy Grace was feeling pretty happy with himself, too, as he slid off the physiotherapist’s table in her small Brighton consulting room. And looking forward to Saturday, Valentine’s Day. He’d booked a table at his and Cleo’s favourite Brighton restaurant, English’s, and he was already thinking, with anticipation, about what he was going to have. Oysters Kilpatrick — grilled, with bacon — and then either lobster or a Dover sole — with mushy peas. A glass of champagne to start with and then a nice bottle of their Pouilly-Fuissé white burgundy, his favourite wine, when he could afford it.

Buying their new house, a cottage in the country on the outskirts of Henfield, had stretched them both financially, but they’d still kept a small amount aside for spoiling each other on special occasions, and this was one. They’d already had a great house-warming party with family and friends, and he was delighted that his sister was becoming close friends with Cleo’s sister, Charlie. His first wife, Sandy, had had no siblings, and relations with her odd parents had always been strained, at best. So this was really nice to see.

‘That’s it!’ Anita Lane said. ‘We’re done! I don’t think I need to see you again, unless your leg starts giving you any grief, in which case call me.’

‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Brilliant!’

He’d been coming here twice a week since early January, after a surgeon at the Royal Sussex County Hospital had removed eleven shotgun pellets from his right leg just before Christmas. He had been shot at close range by a suspected serial killer he’d been attempting to arrest in a bunker beneath a house in Hove. The surgeon had breezily told him he’d been very lucky not to lose his leg.

To begin with, recovery had been agony, with several of the nerves damaged, and he’d woken many times during the nights that followed with the sensation that his leg was on fire. But he’d stuck rigidly to the exercise programme the physio had given him, in between their sessions; finally the pain had eased and the mobility was returning.

‘Keep up the exercises for a few more weeks,’ she said.

‘How soon can I start running again, Anita?’

‘You can start now but build it up slowly. Don’t try and do a marathon, OK?’

‘I won’t!’

‘If you get pain, come straight back to see me. That’s an order!’

‘You’re quite the bully, aren’t you?’ He grinned.

‘It’s because I can see you’re chomping at the bit. You’ve had a massive trauma to that leg, and just because you’ve thrown your walking stick away and I’m discharging you doesn’t mean you can start going mad. Comprende? ’

‘ Comprende! ’

‘And try not to get into any bundles with any villains for a while.’

‘I’m a detective superintendent, I don’t get into many fights with suspects.’

‘Oh, right, being a detective superintendent means you just get shot by them?’

He grimaced. ‘Yep, well, hopefully not too often.’

‘I hope not. A lot of people only get shot once, and it’s not a physiotherapist they need afterwards but an undertaker. Stay safe, isn’t that what you say?’

‘I’m impressed with your police lingo!’ He shook her hand, went out to the receptionist and paid the bill, carefully sticking the receipt in his wallet. Treatment for injuries sustained whilst on duty were reimbursed out of police funds.

Twenty minutes later he arrived back at his office in Sussex House, feeling a sense of an era passing. Although in part a lateral, out-of-the-box thinker, Roy Grace was at heart an extremely methodical man, the quality he had always admired and respected in those he had learned from in the past, and which he sought in anyone he selected to work with him. He was a creature of habit, and didn’t like change, which he always found unsettling. And thanks to the government’s swingeing budget cuts to the police, massive changes had already happened and there were more afoot.

The effect on morale was palpable. A decade ago he could guarantee that almost everyone in the force loved their job. Now, too many people were leaving before their retirement time, fed up with the freezes on promotion, or with the alterations to their pensions foisted on them midstream in their careers, or with walking on eggshells in fear of the political correctness zealots. Being a police officer had become a job where you were afraid to speak your mind or tell a joke. Yet, Grace knew only too well from his own experience, it was precisely that gallows humour the police were so famous for that enabled officers to cope with the horrors they sometimes saw.