Peter James - Not Dead Yet

One summer, when he was eighteen, he applied for a holiday job as a guide and to his joy he was accepted. He would escort parties of tourists around, telling them of the love the king had for his mistress and how frustrated he was by the protocols of his age. But what he loved most of all about this job was the access it gave him. The freedom to wander around the Pavilion’s interior when there were no tours for him to guide, without the security guards taking any notice of him.

He liked best of all its hidden parts. The secret corridors that ran behind the kitchens to the grand rooms, where servants could move around with drinks and food, slipping in and out of secret doorways. There was a hidden spiral staircase, that the public never saw, because the banisters were dangerously rickety, up which he could climb to an area, beneath one of the domes, to which the king invited his guests to see the spectacular views, and later where occasional senior household staff were rumoured to have lived.

It was now derelict, the floorboards were in poor condition, and there was a very large trapdoor secured with just two bolts, and carrying a warning sign, below which was a forty-foot drop down into a store room above the kitchens. There was a rope-and-pulley system from the 1800s, which Eric imagined to have been a very primitive kind of dumb waiter. And from this rooftop eyrie he had the finest view of Brighton he had ever seen.

He’d sneaked a sleeping bag up here and made it his private place. Sometimes, if he could avoid the security guards when they closed up the building in the evening, he would bring a picnic here and hole up for the night. Safe. No bullies up here. He would close his eyes and imagine himself living here, a king, worshipped and adored.

Then one night he got caught by a bully security guard.

They fired him as a guide. He was told he could never come back here again.

Cleo loved her little town house in the trendy North Laine district of Brighton; she felt secure here and she liked the convenience and the buzz of living in the centre of the city. It was great to walk across the courtyard and out of the gates, and be able to stroll through the maze of cafés and small independent shops, and down to the beach on a fine day. But there were some drawbacks. One was that Humphrey needed a garden to be out in when she was at work – and she planned to return to the mortuary as soon as practicable after the baby was born. A bigger problem still was that she only had one tiny spare room and needed that for her studies – she was doing an Open University degree course in Philosophy – and for Roy to have a workplace at home. The baby would be born in a matter of weeks, perhaps even sooner, and they would be short of space. As soon as Roy sold his house they could start looking for a bigger place together. Another less serious, but constant, irritant was having to park on the street, and it was getting harder and harder to find spaces when she came back from work in the evenings.

Throughout her life, Cleo’s favourite time of the week had always been Saturday mornings – even though in this job she frequently had to work part of her weekends. People who died suddenly were rarely obliging enough to do so only during office hours, which meant that when she was on call, which was most of the time as they were short-handed in the mortuary, she frequently had to go out on weekends and holidays to help recover a body.

The one last night had been particularly unsavoury, and today she had to attend and assist at the post-mortem, which had now moved from the deposition site to the mortuary. But she wasn’t daunted. The torso lying in a tank of chicken droppings was grim work, but mangled and sometimes disembowelled bodies in car crashes were far worse and more harrowing. So were charred corpses in fires. And it always made her sad to see lonely, elderly people who had died in their homes and not been discovered for months. But by far the worst of all were children. A couple of weeks previously she’d had to recover a six-month-old baby who’d died of suspected sudden infant death syndrome.

Removing that tiny girl from the little cot in the house had been traumatic for her, thinking all the time of how she might feel if that had happened to her and Roy. And the frightening prospect that it could.

But she wasn’t thinking of any of that now as she stepped out of her front door into the early June sunshine. Above her was a cloudless sky, and she smelled the tang of salt in the air from the English Channel, a short distance to the south. The forecast was good, and although she was destined to spend much of the day in the mortuary, she hoped to get away by late afternoon, and meet her sister for a coffee and catch-up in a café on the seafront. Afterwards she planned to get prawns and avocado and some nice Dover sole and cook Roy one of his favourite meals this evening – after which they could watch a DVD, if she could stay awake that long!

She strode across the courtyard, dressed in a long lycra T-shirt, with her bump out loud and proud, her Crocs – which Roy didn’t care for – slapping on the cobbles. She ignored her almost constant backache from the weight of the baby, feeling so blissfully happy she was almost high. She was carrying the child of the man she truly, deeply loved. A wonderfully kind, caring and strong person. And she genuinely believed he loved her just as much.

Two seagulls swirled overhead, shrieking, and she glanced up at them for a moment, then carried on towards the wrought iron gates. She clicked the lock and stepped out into the narrow street. This part of the city was always teeming with people on a Saturday morning, spilling out of the rammed Gardner Street bric-a-brac market a couple of streets away. It was 9.30 and the antique dealer across the road, who specialized in fireplaces, already had some of his goods out on display, propped against the shop front.

She walked up the hill, taking the first right turn, and strode along the even narrower street, lined on both sides with small terraced Victorian houses, past the nose-to-tail parked cars. She saw her black Audi TT halfway along, where she had parked it last night – relieved as ever that it had not been stolen.

As she neared it, she witnessed the standard hazard of parking out in the open in this city – thanks to all the gulls, half of the vehicles looked like Jackson Pollock paintings. Even from a hundred feet away, she saw the streaky, swirly white and mustard-yellow splodges all over her beloved convertible.

But then as she got closer, her mood suddenly changed. With a tightening in her gullet, she broke into an anxious run, ignoring the fact she wasn’t supposed to run. Then she stopped beside the car.

‘Shit,’ she said. ‘Shit.’

The fabric roof had been ripped open, both lengthways and sideways.

Feeling a flash of fury, her sunny mood totally gone, she peered inside, looking for the damage. But to her surprise the CD and radio player were intact. ‘Bastards,’ she mouthed. ‘Scumbags.’

Then she saw the marks on the bonnet. At first she thought it had been someone tracing in the dust with their fingers, until she looked closer. And froze.

Someone had used a sharp instrument, a screwdriver or a chisel, and had engraved the words in the paintwork, gouging right down to the bare metal.

COPPERS TART. UR BABY IS NEXT.

Malling House, the headquarters of Sussex Police, was on the outskirts of Lewes, the historic county town of East Sussex, eight miles north-east of Brighton.

The sprawling, ragged complex of Police HQ buildings, from where the administration and key management for the force’s 5,000 officers and civilian employees was handled, was fronted by a handsome red-brick Queen Anne house, once a private stately home, and faithfully restored after it had been gutted by fire over a decade ago. It housed the offices of the Chief Constable, the Deputy Chief Constable, the Assistant Chief Constables and other chief officers together with their support staff.