Peter James - Not Dead Yet

‘What about someone who has a grudge against the farmer?’ Nick Nicholl said. ‘He doesn’t want to get caught, so he removes the head and hands, but puts the body there to try to frame the farmer?’

A possibility, Grace thought, but that didn’t strike him as likely. There were many kinds of murders, he knew from experience, but most of them fell into one of two categories: those cold psychopaths who planned carefully, and others who killed in the heat of the moment. The psychopaths who planned were the ones who often got away with murder. He remembered a conversation he’d once had with a Chief Constable some years back, when he had asked the Chief if in his experience he believed there was such a thing as the ‘perfect murder’. The Chief had replied that there was. ‘It’s the one we never hear about,’ he said.

Grace had never forgotten that. If someone devoid of all human emotion were to plan an execution killing, with the disposal of the body carefully thought out, he or she had a good chance of getting away with it. When you found a body, or body parts, that usually indicated carelessness by the killer. Carelessness tended to be caused by panic. Someone who had killed in the heat of the moment and had not thought it through.

This headless, limbless torso smelled of the latter to him. It was a hurried, amateurish body dump. When killers panicked, they made mistakes. And the kind of mistake a killer usually made was to leave a trail, however tiny. His job was to find it. Invariably, it involved getting his enquiry team doing painstaking work, turning every stone – and hoping, at some point, for that one small piece of luck.

He turned to the analyst, Carol Morgan. ‘I want you to look back through the serials covering the winter months – let’s set an initial parameter of February the twenty-eighth going back to November the first of last year – for any incident reported in the Berwick area. Someone behaving strangely, someone driving recklessly or just speeding; attempted break-ins; trespass. Take a three-mile radius around Stonery Farm as your starting point.’

‘Yes, sir,’ she said.

He let Glenn Branson run the rest of the briefing by himself. Although Grace kept track of all that was said, he was multi-tasking, running through the security strategy he had agreed with Chief Superintendent Graham Barrington, and which the Chief Constable had signed off. Gaia was arriving in this city the day after tomorrow. But he was also running through something that was happening tomorrow. Something he could not stop thinking about. The old rogue Tommy Fincher’s funeral. And one particular mourner who would be attending.

Amis Smallbone.

Just the thought of the creep caused Grace to clench his fists.

To those few people acquainted with Eric Whiteley, he seemed a creature of habit. A small, balding, mild-mannered man, with a wardrobe of inoffensive suits and dull ties, who was always unfailingly polite and punctual. During the twenty-two years since he had joined the Brighton firm of chartered accountants Feline Bradley-Hamilton, he had never taken a day off sick and had never arrived late. He was always the first in the office.

He would dismount his sit-up-and-beg bicycle at the New Road offices, directly opposite the Pavilion gardens, at precisely 7.45 a.m., rain or shine, with a tick-tick-tick sound as he scooted the last few yards balanced on one pedal. He would chain the machine to a lamp post which he had come to regard as his own, remove his bicycle clips, let himself into the premises and enter the alarm code. Then he would make his way up the staircase and along to his small back office on the second floor, with its frosted-glass borrowed-light window that was partially obscured by a row of brown filing cabinets and stacks of boxes. In winter he would switch on the heater, in summer, the fan, before sitting at his tidy desk, booting up his computer terminal, and settling into his tasks.

One thing his colleagues had learned about him was that he was something of a self-taught computer expert. He was normally able to fix most software problems that occurred in the company.

Eric Whiteley liked computers, because he was happier interacting with machines than people. Machines didn’t bully you or make fun of you. And he liked figures, because there was no ambiguity about numbers; there was always a satisfying precision. His job was to audit the accounts for clients of his firm, from the figures supplied to him, to do the company payroll, and occasionally to visit the firms to assist one of the accountants going through the books. He had been doing this job for twenty-two years, and expected to continue for at least another thirteen years until he reached the retirement age of sixty-five. Beyond that he had no plans. ‘We’ll see where the wind blows,’ he replied to work colleagues, on the rare occasions, such as the Christmas party, when someone asked him that question.

He did not like the Christmas party, always stayed the minimum amount of time he needed in order not to appear rude, and avoided conversations with his colleagues. After two decades of working with many of the same people, none of the other employees or partners of Feline Bradley-Hamilton knew any more about Eric Whiteley’s private life than they had on the day he first joined the firm.

He bought his lunch from the same sandwich shop in Brighton’s Bond Street every day of the week, and his menu never varied. Tuna mayo with sliced tomato on wholegrain, two twists of the pepper grinder, one shake of salt, a Twix bar, an apple and a bottle of sparkling water. Then he would buy a copy of the Argus from a newsagent and scurry back to the sanctuary of his office, where he would spend the remainder of his lunch hour eating and reading the paper all the way through – except for the sports pages, which did not interest him – and ignoring the phone if it rang.

Today, his eyes were suddenly drawn to the top-right column on the third page. It was an advertisement.

FILM EXTRAS WANTED!

EARN UP TO £65 PER DAY TO APPEAR IN

“THE KING’S LOVER”,

STARRING GAIA & JUDD HALPERN.

PRODUCTION STARTS IN BRIGHTON NEXT WEEK.

There was a phone number, an email address and a website.

He carefully cut out the advertisement and placed it in the middle drawer of his desk. Then he returned to his lunch.

The advertisement caught the eye of a number of other people in the city at the same time as Eric Whiteley. One was Glenn Branson, who was sitting on a train with Bella Moy, heading to the Crimewatch studio in Cardiff. He was eating a banana and scanning through the newspaper. He wrote down the details excitedly. Sammy and Remi were nuts about Gaia! His estranged wife Ari was doing her best to poison his kids against him. Maybe he could get them roles as extras on the set – how cool would that be? And it would have to be worth a lot of brownie points in his relationship with them.

Another person reading the advertisement with interest was the occupant of room 608 in The Grand Hotel in Brighton, who had been going through the newspaper’s small ads in search of a hooker.

He was feeling tired and jet-lagged, and was hyper with too much caffeine, but he didn’t care, he poured himself another cup now, then reached for the phone, checked how to make a local call, and dialled the number given in the advertisement. Moments later he heard the tell-tale delay, after the call was picked up, that he was through to a voicemail recording.

His anger surged. He hated that system, that whole culture of voicemail. That was how people fobbed you off, how they screwed you.

‘ If you’re phoning to register interest in being an extra in The King’s Lover , please leave your name, age and a number we can call you right back on. Alternatively you can email us your details, together with a recent photograph and a contact number. Thank you for calling Brooker Brody Productions! ’