Peter James - Dead Like You

Grace shook his head, acutely aware of how ignorant he was compared to Cleo. He’d read so little in his life.

‘He’s one of my favourite writers. I’m going to make you read him one day! He wrote, “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.” That’s you. You’re stronger, aren’t you?’

‘I hope so – but I sometimes wonder.’

‘You have to be stronger than ever now, Detective Superintendent.’ She patted her stomach. ‘There are two of us who need you.’

‘And all the dead people who need you!’ he retorted.

‘And the dead who need you too.’

That was true, he thought ruefully, glancing at the file again. All those blue boxes and green crates on his office floor. Most of them representing victims who were waiting from beyond the grave for him to bring their assailants to justice.

Would today’s rape victim, Nicola Taylor, get to see the man who did this brought to justice? Or would she end up one day as just a name on a plastic tag on one of those cold-case files?

‘I’m reading about a Greek statesman called Pericles,’ she said. ‘He wasn’t really a philosopher, but he said something very true. “What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.” That’s one of the many reasons I love you, Detective Superintendent Grace. You’re going to leave good things woven into the lives of others.’

‘I try,’ he said, and looked back down at the files on the Shoe Man.

‘You poor love, your mind really is somewhere else tonight.’

He shrugged. ‘I’m sorry. I hate rapists. It was pretty harrowing today up in Crawley.’

‘You haven’t really talked about it.’

‘Do you want to hear about it?’

‘Yes, I do. I really do want to hear about it. I want to know everything you learn about the world that our child is going to be born into. What did this man to do her?’

Grace picked up his bottle of Peroni from the floor, took a long pull on it, draining it, and could have done with another. But instead he put it down and thought back to this morning.

‘He made her masturbate with the heel of her shoe. It was some expensive designer shoe. Marc Joseph or something.’

‘Marc Jacobs?’ she asked.

He nodded. ‘Yes. That was the name. Are they expensive?’

‘One of the top designers. He made her masturbate? You mean using the heel like a dildo?’

‘Yes. So, do you know much about shoes?’ he asked, a little surprised.

He loved the way Cleo dressed, but when they were out together she rarely looked in shoe-shop or fashion-shop windows. Whereas Sandy used to all the time, sometimes driving him to distraction.

‘Roy, darling, all women know about shoes! They’re part of a woman’s femininity. When a woman puts on a great pair of shoes, she feels sexy! So, he just watched her doing this to herself?’

‘Six-inch stilettos, she said,’ he replied. ‘He made her push the heel all the way in repeatedly, while he touched himself.’

‘That’s horrible. Sick bastard.’

‘It gets worse.’

‘Tell me.’

‘He made her turn over, face down, then he pushed the heel right up her back passage. OK? Enough?’

‘So he didn’t actually rape her? In the sense that I understand it?’

‘Yes, he did, but that was later. And he had problems getting an erection.’

After some moments’ silent thought she said, ‘Why, Roy? What makes someone like that?

He shrugged. ‘I talked to a psychologist this afternoon. But he didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know. Stranger rape – which this one looks like – is rarely about sex. It’s more about hatred of women and power over them.’

‘Do you think there’s a connection between whoever did this and your file on the Shoe Man?’

‘That’s why I’m reading it. Could be coincidence. Or a copycat. Or the original rapist reoffending.’

‘So what do you think?’

‘The Shoe Man did the same things to some of his victims. He also had problems getting an erection. And he always took one of his victim’s shoes.’

‘This woman today – did he take one of her shoes?’

‘He took both, and all her clothes. And from what the victim has said so far, it sounds like he might be a transvestite.’

‘So there’s a slight difference.’

‘Yes.’

‘What’s your instinct? What does your copper’s nose tell you?’

‘Not to jump to conclusions. But…’ He fell silent.

‘But?’

He stared at the file.

Saturday 3 January

Ask people to recall where they were and what they were doing at the moment – the exact moment – they heard about the planes striking the Twin Towers on 9/11, or about Princess Diana’s death, or that John Lennon had been shot or, if they are old enough, that John F. Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas, Texas, and most will be able to tell you, with crystal clarity.

Roxy Pearce was different. The defining moments in her life came on those days when she finally bought the shoes that she had been lusting after. She could tell you exactly what was happening in the world on the day she acquired her first Christian Louboutins. Her first Ferragamos. Her first Manolo Blahniks.

But today, all those gleaming leather treasures languishing in her cupboards paled into insignificance as she strutted around the grey-carpeted floor of Brighton’s Ritzy Shoes emporium.

‘Oh yes! Oh, God, yes!’

She looked at her ankles. Pale, slightly blue from the veins beneath the surface, they were too thin and bony. Never before her best feature, today they were transformed. They were, she had to admit, one pair of drop-dead-beautiful ankles. The thin black straps wrapped themselves like sensuous, living, passionate fronds around the white skin either side of the protruding bone.

She was sex on legs!

She stared in the mirror. Sex on legs stared back at her! Sleek black hair, a great figure, she definitely looked a lot younger than a woman three months short of her thirty-seventh birthday.

‘What do you think?’ she said to the assistant, staring at her reflection again. At the tall stilettos, the curved sole, the magical black gloss of the leather.

‘They were made for you!’ the confident thirty-year-old salesgirl said. ‘They were just absolutely made for you!’

‘I think so!’ Roxy squealed. ‘You think so too?’

She was so excited that several people in the shop glanced round at her. Brighton was busy this first Saturday morning of the new year. The bargain hunters were out in force as the Christmas sales headed into their second week and some prices came down even more.

One customer in the shop did not glance round. Anyone looking would have seen an elegantly dressed middle-aged woman with a long dark coat over a high roll-neck jumper and expensive-looking high-heeled boots. Only if they peeled back the top of the roll-neck would they have spotted the giveaway Adam’s apple.

The man in drag did not glance round, because he was already looking at Roxy. He had been observing her discreetly from the moment she’d asked to try on those shoes.

‘Jimmy Choo just has it!’ the assistant said. ‘He really knows what works.’

‘And you really do think these look good on me? They’re not very easy to walk in.’

Roxy was nervous. Well, £485 was a lot of money, particularly at the moment, when her husband’s software solutions business was in near meltdown and her own small PR agency was barely washing its face.

But she had to have them!

OK, £485 could buy an awful lot of things.

But none would give her the pleasure of these shoes!

She wanted to show them off to her friends. But more than anything she wanted to wear them for Iannis, her crazily sexy lover of just six weeks. OK, not the first lover she’d had in twelve years of marriage, but the best, oh yes. Oh yes!