Peter James: Dead Tomorrow

The fifth book in the Detective Superintendent Roy Grace series, 2009

Susan hated the motorbike. She used to tell Nat that bikes were lethal, that riding a motorcycle was the most dangerous thing in the world. Over and over again. Nat liked to wind her up by telling her that actually, statistically, she was wrong. That in fact the most dangerous thing you could do was go into your kitchen. It was the place where you were most likely to die.

He saw it for himself every day of his working life as a senior hospital registrar. Sure there were some bad accidents on motorbikes, but nothing compared with what happened in kitchens.

People regularly electrocuted themselves sticking forks into toasters. Or died from broken necks after falling off kitchen chairs. Or choked. Or got food poisoning. He liked, in particular, to tell her the story of one victim who had been brought into A &E at the Royal Sussex County Hospital, where he worked – or rather overworked – who had leaned into her dishwasher to unblock it and got stabbed through the eye by a boning knife.

Bikes weren’t dangerous, not even ones like his monster red Honda Fireblade (which could hit sixty miles an hour in three seconds), he liked to tell her; it was other road users who were the problem. You just had to watch out for them, that was all. And hey, his Fireblade left a damn sight smaller carbon footprint than her clapped-out Audi TT.

But she always ignored that.

The same way she ignored his moans about always having to spend Christmas Day – just five weeks away – with the outlaws , as he liked to call her parents. His late mother was fond of telling him that you could choose your friends but not your relatives. So damn true.

He had read somewhere that when a man marries a woman, he hopes she will stay the same forever, but when a woman marries a man, her agenda is to change him.

Well, Susan Cooper was doing that OK, using the most devastating weapon in a woman’s arsenal: she was six months pregnant. And sure, of course he was proud as hell. And ruefully aware that shortly he was going to have to get real. The Fireblade was going to have to go and be replaced by something practical. Some kind of estate car or people carrier. And, to satisfy Susan’s social and environmental conscience, a sodding diesel-electrical hybrid, for God’s sake!

And how much fun was that going to be?

Having arrived home in the early hours, he sat yawning at the kitchen table of their small cottage at Rodmell, ten miles from Brighton, staring at the news of a suicide bombing in Afghanistan on the Breakfast show. It was 8.11 according to the screen, 8.09 according to his watch. And it was the dead of night according to his mental alertness. He spooned some Shreddies into his mouth, swilled them down with orange juice and black coffee, before hurrying back upstairs. He kissed Susan and patted the Bump goodbye.

‘Ride carefully,’ she said.

What do you think I’m going to do, ride dangerously? he thought but did not say. Instead he said, ‘I love you.’

‘Love you too. Call me.’

Nat kissed her again, then went downstairs, tugged on his helmet and his leather gloves, and stepped outside into the frosty morning. Dawn had only just broken as he wheeled the heavy red machine out of the garage, then swung the door shut with a loud clang. Although there was a ground frost, it had not rained for several days, so there was no danger of black ice on the roads.

He looked up at the curtained window, then pressed the starter button of his beloved motorbike for the last time in his life.

Dr Ross Hunter was one of the few constants in Lynn Beckett’s life, she thought, as she pressed his surgery bell on the panel in the porch. In fact, if she was honest with herself, she’d be hard pushed to name any other constants at all. Apart from failure . That was definitely a constant. She was good at failure, always had been. In fact, she was brilliant at it. She could fail for England.

Her life, in a nutshell, had been a thirty-seven-year-long trail of disasters, starting with small stuff, like getting the end of her index finger chopped off by a car door when she was seven, and steadily getting bigger as life took on more gravitas. She had failed her parents as a child, failed her husband as a wife, and was now very comprehensively failing her teenage daughter as a single-parent mother.

The doctor’s surgery was in a large Edwardian villa in a quiet Hove street that had in former times been entirely residential. But now many of the grand terraced houses had long been demolished and replaced with blocks of flats. Most of those that remained, like this one, housed offices or medical practices.

She stepped into the familiar hallway, which smelled of furniture polish tinged with a faint whiff of antiseptic, saw Dr Hunter’s secretary at her desk at the far end, occupied on a phone call, and slipped into the waiting room.

Nothing had changed in this large but dingy room in the fifteen or so years she had been coming here. The same water stain, vaguely in the shape of Australia, on the stuccoed ceiling, the same potted rubber plant in front of the fireplace, the familiar musty smell, and the same mismatched armchairs and sofas that looked as if they had been bought, back in the mists of time, in a job lot from a house clearance auctioneer. Even some of the magazines on the circular oak table in the centre looked as if they had not been changed in years.

She glanced at a frail old man who was sunk deep into an armchair with busted springs. He had jammed his stick into the carpet and was gripping it firmly, as if trying to prevent himself from disappearing into the chair completely. Next to him an impatient-looking man in his thirties, in a blue coat with a velvet collar, was preoccupied with his BlackBerry. There were various pamphlets on a stand, one offering advice on how to give up smoking, but at this moment, with the state of her nerves, she could have done with advice on how to smoke more.

There was a fresh copy of The Times lying on the table, but she wasn’t in any mood to concentrate on reading, she decided. She’d barely slept a wink since getting the phone call from Dr Hunter’s secretary late yesterday afternoon, asking her to come in, first thing in the morning, on her own. And she was feeling shaky from her blood sugars being too low. She had taken her medication, but then had barely swallowed a mouthful of breakfast.

After perching herself on the edge of a hard, upright chair, she rummaged in her bag and popped a couple of glucose tablets into her mouth. Why did Dr Hunter want to see her so urgently? Was it about the blood test she’d had last week, or – as was more likely – about Caitlin? When she’d had scares before, like the time she’d found a lump on her breast, or the time she’d become terrified that her daughter’s erratic behaviour might be a symptom of a brain tumour, he had simply rung her himself and given her the good news that the biopsy or the scan or the blood tests were fine, there was nothing to worry about. Inasmuch as there could ever be nothing to worry about with Caitlin.

She crossed her legs, then uncrossed them. Dressed smartly, she was wearing her best coat, blue mid-length wool and cashmere – a January sale bargain – a dark blue knitted top, black trousers and black suede boots. Although she would never admit it to herself, she always tried to make herself look good when she came to see the doctor. Not exactly dressed to kill – she had long ago lost the art, not to mention the confidence, to do that – but dressed nicely at least. Together with a good half of Dr Hunter’s women patients, she had long secretly fancied him. Not that she would have ever dared make that known to him.