Peter James - Dead Man’s Footsteps

Then he punched her again.

Shortly before 7 o’clock, Cassian Pewe drove his dark green Vaux-hall Astra through the buffeting wind and neon-lit darkness of the cliff-top coast road. He crossed two mini-roundabouts into Peace-haven, then continued for the next mile past endless parades of shops, half of them seemingly estate agents, the rest garish fast-food places. It reminded him of the outskirts of small American towns he had seen in films.

Unfamiliar with this area a few miles east of Brighton, he was being bossed through it by the female voice of his plug-in sat nav. Now, past Peacehaven, he was following a crawling camper van down the winding hill into Newhaven. The sat-nav woman instructed him to keep straight on for half a mile. Then his mobile phone, in the hands-free cradle, rang.

He peered at the display, saw it was from Lucy, his girlfriend, and reached forward to answer it.

‘Hello, darling,’ he cooed. ‘How is my precious angel?’

‘Are you on your hands-free?’ she asked. ‘You sound like a Dalek.’

‘I’m sorry, my precious. I’m driving.’

‘You didn’t call,’ she said, sounding hurt and a tad angry. ‘You were going to call me this morning, about tonight.’

Lucy, who lived and worked in London as a PA for a hedge-fund manager, had not been impressed by his recent move to Brighton. Most probably, he thought, because he hadn’t invited her to move with him. He always kept his women at a distance, rarely rang them when he said he would and frequently cancelled dates at the last moment. Experience had taught him that was the best way to keep them where he wanted them.

‘My angel, I have been soooooo busy,’ he cooed again. ‘I

just didn’t have a moment. I’ve been in wall-to-wall meetings all day.’

‘In one hundred and fifty yards turn left,’ the sat-nav lady instructed him.

‘Who’s that?’ Lucy demanded suspiciously. ‘Who’s that in the car with you?’

‘Only the sat nav, sweetheart.’

‘So are we meeting tonight?’

‘I don’t think it’s going to work tonight, angel. I’ve been dispatched on an urgent case. Could be the start of a major murder inquiry, with some rather ugly consequences within the local police here. They thought I was the right man for it, with my Met experience.’

‘So what about afterwards?’

‘Well – if you were to jump on a train, we could maybe have a late dinner down here. How does that sound?’

‘No way, Cassian! I’ve got to be in the office at 6.45 in the morning.’

‘’Yes, well, just a thought,’ he replied.

He was driving over the Newhaven bridge. A barrage of signs lay ahead: one to the cross-Channel ferry, another to Lewes. Then, to his relief, his saw a sign pointing to Seaford, his destination.

‘Take the second left turn,’ the sat nav dictated.

Pewe frowned. Surely the Seaford sign had indicated straight on.

‘Who was that?’ Lucy asked.

‘The sat nav again,’ he replied. ‘Aren’t you going to ask me how my day was? My first day at Sussex CID?’

‘How was your day?’ she asked grudgingly.

‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I got a bit of a promotion!’

‘Already? I thought moving from the Met was a promotion. Going from a Detective Chief Inspector to a Detective Superintendent.’

‘It’s even better now. They’ve put me in charge of all cold cases – and that includes all unaccounted-for missing persons.’

She was silent.

He made the left turn.

The sat-nav display of the road ahead disappeared from the screen. Then the voice commanded, ‘Make a U-turn.’

‘Fuck,’ he said.

‘What’s going on?’ Lucy asked.

‘My sat nav doesn’t know where the hell I am.’

‘I have some sympathy with her,’ Lucy said.

‘I’ll have to call you back, my angel.’

‘Was that you or your sat nav speaking?’

‘Oh, very droll!’

‘I suggest you have a nice romantic dinner with her.’ Lucy hung up.

Ten minutes later, the sat nav had found its bearings again and delivered him to the address he was seeking in Seaford, a quiet, residential coastal town a few miles on from Newhaven. Peering through the darkness at the numbers on the front doors, he pulled up outside a small, nondescript pebbledashed semi. A Nissan Micra was parked on the drive.

He switched on the interior light, checked the knot of his tie, tidied his hair, climbed out of the car and locked it. A gust of wind immediately blew his hair into disarray as he hurried up the path of the neat garden to the front door, found the bell and pressed it, cursing that there was no porch. There was a single, rather funereal chime.

After a few moments the door opened a few inches and a woman – in her early sixties, he guessed – stared out at him suspiciously from behind rather stern glasses. Twenty years ago, with a better hairdo and the thick worry creases airbrushed from her face, she might have been quite attractive, he thought. Now, with her short, iron-grey hair, a baggy orange jumper that swamped her, brown polyester trousers and plimsolls, she looked to Pewe like one of those doughty, backbone-of-England ladies you find manning stalls at the church bazaar.

‘Mrs Margot Balkwill?’ he asked.

‘Yes?’ she said hesitantly and a little suspiciously.

He showed her his warrant card. ‘I’m Detective Superintendent Pewe of Sussex CID. I’m sorry to trouble you, but I wonder if I could have a word with you and your husband about your daughter, Sandy?’

Her small, round mouth fell open, revealing neat teeth that were yellow with age. ‘Sandy?’ she echoed, shocked.

‘Is your husband in?’

She considered the question for a moment, like a schoolmistress who had just been thrown a curve by a pupil. ‘Well, he is, yes.’ She hesitated for a moment, then indicated for him to come in.

Pewe stepped on to a mat which said WELCOME, and into a tiny, bare hall which smelled faintly of a roast dinner and more strongly of cats. He heard the sound of a television soap opera.

She closed the door behind him, then called out, a little timidly, ‘Derek! We have a visitor. A police officer. A detective.’

Tidying his hair again, Pewe followed her through into a small, spotlessly clean living room. There was a brown velour three-piece suite with a glass-topped coffee table in front, arranged around an elderly, square-screened television on which two vaguely familiar-looking actors were arguing in a pub. On top of the set was a framed photograph of an attractive blonde girl of about seventeen, unmistakably Sandy from the pictures Pewe had studied this afternoon in the files.

At the far end of the small room, next to what Pewe considered to be a rather ugly Victorian cabinet full of blue and white willow-pattern plates, a man was sitting at a small table covered in carefully folded sheets of newspaper, in the process of assembling a model aircraft. Strips of balsa wood, wheels and pieces of undercarriage, a gun turret and other small objects Pewe could not immediately identify were laid out on either side of the plane, which rested at an angle, as if climbing after take-off, on a small raised base. The room smelled of glue and paint.

Pewe made a quick scan of the rest of the room. A fake-coal electric fire, which was on. A music centre that looked like it played vinyl rather than CDs. And photographs everywhere of Sandy at different ages, from just a few years old through to her twenties. One, in pride of place on the mantelpiece above the fire, was a wedding photograph of Roy Grace and Sandy. She was in a long white dress, holding a bouquet. Grace, younger and with much longer hair than he had now, wore a dark grey suit and a silver tie.