Peter James - Dead Man’s Footsteps

‘Usual? Glenfiddich on the rocks. Tiniest bit of water?’

‘So your memory hasn’t gone?’

‘Fuck off, old-timer!’

Grace thought hard for a few moments, his mind back on his work. Chewing over the 6.30 briefing meeting they’d just had. Joanna Wilson. Ronnie Wilson. He knew Ronnie from a long time back. One of Brighton’s rogues. So Ronnie had died in 9/11. Events like that were so random. Had Ronnie killed his wife? His team were on the case. Tomorrow they would start checking into the man’s background, and his wife’s.

Branson returned and sat back down.

‘What do you mean, Glenn, that Ari’s trying to punish you?’

‘When Ari and me met, we shagged all day. You know? We’d wake up and shag. Go out somewhere, get an ice cream maybe, and we’d fool around. Shag again in the evening. Kind of like it wasn’t the real world.’ He drank some more of his beer, almost half the glass, straight down. ‘OK, I know you can’t maintain that for ever.’

‘It was the real world,’ Roy said. ‘But the real world doesn’t stay the same. My mother used to say that life is like a series of chapters in a book. Different things happen at different times. Life changes constantly. You know one of the secrets of a happy marriage?’

‘What?’

‘Don’t be a police officer.’

‘Funny. Ironic, isn’t it, that’s what she wanted me to be.’ He shook his head. ‘What I don’t get is why she’s angry all the time. At me. You know what she said this morning?’

‘Tell me?’

‘She said that I deliberately keep her awake, right? Like, when I get up in the night to go to the toilet, you know, have a piss, that I deliberately aim into the water so it makes a splashing sound. She said that if I really loved her, I would pee on the side of the bowl.’

Grace tipped the contents of the new glass into his existing one. ‘You’re not serious?’

‘I’m serious, man. There’s nothing I can do right. She’s, like, told me she needs her space, and screw my career as a policeman. She’s gonna go out in the evenings, she’s not prepared to be tied to the kids, and it’s my responsibility. If I have to work lates, then I have to find babysitters.’

Grace sipped his drink and wondered if perhaps Ari was having an affair. But he didn’t want to upset his friend further by suggesting it.

‘You can’t live like this,’ he said.

Branson picked up his packet of crisps and turned it over and over in his hands. ‘I love my kids,’ he said. ‘I can’t go through some divorce shit and, like, see them for a few hours once a month.’

‘How long has it been like this?’

‘Ever since she got this bug in her head about self-improvement. Mondays she does evening classes in English literature, Thursdays she does architecture. And all kinds of other shit in between. I don’t know her any more – I can’t reach her.’

They sat in silence for a while before Branson mustered a cheerful smile and said, ‘Anyhow my shit to deal with, right?’

‘No,’ Roy replied, even though he knew that if Ari threw Glenn out again, he’d be lumbered once more with the lodger from hell. He’d had Glenn to stay a couple of months ago and the house would have been tidier if he’d had an elephant high on magic mushrooms come to stay. ‘I sort of feel we are in this together.’

For the first time that evening, Glenn smiled. Then he finally ripped open his packet of crisps, peering inside with a faint look of disappointment, as if he had been expecting it to be filled with something else.

‘So, what’s happening with Cassian Pewe – sorry, Detective Superintendent Cassian Pewe?’

Grace shrugged.

‘Is he eating your lunch?’

Grace smiled. ‘I think that was his game plan. But we’ve put him back in his box.’

Cassian Pewe took another tentative sip of his tea, wincing as the hot liquid touched his teeth. Last night he had slept with whitening gel on them and today they were sensitive to extremes of temperature.

Putting the cup down in the saucer, he said to Sandy’s parents, ‘I do want to make one thing clear. Detective Superintendent Grace is a well-respected police officer. I have no agenda other than to discover the truth about your daughter’s disappearance.’

‘We need to know,’ Derek Balkwill said.

His wife nodded. ‘That’s the only thing that matters to us.’

‘Good,’ he said. ‘It’s very reassuring to know we are all on the same page.’ He smiled at them. ‘But,’ he went on, ‘without wanting to cast any aspersions, there are a number of senor officers in the Sussex CID who feel that a proper investigation has never been carried out. This is one of the main reasons I have been drafted in.’

Pausing, he was satisfied by their receptive nods, and a little emboldened. ‘I’ve been studying the case file all day today and there are many unanswered questions. I think, if I was in your shoes, I would be feeling less than satisfied with the work of the police to date.’

They both nodded again.

‘I really don’t understand why Roy was allowed to review the investigation himself, when he was so personally involved.’

‘We understand there was an independent team appointed a few days after our daughter disappeared,’ Margot Balkwill said.

‘And who was it who reported their findings to you?’ Cassian Pewe asked.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘it was Roy.’

Pewe opened his arms. ‘There, you see, is the problem. Normally when a wife goes missing, her husband is instantly the prime suspect, until cleared. From what I have read and heard, it doesn’t seem to me that your son-in-law was ever formally regarded as a suspect.’

‘Are you saying that you regard him as a suspect now?’ Derek asked.

He picked up his teacup and again Pewe noticed the tremor. He wondered whether the man was nervous or it was the onset of Parkinson’s.

‘I wouldn’t go so far as to say that, at this stage.’ Pewe smiled smugly. ‘But I’m certainly going to take radical steps to eliminate him from suspicion – which is something that has clearly not yet been done.’

Margot Balkwill was nodding. ‘That would be good.’

Her husband nodded, also.

‘Can I ask you both a very personal question? Has either of you ever, for a moment, suspected that Roy might be hiding something from you?’

There was a long silence. Margot furrowed her eyebrows, pursed her lips, then clenched and opened her hands several times. They were coarse hands, Pewe noticed, a gardener’s hands. Her husband sat still, his shoulders hunched, as if being slowly crushed by a huge, unseen weight.

‘I think you should understand,’ Margot Balkwill said, ‘that we don’t have any animosity towards Roy.’ She spoke like a schoolmistress delivering a report to a parent.

‘None,’ Derek said emphatically.

‘But,’ she said, ‘a little bit of you can’t help wondering… Human nature. How well do any of us really know anyone. Isn’t that right, Officer?’

‘Oh, absolutely,’ Pewe agreed silkily.

In the silence that followed Margot Balkwill picked up her spoon and stirred her tea. Pewe noticed that although she didn’t take sugar, this was the third time now she had stirred it. ‘Was there ever anything you noticed in the way Roy treated your daughter,’ he asked. ‘Anything that bothered you? I mean, would you say they had a happy marriage?’

‘Well, I don’t think it’s easy for anyone being married to a police officer. Particularly an ambitious one like Roy.’ She looked at her husband, who shrugged assent. ‘She had to put up with being on her own a lot. And being disappointed at the last minute when he got called out.’