Peter James - Dead Man’s Footsteps

The fourth book in the Detective Superintendent Roy Grace series, 2008

If Ronnie Wilson had known, as he woke up, that in just a couple of hours he would be dead, he would have planned his day somewhat differently.

For a start he might not have bothered to shave. Or wasted so many of those last precious minutes gelling his hair, then messing around with it until he was satisfied. Nor would he have spent quite so long polishing his shoes, or getting the knot of his expensive silk tie absolutely right. And he sure as hell would not have paid an exorbitant eighteen dollars – which he really could not afford – for the one-hour service to have his suit pressed.

To say that he was blissfully unaware of the fate awaiting him would be an exaggeration. All forms of joy had been absent from his canon of emotions for so long, he no longer had any idea what bliss was. He didn’t even experience bliss any more in those fleeting final seconds of orgasm, on the rare occasions when he and Lorraine still made love. It was as if his balls had become as numb as the rest of him.

In fact recently – and somewhat to Lorraine ’s embarrassment – when people asked him how he was, he had taken to replying with a brief shrug of his shoulders and the words, ‘My life is shit.’

The hotel room was shit too. It was so small that if you fell over you wouldn’t even hit the floor. It was the cheapest room the W had, but at least the address helped him to maintain appearances. If you stayed at a W in Manhattan, you were a somebody . Even if you were sleeping in the broom closet.

Ronnie knew he needed to get himself into a more positive mode – and mood. People responded to the vibes you gave out, particularly when you were asking for money. Nobody would give money to a loser, not even an old friend – at least, not the kind of money he needed at this moment. And certainly not this particular old friend.

Checking out the weather, he peered through the window, craning his neck up the sheer grey cliff of the building facing him across 39th Street until he could see the narrow slit of sky. The realization that it was a fine morning did nothing to lift his spirits. It merely felt as if all the clouds had drained out of that blue void and were now in his heart.

His fake Bulgari watch told him it was 7.43 a.m. He had bought it on the internet for forty pounds, but hey – who could tell it wasn’t real? He had learned a long time ago that expensive watches gave off an important message to people you were trying to impress: if you cared enough about a detail like time to buy one of the best watches in the world, then you would probably care just as much about the money they were going to entrust you with. Appearances weren’t everything, but they mattered a lot.

So, 7.43. Time to rock and roll.

He picked up his Louis Vuitton briefcase – also fake – placed it on top of his packed overnight bag and left the room, wheeling his luggage behind him. Emerging from the elevator on the ground floor, he skulked past the front desk. His credit cards were so maxed out he probably didn’t even have enough to settle the hotel bill, but he would have to worry about that later. His BMW – the swanky blue convertible that Lorraine liked to drive around in, posing to her friends, was about to be repossessed, and the mortgage company was about to foreclose on his home. Today’s meeting, he thought grimly, was the last-chance saloon. A promise he was calling in. A ten-year-old promise.

He just hoped it had not been forgotten.

Sitting on the subway, cradling his bags between his knees, Ronnie was aware that something had gone wrong in his life, but he couldn’t really put a finger on what it was exactly. Plenty of his contemporaries from school had gone on to have big successes in their fields, leaving him floundering in their wake, getting increasingly desperate. Financial advisers, property developers, accountants, lawyers. They had their big-swinging-dick houses, their trophy wives, their kids-to-die-for. What did he have?

Neurotic Lorraine who spent the money he didn’t have on endless beauty treatments she seriously did not need, on designer clothes they seriously could not afford, and on picking up the tabs of absurdly expensive lunches of lettuce leaves and mineral water with her anorexic friends, who were all far richer than they were, in whatever happened to be the latest hip restaurant-of-the-week. And despite a fortune spent on infertility treatment, she had still been unable to produce the child he so badly wanted. The only expenditure of which he had really approved had been her boob job.

But of course Ronnie was too proud to admit to her the mess he was in. And, ever the optimist, he always believed there was a solution just around the corner. A chameleon, he blended perfectly into his environment. As a used-car dealer, then an antiques dealer and an estate agent, he used to look pin-sharp, with the gift of the gab that was, unfortunately, better than his financial acumen. After the estate agency business went down the toilet, he had rapidly segued into property developing, where he used to look convincing in jeans and a blazer. Then, as the banks foreclosed on his twenty-home development that ran aground over planning issues, he reinvented himself yet again as a financial adviser to the rich. That business hit the buffers too.

Now he was here in the hope of convincing his old friend Donald Hatcook that he knew the secret of making money out of the next golden goose – biodiesel. Donald was rumoured to have made north of a billion in derivatives – whatever they were – and had lost only a paltry couple of hundred thousand investing in Ronnie’s failed estate agency business ten years ago. Claiming to accept all his friend’s reasons for the failed enterprise, he had assured Ronnie he would back him again one day.

Sure, Bill Gates and all the other entrepreneurs on the planet were looking for the way forward in the new, environmentally friendly biofuel market – and had the money to throw at it to make it happen – but Ronnie reckoned he had identified a niche. All he had to do this morning was convince Donald. Donald was sharp, he’d see it. He’d get it. It ought to be – in New York parlance – a slam dunk.

In fact, the further the train headed downtown, while he mentally rehearsed his pitch to Donald, the more confident Ronnie became. He felt himself turning into the Michael Douglas character in Wall Street : Gordon Gekko. And he sure looked the part. Just like the dozen other sharply dressed Wall Street players sitting in this swaying carriage with him. If any of them had just half of his troubles, they were keeping it well hidden. They all looked so damned confident. And if they bothered to glance at him, they would have seen a tall guy with lean good looks and slicked-back hair who looked equally confident.

People said that if you hadn’t made it by the time you were forty, then you were never going to make it. He was coming up to forty-three in just three weeks’ time.

And he was coming up to his station. Chambers Street. He wanted to walk the last few blocks.

He emerged into the fine Manhattan morning and checked his bearings on the map the hotel concierge had given him last night. Then he looked at his watch: 8.10 a.m. From past experience of navigating New York office buildings, he reckoned he should allow himself a good fifteen minutes to get to Donald’s office once he reached the man’s building. And it was a good five minutes’ walk from here, the concierge had told him – and that was assuming he did not get lost.