Peter James - Looking Good Dead

‘Easy for you to say as you don’t have any.’

‘I shave my head, man, because it’s well cool.’

‘I’m not shaving mine.’

‘I told you before, I know a great hairdresser. Ian Habbin at The Point. Get some highlights put in, keep your sides short, but grow a bit on top and get it all gelled up.’

‘I don’t have time to grow it by eight o’clock tonight. But I do have time to get some kit.’

Branson suddenly gave his friend a really warm smile. ‘You’re serious, man; you really do have a hot date! I’m pleased for you.’ He squeezed Roy’s shoulder. ‘It’s about time you started getting yourself a life again. So who is she? Anyone I know?’

‘Maybe.’ Grace was touched by his friend’s reaction.

‘Cut the mystery crap. Who is she? Not that Emma-Jane? She’s well fit!’

‘No, not her – anyhow she’s far too young for me.’

‘So who? Bella?’

‘Just tell me what I should wear.’

‘Not the old git suit you’re wearing now.’

‘Come on, what do you think?’

‘So where are you taking her?’

‘Out for an Italian. Latin in the Lanes.’

‘That’s the old lady’s favourite restaurant! Ari loves the seafood mixed grill.’ He beamed. ‘Hey, you’re spending serious dosh on her!’

Grace shrugged. ‘What do you think I should do, take her to McDonald’s?’

Ignoring the comment, Glenn Branson said, ‘Watch how she eats.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘You can tell from how a woman eats how she is going to be in bed.’

‘I’ll remember to watch.’

Then Branson was silent for some moments, studying the magazine. He flipped over a few pages. ‘For someone of your age, I wouldn’t try to look too young.’

‘Thanks.’

Branson pointed at a model wearing an unstructured casual beige jacket over a white T-shirt, jeans and brown loafers. ‘That’s you. Can see you in that. Mr Cool. Go to Luigi’s in Bond Street; they’ll have something like that.’

‘Want to come with me after the mortuary – help me choose something?’

‘Only if I get to date you afterwards.’

There was a loud blast on a horn. Branson and Grace both turned to see the nose of a bus filling the rear window.

Branson put the car in gear and drove on. A few minutes later they were driving downhill into the busy gyratory system, past a giant Sains-bury’s supermarket to their right and then a strategically placed undertaker’s. Then they turned sharp left in through wrought-iron gates attached to brick pillars bearing the small, unwelcome sign, brighton and hove city mortuary.

Grace had no doubt that there were worse places in the world, and in that respect he had led a sheltered life. But for him this place was about as bad as it got. He remembered an expression he had once heard, ‘the banality of evil’. And this was a banal place. It was a bland building with a grim aura, a long, single-storey structure with grey pebbledash rendering on the walls and a covered drive-in on one side high enough to take an ambulance.

The mortuary was a transit stop on the one-way journey to a grave or crematorium oven for those who had died suddenly, violently or inexplicably – or from some fast-onset disease like viral meningitis where a post-mortem might provide medical insights that could one day help the living. Normally he found himself shuddering involuntarily as he passed through these gates, but today was different.

Today he felt positively elated. Not because of the dead body he was coming to study, but because of the woman who worked here. His date for tonight.

But he wasn’t about to tell Glenn Branson that.

Tom carefully reversed his Audi out of the bay in the Gravytrain Distributing parking lot, nervous of hitting Ron Spacks’s Ferrari, then stuck his phone into the hands-free cradle and dialled Kellie, deep in thought.

That image of the woman being butchered was chilling him, going round and round in his mind. It was a movie, must have been – there were hundreds of movies he had never seen – just a scene from a thriller. Or maybe a trailer for one. You could create all kinds of effects these days. It was a film.

It had to have been.

But he knew he was just trying to convince himself. The trashing of his computer, the threatening email? He shivered as if a dark cloud had slipped across his soul. Just what the hell had he really seen on Tuesday night?

Then he heard Kellie’s voice, a tad more cheery now.

‘Hiya,’ she said.

‘Darling?’ he said. ‘Sorry about that, I was with a very difficult customer.’

‘No, it’s OK, it’s probably just me. It’s just – you know – it was spooky.’

As he drove along past a row of factory and warehouse units, another plane was coming in to land, and he raised his voice above the din. ‘Tell me exactly what happened.’

‘It was just a phone call. The man asked if this was the Bryce residence, then if I was Mrs Kellie Bryce, and when I told him I was, he hung up.’

‘You know what it is?’ Tom said. ‘It’s probably one of those con men. I read about them in the paper the other day – there’s a whole ring operating. They call up people pretending to be from their bank, saying it’s a security check; they get them to confirm a whole load of stuff about their house, their passwords, then their bank details and credit cards. It could have been one of those interrupted in mid-flow.’

‘Maybe.’ She did not sound any more convinced than he felt. ‘He had a strange accent.’

‘What kind of an accent?’

‘Sort of European, not English.’

‘And he didn’t say anything else at all?’

‘No.’

‘Are you expecting any deliveries?’

There was an awkward silence. ‘Not exactly.’

Shit. She had bought something. ‘What do you mean not exactly, darling?’

‘The bidding hasn’t closed.’

Tom didn’t even want to know what today’s extravaganza might be. ‘Listen, I’ll try to get home early. I have to go into town and collect my laptop – it’s being fixed again.’

‘Still wrong?’

‘Yes, some glitch that won’t go away. How’s the weather?’

‘Brightening up.’

‘Maybe if I get down in time we could have a barbecue with the kids?’

Her response was strange, almost evasive, he thought as he pulled out onto the main road, looking for the signs to London at a roundabout a short distance ahead. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Well, OK, maybe.’

All the way, on the slow crawl along the M4 bottleneck, thanks to John Prescott’s cursed bus lane (for which many times Tom could have boiled the Deputy PM’s testicles in oil), he was trying to work out all the reasons someone might have made that call and then hung up. And the most likely was a delivery driver who got cut off. Simple as that. Nothing to get worried about.

Except he did worry, because he loved Kellie and Max and Jessica just so damned much.

His parents had been killed in a car smash in fog on the M1, when he was twenty, and his only sibling, his brother Zack, five years younger than him, who had never really got over it, was a dope-head dropout living in Bondi Beach in Sydney, doing odd jobs and a bit of surfing. Apart from Zack and a maternal uncle who lived in Melbourne who he had not seen since he was ten – and who hadn’t bothered to come to his parents’ funeral – Kellie, Max and Jessica were all the family he had, and that made them even more precious still.

Just as the motorway ended and became Cromwell Road, his phone rang. No number showed in the caller display.

Tom pressed the button to answer it. ‘Hello?’

A male voice with a strong eastern European accent asked, ‘Is that Tom Bryce speaking?’