Peter James - Looking Good Dead

The Thursday-night rush hour traffic out of London had been worse than usual. And tonight being a fine, balmy night, it seemed every Londoner was escaping into the countryside. Tom normally travelled by train to avoid this hell, but he’d had to take the car today to get out to Ron Spacks’s office, and afterwards he’d had to drive back into central London to collect his laptop.

His plans to get home early and have a barbecue supper in the garden with his family had been shot to ribbons by Chris Webb arriving late to fix his computer and then taking much longer than he had thought. It was almost half past four in the afternoon by the time Chris had finished, freeing Tom to start his journey at the worst possible time.

Normally in the car he would catch up on phone calls or listen to the radio – in London he particularly liked David Prever on Smooth FM, otherwise he listened to the Radio 4 news or Jazz FM – but this evening, apart from one call to Ron Spacks to say he had his team working on prices for the Rolex Oyster watches – that was potentially a dream order he just had to get – he had driven in silence, just with his own sombre thoughts.

Is that Tom Bryce speaking?

The strong eastern European accent. His conversation with Kellie earlier.

What kind of an accent?

Sort of European, not English.

The same person?

Last night you accessed a website you were unauthorized to visit. Now you have tried to access it again. We do not appreciate uninvited guests. If you inform the police about what you saw or if you ever try to access this site again, what is about to happen to your computer will happen to your wife, Kellie, to your son, Max, and to your daughter, Jessica. Take a good look, then have a hard think.

Tom had had no intention of informing the police about what he had seen on Tuesday night. The internet was a sewer; you could find anything you wanted on it, however erotic or gross. He’d been to a website that was either a movie trailer or some gratuitously violent site for sickos and would have left it at that. It wasn’t his job to police the sewer.

But that threatening email implied there was something more to that site.

He was approaching the South Downs now; the traffic, although heavy, was moving quickly. Over to his left, half a mile across meadows, he saw a glint of light in reflected glass. A train. Forgetting the cramped, stuffy conditions for a brief moment, he envied its passengers the relative ease of their journey. However, he’d be home in fifteen minutes, and he was looking forward to a large, stiff drink.

He looked out through the windscreen at the brilliant yellow ball of sun sinking low in the cobalt sky. Beyond the hills was his home, his sanctuary. But he didn’t feel safe; something was shaking his insides, mixing up all his emotions, pouring a cocktail of confused fears into him.

He didn’t want to tell Kellie that he’d had the same call, and yet they had always been so open and honest with each other, he wondered if it would be wrong not to tell her. Except it would only make her even more nervous. And then he’d have to explain the CD.

And then?

The threat in the email was clear. If he informed the police. If he attempted to visit the site again.

Well the fact was he intended to do neither. So they should be fine.

So why the calls? Maybe he’d been stupid to make that second visit to the website, he realized.

As he turned into his street and drove up the hill, an alarm bell rang inside him. Ahead he could see Kellie’s old maroon Espace parked out in the street. She normally put it in the carport. Why was it out on the street? he wondered.

Moments later as he pulled up outside the house he saw the reason. Almost every square inch of the carport was taken up by a crate. It was one of the biggest crates he had ever seen in his life. It could easily have housed a full-grown elephant, with room for it to swing a cat from its trunk.

The thing was taller than the garage door, for Chrissake.

And instead of the front door opening wide, and Kellie, Max, Jessica and Lady bursting out through it to greet him, the door opened just a few inches and Kellie’s face peered round, warily, before she emerged wearing a baggy white T-shirt over cut-off denim shorts and flip-flops. Somewhere at the back of the house he could hear Lady barking in furious excitement. No sign of the kids.

‘It’s a little bigger than I expected,’ Kellie said, meekly, by way of a greeting. ‘They’re going to come back tomorrow to put it together.’

Tom just stared at her for a moment. She looked so vulnerable suddenly. Scared of the phone call or of him? ‘Wh- what is it?’ he asked. All he could think was that whatever was in there had to have cost serious money.

‘I just had to buy it,’ she said. ‘Honestly, it was such good value.’

Jesus. Trying desperately to hold on to his fast-unravelling patience. ‘What is it?’

She gave a little shrug and said, trying to sound nonchalant and not succeeding, ‘Oh, it’s just a barbecue.’

Now he understood the reticence in her voice when he had suggested earlier today that they had a barbecue this evening. ‘A barbecue? What the hell do you barbecue in a thing that size? Whales? Dinosaurs? An entire fucking herd of Aberdeen Angus?’

‘The list price new is over eight thousand pounds. I got it for three thousand!’ she exclaimed.

Tom turned away, his temper just a few threads from fraying completely. ‘You’re unbelievable, my darling. We’ve already got a perfectly decent kettle barbecue.’

‘It’s rusting.’

‘So, you could get a brand new one from Homebase for about seventy quid. You’ve spent three thousand ? And where the hell are we going to put it – the thing’ll take up half the garden.’

‘No, I don’t – it’s not – not that big when it’s assembled. It just looks so cool!’

‘You’ll have to send it back.’ Then he paused, looking around. ‘Where are the kids?’

‘I told them I needed to speak to you before you saw them. I warned them that Daddy might not be too pleased.’ She slipped her arms around him. ‘Look, there’s something I haven’t told you – I sort of wanted it to be a surprise.’ She gave him a kiss.

Christ, he wondered, what now? Was she going to tell him she was pregnant?

‘I’ve got a job!’

The words actually jolted a smile out of him.

Half an hour later, after he had read Jessica several pages of Poppy Cat Loves Rainbows, then Max a chapter of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and had watered his tomatoes in the greenhouse, and the raspberry canes, strawberries and courgettes in the strip of soil beside it, he was seated with Kellie at the wooden table on their terrace, with a massive vodka martini in his hand, catching the last rays of the evening sun on their garden. They clinked glasses. Near his feet, Lady crunched contentedly on a bone.

Len Wainwright’s head was visible, through the wisteria Kellie had trained along the top of the fence to give them added privacy, moving along, down towards his shed. Len had spent a lot of time, time that Tom could not afford, talking him through the various stages in the construction of this shed. But he had never actually explained its purpose. Kellie had once suggested that he was going to murder his wife and put her underneath. It had seemed funny at the time; Tom wasn’t smiling any more.

The air smelled sweet and was still, other than the busy evening chatter of birds. It was a time of year he normally loved, a time of day when he normally unwound and began enjoying life. But not this evening. Nothing seemed to calm the undefined fear that just went round and round inside him.