Peter James - Looking Good Dead

He thanked him, then dialled Directory Enquiries and asked for the number of the Royal Sussex County Hospital. A few minutes later he was through to a tired-sounding woman at Accident and Emergency. She assured him that no one of Kellie’s name had been admitted in the past few hours.

Next he got the main number for Sussex Police, from Directory Enquiries again, and rang that. But after being transferred to Traffic, then put on hold for several minutes, he was told there had been no reported road traffic accidents involving his wife or their car.

He did not know what to do next.

It was only Wendy Salter’s second time on nights. The probationary WPC was three weeks out of Police Training College at Ashford in Kent, and had the best part of two years yet to serve before becoming a fully fledged officer like her colleague. PC Phil Taylor, a few weeks shy of thirty-seven, was at the wheel of the liveried police Vectra, driving fast, blues on, but on this empty road there was no need for the siren.

They were less than a mile from CID headquarters in Sussex House, and had driven almost the entire width of Brighton and Hove in the two minutes since they had picked up the emergency call from the Control Room. They had only just finished sorting out a drunken argument over a bill, which had turned into a fight, in the Escape nightclub just off Brighton seafront.

Going at high speed through the city gave Wendy a massive thrill – she couldn’t help it – it was like being on the best funfair ride in the world. And a lot of officers felt the same. The expression on Taylor’s face showed he was among them.

It was 4.15 a.m. and, looking up through the windscreen, Wendy could see a few cracks of grey dawn light appearing in the black canopy of the night sky. A terrified rabbit sprinted in the glow of the car’s headlights across the road and vanished beneath the bonnet. She waited for the thud and was relieved when there was none.

‘Bloody kamikaze bunny that was,’ Phil Taylor said cheerily.

‘I think you missed it.’

‘I read somewhere that some bloke’s published a book of road-kill recipes – in America.’

‘Could only be in America,’ Wendy said. She’d never actually been there, and had an image of the country heavily influenced by all the crazies in California she had seen on television, or read about, with a bit of Michael Moore thrown in for good measure.

They were passing woodland on their right and a sweeping drop to their left down to the lights of Brighton and Hove. Then, rounding a sharp right-hand bend, they saw the red glow ahead of them.

For a brief instant Wendy thought it might be the sun starting to rise, but dismissed that when she worked out they were travelling almost due west. The glow intensified as they drew closer, and then, suddenly, she could smell it.

The vile, acrid stench of burning paint, rubber and vinyl.

Taylor braked and pulled over a short distance from the blazing car, which was in a tarmac car park in a beauty spot with magnificent daytime views. But all WPC Wendy Salter could see as she unclipped herself and stepped out of the car, dutifully pulling on her hat, was dense, choking smoke as the strong breeze blew it straight towards them, making her eyes water. She turned away for a moment, coughing, then ran alongside her colleague as close as they could get to the vehicle before the heat stopped them.

In the distance she could hear the wail of a siren. Probably the fire brigade, she thought, the stench of burning paint and rubber one hundred times stronger now, and the fierce crackling and roaring of the inferno filling her ears.

She could see inside the car now, with most of the glass of the windows already burned out, and to her relief it was empty. It was an estate, and walking round to the front she recognized the radiator grille. ‘An Audi,’ she called out to PC Taylor.

‘It’s a recent model; you can tell from the grille,’ he said.

‘I know. The new A4.’

He gave her a glance. ‘Bit of a petrol-head, are you?’ he said with grudging admiration.

‘Not as much as whoever did this,’ she retorted.

‘Kids,’ he said, as if it were a swear word. ‘Little bastards. Torching someone’s brand new wheels.’

‘Joyriders?’

‘Bound to be,’ he said. ‘Who else?’

Roy Grace woke at six thirty on Sunday morning to the beeping of his alarm clock, with a parched mouth and a blinding headache. Two paracetamol capsules he’d swallowed with a pint of water at about five in the morning had had about as much effect as the first couple he had downed a few hours earlier. Which was not a lot.

As he hit the snooze button, temporarily silencing the clock, the loud chirrup of a bird outside took over, incessant, like a stuck CD track. Light streamed in through a wide gap in the curtains, which he realized he had not closed properly.

How drunk was I last night?

Assembling his thoughts, his brain sluggish, feeling like someone had spent all night pulling wires out of it at random, he reached out for his mobile phone. But there was no further text from Cleo.

He could hardly expect there to be one, as it was only half six in the morning and she was probably sound asleep, but logic wasn’t a major feature of his thinking just at this moment, with the pounding inside his head and the damned bird, and the knowledge that he had to get up and face a full day’s work. No chance of a Sunday lie-in today, boyo.

He closed his eyes, thinking back. God, Cleo was lovely in every way, a really warm, gorgeous human being. She was very, very special – and they had got on so incredibly well! Then he thought back to their kiss in the back of the taxi, a long, long, amazing kiss. And he tried to remember who had started it. It was Cleo, he seemed to recall. She had made the first move.

He felt a pang of longing to speak to her, to see her. Suddenly, he thought he could smell her perfume. Just the lightest trace on his hand; he brought it to his nose and yes! It was strongest on his wrist; it must have come from when he had sat in the cab with his arm around her. He held his wrist against his nose for a long time, breathing in the musky scent, something stirring deep in his heart that he had thought, until these past few days, was long dead.

Then he felt a twinge of guilt. Sandy . But he ignored it, shut it out of his mind, determined not to go there, not to let it spoil this moment.

He looked at the clock again to double-check the time, his brain turning, reluctantly, to work. To the 8.30 a.m. briefing. Then he remembered he needed to collect his car.

If he got up now, he worked out, he would just have time to run to the underground car park where he had left the Alfa last night – the fresh air might help his head. Except that his body was telling him it did not need a run, it needed about eight hours more sleep. He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to crush the pain like cheese-wire cutting through his skull – and to ignore that sodding bird which he could happily have shot if he’d had a gun – and drifted for a few delicious moments back into thoughts about Cleo Morey.

It seemed barely a few seconds before the alarm started beeping again. Reluctantly, he hauled himself out of bed, opened the curtains the rest of the way, and padded naked into the bathroom to brush his teeth. The face that stared back at him out of the mirror over the basin wasn’t a pleasant sight.

Roy Grace had never been a vain man but had until recently considered himself still young, or youngish, not handsome but OK-looking, with his best feature being his blue eyes (his Paul Newman eyes, Sandy used to tell him) and his worst his small but very broken nose. Now, increasingly, the face he stared at early in the morning seemed to belong to some much older guy – a complete stranger with a wrinkled forehead, slackening jowls and bags the size of oyster shells beneath his eyes.