Peter James - Looking Good Dead

It wasn’t the beer or the fags or the fast-food diet or the crazy work schedule that got you in the end, it was gravity, he decided. Gravity made you a little bit shorter every day. It slackened your skin a little more, pulling it relentlessly downward. Half your waking life was a struggle against gravity but it always got you. It would be gravity that banged the lid down on top of you in your coffin. And if you had your ashes scattered to the winds, gravity would eventually bring them back down, every single bit of them.

He worried about his thoughts sometimes, which were becoming increasingly morbid of late. Maybe his sister was right; maybe he was spending too much time alone? But after all this time he was used to solitude. It was what he knew as normality.

It wasn’t the kind of life he’d planned, nor the kind he’d ever remotely imagined he would be living, seventeen years back, when he had proposed to Sandy on a warm September day on the end of the Palace Pier, telling her that he’d taken her there because if she had said no, he would have jumped off. She’d smiled that beautiful, warm smile, tossed her blonde hair from her eyes, and told him – with her typical gallows humour – that she’d have considered it a much stronger test of their love if he had taken her to Beachy Head.

He downed a glass of tap water, screwing up his face at the taste of the fluoride, which seemed heavier than usual this morning. Drink more plain water, his fitness instructor, Ian, at the police gym told him repeatedly. He was trying, but the stuff just didn’t taste as good as a Starbucks latte. Or a Glenfiddich on the rocks. Or just about anything else. He hadn’t really worried about his appearance until now.

Until Cleo.

These years since Sandy’s disappearance had taken a heavy toll on him. Police work was hard, but at least most coppers had someone to go home to at the end of their shift, and talk to. And Marlon, although company of sorts, just didn’t do it for him.

He put on his jogging kit, gave Marlon some breakfast in case he forgot later, and eased himself out of the front door into the deserted street. It was a deliciously cool summer morning, with a clear sky holding all the promise of the day being a corker. And suddenly, despite his hangover and lack of sleep, he felt energized. With his heart humming, he set off down the street at a brisk pace.

Roy Grace lived in Hove, a residential district that had until recent years been a separate town to Brighton, although joined at the hip. Now both came under the joint umbrella of the City of Brighton and Hove. The Greek, from which the name Hove came – or Hove, Actually, as it had been nicknamed – was rumoured to translate as ‘burial ground’.

This was not entirely inappropriate, as Hove was the quieter, more residential sister to the once brash, racy Brighton. The border began on the seafront at a spot marked by a war memorial obelisk and a coloured line across the promenade, but after that became increasingly obscure, with many people along its zigzag pathway north finding it ran through their houses.

Grace’s own modest three-bedroom semi was in a street that went directly down to the Kingsway, the wide dual carriageway on the far side of which was the seafront. He crossed over, then ran across the dewy grass of the lawns, past the children’s playground and the two boating ponds of Hove Lagoon where his dad, who enjoyed building model motor boats, used to take him as a child and let him hold the remote controls.

The Lagoon had seemed such a huge place to him then, now it looked so small and run-down. There was a worn-out-looking roundabout, a rusting swing, a slide in need of paint, and the same ice cream kiosk that had always been there. The boats were still locked away for the night, and several ducks drifted on the smaller of the two ponds, while a group of swans sat on the edge of the larger one.

He skirted the ponds and hit the promenade, just as deserted as it had been at this hour yesterday, and passed along a long row of blue bathing huts. As he ran, the landscape on his left changed. At first there was a row of drab post-war blocks of flats and a stretch of equally uninteresting houses. Then, after the King Alfred Leisure Centre, at the moment a major construction site, the view on his left turned into the one he loved: the long esplanade of grand, terraced Regency town houses, mostly painted white, many with bow windows, railings and grand porches. A lot of them had once been single dwellings, weekend homes for rich Regency and Victorian Londoners, but now, like most of the buildings in this city with its sky-high property prices, they had been carved up into flats or converted into hotels.

A few minutes later, approaching the boundary between Brighton and Hove, he could see, ahead of him to the right, the sad, rusting spars rising from the sea which were all that remained of the West Pier. It had once been as lively and garish as its counterpart, the Palace Pier exactly half a mile further east, and visiting it had been one of the constant highlights of his childhood.

His dad, who was a keen fisherman, had taken him to the Palace Pier often, walking down to the exposed fishing platform at the far end, from where on a Saturday afternoon – out of the football season or when the Albion was playing away – they could come home with a good haul of whiting, bream, plaice and, if they were lucky, the occasional sole or even bass, depending on the tide and weather.

But it wasn’t the fishing that had been the big lure of the pier for Roy as a child, it was the other attractions, particularly the bumper cars and the ghost train, and most of all the old wooden glass-fronted slot machines that contained moving tableaux. He had one favourite and was forever cajoling his father into giving him more pennies for the slot. It was a haunted house, and for a full minute, as gears cranked and pulleys whined, doors would fly open, lights would go on and off, and all kinds of skeletons and ghosts would appear, as well as Death itself, a hooded figure all in black holding a scythe.

Coming up on his left now – and his energy was starting to sag a little – was the hideous monstrosity of the Kingswest building, a grim, 1960s leisure structure totally out of keeping with the rest of the seafront. A few hundred yards further on and the handsome facade of the Old Ship Hotel loomed. He sprinted up the steps onto the upper promenade, crossed the almost deserted road, kept up his pace along the side of the hotel, and then entered the car park and glanced at his watch.

Shit. He realized he had badly miscalculated. If he was going to make the 8.30 a.m. briefing on time – and it was vital to his team’s morale that he did – he had less than half an hour to get home, change and be out of the door.

He also now had a raging thirst, but there was no time even to think about stopping and grabbing a bottle of water from somewhere. He inserted his ticket in the machine followed by his credit card, then hurried down the concrete staircase to the level he had left his car on, crinkling his nose at the smell of urine, wondering why it was that someone had pissed in the stairwell of every single car park he had ever been into in his life.

At 8.29 a.m., with just a minute to spare, Grace approached MIR One, eating his breakfast, a Mars bar from a vending machine, and clutch-ing a scalding cup of coffee.

He hurriedly finished his Mars, and popped a stick of mint chewing gum into his mouth to mask any residual alcohol from last night. Putting the rest of the packet back in his pocket, he was about to enter the room, when he heard footsteps behind him.

‘Yo, old timer, so how was the date?’

He turned to see Glenn Branson, in a leather jacket as glossy as a mirror, holding a cappuccino. He had a rim of its froth, like a white moustache, around his mouth.