Peter James - Looking Good Dead

It was Lynn Cottesloe, Kellie’s best friend who also lived in Brighton, wondering if there was any news or anything she and her husband could do to help. Could they bring some food over? Help out with the children? Tom thanked her and said that a rota of family liaison officers had been organized. She told him to call the instant he had any news, and he promised he would. Then he returned to his task.

The first camera showed the length of the platform, from a high vantage point. A train was just pulling out of the station. A counter in the top right-hand corner read 19.09.

‘That’s the Thameslink, the London Bridge service,’ Glenn Branson informed him. ‘Yours is coming in a couple of minutes.’

Tom fast-forwarded, then slowed when a new train appeared on the track. His nerves tightened. The train came to a halt. Doors opened and about thirty people climbed down onto the platform. He pressed the freeze-frame button, and looked at each character carefully.

No sign of the dickhead.

‘This is the right train?’ he asked.

‘Definitely. The 6.10 fast service from Victoria – the one you told me you took,’ Branson replied. ‘Run it on a bit; might be that not everyone’s off yet.’

Tom pressed the play button and all the people sprang back into life. He scanned the open doors of the train, many of which were being shut again, trying to work out the carriage where he had been sitting. It was about four back from the front – he estimated he was looking at it now.

And then he saw him.

The big-framed, baby-faced man, dressed in a safari-style shirt over shapeless slacks and clutching a small holdall, was stepping down onto the platform now, and looking carefully around almost as if to ensure the coast was clear before he got off.

Clear of what? Tom wondered, stabbing the freeze button.

The man stopped in mid-step, his left, trainer-clad foot in the air, his face angled slightly towards the camera but showing no awareness of it. Although the look of deep consternation on his face was clearly visible.

Tom pressed the play button again, and within moments the man’s concerns seemed to be over, and he began walking, almost jauntily, towards the exit barrier. He froze the tape again, and said, ‘This is him.’

Branson stared at the man in shock. ‘Zoom in, will you, on his face.’

Tom fumbled with the controls, then zoomed in, a little jerkily, until he was tight on the dickhead’s face.

‘You’re absolutely sure?’

Tom nodded. ‘Yes. That’s him. Absolutely.’

‘You couldn’t be mistaken?’

‘No.’

‘That’s very interesting,’ the Detective Sergeant said.

‘Do you know who he is?’

‘Yes,’ Branson said, his voice turning grim. ‘We do.’

Shortly before five o’clock, Sergeant Jon Rye was sitting at his desk in the High Tech Crime Unit, still working on Tom Bryce’s computer, when his direct line rang. He picked up the receiver. ‘Jon Rye,’ he said.

‘Hello. It’s Tom Bryce. I’m actually in your building, up in the CCTV room… Just wondered if – if my computer was ready. I – could pop down… collect. I – I need to do some work tonight. I – I have – have to prepare for a very big meeting tomorrow. How are you doing?’

You sound terrible. You need to do some work, and I need to go home and salvage my marriage, Jon Rye thought. There was only himself and Andy Gidney, a short distance across the room from him, still there in the department late on this Sunday afternoon. Were the two of them sad or what?

Gidney, his iPod plugged as ever into his ears, was hunched over his keyboard, his desk littered with empty Coke cans and plastic coffee cups from the vending machines, clicking relentlessly away, working on cracking the code he had been trying to crack all week.

Rye worried about the geek – he seemed a lost soul. At least when Rye left the building, he had a home to go to. Maybe Nadine was sour sometimes, but there would be a meal on the table, the kids to talk to. Some kind of normality. What was Gidney’s normality?

Mind you, he wondered, what was anyone’s normality in here? Including his own? Most of their working weeks consisted of looking at porn on seized computers. And the vast majority of it was not your average titillating-but-cosy Playboy centrefold stuff; it was middle-aged men with children as young as two years old. Something he would never, not in a trillion years, really comprehend. How did that stuff turn people on? How could people do that with innocent children? How could a forty-year-old man sodomize a small child? And then live with the knowledge of what he had done?

The answer, sadly, was too easily and too often.

He knew exactly what he would have done if he’d caught someone meddling with his children when they had been young. It would have involved a razor blade and a blowtorch.

There was a sudden jangle of weird electronic noises which was becoming irritatingly familiar to Rye. Gidney’s mobile phone. The geek removed an iPod earpiece and answered the phone in a flat tone, devoid of any emotion. ‘Oh hi,’ he said.

Rye knew roughly where Gidney lived – up off The Level, somewhere towards the racecourse, in a bedsit. It was an area of densely packed Victorian and Edwardian terraced houses, originally built as artisan dwellings, now largely monopolized by students and young singles. What did the geek go home to – if and when he ever did go home? A tin of beans on a single hob? Another computer screen? The Guardian newspaper – which he always carried under his arm into work but never seemed to read – and a pile of techie magazines?

‘I need about another half-hour,’ Rye said to Tom Bryce. ‘You could wait, or would you like me to drop it back to you on my way home?’

‘Yes. I – I have the children – I need to get back. Thank you,’ Bryce said. ‘If you could drop it back I’d appreciate that.’

‘OK, I have your address. I’ll be there as soon as I can.’ He checked his watch, wanting to make sure he left enough time to get home for the one television programme of the week he was addicted to, the motoring programme, Top Gear. Although it was some years since he had been a traffic cop he was still an unreconstructed petrol-head.

As he replaced the receiver, he saw Gidney, wearing his anorak and carrying his small rucksack, heading out of the door. No goodbye. God, he was always the same – no social graces at all!

It took Rye longer than he had planned to finish his examination, and he realized, just a little guiltily, that it was now over an hour and a half since he had spoken to Tom Bryce. He finally closed the man’s laptop and was about to stand up when the phone rang.

It was an operator from the call handling centre in a building at Malling House, the police headquarters, where non-emergency calls from the general public were handled. ‘Is that the High Tech Crime Unit?’ the operator said.

Rye took a deep breath, resisting the temptation to tell the man he had the wrong number. ‘Sergeant Rye speaking.’

‘I have a caller who’s complaining that someone is using his wireless internet connection without his permission.’

‘Oh perrrlease?’ Rye said, nearly exploding – he really didn’t have the time for this. ‘If he has a wireless internet connection, all he has to do is activate the encryption to protect it!’

‘Would you mind talking to him, sir?’ the operator said. ‘It’s the third call we’ve logged from him in the past month. He’s a bit agitated.’

Join the club, Rye thought. Reluctantly he said, ‘Put him on.’

Moments later he heard an elderly-sounding male voice, with a guttural Germanic accent. ‘Oh yes. Hello there, my name is Andreas Seiler. I am an engineer; I am retired now but I was building bridges.’ Then there was just the hiss of static. Rye waited a while.