Peter James - Looking Good Dead

‘Alive or dead?’

‘Dead. Why are you asking, can I enquire?’

‘Sounds like he’s well into his entomology,’ Grace said. ‘If it’s the same man, he’s now using scarabs – dung beetles.’

‘Very fitting.’

Grace thanked him, agreed to keep him fully in the loop and hung up. Norman Potting immediately strode over to his desk and laid the sheet of paper he was holding down in front of him.

‘Sulphuric acid, Roy. I’ve got what I think is a pretty comprehensive list of all the suppliers in the UK. There are five down in the south, two of them in our patch – one in Newhaven and one in Portslade.’

Grace, still absorbing the information he had been given by Barry Farrier, picked up the list and quickly scanned through the names and addresses. He clocked the two local ones.

Suddenly, the door burst open and Glenn Branson came in, his face lit up with excitement. ‘I’ve got a result!’ he said, his face inches from his SIO’s.

‘Tell me?’

Branson slapped the photograph of the VW Golf driver down triumphantly on the desk. ‘I’ve just had a phone call from a taxi driver mate of mine.’

Frivolously, and for no real reason, Grace asked, ‘Not the one who sneaked on me and Cleo to you?’

‘The very same.’ Branson grinned, then continued, totally elated, ‘I circulated this photograph to all my contacts. He just belled me. He just picked up a fare who he says is a dead ringer for this fellow – in central Brighton twenty minutes ago. He’s convinced it’s this man. Dropped him off at a warehouse in Portslade. At this address.’ He gave a handwritten scrap of notepaper to his boss.

Grace read it. Then he looked again at the list Potting had just given him. At the distributor of sulphuric acid based in Portslade.

It was the same address.

Tom remembered something. He did not have his mobile phone, but he had something else. He had felt the hard lump – he had been lying on it some of the time. Why the hell hadn’t he thought of it before? he wondered.

He dug his hand into his trouser pocket and extricated his Palm Tungsten PDA. He pressed one of the four buttons on the bottom. Instantly the display lit up. The machine emitted a glow that, at this moment, suddenly felt as good as a thousand torches.

He could see!

‘What’s that?’ Kellie called out.

‘My Palm!’ He could see her, actually see her face!

‘How did – you – you can move?’ she hissed.

‘My hands.’

The beam did not have a long throw, it was wide and short, but for the first time he could begin to orient himself. They were in a huge store, with a ceiling maybe twenty feet high, stacked all the way round with racks of chemical drums; there were hundreds of them, if not thousands. There was a concrete floor, no windows, and the beam did not get as far as the door. From the temperature and the total absence of light, he guessed they were underground.

There must be a door big enough to get a forklift through for these drums, he thought. And almost certainly a lift.

He examined the shackle around his ankle. It looked like one of those police manacles for criminals he had seen in the movies: a wide metal clamp, locked, with a chain running off it secured to the wall by a metal hoop which was not going anywhere. Kellie was chained to another hoop some distance away. Her chain was fully extended. He stood up and moved towards her, but when his chain went tight there was still a gap of about ten feet between them.

‘You can’t dial with that thing, can you?’ she asked.

‘No.’

‘What about email?’

‘I could if I had my phone.’

He urinated into the orange bucket which had arrived a few minutes earlier with a relief that was, for a few fleeting moments, close to bliss.

‘Don’t forget to pull the chain,’ Kellie said.

He grinned, suddenly loving her courage. If you could still smile, keep your spirits up – that was how people survived ordeals. ‘I won’t,’ he said. ‘And I’ll put the lid back down.’

He took the few paces the chain allowed him over to the drum he had opened, then shone the light on its side, looking for the label he had felt earlier in the darkness. He found it.

It was white, with a yellow and black HAZARDOUS SUBSTANCE! warning label next to it. On the white part was written: H 2SO 4. CONCENTRATE. 25 LTRS.

Tom again thought back as hard as he could to his schoolboy chemistry lessons. Would this stuff eat through metal? How quickly?

There was just one way to find out.

He put the Palm down on the floor and picked up the bucket. As he did so, the display went out. For an instant his heart sank as he feared the battery had died, then he realized it was on an automatic power-down after two minutes. Quickly, he reset it to stay on permanently. Then he picked up the bucket and hurled its contents away from himself and Kellie, as far as he could.

He turned his attention to the drum. He had removed the cap earlier, and there was a fierce acrid smell as he neared it. He took a deep breath and, holding the drum as firmly as he could, very aware and scared of the consequences of knocking it over, tilted it so that some poured from the top and splashed on the floor beside the bucket.

‘Shit.’

Steam curled up from the floor. The acid was reacting with something, which was a good sign.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Just trying an experiment.’

‘What? What are you trying?’ Kellie asked, her voice pitifully tight.

From his poor memory of chemistry some acids would not dissolve both plastic and metal. The fact that these drums were plastic told him they should not dissolve the bucket.

The burning acrid reek was getting worse; he could feel it right down his throat. He stepped back, took a deep breath, then eased the drum back a few inches and tried again. This time the acid rattled into the bucket. He kept going until it was just under half full, set the drum back down, upright, then picked up the Palm, examining the bucket carefully to make sure no acid was on the handle nor anywhere else he would touch.

He poured a small amount of the acid onto a couple of links of the chain.

Nothing happened. Wisps of vile-smelling steam rose from the floor on which the two links lay, and immediately around them, but there was no apparent reaction with the steel at all.

He stared down in agonized frustration, and swore. He might just as well have poured water onto them.

Carl Venner waddled up and down his office, a freshly lit cigar clamped in his mouth, wringing his hands, directing his anger alternately at Luvic, who was chewing gum and smoking a cigarette at the same time, and the Russian. ‘Boys, this is not a good situation. It is just so not good.’

He raised his hand to his mouth, removed his cigar, then began biting the skin on the end of his index finger again. Tearing at it.

The Russian, who rarely spoke, said, ‘We need get Yuri out of hospital before he wake.’

‘Either get him out or silence him,’ Venner said.

‘I don’t kill my brother,’ he said darkly.

‘You work for me, Roman; you do what I fucking tell you.’

‘Then I no work for you.’

Venner strutted up to him. ‘Listen, you piece of shit. You’d be fucking driving a tractor in the Ukraine if it wasn’t for me, so don’t ever threaten to quit, because I just might accept your resignation, and then what the fuck do you do?’

The Russian looked sullen but said nothing.

Luvic mimed a chop across his own neck with his hand. ‘I fix.’

The Russian walked across to the Albanian and planted himself squarely in front of him; he stood a good head taller than the former bare-knuckle fighter. ‘You kill my brother,’ he said, ‘I kill you.’