Peter James - Not Dead Enough

Except it wasn’t going to come along in this place.

She was out there somewhere, in one of those lonely-hearts columns, on one of those websites. Waiting for him. Gagging for him. Gagging for a tall, lean, great-dancer-dude who was also a mean kick boxer. Which he was practising now. Behind the counter, behind the bank of CCTV monitors that were the window on his shop and the outside world, he was practising. Roundhouse kick. Front kick. Side kick.

And he had a ten-inch dick.

And he could get you anything you wanted. You name it – I mean, like, you name it. What kind of porno you want? Toys? Drugs? Yeah.

Camera Four was the one he liked to watch most. It showed the street, outside the door. He liked watching the way they came into the shop, especially the men in suits. They sort of nonchalantly sidled past, as if they were en route to someplace else, then rocked back on their heels and shot in through the door, as if pulled by an invisible magnet that had just been switched on.

Like the pinstriped git in a pink tie who walked in now. They all gave him a sort of this-isn’t-really-me glance, followed by the kind of inane semi-grin you see in stroke victims, then they’d start fondling a dildo, or a pair of lace knickers, or a set of handcuffs, like sex had not yet been invented.

Another man was coming in. Lunch hour. Yeah. He was a bit different. A shell-suited jerk in a hoodie and dark glasses. Clyde lifted his eyes from the monitor and watched as he entered the shop. His type were the classic shoplifters, the hood shielding their face from the cameras. And this one was behaving really weirdly. He just stopped in his tracks, staring out through the opaque glass in the door for some moments, sucking his hand.

Then the man walked over to the counter and said, without making eye contact, ‘Do you sell gas masks?’

‘Rubber and leather,’ Clyde replied, pointing a finger towards the back of the store. A whole selection of masks and hoods hung there, between a range of doctor, nurse, air hostess and Playboy bunny uniforms, and a jokey Hung Like a Stallion pouch.

But instead of walking towards them, the man strode back towards the door and stared out again.

Across the road, the young woman called Sophie Harrington, whom he had followed from her office, was standing at the counter of an Italian deli, with a magazine under her arm, waiting for her ciabatta to be removed from the microwave, talking animatedly on her mobile phone.

He looked forward to trying the gas mask out on her.

14

‘Gets me every time, this place,’ Glenn Branson said, looking up from the silent gloom of his thoughts at the even gloomier view ahead. Roy Grace, indicating left, slowed his ageing maroon Alfa Romeo saloon and turned off the Lewes Road gyratory system, past a sign, in gold letters on a black ground, saying Brighton and Hove City Mortuary. ‘You ought to donate your rubbish music collection to it.’

‘Very funny.’

As if out of respect for the place, Branson leaned forward and turned down the volume of the Katie Melua CD that was playing.

‘And anyhow,’ Grace said defensively, ‘I like Katie Melua.’

Branson shrugged. Then he shrugged again.

‘What?’ Grace said.

‘You should let me buy your music for you.’

‘I’m very happy with my music.’

‘You were very happy with your clothes, until I showed you what a sad old git you looked in them. You were happy with your haircut too. Now you’ve started listening to me, you look ten years younger – and you’ve got a woman, right? She’s well fit, she is!’

Ahead, through wrought-iron gates attached to brick pillars, was a long, single-storey, bungalow-like structure with grey pebbledash rendering on the walls that seemed to suck all the warmth out of the air, even on this blistering summer’s day. There was a covered drive-in one side, deep enough to take an ambulance – or more often, the coroner’s dark green van. On the other side, several cars were parked alongside a wall, including the yellow Saab, with its roof down, belonging to Nadiuska De Sancha and, of much more significance to Roy Grace, a small blue MG sports car, which meant that Cleo Morey was on duty today.

And despite all the horror that lay ahead, he felt a sense of elation. Wholly inappropriate, he knew, but he just could not help it.

For years, he had hated coming to this place. It was one of the rites of passage of becoming a police officer that you had to attend a post-mortem early in your training. But now the mortuary had a whole different significance to him. Turning to Branson, smiling, he retorted, ‘What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls the butterfly.’

‘What?’ Branson responded flatly.

‘Chuang Tse,’ he said brightly, trying to share his joy with his companion, trying to cheer the poor man up.

‘Who?’

‘A Chinese philosopher. Died in 275 bc.’ He didn’t reveal who had taught him this.

‘And he’s in the mortuary, is he?’

‘You’re a bloody philistine, aren’t you?’ Grace pulled the car up into a space and switched the engine off.

Perking just a little, again, Branson retorted, ‘Oh yeah? And since when did you get into philosophy, old-timer?’

References to Grace’s age always stung. He had just celebrated – if that was the right word – his thirty-ninth birthday, and did not like the idea that next year was going to be the big four-zero.

‘Very funny.’

‘Ever see that movie The Last Emperor ?’

‘Don’t remember it.’

‘Yeah, well, you wouldn’t,’ Glenn said sarcastically. ‘It only won nine Oscars. Well brilliant. You should get it out on DVD – except you’re probably too busy catching up on past episodes of Desperate Housewives . And,’ he added, nodding towards the mortuary, ‘are you still – you know – she still yanking your chain?’

‘None of your damn business!’

Although in reality it was Branson’s business, it was everyone’s business, because at this moment it was causing Grace’s focus to be elsewhere, in totally the wrong place from where it should have been. Fighting his urge to get out of the car and into the mortuary, to see Cleo, and changing the subject rapidly back to the business of the day, he said, ‘So – what do you think? Did he kill her?’

‘He didn’t ask for a lawyer,’ Branson replied.

‘You’re learning,’ Grace said, genuinely pleased.

It was a fact that the majority of criminals, when apprehended, submitted quietly. The ones that protested loudly often turned out to be innocent – of that particular crime, at any rate.

‘But did he kill his wife? I dunno, I can’t call it,’ Branson added.

‘Me neither.’

‘What did his eyes tell you?’

‘I need to get him in a calmer situation. What was his reaction when you told him the news?’

‘He was devastated. It looked real enough.’

‘Successful businessman, right?’ They were in the shade here, alongside a flint wall, by a tall laurel bush. Air wafted in through the open sun-roof and windows. A tiny spider suddenly abseiled down its own thread from the interior mirror.

‘Yeah. Software systems of some kind,’ Branson said.

‘You know the best character trait to become a successful businessman?’

‘Whatever it is, I wasn’t born with it.’

‘It’s being a sociopath. Having no conscience, as ordinary people know it.’

Branson pressed the button, lowering his window further. ‘A sociopath is a psychopath, right?’ He cupped the spider in the massive palm of his hand and gently dropped it out of the window.

‘Same characteristics, one significant difference: sociopaths can keep themselves under control, psychopaths can’t.’