Peter James - Not Dead Enough

At that moment Grace’s mobile rang.

He stepped away to answer it. ‘Roy Grace,’ he said.

It was Linda Buckley again. ‘Hello, Roy,’ she said. ‘Brian Bishop’s just come back. I’ve phoned and called off the alert for him.’

‘Where the hell was he?’

‘He said he just went out for some air.’

Walking out of the room, into the corridor, Grace said, ‘Like hell he did. Get on to the CCTV team – see what they’ve picked up around that hotel in the last few hours.’

‘I will do, right away. When will you be ready for me to bring him down for the viewing?’

‘Be a while yet. A good three or four hours – I’ll call you.’

As he hung up, his phone immediately rang again. He didn’t recognize the number – a long string of digits starting with 49 that suggested it was from somewhere overseas. He answered it.

‘Roy!’ said a voice he instantly knew. It was his old friend and colleague Dick Pope. Once Dick and his wife, Lesley, had been his best friends. But Dick had been transferred to Hastings and since they had moved over there, Grace hadn’t seen so much of them.

‘Dick! Good to hear from you – where are you?’

There was a sudden hesitation in his friend’s voice. ‘Roy, we’re in Munich. We’re on a motoring holiday. Checking out the Bavarian beer!’

‘Sounds good to me!’ Grace said, uneasy at the hesitation, as if there was something his friend was holding back from saying.

‘Roy – look – this may be nothing. I don’t want to cause you any – you know, upset or anything. But Lesley and I think we may have just seen Sandy.’

18

Skunk’s phone was ringing again. He woke, shivering and sweating at the same time. Jesus, it was hot in here. His clothes – the ragged T-shirt and undershorts he was sleeping in – and his bedding were sodden. Water was guttering off him.

Breeep-breeep-breeeep.

From somewhere in the fetid darkness down towards the rear of the camper, the Scouse voice shouted out, ‘Fokking thing. Turn the fokking thing off, for Chrissake, ’fore I throw it out the fokking window.’

It wasn’t the phone he had stolen last night, he realized suddenly. It was his pay-as-you-go phone. His business phone! Where in hell was it?

He stood up hurriedly and shouted back, ‘You don’t like it, get the fuck out of my van!’

Then he looked on the floor, found his shell-suit bottoms, dug his hands in the pocket and pulled the small green mobile out. ‘Yeah?’ he answered.

The next moment he was looking around for a pen and a scrap of paper. He had both in his top, wherever the hell that was. Then he realized he had been sleeping on it, using it as a sort of pillow. He pulled out a thin, crappy ballpoint with a cracked stem, and a torn, damp sheet of lined paper, and put it down on the work surface. With a hand shaking so much he could barely write, he managed to take down the details in spiky scrawl, and then hung up.

A good one. Money. Moolah! Mucho!

And his bowels felt OK today. None of the agonizing gripes followed by diarrhoea that had been plaguing him for days – not yet, at any rate. His mouth was parched; he was desperate for some water. Feeling light-headed and giddy, he made his way to the sink, then, steadying himself on the work surface, he turned on the tap. But it was already on, the contents of the water tank all run out. Shite .

‘Who left the fucking tap on all night? Hey? Who?’ he yelled.

‘Chill out, man!’ a voice replied.

‘I’ll fucking chill you out!’ He pulled open the curtains again, blinking at the sudden intrusion of the blinding, early-afternoon sunlight. Outside he saw a woman in the park, holding the hand of a toddler on a tricycle. A mangy-looking dog was running around, sniffing the scorched grass where a circus big-top had been until a couple of days ago. Then he looked along the camper. A third crashed-out body he hadn’t noticed before, stirred. Nothing he could do about either of them now, just hope the fuck they’d be gone when he came back. They usually were.

Then he heard an almost rhythmic squeak-squeak-squeak , and saw Al, his hamster, with his busted paw all bound up in a splint by the vet, still spinning the shiny chromium treadmill, his whiskers twitching away. ‘Man, don’t you ever get tired?’ he said, putting his face up close to the bars of the cage – but not too close – Al had bitten him once. Actually, twice.

He had first found the creature abandoned in its cage, which had been tossed by some callous bastard into a roadside skip. He had seen its paw was busted and tried to lift it out, and been bitten for his troubles. Then another time he had tried to stroke it through the bars and it had bitten him again. Yet other days he could open the cage door and it would scamper into the palm of his hand, and sit there happily, for an hour or more, only shitting on it occasionally.

He pulled on the grey Adidas shell-suit bottoms and hooded top, which he had stolen from the ASDA superstore at the Marina, and the brand-new blue and white Asics trainers he had tried on and run out with from a shop in Kemp Town, and grabbed a Waitrose carrier bag containing his tools, into which he dropped the mobile phone from the car he had stolen yesterday. He opened the door of the camper, shouted, ‘I want you all fucking gone when I come back,’ and stepped out into the searing, cloudless heat of The Level, the long, narrow strip of parkland in the centre of Brighton and Hove. The city that he jokingly – but not that jokingly – called his office .

Written on the damp sheet of paper he carried, safely folded and tucked into his zipped breast pocket, were an order, a delivery address and an agreed payment. A no-brainer. Suddenly, despite the shakes, life was looking up. He could make enough money today to last him an entire week.

He could even afford to play hardball in negotiations on the sale of the mobile phone.

19

My father is crying today. I’ve never seen him cry before. I’ve seen him drunk and angry, which is how he is most of the time, drunk and angry, slapping my mother or me, or punching one of us in the face, or maybe both of us depending on his mood. Sometimes he kicks the dog because it’s my dog and he doesn’t like dogs. The only person he doesn’t punch or slap or kick is Annie, my sister, who is ten. He does other things to her instead. We hear her crying out when he is in her room. And crying, sometimes, after he has left her room.

But today he is crying. My father. All twenty-two of his pigeons are dead. Including two that he has had for fifteen years. And his four Birmingham Rollers that could fly upside-down and do other kinds of aerobatics.

I gave them one large shot of insulin each from his diabetic kit. Those pigeons were his life. It is strange that he could love these noisy, smelly birds so much, yet hate us all. I never understood how they could have given us children to him and my mother in the first place. Sometimes there are as many as eight of us here. The others come and go. Just my sister and I are the constant ones. We suffer along with our mother.

But today, for once, he is suffering. He is hurting really badly.

20

Sophie’s ciabatta sat on her desk, going cold and making its paper wrapper soggy. She had no appetite. The copy of Harpers & Queen lay on her desk unopened.

She liked to ogle the dreamy clothes on the almost insanely beautiful models, the pictures of stunning resorts she sometimes dreamed that Brian might whisk her off to, and she loved to trawl through the diary photographs of the rich and famous, some of whom she recognized from film premieres she had attended for her company, or from a distance when she had walked along the Croisette or crashed parties at the Cannes Film Festival. It was a lifestyle so far from her own modest, rural upbringing.