Peter James - Not Dead Enough

She had never particularly sought glamour when she came to London to do a secretarial course – and she certainly had not found it when she’d got her first job with a firm of bailiffs, carrying out work seizing goods from the homes of people who had run into debt. She found the company cruel and much of its work heartbreaking. When she had decided to make a change, and began trawling the ads in the Evening Standard newspaper, she had never imagined that she would land up in quite such a different world as she was in now.

But at this moment her world had, suddenly, gone completely out of kilter. She was trying to get her head around the totally bizarre conversation she had just had with Brian on her mobile a short while ago, outside the café, when he’d told her his wife was dead and had denied that he had come over to her last night – or rather, early this morning – and made love to her.

The office phone rang.

‘Blinding Light Productions,’ she answered, half hoping it was Brian, her voice devoid of its usual enthusiasm.

But it was someone wanting to speak to the Head of Business and Legal Affairs, Adam Davies. She put them through. Then she returned to her thoughts.

OK, Brian was strange. In the six months since she had met him, when they had sat next to each other at a conference on tax incentives for investors in film financing, which she had been asked to attend by her bosses, she still felt she only knew just a very small part of him. He was an intensely private person and she found it hard to get him to talk about himself. She didn’t really understand what he did, or, more importantly, what it was he wanted from life – and from her.

He was kind and generous, and great company. And, she had only very recently discovered, the most amazing lover! Yet there was a part of him that he kept in a compartment from which she was excluded.

A part of him that could deny, absolutely, that he had come to her flat in the early hours of today.

She was desperate to know what had happened to his wife. The poor, darling man must be distraught. Deranged with grief. Denial . Was the answer as simple as that?

She wanted to hold him, to comfort him, to let him pour it all out to her. In her mind a plan was forming. It was vague – she was so shaken up she could not think it through properly – but it was better than just sitting here, not knowing, helpless.

Both the owners of the company, Tony Watts and James Samson, were away on their summer holidays. The office was quiet, no one would be that bothered if she left early today. At three o’clock she told Cristian and Adam that she wasn’t feeling that good, and they both suggested she went home.

Thanking them, she left the building, took the tube to Victoria, and made straight for the platform for Brighton.

As she boarded the train and settled into a seat in the stiflingly hot compartment, she was unaware of the shell-suited man, in the hoodie and dark glasses, who was entering the carriage directly behind hers. He gripped the red plastic bag containing his purchase from the Private Shop, and was quietly mouthing to himself the words of an old Louis Armstrong song, ‘We Have All the Time in the World’, which were being fed into his ears by his iPod.

21

When Roy Grace hung up he walked back into the post-mortem room in a daze. Cleo made eye contact, as if she had picked up a vibe that something was wrong. He signalled back lamely that all was fine.

His stomach felt as if wet cement was revolving inside it. He could barely focus his eyes on the scene unfolding in front of him, as Nadiuska De Sancha dissected Katie Bishop’s neck with a scalpel, layer of tissue by layer, looking for signs of internal bruising.

He did not want to be here right now. He wanted to be in a room on his own, sitting somewhere quiet, where he could think.

About Sandy.

Munich.

Was it possible?

Sandy, his wife, had disappeared off the face of the earth just over nine years ago, on the day of his thirtieth birthday. He could remember it vividly, as if it was yesterday.

Birthdays had always been very special days for them both. She had woken him with a tray on which was a tiny cake with a single candle, a glass of champagne and a very rude birthday card. He’d opened the presents she had given him, then they had made love.

He’d left the house later than usual, at nine fifteen, promising to be home early, to go out for a celebratory meal with Dick and Lesley Pope. But when he had arrived home almost two hours later than he had planned, because of problems with a murder case he had been investigating, there was no sign of Sandy.

At first he’d thought she was angry with him for being so late and was making a protest. The house was tidy, her car and handbag were gone, and there was nothing to suggest a struggle.

For years he had searched everywhere. Tried every possible avenue, distributed her photograph, through Interpol, around the world. And he had been to mediums – still went to them, every time he heard of a credible new one. But nothing. Not one of them had picked up anything to do with her. It was as if she had been teleported off the planet. Not one sign, not a single sighting by anyone.

Until this phone call now.

From Dick Pope. Saying he and Lesley had been on a boating lake in a beer garden in Munich. The Seehaus in the Englischer Garten. They had been out in a rowing boat, and both of them could have sworn they saw Sandy, sitting among the crowds at a table, singing away as a Bavarian band played.

Dick said they had rowed straight over to the edge of the lake, shouting to her. He’d scrambled out of the boat and run towards her, but she had gone. Melted away into the crowd. He said that he couldn’t be sure, of course. That neither he nor Lesley could be completely sure.

After all, it was nine years since they had seen Sandy. And Munich, in summer, like anywhere else, had countless dozens of attractive women with long, blonde hair. But, Dick had assured him, both he and Lesley thought the resemblance was uncanny. And the woman had stared at them, with what looked like clear recognition. So why had she left her table and fled?

Leaving three-quarters of a large glass of beer behind.

And the people sitting near her claimed never to have seen her before.

Sandy liked a glass of beer on a hot day. One of the million, billion, trillion, gazillion things Roy Grace had loved about her was her appetites in life. For food, wine, beer. And sex. Unlike so many women he had dated before her, Sandy was different. She went for everything. He had always put that down to the fact that she was not 100 percent British. Her grandmother, a great character, whom he had met – and really liked – many times before she had died, had been German. A Jewish refugee who had got out in 1938. Their family home had been in a small village in the countryside near Munich.

Jesus . The thought struck him now for the first time.

Could Sandy have gone back to her roots?

She had often talked about going to visit. She had even tried to persuade her grandmother to go with her, and show her where they had lived, but for the elderly lady the memories were too painful. One day, Grace had promised Sandy, they would go there together.

A sharp crunch , followed by a snap , brought him back to the present moment.

Katie Bishop’s breasts were inverted, beneath peeled-back flaps of skin, the ribs, muscles and organs of her midriff now exposed. The heart, lungs, kidneys and liver were all glistening. With her heart no longer pumping, only a trickle of blood slid, sluggishly, into the concave metal table on which she lay.

Nadiuska, holding what looked like a pair of gardening shears, began cutting through the dead woman’s ribs. Each grisly, bone-crunching snap brought Grace, and all the other observers in this room, to a strange kind of focused silence. It didn’t matter how many post-mortems you had attended, nothing prepared you for this sound, this awful reality. This was someone who had once been a living, breathing, loving human being reduced to the status of meat on a butcher’s hook.