Peter James - Not Dead Enough

Suddenly her phone rang again. For an instant, her spirits rose, hoping it was Brian. Then she saw Holly’s name on the display. She hit the answer button. ‘Hi.’

Holly’s voice was mostly drowned out by a continuous, banshee howl. She was in the hairdresser’s, she informed her friend, under the drier. After a couple of minutes trying to explain what had happened, Sophie gave up and suggested they speak later. Holly promised to call her back as soon as she was out of the salon.

The man in the hoodie was following her at a safe distance, holding his red plastic bag and sucking the back of his free hand. It was nice to be back down here at the seaside, out of the filthy air of London. He hoped Sophie would head down to the beach; it would be pleasant to sit there, maybe eat an ice cream. It would be a good way of passing the time, of spending a few of those millions of hours he had sitting on deposit in his bank.

As he walked, he thought about the purchase he had made at lunchtime today and jiggled it in his bag. In the zippered pockets of his top, in addition to his wallet and his mobile phone, he carried a roll of duct tape, a knife, chloroform, a vial of the knockout, so-called date rape drug, Rohypnol. And a few other bits and pieces – you could never tell when they might come in handy . . .

Tonight would be a very good night. Again.

23

Cleo’s skills really came into their own when, shortly after five p.m., Nadiuska De Sancha finally finished the post-mortem on Katie Bishop.

Using a large soup ladle, Cleo removed the blood that had drained into Katie’s midriff, spoonful by spoonful, pouring it into the gully below. The blood would run into a holding tank beneath the building, where chemicals would slowly break it down, before it passed into the city’s main drainage system.

After that, as Nadiuska leaned on the work surface, dictating her summary, then in turn filling in the Autopsy sheet, the Histology sheet and the Cause of Death sheet, Darren handed Cleo a plain white plastic bag containing all the vital organs that had been removed from the cadaver and weighed on the scales. Grace watched, with the same morbid fascination he had each time, as Cleo inserted the bag into Katie’s midriff, as if she were stuffing giblets into a chicken.

He watched with the shadow of the phone call about Sandy hanging heavily over him. Thinking. He needed to call Dick Pope back, quiz him more, about exactly when he had seen Sandy, which table she had been at, whether he had talked to the staff, whether she had been alone or with anyone.

Munich . The city had always had a resonance for him, partly because of Sandy’s family connections, and partly because it was a city that was constantly, in one way or another, in the world’s consciousness. The Oktoberfest, the World Cup football stadium, it was the home of BMW, and, he seemed to remember, Adolf Hitler had lived there, before Berlin. All he wanted to do at this moment was jump on a plane and fly there. And he could just imagine how well that would go down with his boss, Alison Vosper, who was looking for any opportunity, however small, to twist the knife she had already stuck into him, and get rid of him.

Darren then went out of the room and returned with a black garbage bag containing shredded council tax correspondence from Brighton and Hove City Council, removed a handful, and started to pack the paper into the dead woman’s empty skull cavity. Meanwhile, using a heavy-duty sailcloth needle and thread, Cleo began carefully but industrially to sew up the woman’s midriff.

When she had finished, she hosed Katie down to remove all the blood streaks, and then began the most sensitive part of the procedure. With the greatest care, she was putting on make-up, adding some colouring to the woman’s cheeks, tidying her hair, making her look as if she was just having a little nap.

At the same time, Darren began the process of cleaning up the post-mortem room around Katie Bishop’s trolley. He squirted lemon-scented disinfectant on to the floor, scrubbing that in, then bleach, then Trigene disinfectant and finally Autoclave.

An hour later, laid out beneath a purple shroud, with her arms crossed and a small bunch of fresh pink and white roses in her hand, Darren wheeled Katie Bishop into the viewing room, a small, narrow area with a long window, and just enough space for loved ones to stand around the corpse. It felt a little like a chapel, with dinky blue curtains, and instead of an altar, there was a small vase of plastic flowers.

Grace and Branson stood outside the room, observing through the glass window, as Brian Bishop was led in by WPC Linda Buckley, an alert, pleasant-looking woman in her mid-thirties, with short blonde hair, dressed in a sober dark blue two-piece and white blouse.

They watched him stare at the dead woman’s face, then rummage under the shroud, pull out her hand, kiss it, then grip it tightly. Tears streamed down Bishop’s face. Then he fell to his knees, totally overcome with grief.

It was at moments like this, and Grace had experienced far too many in his long career, that he wished he was anything but a police officer. One of his mates from school had gone into banking and was now a building society branch manager in Worthing, enjoying a good salary and a relaxed life. Another operated fishing trips from Brighton Marina, without an apparent care in the world.

Grace watched, unable to switch his emotions off, unable to stop himself feeling the man’s grief in every cell of his own body. It was all he could do to stop crying himself.

‘Shit, he’s hurting,’ Glenn said quietly to him.

Grace shrugged, the cop inside him speaking, rather than his heart. ‘Maybe.’

‘Jesus, you’re a hard bastard.’

‘Didn’t used to be,’ Grace said. ‘Wasn’t until I let you drive me. Needed to be a hard bastard to survive that.’

‘Very funny.’

‘So did you pass your Advanced Police Driving test?’

‘I failed, right?’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah. For driving too slowly. Can you believe that?’

‘Me, believe that?’

‘Jesus, you hack me off. You’re always the same. Every time I ask you a question you answer with a question. Can’t you ever stop being a bloody detective?’

Grace smiled.

‘It’s not funny. Yeah? I asked you a simple question, can you believe I got failed for driving too slowly?’

‘Nah.’ And he really could not! Grace remembered the last time Glenn had driven him, when his friend had been practising his high-speed driving for his test. When Grace had climbed out of the car with all his limbs intact – more by luck than by anything to do with driving skills – he had decided he would prefer to have his gall bladder removed without an anaesthetic than be driven in earnest by Glenn Branson again.

‘For real, man,’ Branson said.

‘Good to know there are still some sane people in the world.’

‘Know your problem, Detective Superintendent Roy Grace?’

‘Which particular problem?’

‘The one you have about my driving?’

‘Tell me.’

‘No faith.’

‘In you or in God?’

‘God stopped that bullet from doing serious harm to me.’

‘You really believe that, don’t you?’

‘You have a better theory?’

Grace fell silent, thinking. He always found it easier to park his God questions safely away and to think about them only when it suited him. He wasn’t an atheist, not even really an agnostic. He did believe in something – or at least he wanted to believe in something – but he could never define exactly what. He always fell short of being able to openly accept the concept of God. And then immediately after that he would feel guilty. But ever since Sandy had disappeared, and all his prayers had gone unanswered, much of his faith had eroded.