Peter James - Not Dead Enough

He stopped to take a breath, and dark, undefined fear suddenly rolled through him, drawing all the heat of the day away from him, leaving him feeling as if he had suddenly walked into a deep-freeze. His skin crawled again, the way it had done earlier, as if a million termites were swarming over it.

He saw the phone booth. Needed that booth. Needed that hit to get his focus, his equilibrium. He stepped into it, and the effort of pulling the heavy door left him suddenly gasping for breath. Shit . He leaned against the wall of the booth, in the airless heat, feeling dizzy, his legs buckling under him. He grabbed the phone, steadying himself with one hand, dug a coin from his pocket and put it in the slot, then dialled Joe’s number.

‘It’s Wayne Rooney,’ he said, talking quietly as if someone might overhear him. ‘I’m here.’

‘Give me your number. I’m going to call you back.’

Skunk waited, getting nervous. After several minutes, it finally rang. A new set of instructions. Shit, Joe was getting more paranoid every day. Or had watched too many Bond movies.

He left the booth, walked about fifty yards up the street, then stopped and stared in the window of a shop that cut foam rubber to order, as he had been instructed.

The two police officers sipped their cold coffees. The shorter, burly one, whose name was Paul Packer, gripped his cup by looping his middle finger through the handle. Eight years ago, the top of his right-hand index finger had been bitten off below the first knuckle, in a scuffle, by Skunk.

This was the third deal they had witnessed in the past hour. And they knew that the same thing would be going on in half a dozen other hot spots around Brighton at this very moment. Every hour of the day and night. Trying to stop the drugs trade in a city like this was like trying to stop a glacier by throwing pebbles at it.

To feed a ten-pound-a-day drug habit, a user would commit three to five thousand pound’s worth of acquisitive crime a month. Not many users were on ten pounds a day – most were on twenty, fifty, one hundred and more. Some could be as high as three or four hundred a day. And a lot of middlemen took rake-offs on the way. There were rich pickings all along the chain. You busted a bunch of people, took them off the streets, and a few days later a whole load of new faces, with a fresh supply, would appear. Scousers. Bulgarians. Russians. All with one thing in common. They made a fat living off sad little bastards like Skunk.

But Paul Packer and his colleague, Trevor Sallis, had not paid fifty pounds out of police funds to an informer to help them find Skunk in order to bust him for drugs. He was too small a player there to bother with. It was an altogether different player, in a very different field, they were hoping he would lead them to.

After some moments, a short, fat kid of about twelve, with a round, freckled face and a brush cut, wearing a grubby South Park T-shirt, shorts and unlaced basketball shoes, and sweating profusely, sidled up to Skunk.

‘Wayne Rooney?’ the kid said, in a garbled, squeaky voice.

‘Yeah.’

The kid popped a small cellophane-wrapped package from his mouth and handed it to Skunk, who in turn put it straight into his mouth and handed the kid the Motorola. Seconds later the kid was sprinting away, up the hill. And Skunk was heading back towards his camper.

And Paul Packer and Trevor Sallis were out of the Starbucks door and following him down the hill.

25

The Major Incident Suite at Sussex House occupied much of the first floor of the building. It was accessed by a door with a swipe pad at the end of a large, mostly open-plan area housing the force’s senior CID officers and their support staff.

Roy Grace felt there was always a completely different atmosphere in this part of the CID headquarters from elsewhere in the building – and indeed any of the other police buildings in and around Brighton and Hove. The corridors and offices of most police stations had a tired, institutional look and feel, but here everything always seemed new.

Too new, too modern, too clean, too damn tidy. Too – soulless . It could have been the offices of a chartered accountancy practice, or the admin area of a bank or insurance company.

Diagrams on white cards, which also looked brand new, were pinned to large, red-felt display boards at regular intervals along these walls. They charted all the procedural information that every detective should know by heart; but often at the start of an investigation Grace would take the time to read them again.

He had always been well aware of how easy it was to become complacent and forget things. And he had read an article recently which reinforced that view. According to the paper, most of the world’s worst air disasters during the past fifty years were due to pilot error. But in many cases it wasn’t an inexperienced junior, it was the senior pilot of the airline who had slipped up. The article went so far as to say that if you were sitting on an aeroplane and discovered your pilot was going to be the senior captain of the airline, then get off that plane at once!

Complacency. It was the same with medicine. Not long back, a consultant orthopaedic surgeon in Sussex had amputated the wrong leg of a male patient. Just a simple error. Caused, almost certainly, by complacency.

Which was why, at a few minutes to six p.m., Grace stopped in the hot, stuffy corridor at the entrance of the Major Incident Suite, his shirt clinging to his chest from the savage afternoon heat, the sighting of Sandy in Munich clinging to his mind. He nodded to Branson and pointed at the first diagram on the wall, just past the door of the HOLMES system manager’s office, which was headed Common Possible Motives.

‘What does maintain active lifestyle actually mean?’ Branson asked, reading off the diagram.

In an oval in the centre was a single word: motive . Arranged around it, at the end of spokes, were the words jealousy , racism , anger/fright , robbery , power/control , desire , gain , payment , homopho bia , hate , revenge , psychotic , sexual and maintain active lifestyle .

‘Killing to inherit someone’s money,’ Grace answered.

Glenn Branson yawned. ‘There’s one missing.’ Then he frowned. ‘Actually, two,’ he said gloomily.

‘Tell me?’

‘ Kicks . And kudos .’

‘Kicks?’

‘Yeah. Those kids who set fire to an old bag lady in a bus shelter last year. Poured petrol over her while she was sleeping. They didn’t hate her, it was just something to do, right? Kicks.’

Grace nodded. His mind really wasn’t in gear. He was still thinking about Sandy. Munich. Christ, how was he going to get through this? All he wanted to do right now was to take a plane to Munich.

‘And kudos, right?’ Glenn said. ‘You join a gang, it’s one way to get street cred, right?’

Grace moved on to the next board. It was headed Developing Forensic Overview. He glanced down the list, the words a meaningless blur at this moment. Assess potential information , intelligence , witnesses. Reassess. Develop and implement forensic strategy . Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a dapper, energetic-looking man in his early fifties, wearing smart fawn suit trousers, a beige shirt and a brown tie, striding up to them. Tony Case, the Senior Support Officer for this building.

‘Hi, Roy,’ he said cheerily. ‘I’ve got MIR One all set up for you, and the tape’s ready for you to rock and roll.’ Then he turned to the Detective Sergeant and shook his hand vigorously. ‘Glenn,’ he said. ‘Welcome back! I thought you weren’t going to be working for a while yet.’