Peter James - Not Dead Enough

From the getgo, he needed to plan the handling of the press and media with extra caution, and to try, as he always did, to make the coverage work for, rather than against, his investigation. Tomorrow morning he would be holding the first of what would become a regular series of press conferences. Before then, he had two briefing meetings with the team he was assembling, to get prepared.

And somehow, despite all that was going on, he had to find a space to get on a plane to Munich. Had to.

Absolutely had to.

So many thoughts swirled through his head about Sandy. Sitting in a beer garden. With a lover? With memory loss? Or was it just mistaken identity? If it had been anyone else who’d told him he would probably have dismissed it. But Dick Pope was a good detective, a thorough man, with a fine memory for faces.

A few minutes before six thirty, accompanied by Glenn Branson, Grace left the Witness Interview Suite viewing room, grabbed them both a coffee from the vending machine in the tiny kitchen area, and walked along the corridor to MIR One, which his investigation had been allocated by Tony Case. He passed a large red-felt board headed Operation Lisbon, beneath which was a photograph of a Chinese-looking man with a wispy beard, surrounded by several different photographs of the rocks at the bottom of the tall cliffs of local beauty spot Beachy Head, each with a red circle drawn around them.

Beachy Head, a dramatic and beautiful white chalk headland, had the unwelcome reputation as England’s most popular suicide spot. It offered jumpers a sheer, and grimly tantalizing, 570-foot plunge on to the shore of the English Channel. The list of people who had stepped, dived, rolled or driven over its grassy edge and survived was short.

This unfortunate, unidentified man had been found dead in May. At first he had been assumed to be just another jumper, until the post-mortem indicated that he’d probably had some assistance, on account of the fact he had been dead for some considerable while before he took his plunge. It was an ongoing investigation, but getting scaled down all the time as each successive line of inquiry hit a blank.

Every major incident was allocated a name thrown up at random by the Sussex Police computer. If any of the names had any bearing on the case to which they related, it was entirely coincidental. And they rarely did.

Unlike the workstations in the rest of Sussex House – and in all the other police stations in the county – there was no sign of anything personal on the desks here in MIR One. No pictures of families, or footballers, no fixture lists, no jokey cartoons. Everything in this room, apart from the furniture and the business hardware, related to the investigation. There wasn’t much banter either, just fierce concentration. The warble of phones, the clack of keyboards, the shuffle of paper ejecting from laser printers. The silence of concentration.

He surveyed his initial team with mixed feelings as he walked across the room. There were several familiar faces he was happy to see. Detective Sergeant Bella Moy, an attractive woman of thirty-five with hennaed brown hair, had, as ever, an open box of Maltesers, to which she was addicted, in front of her. Nick Nicholl, short-haired, tall as a beanpole, in an open-throat short-sleeved shirt, had the pasty-faced, worn-out look of the father of a six-week-old baby. The indexer, a young, plump woman with long brown hair called Susan Gradley, who was extremely hard-working and efficient. And the long-serving Norman Potting, whom he would need to keep an eye on.

Detective Sergeant Potting was fifty-three. Beneath a thinning comb-over he had a narrow, rather rubbery face criss-crossed with broken veins, protruding lips and tobacco-stained teeth. He was dressed in a crumpled fawn linen suit and a frayed yellow short-sleeved shirt, on which he appeared to be wearing most of his lunch. Unusually, he was sporting a serious suntan, which, Grace had to admit, did improve his looks. Because he was totally politically incorrect, and most women on the force found him offensive, Potting tended to get shunted around the county, filling in gaps when a division was desperately short of manpower.

The team member Grace was least happy about of all was DC Alfonso Zafferone. A sullen, arrogant man in his late twenties, with Latino good looks and gelled, mussed-about hair, he was slickly dressed in a black suit, black shirt and cream tie. The last time he had worked with him, Zafferone had proved to be sharp, but had had a serious attitude problem. It was partly due to lack of choice, because it was the holiday season, but equally from a desire to teach the runt a lesson in manners that Grace had pulled him on to his team.

As he greeted each person in turn, Grace thought about Katie Bishop on the bed in her house in Dyke Road Avenue this morning. He thought about her on the post-mortem slab this afternoon. He could feel her, as if he carried her spirit in his heart. The weight of responsibility. This lot here in this room, and the others who would be joining his team in the conference room shortly, had a huge responsibility.

Which was why he had to push all thoughts of Sandy into a separate compartment of his mind, and lock them in there, for the time being. Somehow.

Over the course of the following hours and days he would get to know more about Katie Bishop than anybody else on earth. More than her husband, her parents, her siblings, her best friends. They might think they knew her, but they would only have ever known what she let them know. Inevitably something would have been held back. Every human being did that.

And inevitably, for Roy Grace, it would become personal. It always did.

But he had no way of knowing, at this moment, quite how personal the case was going to become.

27

Skunk was feeling a whole lot stronger. The world was suddenly a much better place. The heroin was doing its stuff – he felt all kind of warm and fuzzy, everything was good, his body awash with endorphins. This was how life should feel; this was how he wanted to stay feeling forever.

Bethany had turned up, with a chicken and some potato salad and a tub of crème caramel she had taken from her mother’s fridge, and all the shit-heads had left his camper, and he’d boned her from behind, the way she liked it – and the way he liked it too, with her massive ass pushing into his stomach.

And now she was driving him along the seafront in her mother’s little Peugeot, and he lounged in the passenger seat, tilted back, staring out through his purple lenses at his office . Clocking each of the parked cars in turn. Every kind of car you could think of. All dusty and sun-baked. Their owners on the beach. He was looking for one that matched the make and model that were written on the damp, crumpled sheet of lined notepaper on his lap, his shopping list , which he had to keep looking back at because his memory was crap.

‘Have to get home soon. My mum needs the car. She’s going out to bridge tonight,’ Bethany said.

Every fucking make of car in the world was parked along the seafront this evening. Every fucking make except the one he was looking for. A new-shape Audi A4 convertible, automatic, low mileage, metallic blue, silver or black.

‘Head up to Shirley Drive,’ he said.

The clock on the dash read six fifteen p.m.

‘I really have to get home by seven. She needs the car – she’ll kill me if I’m late,’ Bethany replied.

Skunk looked at her for a moment appreciatively. She had short black hair and thick arms. Her breasts bulged out of the top of a baggy T-shirt and her plump brown thighs were scantily covered by a blue denim miniskirt. He kept one hand up under the elastic of her knickers, nestling in her soft, damp pubes, two fingers probing deep inside her.