Peter James: Not Dead Enough

Which explained the pile of philosophy books on the coffee table beside his chair. Most of them he had recently bought from City Books in Western Road, and the rest from a trawl of just about every other bookshop in the whole of Brighton and Hove.

Two supposedly accessible titles, The Consolations of Philosophy and Zeno and the Tortoise, were on the top of the pile. Books for the layman, which he could just about understand. Well, parts of them, anyhow. They gave him enough at least to bluff his way through discussions with Cleo about some of the stuff she was on about. And, quite surprisingly, he was finding himself genuinely interested. Socrates, in particular, he could connect with. A loner, ultimately sentenced to death for his thoughts and his teachings, who once said, ‘The unexamined life is not worth living.’

And last week she had taken him to Glyndebourne, to see Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro . Some parts of the opera had dragged for him, but there had been moments of such intense beauty, in both the music and the spectacle, that he was moved almost to tears.

He was gripped by this black and white movie he was watching now, set in immediate post-war Vienna. In the current scene, Orson Welles, playing a black-marketeer called Harry Lime, was riding with Joseph Cotten in a gondola on a Ferris wheel in an amusement park. Cotten was chastising his old friend, Harry, for becoming corrupt. Welles retaliated, saying, ‘In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed – but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.’

Grace took another long swig of his whisky. Welles was playing a sympathetic character, but Grace had no sympathy for him. The man was a villain, and in the twenty years of his career to date, Grace had never met a villain who didn’t try to justify what he had done. In their warped minds, it was the world that was skewed wrong, not them.

He yawned, then rattled the ice cubes in his empty glass, thinking about tomorrow, Friday, and dinner with Cleo. He hadn’t seen her since last Friday – she had been away for the weekend, for a big family reunion in Surrey. It was her parents’ thirty-fifth wedding anniversary, and he had felt a small pang of discomfort that she hadn’t invited him to go with her – as if she were keeping her distance, signalling that although they were dating, and making love, they weren’t actually an item . Then on Monday she’d gone away on a training course. Although they’d spoken every day, and texted and emailed each other, he was missing her like crazy.

And tomorrow he had an early meeting with his unpredictable boss, the alternatively sweet and sour Alison Vosper, Assistant Chief Constable of Sussex Police. Dog-tired suddenly, he was in the process of debating whether to pour himself another whisky and watch the rest of the movie or save it for his next night in when the doorbell rang.

Who the hell was visiting him at midnight?

The bell rang again. Followed by a sharp rapping sound. Then more rapping.

Puzzled and wary, he froze the DVD, stood up, a little unsteadily, and walked out into the hall. More rapping, insistent. Then the bell rang again.

Grace lived in a quiet, almost suburban neighbourhood, a street of semi-detached houses that went down to the Hove seafront. It was off the beaten track for the druggies and the general nocturnal flotsam of Brighton and Hove, but all the same, his guard was up.

Over the years he had crossed swords with – and pissed off – plenty of miscreants in this city because of his career. Most were just plain lowlife, but some were powerful players. Any number of people could find good reason to settle a score with him. Yet he’d never bothered to install a spy hole or a safety chain on his front door.

So, relying on his wits, somewhat addled by too much whisky, he yanked the door wide open. And found himself staring at the man he loved most in the world, Detective Sergeant Glenn Branson, six foot two inches tall, black, and bald as a meteorite. But instead of his usual cheery grin, the DS stood all crumpled up and was blubbing his eyes out.

4

The blade pressed harder against her neck. Cutting in. Hurting more and more with every bump in the road surface.

‘Don’t even think about whatever it is you are thinking about doing,’ he said, in a voice that was calm and filled with good humour.

Blood trickled down her neck; or maybe it was perspiration, or both. She didn’t know. She was trying, desperately trying, through her terror, to think calmly. She opened her mouth to speak, watching the oncoming headlights, gripping the wheel of her BMW with slippery hands, but the blade just cut in deeper still.

They were cresting a hill, the lights of Brighton and Hove to her left.

‘Move into the left-hand lane. Take the second exit at the roundabout.’

Katie obediently turned off, into the wide, two-lane Dyke Road Avenue. The orange glow of street lighting. Large houses on either side. She knew where they were heading and she knew she had to do something before they got there. And suddenly, her heart flipped with joy. On the other side of the road was a starburst of blue flashing lights. A police car! Pulling up in front of another car.

Her left hand moved from the wheel on to the flasher stalk. She pulled it towards her, hard. And the wipers screeched across the dry windscreen.

Shit.

‘Why have you put the wipers on, Katie? It isn’t raining.’ She heard his voice from the back seat.

Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit. Wrong fucking stalk!

And now they were past the police car. She saw the lights, like some vanishing oasis, in her mirrors. And she saw the silhouette of his bearded face, shadowed by his baseball cap and further obscured by dark glasses although it was night. The face of a stranger but at the same time a face – and a voice – that were uncomfortably familiar.

‘Left turn coming up, Katie. You should slow down. You know where we are, I hope.’

The sensor on the dash would automatically trigger the switch on the gates. In a few seconds they would start to open. In a few seconds she would turn into them, and then they would close behind her, and she would be in darkness, in private, out of sight of everyone but the man behind her.

No. She had to stop that from happening.

She could swerve the car, smash into a lamppost. Or smash into the headlights of a car that was coming towards them now. She tensed even more. Looked at the speedometer. Trying to work it out. If she braked hard, or smashed into something, he would be flung forward, the knife would be flung forward. That was the smart thing to do. Not smart . It was the only option.

Oh, Jesus, help me.

Something colder than ice churned in her stomach. Her mouth felt arid. Then, suddenly, her mobile phone, on the seat beside her, began to ring. The stupid tune her stepdaughter, Carly, who was just thirteen, had programmed in and left her stuck with. The bloody ‘Chicken Song’, which embarrassed the hell out of her every time it rang.

‘Don’t even think about answering it, Katie,’ he said.

She didn’t. Instead, meekly, she turned left, through the wrought-iron gates that had obligingly swung open, and up the short, dark tarmac driveway that was lined by huge, immaculately tended rhododendron bushes that Brian had bought, for an insane price, from an architectural garden centre. For privacy, he had said.

Yep. Right. Privacy.

The front of the house loomed in her headlights. When she had left, just a few hours earlier, it had been her home. Now, at this moment, it felt like something quite different. It felt like some alien, hostile edifice that was screaming at her to leave.